Sages of the Underpass

by Aaron Michael Ritchey

  Niko didn’t mind. He liked the small space. All of his things had their place, his bed was made, and he slumped down onto it. No brushing his teeth. No washing his face. He was far too tired for that. He wished he had implants, or at least a pair of eGlasses, to check his stats. That was unlikely ever to happen. He’d have to see Dr. Wochick and hope the apothecary didn’t berate him too much. Or get too nosy. Neither the doctor nor Niko’s parents knew the damage he’d done to himself five years ago.

  Niko meant to keep it that way.

  He wasn’t going to think about it.

  He gave his PlayStation a quick glance. He considered playing Twelve Legends, but he could do that in the morning.

  Lying on his back, he grinned up at the familiar watermarks in the ceiling above him. Had the day really happened? Was he really going to start down the path of the Artist again?

  He was.

  That meant returning to the Artist Discipline.

  Every muscle ached. He ignored his exhaustion and got up.

  He opened his closet and reached beyond his shoes to a cardboard box. He drew it out. On top were his dusty Battle Artist robes. Underneath, his meditation mat.

  He grabbed it and laid the carpet out on the hardwood floor in front of his door, between his bed and his bookcase.

  Before he sat, he drew a hand over the woven fibers of a man with two faces, the Gemini sign. Taylor had given him the carpet. She would be so happy for him, so proud, so encouraging. If only she were still around.

  He sat down, legs crossed, hands in position. He concentrated on his breath, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth. He counted to twelve, one breath for each of the Battle Artist signs. And then he started again at one. He went through, saying a sign, then counting one to twelve, over and over. When he was relaxed, he cycled his prana for the first time in a long time. At work, he used a bit of prana to fix things or to adjust daemons, but not often. Mostly, his core sat dormant.

  His energy was sluggish and sore. He was lucky that the fight at MudCon hadn’t damaged his already fractured core.

  The cycling was as agonizing as it was wonderous.

  And that was the Battle Arts.

  Before he went to bed, he wondered what Dr. Wochick would think of his return to the Arts. It wouldn’t be good. Dealing with the apothecary was brutal.

  The Apothecary

  DOCTOR HUGO WOCHICK’S business hadn’t changed a bit in five years. It was in the same bad part of East Apricot between an adult bookstore and a liquor store on the El Camino Real. Another skyrise condo complex overlooking 101 sprouted up behind them. It might have been an exact copy of Niko’s home strip mall, except his little corner of Apricot was far less sleazy.

  Niko locked his bike up in the liquor store’s bike rack, where another bike and trailer, with crap piled high, already rested. Some homeless guy’s ride, probably, given the state of the cardboard boxes bungee-corded to the racks. The trailer was equally loaded.

  He took a minute to double-check his lock. The last thing Niko needed was to lose his bike. He would need it in a couple days to get to the wharf in Bay City. That was where the critique group met, in some kind of seafood market. It’d be cold, but after hours, it should be relatively deserted. He’d get good views of Prison Island and Red Gate at least.

  The No-Bull Apothecary had two rooms. Posters of faded greats hung on the walls of the reception room. Franklin Wash, fists raised, smirked. Olivia Cowler, from the late 1970s, with an ERA tank top and a storm of energy around her, stood with her arms high, as iconic now as it had been at the time. The most current fighter was Criss Blackstar from the 1990s. He’d committed suicide. To think, he won the LBA Unum at the Grand Tournament three years in a row and helped give his company, Vannix House, the Triple Crown two out of the three years. It must not have been enough. He’d left behind a wife and three kids. They popped up in the news now and again. One of the kids was fighting, going by Kid Blackstar. His father’s agency repped him, and he fought for Vannix House. Teddy said he wasn’t going very far. Kid Blackstar couldn’t take a punch.

  The doctor’s office smelled of stale cigarettes. The gold wallpaper had faded away into nicotine yellow.

  Magazines from the ’90s, proclaiming grunge metal would never die, lay on the tables in front of a pastel-blue couch.

  Dr. Wochick opened the door to his exam room and leaned against the doorjamb. “Do my eyes deceive me? Or do I have eye cancer? Nikodemus Kowalczyk. Today was going to suck, it’s Monday, sure, but at least there’s a surprise tucked away in all the suckage.”

  The doctor was lean, not from being fit, but from probably not eating very much ever. His skin was wrinkled, and his hair was giving up the fight, showing a white scalp. He fished into the pocket of his shirt to retrieve a pack of LeMacs. He got a lighter out of his faded jeans and lit up. “I’m going to smoke. You don’t like it, get the hell out.” He regarded Niko with eyes a watery blue, like his jeans.

  “Sure.” Niko tried not to let the grimace show on his face. He’d known he’d get smoke when he stepped in the door. No, the grimace was for Wochick in general. Niko would’ve gone somewhere else if he’d been able to afford it. The doctor was another Pole and gave Niko the Polish deal.

  Wochick grimaced right back. “What do you want? You’re not on my schedule. I don’t like walk-ins.”

  Ironic, since there was a sign on the door that said walk-ins were welcome.

  “Yeah, sorry. I left some messages. It wasn’t an emergency, so I didn’t page you.”

  Wochick coughed, a deep, wet sound. “Good thing. I don’t like weekend calls anyway. It seems you’re thinking about getting back into the game. I wouldn’t recommend it. You have a job. Keep it that way. You were never going to go very far anyway.”

  That stung.

  Wochick laughed because he knew the barb had struck and struck deep. “Come on inside. I can squeeze you in. My first patient is always late. Always. Goddamn business.” He stepped to the side to let Niko pass into the exam room—a sink, the door to the bathroom, a table, and a desk with a computer he’d gotten second-hand from the Fix-It Shoppe—old-ass PC, a big hunk of a monitor, and an ancient tractor-feed dot matrix printer.

  “Sit on the table. You know the drill.” The doctor clamped the cigarette in his lips, squinted against the smoke, and tried not to cough.

  Niko took off his shirt and got on the exam table, the paper crinkling under him.

  Wochick didn’t wash his hands. He got down to it, reaching for a corded prana scanner connected to the PC.

  Niko couldn’t help but notice the cord.

  Wochick chuckled around his cigarette. “That’s the least of my worries. Goddamn eGlasses are getting cheaper, as are the implants. What’s that I hear? Oh, yes, the end of my crappy little apothecary. And technology marches on over all our corpses.”

  The doctor, thankfully, put his cigarette on the lip of an overflowing ashtray. He came forward, gathering a little slack for his scanner, and moved it over Niko’s neck, chest, and the embarrassing pudge of his belly.

  “You’re out of shape, physically I mean. If you’re going to fight, you’ll need to lose weight, a lot of it. Your generation is plagued by the creature comforts our miserable species has fought to attain—too much junk food and too many video games.”

  Niko wasn’t going to mention the dangers of smoking. There was no point. He just needed to know the shape of his prana. He couldn’t do that on his own. Yet.

  Wochick closed his eyes. He wasn’t a true Luna, but he didn’t need to be. As an Erosion, the doctor was harmonic enough with Luna that he could do some energy work, for exams and some corrections.

  Niko felt the doctor’s energy slap his core. The old Arena Assistant at MudCon had been gentler, and that was before a match.

  While Wochick examined him, Niko remembered the Coffey three-on-one he’d seen with Teddy Saturday night. The three had put on a good show, but Coffey had won the Zenith Spin. The t
wo B-listers he’d fought with hadn’t done much. Coffey had gone up against a Woda, a Sky, and a Forge. There had been plenty of fireworks, some good ice Studies, and some cool weapons. The Forge had fashioned a weighted sickle-chain, otherwise known as a kusarigama, with his prana. He’d nearly clobbered Coffey, though the pro Battle Artist had been too fast to be in any danger of losing. Coffey had taken out the Woda first, then the Sky, and then, in a flourish of punches, had taken down the Forge.

  The apothecary’s ancient printer clattered to life, spitting out a few pages, which tumbled down in front of the desk.

  Wochick turned, set his scanner in the cradle, and lifted the pages. “Okay, so your core is basically worthless. We both know you’re not a Mars Belt, but you’re barely a Mercury Belt at this point. How often are you cycling?”

  “Every four hours,” Niko said. “But it’s only been a couple of days, and only for about five minutes each time.”

  “Yeah, that shows. Bad prana, worse sharira, and you’re pudgy, a snickerdoodle away from fat. Why come in and bother me?” Wochick retrieved his cigarette.

  Wochick was the worst. Niko swore that if he ever did make it big, he’d come in and buy out the doctor and close his crappy little apothecary. “To track my progress. And to see if there is any lasting damage from my accident.”

  Wochick either laughed or coughed, it was hard to tell which. “Accident? Is that what you’re calling it? Well, whatever lets you sleep at night. Whatever you did, it tore up your prana. Yeah, there’s lasting damage. Your core is crap. And I know your technique is crap, which means every time you use prana, you drain most of it doing even the simple Studies. Why are you wasting my time?”

  “In the end, it’s none of your business. I’m paying you. That’s all you need to know.” Niko wasn’t about to admit a thing to this guy.

  “Your parents are paying me. It’s their business, right?” The doctor wasn’t taken aback, not a bit, and in fact, he smiled. “But you’ll do the work if my computer craps out. That’s fine. Are you still against tinctures? I’m warning, I’ll charge you double if you want one.”

  “Why?” Niko put on his shirt. He wanted out of the cigarette cloud and away from the doctor.

  “For one, because I can. For two, you dropped out once, and I figure you’ll drop out again. Might as well make money on you while you’re all motivated. It’s cute. I’ve seen it a thousand times. A has-been gets a spark up their butt for a few months but then it gets too hard and they quit. Again.” Wochick grinned at him. “I’m like a gym in January, getting rich off fatties high on their New Year Resolutions.”

  Niko held out his hand. “My printout. It’s why I’m here. And do you have a tincture that can help repair the damage from my accident?” He was going to call it that though the truth was far more complicated.

  The doctor smacked the paper into Niko’s hand. He’d have to tear off the perforated sides himself, but it was all part of the ritual of surviving a visit to the No-Bull Apothecary. It was either the best name ever, or the worst. Wochick would never lie or try to sugarcoat a thing. In fact, Niko was sure that Wochick’s thoughts went directly from his brain to his mouth.

  “I have something for you, and in fact, it’s cheap, since anything too expensive at this point would do more harm than good. And I took an oath or something. You won’t like it.” Wochick opened a cupboard and brought out a small vial, much too small to be a regular tincture.

  “I don’t smoke or vape,” Niko said.

  A shrug from the terrible doctor. “Not my problem. I don’t have the oral form, just the inhalant. You need to strengthen your prana core because of the ‘accident.’” The smirking Wochick threw out air quotes. “And your sharira needs to be stronger to handle the energy when your core improves. Which will be right around the time you quit. You can buy an e-cigarette at the liquor store.”

  Niko swallowed his anger. “I’m not going to smoke or vape. I’m not.”

  Wochick’s eyes sparkled a little. He liked to fight. “Then I can’t help you. It’s this or nothing. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t care what you do, but you’re trying to overcome a serious injury, and you have your natural cusp handicap. You might have to do things you’d rather not do. That’s the game. You’re welcome not to play it.”

  “Fine,” Niko growled. “Are we done?”

  “We are.” Wochick wiggled the vial in front of him. “Say hello to Buzz for me. I’m thinking about putting him on my payroll. He scares away the more skittish patients.”

  Niko didn’t know who Buzz was, and he didn’t care. He took the small vial of fluid. “I figured you handled that yourself, Wochick. You’ve gotten worse.”

  The doctor grinned, showing yellow teeth. “No, you’ve gotten older. I’m the same. You were good back in the day, and I liked working with you. Now? You’re too old, and you have the stink of tragedy on you. It kind of makes me sick.”

  “Now you know how I feel.” Niko left the room without saying goodbye or asking about a bill. If Wochick could be an asshole to him, Niko could be an asshole right back.

  Outside, a homeless man in layers of filthy coats and a long beard stood next to his bike, the same bike Niko had seen before. He turned on Niko. “Oh, a Battle Artist. Did Dr. Wochick fix you up? When do you fight?”

  Niko wasn’t about to endure this guy. He was going to get into the liquor store and buy a vape so he could start on the treatment right away. He’d have to Google how to smoke, though. He had no idea how to do it. He could ask Pete. His brother had returned Sunday morning after being gone for two days without a word. They’d cancelled their normal Sunday family dinner. Aleksy would be happy about that.

  As for Pete, he’d slept the day and night away. Monday morning, the youngest Kowalczyk brother was out taking calls, covering for Niko so he could go to the apothecary.

  The homeless guy didn’t stop, even after Niko didn’t answer. The cloud of alcohol rising out of the guy’s maw was almost visible. “I fought for years, child, years. I was good. Got some good press. You have to get good press. And fans, you have to get fans. I was ranking with Criss Blackstar for a hot minute. If you got a warrior’s fire in you, you best use it. Ain’t nothing like fighting when you got the fire in you.”

  Niko thought of Barton Hennessey’s book, The Art of the Inner Warrior. It had become required reading right around the time Niko quit.

  Niko had gotten used to homeless people, living in the Bay Cities. Sometimes you engaged, most of the time you didn’t, and they would continue on with their lives. Niko walked right into the liquor store, bought an e-cigarette kit and pack of chocolate mini donuts, and then returned to unlock his bike.

  The homeless guy sat in front of the No-Bull. He squinted up at Niko. “Keep clean. Don’t vape no nicotine. Eat your vegetables, say your prayers, and cycle it, young man, cycle it as much as you can.”

  Niko pointed at the sidewalk in front of the liquor store. “You can’t sit there, can you?”

  “Nope. The guy threatens to beat my ass if I do.”

  “But you can sit in front of Wochick’s?” Niko asked.

  “The doc?” The bum’s thick beard wiggled. “Me and the doc go way back. He treated me when I was a pro. Ranked with Criss Blackstar. Did I mention that? I must’ve. Anyway, the doc lets me hang out here. Sometimes, he gives me some coin for my medicine.” From the smell, that medicine came out of a liquor bottle.

  “You’re Buzz.”

  “Buzz Keaton. Yessir.”

  Niko tossed the guy the pack of mini donuts. “Here you go, man. Good luck.”

  “You hear me when I talk about the fire?” Buzz asked.

  Niko had. “Yeah, Buzz, I got the fire for a minute. Wochick thinks it’ll go out any minute.”

  The homeless guy laughed loudly. “Oh, ’cause he’s seen it all the time, brother. He’s jaded. Just because he’s him doesn’t mean you can’t be you.”

  Niko got on his bike. “I have to go cycle.”

  �
��In more ways than one.” Buzz laughed at his own bicycle pun. Then, like Wochick, his laughter turned into wet coughing. Another smoker. He could imagine Wochick smoking with Buzz in the back alley.

  Niko pedaled away, his satchel hanging off his side. He stopped under a tree and called Pete. His morning wasn’t about to get any easier. Wochick was brutally honest. Pete lied beautifully.

  The Brother

  NIKO KEPT TO THE SIDEWALKS because riding in the street was a suicide gambit in Apricot and South Valley. The cement was cracked and creased from tree roots buckling the concrete. He bounced around, winding his way into the machine shops near 101, north of South Valley. He could’ve grabbed a bus or a light rail train, but now that he wanted to fight again, he had to get back into shape. Biking in the Bay Cities was a survival of the fittest type of deal. If you were slow, or not focused, you wound up dead.

  The fog was burning off, and while the day started off chilly, it would get into the low 80s by the afternoon, but not hotter, not until summer actually started. Spring temperatures brought out the perfume of flowers and budding trees. The world was coming alive.

  Niko felt somewhat similar. He tried not to think too hard about Wochick’s doom-filled prophecies of failure. Yet, he could only imagine what the doctor saw: some stupid kid, grasping for the glories of high school, without any real chance of making it.

  Niko saw the Pig, parked next to a squat concrete building. He had his keys, so he could get into the van, and there was just enough space to wedge his bike into the back.

  Pete came out, a big Whitney unit dangling off his shoulder. He also had his backpack, full of his tools. Niko recognized the place, Schraeder Precision Machining. They were a reliable client and paid their bills on time. They burned out drodes on a weekly basis.

  Peter Kowalczyk was smaller, thinner, and beardier than his brothers. Whiskers hung from his cheeks and chin, not completely filled in, but not bare either. His muddy green eyes were a bit brighter, but the girls liked his eyelashes more than anything. He’d shaved the sides of his head but let his bangs hang down. So far, he only had the one dragon tattoo on his left arm. He wore black jeans and a FIX-IT SHOPPE long-sleeved black shirt. He wasn’t the best representative for the family business, but that was okay, Pete didn’t work that much. Only on special occasions, or when the moon was right.