9:59pm, Thursday the 9th October, 2132.
The wail of sirens faded as their source grew distant, and their electronic cries of alarm were replaced by the hard-jolting techno beats and psychedellic trance tracks of the city’s crime-ridden clubs. They played through the open doors of rival venues and filled the streets in competition, each seeking to draw in the myriad hedonists who walked the evening sprawl.
Aiden found himself walking down one such street. It was barely more than an alley and yet had life enough to be an urban jungle, and its dwellers wore hairstyles and clothes more outlandish than any he had ever seen in England. The multitude of colours they wore were bright, and starkly contrasted against the street’s darkest corners, and they reminded him of animals putting on a display to attract mates or warn predators of their venomous natures.
Even so, they looked at Aiden as though he was somehow stranger than they were, as though he was some heretic who refused to conform to their disconformity. He wore nothing but hospital trousers that were still stained with dark, heavy patches, and the shirt that had been torn to shreds was rolled into a ball and stuffed under his arm. His feet, bare, were careful not to step on broken glass or discarded needles.
“Want a good time, baby?” Asked the barely clothed virtual girls who lined brothel windows, beckoning him to enter. They seemed to target Aiden specifically, as though whichever computer intelligence or studio-bound performer that controlled those images noticed him against the crowd, and saw in him someone vulnerable enough to target.
He kept walking, holding no desire other than to find a place both safe and hidden. Another woman, real this time, stood leaning by a door that led into some violet-lit interior, and she called to him and showed her chest and all but begged him to go with her.
“Don’t do it,” someone told him.
Aiden paused to find that a pale man was standing directly in his path. He must have been an entire foot taller than Aiden, and his short hair had been bleached an unnatural blond.
“Don’t do what?” Aiden asked, eyeing him carefully.
“Don’t go with her,” he said. “If you do, then you flip a coin. With a lucky result, she’ll keep you preoccupied while her friends steal everything you have. With an unlucky result, she’ll lead you into a room of thugs who will still steal everything you have, but they’ll beat you half to death first.”
“I don’t have anything to steal.”
The tall man looked down and examined him through tinted aviator glasses, his lips spreading into a partially toothed grin. “The truly committed thief will always find something.”
By this point the whore had rolled her eyes and begun looking out for some other mark, and the tall man waved at her mockingly.
Aiden watched him for a moment, then took a breath. “Excuse me,” he said, then tried to walk past and continue on his way. The man, however, took another step directly in his path and forced him to stop.
“Why are you in such a rush? Somewhere you need to be?”
“None of your business,” Aiden replied. “Let me pass.”
The man shook his head, dipping a hand into his coat pocket to pull out a glass screen the size of his palm. “I’d say it is,” he said, and swiped his finger along the screen until muted news footage suddenly began to play. It showed a reporter standing in front of Fukaya General Hospital, with a small army of doctors, police officers and forensic scientists behind him. “Isn’t it funny how, so soon after a terrorist attack on a major hospital, I happen to see a man wearing ruined hospital wear walking, rather openly, in the exact opposite direction? Well… Perhaps not so much funny as… Intriguing.”
“That is quite a strange coincidence,” said Aiden, before attempting to pass the man again. The man placed a hand on his shoulder and stopped him, and Aiden let out a heavy sigh. “What do you want?”
“A word, that’s all. But not out here on the street where we can be heard.”
As much as he loathed to go with him, Aiden immediately knew that he did not have much of a choice. If the man was trying to blackmail or entrap him, which he already believed was the most likely possibility, then a private place was where he could best deal with the situation. If he wasn’t being blackmailed, and the man somehow had Aiden’s best interests at heart, then he wasn’t picky enough to decline such an invitation.
“Alright,” Aiden said. “Where do you have in mind?”
The man, grinning again, gestured for Aiden to follow him and turned without speaking, and led him further along the street until it opened up into a small night market filled with food stalls. There, the man turned off down an alleyway that was somehow even more run-down than the one previous, and the homeless squatted there on floor mats of decade old cardboard and made tents of waterproof sheets.
“Where are you taking me?” Aiden asked.
“You’ll see.”
Aiden was already doubting his decision. Perhaps he should just leave; turn around and run into the nearest crowd and never see the man again. Yes, there was a very real chance that any yet ungiven threat of blackmail would be acted on, but was that really so bad? When so many already wanted to catch or kill him, was one more minor worry really going to break the camel’s back?
It’s not like his situation could get any worse. Perhaps that was exactly why he was even going along with it. Perhaps he was following the man not out of fear, and definitely not out of trust, but out of a mixture of indifference and curiosity. Perhaps, now that he knew in his heart that he had already fallen so low, he merely trusted that there was nothing worse that could be done to him.
“In here,” said the man, opening a steel door that led into the back room of a sleazy bar.
“Really?” Aiden asked. “You want me to go in there?”
“Why not? You’ll want to hear what I have to say,” he replied, grinning all the while as he went inside.
Aiden followed him to find the back room was actually some sort of unused function hall, with booths of cushioned violet seats covered in plastic wrap, and a stage just large enough to fit a band. The whole room smelled of age, and the layers of dust and peeling wall-paint reminded him of some forgotten and haunted place. Yet the door on the opposite end of the hall had muffled music and talking coming from beyond it, and multi-coloured lights around its edges danced in the shadows of the people on the other side.
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“Close the door if you would,” said the man. “Do you want a drink?”
“No,” answered Aiden, obeying him until the door clinked shut with an electronic lock.
“Good. Neither do I.”
The man walked over to one of the booths and pulled the protective plastic covering from the seats, and threw it down over the dusty floor with a sweeping heave. Then he slid into one of the seats on one side of a rectangular table, and offered Aiden a seat on the other. Aiden took it, and as the stranger placed his hands on the table’s surface, Aiden leaned into the backrest behind him.
“What do you want?” Aiden asked.
“I want to take a look at you,” the man replied.
Aiden immediately felt uncomfortable, and as the man’s eyes searched his face unapologetically for features that even he would struggle to know, he turned away and pretended to busy himself examining the rest of the room. “I must warn you,” he said. “I don’t make a good victim.”
The man’s grin suddenly grew wider than seemed natural, and he almost seemed about to laugh until he relaxed into the back of his seat and removed his glasses. “I can imagine,” he said, his eyes unnaturally pale. “I noticed you haven’t asked for my name.”
“Do I need it?”
“Most likely.”
“Then say it.”
The man grinned again, and Aiden wasn’t sure if he found the man’s constant grinning annoying or unnerving. “They call me Sarratt,” he said.
“Who? Your friends?” Asked Aiden, now looking to see if the man had any signs of a weapon beneath his jacket. It was almost certain he did, of course, but Aiden wanted to know where it was.
“Some of my friends, yes,” Sarratt replied.
“And I assume you want me to give my own name in return?”
“Oh, I already know who you are, King.”
Aiden began to feel unnerved. If the news had publicly named him a person of interest in the terrorist attack then surely he would have known? On top of that, it was all but impossible that the police could have already picked his name out of the chaos. How then, with no possible way for Sarratt to have learned his name, did he know it?
“You really don’t remember me, do you?” Sarratt asked. “How curious. They thought you might not remember anything, but I did not believe it. After all, how could you not? After everything that’s happened?”
Aiden closed his fists tightly. “Remember what?” He asked.
“I must say, King, that we were surprised to learn you were not dead. You were a failure beyond all doubt and yet, to not only survive, but stay hidden this long? You have earned my respect.” Sarratt clapped his hands together in some false and grandiose gesture of regard. “Though, of course, she would want me to take you back. Especially since her mercenaries failed to do so.”
“Who are you?” Aiden asked again, a tightness growing in his chest.
The bleach-haired man paused and examined him again, as though bewildered the question needed to be asked a second time. “I told you, I am Sarratt,” he said.
Aiden barely had time to hear the European accent, now vaguely present in Sarratt’s voice, before a steel throwing knife punched directly into the center of his chest. The force of it knocked the breath out of him and he gasped, trying desperately to draw air back into lungs that now rejected it, and reached up his left hand to take hold of the knife’s black hilt.
“Why are you struggling and gasping, King?” Sarratt asked him. “Do you truly need air so badly?”
Aiden pulled the blade out of himself, then pushed his hand down against the table to force himself out of the booth. Just as he was almost free, another knife was slammed down through the top of his palm, nailing his hand to the wood beneath it. He screamed out in pain as Sarratt continued to calmly sit there, examining the actions of his prey like some deranged researcher.
“What do you want from me?” Aiden asked, almost begging for an answer. “Leave me alone!”
Sarratt grinned again. “But you have given me no reason to leave you,” he explained. “You are making this so easy, and you are not even trying to stop me.”
Aiden reached towards the knife with his free hand as Sarratt spoke, and as he moved to take the hilt, another blade was slammed down into it. Quicker than he had been able to see, his second hand had been speared into the first, and all he could do was release a terrified cry. On the far side of the hall, the music was still pumping through the door, and he knew that the listeners couldn’t hear him.
“You must fight a lot harder than that if you want to escape,” Sarratt told him. “I would have hoped that, surviving for as long as you have, you might have finally learned how to do that.”
Aiden suddenly pressed his hands down into the table and swung his entire body up over it, and used the momentum to kick Sarratt square in the face. Sarratt’s head went back awkwardly to the sound of breaking bones, and as Aiden landed on the table surface, Sarratt slumped away in misshapen silence.
Aiden wasted no time in making for his escape. With a groan he pulled his hands up against the blade hilts until the blades themselves gave way and lifted cleanly out of the table. Then he pulled one hand from the other, and quickly and messily pulled the knives from his flesh and let them clatter to the table as pale white spilled from already sealing wounds. He rolled away from Sarratt, falling to the ground with a clamor, and then got to his feet to half-stumble across the room back towards the steel door.
“Not bad,” came a groan from behind him, a half wheezing man who cracked and popped until he was straight and right again. “I did not expect that from you. It will not open, by the way. The door is mag-locked.”
Aiden paused in disbelief, then turned slowly to see that Sarratt was now standing next to his previous seat and watching him. A thin trickle of pale liquid still ran from his eyes and nose, and his characteristic grin was smaller than it had been.
“You were always clever, King. Always able to pick up on those small things that the rest could not notice,” Sarratt began to say. “You were the smartest of us. And yet you never applied it to combat. I never understood that. You could tell when a man was lying to you; you could discern a motive that was hidden beneath layers of false lies and half-truths, and read the tone of a voice like a book. And yet…”
Sarratt stopped speaking just long enough for Aiden to feel another knife punch into his shoulder, then continued: “… You never realized how to use it in a fight. You never realized how dangerous it could make you.”
Aiden pulled the knife free with clenched teeth and, rather than seeking answers or dropping the blade as he had the others, flicked his wrist and sent it back towards Sarratt with an aim he didn’t know he had. The knife was struck from midair with another that Sarratt threw, and both clattered back to the ground.
“You cannot defeat me at this,” said Sarratt. “You should play to your own strengths, not mine.”
Suddenly Sarratt was moving, and those movements were so erratic and disturbingly quick that Aiden had trouble following him or discerning what he was trying to do. Sarratt slid down to the two knives that had fallen to the floor and, in a single sweeping motion of his arm, sent them both flying back towards him, one after the other. They whizzed through the air and Aiden leaned aside, the first knife cutting his cheek as he reached up to catch the second.
As the first knife bounced away from the steel door behind him, Aiden tossed the second at his foe. Sarratt wasted no time in throwing yet two more, and Aiden’s toes gripped tightly around the hilt of the blade that was now on the floor beneath him.
What happened next did so in barely an instant, yet it cemented Aiden’s victory. The first knife that Sarratt threw knocked Aiden’s own out of the air, and the second passed it to fly straight for Aiden’s head. He leaned backwards, and as the projectile passed harmlessly over him, he used his body as a counter-weight and the power of his leg to flick the other knife up from the floor with his foot.
Though he did not understand how he got his aim, it was none-the-less impeccable. Sarratt had not expected the maneuverer and, unable to avoid it, suddenly found one of his own throwing blades burying itself deep into his forehead.
For a moment Sarratt looked almost impressed. He began to open his mouth, perhaps to congratulate Aiden, but fell backwards to the floor before a single word was spoken. He was limp now; his eyes open but unresponsive, and Aiden walked and stood over him and prodded him with his foot to make sure he wasn’t going to get up again.
“Shit…” Aiden mumbled. He left Sarratt’s body, and crossed over to the unlocked door that still had music playing behind it.
When he opened the door, he was greeted with the sight of a bar full of men and women who appeared to be bikers. They sat around a stingy counter or at tables in groups, drinking and entertaining one another with jokes and tales of violent daring. When they saw Aiden stood there, shirtless and shoeless, and with the still-warm body of a man lying there on the floor behind him, there was only one thing they could think to say.
“What the fuck?”