“Haseph should be waiting for us in the town square,” she said, getting off the bike. “Follow me.”
I did.
I noticed that unlike Po, my footsteps were loud—they clapped against the stone tiled road, and the sound bounced against the old walls. I tried to tread more softly, but my boots still clacked. I could feel my gait getting awkward. Po was wearing the same boots, but her strides were confident, her swaying hips discernible even beneath her billowy cloak. Her steps oozed with an almost sexual energy, and yet they were, incredulously, soundless. I had no idea how she was doing it.
After walking down two blocks, we arrived at a wide open courtyard I assumed was the town square. The moonlight seemed brighter here. Wind carried swirls of dust across the stone floor.
As we walked to the centre of the square, a piece of black melted out of the darkness opposite us, and stepped into the light. It was a bent man in a cloak. He met us in the square, and took off his hood.
I recognized the greying hair and eye scar of R’miah K’ashtaphar Haseph, our informant.
“I wish you peace,” I greeted, in traditional K’har fashion.
“My darling, I may be K’har in appearance and name, but trust me, I am Auroran through and through,” Haseph chuckled, without a trace of the K’har accent.
“Haseph is K’har but he was born in Aurora,” Po explained. “He worked with S.I. for thirty years, and then Beta for five before accepting to go undercover in the K’har crime world.”
“What can I say?” he said, switching to a flawless K’har accent, “Me, I wanted some morrr ex-zitement.”
I smiled.
He squinted up at me. “You’re new aren’t you? Anybody tell you that you look a bleakuva lot like Agent Watters? You know her? Fey Watters? Dead ringer. Almost creepy.”
I squirmed.
“What have you got for me Haseph?” Po interrupted.
Haseph eyed me for a moment longer, before turning to Po. “First, what have you got for me?”
Po sighed, and reached beneath her cloak. She handed him what I recognized to be a kho’late candy bar.
Seriously? I thought. That’s the trade?
“Ah yes,” Haseph sighed, sniffing the bar and then stuffing it away under his robe. “These things cost a fortune here in K’har. You’d think they’d be cheaper where the beans are actually grown. Damn trade barriers.”
“Okay now spill it,” Po said.
Haseph reached back under his robe. “I’ve got two great pieces of info for you girls today. Great pieces of info. You’re going to love me tonight.” He produced a small pouch. Po received the pouch, peeked into it, and looked up, frowning.
“Seriously, Haseph?” she said. “Scraps of paper?”
“They’re not just any scraps of paper—“
“Like half of these are charred,” Po complained. “Are you muckin’ with me?”
“Language. Bright Light, you young agents—no manners,” he said. “They’re not just any scraps. Past few years, I’ve been working as a habannah for hire.”
“A habannah?” I looked at Po.
“House servant,” Po translated.
“Yeah, but not just any kind of habannah. A habannah for criminals.”
“A habannah for criminals?” Po sounded incredulous. “Seriously?”
“Aren’t you judgemental. Criminals care about hygiene too you know? But obviously, they don’t just hire anybody to clean their homes. They only hire habannah they can trust; habannah that come highly recommended. And I’ve been working hard building up a reputation in the underground.”
“Okay, if you say so. Get to the point,” Po said.
“Well, you have no idea the kind of stuff habannah can learn. Or, the kind of people they can meet. Recently, I was hired by this real piece of work called—“
“Don’t care,” Po jumped in.
Haseph talked faster: “So a couple of days ago, I walk into work, and you’ll never guess who’s on the terrace, sipping herb with my employer.”
“The Puppeteer?” I guessed.
“Ten points to the newbie,” Haseph said.
My head spun. This man had been in the same room with the Puppeteer. I felt my fists tighten.
“He stayed over for a few days. I used my sound amplifier, tried as often as I could to listen into his conversations with my employer,” Haseph said. “But they never talked business. At least, I don’t think so. If they were, then that was one elaborate code. They did mention hospitals a lot though. I don’t know why. Finally, on his last day with us, the Puppeteer asked me to clean out his room. His waste basket was full of shredded paper. As you can see, some of it was burned. Needless to say, that paper never saw the bottom of a dustbin.”
Haseph whistled, and pointed at the pouch in Po’s hands.
“Long journey for some shredded paper,” Po sighed.
“A ‘thank you’ would be nice,” Haseph snapped.
“Sorry. Thanks.”
“I slave away in criminal houses all day and all I get is sarcasm?” Haseph grumbled. “I ought to take my second tasty morsel of info with me home.”
Po smiled. “Don’t be like that Haseph.”
“I should,” he said, folding his arms. “Especially because this second one is such a doozy of a morsel.”
“Come on, Haseph,” Po sighed, with pleading eyes. “You know how hard it is to sneak a kho’late candy bar past K’har customs?”
Never thought I’d see Po plead like that.
Haseph glared for a moment, and then smirked. “How can I resist those eyes, uh?” He leaned in. “I overheard my employer call the Puppeteer by his name. His real name.”
“What?” Po looked stunned. There was excitement bubbling down in my gut.
Haseph was grinning hard. “Yeah, I couldn’t believe it either. And I don’t think it was an alias either. You could tell from the way they were talking—I think they were old time buddies, my employer and the Puppeteer.”
“Well,” I said, my voice wobbly, “what are you waiting for? Tell us.”
“Shush!” Po told us, and we froze. I look at her. She had cocked her head, listening for something.
There was a stretch of utter silence. I could feel my heart beginning to pound.
“What?” I finally whispered.
“Do you hear that?” she said. “I think…I think someone’s coming.”
I listened again, my heart pounding harder. I heard nothing. At first. Then, I picked up the faint roar in the distance. A guttering sound, mixed with a contained variant of thunder. The sound of approaching bikes. Motorized bikes.
“S’renki,” Po breathed.
The word wrenched my stomach.
“Spread out! Hide!” Po ordered, and we scattered.
I dove behind a broken wall, and stayed on the ground. I pressed hard against the weathered clay, trying to fit beneath the meagre shadow of the half-wall.
The rumbling grew louder, till I could feel it reverberating through the earth. Suddenly, the guttering sound exploded into the square, making my bones rumble.
They were here.
The lights from their bikes cut through the night, sweeping in wide arcs over the air above me. The engines stopped, and—
Silence.
I could hear myself breathing. It sounded loud. I tried to breathe quieter.
The square was completely silent. I did not hear a single footstep, or a spoken word. Just silence. Long, uncomfortable, silence.
Droplets of sweat travelled down my face, and along my back. An icy drop slid down my spine, and I shivered. My legs were cramping.
A lean, spindly shadow passed over me suddenly. I froze. The shadow lingered for a few moments, and then, glided on.
They were searching for us.
I closed my eyes, and waited, my every breath shuddering.
More silence.
I heard a cry, and the sound of a breaking bone. My stomach roiled as the yelling continued. It was a man’s
voice. Haseph’s voice.
Now, the S’renki were talking, in their throaty, crackling language. There were a lot of voices, I couldn’t make a proper estimation? Seven? Eight? Fifteen?
Haseph was speaking now, in K’har. He sounded angry, but also strained from the pain. I heard a loud smack, and Haseph went quiet. The S’renki kept talking. One of them was yelling. He sounded furious. Another smack.
I wanted to do something.
A hand grabbed my shoulder and I spun around with a readied fist. It was Po.
“We need to get out of here,” she breathed into my face.
“We need to help him,” I whispered back.
“He’ll be fine,” Po insisted. “They think he’s a local, out past curfew. They’ll just haul his rump back to a nearby town. Us though, they won’t be so kind towards.”
I got up and followed Po through the ruins. At one point, I kicked my boots aside and proceeded barefooted. Now, my steps were as silent as hers. We took a roundabout route, keeping away from the light, slinking from pocket of darkness to pocket of darkness.
“Finally,” Po muttered, when we spotted our hover bike. It was in the shade across the moonlit street. We had no choice but to step into the light.
“Come on,” Po said, dashing out of the darkness. I ran after her.
“Ey! Heim! Heim!” a voice screamed.
We didn’t bother to look back. Po jumped onto the hover bike, and tried to start it. The rubriq at the base of the bike lit up briefly, and then died. Po tried again. The rubriq lit…and died.
“Are you mucking kidding me?” Po asked the bike, smacking its dashboard.
I turned to see how close the S’renki were. They were running from the square, their body wrappings twirling behind them. I counted ten of them. Each of them was wielding some kind of staff. I wondered what the staffs were till one of the S’renki stretched forth his and a bolt of crimson light shot out towards me, missing the side of my face by units.
“Muck!” I cried. “They’re shooting at us!”
“Relax, I’ll get this thing started. Come on,” she muttered, trying the ‘start’ button on the bike a few more times. Finally, she ripped through the plate on the neck of the bike, and pulled out some wires.
“Hot wiring. Good idea,” I said.
“No, that won’t work. I’m trying something a little more out-of-the-box,” she said, biting the rubber off their bundled metal strands. She wrapped the strands around her fingers, and formed a fist. Rubriq formed in her palms and started to glow.
Now, I was incredulous. “You’re trying to jump start it with your own mana?”
“You got any better ideas?”
A few more bolts of red came flashing past me. I looked up, and I don’t know why, but my eyes did not rest on our K’har pursuers. Instead, they travelled across the street, to the building Po and I had dashed across the street from; they travelled higher, to the broken upper room, where a woman was standing in the window.
A woman with green skin.
“Evon,” I whispered.
Evon stretched out her hand, the wind tugging at her black-as-night hair. “Arra, save me,” she mouthed.
At the same time, I heard our hover bike finally hum to life. Po squealed at her success. “Come on,” she said behind me. “Get on!”
But I couldn’t move. My eyes were frozen on my Evon, reaching at me from the window, eyes sad. “Don’t let me die again,” she whispered.
I wouldn’t.
I timed the rapid bolt-fire, and scurried across the street with my head bowed.
“Everglade,” Po roared after me. “Everglade, what the muck!”
One bolt of fire exploded the tiles right beneath my heel, and the force sent me flying through the door frame of the building. I crashed into the wall, but regained my footing in fractions. There was a deteriorating staircase overhead. I went around, and started to ascend the steps. Some of the clay gave way, and I almost tumbled back down, but I clawed at the walls, forcing myself back to my feet.
“Evon!” I cried, when I’d reached the upper floor. “Evon, where are—“
I stopped at the door to the upper room. Instead of a lithe green woman, there was a small dirty child, looking up at me from the floor with terrified eyes. The girl stammered something in K’har, and started to cry.
I rushed to her side, and held her. “It’s okay,” I whispered, stroking her hair. “It’s okay. I’ve got you. No one’s going to hurt you.”
There was yelling downstairs. The S’renki were here.
“Can you do something for me?” I said to the child, trying to sound as reassuring as I could. “Get onto my back. Can you do that?”
The child looked confused. I gestured to my back, and she nodded. I let her climb on, and felt her grip around my neck tighten.
“Good,” I said. “Hold on.”
I bolted out of the room. Four S’renki officers were half-way up the stairs.
“Ey!” the first one cried, right before I lifted my foot and smashed it into his chest dead centre.
The officer flew back, crashing into his colleagues, and creating a clear path right down to the bottom. One S’renki was waiting for me there. He swung his staff at my head, and I swayed out of his reach. I connected two punches to his chest, and my knee to his groin. I shoved him to the ground.
The girl on my back whimpered.
“Don’t worry,” I told her, as I ran out of the building and into the light. “My partner should be right…”
I stopped. Po and the bike were gone.
“Bleeding bleak,” I swore.
“U’re! Heim! Heim a’ha chur,” more voices yelled at me from down the street. More S’renki. They pointed their staffs, and red blasts streaked past me.
I turned around, and ran, screaming over my shoulder, “Come on, I’m carrying a kid for muck’s sake.”
I turned a corner, and headed into another building. This building seemed to link up with several others in a row, so I ran from home to home, trying to make out obstacles in the dark. The little girl was crying again.
“It’ll be alright,” I panted. “Don’t worry. Just hold on.”
There was a cacophony of rumbles, and bright beams arced across the buildings outside; the lights cast even darker shadows, turning everything around me into an amalgam of silhouettes.
Three S’renki were back on their bikes, riding beside the row of houses I was dashing through. Crimson light flashed at the corner of my eye, and the walls to my left started to explode.
“These guys are muckin’ insane,” I gasped, as I run through the symphony of blasts and the curtains of smoke. “Keepers of peace my rump.”
There was a light behind me, coupled with a stuttering growl. One of the bikes was in the building. I swore, and tried to run faster. But I could suddenly see a dead end coming up. I was in the last house on the street.
Just as I reached the last wall, I noticed another staircase. I climbed up, hoping that the upper rooms on the street were linked too. But when I reached the top of the stairs, there was only an open window. I couldn’t jump to the ground with a little girl on my back.
I was trapped.
“Muck,” I said under my breath, running my fingers through my sweaty hair. “Muck!”
The S’renki were coming up the stairs. They were yelling things. Angry things. Things I didn’t want translated.
Just then, I heard a gentle hum and headlights flooded the room through the window. I shielded my eyes, and tried to make out the figure behind the lights. It was a woman on a bike. A hover bike.
“Get your rump on this bike,” Po yelled at me. “Now!”
I ran for the window as the S’renki burst into the room. They screamed what I assumed were obscenities.
“Shooting at a kid, guys?” I said to the officers, whilst I climbed through the window. “Real nice.” Then, I leapt onto the hover bike and threw them an obscene gesture.
Red blasts streaked over our heads
, as Po lowered the bike back to the ground, and sent us rocketing down the street.
The little girl was crying into my shoulder.
“Shhh,” I cooed. “Told you we’d be fine. Everything’s fine.”
“Is it?” Po said over her shoulder, and the ice in her tone gave me chills. But I didn’t let it worry me too much.
I had saved a little girl. And that was all that mattered right now.
CHAPTER 36
“Let me make sure I understand this.”
I sighed, and rubbed my temples. I was in the Director’s office, and she was on the opposite side of the table, staring somewhat incredulously at me. Her cup of herb was half-way to her lips, where it had stopped decidedly after I’d given her my report on the K’har assignment.
“You abandoned your partner in the middle of a retreat, to kidnap a nomad girl?” the Director asked, her every word heavy with disbelief.
“I didn’t kidnap her. I saved her,” I corrected. “Those S’renki hurt Haseph. They could have hurt her too.”
“You didn’t wonder why a little girl would be all alone in an abandoned town?” the Director asked.
I pursed my lips, and shrugged. “I wasn’t doing a lot of thinking. I was trying to save a little girl.”
“She was a nomad, Everglade,” the Director said, narrowing her eyes. “K’har nomads sleep wherever they find themselves. Which means she had likely come to that town with her parents.”
“Her parents weren’t there,” I said.
“The curfew laws don’t apply to nomads. Her parents could have been on their way back from a neighbouring town.”
“But you don’t know that,” I argued. “She looked like she’d been abandoned there. She was dirty, and she looked hungry. She trusted me so easily; children who expect their parents to return don’t jump into the arms of strangers.”
“Is that right?” the Director said. “You’re an expert in child psyche now?”
“No, I’m a detective,” I said, firmly. “This job isn’t going to change the kind of person I am. That girl may not have been part of the assignment, but I wasn’t going to leave her there to take her chances with the S’renki.”
“The S’renki are well aware of their responsibilities as keepers of peace, Miss Everglade,” the Director said. She sounded annoyed. “They would not have harmed the girl.”
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