The wolf’s ears pricked forward, and he sniffed the air.
“Commander Kyron is finished. It will just be you and me, Healer,” Salam said, showing his teeth like a predator. Triel glanced at Jetta. The young soldier had frozen in place, her eyes distant, shadowed by something ominous, her essence completely withdrawn.
“All I need is a drop of your precious leech blood, and it won’t matter if you are alive or dead. It’s your choice.”
“You know... what happens... when you threaten a Solitary?” she asked, doubling over as fingers of malice wrapped around her core. Her skin instantly mottled, her nails yellowing and her markings fading into the gray of her flesh.
Triel could hear the sneer in Salam’s voice. “I’ve studied your kind for years. I know that much of your power comes from the reactions of others. Fortunately, I will not be the one drawing your blood. Neither will my soldiers.”
Salam grasped the scruff of the wolf tightly and then let go. The wolf whimpered and rolled to the ground. “You have complete power and control over the Sentient mind but cannot connect with the most basic of all creations. What a shame. It could have saved your life.”
Salam signaled the guards waiting outside the fence, and they unlocked the animal cages, beginning with the wolves. A series of whistles echoed from the loudspeakers. None of the beasts took notice of Salam as he left the enclosure, but they did see her and Jetta.
“Jetta!” Triel cried as she fell to the ground. The pain ripping through her was incredible and intoxicating. If the predators didn’t kill her, the Fall would.
Jetta didn’t move. Her eyes were open but unseeing, her hands clenched in tight, white fists.
Triel craned her neck up at the wolf that Salam had been petting. He had risen and was approaching them cautiously.
“Please,” she whispered.
There were seven wolves in the pack, and the three that they had encountered earlier kept their distance as the other four advanced. The one closest to Triel eyed her possessively, as if he already knew the taste of her flesh. The one nearest Jetta snarled as he crouched low, ready to spring.
The world shattered into prisms of light and sound as her mind began to circle the infinite drain of her Fall. Through the haze of pain she caught the eye of the gray-pawed wolf Jetta had bonded with and made one last attempt.
Her voice sapped by the poison in her veins, her mind reached out. Please—help us—help her! Don’t you remember?
Triel collapsed, splattering mud. She saw the wolf strike Jetta from behind as the world turned crimson.
Chapter IV
The fluttery queasiness in Agracia’s stomach soured to a pit of acid the closer she got to the warehouse on the outskirts of the underground Spillway. There were fewer and fewer of her people—the townies and Jocks—and more of the Johnnies she had been careful to avoid over the years. The Johnnies in the west Spillway were the most brutal kind, too—the black-marked dog-soldiers and madmen too vicious to operate in any ordinary gang. They tied red bandanas around their right arms and bore mangled lumps where their left ears should have been. Some of them even filed their teeth to points, adding tothe savage effect of their tattoos and scars. They were mostly Scabbers and Meatheads, but some of them were hybrid off-worlders who had returned to Earth when the rest of the universe had proven to be cruel and unwelcoming.
Agracia was still weaponless, and despite Victor’s assurances that she wouldn’t have any problems getting into the warehouse, she had learned over the years not to trust anyone.
Two Johnnies snickered as she neared the sign carved into one of the foundation pillars. It read “Berish and Mau Imports and Exports.”
From the structure of the original archway, Agracia guessed that this nest site was part of the old subway station. It had been severely damaged in the war, and modifications had been made to the supports to keep the whole place from caving in. Gouges marked the walkway where early survivors might have dragged their machines to expand their new underground homes. A couple of derailed subway cars confirmed her suspicions. They had been gutted and refurbished with an arsenal of assault weapons to guard the entryway to the warehouse.
One of the Johnnies spoke in a garbled mixture of broken English and Common as he stroked his submachine gun: “Oh sweets, you just stepped into the wrong neighborhood.”
If she showed fear they would kill her on the spot, even if Victor truly had ordered her safe passage. It was part of the unspoken Spillway code—only the tough deserved their skin. “Shove it or I’ll spank you just like I spanked your mom last night.”
The second Johnnie laughed out loud, slapping his companion on the shoulder. The first turned bright red, but the flush of color was quickly replaced with a malevolent smirk. “You keep that smart mouth. I’ll eat that tongue of yours by tonight.”
Agracia shouldered past them, keeping an eye on their position by watching their shadows. They kept their distance, but it didn’t stop their verbal assault as she tried to open the metal double doors before realizing they were electronically dead-bolted and retinal-coded—an unusual find on Earth, where power supplies were limited. Besides, who here would keep anything that needed that kind of protection?
Agracia held her breath as she struggled with what to do next. Now that Jetta Kyron had revealed her terrestrial upbringing to be a fabrication, she questioned every action and every thought. Was it really hers or was it part of the military construct? Where did the low-life Jock end and she begin?
But who the hell am I anyway?
Agracia bit her lip and cursed as the beginnings of a headache swelled inside her skull. Not again, she thought to herself. Now was the time to help her friend and screw everything else.
That’s Agracia the Scabber—
“Hey, numbnuts,” Agracia shouted, “are you going to open this for me, or am I going to have to rip your eyes out?”
The first one aimed his gun at her, but she crossed her arms and leaned to one side. “Come on, really? Ain’t you got two brain cells to rub together?”
“Gonna eat your tongue, and maybe your ugly little face,” he whispered, clicking off the safety.
The other guard slung his gun and walked over to the interface. After punching in the codes and scanning his eyes, the double doors parted. But he grabbed her by the arm as she tried to step through. His breath was soured by years of smoking and cheap booze. “Sykes over there ain’t half of what you gonna see in there, little missus. Gonna make you wish you hadn’t been born. Gonna kill every last bit of you that ever mattered.”
Agracia deftly kissed him on the nose before breaking his grip with her opposite hand. “Awh, don’t you worry about me. Big boys with big guns and little peckers really don’t twist my panties.”
Was that me or the Scabber?
As he raised the butt of his gun, Agracia unsheathed the knife from his belt and ducked out of range. The first guard fired a few rounds but missed as she flattened herself out behind a pylon.
“Leave her!” someone shouted from inside the warehouse.
Agracia kept her eyes trained on her two assailants, who begrudgingly held their fire. She waited until the double doors sealed again before turning away.
“Agracia Waychild. Always making a scene.”
Agracia stopped in her tracks at the sight of the man standing ten meters away. Immediately her gut kicked in, telling her to play this one straight. There was something ominous about him—something sinister in the way his cold eyes looked her over.
“Come with me. I was just having a chat with your friend.”
Agracia tried not to let the pain in her head distract her from her surroundings, but it was getting worse, throbbing inside the confines of her skull. Ever since Jetta had pried her way inside Agracia’s head, she’d been bedeviled by headaches, each one progressively more painful and violent, the worst of which seemed to be triggered by thoughts of her upbringing.
“Keep it together,” she mumbled to herself, crack
ing her knuckles.
She forced herself to memorize every detail of her environment despite the pain splitting open her head. The entryway to the warehouse looked like an old ticket booth. Cash registers, rusted and barely recognizable, were still mounted on the counters behind broken out windows. Graffiti and ominous stains splattered the crumbling tiles and peeling paint. It was a narrow passageway, but a light at the end of the hallway illuminated a doorway that vented industrial rock and drunken chatter.
What really got her attention was the smell—something terrible that stirred a distant memory and made her stomach hitch.
“Now count backwards from one hundred...”
Agracia lurched forward, swallowing hard to keep the memory locked away. Right now she couldn’t afford to come unglued.
“Who are you?” Agracia asked, refocusing on her escort.
The man looked at her with his cold eyes, his extended silence making her squirm. Finally he answered, “You may call me Shandin.”
Agracia followed Shandin into a large chamber that looked as if it had been carved out of the Earth but never finished. Dead roots still hung from the ceiling, and clumps of dirt and construction debris littered the floor. In the middle of the room was an active wet bar made out of clawed bathtubs, toxic waste drums, copper wiring, and spiral tubing with No Smoking! scrawled across the apparatus every which way. In the Dives she’d seen active bars, but none this elaborate or with such a variety of alcohol churning through the tubes and into the spigots.
Perched on the stool nearest the spigots was her pig-tailed friend, who alternated sucking on her lollipop with spouting profanities as she impatiently waited for the machines to cook up another round. An audience of Johnnies surrounded her, all of them as battered and bruised as her friend but seemingly in good spirits, laughing as Bossy stood on her stool and mocked the barkeep.
“Bossy?” Agracia said, her headache suddenly ebbing.
Bossy plopped down on the edge of her bar and faced Agracia, her eyes bloodshot and glazed as she swayed drunkenly to the beat of the music. Finally she seemed to register Agracia’s face and pursed her lips.
“You traitor—godich Skirt-lover,” she slurred.
Agracia carefully approached her companion, keeping her eye on the Johnnies. They all had one hand on their drink and the other a little too close to their weapon.
“Bossy, please—this is serious,” Agracia whispered.
Bossy obviously didn’t recognize the tone of her voice. She wasn’t talking like Agracia the Scabber but like the stranger Jetta had unearthed while digging through her memories. She was no longer just an urchin, a bottom-feeder, a Scab that had remained on a dead planet to piss away her life in the wastelands. She had once been someone important, someone who had been groomed to be a leader and hero. She couldn’t remember it all, but that much Agracia knew.
Jetta had promised to come back and help her remember in exchange for information about the tattoo on her right arm, and if Bossy hadn’t run away, they’d already be halfway to Ground Zero, otherwise known as the Deadzone. But Victor had interceded, promising her two tickets to the Mars colony and three months’ pay if she could go to the Deadzone and retrieve a launch signature. Most of the computers were destroyed or broken, but a few still existed deep underground, safely hibernating in protected vaults. That they both needed her to go to the Deadzone was a coincidence sufficiently strange that it might not be coincidence at all.
“I have work for us,” Agracia tried again.
“Can’t you see I’m busy?” Bossy asked as the barkeep poured her a steaming glass of a rusty-red liquor. She rolled her designer lollipop to the other side of her mouth and took a giant swig.
Thinking she was too plastered to care, one of the Johnnies tried to slide his hand under Bossy’s crop top. It was a mistake that many men had made in the years that Agracia had known her quick-tempered friend, and oftentimes a deadly one.
Before the other Johnnies could reach for their weapons, Bossy had broken her glass and was holding the jagged pieces up against the offender’s jugular. Out of the corner of her eye, Agracia noticed Shandin watching, his face remaining cold and emotionless.
“Wanna know how I got my nickname?” Bossy asked, her eyes ablaze.
The Johnnie sputtered something unintelligible that widened Bossy’s grin.
“Quit, Bossy. You don’t want his mud blood stainin’ your skins,” Agracia said.
Bossy seemed to consider her advice and lowered her weapon. Most Johnnies had infected blood. HIV was the most common disease, even though a cure had been found in 2032 and was readily available in the Homeworlds. By adapting itself to bypass the weak and meager drugs available on Earth, the virus had stuck around, silently infecting junkies, streetwalkers, and Meatheads, and more often than not the children born to infected mothers.
Bossy leapt off her perch and grabbed Agracia by the collar. She was drunk, but other than her muddled speech and the look in her eyes it was hard to tell. “Why did you leave me for that Skirt? She was a filthy leech—she messed with your head!”
Agracia quietly pulled Bossy to one side, out of Shandin’s direct view. She relaxed into her old slang, calming both herself and her companion. “She showed me things I didn’t remember straight. Right now we’ve got her on our side, alright? I don’t need you buggin’ out on me—things are really juiced right now.”
Bossy gave her the side-eye and sucked noisily on her lollipop. “Why’d you come here?”
“I came after you, dimwit. Can’t have you havin’ all the fun, yeah?”
Bossy let a smile slip but quickly shuffled it behind a scowl. “After you made kissy face with that Skirt I hitchhiked to the Spillway. Only purse available in the fighting rings was a pinch bag—maybe fifty bucks—but it didn’t matter. I just need a fight. I thought it was just gonna be a Meathead or two, but they laid fifty guys on me within the first thirty seconds. I managed to kill about twenty or thirty before they blew in Rage.”
Rage was a bioweapon used in the Last Great War to incite soldiers to battle. It was aggression and violence concentrated into an aerosol compound that was detonated just like a grenade. Fighting rings still used Rage when the fights weren’t exciting enough for the crowds, or when the underdog needed a boost of adrenaline.
“Rest of it was... red. That’s all I remember. I just saw red. Then I wound up here. I was still not right in the head,” she said, jabbing her thumb at the Johnnies, and Agracia could guess where their bruises had come from. “But just one of these—hey you! What the hell is this sycha called?” she said, holding up her mug.
“Mississippi Diesel 999,” the barkeeper replied indifferently over his shoulder.
Agracia caught a whiff, and it made her nose burn and eyes water. Bossy grinned as Agracia took a step back. “Yeah, a few 999s later and I’m shipshape,” she asserted, letting out a giant belch.
Out of habit Agracia reached for the smokes tucked away under her sleeve, but the bartender whipped around and stabbed his chubby finger at her before she could even flip open the carton.
“Can’t you read?” he barked, pointing to the no smoking graffiti.
It made sense. Mississippi Diesel 999 smelled like a crude mixture of gasoline and witch hazel, so a single spark would probably ignite the whole place. Regardless, Agracia found herself resorting to her Scabber attitude. “Don’t get your panties in a bind, I ain’t gonna light up,” she said, poking one in her mouth and chewing on the end.
The barkeep looked to Shandin, grumbled something, and resumed cleaning his spigots with a dirty rag.
“So anyways, a chump named Victor said he bailed you out. He told me you were here and offered me a job.”
Bossy wrinkled her nose. “You didn’t buy that gorsh-shit, did you?”
Agracia shrugged. “It was two tickets to Mars and three months’ pay.”
Bossy’s eyes grew wide, but she didn’t look convinced. “Still smells like gorsh-shit.”
&nb
sp; “Speaking of smells,” Agracia said, eyeing the Johnnies at the bar. They guzzled their brew and slapped each other around, paying no attention. Shandin was standing where he had left them, watching closely. “What is that smell?”
Bossy scoffed. “It’s a meat-packaging plant. Or some crap like that. Dunno, don’t care. They make good booze!”
“Come on,” her tiny companion said, heading back to the bar, “I’m getting sober.”
“Wait,” Agracia said, pulling her back. “Do you want to hear about the job?”
Bossy listened as Agracia explained Victor’s assignment to retrieve the launch signature from a computer database in Ground Zero. Bossy looked bored and uninterested until Agracia noted the coincidence about finding Jetta’s tattoo scrawled near the same site.
“Somethin’s fishy.”
“I know, I feel it too, but we gotta take this.”
“Whaddya mean we gotta?!” Bossy said, crossing her arms.
“There’s something about Victor—he ain’t no ordinary Joe. He’s somethin’ entirely different. And that jackoff there,” Agracia said, nodding towards Shandin, “is of the same breed. Somethin’ ain’t right with them. I want to play this one straight, get our dime and get out. No fussin’. All we ever wanted was off this crap hole, and this might be our ticket.”
“What about the Skirt?” Bossy said.
“Jetta?” Agracia laughed. “Come one, she’s alright. We can settle two scores by taking the job in the Deadzone. ‘Sides, you shouldn’t be jealous, it’s bad for your complexion.”
Bossy popped out her lollipop and stuck it in Agracia’s face. “You play me over a Skirt or any other jerkoff and you better believe I’ll be stuffin’ a 20-20 where the sun don’t shine.”
Agracia smiled. “Aw, I missed you, sweetheart.”
Shandin walked up behind them. “Enough talking—are you ready to get started? We need to equip you for your assignment.”
Agracia saw Bossy cuing up to say something inflammatory, so she wrapped her arms around her friend and pulled her away from Shandin. “We was getting tired of waiting.”
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