“It would be shiny if you thanked me for rescuing you,” Abigail said, arms crossed and lips pressed into a pout.
The red haired woman regally reclined against one of the steel light posts inside the analyst's district tram terminal. Like a queen at her court, Abigail surveyed her bustling kingdom with imperial disdain. Her arms were laid across her chest in what could have been a suggestive pose if it weren’t for the narrow eyed glare she directed Rath’s way. The righteous indignation in her glare was the only reason no one in the crowd struck up a conversation with the beautiful analyst. Several men and women slowed their steps toward the tram and summoned up their courage only to deflate beneath the woman’s withering gaze. Rejected, the would be suitors trudged onward toward the tram that slithered by the terminal like a silent silver snake.
Only one potential paramour withstood Abigail’s wrath, though he would take issue with the insinuation that he was courting her. After all, he'd had planned to skip his rendezvous with her altogether. Rathaniel could see now that telling her he’d planned to stand her up had been ill advised. Already angry at him for not being properly appreciative of his 'rescue', she'd grown incised at his confession. In hindsight, he should have chosen a better opportunity to tell her that his plans went awry. If he told her at all.
Rath regretted his decision to share his thoughts about putting her in danger by associating with him. The laborer found himself regretting a great many things while he tried to placate the lovely lady staring daggers at him. Despite Rathaniel offering several sincere explanations, Abigail's emerald eyes continued to spark with barely restrained violence.
“I didn’t need rescuing, Abigail,” Rath tried again, a martyr’s sigh slipping from his lips. He tore his eyes away from the beautiful woman to stare up into the infinite darkness above. “I was trying to find out why the Keepers are after Ovid. Or maybe I could have found out what Dexter wanted them to pay him for being an informant.”
The tall man’s lips pressed into a thin, pale line. With a sigh, he gave up finding the solutions to his problems in the impenetrable shadows obscuring the far reaches of Magna Spelunca. “You are right though,” Rathaniel continued, forcing himself to meet her irritated gaze. “Intervening like that was a very brave thing to do. It could have gotten you into some serious trouble if you’d interfered with the Keepers instead of jerking me off the tram after they dismissed me.”
“How’d you do that, anyway?,” a smile tugging at the corner of his lips in genuine amusement. He studiously maintained eye contact despite his impulse to evaluate the supple frame tucked into her green coveralls. “You don’t look that strong.”
“Your flattery is going to have to be better than that if you want to salvage this date, Ratty,.” the young woman said with a haughty sniff. “Being late for our shift isn’t going to improve our day though. We may as well get moving before anything else goes wrong.”
Despite her words, Rathaniel felt a pang of relief at her mollified tone. He did not relish the thought of riding across Sector C with an angry Abigail beside him. If an apology and a well deserved compliment was enough to quell her ire, Rath would pay that price.
Unfortunately, words were only the first installment toward the debt that would haunt him for the foreseeable future. Abigail had stopped, one arm extended toward him with her fingers wiggling in silent invitation. When Rathaniel didn’t immediately move to take hold of her offered hand, the analyst tossed an unamused look over her slim shoulder. Her deadpan expression never changed as she cleared her throat, loudly, before wiggling her fingers again.
“Come on, Abigail,” Rathaniel whined. The dark haired laborer anxiously rubbed at the back of his neck while his hazel eyes darted across the terminal to see if they’d acquired an audience. “We’re in public and…and…”
The tall laborer let his words trail off when Abigail’s lips began to twist into a frown to match the way her eyebrows started to narrow. Instead of speaking, the young woman beckoned for him with a roll of her wrist. Unwilling to reignite her fury, Rath allowed himself a mournful sigh in honor of his shattered pride. Without further protest, he laced his long, calloused fingers with her dainty ones.
Abigail’s face immediately brightened as if she hadn’t been debating the merits of murder a mere heartbeat ago. “See? That wasn’t so hard, was it? I knew you could be trained,” she finished with a note of smug satisfaction ringing through her alto voice. Rath would have dropped her hand like a jagged piece of glimmerkriss if she hadn’t tightened her grip. She was much stronger than he’d have thought possible for a woman of her size. Unaware of her companion’s reluctance, she turned to begin leading him toward the tram. “Last night I told Cathy, that’s my best friend, that you’d be worth all the work I’d have to put into you.”
Rathaniel scowled, his own thoughts drifting toward homicide, “I don’t think I’m the one who has things they need to learn. Didn’t they teach you about proper etiquette in the Dormitory you attended?”
The question was purely rhetorical. The curriculum across the Dormitories was exactly the same. Hundreds of years of refinement had honed the educational system of Nox into a well oiled machine. It's sole purpose was to introduce freshly minted adults into the caste they were most suited for. Cycle after cycle, children grew up beneath the watchful eyes of Magisters that worked tirelessly to ensure their charges respected and appreciated the responsibility of citizenship.
It was a message repeated early and often considering infants entered the Dorms on the day of their birth. There wasn’t a parent among the citizens who even so much as knew their child’s name. Still covered in afterbirth, newborns were immediately taken into the custody of the only parent they’d ever know, The Citystate of Nox. The state would go on to name them, feed them, cloth them, house them, and teach them until they reached adulthood. In return, the citizens of Nox devoted their lives to supporting their city.
“You’re so stuffy, Ratty,” Abigail said, her purring alto voice taking on the tone of a scolding Magister. “You’re like a kid so scared of breaking his toy that he refuses to play with it. Life is for having fun, Rath. One day you’ll grow old and that toy you’re scared of breaking will shatter anyway. Before then, take it down off the shelf and enjoy it.”
“I do enjoy my life, Abby,” Rath said, ignoring the way her face scrunched together when he shortened her name. “It’s hard to live in Magna Spelunca. Humans weren’t made to spend their lives underground. Helping the city flourish and spending time with friends is the most rewarding life a person could live. What more could anyone want?”
Abigail’s distaste at the abbreviation of her name shifted into a provocative smile at Rath’s question. Their progress toward the nearby tram halted when she turned to face him. All it took was a measured step to press herself into his side in a way that made the contours of her body wickedly evident even through the synthcloth coveralls they wore.
“I wonder,” Abigail said, her sultry purr working at full strength. Rising up onto her tiptoes she brought her lips so close to Rath’s ear that he could feel the vibration of her words against his skin. “What more could anyone want?”
Fortunately for Rathaniel, repeated exposure to Abigail’s charms had substantially improved his resistance to their effect. The same inviting touch that had turned him into a puddle of hormone laced goop yesterday merely drew a tired sigh from him today. After untangling his fingers from hers, he leaned back to look straight into her enchanting eyes.
“Personal space,” Rathaniel said, his words as dry as the sun scorched sand in Magister Sigma’s stories.
Flummoxed, Abigail could only blink as she rocked back onto her heels. Her pearly white teeth began to worry at her lower lip while she tried to gauge how serious Rathaniel was. After a moment’s consideration, the young woman threw her hands up in the air with an undignified huff.
“You were much more fun yesterday,” she grumbled, abandoning all pretense at being provocative.
In that moment, with a river of humanity flowing around them, Abigail looked like a completely different person. Gone was the carefree smile and the mischievous twinkle in her eye. Instead, there was a cold, clinical detachment in her green gaze, as if she were measuring something of no more consequence than a few benign bacteria in a petri dish. The sight sent a chill running down his spine. It was quite uncomfortable to feel dissected like a toad beneath an uncaring scalpel.
The moment passed and the statuesque cast of her features softened into something human once again. “Well come on then, Rathaniel,” Abigail said, her tone, once again, the casual, self-assured alto he was familiar with. “We really will be late if we don’t catch the tram.”
It took Rath a heartbeat to process the sight of the beautiful woman spinning on her heel to march off into the thinning crowd. In their short friendship, he’d seen many sides of Abigail Summers, but there had been something unnerving about the way she’d looked at him. He’d expected anger or resentment. Perhaps he even deserved one, or both, of those reactions. What he hadn’t expected was the same sort of cold dismissal he’d have used for a glob of mud stuck to the bottom of his boot.
“You know,” Rath said, taking two quick steps to catch up with Abigail after gathering his scattered wits. “You don’t have to be so aggressive. I’m very aware of how beautiful you are whether you tease me or not.”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The young woman tilted her head up, meeting his gaze with a set of half-lidded eyes as they stepped into the waiting tram. “A bit presumptuous of you to assume that I’m teasing you for your sake, don’t you think?” The analyst quickly found two unoccupied seats. Settling daintily into one seat, she playfully patted the empty one beside her. “Making me out to be a puppet dancing on the strings of your attention is a pretty poor attempt at salvaging this date.”
Rathaniel, already frowning at her words, knit his dark eyebrows together in consternation. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he grumbled, taking his seat without argument. “I meant that you’re obviously smart enough to wear green and you’re brave enough to risk getting on the wrong side of the Keepers.”
“Beautiful, smart, brave,” Rath ticked off each point on his fingers. With each point to the woman's smile grew until it was so large it might devour him whole. “You have so many amazing qualities. There's no reason for you to play into being a…a…,” Rathaniel stumbled, searching for the perfect word but, awkwardly, only Mary’s term leapt to mind. “...a trollop.”
To his credit, Rath managed to hide his surprise at Abigail’s giggle. Once she had regained control of her amusement she reached out to place her delicate fingers upon his chest. Her elegant digits toyed with the zipper of his coveralls while she spoke.
“Oh, Ratty, Ratty,” her purr had returned, and Rath found himself drawn toward the window behind her and the city streaming by outside the tram. He wanted to look anywhere except the smoldering gaze of her faceted eyes. “Even if what you’re saying is true, why should I only be one of those things? Or two? Why can’t I be all those things when I want to be?”
He could feel the grind of the zipper as she pulled it lower, exposing more of the undershirt stretched across his broad chest. Her deft touch slid the zipper up again while she spoke “The same is true for you,” her voice was soft, almost hypnotic, and he found himself looking into her eyes despite his earlier reluctance. “You don’t have to spend all your time being a good guy. A hero. Sometimes being a villain doesn’t make you bad. Or wrong. It just makes you whole.”
“It's not that easy,” Rath rasped, his mouth dry and his eyes slowly drifting shut. Distantly he was aware that he was leaning toward her, caught in the grip of her inexorable gravity like a comet plucked from the cosmos by a covetous black hole. “Good and bad aren’t lights that turn on and off when you flip a switch. They’re the scars you carry for every decision you make. Scars you see in the mirror till the day you die.”
Rath was dimly aware of a sweet taste on the tip of his tongue, like the lilacs in Meadow Park. It wasn’t until she spoke again that he realized her lips were close enough that he could taste her breath. “They aren’t scars, “ Abigail said, each wicked whisper causing Rath’s world to shrink as he mentally tumbled into the vanishing space between them. “Good? Bad? They’re weights that other people have laid upon your shoulders since before you were born. All you have to do is let them go.”
As if he’d closed his hand around a live wire, agonizing heat leapt up the length of his right arm in a bolt of electric shock that buried itself in the base of his skull. Recoiling with a pained hiss, Rathaniel’s pale hazel eyes fluttered open. His left hand closed around the silver ONI bracer he wore on his right wrist while he fought to control the twitching fingers of his right hand.
“Depthless dark that hurts,” Rathaniel swore, all thoughts of Abigail vanishing from his mind in the wake of the eye watering pain. It felt as if his arm was going to ignite like a piece of oiled cloth. Then, as if it'd been a figment of his imagination, the pain subsided as suddenly as it had appeared. Rathaniel’s fingers stopped twitching and the throbbing at the base of his skull vanished .
“My ONI is malfunctioning.” Rath said, splitting his attention between the analyst beside him and the process of withdrawing his arm from the coveralls he wore. The zipper hissed like a wary snake when Rath jerked it down to his stomach. A roll of his broad shoulders let him shrug his way out of the sturdy synthcloth that fell down to pool around his waist.
“Since yesterday it’s felt like it was about to melt through my arm. But it hasn’t hurt quite like that before,” Rathaniel murmured. His hazel eyes trailed up and down the length of his unmarred arm while his left hand rubbed at the unassuming ONI clasped around his wrist.
With a contemplative hum, Abigail arched one carefully sculpted eyebrow while she regarded Rath’s silver ONI with a baleful stare. She tentatively lifted a hand as if she planned to inspect it herself only to abort the attempt halfway to his wrist. Instead of examining his ONI, she let her arm drop listlessly to her side.
“Curious. Very curious,” she spoke as much to herself as to the agitated laborer. “You said this all began yesterday? When?,” When the analyst lifted her gaze from his wrist, Rathaniel felt himself sinking into her emerald gaze again. This time he tore his eyes away from her’s, hiding the abrupt motion by focusing his attention on his shoulder and elbow. The malfunctioning ONI wasn’t the only thing that had unnerved Rathaniel.
“I first noticed it at the shuffle. I’ve felt it a few times since, but never quite like that. Before I've felt a tremendous heat. This time it felt like an electric current was running through my arm.” While Rathaniel spoke, his fingers clenched into a fist to test the hand that had betrayed him a moment ago.
Abigail made no attempt to hide the way her eyes followed the cords of muscle that slithered beneath Rath’s skin when he flexed his arm. Her tongue flicked out, quick as a whip, to moisten her dry lips before she spoke. “I’ve never heard of anyone having a malfunctioning ONI. Have you noticed anything that seems to trigger these episodes?”
Rathaniel found himself reluctant to reply. It was hard to trust Abigail, even if she had been willing to ‘save’ him from the Peace Keeper. That didn’t change the fact that they had only known each other for a very short time. Something about this problem with his ONI made him want to keep thoughts to himself.
“Nothing I can be sure about,” Rathaniel replied, hedging the truth despite a stab of guilt he felt for being less than forthcoming. “We’re almost to the mines. It's probably best to have this talk after our shift since we’ll have to split up as soon as we get off the tram.”
“Oh? Are we going to talk after our shift?,” Abigail asked, a half smile tugging impishly at the corner of her lips. “You mangled this date like a dweller wrecking a vein of glimmerkriss. I haven’t decided if there will be a second date yet.”
“What can can you do to convince me, Rathaniel Bright?,” Abigail said, leaning forward at an angle calculated to spread the top of her coveralls and expose the snug green shirt she wore underneath.
“Well, Abby,” Rath said, rolling his eyes as he rose to his feet. A small step brought him into the isle that was filling with citizens preparing to exit the tram. “With the way my life is going right now, the only thing I can guarantee is that things will never be dull.”
An expression of profound pity crossed her lovely face. “Oh Ratty,’ Abigail said in a wistful tone. “That was awful. If you can’t do any better than that then I owe it to the other women of Nox to try and teach you how to flirt.”
Rathaniel shook his head with a soft chuckle as the tram came to a stop. The tide of humanity, dressed in laborer gray and analyst green, surged toward the doors as soon as they slid open. Swept down the aisle by the crowd, Rath could only call back over his shoulder at the still seated woman, “I’ll see you at the terminal after our shift.”
Stepping out of the tram, Rath’s heavy boots carried him across the steel terminal and down a short flight of stairs. At the base of the stairs two armed Keepers stood with their kinetic rifles resting on their shoulders. There were only a few places in Nox where the Keepers would be armed with more than a suppression datapad. The mines, with their proximity to the walls and potential for dweller incursion, qualified as one of those places.
Rath kept his eyes averted from the mirrored masks worn by the two Peace Keepers. Once he stepped past them he was treated to the sight of the sprawling Sector C mining facility. It wasn’t the first time he’d worked to harvest glimmerkriss, but that didn’t dull the awe he felt at the sight of the complex.
Like mushrooms surrounding a mud puddle, small, squat buildings sat around the edge of a massive pit. The yawning chasm was so large that it made the people working in and around it appear as little more than ants bustling around a hive. Rumbling conveyor belts carried dusty buckets laden with stone to the small buildings surrounding the mine. Once there, they were unloaded and sorted into appropriate bins that trax drivers would hitch to their vehicles and tow to one of the two gargantuan processing facilities at either end of the mine.
The operation was loud, hot, and necessary. Not only did the mines provide workable building material for the maintenance of Nox, but more importantly, the mines in Sector C and D were the only viable source of glimmerkriss. Glimmerkriss was the primary building block of the organic nanites that served as the foundation of human life in Magna Spelunca.
Rathaniel actually felt those very nanites adjust his auditory input several decibels. Their constant adjustment of his biometrics were so subtle that he rarely noticed, but there was nothing subtle about work in the mines. In addition to the noise, Rath could already feel the fine grit clinging to his hands and his face. The sensation quickened his step to the nearest intake facility where he sought out an older man wearing a safety hat and dressed in analyst green.
“Name?,” the man said, his voice pitched above the ambient noise of the stone being moved around them. The foreman had a lean, wiry look typical to most analysts. Weathered lines etching his face spoke of far more experience in the front lines than most of the calculators ever saw. There was also a hint of gray at the roots of his dark hair, suggesting that the man only had a few shuffles left before he ended his days in one of the towers outside the city.
“Rathaniel Bright,” Rath replied, helping himself to one of the hard hats hanging from a nearby peg board. After claiming a piece of headgear, he pulled a respirator from a nearby table to filter out the ambient dust that choked the lower levels of the mine. “I’m assigned to shaft forty-eight”
The gruff foreman offered a nod of approval before tapping a series of keys on his datapad. “Glad to see you’ve shuffled into the mines before. The fewer rookies we have wandering around in the deep the better off everyone is. Work manifest says you’ve got trax experience. Part of the crew down there is shuffling out in a deca. When they do, I’ll shift you from the monofilament mattock into a driver’s job. For now though, you’re going to be digging in the dirt.”
Rath was thankful that the respirator hid his grimace. He knew the foreman was trying to be considerate, but Rath would prefer swinging a mattock to driving a taxi for the other workers. At least the stone didn’t complain. There were few experiences worse than being a captive audience in a group of commiserating laborers after a fifteen hour shift.
“One more thing,” the foreman said, stepping close enough that Rath had to resist an impulse to step back. “Keep an eye out down there. We’ve had two dweller incursions in the last mensis. If you see anything amiss, get your shiny little cheeks back up here. Shaft forty-eight is a long way from the Keepers and their kinetic rifles.”
“Heard and understood,” Rath replied, stepping past the foreman to make his way toward a large, flat-bed trax that was bound for the lower strata of the mine. Rath would have to delve deep into the abyss to find shaft forty-eight.
“May the beacon guide you,” the foreman said, his words nearly lost amidst the racket created by the busy facility.
A short while later, Rath, and an entire crew of heavily geared laborers, descended into the depthless dark.