_ _ _Hiiro

Two weeks had passed since the outfit's beach day and now I was sipping an overly-rich blend of coffee across the street from a backstreet machine shop in one of the more well-to-do neighborhoods outlying one of Crucibab's coastal industrial districts. After a week of beating feet I'd tracked a shipment of mass-stamped SMGs to this combination garage/foundry/ironmonger. It could have been nothing but it was the best lead I had that someone what gearing up for a fight in Celio's backyard. Now I was waiting to see who came to pick them up. It wasn't a bad job, even if the coffee was too bitter and still had grinds in to, plus it gave me some time to think. Maybe a little too much time…

I wasn't privy to the specifics of the conversation, though I knew Celio was none to happy about our little fact finding incursions. Leeroy wanted operators he could trust on the job which surprisingly enough, included me over a few hundred of Celio's vigia. At the root of it, we were digging for info on anyone still moving against Celio. Trying to be proactive instead of reactive, seizing the initiative and whatnot. I was still convinced Leeroy had cooked up this whole botshit detail just to get me out from underfoot, not that I was complaining— there were certainly worse jobs out there.

Truth be told, I was just glad Celio had finally given up on his damned motorcades. Moving through the city on foot was a whole other beast compared to driving through it. Crucibab had a living churn to it that my homeworld never did. There was an ebb and flood to everything, almost like everyone was always about to miss a deadline before they could relax for an hour or two. I caught myself then, still looking back into old memories instead of facing the present.

I don't know when it happened but I'd been thinking of Intatenrup more and more lately, constantly searching for something familiar to ground myself on the foreign streets of this distant world. I might find a single similarity for a dozen differences. They were never enough. It was hard to keep the time straight between the voyage here and the long days; I thought it was around half a year since I'd left Intatenrup but sometimes it felt like it was just last week. That or it could have been lifetimes ago, it depended on the day. I knew could spend a decade trying to blend in with the locals and by the end of all that time I'd still just be a dos Estrelas— a spaceman from somewhere else. Not one of us. An outsider.

It was almost ironic. Compared to the homogeneous roots of my home world, this entire planet was little more than an imbalanced mixture of foreigners. The only faction who could trace their earthly lineage more than a few generations back were the people of the land— indentured servants to all the conquering spacemen that had came after them. Just like we were helping Celio do now.

I sipped at my too bitter coffee and shook my head. Mercenaries weren't supposed to get hung up on little things like ethics or morality, but then again I wasn't really a merc. More of an unwilling volunteer, a recruit by circumstance, or if I was feeling dramatic a hostage. Why the hell was I still working with them? It was a thought I kept bumping into all too often during these long boring days. Sure, the money was good but I'd already more than paid off my debt to them for saving my life. Because I liked a few of them well enough? More than half of them wanted me dead on general principle and the rest were still making up their minds. I was good at the job, the work was familiar in a soul-numbing kind of way. The idea of killing being second nature was a bitter one to swallow, enough so that it made my coffee seem sweet by contrast. I reached the bottom of my list with the same little tug on my heart that I always felt when I thought of her.

Bim. She was still working with them, as trapped by circumstance as I was. The sight of her body, her smile, her next to me when I had woken up still haunted me. I hadn't seen Bim since I'd got this undercover assignment and our separation had made it abundantly clear that I had more than just feelings for her. In a lot of ways, it was almost like she had a hook lodged in my soul and every so often I would feel her pulling on the line. I didn't know if that was what love felt like but I knew that, consequences be damned, the next time I saw here I was going to man the hell up and tell her just how crazy I was for her.

The idea had my stomach doing flips, yet the heat inside of me was resonant with it. Something about my inner flame had changed. It didn't feel like an inferno constantly looking for the next forest to consume. I couldn't really explain it as much as I damn well tried but it was kind of like a soothing bed of embers. The word I kept reaching for even though it wasn't quite right was glowing. Like it was nice and warm and steady and sure and good and right and glowing.

I took another sip of my too-bitter coffee, knowing that if I ever tried to explain it to someone they'd probably think I was crazier than usual. But the weird thing was, on some base instinctive level, I felt better than I had in a long time— like some part of me knew everything was going to work itself out and I'd be alright in the end. It may have been crazy or maybe that's just how love was. All I knew was that if I could wake up next to her every morning then I'd be doing pretty damned well.

All we had to do was survive this job together and after that everything would be fine.

A dingy truck that must have been running hard for the last half-century came bumbling down the street. The three men sitting rifles in hand on the roof drew my attention back the present. There was some part of me, some small part that had a morbid curiosity when I saw Celio's shadow war from the outside in. Young men, the poor luckless bastards that had been born into this life without a spitting chance for anything more, were little better than bullets.

The dingy truck trundled to a stop a half-block down from the coffee shop I'd been using for my stakeout. Some jackass with a bullhorn climbed out and gave a speech about honor and riches and glory— a better life if only you had the courage to reach out and seize it. He mentioned the Savior enough that despite my difficulties with the lingo I knew this guy was on our side, recruiting the righteous and the just where those opposing Celio would only hire the criminal and the corrupt. No one but me seemed to notice how these recruitment trucks would both target the same neighborhoods and draw the same crowds— the same poor luckless bastards just trying to scrape by.

After the jackass finished his speech some twenty or so kids all piled onto the back or sat on the hood or stood on the side bars holding on for dear life. I knew that in a few hours maybe half that number would come back, a gun in one hand and pocket change in the other. Some of the cannier ones would sell the gun for a few more days pay. They knew they'd be given a new one the next time they went off to shoot up another block or stomp out a rival family or abduct some street level boss. If it wasn't for the fact that those kids made good informants, I probably would have looked the other way same as everyone else on this street— after all, this was a safe neighborhood; there wasn't any fighting here so who cared? Not a damned soul, that's who.

I hated myself because I was no better. Turning a blind eye to the consequences every time one of my informants up and disappeared. I hoped a few of them got wise and ran away. I knew that most of them didn't, but I kept using them anyway paying out a hundred here or a thousand there while they gambled with their lives. Sometimes, in my low moments, it made me sick to think about it and I took small consolation in the fact that I was proud because it did. Maybe one day, once I'd banked enough self-loathing, I could get out of the job. If I had to gamble with people's lives it was pretty damned cowardly to always use someone else's.

A woman—more of a girl really—sat opposite me with one of the dense little flatbread snacks that all the locals seemed to love. She wasn't much of a looker. She carried herself meekly, eyes downcast and nervous. I knew her, she was on my payroll after all.

"They want my brother to work the scrapyard tonight." She whispered between bites. "He could forget to lock the drop off access gate at high moon when he finishes."

I thought it over for all of a quarter-second. If I could sneak into the scrapyard, I'd be a short way below the admin office. I didn't think the locals were much for keeping their paperwork up to date, but all I needed was a name or a date. Something to get me pointed in the right direction. Not to mention, this way I could shoulder some of the risk too.

I folded a pocket rag around a single cash token and slid it over to her. She dabbed her face for some non-existent crumbs and cast a sly glance at the money. Her eyes went wide for a second before she nodded gratefully. It amused me for a second, throwaway change to me was a few months income for her entire family. It reminded me of Celio's 'charity', heating up coins to throw for beggars. A wave of disgust quashed my amusement a split-second later.

"It must be hard having such a forgetful brother." I said, sipping my coffee. "Maybe if you moved to the countryside he'd be able to focus more…"

I let the insinuation hang for a long moment so she could weigh it over. She smiled at the thought but there was no warmth behind her eyes.

"My family work the land." She started. "This land. It's our home, regardless of the city that sprouted up around us. We can't just leave."

"You could-"

"We won't." She stated, steel in her voice. "No amount of money will buy our pride. This is who we are. Our roots are too deep to pack up and leave."

I wanted to tell her she was a fool. To think of her safety, her future. I met her eyes with the words on my tongue and I already knew she wouldn't listen. Looking into her eyes was like looking at a whole other person; the meek, nervous girl was gone and the spirited woman glaring back at me was all mettle.

"For what it's worth, I appreciate the offer." She whispered, her pride flagging and the meek girl once more at the for. "I appreciate everything you've done for my family. We all do."

All I'd done for them was pay them to risk their lives. To snoop. To eavesdrop. To tell me thing they probably shouldn't. She might not have seen the harm in that but I had. Justice on the backstreets of Crucibab was almost as swift and ruthless as it was in the wild. Thieves had their fingers broken as a warning or their hands chopped off as a message. Informants never got a warning, first offenders lost their tongues.

And she was thanking me for that. For paying her and her family to run those risks because they could get places I couldn't and see things I didn't. Some small part of me always had a slight niggling reminder that if someone had to pay for my actions it was better them than me; that so long as I kept my fingers intact and my tongue attached, a little guilt was a small price to pay. I wanted to crawl in on myself and vanish from her life right then. I felt like a parasite and she was thanking me.

That would change tonight. I'd stop making everyone else take the risks and do the job myself.

Set on a course of action, I gulped down the last of my coffee and headed back to my safehouse for to kill a few hours. Safehouse may not have been the right word but it had a better ring to it than 'the one-room sublet I had from one of Celio's vigia's cousin's widowed mother'. Her townhouse was damned-near invisible, sandwiched as it was on a street of a hundred duplicates. Walking down the rows of identical houses had been unsettling for the first few days, like a bad dream where you're walking down a dark hallway and you keep passing the same door. It reminded me of the suburbs of Intatenrup, one apartment building every block for ten blocks by ten blocks with nothing but numbers to differentiate them.

I followed the smell of fresh-baked bread into her home. Sophia was slathering her easel with a pot of green paint, her smock was already smeared with blues and teals. A wavy locke of her thick chestnut hair had slipped from the hideous yellow and blue headband she always used to tie it back.

Sophia was a lovely woman in a motherly sort of way, two decades my senior but aging gracefully and she always had a warm smile on her face. She was plump in the right places, maybe not quite voluptuous but damned close. In my two weeks of living with her, I'd never once felt like a stranger in her home.

"I was just about to start on supper, but first… what do you think?"

She spun the easel around to reveal a mess of green and blue. There was the slightest impression of a coastline or maybe a skyline. The color mixing was amateurish, the paint too thick and there was no sense of scale to the portrait at all. Yet… something about it seemed inviting, like the blurriest postcard ever made.

"I can't wait to see it when it's done." I answered neutrally.

"It is done."

"Oh…" I said.

"Oh?" She asked, arms crossed and a single eyebrow creeping upwards.

"I didn't say anything."

"Didn't you ever do any impressionist paintings? You said you used to paint."

I'd mentioned it once in passing and she'd never let it go. In a lot of ways, all of my works were impressionist pieces. There was a perverse intimacy that came with looking at someone's final moments captured on a wall or a floor. It all left an impression. Mostly of rage. Brutality. A life of possibility cut short with a single death-stroke of my painter's brush. My 'paintings' left the taste of ash and gunsmoke clawing their way up my throat.

"I did some…" I said, keeping my voice flat. "But my work was more monochrome with accent. Black, white, grey and contrasting reds."

"Bold."

"It wasn't!" I snapped before regaining myself. "Sorry. It wasn't. It was cowardly. I was afraid to… I just… I used the same color so much that I forgot there were other one's out there."

It was a half-assed half truth at best and she saw through it. I got the impression that even if she wasn't the sharpest woman on the planet, there wasn't a lot that she missed. I could only imagine what growing up under her tender scrutiny would have been like. She swapped out her painting for a blank canvas and pulled a stool up to her easel.

"Sit your bum here mister. I'll start on supper and I want you to paint me something while I cook." She practically shoved her paints onto me, her damp smock following a second later. "You've got blue and green. Make it work."

"Just two colors?" I asked, smiling at the absurdity.

"Between the two of them you've got all the colors you could want. You just might need to get a little creative with them."

Sophia disappeared into the kitchen, tossing a clattering of charcoal sticks into the range. Seconds later, a chopping knife joined the dull instrumentals and she started humming a tune that not even a truck could carry.

I stared at that blank canvas and all I could picture was how I would paint it red. Old instincts surfaced in my mind and they sickened me. I didn't want to think like that, didn't want to remember how many times I'd killed before I saw the blood as art. I couldn't stand looking at all that white empty space!

A slapped a thick stroke of green on one end, mirrored it on the other, then blue up the middle. It was ugly. Amateurish. Three lines of thick paint was hardly a portrait. But it was better than an empty canvas. Sophia was still cooking, so I wet my brush and thinned my paints, drawing them out to cover up the worst of the negative space.

Then I just stopped thinking and let my hands do what my eyes told them too. Two colors wasn't nearly enough variety no matter how much I thinned or layered. So I mixed and experimented and made mistakes and rolled with the chaos of creation. I had no idea what I was making. Every brush stroke brought me closer to it though, so I kept painting— chasing a high with every swipe of paint. Then I saw it.

Like the famed angel in marble, my mind saw what my eyes had seen all along.

"Hey Sofia, can I use a little bit of yellow?"

"That depends…" She answered from the stove top. A moment later she was leaning in over my shoulder and I heard her breath catch. "For her eyes?"

I nodded and she handed a small mason jar the color of honey and powdered gold. I finished my painting and I took a step back to look at the whole thing.

I'd painted a blue woman drifting in a sea of thin green. The colors were comprehensive yet muted by the lack of negative space. Her gossamer dress could have been the suggestion of water flowing over her naked flesh instead, the color a swirling shade somewhere between teal and jade complimenting the rich blues of her skin and pale green of the sea. Her eyes were twinned dabs of golden yellow, regal and cutting all at once. They were the eyes I woke up hoping to see every day for the rest of my life.

"You must really love her." Sophia said.

I was too embarrassed to say anything. I dropped my head and turned to leave but she took my hand and made me meet her warm brown eyes.

"You'll make a great husband and any woman you choose will be lucky to have you."

Some small part of me was relieved to hear those words. They soothed a doubt I hadn't realized I'd even had. I couldn't help wondering about my parents at that moment, the stranger's I'd never met who had abandoned me before I was born. Had I just been a mistake from a night of passion or were they still out there, loving life without me?

Sophia went back to the kitchen and I pictured Bim in her place. A simple life, a happy wife and maybe when we were ready some kids of our own. It was a nice picture. I'd never thought about having a family before either, but suddenly it seemed like an option. If Bim could have kids… If we survived long enough to try… If I was man enough to say three stupid words to her.

"Supper's ready!" She called out.

We ate and talked about painting and life and nothing at all. She didn't mention my painting and I was glad she didn't. I didn't know what I'd say if she did. It was so natural, as natural as breathing was. So why did it feel completely alien to me? Because I'd never knew my family? Never ate a home-cooked meal across from someone who gave a shit about me? Because I never realized that this was the thing I'd never had until it was right in front of me.

Halfway through our meal, Sophia gave herself a playful smack on the forehead— inadvertently slapping another daub of still-wet green paint onto her hideous yellow/blue headband.

"Your friend Xan called early, while you were still at work. He said it was urgent but he wouldn't leave a message with me."

"I should go check in then." I said, scarfing down the last of my vegan stir-fry. "Thanks for supper, it was delicious."

She raised her paint-stained mug of tea in salute and I disappeared into my room. Maybe one day, if the stars aligned just right… I shook the thought from my head. There was work to do. Now wasn't the time for stupid daydreams.

It was curious how compartmentalized technology could be sometimes. On the voyage here aboard the Stalking Shadow, it had been everywhere. Back at Celio's palace and out at his sea stead, it wasn't as ubiquitous but it was still damned-near. Here on Sophia's street, there were hand pumps for water every hundred or so meters, maybe one house in twenty had a solar collector to power a radio or a few lights, and everyone cooked on ranges burning bamboo charcoal or dried kelp. Air conditioning was as much a myth to people like Sophia as void dragons or the Eldritch were.

Meanwhile I had more hardware and electronics tucked in my room than the surrounding square kilometer did combined. I barely touched half of it, a technological treasure trove gathering dust while I fell back on the basics. The low-profile camera, datapad and commlink were just about the limits of my tech-savvy.

I booted up my datapad and checked in on my little slice of Alice's spy network. There wasn't a lot of info for me. It was out there, I just couldn't see the whole picture over the data partitions. The basic idea made sense, if one of us got captured we couldn't spill what we didn't know. That didn't make it any less annoying.

From what little I could see, a lot had been happening wile I was staking out my best lead. Xan had tried to get a hold of me for some support since I was the closest. If he'd been desperate enough to ask me of all people, then whatever was happening was big. Three hours later Alice had sent out the order to go to ground and lay low.

I didn't like that, not one bit.

If something was happening, I'd be damned if I was going to tuck tail and hide. I was stick of being a coward that let other people fight my battles for me. Was that my pride talking? The order had to have come down for a reason and Alice could see the whole picture. Wouldn't it be better if I just did what I was told and waited out the storm? What was the worst that would happen if I took the night off?

A window would close. I might miss my last best chance at getting some real information out of this trumped up mission. I could make all the difference if I just got this one thing right.

Just like that, I banished all thoughts of of hunkering down for the night.

I wasn't helpless. I had powers and abilities no one else did. If I left my gun and comm behind, then why wouldn't I be able to pass as any other dos Estrelas out for a stroll taking in the cool night air. After all, I didn't need a gun to defend myself.

With a flicker of thought I summoned up my inner flame. It answered like a friendly wolf, warm, comforting and deadly. It was a steady burning glow in my soul that filled me with conviction. I made my preparations, uploaded my daily reports and waited out the clock.

Sophia was waking up from an evening nap as I was about to step out the door.

"Off to work again?" She asked still half-asleep.

"Yeah…" I still hadn't told her exactly what I did, but she knew I wasn't from around here and I worked for Celio. It didn't take much effort to puzzle the rest out from there.

Sophia hadn't bothered to change after eating or tidying up— I even spotted some flecks of paint on her wavy chestnut hair from where they must have touched the splotch on her hideous yellow/blue headband. The days were long and the nights were too, but when the suns went down and the orbital stations glowed like a collection of artificial moons, that was when the city really came to life. If tonight was going to be extra exciting, I really didn't want her to get caught up in my stupid problems. She was innocent in all this, and I wanted it to stay that way.

"It sounds like things might get a little busy tonight. You should probably stay inside." I said as I stood at the doorway.

"You know I like to do my shopping at night-" She started.

"I know but please, for me, stay inside tonight. Just to be safe."

I could see her still-waking mind thinking it over. She read between the lines quickly and nodded with a pout where a smile should have been. I was almost tempted to tell her about the loaded guns I kept in her spare room, but I kept that to myself. She was a gentle soul. I didn't think she could use a gun in anger and even if she could, I didn't want to be the one to corrupt her like that. For the sake of her innocence, I had to be stronger than that.

It was a trick of the light, but I swear I saw another woman's face instead of Sophia's just then in the gloom. In my memories she whispered, this life makes monsters of us all so go do your job, Cowboy.

"Okay. You be safe too." Sophia said. I could tell she meant it.

"We can go shopping when I get back. My treat."

"I'll hold you too it."

I made my way down bustling streets in the twilight, navigating as much by memory as by the slow burning candles denoting public works. The streets were in their largest flood of the day, with the temperature dropping to into the low thirties— which was considered to be chilly. Back on my homeworld we'd consider it hot if the temperature ever climbed back into the positive.

Street lamps and arsenic smell of burning metals meant I was getting close to my target. I passed my usual coffee shop and circled around to the ironmonger's public scrapyard. There was hardly any rhyme or reason to the discarded scraps, some like items were clustered together but that was the exception not the rule. Beyond the piles of scrap there was the gates connecting the scrapyard to the smelters. The gate was unlocked, just like it was supposed to be. I crept inside.

The foundry has a volcanic, sulfur kind of acidic reek and anyone else would have found the heat oppressive. As it was, even I found it a little much though it made my soul soar as I drank it in. I wasn't sure if it was the fumes or the heat, but the longer I spent here the more lightheaded I got. Kind of a loose, tipsy feeling. I kept to the shadows and made a quick sweep of the ironworks.

The office was nearby, on a demi-floor overlooking the whole operation, and the factory was nearly empty. I knew there was only a skeleton crew doing maintenance at this hour, but I hadn't expected them to slack off this much. I don't think I saw a single man doing his job as I slunk through to ironworks. I couldn't really blame them, from what I'd heard the work was lousy, dirty and it hardly paid. I spotted a poker game played atop a bundle of rebar and let myself relax a little bit as I made my way into the office.

The air conditioned office was abandoned, just like I'd been expecting it to be. Office is a big glass and steel semi-circle with computers overlooking the ironworks through some thick window that kept the heat out. I resisted the temptation to turn on the lights, searching in the dark by the dim light of of the glowing furnaces.

I'd been hoping for a nice stack of papers I could pocket but no such luck. Aside from a few hundred sticky notes with everything from operating instructions to production ratios to office drama, everything seemed to be digital. Irritating as that may be, I still had a job to do.

I booted up a terminal and—with the help of some nearby sticky notes—got logged into the orders and procurement system. I kicked myself over leaving my datapad and comm behind since that meant I had no way to bulk transfer the data off the terminal. Which meant I had to do it the old fashioned way.

I called up the recent orders and started going through them one by one, jotting down names and dates on sticky notes as I did. After a few minutes of tabbing through files, I found what I as looking for. An order for eight-thousand stamped out SMGs, for the Crucibab Civil Militia: Counter-Terrorism Unit, by order of Paladin of the Public, Colonel Marcos Heathcliff. The order had been commissioned about a month ago, half of it had already been finished and the next portioned would be shipped out… In three day! That was perfect! This was exactly the intel I needed.

The office lights flicked on at once, blinding me as I reached for a pistol I wasn't carrying. I reached an arm up to shade my eyes and felt three little puffs of air— two on my arm, the third on my jaw.

I squinted into the glare, light-headed and vision blurred. I could hear a man whispering but couldn't make out the words. I raised both hands overhead to show they were empty and they felt like lead as I did.

"I wasss geettting…" I started to say, mumbling out the words in a slur. My tongue felt thick and sluggish. I was teetering on my feet by the time I realized they'd drugged me.

I toppled to my hands and knees, struggling to lift my head and get a good look at my attackers. I reached a hand to wipe my chin and it came away a viscous powdery purple.

I reached for the killing fire inside of me. It answered, impossibly faint and far away. Like a lighthouse on the other side of the galaxy. It wasn't going to do me any good now.

"Is he one of theirs?" A man said as he kept a gun pointed at me.

I collapsed. The weight of my own body was too much. It was dragging my mind down too. His partner—there were two of them or was there four—walked to the terminal I'd been using.

"He was looking into the shipment. That's all the proof I need."

"Should I take care of him?"

"No. We'll take him back to base. Diablo will get some answers out of him."

I barely felt the last little puff that sent me toppling over the edge into darkness.