Vomero stripped his shirt off and knelt beside Cash, applying pressure. He looked over to me, still standing in the middle of the street torn between helping and chasing the shooter.
“We’ve got him,” Vomero said, understanding my dilemma. “Just go!”
“Skye, you’ve got this?” I heard Dick call after me with concern, but I was already moving, sprinting as fast as I could toward the alleyway where I had last seen the barrel of that gun.
The corridors in this part of town were long and narrow with few places to hide. As I rounded the corner of the alley, I never slowed my pace. I knew the shooter had a head start, but I was hoping they weren’t expecting a pursuit. Believing they’d gone undetected, I hoped whoever it was would try for a slow, calm retreat so as not to draw attention.
My intuition paid off as I saw a figure dressed in baggy, plain clothes carrying something wrapped in a blanket over their shoulder. It would fool casual observers, but I had smuggled plasma rifles through customs enough times to recognize the shape.
As soon as the figure noticed me bearing down on them from down the alleyway, they gave up their casual façade and took off toward the end of the lane. When I arrived at the end, I glanced left in the direction the shooter had turned and saw the figure scaling over a small wall lining the right side of the corridor. I followed.
The fleeing assailant was quick and agile but needing to carry the rifle was a hinderance that let me keep pace. It also helped that I had experience in this type of pursuit. Although to be fair, I was more accustomed to being on the other end of it. One did not last long as an Outlaw without knowing how to sprint and parkour through shady alleyways to evade capture or detection.
The chase took us on a winding path through the back market district. Sensing they could not simply out-maneuver me, my quarry switched tactics by trying to lose me in the crowd of people hustling between the various shops and merchant stalls. I refused to be misled, however. Even losing sight of the shooter for a few seconds, I used intuition and good guesswork to anticipate the route they would most likely follow.
I caught up just in time to see them scaling a gutter onto a low-lying rooftop.
“Of course,” I muttered to myself, huffing from the break-neck pace we had been keeping for nearly 15 minutes. “It’s always the rooftops.”
I hoisted myself up the same gutter and kept running. I was gaining ground, but still always just one step behind. As I neared the edge of the rooftop where the assailant had slipped down to the alley below, I tried a different approach. Rather than nimbly scaling down the side as they had done, I instead launched myself as hard as I could off the roof and toward them.
Luckily, the roof was not that tall on the edge, and my momentum carried me straight into my opponent’s back, allowing me to tackle them to the ground in the process. The hooded shirt they had been wearing fell back from the impact, and I could now see the shooter was a woman, human in appearance, with sharp, dark features. She recovered quickly, however, and once again decided to switch tactics. This time she traded flight for fight and kicked me hard enough to send me flying away from her as she performed a kip-up to her feet and took a fighting stance. I used the momentum of being kicked away to roll into a crouch, simultaneously summoning my daggers with a thought.
I saw her eyes flicker in surprise as my daggers manifested, but she seemed undeterred to be engaging in hand-to-hand combat with someone who was armed.
“Done running, then?” I goaded her. I wasn’t conceited enough to believe there’s no chance she could beat me in a fight. Getting in her head or at least learning what I could in the meantime seemed the smartest option.
“You’ll wish I‘d kept running when this is over,” she replied as we circled each other slowly looking for an opening to strike.
“Oh I doubt it,” I said, flippantly. “I’ve got bad arches and these boots aren’t ideal for sprinting.”
I deliberately left myself open, hoping she would mistake my banter for distraction. I was rewarded as she lunged toward me with a round-house kick, thinking she had caught me off-guard. I ducked under her kick and jabbed at her side with my dagger. She pivoted quickly to block the knife with her forearm.
“You’re in over your head,” the woman warned. “You should have minded your own business.”
“Last time I checked, I was minding my own business when you started shooting my friends.”
“Friends?” she laughed. “You don’t even know anything about Theodoric Cash. If you did, you’d have left him to bleed out on the street.”
“Technically, I did leave him to bleed out on the street,” I said, affecting a nonchalant air.
“Last chance to scamper away before I teach you a lesson about interfering with assassin business,” she said.
Bingo, I thought. My trash talk method was working. She was an assassin, but who was paying her?
She used the blaster rifle as a baton, twirling it to block my attacks and swinging it to try and land heavy hits. I met each of her attacks with one of my own, landing a few hard kicks, though she was adept at avoiding my blades as we traded blows. I was not as skilled at avoiding her blows, however, as she struck me several painful times with the rifle, leaving me bruised and bleeding from a few hard scrapes of the metal barrel.
“Actually, I’m glad you didn’t take my offer to flee,” she said, wiping blood from her lip. “I’m going to enjoy killing you for the fun of it.”
“That’s not very assassin-y of you,” I said sarcastically. “Isn’t getting paid to kill people supposed to be your thing?”
“Some jobs are business,” she said. “Others are pleasure.”
“Now, you just sound like a psycho.”
Her next hit was to my shin, sending me down on one knee.
Finally finding a genuine opening in the battle, she swung the rifle down like an axe, trying to take advantage of the weapon’s weight to power through my defenses. I crossed the daggers in front of my forehead to catch the rifle barrel as it descended. This left us stuck in a standoff in which she had the superior leverage.
Deciding that I would rather not have my skull crushed in by this woman today, I channeled all my energy through the blades. They pulsed brighter and sliced cleanly through the barrel of the rifle. My daggers immediately dispersed, and I slammed an uppercut into her jaw with all my strength as she fell forward from the momentum of her swing.
It was a risky move. I knew juicing up my weapons that way would temporarily disrupt my ability to resummon them. That's why I always carried back up.
Knocked back and reeling from the blow, she raised her head to find the barrel of my plasma pistol pointed at her face.
“Tell me why you tried to kill Cash,” I said without mincing words. The glib, bantering tone of earlier vanished. In its place was icy steel.
“What makes you think I’ll do that?” she said.
I pressed my thumb into the back of my blaster and it whirred audibly as I primed a shot.
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“Self-preservation,” I said, flatly.
“You expect me to believe you’d kill someone in cold blood over a person you barely know?” she challenged.
“Not yet,” I conceded and fired a shot into her shoulder. “How about now?”
She howled in pain and clutched her arm. The shot had shattered her collarbone and ripped through the ligament in her shoulder, leaving her arm to dangle loosely at her side. She sank down to her knees and supported the weight of her now defunct arm on her thigh to take the pressure off her shoulder.
I could see by the way her countenance changed that she understood I was done playing games. Once again, another layer of her façade, the evil bitch attitude she had been projecting throughout our fight, peeled away, and I knew I was finally seeing the real cold, hard assassin come out. Despite the pain I knew she must be feeling, she straightened her posture as much as she could while still supporting her wounded arm.
“Loyalty is an interesting thing,” she said, solemnly. “In the right place, it’s an unstoppable force. Misplaced, and it becomes a slave’s shackle.”
I wouldn’t admit to myself, much less to her, how much her words affected me. Loyalty and resolve were crucial to the Outlaw code. And while those ideals were a big part of what drew me to the Outlaw lifestyle, it was a variance of those same ideals that had pushed me away from it, as well. The guilt of wondering if deeper loyalty and stronger resolve to stay with my friends may have saved their lives was its own type of shackle.
“I listened to your lesson earlier. Now, I’m going to teach you one about Outlaws,” I said. “Nobody takes a shot at one of mine for free.”
Maybe it was why I had chased her so hard; maybe it was why I wasn't willing to let her go without answers. The Outlaws had a saying: Mine to Take, Mine to Keep. It was an acknowledgement that all things were fair game, but also a reminder that the only thing that truly mattered to the Outlaw way of life was the resolve to protect what was ours. Whatever reservations I held about this pseudo crew I had fallen into, our time in the bar had reminded me what it meant to be part of something, even if that something wasn’t perfect.
“Where would you like the next shot?” I asked, charging up my blaster for another round.
“Suffice it to say,” the assassin said hurriedly. “Cash is not what you think he is, Skye Alnasi.”
“I already know he’s part cyborg,” I said, taking note that she knew my name and, therefore, had information on all of us somehow. She must be well-connected because we had only been on this planet for less than a day.
“Sure,” she said. “That's not hard to figure out. Why he’s a cyborg, now that’s a different story.”
“If you think vague half-answers is going to keep me from putting another hole in you, then I obviously didn’t hit anything vital enough,” I said.
“You will have to kill me before I reveal anything about my mission” she said, and I could tell she meant it. Unfortunately for her, so did I.
“Noble of you,” I said. “But if you’re done giving answers, then I’m done listening.”
I pointed my blaster at her head, ready to pull the trigger.
“Skye! Stop!” Ryuuk stepped out from behind a nearby building. “You can’t just kill her.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked, but the momentary distraction was all the skilled assassin needed.
I heard the whirl of her sawed-off rifle as she charged up the power core fully. I turned just in time to see her fling the destabilized weapon in Ryuuk and my direction. I dove for him and shoved both of our bodies between two nearby garbage units in the alley. The weapon exploded in midair, showering shrapnel and sparks of plasma down on the area.
My ears were still ringing as I emerged back into the alley. As I suspected, the assassin was gone.
* * *
“What the hell were you thinking?” I spat at Ryuuk.
We had almost retraced our steps back to the entertainment district. Ryuuk filled me in on how he had arrived at the bar after hearing the shots. Dick had told him to come find me in case I needed back-up. Being able to fly and keen eyed, he was able to locate me and arrived just as my fight was ending with the assassin.
“I was thinkin’: Gee maybe I ought not let her kill some unarmed and injured woman and get herself arrested,” said Ryuuk. “This ain’t the wild west, Skye. Trust me, I’d know. You can’t just go round like some vigilante shootin’ people up with no good reason.”
“She tried to kill Cash, Ryuuk! Hell for all we know, she succeeded. That’s not ‘no good reason.’”
“That still don’t make it right,” he said. “The law is the law for a reason. It’s what makes us the good guys and people like her the bad guys---err, uh girls, I guess.”
“You’re so naïve,” I said. “I don’t know what rock you crawled out from under, but you better grow some common sense, and fast, or else this world is going to chew you up.”
“How am I the one lackin’ common sense, when you’re the one trying to break the law and think you’ll get away with it just cuz’ the other guy deserved it?”
“I don’t suppose it occurred to you that if Cash did survive that attack, there’s now one very pissed off assassin running free waiting to finish the job, an assassin who has very good connections in this city, by the way, the city we know jack squat about.”
“We’ll face that dust storm when and if it comes,” said Ryuuk. “Avoiding the dangers of tomorrow isn’t worth losing our souls today.”
I shook my head in frustration and breathed deep to release my anger. There was no point reasoning with someone who saw life as one great big adventure where the good guys always won and honor and justice always prevailed. That wasn’t the reality I was born into, and it wasn’t the reality we currently found ourselves in.
Arriving back at the square where Cash was shot, there was a ton of commotion as people gathered to gawk at the enforcers investigating the scene. I could see Cash was no longer in the area. A tinge of worry crept in my mind as I wondered whether it was due to him being taken away for treatment or taken away dead.
I scanned the crowd, looking for anyone I recognized but saw nobody. I didn’t really want to engage with the enforcers, thinking they’d probably be more interested in asking questions than answering them.
“Hey,” Dick said from directly behind me. Startled, I whirled around, fist raised instinctively to strike. He had definitely not been in the area a second ago.
“Whoa,” he said, catching my fist. “Easy. I take it that you caught up with whoever shot Cash.”
He nodded his head toward a bruise on my wrist and stared concerned at some scrapes on my face.
“You should see the other chick,” I said, pulling my hand carefully from his grasp so he wouldn’t feel my pulse jump at his proximity. “She got away though, thanks to my back-up.”
Ryuuk let out a snort of disagreement beside them but said nothing.
“She? Maybe I’m a little sexist, but I definitely expected it to be a guy,” Dick said, smiling. “It’s too bad I missed the cat fight.”
I rolled my eyes but refused to be baited by his comment.
“Cash....” I hesitated, not knowing how to tactfully ask if he survived.
“Medics took him to some fancy surgery center across the city,” Dick explained. “Apparently, the whole half man, half machine thing requires a specialist. He was critical when they took him, but I imagine if he survives, he’ll wish he hadn’t once he gets the bill.”
Vomero and the old guy went with Cash. They were waiting for us in the lobby when we arrived. The surgery center was indeed one of the most high-tech and expensive facilities I had seen in the city, so far. It was at least 20 stories high, judging from the outside, and made of glass and a hard shell-like substance I noticed was used to build many of the city’s structures.
“He just got out of surgery,” Vomero reported. “They said he’s stable and will make a full recovery, but he’ll be laid low for a while. They’ll have to keep him here at least a week so some cybernetic patch they installed has time to integrate into his system.”
We waited a while longer to find out he had been settled in a critical observation room. He wouldn’t be allowed visitors until tomorrow, they informed us, and then it was only one at a time. Realizing there was nothing we could do to help him today, we made our way to the exit. We agreed to track down some dinner, over which I could fill everyone in on the assassin.
I didn’t want to leave anyone in the dark, especially considering the danger might not be over and any one of us could be targeted for leverage—or revenge, I thought remembering the mangled state in which I had left the assassin. However, I hadn’t yet decided how much I wanted to reveal regarding the things the assassin had hinted at about Cash. It seemed poor taste to cast suspicions on someone who was in critical condition.
However, dinner and the assassin’s tale would have to wait.
As we approached the transit area that would take us back to our hub, two enforcer vehicles pulled up around us. At least six enforcers emerged from the strange hydro hover contraptions, blocking us in.
“Skye Alnasi,” one said, obviously the ranking officer based on her more formal uniform than the rest. “We need you to come with us and answer some questions.”
“What’s this about?” I asked.
“We know you had contact with the person who shot your traveling companion, today. You'll need to answer some questions about the incident and your involvement.”
“Involvement?” I asked.
“See,” Ryuuk said. “I told you murder wasn’t a good idea.”
Seeing the raised eyebrows of the enforcers, I glared at Ryuuk.
“Not that there was any murderin’ going on,” he hastily clarified. “I stopped her.”
“I really wish you’d stop helping,” I sighed.