The corrupted aura of the adept was close, much closer than he’d usually seen it. He’d felt the adept in Iblanie territory before, not just around the edges as during the ambush, but deep inside while he biked between the towers on his duties as a courier. Now, though, as he left his apartment behind, he felt it swell in his third eye as he biked toward the tower until it dominated his spiritual horizon.
The tower buzzed with activity as Marroo landed his bike on the balcony outside the courier’s lounge. Alone, the activity would have been nothing out of the ordinary, but there was an edge to the voices Marroo picked up with his open meridian, a frenetic pace to the movement of people between the floors, and a flare to the candle flames of breath he sensed throughout the tower. Guards that hadn’t been there a day before had tracked him with long barreled arquebuses and turret mounted sunflares as he biked in while familiars touched by half a dozen different icons circled the tower in defensive rings.
“Thank the ancestors you’re finally here.” One of the couriers said when Marroo stepped through the sliding door into the lounge. He threw his cards down on the table and stood as the other two couriers at the table turned to look at Marroo.
“We aren’t done with this hand yet.” One of the others told the boy as he left the table.
“I don’t care, I’m losing anyways.”
“We’ll just mark you down then.”
The boy pulled a frayed leather jacket over bony shoulders as he approached the door. “You were supposed to start at eight.” He told Marroo. “What took you so long?”
Marroo waved a hand dismissively as he looked over the room, really casting his spiritual senses, reduced as they were by his veil, through the walls to the frenetic activity going on in the tower around them. “What’s going on?” He asked.
“Some kind of coup or something.” The other boy stopped at the door to tighten the yellow bandanna he wore over the short mop of braids. “I don’t know, but they had me fly out to some mansion out in the garden-top district half a dozen times since the night passed and there’s a whole horde of red-squad posted up around the place. No one going inside though, just watching with a lot of guns trained on it, so I don’t know, make what you will of it.”
“There are red squad on the roof.” Marroo said.
The boy shrugged and pulled his bandanna snug then pushed it flat over the top of his head. “Coup then. Maybe. Maybe a hit. Who knows. Anyways, now you’re here I’m headed out to the playground. They let Podmandu out this morning and I figure this is my chance to beat him. You gonna come out after your shift?”
“I have a twelve.” Marroo replied.
The boy shrugged again and pushed the door open. “Someone’ll still be there.” He looked to Marroo an waited for an answer.
“No.” Marroo said after a moment. “No, I have other stuff going on.”
“Suit yourself.” The boy saluted with a parting, “don’t put down roots”, and left while Marroo went to pick up the hand of cards the boy had dropped on the table while he waited to be dealt in.
Marroo was holding the Lord, Adept, and Acolyte of Hands when the guards came for him. He felt them coming. Both blazed with the spiritual presence of cultivators, so they looked like bonfires beside the sparks of breath present in the people around them. He recognized them long before it was clear they were headed for the courier’s lounge and felt his heart sinking as their destination became clear.
He didn’t want to toss his cards when the guards finally pushed open the door to step inside and say his name. He stared at the Lord of Hands depicted on the card with his hand raised as though he was about to slap the adept in the next card down.
“Athesh wants to see you.” The shorter of the two guards in the lead informed Marroo. “Now, if it’s convenient.”
Marroo glared up at him. There was a cruel edge to the guard’s tone that made it clear he didn’t care if it was convenient or not.
Marroo looked back at his cards. “Does he have a message he needs sent?” He asked.
“He didn’t say.” The guard replied. “He told us to get you, so that’s what we’re doing.”
Marroo fiddled with the hand of cards for a moment before he looked around the table at the silent couriers. “How many points on the table?” He asked.
“Four a-piece.” One of the boys said. “Same as always.”
Marroo shuffled his hand, then slowly laid out his cards to show them how they’d have been beaten. “Keep the points.” He said, then stood.
“Trump never got called.” The boy across from him pointed out.
“Were you going to call it?” Marroo asked.
The boy shuffled in his seat, then showed his hand of low numbers in four suits. “Your points.” He conceded.
“Now, master courier.” The lead guard said.
Marroo looked at the cards, looked at the boys around him, then shook his head and stood. “Keep them.” He told the boys again, he opened his mouth to say more, looked around one last time, then closed it and followed the guards out the door.
The guards led him, one in front and one behind, to the elevator that would take them up to Athesh’s office. They were lopsided men, one short one tall, but it was the shorter of the two who had the most open meridians. Four. Core, Extremis, Sensorium, and Mentalis, while the tall one only had his Core, Extremis, and Sensorium open. Marroo turned to look at the taller of them as the elevator hummed and pulled them up the floors towards the top level.
“You’ve opened another meridian.” He said.
The guard towered over Marroo, almost as tall as Athesh if built more of muscle than the fat that made up the vast majority of the Executive’s bulk. He flicked his eyes to the shorter of the two guards before grunting an affirmative and Marroo turned back to the doors in front of him.
“Have you gotten over the spinning yet?”
“Some days.” The guard grunted. “Others, feel like my head is splitting open.”
“It gets better once you open your Mentalis.” Marroo replied.
The guard grunted again. “I’ll take your word for it.”
More red squad guards lined the hallways of the executive floor. There were no more than a dozen offices up here, but each of them belonged to one of the highest ranking members of the Iblanie organization, and the halls between them looked more like lounges in their own right than the narrow hallways of the offices on lower floors. Soldiers filled those lounges, reclining in armor on expensive couches and spitting drug juices into potted plants. Sunflare turrets with blast shields and rolling mounts clogged some of the lounges, positioned for easy deployment to windows that would do nothing to slow the beam of energy if they were ever fired through them, while stacks of rifles, arquebuses, powder kegs, and shot, occupied tables alongside expensive teaware and empty cigar boxes.
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They had to step over a small howitzer at one intersection in the halls. They squeezed past while the gun crew watched them and smoked cigars despite the steel barrels of gunpowder they sat on beside pyramids of chrome shot.
Marroo could feel a half dozen other cultivators among the guards stationed throughout the floor, though none with more than an open core.
They met Athesh’s secretary running the other way as they came to Athesh’s door. He barely acknowledged them before hurrying by. The short guard gave Marroo a smile as he pushed past to open the door and gesture Marroo inside, but there was nothing kind about that smile.
If Athesh’s office was free from the military clutter that filled the floor beyond his door, the man himself was a different story. He wore Armor as Marroo had seen him wear at the sub-sect headquarters he’d torn down to get Podmandu out, but these were strapped on over top of the expensive set of evening robes he must have been wearing when the crisis began and he wore the haggard look of a man who’d been running through half the night, with more running ahead of him.
Familiars stood open around his desk in their display mode with messages waiting for a response while cigar smoke spiraled through the light-bound constructs from a half smoked cigar sitting in an ash-tray to the executive’s left next to a sunflare pistol small enough to look like a toy next to the big man’s paw of a hand.
Athesh didn’t notice them immediately as they stepped in. One hand ran across the surface of one of the familiars with a pen as he scrawled some note to one of his agents while the other hand pressed two fingers to his broad forehead.
“Dehpreet.” He said as he finished the note and closed it down into its mobile configuration, a blue holographic drake about the size of Marroo’s hand. The drake arched its neck before zipping out the window, and Athesh pulled another open familiar in front of him to scan through its message. He looked up from the familiar when no one answered him and scanned the room.
“Gone. Damn. That’s good.” He stared at Marroo for a moment without recognizing him, then slowly returned to the present as awareness dawned like a light in his eyes. Another familiar shaped like glowing leaf blown on the wind came through his window to park itself above one of the clips on Athesh’s desk then opened to display a new message, but Athesh touched the base of each of the little projections until they’d each winked out and left nothing between the two of them but the big executives cluttered desk and the smoking cigar.
Athesh glowered at Marroo from beneath knit brows for a moment once the familiars were gone, then lifted the cigar to take a long drag. The ash on its tip was at least an inch long and he took his time tapping it off as he blew the smoke out before he took a second drag on the huge drugstick.
“There is an Adept in Dhruv’s house.” Athesh rumbled at last. Smoke coiled up from his beard and his nostrils. He puffed out the last of the smoke in his mouth and it drifted between them in a fog. “Whether Dhruv is alive, or dead, we don’t know, but the Adept hasn’t come out, and we’ve sent four of our best teams in without any survivors coming back, or any demands being issued.” Athesh’s tone lacked any emotion as he looked at Marroo and tapped the cigar on the ash tray at his desk again. He reached for a drawer as he sucked in another drag of the cigar and pulled out a box that he opened and offered to Marroo along with a puff of the smoke as though to emphasize the box’s contents.
Marroo shook his head.
Athesh put the cigar box away without comment and continued smoking as he studied Marroo. After a moment his gaze drifted. He sighed. “This would never have happened while your father was around.” He rumbled.
Marroo cleared his throat. “If you’re going to ask me to go in there, you should know that I intended to hand in my resignation today.” The smoke stank where it touched the empty meridians of his aura and Marroo waved a hand in a vain effort to clear it from his immediate vicinity. “And you already know how I feel about killing for you.”
Athesh glowered at him again and deliberately blew a puff of smoke in Marroo’s direction. The executive coughed, then glared at the cigar and set it back in its ashtray. “You can pretend that you don’t care what happens to this family.” Athesh said as he leaned towards Marroo across his desk, “but I know that you do care what happens to your friends in the couriers.” He leaned back, as though he’d just played a winning hand, and coughed into a closed fist as another familiar flit through the window, this one shaped like a bird. He merely glanced at it when it opened in a screen on his desk, then swiped it closed and coughed again.
“Do you know what I’ve been doing all evening?” He asked. He glanced at a clock hanging on the wall, “No, morning now, I suppose. Do you know? I’ve been activating all of the family’s safeguards for the event of the death of our primary leadership. That’s me, and Dhruv, and Nadhd. Later,” he pulled a display out of the side of his desk to check something then pushed it back into the paneling, “I will be going down to Dhruv’s manse myself along with Nadhd to supervise the rescue efforts.” He looked back up at Marroo. “More realistically we’ll be there to offer the adept the chance to behead our organization without destroying the rest of the family, if that is truly what he is here for. We’ll try to save the lives of hundreds of our subordinates by offering the adept our own on a battlefield of our own choosing.”
“I saw the red squads in your lobby.” Marroo replied.
Athesh’s face twisted. “A temporary measure. They’ll be coming with me to the manse when we evacuate the tower. If we’re lucky, the red squads we post around our little ambush will be able to kill the adept as he takes our lives. If we’re not, well, the family will be in hiding, and we won’t be around to watch him kill everyone we’ve ever known.”
Marroo looked away, out the window at the clouds still moving above the city, then back to the man in front of him. Smoke drifted between them from the cigar but neither spoke and one of the familiars on the desk re-opened without drawing of their attention as it flashed with scribbled text.
“I won’t kill for you.” Marroo said at last.
“You know what he’ll do to us if he isn’t stopped.” Athesh rumbled. “You’ve seen your father at work. We both have.” The executive coughed again and waved at the smoke drifting from the ashtray in front of him.
“I haven’t spoken to my children in three years,” Athesh went on, “but they don’t deserve to die like that. I’m taking the best course of action I can see to stop him, and that involves betting my life on the hope that he is only here to take out our leadership, the hope… But you.”
Athesh leaned forward again. “You could stop him. You could save the entire family.” He leaned back in his chair and wiped at the ash dotting his chest plate. “You, at least, have that ability.”
Marroo glared at the man behind the desk. “You aren’t family.” Marroo replied.
Athesh’s face twisted in disgust. “Then do it for your friends.” He snapped.
“My friends are all just couriers.” Marroo replied. “They’ll be safe no matter what happens to the rest of you.”
“Betmo isn’t just a courier.” Athesh replied. “His parents are high ranking members of one of our subsects, and his betrothed is the daughter of one of our retired executives. He’s only a courier until the end of the year when he’ll move into an executive role, and Podmandu? His father is one of our sect contact managers. If the family is going to fall, he’ll be on the chopping block with the rest of us. I could go on.” His eyes glittered as he regarded Marroo over the desk.
Marroo looked at the books shelves along one wall of the plush office Athesh maintained. “Do you know what they told me being a courier was all about when I first joined?” He asked at last. He turned back to Athesh who simply waited for him to answer. “Freedom.” Marroo said. “The freedom to fly away when things go to the pits.” He shook his head. “They’ll be alive long after they’ve given your bones to the reliquaries.”
Athesh looked at the cigar smoking on his desk, then he picked it up and gave it another drag. He rolled the smoke in his mouth as he set the cigar back on the ashtray then sucked it down and blew it out his nose, coughing as he did so. “I’m no good at begging.” He told Marroo without looking at him. “But I will, if that’s what you need me to do.” He looked at Marroo and Marroo looked back.
“Do this for us, and we’ll never ask another thing of you again. We’ll set you up for life, money, influence, anything,” he held up a single finger, “all for one good deed.”
“One life.” Marroo replied.
“My life!” Athesh shoved himself to his feet as though height would give his bellow greater force. Marroo just looked at him as he glowered down on Marroo like a mountain that thought its anger would give it power.
“My life,” he said again, “and the life of every other member of this family.”
Marroo shook his head. “Even once, and we’ll be back here again. You’ll never stop making enemies, and those enemies will never stop trying to kill you. I’ll have to choose, over and over, and over again, but I’ve already made my choice. Not once, not ever.” Marroo pointed at the executive. “You’re, not my family. You made those enemies, you deal with them. I have other plans for my future, and I don’t want any part in yours.”