Kelly’s malicious detailing of corporate perks to Ginevra continues aboard the hung t’ou taxicab, the two of them hunched over, lowering their heads against the vessel’s oily ceiling. At their feet, wiry shag carpeting, an off-color, yellow-bronze. It smells sour of flattened beer-laced recyclables and forgotten plastic-bamboo barbeque skewers. All the while, the pilot, chittering, nearly yelling, is silent. To Ginevra and Kelly, at least, beyond the opaque and condensation-splattered soundproof partition, the separate atmosphere holding himself, his wife, and two children. Their skin is too soft. White. Shielded from the sun’s warmth and weak from radiation poisoning. The pilot lights another cigarette from crumpled yellow-gold packaging as he careens around Hu Shih’s exterior towards Kelly’s chosen destination.
This priority ride Ginevra’s enjoying—it’s all thanks to his Network, Kelly says over the automated, caterwauling shidaiqu pop music. It’s jazzy alongside the singer’s sultry wailing, with plinking castanets and braying clarinets. Hazy with static in the poorly-received radio broadcasts. Kelly maintains it’s that big corporate web of perks and kickbacks of his that got him this ride. The same one that has helped him track the hunters’ mutual target, a certain gladiatrix. A certain sister.
Tomorrow they’ll depart for the Northern Edge, Kelly plans. Home to Hu Shih’s industrial districts. Thousands of ports and airlocks and pipelines that funnel raw goods in and manufactured materials out of Hu Shih’s grasp. There, on that semi-horizon sleeps the efficiently organized system of squarely platted factories where faceless crowds of hungover bicyclists will soon converge on intersections like swarms of bees and blue-service-capped traffic police will gesticulate wildly their directions and hiss venom through their hand whistles, ones bitten and exhaled into until the cheap metal begins to warp.
Not the prettiest place to spend the cycle, Kelly admits. But, they’re on the hunt. No choice. Unless they want to waste some time. Ginevra’s continued silence is her veto.
As they enter his penthouse, Kelly’s hands draw across Ginevra’s shoulders, touring her through the comforting amenities of the penthouse’s open floor plan.
He assures Ginevra his penthouse is exactly that—his. Custom-designed and curated, from the hand-carved wooden columns—ultra-modern, devoid of molding or design—to the tall abstract oil paintings. Practically murals in their size, their earthy red-green tones a visual hodgepodge consisting of slashing lines and human figures distorted all parabolic. Thematically, they’re similar. But, purchased individually. Their simple geometric shapes of man and woman have been divined from the jarring right-angled genius of corpo-commissioned genius. Not to mention the heated floors, for when Hu Shih’s artificial atmosphere cools during one-third of the year. Or the room’s centerpiece, that sunk-in conversation pit dug near the floor-to-ceiling windows, room for six comfortably, twice that in well-acquainted pairs, one or two more than that when all’s bunched together and uninhibited.
There, nestled in the center of the floor, the nightcap they share is a freshly-opened bottle of tsipouro, a drink which Kelly assumes Ginevra has tasted before.
“Haven’t heard of it,” she lies, Bergeret pistol switched to her non-dominant right hand, lingering to her side, resting on the conversation pit’s bright-orange ottomans, her fingers calcified around the semi-automatic’s grip. She’s across from him, his back to the windows. Poor security on his part. Yet he places both filled glasses on his side and waits to drink until they’re sat shoulder-to-shoulder.
Kelly’s correct. She’s tasted it before. Often, in those domes.
And it’s nutty and strong at her dry lips, with hints of fermented apricot, guzzled from twin jadeite lowball glasses. Part of a set. Sickly green but lacking the normal chalky texture. The tsipouro tastes Corcyran made, which means it’s of middling quality, unlike that brewed on Pyrrhichus or Pygela. Each sip writhes down her throat like the dying, lunging movements of her first kill. Descending from her alcoholic stupor into a peaceful buzz, Ginevra uses the opportunity to down two more purple-dyed pills as Kelly puts on another antique audiorecording comprised of surdo-drum-saturated lounge beats that echo across the penthouse’s spotless floors and refract against the deepest hours of the night. The atmosphere outside is still. Quiet. Purposefully sterile. Devoid of wind or rain or the odd Sant-Sarninian dust squall.
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Kelly assures again that the lead tomorrow is promising. ‘A big deal,’ he says. But, it’s got to do with pirates, he warns from the master bathroom’s doorway. Privateers, more specifically. ‘They like to be called that,’ he remarks. Contract workers. Which, of any stripe or business, ‘just can’t be trusted. So plan accordingly,’ he recommends, drying his face, all muffled from behind a fresh towel, water droplets from his shower unable to penetrate his plastic skin, their surface tension perfect atop his cheeks.
His real-cotton sheets are low thread count and breathable. Freshly laundered and smooth on Ginevra’s palms and smelling briefly of citrus. Then olive wood. Cigarettes. She’s comforted only briefly—her heightened awareness ticked—before the ethereal sensation once more dissolves into nothingness.
Sniffing, searching for those scents once more, the filly realizes the entire bedroom is diffused with smells in the absence of a natural ecosystem. Not the citrus and cigarettes she craves, but instead, artificial oils that mimic the estates of old. Like primrose in a humid valley, or beechwood on a warm summer’s night. Just like the domes in Sant-Sarnin with their holographic vistas. She remembers them. With high ceilings, like Kelly’s, although his walls are too bare—empty save for the odd oil-slicked and abstract money laundering monstrosity. Yet the penthouse is acoustically designed to prevent an unsightly echo. Even those surdo-drum beats have since subsided. The hiss of spent vinyl sounds like on oxygen leak before Kelly puts the record out of its misery.
The pillows are natural, dutifully stuffed with top-shelf pseudo-feathers by unseen help, hand-prepared with care. Cloudlike on Ginevra’s sore neck. Her spine, sore shoulders, bruised flanks are bobbing atop an ocean’s surface, at least to the filly’s intoxicated mind. She’s sore already from the physical strain of the Old Eighty-Six’s booth seating. From twelve—thirteen?—straight cycles of hunting.
Not to mention the lack of sleep.
Out the floor-to-ceiling windows, the wraparound vista frames the late evening spectacle. Hu Shih goes through his state-mandated sleeping cycle. The thickets of skyscrapers enforce rigid lights-out schedules, forgotten office windows and street lamps building randomized constellations that tomorrow will transmute into government-issued notices of levied fines. Some of those distant stars flicker on-and-off, where salarymen chained inside their offices put in their extra hours, getting ahead in their work or desperately catching up, most sunken-face and stressed beyond reason—half-drink victims of Hu Shih’s pragmatic zest for workmanship who, too, dread the approaching digital dawn.
The filly’s guttural sigh signals her world has stopped spinning. Those constellations are no longer in orbit. And, sobering quickly, Ginevra watches these stars like fireflies twinkling in the distance, the top-dollar shikumen façades sparkling dull like Kelly’s gold band hidden within the plain-white ergonomic bedside table—that ring the filly inspected as she searched for a hidden holdout firearm to preemptively unload should conflict arise. She rolled the non-synthetic jewelry between her fingers, attempting to discern the shaved-off date and initials. Impossible to read. Scraped by hand, by the looks of it. Like a familiar Kanapaha rifle. As she wedges the loaded Bergeret beneath her pillow, her spine is conscious but rigid, nerves devoid of sensation below the neck, tail flicking out of semi-inebriated habit.
Unrealized nervousness, maybe, as Ginevra can’t relax. No, it’s not the preemptive dread of hangover. It’s the bedroom’s dark corners. Where they converge into malicious angles. Like The Regency’s thin walls, where dissected phantom mares plot alongside murderous porters. Bumming cigarettes from one another, hissing spiteful comments in hushed tones. They lurk there, pining for a chance when she’s at her weakest.
But, although she’ll never admit it, she’s grateful when her attention is finally torn away to focus on something else.
Her almond eyes glaze over for the evening, going through the familiar out-of-body motions. Messes of silent pankration holds. Grips on necks, contortions she’s all too familiar with after Augo’s years of training. But unlike the chastising or critiques—from Augo, from those mares lurking in the darkened corners, from doe-eyed long-fanged tarts who gossip with malicious hotel staff—it’s silent. Nearly silent. Quieter than it’s been since those purple-plasticky pills first entered her bloodstream. Just the rapid acceleration of heartbeats keeping time with that Cortébert metronome.
Ginevra whispers in Kelly’s ear, panting, against her better judgement, guard down, that Bergeret’s safety finally flicked, that she looks forward to working with him.