“Well” is subjective.

The capsule hotel is, expectedly, cramped. At the Rose Love, you both pile onto one another, alongside the various coolies, day-laborers, and clandestine couples on affair. Contortions performed throughout the evening leave you sore. Although the breakfast of congee and mysterious meats at the nearby stall recommended by Kathi is alright by comparison, you’re still forced to take turns standing in the cramped storefront, accidentally bumping into fellow wanderers at the Below’s lean-to, filled to the brim with poor junkies and the stench of sewage.

Below, the only thing that goes “Well” is the information.

A portly woman with a round face and one missing canine, another gold-plated, tells you the location of the White Axes. She spits onto the floor as she cleans the capsule below you both, the two of you staring down at her, vaguely threatening and feeding her a credit or two with every short semi-useful factoid she provides. She spits curse words between your interrogation, recoiling at the stench the deceased gambler has left behind, the distinct copper smell of blood flooding the whole condominium following his capsule’s exhumation.

Your destination is beyond the Old Wall, with its marble façades chipped and yellowed from pollution, somewhere in the sand-blasted wastes left behind from orbital bombardment. One so thorough that there are few craters, just a single flat layer of radioactive ash. Ø shakes her t-shirt top, stained with sweat, dirty from a lack of washing and caked with the capsule hotel’s grime. She holds a hand at her snout’s crest, covering her eyes from the piercing sunrise, wishing she had her d’Valay’s.

The umbrella salesman at the gate points to the empty road ahead, traversed only by a few meandering souls; a few hooded carts of produce, coolies hunched over, some dotting the horizon a few kilometers out of the city, vibrating with the horizon’s heat. From the ancient gateway, he pantomimes with his choppy dialect, are the hydroponic farms that feed most of the arcology. Below the surface, of course, away from the radioactive storms, their descending staircases marked with various company symbols and business addresses.

He studies the little symbol the capsule hotel’s proprietor provided, eyes crinkling along fault lines, squinting through early-onset cataracts.

You stop at three separate trapdoor farms, each with the simple motif of a white triangle—and deserted—before you arrive at the fourth. At the top of a dusty staircase, you hold the cheap pastel-green umbrella high, encompassing you and Ø in a pleasing octagonal shadow. With a sigh, trudging down the steps in unison, she once more brings her hand to knock at a metal door, the discolored hinges obviously not up to code for the regular dust storms that whip the infrastructure during the torrid months.

After a moment of waiting, the various locks are undone behind the bunker door, seven in all, ker-chunking with purpose, revealing a tired-looking worker, pupils dilated from the darkness within, unpolished revolver sloppily placed in his plastic holster. He looks you both up and down, as if trying to discern your importance. You lean forward and smile, nodding.

“Are you guys the White Axes?” you ask.

“Uh-huh,” the worker replies, slack-jawed. Immediately, over his shoulder, another worker yells in some uncertain dialect, the entire facility being alerted in only a moment. Before they can latch the door, however, Ø brings a hoof to it, pinning the poor horticulturist to the industrial cement wall.

The bok choy plantation springs to life.

Metal planters, stenches of imported earth, manure, and fertilizer, hold shelves of plants stacked to the height of a man, slowly rotating, watered at specific intervals throughout the cycle, jolting to their new places every thirty-or-so-seconds. Stenches of stale opium and marijuana tell you this is the hideout you were searching for. Ø plants a slug in the solar plexus of the yowling watchman, his dying screech announcing violence to his nest, ricocheting off the steel walls, reverberating against trough planters.

You and Ø sprint into the facility, dodging fleeing day-laborers, the mare delivering elbows to anyone wearing white suits. As you hide behind a flowering stalk, you look down the railing, where several stories bore into the earth. The chasm of rotating vegetables breathes safely between the maze of rusted staircases and water mists releasing at specified altitudes and sixty-second intervals, piping hissing and clanking.

Behind Ø, you follow her lead, the both of you operating in psychopathic, telepathic tandem. You fire at her side, laying down sporadic cover as her accuracy does most of the work. White suits gleam with fresh crimson. Gangsters slump over the leafy greens of the bunker’s interior, some flopping down staircases, falling between the gaps of infrastructure, or crawling across the serrated flooring, wailing in pain.

Rapidly, you descend the eight floors while Ø hops between the openings in the grates, swinging monkey-armed across the exposed piping, landing on and dispatching the guards caught unawares. Meanwhile, you fight through the swaths of unwashed technicians, the semi-law-abiding making a mad dash up the stairs to what you assume is the only exit.

Ø’s latest pounce, her hooves digging into the shoulders of an unlucky guard, pinning him—paralyzed and unconscious—to the metal floor, is followed by the whaling on and tossing of another White Axe, sending him over the railing, into several rows of planters, twisting and landing with a crunch on the concrete flooring stories below.

As you both reload in tandem, you estimate you’re already a floor away.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

At the bottom of the pit, along with the twitching corpses of a few vertically menaced gangsters, is a collection of shipping containers. Antiques, normally used for luxury housing. No doubt fulfilling the dual purposes of processing produce and acting as a small hideout. Ø turns her gun on the door, firing indiscriminately through the cheap sheet metal, her piercing rounds ricocheting at random out of view with sporadic pings. You follow suit until the both of your guns impotently click empty.

Finally, with emphasis, she unlatches the entrance, finding a single gangster left, unloaded shotgun untouched meters away, his hands more concerned with stemming the bleeding in his kneecap.

You both approach, standing over the wailing prey.

He’s crying with pain. Mewls escape his gold-plated mouth, his whole body contorting, white suit pants coating and re-coating in pooled blood. His shirt, of geometric zig-zags of purple and green, is almost completely unbuttoned, showing off a chest of calligraphic doodles—calligraphic phrases for luck and joy punctured by beehive-haired geishas.

Ø’s wired, and she flashes her teeth with pride. This really is easy money, isn’t it? Surreal, almost too easy, being able to blast your way straight through a gangland headquarters. The papier-mâché underbelly of Tiangong, soiled with the semen and blood of a deranged populace, disgusts you in its juxtaposition of incompetence and depravity. Ø enjoys the ease, a welcome change of pace to the constant difficulties you’re normally subjected to.

She’s giddy at the thought of Shishito eating his words.

“It’s alright,” you begin, holstering your gun, acting civilized for you both. “We just want to speak with Big Jay, ask a couple questions is all.”

“He’s not here,” the man shouts, spitting through tears.

Ø responds with a firm kick to the prone man’s stomach. He lurches in fear, and you guess, humiliation. Gritted teeth stifle sobs, his fetal position one of disgrace.

“Just for background, we’re the ones who found your ‘meat house’ yesterday.” You emphasize your point with air quotes, speaking slowly to make sure your dialect is understood through the searing pain you are all too familiar with.

“So give us a reason not to bust your windpipe open,” Ø laughs.

“Like she said, we’d rather just get a couple of answers. For example, who’s been killing all of Boss Shishito’s girlies?”

“They’re barely even his girlies!” the prey yelps.

“Second mistake,” Ø chides, digging a hoof against his bleeding, shattered kneecap, patella crunching, sublimating and subluxating into a thousand pieces. His eyes shoot open. Nine digits claw at her cannon bone, screeching as she rolls her pasterns from side to side.

“Well, we know they’re barely his girlies, but at the end of the day, we’ve still got to ask,” you plead. “Let’s start easier. You’re Big Jay, right?” He clenches his, partly in pain, mostly in defeat.

“We’ll need more than a grimace, bossman,” Ø laughs.

“Yes,” he hisses, spitting blood through his fourteen-karat teeth, one freshly lost.

“Okay, that’s good to hear. Yesterday, we spaced a guy of yours. White jacket, glasses. I know it may not narrow it down, but before, he knocked off a Yaomo, a tenghuang. We hear the kid was in cahoots with some slasher running around town,” you kneel. “Please tell us about that.”

“It wasn’t an aggression thing—we wasn’t trying to make a move or nothing!”

“Offing four of his girlies wasn’t an aggression thing?” Ø scoffs as she traces the room, investigating the piles of spezie and rolled-up wads of credits stashed between bundled heads of freshly harvested wombok. She weighs her options, all three seeming of equal value after your trek through the heat.

“We don’t have a choice, we had to! We’ve been forced!”

“To do what?” you interrogate, “Any by who, another family?”

“To kill! He forces us to kill!”

“Who?”

“He has no name,” the man screeches. “The Ghost!”

“Not a brilliant answer, bossman. Think, does he have a name? No? Then why’d you give him one just now?” Ø muses as she stuffs a couple baggies of spezie into her alligator-skin backpack, before rolling one or two stacks of credits into her jeans and into her brassiere. “And that’s a dumb name, too.”

“He’s a killer we took in,” Big Jay gulps, spilling information and tears in a pathetic display. “Bossman Sookwon found him across-planet, in the I-14 Arcology. We busted him out of the prisoner transport before they could get him off planet and put him under the ice. We wanted him to settle some of our scores over here—and he did! He halved the Phantoms, carved out the Hongshou brothel, caused their whole family to go bust! But,” his choking is hoarse, tragic, even, “when we said the war was over, he said we had to keep bringing him targets. We told him to get lost, but then he killed Boss Sookwon, and another nine of our guys. He wanted fresh meat, so we choose at random, anyone, anywhere, hoping he’ll get himself caught, but we can’t shake him loose. At first it was only one a month, a kid nobody’ll miss or a shopkeep who doesn’t pay protection, but now it’s daily! He keeps coming back, and we can’t get rid of him! If we try to off him, he’ll...”

The bossman, now gang-less, pounds the metal flooring, cutting his hand in rage. Warm tears stream through the bullet holes that pockmark him, still warm from minutes ago. The conundrum leaves you in awe, filled with anger. You remember the plastic-wrapped corpses, artfully organized and lovingly created, collected because of petty criminality and sport. Over a hundred and fifty souls, in exchange for a paper tiger gang, a sullied bok choy farm, and a stupid nickname.

Your sympathy evaporates.

“Where did you send him tonight?”

“The same bar as a couple days ago, Bloom!. They’ll have extra security, maybe they’ll space him, I don’t know…”

“What room?”

“Hundred twenty-four. Just told him to carve whoever’s in there tonight. Made up some story, said it was Yaomo business.”

“Alright,” you whisper, letting the scumbag continue to struggle on the floor. Ø stands opposite, looking to you for next orders, smiling with satisfaction. Somehow, the whole situation affects and emboldens you far more than usual, your visit to Tiangong finally weighing you down. Disgusted, you turn towards the door, Ø stuffed with valuables, and leave the bossman, screeching, crying out in pain. Your mind returns to the peeled ribcage you had seen only a day before, and an unfamiliar anger sloshes between you and your girl’s psyche.

One you feel, for once, is totally justified.

Your ascent up the eight flights of stairs is uneventful. The discarded gangsters have stopped twitching, or were smart enough to pretend they died minutes earlier. The rest, you assume, have fled into the wastes, shambling the kilometers back to the walled city, the intense radiation leaving them with red faces and sunburns that, for the slowest, can be second-degree burns. At the entrance—thankfully—you find your umbrella open and forgotten in the commotion.

You trace the stairs back to the main road, squinting from the change in the afternoon sunlight. The air is still, choking with forty-degree heat that warps your cheap umbrella’s spine, making it wilt like bok choy stalks. It’ll be another two-hour walk back to the Settlement.

But, at the top step of the White Axes compound, you’re greeted by Captain Fairsykes of the Settlement Police.