Your boots slap the muddy roadway. You sprint between dark alleyways, dodging the discarded trash—both the loose foliage crashed from the rainforest ceiling and the humanlike forms collapsed in their stupors.
The trio of assassins has grown to a riot. With nowhere to sleep, and no refunds, the scum naturally seek satisfaction from you both. In the form of beating and robbery, you assume, as they shout obscenities from over your shoulders.
However, lucky for you, a few well-placed elbows and a penchant for running away gives you the advantage. The local drug-addled populace is out of shape, unless they fight in the ring. And if they did, they’d be smart enough to avoid antagonizing someone in front of Main Street’s few flophouses.
Before long, you and Ø are once more outside The Columbia Manor, adjacent to George Merrick, the destination of your rush to safety. Some stalls remain open, their dying lights staffed by watchful eyes that inspect the lurking passerby. The hawkers finger their guns beneath their wares, careful to watch for new customers or potential thieves. Painted ladies, with catty interest, observe from the foggy windows of their bawdyhouse dwellings, tramps intrinsically drawn to commotion.
While the streets turn in, the thunderstorm grows stronger. Wind whips the plastic tent stalls, sat atop their stone promontories, safe from the weather. The mud at your feet seeps, liquefying by the step. Alone in your struggle, voyeuristically watched from the covered balconies of those that can afford them, you slip to your knee. The growing riptide nearly drags you to into the maelstrom.
A subtle, three-tone siren rings. A warning light blinks from a nearby sign. Lights snuff themselves out. Denizens yowl cautions against the natural cacophony and shutter their windows. The flashing notice winks itself at anyone smart enough to heed its message of flash-flooding.
You double your efforts. The two of you fight against the ankle-deep, then knee-deep slurry as it travels through the deserted streets. In the distance, waves crash against the reinforced alleyways, carrying away refuse and degenerates caught off-guard. Howling wind scrapes against the ancient walls of the amphitheater, producing a ghastly moan.
With a last drive you trudge towards the slick limestone steps, dragging your boots out of the mud just as a meter-high wave of sludge carries leaves, branches, and garbage across Main Street, down the slope to further portions of Algonquin and beyond. In a moment of lucidity, you glance at the spontaneous river, admiring its uncaring nature as it rambles along, drawn by forces outside its control.
You follow Ø up the stairs, squeaking and flopping against the stone, stepping over soggy boozers. She approaches a nondescript entry and, with a groan, foists open its metal locking mechanism. It reveals a tunnel. A completely unremarkable orifice, one of George Merrick’s thousands.
In the darkness, bewitched, she follows her memory, allowing her third eye to guide you both through the crisscrossing catacombs of the amphitheater’s anatomy. During the day, in these hallways, the various slaves, gladiators, and big shots march through to their destinations. The factotums ferry corpses, meat for bait, lost spectators, anything required to be shuffled in secret from the all-seeing public above. You blink against total dark, your senses overdrawn by the echoes of clip-clopping hooves and heavy panting off sleek walls.
The ceiling height oscillates. At points, five meters high, lit by ancient carbyne-filament bulbs. Others stretch only a meter and a half in height, forcing you to turn sideways through narrow walls caked with slime. Mold tastes like copper, greasy against your face, catching in the mare’s pelt in clumps. Finally, coming to the end of a darkened passageway, she presses forward on a loose stone, opening the hidden postern to George Merrick’s locker room.
The side-door entrance reveals the low-light sanctuary of marble and murder. Open-air mineral pools, crystal shower fixtures, and stainless steel lockers adorn the massive single chamber. Faded murals of powerful warriors trace the domed ceilings, their neglected lead-laden paint unable to escape in the humidity. In only a few hours, fighters of all builds and creeds will pile in, lacking of privacy but full in luxury, to prepare for what may be their imminent expiration.
Ø guides you to a sealed oak bench at the foot of the showers. Like the rest of the facility, their antique fixtures lack walls to partition from wandering eyes. You heave a sigh as you feel the natural wood in your hands, its form soft and inviting compared to the imitation plasticwood you’ve grown accustomed to.
She’s tired, hungry, agitated. You’re shaken, lost, bleeding. Yet you both know the rules. When unused, these facilities are off-limits. But the typhoon outside, of both water and danger, forces you to shirk procedure. You both recognize, subconsciously, that you’re out of options.
You peel off your poncho, revealing the same unwashed clothes you’ve worn for months. The zipper from your windbreaker is busted. You heave it over your head, exposing your neglected, ironic powder Blue athletic shirt. It’s nearly fused with your body. With the peeling comes forgotten scabs from your first, and only, attempt at combat. They open once more, oozing overlooked pus that shows off your discolored skin, now a noxious pale.
You remember the cuts of the gladius along your ribcage. Back when your purse had dwindled down to nothing. Injured, recuperating, facial bandages bleeding through, Ø trained you in the days before your entry. Although you thrust your spear into the sinewy vines with your entire weight, their scaly membranes ignored your vain attempts to use them as target practice. A performance that turned her scowl to an unbending limestone.
Still recovering, she had to give you advice from the nosebleeds. She clicked her lips with impatience as you circled your opponent in mutual impotence, Blue and Red in a sorry duel. The crowd jeered, and you knew the omniscient George Merrick would release the beasts if you refused to kill. Disgusted with your lack of intensity, jaw clenched to splintering, Ø guided your actions beyond your control—the only time she’s achieved the feat.
Close the gap.
No, move forward, close the gap.
Thrust to left calf.
Ignore the screeching.
She controlled you, still, as vomit escaped the corner of your lips.
Stab below the ribcage.
Now, above the ribcage.
Go for the throat.
Drop to your knees.
Tear at the eyes.
Keep biting until the meat stops moving.
It’s still moving, keep biting.
Keep biting.
Keep biting.
You forgot to shower afterwards. You were too sick. Instead, you sat alone atop this same wood slab, heaving your opponent’s gore onto the artisanal, technicolor mosaic flooring, to the antipathy of the surrounding gladiators and prodding teakettler attendants. You can still taste the living, pulsating marrow your teeth had scraped against. Following your departure, with enough cash to afford a meal each for a single week, you didn’t speak with Ø.
And you both know she hadn’t cared.
Now free of your tattered clothes, you both walk across the clean floor to the shower. The warm, polished tiling is clean, mud and gunk expunged. Fit for the warriors who compete within Algonquin’s psycho-cultural sanctuary.
Ø turns the faux-crystal knobs, letting the touch of hot, steaming water caress your body. You’ve only felt such balneotherapy through vicarious whispers. While you enter her mind after every bout, invading her privacy, you’ve never truly basked in the sensation. You haven’t been this warm since you disembarked the Mr. Memory all those months ago. When you left behind your ship, your home, your AI that only begrudgingly approved your departure.
Your scarred arm pulls Ø closer, letting you share in the warmth as it drips from her mane and streams over your head. Its a selfish movement of many, as you both jockey for warmth. You brush your hands through her back’s pelt, matted and dirty, and feel the chafed skin underneath. Her dark digits scrape against your scalp. The lice, ticks, and grease coagulate between her fingers as she scratches the refuse away, searching for pockets of heat.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
The pipes hiss against the cold air. Her body quivers along with yours. You finally begin to relax, nearly collapsing from exhaustion along with her. She whispers to you, with an uncharacteristic, nearly human judgment. A learned one that you haven’t felt since arriving planetside. It drips off her lips with saliva, her own eyelids fluttering closed, too tired to keep up her hostility.
“You miss your friend.”
---
“Come on. You can’t stay here,” Dyle buzzes.
The three-dimensional AI looks past you at the binary stars outside the Mr. Memory’s cockpit window. The two dwarves calmly rotate with another in their dance, alone in the system. Their glaucous hue lights the ship, down for repairs, at limited power following your most recent scrap above the planet of Alessandria D’Altair.
One more batch of planetary forces has joined your long list of enemies, you think, as you rifle through your meagre heist from a jewelry shop in mid-atmosphere, aboard Stazione Strabone. The rip-off yields a couple hundred credits. Enough to buy some ammo, fuel, and provisions to continue your endless withdrawal across the stars.
Dyle’s fifteen-centimeter holographic image hazes against his processes, running at minimized capacity. In crucial times like this, his full human-looking avatar acts as his debonair mouthpiece. He’s ditched his single-breasted jacket and tie, and he brings his hands to his flickering flannel suit pants. The high waistline emphasizes his disheveled collar, a visual representation of his quantitative unease.
He’s almost tired as he speaks bluntly, careful not to cut or stutter mid-sentence along with the electronics elsewhere aboard.
“We’re not talking about my skin. We’re talking about yours, to save it,” he declares with as much gravitas as a free-thinking AI can muster, his intentionally limited script of vocabulary contorted to straining.
You watched the Mr. Memory take off from New Port Moresby months ago. It left you and your mare behind in a magnificent plume of energy as Dyle receded into the storm clouds. He was forgotten in the bustle of Fisher Spaceport, with its lack of registration or central control, as multiple other pilots crammed themselves onto the platform in his place.
The ship’s registry was tainted, he claimed. So long as he was in your vicinity, the bounty hunters, the law enforcement, the vengeful pirates, the corporate enforcers—anyone could identify you with ease. He was advanced enough to travel alone, to act as a red herring.
And he was right. Dyle’s systems are second-to-none, his strategic matrices far more experienced than your years of hauling freight across the galaxy. Even Ø deferred her tactics to him, without of any competent piratical advisor on hand. He could buy you time to find some sort of solution, he claimed. Some kind of payoff. A magic bullet.
After a cycle of calculations, idling near the two brotherly stars, you almost hear sadness in his pre-recorded sarcastic chirping.
“Well, let’s have some smiles and good cheer,” he stutters, his light-hearted tone breaking and repeating.
“Sure. And the plan. You’ll meet up with us a year from now. New Port Moresby. Algonquin County. You’ll be able to find us?”
“On the street you live,” he retorts. Matter-of-fact as ever.
“And the heat should be off by then?”
“Well, it’s a toss-up, I can tell you that.”
“You know, I’m going to miss you.”
“And vice versa.”
---
“Sure,” you wonder where he could be.
You imagine him beguiling and surprising. Acting as the chaotic AI he’s always destined to become. An intergalactic miscreant you’ve unleashed upon the unsuspecting universe. Only a moment longer, and you think of worst-case scenarios, terrible endings, the regrettable most-likely assessment of whether he’s still flying somewhere out there.
“He’d hate it here,” Ø muses. Her arms drape over yours, scraping a rogue parasite from your back, pinching it off at the sucker. She leans into you, nearly dragging you down to the tile.
“You don’t know that,” you say.
“Well, that’s the excuse he gave me,” she huffs.
“I didn’t know you two had time to talk.”
“We didn’t. You’d be asleep. I’d wander around the cockpit. He’d tell me all the things he hated. I’d tell him everything I hated.”
“Sounds like two you had a lot to talk about.”
You feel a smile drag over your face. It’s reflexive, nostalgic. You cope, pretending you’re somewhere else.
Ø’s reaches for the nearby waterproof dispenser. A slurry of lavender oils, crushed rose petals, and soothing eucalyptics congeal in her palm. She brushes into her mane, letting the small clumps of hair leave her head, balding from stress. You follow suit, enjoying the minty feeling as you lather your body in a slippery embrace, the first in half a year.
“We can’t hide in Algonquin anymore. Not after tonight,” you whisper through the steam. “Nowhere to stay. Nothing to show for it, either.”
“You know, before Dyle dropped us here, I thought I was sick of this place. But now...” she snorts. “There’s nothing we can pawn to afford passage out of here, right?”
“No. You just have to win tomorrow.”
“That’s all? Just survive the most important event in this year?”
She’d yell if she had the energy. Spit, had she the room. Instead, she simmers with disappointment at her one-mare drive to victory.
“Sure. You’ve killed enough meat to get this far,” you breathe, letting the eucalyptic scents explore your bruised sinuses. “Then they’ll induct you into The Circuit. We’ll be out of Algonquin before we know it.”
“Assuming they let me bring a ride-along,” she whispers. It’s a thought too distant. A bridge not even built, yet alone able to be crossed. Her mind wanders back to your captain’s chair, empty, skating through the stars. Restless, nearly unconscious, her natural wanderlust takes hold.
“Think he’ll find us if we leave?”
“Yeah,” you lie. “He’s good at that sort of thing.”
---
A distant surge of water wakes you in fright. Instinctively, you hold your breath, ready to fight against the floods. Your eyes jolt open to the sterile locker room, bathed in its everlasting fluorescent lighting and chloric stench. Your pupils dilate, and you squint against the naked forms before of you.
The day’s fighters have arrived. Scattered, damned souls meander about, ignoring your presence on the floor. Another shower’s knob turns, squeaking across the decorated walls and letting forth rushing water on ancient flooring.
You gargle the loose, fresh saliva in your throat with a few sleepy coughs. Ø clicks her lips, uncaring of the drool on your chest as she snorts herself awake. Mucus wakes within the both of your nostrils, and like every other soul meandering about, you hack spit into the alcoves where the limestone walls met the earth.
“No guests in the sanctuary,” a voice bellows. Single-tonal, almost bored. The thud of a locker closing bisects its monotonous tonality. “I will deduct this infraction from you winnings, if you earn them.”
Black faux-fur moccasins glide across the floor. Wearing them is Chief, the leader of the Blacks. His seven-foot frame is tattooed, as is tradition, with straight lines and serpentine curves. Pitch marking traces from bald head to severed little toe, a maze of tribal artwork created with the steady hands of the poor souls he represents in the ring. At his pecs, the mangled rectangular shadow of a slave’s barcode, torn from flesh. He’s scarified, malformed, for some perverted lodge purpose that’s lost on the Reds, Blues, and non-affiliated.
He’s a living mass of pain, like all those who have held the moniker of ‘Chief’ on behalf of the Black faction, stretching back to prerecorded history.
He brings a towel to his gnarled face. The warm milli-cotton caresses the recent, cauterized wounds from the previous day’s victory. With a scoff, he eyes you both in disdain, focusing on your waking corpse. Your very presence insults him, your body still soft to the gangrenous decay of the universe. Untouched by the misery his kind revels in, that his culture holds in esteem. He shoots a reprimanding glance at Ø, expecting more from the gladiatrix.
“You track mud into this place of honor yet again, sungnuni. Wild animals like you have no place here.”
“I’ll pay the fine, relax,” Ø hisses, her lips pulling up to show her horse’s teeth in spite.
“You’ll need to pay. But to make pay, you need to win.”
“Who says I won’t?” Your mare forces herself to her hooves. Leaning her back against the wall, she adjusts to the light, arms carefully flexing in defense. “Go ask your last brave how it felt to take me on.”
“Speak ill of the dead at your own risk. You’re facing the strongest members of the Blacks today.” He slaps his fist against his chest, eliciting a grunt of approval from his nearby warriors, their skins a patchwork of Black tattoos that never wash away. “If you live long enough to face my blade.”
She huffs, her stray digits dragging you to your feet by the collar. Your slick soles wipe against the clean floor. A numbness emanates from your spine, and your sense of urgency evaporates. You could stay for hours in the inner sanctum, with its polished tiling and pleasant mineral tastes. A few insults are a small price to pay.
“Tell your hignaku to boil his shirt. His kind aren’t fit for this place, either.”
Ø doesn’t need to speak out of turn. Everyone knows the score. She knows you’re a liability, an insult to her and the other condemned fighters, prey among predators. But, beneath her surface, she threads together daisy-chains of taunts out of principle. Like the millions of tree limbs high above, she strains against the wind, bending and threatening to snap.
There’s two options.
The first is Ø’s path. To lash out, slapping, biting, punching, making a bloody mess out of a simple confrontation. Any living creature reduced in position, relegated from apex predator to entertainment livestock, similarly lashes out. It would be another tiresome situation concerning ‘respect’ that drives you to boredom, your mare to murder.
But, as always, fatigued, you take your path of least resistance.
Without another word, you withdraw towards the exit, passing the various fighters as they enter. Tall, bulky, wiry, tattooed, or mangled. At the formal entrance up a short few steps, its bronze doors constantly aflutter, a teakettler approaches, one of the many that scurry about. It looks up to you, it’s pointed ears filled with holes and tears. Steam emanates from its mouth as its canine eyes scan you for issue.
Upon realizing your infraction, the slave’s canid pupils dilate. Its pitched, aggressive hiss persuades you to follow, up the wide, then narrow, staircases and pathways, past the others of its slave race, and into the crowd of gawkers that have arrived early for the first glimpses at the day’s fights. Without warning, it clasps the door behind you, locking you out alone in the swirling crowds that have gathered in anticipation of The Circuit’s arrival.
To nobody’s surprise, it’s raining.