“What do you want?” Dhret asked him on a day when they had nothing to do but lounge in the bed that dominated his apartment. His apartment, though really only his in name and legality by the. An apartment that was rapidly becoming hers as well.
He smiled and touched one of her bare shoulders.
She rolled her eyes. “Not like that silly.” She bit his wrist playfully and he jerked it away as though she’d injured him and gave her a dramatic expression of pain. She laughed but her smile didn’t touch her eyes the way it did when she was really having fun and when she rolled onto her back the laughter stopped as though she’d turned it off with a switch.
Marroo nuzzled into her neck and let his breath expand to encompass the little flame that lived at the center of her core. This close he could feel it moving through her, seeping through meridians still clogged and knotted by birth. The smell of her seemed to fill more than just his nostrils, it filled his head, his heart, made his ears buzz, despite the uneasy silence that lay between them. He held her and waited for her to fill it. After a few minutes she disengaged from his arms and sat up to look around the shabby little apartment he’d occupied since leaving his father’s house, then looked down at him.
“Do you like it here?” She asked him. “Working as a courier, this, closet of an apartment?” Dark eyes surveyed the room before regarding him. “Do you like it here?”
He reached up to stroke one of her cheeks. “I like sharing it with you.” He said.
She knocked away his hand and looked out their only window through the tattered drape he’d hung over it long before she arrived. “You know that’s not what I mean.”
He watched her chew her lip while one hand sat limply on the bedcovers, craving the touch of skin she’d pushed it away from.
“Do you like it here?” He asked quietly.
She just chewed her lip some more and looked around the apartment, then down at him. Her smile this time was a tortured one before she leaned down to kiss him. “I like sharing it with you.”
The hand on the bedcovers moved to cup her cheek as they kissed, then slid down until it rested on one hip as they separated to stare at one another. He smiled and she returned it, weaker, and still not touching her eyes. “Something’s bothering you.” He said.
She straightened again and looked away from him. “Don’t you want… don’t you want more?” She asked. “I mean don’t you want more from life than, this?” She looked around the apartment cramped and dusty with books. A single potted plant sat on a stack of books beneath the window as her only contribution to the apartment’s decor. “Don’t you want more?”
Marroo propped himself up on an elbow and surveyed the room as she had. It was still as it had always been. Cramped. Cheap. Inhuman, really, with its corners and crevices filled by his ever expanding collection of old books. He looked down at the blanket rumpled beneath them and drew a line through its folds. When he looked up and met her eyes he shook his head.
“How can that be?” Dhret asked. “How can you be, comfortable, here?”
Marroo looked back down at the blanket and continued to draw. He shrugged. “My father.” He said, then gave it up and looked back up at her. “I’ve never told you about my father.”
She shook her head. “I know he’s dead.”
Marroo nodded and looked back down at the blanket. “My father had… well I guess, my father had plans for me. When I was growing up. A lot of plans really.” His finger had fallen still and he stared at it for a while as she let him find the words to fill the silence he’d created. “I… when he died… I didn’t feel the way... my mother died.” He rolled onto his back and looked up at the ceiling. “I was relieved.”
Her hand touched his chest and Marroo closed his eyes. He could still feel his father’s sword beneath the bed, despite the layer of books he’d covered it with like goodluck charms.
“I’m sorry,” She said, “I just… wanted to know where you’re going… in life. If I’m going to be a part of it.”
Marroo shook his head then took her hand in his and held it to his chest, feeling it within the shifting contours of his breath as though she were actually inside his soul, somewhere deep within where a gap had been until he met her. At the edge of that sensation, as though opposite her, he could feel his father’s sword where it resonated against his spirit with the icon of the sword despite the barrier the reliquary adept placed around it when he taught Marroo how to veil his breath. “I just want to live my life for a little while.” Marroo said. “My life, instead of the life everyone else wanted from me.” He smiled at her, as though to include her in that life, but she looked away and chewed at her lips while her hand squeezed tightly around his.
“We should still think about getting a bigger apartment.” She said after a moment of silence. She was studied and seemed far away in her own thoughts, repeating words that were not her own, until she looked at him and gave him another hesitant smile. “It’s going to be too small for both us, if I stay much longer.”
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Dhret was a beautiful girl. A girl still, at eighteen, still a year ahead of her majority. Her eyes were dark above full lips and her hair was caught between the tight curls of the top-dwellers and straight hair Marroo’s mother used to have. It cascaded from her shoulders in long waves that she kept even after she joined the couriers and began to wear the bandanna that served as their informal uniform. She looked like twilight when she stood among the others, her skin the dusky in between of a half breed, bright in the shadows of the midnight plains and dark when illuminated by the core’s light. When Marroo kissed her he could imagine he was kissing smoke.
He met her for the first time while they were both waiting outside an office he’d been called to as a courier, one guarded by the young woman who served as the officer’s secretary. They sat in chairs at opposite sides of the room until she caught his eye and came across to introduce herself.
“I’m Dhret.” She said as she extended her hand.
“Marroo.”
She seemed to hesitate as they shook hands.
“Do you mind if I join you?” She asked. “I’ve been waiting a long time.”
Marroo just shifted as though to offer her the seat next to his and she took it then sat on its edge and chewed her lip as though ready to bounce to her feet and flee at any moment. She kept glancing at the door to the office while the secretary continued some task that involved a lot of folding paper.
“What are you here for?” She asked when Marroo said nothing to break the silence.
“Courier.” Marroo replied. “Just waiting for a message.”
She nodded and there was another silence filled by the fold and slide of paper.
“What are you here for?” He asked finally.
“Just… waiting.” She replied.
“Are you one of Dhruv’s girls?” Marroo finally asked.
“What? No!” Her eyes were wide when she looked back at him. “I… What made you…”
“Dhret.” he said. “Dhruv. Rumor is he’s got a lot of girls.” He studied the ceiling and shrugged. “Just, seemed too close to be coincidence.”
“No.” She said, and looked away but a flush crept up her neck and into her cheeks. “I’m waiting on an interview. I’ll be a courier too, if the interview goes well.” She didn’t look at him as her face turned red beneath its twilight coloring.
“Well,” Marroo said, “I hope it goes well.”
They didn’t say anything more and eventually the secretary called Marroo into the office where he got his package and headed out. “I’ll see you around,” she told him as he passed her, “If I make it.” She didn’t meet his eye.
They met again the next day when Marroo arrived at the Playground late after he’d finished his deliveries. He found her weaving through the cables and towers under Podmandu’s guidance, long hair whipping in the wind generated by the gyros twisting around her.
“She flies like a stone tied to a string.” Cathay said of her abilities as she Marroo and Ajap watched from the top of a tower. As she said it Dhret’s gyros aligned wrong and she dropped a couple of feet before they realigned and she hopped back up with the circular momentum of the spinning wheels. She almost collided with Podmandu as they did but Pod flit aside to avoid her then led the way through the next part of the course while Dhret followed.
Podmandu looked like the survivor of a near death experience as he landed his bike and turned to watch Dhret circle in. Her landing was as bad as Marroo’s first landing had been, worse, since she actually skidded off of the building and had to curve away from the tower in order to pedal back up to the top and try again.
“Don’t… say… anything!” She shouted as she dropped to the gravel among the other bikes.
“You almost took my bike out you moorkala!” Cathay shouted at her.
“And mine.” Ajap added.
Dhret’s knuckles were white around the handlebars as her gyros spun down with a whine. She tripped as she tried to dismount and Marroo found himself stepping forward to catch her until she caught herself on one of the bikes’ flywheels. “I didn’t ask for anyone’s input.” She growled as she glared at them.
Podmandu ran a hand over his bandanna and slumped over the handlebars of his own bike. “You’re going to fall out of the sky flying like that,” he said. She glared daggers at him and he looked away. “Seriously though. How do you think you’re going to deliver messages over the city if you can’t keep an even flight path?”
“I’ll get used to it,” she growled, “I’ll learn.”
“How did you even get this job if you don’t know how to fly a bike?” Demanded.
Dhret looked at her feet. “I know how to fly a bike,” she mumbled, “It’s just been a long time. Alright?” This time she did glare at Cathay, and everyone else on the top of the tower. “I just don’t like flying.”
“If you don’t like flying then why’d you become a courier?” Ajap asked. “That’s all we do.”
Dhret threw her hands up in the air. “Seriously, can I get a break? I don’t like flying okay! Maybe there’s more to, all, this, being a courier, than just moving through the air. Has that ever occurred to you?” Dhret looked to Marroo as though in appeal but Marroo was seated on his own bike now, watching the exchange, and she looked away. “Sometimes, maybe, the message needs to be more than just what’s in a box or a letter.”
Cathay lounged back on the utility box she was sitting on. “They don’t pay me enough to deliver that kind of message.” She said.
Dhret flushed. “That’s not what I meant.”
“No, I’m sure. We all heard you,” Cathay said and examined her finger nails, “It must be a girl thing.”
Dhret was turning red again. “I mean, I mean... “ She shook her head and glanced in Marroo’s direction again before looking away. “It doesn’t matter how I got the job, as long as I can do it.”
“If they call you out to the stacks you’ll have to know how to fly.” Pod pointed out. “Lot of wires there that could take off your head if you fly like that.”
“Then I’ll figure it out!”
Cathay opened her mouth to continue the assault but Marroo felt a sudden irritation at the heckling and kicked his bike’s gyros into a spin to interrupt her.
“Cathay.” He said. “I owe you points.”
She shut her mouth and turned to him.
“Race for them?” He asked.
She gave him a knife like grin. “Double or nothing?” She asked.
Marroo shrugged. The points were worthless most of the time, an informal currency they used to buy favors among their circle and gambled with when they pulled out their cards. “Sure.” He replied. “Diamond snare.”
Podmandu leaned towards Dhret and Marroo glanced in his direction before he continue to berate their newest courier. “Pods judge.” He said.
Pod pulled his attention away from the new girl to consider the pathway of tangled wires they called the diamond snare, notorious for the diamond shaped gap so small you’d hit the wires on your way through without near perfect precision.
“You’ll lose.” Cathay mocked.
Marroo met Cathay’s smile with one of his own. He gave his pedals another kick that sent the gyros humming around him. “I’m already on my bike.” He said.
Cathay lunged for the seat of her bike as Marroo tilted his bike away from the edge of the building into open air.
He met Dhret’s eyes just long enough to receive a tight smile of gratitude before he was falling sideways through the open air.