“Priority designation. Slick, right? Perfect for getting out of a jam,” Kelly muses, “or avoiding rush hour.”
Priority designation means immediate arrival for those hung t’ou taxicab rides, Kelly explains. Rickshaws, too. One of the perks of corporate life. He’s all smiles, scraping ginger residue from beneath finely clipped nails and sliding into a pleasant tipsiness.
When Kelly’s mouth is shut, the airlock is almost silent. The noise from the Old Eighty-Six is blocked behind the glass on one side, the approaching hung t’ou’s afterburners blocked on the other along with all other friction and heat. In the hangar’s cold air, only the distant ticking of Kelly’s watch sounds. It’s a Cortébert around his burn-scarred wrist, the jump-hour mechanism skipping through time like a flat stone across a river. It’s nearly two in the morning. Hu Shih’s new cycle has begun, and the two flee from the forthcoming digital sunlight, pining for the emptiness of space. That twenty-four karat ticking bores into Ginevra’s oblong skull, along with the two hunters’ intermingling breaths, each one of them careful to maintain an aura of coolness, even as the evening winds down to a crawl.
The filly leans against the airlock glass. Although it’s cold, her pelt at end, she barely feels a thing—numb to temperature—only the kinetic, regretful churning of alcohol. Yet despite the alcohol, she’s absurdly conscious. Aware of the way her lips settle atop her flat teeth, her jutting snout sniffling, auburn pelt feeling as if it was improperly grafted onto her own face, causing a subtle discomfort. She wipes her eyes, picking at stray eyelashes, letting her vision falter, the handgun in her palm an afterthought. The Bergeret’s barrel stares between Kelly’s shins, ready to fire off a shot between his loafers.
It’s the antipsychotics. The way they intermingle with alcohol. That’s why she’s so blitzed. So unable to act as professional as she demands herself to be.
Ginevra knows. She’s familiar with the way her dull purple-dyed antipsychotic pills interfere with her mental state, corralling her natural need to run rampant, her runaway nature encoded into her DNA like a forgotten vintage. So, she shifts uncomfortably. It’s lumpy pseudo-meat—some poorly reheated plant-based lamb—that pools at the corners of her long jaw. Sticky, reverting back to fibrous root extract as she attempts to tongue it away. Her pistol faces the air as she sticks a pinky’s fingernail at her gums, causing them to bleed. The Bergeret’s receiver is left dangling atop her index finger, her desire for clean teeth and keeping Kelly at arms’ length at cross purposes.
“You know, I used to think it was a big deal, this whole thing,” Kelly once more chit-chats at gunpoint. “The corporate life. Perks and all. But, you know what? When you get down to it, there’s really nothing strange about getting—”
Ginevra flinches. A pinky nail bends back against her tooth in confusion. A mare catches her eye. One behind Kelly, outside the airlock. Lurking beneath his silver attaché case. Crouched. On her knees, patella’s hinge joints shattered, head-and-neck dislocated and bouncing with artificial gravity, shimmying around on the Old Eighty-Six’s soiled floor as if the ghastly living corpse is looking for a dropped lighter.
Barely a torso, but Ginevra knows it’s a mare nonetheless.
She recognizes the shambling skeleton. After all, she’s been there. She feels the subhuman needs radiate off each bleached rib—the pining for cigarettes and booze and the thrill of pulling the trigger at her palm. That mare’s corpse hobbles along, searching, as if the living dead could unlock the need for psychotherapeutic release carried through hundreds of copies of that same mare. So there it crawls, skin, muscle gone. Burnt, like those pseudo-meat skewers. Over-salted, too, with supercharged sand turned to glass, caught between flat molars, carrying genetically embedded nightmares of some forgotten nuclear accident.
“—skiing!” Kelly shrugs, smiling meekly, rubbing his shoulders to signal the airlock’s chill has caught him by surprise. “And you know, man I’m telling you, it’s just not my game. And any sort of winter sports—all the way down to the humble toboggan—not my game at all! I know. It’s a sin, right? A guy in my line of work, who’s unable to enjoy a little brandy at the mountain lodge? A little apres ski for a holiday, even for a cycle or two? Well,” he sighs with levity, “just let me say—”
That oblong skull stares from below, through his legs. But before Ginevra can fire a round, she blinks. There’s another mare—above.
There, the other slouching mare raps a fist against the glass. From her muted purple platform combat boots covered in fresh Tiangong yellowcake, she disapproves of Ginevra’s choices, chastising the filly with that bleeding hole through her chest, eviscerated lungs peeling into rancid heaps of spongy organ, sullying the already-stained floor. It’s a look of disdain—a familiar disapproving scowl only seen in reflective surfaces like mirrors or polished machetes.
That mare knows about Ginevra. About her Kanapaha’s shaven-off façade of ‘A-G-M’ initials—about Ginevra’s pisspoor shot grouping. All her weaknesses. Like that thing of hers back in Sant-Sarnin’s domes—that object back in Camelot. The little humanoid shape that the filly refuses to accept as a living creature, her emotional switchboard refusing to cooperate with reality, igniting with impudence at the thought of responsibility and thus weakness.
That purple-booted mare declares all this with the deliberate moves of her head, through the nonverbal physical codes required of a professional killer in the field. The mercenary’s communicating silently. As if a target is lingering nearby. Radio silence. She’s not to be ignored, and so she rests a fist of furred knuckles atop the airlock glass. It chips with each knock. Cracks spread along geometric lines like spider-web. If that mare keeps knocking on the airlock glass like that, the whole pane will give way. Then whoosh.
And that mare’s impatient as always.
“—it’s just when I think about the cold, man I just can’t stand it.” Kelly’s palms turn upwards. “You know how freezing it gets. Doesn’t matter what gloves you’ve got on, either, since there’s always snow that gets between your fingers. Then, what, it melts? Now you’re wet. And not to mention, you’re stuck on the side of some cliff, and the only way back down to the bar is through—”
Ginevra can’t flinch at the third mare. The filly only mouth-breathes, jaw lingering open. Her hooded eyes glare down her sights in an unconscious trance at yet another possible target.
That third mare pouts. That one, with her gaudy showgirl outfit torn across chest, where machete cuts in torn pelt are dug deeper than her décolletage. Sequins sullied, with one pegasi wing wilting and torn from her dress’s spine. Dolled up, just out of the revue. Her whole body in repose. Eyes half-closed, black kohl eyeliner perfect if not for the busted eye socket skull’s bone peeking from skin. She’s contorting as if she were around Kelly’s arm, wearing the telltale skepticism of seduction.
She leers, inspecting Ginevra from hoof to head, nickering with disgust at the unkempt fetlocks, smeared foundation, sweat that’s kept the filly’s pelt sticking in different directions, looking cow-licked and feral—Ginevra’s just another one of Hu Shih’s tarts lingering in a cramped airlock, stinking of booze, her dignity sold over the course of a single meal.
Ginevra could hear the mare’s chiding comments as if they were spoken aloud. But instead, they’re mouthed from glossed lips—coated in an off-burgundy, perfectly applied, anachronistic Hsiaomei Rouge in Mistress (Shade 108). That mare’s backhanded insults are lip-spoken from behind the rapidly chipping airlock glass—and lip-read by the filly, whose Bergeret’s barrel points with renewed vigor at both sides of Kelly’s head, then between his legs, the three mares converging on the corpo, threatening to break through the airlock and tear him limb from limb.
And Kelly’s just standing there. As if he wasn’t in danger at all.
“—the sun, the sand, that’s where it’s at. We’re primed for it, I think. To want a chair on some little spit, a little private island, cold beer in hand. I mean, sure, it’s dangerous for hunters like us to ever let our guard down, but every once—”
When Ginevra focuses, it’s him she sees down her sights. Only him. Relaxed. Talking to her as if he’s addressing all four, with the way he leans in his own calculated manner, never breaking eye contact, dispelling those three anthropomorph mirages with ease. The way his hands never leave his wingspan, staying within his own orbit, master of his own space. His cadence, purposefully stuttering, naturally charming, animal magnetism dripping. His Cortébert’s hypnotic ticking is a heartbeat.
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And to the mouth-breathing, lip-biting, shoulder-shaking filly, Kelly smells like olive trees.
His presence is herbal. Wafting in a foreign breeze that whips through the airlock. A moist, foggy breeze, found in an early morning. It’s raceday—whatever that is, whatever that signifies—some genetic memory of some forgotten fateful competition. The whiskey Kelly scrapes from his lips suddenly feels like citrus peels stinging Ginevra’s gums. Numbing cigarette smoke instead of overwhelming cigar. Tastes that only exist in the recesses of the filly’s mind.
Ginevra pauses. She’s felt this ethereal sensation before—of these phantom flavors. Once before. Wafting off of someone else. Not that familiar canine media magnate, but with someone she never met. Someone she hadn’t noticed. She was busy, after all. She was on the hunt.
It’s a memory from long ago, one Ginevra can remember with traumatic lucidity. Her first murder—that point-blank assassination she committed in the Corcyran taverna.
The semi-automatic pistol’s barrel nearly touched the back of the old man’s head and nearly nestled into his curly, recently trimmed graying hair. His well-shaven face still reeked of oakmoss and sweet musk finto-tallow, clammy to the touch. He hadn’t noticed Ginevra’s arrival, and continued to discuss the mundane—olive grove blights and suspicions of insurance fraud—over the hand-plucked tortoise shell zither performance played alongside long-necked lutes. A Corcyran kakophoni.
Ginevra was green. Younger than she is now. Awkward in her anxiety. But same height and broad shoulders, always misshapen and instinctually off-putting. The lingering foal fringes at the tips of her tail were an afterthought—kept unshorn to make her look as young as possible. For tactical purposes, keeping the filly deliberately unassuming—according to Augo’s training—youthful enough for the odd investigative glances from the corners of eyes, but too young for overt stares to form.
The filly’s eyes instinctually slammed shut as the first armor-piercing round exited through the farming magnate’s right eye at an angle, jerking the filly’s shoulder, obliterating his thick horn-rimmed lenses, mangling his thin Oriago brand circle-cut frames, and wounding the disinterested, lingering mistress sitting diagonal to him—the she-jackal sent yowling, shrapnel embedding just below her tenth rib, ruining her informal bright-yellow-upon-blue peplos gown, growing red tide staining the pure-silk fabric. The other girlies dove for cover alongside the rest of the taverna’s suited patrons, waiters crumbling to the floor, some protecting heads with hand-carved stained wood serving platters, others cradling expensive bottles of bubbly like children, defending from violence their armfuls of finely plated carp roe taramosalata spreads, ones dripping with quarter-cut lemon squeezings and viscous olive oils peppered with paprika scattershot.
That familiar olive-tree-and-citrus sensation… No, it wasn’t from the filly’s victim, nor the wounded mistress crashing alongside the table’s dishes, howling in pain, clutching her thorax and dragging to the floor a half-finished plate of spiced pseudo-meat drowned in béchamel paste. Nor the bartender who instinctively reached for the establishment’s hidden sawed-off shotgun, one left loaded, poorly cleaned, and never fired. He was easily dispatched with a surgeon’s precision by a disappointed Augo, a single one of his small-caliber Star rounds entering and exiting through an unlucky bartender’s upper-left trapezius. He barked pointers at the flustered filly, his frightened apprentice. He chastised her—politely—on her first shot’s trajectory.
Her aim was off. Not a killing blow. A miss, he’d call. Brought on by her nerves, no doubt.
He was right, as evidenced by the shot-through target seizing atop his table, his nervous system unwilling to give up the ghost. The target’s spine bucked, the installed electromagnetic prosthetics entering a state of fight-or-flight, executing emergency procedures and attempting to fight back on behalf of its host. Arms, legs vibrated. Loafers kicked out wildly, slapping both the blood-stained floor and blood-stained patrons who hid beneath the simplistically carved circular wood table.
Ginevra panicked. She tried pressing her shaking right palm against his back, against his maroon pure-silk vest, stuffy, barely fitting around his barrel chest, but she couldn’t get a grip. It was too slippery with sweat and blood, the fabric too waterproof under her digits, her thin frame unable to provide the force necessary for a pin as she meekly leaned against the writhing meat. So with her left hand she hit hard, whipping bottom of her pistol into the man’s skull, tearing at the fresh wound she’d delivered, beating his metal-plated occiput to denting and forcing his pitted face into a full plate of piping hot pseudo-yogurt and dill-drizzled vegetable fritters—over-salted before frying to mop up the finely shredded zucchini’s moisture.
And still, he was too strong for her, too wily to fight against for long. Even with her prey in the final hectic spasms of consciousness, Ginevra was outmatched. Wide-eyed and on the verge of tears, she heaved herself forward, throwing herself on the barely-living corpse as she fired round after round into lungs, spine, and lastly nearly straddling her target’s back, pinning his upper body against the table, two point-blank shots—one bursting through his first and second right premolars, the second exiting through the target’s maxilla, trajectories wild from poor recoil control.
The seizing ceased. She hadn’t noticed it at first, that pain coming from the bullet wound in her right hand. Below, covered in blood, where she’d accidentally shot through her own opisthenár during the struggle.
That familiar, entrancing olive wood and cigarette scent she gets from Kelly wasn’t the thrill of murder, either, as all she could smell was the gunpowder and stench of blood and toppled-over ouzo drinks as the taverna evacuated in fright.
But it was near the scene of her inaugural assassination. At the time, Ginevra hadn’t noticed it. But she felt it. Somewhere. Passed it by during their escape, when Augo had—politely—dragged the newly-minted assassin by the forearm down the thin cobblestone streets, pausing intermittently to re-wrap her hand wound with stolen finto-linen napkins and stifling her crying with purposefully chosen calm words, imploring her to, ‘relax’ between points of advice, calling her whole affair a ‘learning experience,’ and that he was proud of her ‘nonetheless.’
Sprinting past the hundreds of faces in the cobblestone Corcyran streets, the rabble’s identities were anonymous, credit-a-dozen. They leaned out their windows as they always do, lingering atop their porches in wooden chairs, bitter-tasting ellinikó coffees in hand, hmming and huhing at the bloodied filly sprinting through alleyways at dusk. Putting hands up in confusion at Augo’s return-fire maneuvers, watching with interest as the disappointed dog-assassin plugged local fez-topped jandarma officers with shots as they pursued—sometimes shooting lethally, usually nonlethally.
In lieu of the firm reprimand and light corporal punishment Ginevra had expected—as Augo would never, even for her own good, even in spite of the filly’s subconsciously demanded punishment after a self-declared failure—they celebrated over drinks. Tsipouro, the fragrant brandy purposefully pulpy, served with honey, the balmy alcohol calming Ginevra’s nervously tap-tapping hooves, and the fiery pain in her bandaged and re-bandaged hand. Then came Augo’s suggestions on how Ginevra should act in the future—forcibly delivered, ‘proud of you’s’ peppered between unsolicited advice. The old dog never missed a point to critique between breaths of surgically-applied praise.
But the night ended as they always would, with the filly falling asleep in his chest, instinctually looking for the unconditional safety that he was more than happy to provide for his apprentice.
And it was then, later that night. Instead of tasting the bitter anise-atop-honey left staining his lips, instead of fixating on the sharp pain radiating through each of her bandaged right hand’s digits, she tasted that unfamiliar, ethereal citrus for the first time. Aromatic olivewood, the noxious scent foreign to the Amfitriti’s cramped metal interior, as the Retaliation was previously christened. Cigarette breath within his muzzle, as if he hadn’t sworn off tobacco altogether.
Augo could feel her mind was elsewhere. She was preoccupied, her body limp. He assumed it was the pain from the wounded hand, or from the mental anguish of achievement muddled by mistake. But he was wrong—as usual, the filly would spitefully claim. She was focused on the thin Corcycan alleyways, on reviewing her murder from start to finish, attempting to replay an olfactory memory that felt as fleeting as a siesta’s dream.
Her mind simply was elsewhere, fixating on some ethereal memory.
As it is now, lurking in the Old Eighty-Six’s airlock.
“Hey,” Kelly pries with a smile, eyebrows raised, head playfully tilted. “You doing alright?”
Ginevra’s dragged back to her alcohol-fueled reality. Kelly’s alone. Behind him, the Old Eight-Six is empty. Of those sober, at least. One stooge is slumped at the bar, using a neatly folded necktie as a pillow. Another is being led out the door by a familiar flat-faced waitress—no doubt a companion to help him survive the early morning malaise. The filly flinches with confusion as she stares down her six-shooter’s sights.
The only filly remaining is Ginevra, her bloodshot eyes barely visible in the airlock’s reflection.
“Feeling sick? And I’m not worried about a mess—I know you can’t vomit, so don’t think that’s the only reason I’m asking,” he jokes.
“How do you know that?” she sneered, as if she were insulted.
“Just a guess,” he shrugs. “Find me a girl your age who can put away the drinks like that. Either it’s in your genes,” he says, laughing to himself, “or you’re a drunk. But I don’t think you’re old enough to be a lush just yet…” The hung t’ou docks at last, the airlock capsule jolting. It’s nearly a crash, almost loud enough for Kelly’s cheeky sigh to go unheard, his voice carrying an almost ironic appreciation, “Old enough to hold me at gunpoint for five straight hours, though…”