There was a long pause.
Then, I cracked up. “Thank you Dr. Deep,” I said, laughing hysterically.
“Oh admit it,” she said, grinning. “I nailed that line.”
“Yeah, you did,” I laughed, and my laughter died almost immediately. “Or rather, I did. You’re not real, and this is all in my head. Sitting here, conversing and laughing with myself like this? It’s crazy.”
I looked up at her. There was pity in her eyes.
“Oh Light,” I whispered. “I think I’m losing my mind.”
“Maybe,” she said, “But at least, you’re regaining me.”
She took my hand, and this time, I thought I felt a whisper of warmth on my skin.
Just as suddenly as my best friend had appeared, she was gone.
I was alone again.
CHAPTER 27
The next morning, I woke up to an empty apartment. Kattie had left me breakfast on the kitchen island. I saw it, and finally felt a twinge of shame. I decided I was going to make her dinner that night.
“The best damn dinner she’s ever had,” I muttered to myself, “No more moping around.”
As I dumped the dirty dishes in the washer, I asked DEB to turn the screen on. The news was on. A young man’s body had been found last night in the District 3 Park. Wallet, jewellery, cell-comm; nothing had been taken from him. Nothing, but his face.
I asked DEB to turn off the screen.
I went to my room to lie down. My heart was pounding. My hands were trembling. It was infuriating, knowing that there was nothing I could do about what I’d just heard on the news.
Maybe Evon was right: I couldn’t control what was happening out there. But maybe I could control how I reacted to it.
So I decided to occupy myself. I cleaned up the apartment. Then, I did mine and Kattie’s laundry. Then, I did some crunches, and push-ups. By noon, my home was sparkling clean, my wardrobe was citrus fresh, and my belly muscles were toned. But I could not forget the news piece from the morning.
The face-ripping bastard was still out there.
Suddenly, I realized that I may have loved Evon, but her guru proverb was pitch-muck. I wanted to do more than just react. I wanted to do something. I wanted to control. But I couldn’t do anything.
It was driving me insane.
Then, I remembered Dr. Starr in the hospital, and what she’d said to me.
‘Tie something red to your balcony when you change your mind. We’ll be in touch,’ she had said.
No, I thought. I’ve sunk low enough. I can’t believe I even considered that. What is wrong with me?
But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to try it. If for nothing at all, to see if Thena Starr would show her pale, Lillith rump around my apartment. I owed her for the desert incident; a solid right hook, for instance, would be a nice start.
Before I could stop myself, I grabbed an old scarlet scarf from my wardrobe, and rushed to my balcony. I tied the scarf to a metal railing, and stood back, panting. The scarf fluttered in the wind.
I watched for a moment. Then suddenly, I felt stupid. I yanked the scarf off the railing, and went back inside. I packed away the scarf, and got dressed. If I was going to make dinner later that night, I had to go to the shops.
The best fruit, grain, and vegetable shops were concentrated in District 5, Block B: the market district. Unfortunately, traffic there was a nightmare, if you wanted to drive there yourself. Public transporters, on the other hand, had their own exclusive lanes in and out of the place. So, I headed out to the nearest public stop.
At the market district, I bought an assortment of grains, solana fruit, allium bulbs, blue pipers, and some mixed spices. Kattie preferred her muso rennin with plenty of curd. I also got some fruit, in case we got in the mood for salad.
I carried my heavy bags to a public transport stop, and sat on a bench. There was only one other person with me: a little girl. This was unusual. This stop was usually crowded with people looking to get home.
The girl was wearing a pinstriped suit, and she was holding umbrella, though it didn’t look like rain. I said hello.
She turned to look at me, with an expression utterly devoid of emotion—a dead-on Kattie—and said hello back.
I tried not to stare, but I didn’t do a very good job. The girl was mixed-race; something I should not have been able to detect upon sight. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, when two people of different races had a child together, the child physically resembled only one of its progenitors. This girl on the other hand, had the blond hair of a Ruby, the pale skin of a Lillith, and the eyes of both. ‘Overts’, we called them.
She stared back at me, her left eye crimson, her right eye gold.
“I like your outfit,” I said. “Are you going for a party?”
“No,” she said.
“Oh.” I bit my lower lip. “You attend a private learning centre then?”
She didn’t answer. She just kept staring me. Then, she looked away, and stared ahead.
Charming kid.
“We saw the signal,” she said, evenly. “As per your wishes, you’ve been drafted.”
I blinked. “I’ve been what now?”
A taxi screeched to a halt in front of us. The back seat door opened up, and the girl got in.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked.
“I don’t think I should be getting into a vehicle with a stranger,” I mumbled.
The girl stared at me, and waited. Now, I felt stupid for fearing a ride with a pre-pubescent kid. So, against every shred of common sense in my head, I stood up with my bags, and got into the taxi.
The door slammed shut, and the vehicle lurched forward.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“We have a mutual friend. You know her as Dr. Thena Starr.”
My mind raced. How was this girl related to Starr?
“’Friend’ is a little liberal,” I said. “She did threaten to turn my neck into a fountain with a shard of tile after all.”
“Only to get your attention, no doubt,” the girl said. “If Po wanted to kill you, I assure you she would not need a weapon.”
Po?
“That’s comforting.”
“I see you hide your true nature,” she said. “What is that: concealer?”
I touched my face.
“That won’t be necessary anymore,” she continued. “Not when you’re working for us.”
“Could you be any more cryptic?”
“If you want to know more, you’re going to have to earn it.”
Just then, the taxi descended downhill into a tunnel. The light here was pale sepia, and shadows flashed over us intermittently.
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going at least?” I asked.
“Just to see some friends. They are going to help convince your would-be teammates that you’re right for the job. These friends though, they are not a friendly bunch. You are going to need to be assertive with them; push yourself to the limit.”
“I really want to tell you that I understand what you just said, but…”
“Here. You will need this.” She pressed something hard and cold into my hand. I looked down. It was a blaster. “Try not to die.”
I looked up, and I was alone in the backseat.
I shifted forward to talk with the taxi driver. “Sir, could you turn around and head for…” I stared at the empty driver seat, and the steering wheel that was steering itself.
My stomach churned. “Come on.”
Up ahead, a patch in the road suddenly begun to ripple and shimmer. When the taxi reached the patch, it did not drive over it; it sunk.
CHAPTER 28
As the taxi plummeted through darkness, my body hit the ceiling of the vehicle. I didn’t scream. I couldn’t breathe. I could only fight for control over my bladder, as gravity did its work. I was falling. And then, I was not. The taxi crashed onto something solid, and I slamme
d into the seats.
Groaning, I opened a door and crawled out. Broken glass crunched painfully beneath my palms and knees. My temple hurt. I touched it, and brought my hand up to my eyes; there was blood.
“Are you insane?” I yelled furiously, at whoever was listening.
I looked around. I had no idea where I was, but it was vast, cold, and made up entirely of concrete. There were several mouldy pillars. The lights were weak, and flickering. Of course.
I returned to the taxi, and retrieved the blaster. I armed it, and sighed gratefully when it indicated a full charge.
There was soft whirring all of a sudden, coming from all sides. I looked up. There was an armed droid coming my way. And another one. And another one. I whirled around, heart pounding. I counted at least thirty.
“Arra Everglade, you are guilty of committing crimes against the state and people of Aurora,” a voice echoed above me.
I was incredulous. “What?”
“Your sentence is death.”
The droids lifted their weapons.
I swore.
The sound of multiple blasters exploded within the underground compound, just as I dove back into the taxi. The vehicle rocked violently, as it endured rapid mana fire. I smashed the taxi’s privacy partition, and scrambled into the front seat. As I moved, one blast singed my shoulder, and another singed my cheek. I yelped, but I did not stop. I found the driver’s key card already in the ignition slot, so I started the vehicle.
It shuddered to life.
I stomped on the accelerator. The taxi shot forward, smashing through a couple of advancing droids. I kept my head down as I steered, squealing around the pillars, and through the rain of blasts.
“The suspect is fleeing,” the voice echoed.
“Is that what you think?” I growled. And when I was sufficiently distanced from the droids, I brought the taxi to a screeching one-eighty degrees stop. I revved the engine, and tore across the compound back to them. I roared as I flattened droid, after droid, after droid.
But now, the taxi was smoking. One droid landed on the roof of the taxi. Then, another jumped onto the bonnet. Soon, the taxi was laden with automatons.
I couldn’t see where I was going. One droid on my bonnet pointed its blaster at my head. I angled my head just in time (I could hear my headrest crackling), and shot right through the droid’s visor.
That was when I realized the taxi was on fire.
I shoved open my door, and leapt out. I landed hard on the concrete. But in one swift motion, I rolled back up to my knees, took aim at what was now the taxi’s sufficiently compromised mana tank, and fired.
Explosion.
Metal and debris flew my way, but I ducked behind a pillar. From there I picked the remaining droids off one by one with my blaster.
I could hear screaming whilst I fired. I didn’t realize till later that the screaming was mine.
When I ran out of juice, there were five droids left. I didn’t think. I didn’t need to. Something else was controlling me, fuelling me.
I felt fast. Invincible. The droids could barely catch up with me as I flitted from pillar to pillar, and then up to them. I felt no pain, as my fist smashed through the metal head of the first droid, and my foot found the chest of the second droid. I snatched the weapon out of the third droid’s grasp, ripping its arm off in the process. Then, I beat it to the ground with its own arm. I swung around, and batted the fourth droid so hard that its head flew clean off its body. The fifth droid aimed to shoot, but Great Light, why were its movements so slow? I grabbed the outstretched arm, and yanked the droid closer, shoving the barrel of my newly acquired blaster into its face. Then, I squeezed the trigger.
The last droid crumpled to the floor. I looked around at the destruction, panting.
I’d done it. I was alive. Against mucking preposterous odds, I was alive.
I wanted to collapse to the ground, and sleep for a hundred years. But then, I heard the sound of grating concrete, and looked up. A section in the ceiling was sliding open. I squinted.
Something was falling.
I dove out of the way, fractions before the ground I’d been standing upon erupted into a cloud of dust and concrete fragments. Coughing, I staggered to my feet and looked up.
A powerful light poured out of the dust cloud. There was a loud hiss, then a sigh, as an enormous metal form emerged from the dust, blasters gleaming in the weak light.
I cried up at the ceiling, “Oh, come on!”
The bot’s blasters clicked; my cue to move. The blasts were thunderous, blowing pillars to smithereens. As I ran, it briefly occurred to me that this bunker—or whatever it was—could very well collapse upon itself. But the thought didn’t last long. I was too disapproving, too scared out of my mind, of getting turned into an ash pile.
Then, suddenly, the rush of resolve returned. Before I knew it, I was running towards the bot.
It shot at me. Bots had advanced targeting software, so it should have hit me.
It didn’t.
I darted left and right as I ran. I jumped, twirling as one blast streaked beneath me. I landed, and kept running. The bot fired again. I slid on my knees, leaning back as another blast missed my chin by units. I hopped back to my feet, and lunged at the bot. It swung an arm, and sent me flying into the air.
I slammed against the ceiling, and fell to the ground.
I cried out, because the pain was blinding. Not the pain of the fall. My face, my neck, my shoulder, my chest—they were burning. And I could feel the burn travelling down my arms.
I looked down at myself.
My rubriq. It was spreading past my elbows, pushing up to my wrists. It was on fire; blue fire.
Bloody muck, it burned.
The bot was aiming at me again. But I was too busy to care, too busy screaming.
The lights began to flicker, like they had at the desert facility with King, like they had at the hospital.
The bot fired. Mana seared through my chest.
Everything went black.
CHAPTER 29
I could hear them. There were three voices. No, four.
I opened my eyes. I was staring up at a spinning ceiling fan. I didn’t know they still made them.
I sat up, slowly. My body punished my movements with pain. A lot of pain.
I was in a tiny, white room with plain tiled walls. There was a mirror on the opposite wall. I could see that my chest had been bandaged. My rubriq had retracted back: my arms were bare again. But half my face, and my shoulder were still marked with the curious symbols.
I stood up, and shuffled to the mirror. I ripped off the bandages, and examined my chest. There was a rusty smudge above my right breast: dried blood. Otherwise, there was no scar. Whoever had tended to me was a regeneration healer. And they were good.
I noticed the open door on my left. The voices were coming from down the corridor. I threw on a shirt that seemed to have been laid out on a table for me, and exited the room. I followed the voices into a spacious living room. All the furniture was sleek, posh. There were four people at a conference table.
I noticed the little girl with the dead eyes first. She was sipping on an herb cup at the head of the table. Then, I noticed Thena Starr. She looked so different here. She wore no glasses, and her hair was braided into a long, tight ponytail. There were two others I did not know at the table.
The first was a Sprite. The Sprites were from the Floris world, like Evon. Unlike the Phyllians and the Bark however, they were not plant life. They all had bone white skin, and rounded ears. Eye colour was always some variant of pink or purple, hair was always shocking white, and they were almost never taller than four lengths. The sprite at the table had sharp purple eyes, and he had no wings, so I knew he was male. Unsurprisingly, there were a few oddities about this particular sprite. For one, he was the tallest sprite I’d ever seen—at least five lengths. And he was dressed like K’har military: all wrapped up in black strips of cloth, the only visible f
eatures being his hair, nose, and eyes. He was even wearing a black K’har military cloak.
Either this guy was mixed race like the girl, or I was looking at a very peculiar case of identity crisis.
The second stranger was Hiti. Or at least, I thought he was. He was brown, but he wasn’t round or pudgy. He was thick, towering, and heavily built. He was wearing headphones, and I could hear the faint roar of rhymestone emanating from them. So he liked loud music. That didn’t tell me much.
The four of them were talking about something. Someone mentioned something about a puppet. Then the girl noticed me, and everyone stopped to look at me.
“Miss Everglade,” the girl said. “You’re awake.”
“Where am I?” I rasped weakly.
“Temporary assembly point,” she answered. “Room 302, Cerulean Hotel, District 3.”
“District 3?” I walked up to one of the ceiling high windows. Outside, there were several gorgeous commercial, as well as luxury establishments. I had never seen the Pillar this close up from inside a building. A person had to have money to spend a night in this district. A lot of money.
I stared out at the amazing view for a moment. “Who are you people?” I finally managed to whisper.
“We are a covert team of highly trained operatives adept at one or more of the following skills,” the girl rattled breathlessly: “Infiltration, assassination, weapons combat, hand-to-hand combat, cyber offensives, regeneration healing.”
“You’re Senior Intelligence?”
“The S.I. has rules and protocol—limits,” she corrected. “We are the Beta Division.”
“Never heard of you.”
“I would hope not,” the girl said. “Even our governments would deny any knowledge of us. Technically, we do not exist. Every once in a while, there are threats to inter-dimensional security that demand a more…unrestrained approach.”
I blinked. “Oh.”
“The team will introduce themselves.” The girl nodded at Starr.
Starr’s eyes were cold when she turned to me. “Li-Ann Po.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
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