There are roughly two types of people in the military: those who went to school and made this a career and those who kind of YOLO’d it during a time of social and economic pressures and were now Uncle Sam’s property for a set period of time. If you’re in the former category—congrats, your prospects are bright. You get to wake up, hit the meetings, sacrifice some Sickles, and be back by seven to play board games or whatever the fuck functional families do. If you’re in the latter category, and monsters decide to invade your world, there’s nothing to do but shine floors and jerk off, so people compromise with cards.
No matter where you went walking through the Pioneer Square area, you’d find Sickles meeting their trauma head-on with a can of Pabst and a pair of Bicycles against their chest. Sure, people tried to play chess, but the keyword here is tried. Card players were loud, and sooner or later, someone won the pot, and then a fight broke out. People would go flying, crash into chessboards, and chess players would pull out their glock (or whatever the fuck the military had on hand) just to prove that they were as uncivilized as the rest of us. Before long, those people went inside, and the rest of us kept on keeping on.
“Oi! Check out Kei!” Trent said as I walked up. The balding man would make a six-figured salesman or a fired career professional with nothing in between, but that’s how personable people are—for better and worse. A full table of rough men and women around him turned on his cue. They were all sitting under a gazebo that homeless people smoked foilies under a few years back, and I wasn’t sure that human quality had improved much. “You comin’ back from the Unicorn?” he asked, eyeing my pink shirt.
“I’m coming back from a date,” I said. “With a woman. Almost fucked a pre-rift, but she saw my scales. What’s your excuse for dressin’ like that?”
“Bull~shit,” Trent grinned. “Buuuuuull~sheet. You believe this shit?” He looked at Alexis, who everyone naturally called “Alex” on account of her shaved head, tank top that exposed 80% of her cotton bra, and panty-length short shorts that showcased 100% of her Dark Scales on her inner thigh as if she was proud of it. At first glance, you’d think he would’ve asked the feminine Latina beside him instead of Lady Borderlands, but Alex was the real tiebreaker. When I met her, she was a rich girl with long hair, and her soft personality and porcelain smile hadn’t changed much since.
“I like it,” Alexis said quietly, looking away. She was uncomfortable with the discussion.
“Of course you’d say that,” Trent said. He turned to Angelica and then looked back at me as if she didn’t exist. “Looks like we ain’t statistically significant.”
“Chinga tu madre, you crazy fuck!” Angelica—who I called Angel—scoffed, hitting his cards out of his hands. “I’m a woman too.”
“No, you’re a ‘Proud Latina,’” Trent smirked. “You don’t count.”
“I don’t—“ Angel fumed, but when she saw his love-to-rile-you-up grin, she smacked his head. “Puta.” You’d never know these two were best friends. Angel ignored him and turned to me. “It’s nice, Kei. I like it.”
“Thank~you,” I smirked.
Trent looked between the women and then looked at the other man at the table. His name was Randy (“just Randy” if you asked him), a man who had bushy eyebrows who usually couldn’t shut the hell up about politics but was oddly silent. “Come on, Randy,” Trent pleaded. “Back me up here!”
“Just play your hand,” Randy grumbled.
“What’s the point of that?” Trent asked, pointing at the two, seven off-suit cards that Angel smacked out of his hands. He had nothing.
Randy sighed and stood up. “Then it’s about time to call it. Ain’t playin’ with Sundance here.”
I frowned. “I lost money to you last week.”
“Only ‘cause you wanted to.” He cracked open a Rolling Rock with a hiss, letting it clink open before gulping some down. “Besides, I already won enough to beat inflation. Gotta make it count.”
“Here he goes again.” Angel rolled her eyes. “Este idiota siempre con lo mismo,” she grumbled, trailing off.
“Ah, come on. Let’s hate on him together,” Trent said. “Can’t do that when you’re speaking Mexican.”
Angel shot him a death glare but gave in. Trent just said shit to annoy her, but he was legitimately the best-natured person I think any of us had ever met, and it left her exhausted. “I’m saying that that’s all he talks about.” She turned to Randy. "You were right. The apocalypse was coming, and it came. Now get laid or something.”
“You can borrow my shirt,” I offered, grinning as I counted out 120 greenbacks in clean bills.
“Ah, fuck off,” Randy said. “This is a free ass country, so I’m not telling you what to do. But you should take this seriously. Those things just sank a cargo ship, and we’re about to get ass rammed with inflation.”
“What was on that ship, anyway?” Trent asked.
“REEs,” Randy said.
“What’s a REE?” Alex asked.
“Rare Earth Elements.”
“Oh, Rare Ear~th Elements,” Angel said. “Good thing I already bought mine for the month, or I’d be fucked for groceries.”
Randy snorted. “I should’ve just said it had a boatload of sodium polyacrylate in it.”
Alex put down her cards. “What’s that?”
“It’s what’s in your pads.”
Angel threw her cards on the table. “You got a problem?”
“I think… what he’s trying to say…” Alex said softly, “is that just because you don’t know what something does, doesn’t mean it’s not important.”
“Exactly,” Randy said. “And REEs take the cake. No REEs, no computer chips, no computer chips, no drones, no sonar… no nothin’. And we still gotta buy more, so they’re gonna spend even less on us.”
“Which is already nothing,” I said, throwing Trent a dollar and grabbing a Pabst Blue Ribbon from his 12-pack.
“Already nothing,” Alex agreed.
We just wanted to move past this bullshit and move on. In my eyes, they were both annoying, fighting over nothing. Politics meant nothing when our only identity was “Sickle,” and we had no political representation.
“What I want to know,” Trent said, leaning back, “is why in the hell you know what goes into sanitary supplies.”
Randy snorted. “Ain’t that obvious?”
I looked at Angel, who was still pissed, then cracked open my beer and leaned back. “Nope.”
“So I could win this conversation,” Randy said. “Obviously.”
Trent pursed his lips and nodded. Alex giggled, and I presented my free palm to Angel and said, “You gotta at least give ‘em an A for effort.”
Angel scoffed and grabbed my beer, confiscating it as “asshole tax” for not taking her side unconditionally.
My shoulders slumped, but I let her have it. I’ve always been a chintzy bastard when it came to spending money, but I’d pay any amount for peace. So I shrugged, threw a five at Trent (the first was a dollar, the second was pitch), and grabbed another. Trent threw the five back. Alex threw a one at him. He frowned, Alex giggled, I chuckled, and even Angel smiled. We let it hold for a second, then I reached for the chips.
“So we gonna play?” I asked, trading in greenbacks.
We all nodded except Randy, who was still standing. Then we all turned to him, staring him down, especially Angel, who was nudging her head toward the pot out of spite. “Well, pendejo?” she asked.
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“Kei’s down a beer ‘cause of you,” Trent said. “So you kinda owe him one.”
“Trent’s down a beer because of you,” Alex said, grinning, “So you kinda owe him one.”
I almost cracked. “Alex is down a dollar because of you. So you kinda owe her one.”
Angel chuckled as Randy’s eyes sunk inward. He sent me a pleading glance.
“Seems you’ve lost, after all,” I grinned. “Now bet.”
4
Texas Hold’em is a relatively simple game if you already know the value of cards. Everyone is dealt two cards and bets. Then, the game starts with three cards that turn over, which are like a group hand. If you have a pair of aces in your hand, you have one pair. If there’s an ace on the table, you have a three-of-a-kind. Then cards keep turning until there are five on the board. Best hand wins.
It’s a game of skill and bluffs and all that, but it’s primarily a game of statistics. Take the hand I’m looking at with bloodshot eyes and a pounding heart. I got a three and five of diamonds. There’s a jack and nine of diamonds on the board. I know by the cards shown and the deck’s composition that there is a 19.57% chance that the last turn will be a diamond. Then, I’ll get a flush (five of the same suit), piss off Randy and Trent, rake in the $400 pot, and I’d finally be able to afford the necklace I’d been trying to buy for three years.
But here’s the thing—
—the odds of that actually happening were really fucking low.
Trent nearly jizzed himself when the jack was turned, all but screaming, I’ve got a muthafucking JACK! as he went All In, and Randy watched him with a high pair, wondering if he was full of shit, cringing that he bet above inflation. Then there was me, knowing full and fucking well that if absolutely anything dropped that wasn’t a diamond, which was statistically fucking likely, I was gonna be down some serious change. Obviously, as someone who customarily utilized every form of statistic and tactic imaginable to win, I wouldn’t play that hand. It’d be stupid. Irrational. Seriously fucking delusional to play that hand. So why was it that at 1 am, I always found 100 dollars worth of chips in my hand despite having bullshit cards, on the verge of screaming Fuck it, let’s goooooooooooooooo?
I’m still not sure. There’s just something feverish about the thrill of gambling that allures me, and when people bet erratically, and they’re full of shit, it makes me want to do the same. It was an ugly trait that caused me hell, but that’s how it was—and that night was no exception. I was calling, so I reached for my chips. But just before I called, I heard a thud from behind me, followed by a calm voice that addressed me:
“How disappointing.”
The voice was crisp yet ethereal, almost ghostly. I turned and found a woman across the street, standing with her back against a light post. We were on a four-way intersection between 1st Ave and Yesler Way, and she was at a diagonal, almost eighty feet away, making it impossible for me to see the object on her back. But I could see the rest of her.
Beyond having a transcendent voice, her appearance wasn’t special. If I had to describe her, I’d say: “She had a light brown ponytail and an athletic frame.” That’s it. She had no stylish haircut or cheek scar or beautiful makeup or signs of drug use. She wasn’t particularly small or tall, and she didn’t have an oval or egg-shaped head. She was just average. Not pretty or ugly or unique or interesting. Average. And that kinda annoyed me because there was nothing worse than having someone as mediocre as you treating you like you’re unworthy of being near them. The only thing that truly stood out, the thing that I still remember so vividly, was the jacket she was wearing. It was made out of some type of textured hide, like pure white paint on snakeskin, but accented with black blotches like a Rorschach test. It was unique and kinda cool—but it was also kinda hideous. That balanced it out at neutral, just like everything else about her. So I said, “Rude,” as I dropped my chips back in front of me, adding, “Can I help you with something?”
Alex looked at me. “Who are you talking to?”
My heart cranked unnaturally when I realized the vast disparity between the voice’s crispness and how far away the woman was. Then my world slowed a little, and my God’s Vision (the name for being able to see aether) eerily flipped on like a light switch (something that had never happened before). My brain suddenly exploded with pain, but I fought past it to look at the woman. What I saw chilled me to the bone. “Pink” aether flowed through her so bright she looked like a strip club sign—and I had never seen “pink” aether used for anything, and after watching the sheer destructive might of the unknown orange—seeing a new aether made me panic.
I immediately unclipped my Beretta from my holster. Alex looked where I turned from, noticed the woman, and grabbed hers.
Randy’s eyes widened. “Whoa, what the hell are you two—“
“A little slow, but not terrible,” the woman giggled.
Randy froze because there was nothing cute about the giggle. It was terrifying. The sound moved between our ears as if she was controlling two sides of a pair of headphones and was alternating the sound on and off with two separate knobs.
“What the hell’s going on?” Angel asked, standing up.
“It’s a Wraith,” Alex warned. Wraiths were another name for Riftwalker on account of their ability to come and go between dimensions, bend space and time to travel and make themselves invisible—amongst other things. They couldn’t survive a missile or concentrated 50-cal fire—but they had insane power, and hitting them was famously difficult. If she really was a Wraith—we were fucked.
“That’s rude,” the brunette said. I turned back and saw her walking toward us, exposing a scythe on her back. “I’m just looking for answers,” she said.
“About what?” I asked nervously. She stopped in the center of the four-way intersection between 1st and Yesler. Streetlamps bent her shadow in four directions, leaving a gradient of dark and mid-gray shadows jutting around her. It made her look sinister, and the massive, almost cartoonish scythe on her back didn’t help. The weapon didn’t feel like a prop. It had a very specific shape, a slight curve, and the texture of polished bone, making it look like she ripped a claw off a colossal grizzly bear, cut a slice off it, and then sharpened it. It was a Beta’s claw. I was certain of it.
“You. And I was rather disappointed.” She mouthed those words in front of me, but I heard them behind me as if her ghost was caressing my cheek from behind. The image made me break out into cold sweats, and I thought that my bladder would go.
“I was expecting someone skilled or barbaric,” she said, “but you’re just impulsive.” She snorted and walked away from us, traveling down 1st Ave toward the pier under the watch of the other soldiers in Pioneer Square, who were pissing away their savings with a stack of cards and a six-pack only moments before but were now frozen by her oppressive presence. When her body became too distant to see, the soldiers resumed talking, and I leaned back.
“That….” I exhaled, pulling my hand away from my gun. “Was the scariest shit I’ve seen all day. And I went face to face with a stalk—“
I stopped talking when I saw dopples of the woman with the scythe from behind Alex. “Duck!” I yelled.
Alex did, and I grabbed the card table and threw it. Time slowed as the table flew forward, and I could hear money, cans, and poker chips falling like hail. For a moment, I thought I was wrong but—but I wasn’t. A black scythe blade materialized from nowhere, slicing through the table like shears through fabric. The brunette’s face appeared right before she kicked Randy in the stomach and sent him hurtling into the street.
“Quick reflexes, decisive action,” she mused, hands locked around the scythe’s haft. “But it won’t save you against a Wraith.” Then she lifted her scythe, and dear God, all I could think about at the time was just how impractical the weapon was for killing humans. If the blade really was a beta’s claw, I could imagine it going through a tree trunk, but it was impossible to swing in the gazebo. If I got close, she would be defenseless. So I worked with that, planting my legs, stepping toward her, and punching her stomach with all my supra-human strength—
—and promptly broke my hand. Seriously. My knuckles snapped as if I had hit an iron support beam, and my body reverberated unnaturally.
“Don’t try to hit a wraith.” The woman gripped her scythe’s haft and thrust forward, hitting me with the straight bar, sending me stumbling backward. Next, broken-fisted and hazy, I could only stumble backward as she shot forward, elegantly slicing the air, thrusting the bottom of her haft at me, and smashing the ground with the blade.
Even with the dopples telling me where she’d be striking, I didn’t have much Sena slowing my world or Cela speeding up my movements, and I wasn’t dexterous enough to keep up. If she meant to kill me, it would’ve been a massacre. But she wasn’t. She was experimenting on me.
It was surreal. Her attacks were hallucinogenic, with her body’s neon pink aether signature flickering on and off, pink or orange or blue aether flowing into her scythe on one swing and then disappearing the next. When the blade didn’t have aether flowing into it, I couldn’t see its dopple, creating this brutal mix of trust issues with the dopples, unveiling its weakness—I could only see dopples if there was aether present. Luckily, the woman couldn’t get rid of her aether even if she wanted to. Somehow, she masked my God’s Vision, eliminating my ability to see aether flowing through her—but I could see the dopples, so I focused on looking at her body instead of her blade. And she picked up on that. Soon, she imbued the blade with aether and hid it from my eyes; it looked like a normal blade, but I could see the dopples again.
Through it all, I stumbled and fell and scrambled to my feet and dodged and blocked and got kicked this way and that, rolling and standing and jumping, never knowing where I was going. Sickles screamed when I accidently stumbled into the park, making them run or pull guns or yell as she rushed through the area, blade swinging, wide open as if she wasn’t concerned about getting shot by dozens of people, cutting through any object I threw at her.
“What do you want from me?” I asked, throwing a table at her.
“I want to know the truth,” she said.
“So do I—that’s why I’m asking you what I want to know.”
Lady Wraith (as I decided to call her) stopped moving, pausing for a moment and then laughed softly. “Fair. Were you the guy on the turret?”
“I was on a turret...”
“The one protecting my helicopter.”
My bones locked up. “Wait. Were you the one that killed that Beta?”
“Answer me first,” she said.
“Yeah, I did.”
“How?”
I laughed. “I don’t know. And it’s clear you’re not from around here because if you were, you’d know that asking that question’s gonna get me kill—gah!” The trace Sena I was using to slow my world cracked, flooding my world with intense information—making my headache return. I instantly dropped to my knees and grabbed my head.
“Hey! Speed it up. You shouldn’t eve—“
“Shut up!” I yelled, cutting her off. “If you’re gonna kill me, just kill me. Otherwise, shut up and leave! You’re gonna get me in—”
A siren went off in the distance, and soldiers started approaching south on 1st Ave toward us on Humvees. The floodlights snapped on, blinding me and increasing my headache. An intercom clicked on.
“Sickle 1706, get on your knees and put your hands on your head.”