“Citizens and work visas only.”

My eyes snapped open. In front of us was a massive concrete wall painted a sad, faded green. We were stopped at a checkpoint just outside, and a suit of matte white power armor was bending down to address Hank at eye level.

I peered between the gaps in its defenses, hoping to get a look at the wires or circuits beneath, but instead I saw a black underlayer so dark it seemed to leech the light from the edges of its armored plates.

“I have a delivery to make,” Hank replied coolly. He slowly reached into his pocket and produced a purple bearer credit. “What’s the fee for a day pass? Five hundred?”

Even through the gate guard’s opaque faceplate I could feel them staring at me. “No visitor passes today.” The voice that came through the armor’s speakers barely sounded human. I had seen models of paladins in VR, but in person their presence was even more... intense. I knew they were only here to protect us, but something made me nervous.

Hank grimaced briefly, but quickly hid his distress. “My business is urgent,” he insisted as he took another purple and offered them both.

I watched with wide-eyed fascination as the guard’s thick metal fingers gripped the crystals with gentle dexterity, then tossed them into the air and caught them in a fist. They slowly uncurled, revealing that the fragile gems were unscathed.

Hank cleared his throat. “Are we clear to proceed, Brother?”

The sound of their huge metal boots was surprisingly soft on the pavement as they stepped back. It could be shock absorption, but the way they moved didn’t look bouncy enough. Maybe the soles were made of sound dampening material, or- “Don’t linger,” they commanded, and a section of wall slowly raised to allow us passage. I briefly noticed two automated turrets mounted on either side of the gate as we drove out of their line of fire and into the city.

“Welcome to port, kid,” Hank said tiredly. “Journey’s almost over, thank the void.”

Without the wall towering over us I could once again see the sky, where the gate station hovered thousands of kilometres above us. From its base descended twin cables, and as I watched an ascender plummeted down the left one so fast I was sure it would explode on the ground, only to slow and stop with breakneck speed. Besides the elevator cables leading to the city center, there were dozens more tubes connecting the station to the roofs of huge concrete buildings built around the city’s edges. I couldn’t see any train tracks, however.

“Didn’t you say that the syrup is moved by rail?” I asked.

Hank glanced at me with undue disdain. “They’re underground,” he grunted.

His surliness couldn’t dampen my spirits. As we continued on past the warehouse district my face remained glued to the window, staring at colorful and dynamic signs decorating the bleak prefabricated buildings, advertising bars, nightclubs, fight pits... well, most of the ads seemed to be focusing on ways to make bad choices. Some of them got that point across with very detailed holographic models.

“Is that a body scan or an avatar?” I asked, pointing to a particularly lewd hologram of a muscular terran woman brandishing an extremely realistic horse penis.

“Don’t recognize her?” Hank asked sarcastically. “Pretty sure I saw her on a stream with your parents once.”

I shot him a glare, but there wasn’t much else I could do. I tried changing the subject one last time. “So... what kind of errand do you have to do?”

“I’m making one last delivery,” he replied, and I noted with delight that the hostility faded from his tone, along with the tension in his jaw. “Then I’ll have enough to buy passage through the gate.”

Despite how snippy he could be, I was still happy for him. I could tell he was a nice guy under his rough exterior. “That’s great! Maybe I’ll see you out there,” I suggested cheerfully.

“Don’t count on it.” His knuckles were white on the steering wheel as he turned down a narrow side street. He continued that way for a minute, bringing us further from the thoroughfare, then turned again and stopped in front of a garage door in the back of a particularly nondescript building. It was in as poor shape as the buildings around it, with chunks of concrete missing around the corners. I noticed some rough-looking characters leaning against the wall, watching us.

A few moments passed in tense silence. I noticed one of the individuals stepping towards us, but he stepped back as the garage door rattled to life. Hank wordlessly drove us into a downward-sloping tunnel leading, which soon opened into a spacious parking lot packed halfway to capacity with a hundred or so trucks and delivery vans. The already dim overhead lights flickered worryingly, revealing them to be our only source of light outside our truck.

We pulled into a space near the entrance ramp, and Hank killed the engine. “Wait here,” he commanded seriously. “Don’t get out of the car.”

“Are you delivering something illegal?” I asked, wide-eyed. “Not that I have a problem with that! Is it drugs? Oo, or maybe-”

He held up a hand to silence me. “You ask a lot of questions, boy. One day it’s going to get you killed.”

“Right. Sorry.” I zipped my lips and threw away the key.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

He shook his head, his face pinched with... frustration? Worry?

Whatever he might have said next was lost as a door slid open on the far side of the garage. Two mean-looking men flanked a bulky bast woman, who wore a black leather jacket and a conspicuously bulky belt, with a pistol on her hip. Her left sleeve was torn to expose an expensive metallic black cybernetic arm, which matched her left eye and ear. I could feel that mechanical eye focusing on me, and I couldn’t be sure if I saw her smile.

Hank took a deep, shuddering breath, staring apprehensively at his contact.

“You can do this,” I encouraged, giving his knee a gentle squeeze. “I believe in you.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, though I had already forgiven his foul mood. He didn’t look back as he picked his way around vehicles parked in neat rows between us and them, and finally stopped before the bast.

I anxiously zipped and unzipped my bag as I studied the trio across the room. The woman in the middle had dark fur marred by scars that I could see even from such a distance, meaning that her prostheses were probably a repair job, and that she was paid fairly well. She was likely a mercenary, based on that and her non-branded aesthetic. Maybe she would be willing to fence my stuff after she was done with Hank’s business? Bearer credits would go further than trinkets in trying to bargain my way onto a ship.

The woman finally greeted Hank, probably, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying from so far away. Their lips moved subtly at first, their gestures small, but as their conversation continued both grew increasingly more animated. Hank pointed violently at the woman,and she put a hand on her hip, close to her sidearm. Fragments of shouted words reached my straining ears, but I couldn’t find meaning in them. Maybe this was how haggling worked on the wrong side of the law?

The lights flickered, then went out, plunging the subterranean chamber into utter darkness. A flash illuminated the room, accompanied by the echoing crack of a rail rifle, then another. Voices shouted into the gloom, and these I heard. “Confirmed kill, ma’am!”

When the lights came on again, Hank was lying on the ground before them. A pool of blood slowly spread to fill in the gaps between bits of brain and skull scattered across the concrete around what had been his head.

One of the men dropped his limp wrist to the ground, and stepped over his prone form. A part of me wondered why he wasn’t helping him up; he clearly needed medical attention.

The zip on my bag was half closed, my trembling fingers still clutching the tab, frozen mid-stim. Questions swirled through my mind. What was he delivering? Who were those people? Would they let me go if I promised not to tell? Would they still be willing to buy my stuff from me?

The uncertain jumble coalesced into one single train of thought as the woman’s yellow and red eyes locked with mine across the garage. I could feel the cruelty in her stare, the determination to succeed no matter who she had to kill to do it. I could see her anticipation clear as day, the quivering in the tip of her nose, the licking of her teeth beneath her lips; her job was almost complete.

I needed to run.

I pulled the zipper shut, clumsily yanked the door handle, and tripped out of the truck’s cab. I ducked low and dashed behind a row of pickup trucks as the sound of the mens running footsteps echoed deafeningly off the ceiling.

“Put those guns away dumbfucks, that kid’s worth a fortune!” the mercenary barked at her henchmen.

I pressed myself between the front of a truck and the wall. Tears matted the fur on my cheeks as my brain finally pieced together the clues that my excitement had blinded me to. Hank hadn’t been selling drugs, or guns, or any other sorts of illegal goods.

I was the delivery.

“He’s not here ma’am!” one of the goons yelled from the direction of the truck.

I clapped a hand over my mouth as the beam of a flashlight scanned slowly along the row of vehicles behind which I was hiding. “Here kitty kitty!” the second one called. “I have a bone for you!”

“That’s dogs, dick for brains!” the first responded.

The beam of light swept away from my shadow as the mercenary retorted, and I seized the moment to creep around the edge of the pickup. He was standing just behind its bed, with his back to me. There was a knife strapped to his thigh mere inches from my face, and the snap holding it in place was unfastened. Their argument sounded as if it came from under water, barely registering over the ringing in my ears.

I eyed the next row of vehicles, a few metres closer to the elevator.

The lights flickered again. I felt my fist close around the ergonomic grip of his combat knife. The darkness pressed in all around us. The blade slid free.

The terran shrieked in pain and fell to the unforgiving ground as the rusty scent of his blood filled my nose. “Fucking kid stabbed me!” he bellowed.

I didn’t waste another moment next to the bleeding man, seizing my moment to sprint towards the elevator, keeping my head low and my steps soft. When the lights came back on I was halfway there, lying on my belly beneath a van with a clear view of the leader leaning against the elevator doors.

Her pointed ears laid flat against her head, her sharpened teeth bared as she rubbed her furrowed brow. “This is why you don’t skimp on the thug budget,” she growled to herself. “You two get back here and guard the lift! I’ll go get this brat myself.”

I thought the pounding of my heart would give me away for sure as I waited in the shadows. I held my breath when she got close, so close I could reach out and grab her ankle, but she kept walking.

I counted her steps as she moved away from me. Was five enough for me to make a run for it? Six? Seven? On eight I rolled out into the open, and leapt to my feet. I made a mad dash for the lift, ignoring the shouts in my wake. I felt something wet and squishy under my bare foot, but I didn’t dare stop and look.

My hand left a bloody print on the far wall as I slammed into it full-force. My finger fumbled on the up button, then pressed it so hard my nail stuck in the fragile rubber. I turned to face the sound of metal slugs tearing through the closing doors as the uninjured mercenary opened fire on me, barely missing my torso. The bast drew her pistol and pressed it to the mercenary’s temple, ensuring that I would see the spray of steaming viscera before the doors closed completely.

I fell to my hands and knees and retched. In media people always threw up and felt better after seeing someone die for the first time, but nothing came up, and the knot in my stomach remained.

I checked my hand for injuries; it stung from the impact, but the blood wasn’t mine. I wiped it on my pants, hoping the black polymer fabric wouldn’t stain, though my pale fur certainly did.

I shakily got to my feet, facing the door. I was dimly aware of my bag on my shoulders. At least I still had that. I wiped the tears from my face with my clean hand, and set my wobbling jaw. “I need to find help,” I declared with all the stalwart determination I could muster.

A chime sounded from the lift, and it stopped at the sixth floor.