by Noah Rain
“So what,” I said, my mood well past sour, “you’re going to blackmail all the Suits of Silk City, expose them, ruin their credit? Show them what it’s like to be—“
“To be us,” Scarlett said, her eyes clear. “Yes. We’re going to show them what it’s like to be us. To have every sin counted against us, no matter how innocuous. As soon as we get what we need out of them. And you should know … with how things are over here, or worse, out there,” she looked to the south, well beyond the Bay and into the suburbs. “They won’t last a week.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but I realized I didn’t have anything to say.
“Anyway,” Scarlett said, sighing, “it’s a shame you’ll be joining the Guilders, if Vash and his Syndicate don’t kill you before you can cash in someone else …” she eyed me, as if daring me to make a try for her. I didn’t. “So few Syndicates are willing to work together for the greater good. If you’re not with us, you’re with them.” She nodded across the bay, and I could see the city lights reflected in her dark brown eyes.
She stepped even closer, so our lips were almost touching. “You’re cute,” she breathed. “But if I see you in Silk City, I’ll do a hell of a lot more than blackmail you.”
“So … stay here and a Syndicate kills me,” I said. “Go there and you kill me. Seems like I’m in a pickle.”
“Seems that way,” she agreed and withdrew. “What’s your name, then? Now that you know you’re fucked either way.”
“Konnor,” I said. “Konnor Kayde.”
That seemed to spark recognition. “The Champ?” she asked as she crossed the street and straddled her motorcycle.
“Once. Briefly.”
She nodded appreciatively and put a dark blue helmet on, pulling her red hair free so it draped down her back.
“I could never get into the Prime League,” she said casually. “Not sure how people can watch people fight for nothing.”
“For credit,” I said. “For a living.”
“As I said,” she zipped her suit up and revved the engine. “For nothing.”
Fair enough.
“My name’s Scarlett, by the way.”
“I already knew that,” I said.
“You knew it from Darla,” she said without a hint of irony. “Now you know it from me.”
With that, Scarlett road off into the night, and I stood there blinking dumbly in my stupid fucking Gi for what felt like an hour, wondering why I felt so right after everything had gone so horribly wrong.
Chapter 3
Blowing Steam
It was funny. I had witnessed a gorgeous, sexy, blue-haired girl in all her natural, bouncy, sweaty, naked glory just a short while before, but spunky Darla wasn’t the one dominating my thoughts as I walked home.
No. That honor belonged to none other than Scarlett, she of the blood red hair, soft lips and lavender smell.
Of course, I had worked out that the smell had come from some kind of chemical mixture meant to get me into a zombified—or at least more suggestible—state of mind. You’ll have to forgive me for being slow on the uptake, but Vash really did hit hard, even if my nerves deadened the impacts and allowed me to walk through damage that would buckle most horses.
Anyway. Back to the point. It seemed the same condition that allowed me to absorb damage also made me immune to the ladies in black. Well, immune to their chemical charm, if not entirely immune to their natural beauty. Still, Scarlett had cast some sort of spell on me, and it wasn’t until I had scanned into the community apartments I shared with 400 other tenants—still enough credit to gain entry here, at least—and reached my squat, cramped room that I actually moved past the memory of her eyes, her hair, her face and, of course, her body that I remembered some of the things she had said.
Mostly, the part where she had said I was fucked, because Vash and his Shockers, or whatever the fuck they called themselves, knew what I looked like, and knew that I had no Capture Card to turn in. They knew I wasn’t a part of a Guild, but that I wanted to be, which meant I no longer had the unspoken immunity granted by Synners and Guilders alike to the common folk toiling in the streets of Jaxton, and they’d probably be acting soon in order to make sure I never had the opportunity to marry my obvious martial skills and less obvious superpower with advanced, military contractor-grade Kevlar and any sort of tech my lucky employer could provide.
I’d be one of Silk City’s peacekeepers if they didn’t get to me soon, and while Scarlett was right, and Synners died when they pushed too far, killing a Guilder was a death sentence in and of itself. Vash and his Syndicate would track me down soon, and make an end of me. I should have known better. I should have known getting involved in this line of work could be deadly. Well. I did know. But, I suppose I simply never considered the possibility of losing to Vash in the first place.
I guess I should have picked an easier first target. Vash’s technique left a lot to be desired, but I didn’t know he had that kind of tech behind him. I mean, come on. A mechanical spider with enough voltage to paralyze a fucking cow? How does someone on this side of the river get a hold of that shit? Probably took it off a Guilder they beat, or bought it from one of the Silk City Suits who was willing to put a little more risk into his credit in order to gain allies on our side of the Bay.
Yeah. No matter which way I sliced it, it certainly seemed like I was fucked in every way but the way I’d want to be right then and there.
Scarlett had either meant for me to wallow in self-pity and prepare for my inevitable death at the ends of a bunch of sparkling batons, or she had wanted me to come crawling back to her and throw myself in with a lot of motorcycle-driving spy chicks in Silk City and fight the corruption of a system that had long since passed into the realm of invincible. There was a deep, buried part of me that wanted to try, but it was the same part of me tied to that crying little kid I had left behind as soon as I had wandered into Jackie’s Gym after escaping the youth home.
As I laid in my glorified cot smooshed against the peeling plaster wall of my room, bathed in the blue glow of my screensaver and doing my best to ignore the pounding in the bed upstairs that was all springs and creaking pine and none of the supple slap of Darla, I thought Scarlett was quite right. Neither of those options left me happy. In fact, neither of them left me alive.
I grabbed my laptop, making sure my proxy barrier was enabled. Of course, the proxy only protected me from the government’s prying eyes, and I had no doubt that the proxy itself was owned by one of the very Companies responsible for upholding the system I was trying to hide from in the first place.
Alas. I didn’t really care in the moment.
I had never been all that interested in learning about the Guilds and Syndicates. I had planned to be a prize fighter—prize being the operative word there—and things had been going rather well right up until they weren’t anymore. The Guilds all had official web sites and social pages. Bios for all their best and brightest. You could even rent some of them out for private functions. Have a would-be Superhero come to your daughter’s Sweet Sixteen. Of course, only the Suits and Pearls had the sort of credit for that, but then, everything was designed for them, advertised by them and consumed by them. They didn’t really need a middle class anymore, other than to provide cheap labor in exchange for numbers on a screen and the right to keep eking out a living in the sew—
But I digress.
It was slightly more difficult to find information on the Syndicates. They kept their tracks more carefully hidden. But the news corporations still covered them. Interestingly, for a Syndicate that seemed to operate in Silk City—the only one that I could think of—Scarlett and her gang were nowhere to be found. I looked everywhere, from the Silk City News to Page Nine, from the GossipHer to the RumorSill. Nothing.
I had almost given up finding anything, when a series of general keyword searches—terms like ‘b
iker chick Synners,’ ‘hottest Synners,’ ‘Syndicate blackmail,’—led me to a series of forums where peons in Jaxton tracked their favorite Syndicates. Where the Guilders were the belles of the ball in Silk City, it seemed that some in Jaxton were beginning to wake up. They thought the Syndicates were fighting for them just because they were fighting against the system. I cringed reading about SynPhul788’s favorite Syndicate hits, but deep in a thread full of more, let’s say, adult-oriented material, a woman with short blue hair and milky skin stood out, as did the black suit she wore.
It was a photo of Darla from behind. It had been taken from an upper window, and her back was partially turned to the camera, giving us an even more curvaceous view of her body, if that was possible. She was talking to someone wearing an oversized trench coat, but forum-arguers claimed it was a Suit, and a well-known one from HyCorp.
I scanned and scanned, skipping past all the conspiracy nonsense. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in conspiracies. Our whole world had turned into one during my lucky lifetime. It was just that there was nothing I could do about it.
Finally, I happened upon a proposed name for Darla and her Syndicate, since there seemed to be no official title given to them by either law enforcement or the Companies.
Vixens was how they were referred to online. The Silk City Vixens, to be precise.
I researched for a little while longer, finding a few obscured fan pics of some of the other members of the Syndicate, but I didn’t see anything on Scarlett, and the boredom set in, as well as the creeping, existential dread I had managed to distract myself from.
If I had wanted to know how well and truly fucked I was, I would have researched Vash and the Shockers. But … I had never been into watching tape on my opponents during my fighting career. Why start now? Vash could surprise me, and maybe I’d even surprise him, but as I looked around my tiny, less than royal chambers, I knew that, whatever fight was to come, I didn’t want it taking place in such small confines.
If nothing else, I was a man of action, and so, as I tried to keep from fantasizing about the woman who had caused me to grappled with my impending mortality, I decided to go to the only place I could blow off some steam.I left the upstairs neighbors to their endless, brutish love-making, and made my way down the lively Jaxton streets, filthy Gi still adorning my sweaty shoulders, duffel bag in hand.
On the way, I ignored the stares of passers-by, from the homeless to the chain-smoking, knowing all of them reported to one Syndicate or another, and tossed over the two options I had mentioned before: dying to the Shockers, or joining up with a Syndicate.
A third option did pop into my mind, and I don’t know why it made me feel guilty. Instead of dying at Vash and the Shocker’s hands, or throwing my lot in with a Syndicate, I could still get my Capture Card, and take one of the girls in. Maybe Scarlett herself. Maybe they had enough blackmail saved up to get themselves out of whatever faux-legal jam the Companies would draw up for them. Then again, maybe she’d be put into a bottomless pit and they’d throw away the key.
I showered and changed at the gym, and tossed my Gi into an old washing machine, wrinkling my nose at the rancid smell as I shut the closet door. I didn’t have much in the way of clothes, and it was a hot night. The windows were obscured by that sort of old manila yellow that seemed to grow on old glass, anyway, so fuck it, I worked out in my boxers. The term had come from somewhere, after all.
I wrapped my hands, then ignored the ring for now and walked over to my favorite heavy bag, running my fingers along the surface, and smiling as they brushed over the congealed patch of a hundred pieces of the same roll of duct tape Jackie had kept in his office all these years.
The first combo always made my neck sting. As my jab-cross-hook sank into the hard-packed bag, pleasant shocks traveled up my arms, ran through the coils of muscle and scar tissue in my shoulders and back, and coalesced on the nape of my neck. The second combo produced a lesser sting, and by the third, when I started mixing in a series of thudding kicks, everything was as numb as ever. I still felt some of the impact, and the occasional tingle along my skin, but I’d packed the bags in Jackie’s old gym tighter than anyone else did precisely because they couldn’t hurt me.
I tried to visualize Vash’s face full of glass as I slammed a cross into the bag, and then pictured his cronies, all dressed in their own blue Kevlar and resin, all carrying an assortment of their own sparking batons and bats. As I picked up the tempo, I felt the adrenaline dump that used to make me want to shit myself before a fight. Some called adrenaline liquid anger, but I knew it was liquid fear. The thing was, fear could be useful. Fear kept you alive.
So yeah, I was scared. I was scared of Vash’s crew, and scared that I hadn’t felt true pain in long enough that, when it finally did break through my Frankenstein condition, it would leave me whimpering like a whipped dog.
By the time I was nice and loose, and the bag was as lumped and bruised as I was, the images had changed from me whimpering under an endless onslaught of sparking batons to a pile of bodies crumpled at my feet. I might go down. I probably would go down. But since guns had been banned—even for use by the supposed government—twenty years ago, Vash and the fuckers were going to have to do it the old fashioned way. And no matter what happened, I was taking a whole lot of the fuckers down with me.
As I took my first break, sitting on the edge of the ring and leaning my back against the rubber ropes, I tried to imagine how the fight would go. It was getting to the point where I was actually impatient waiting. If they were going to come for me, just get it over with.
But now that I was still, my mind kept skipping over the coming violence and focused on Scarlett once again. Focused on her face, her eyes and … well, you know.
I shook myself out of my private contemplations and got back to work, expecting the door to burst open at any second.
It went on like that for three days. I slept in the ring, showered every morning and put on a fresh pair of boxers, and went back to work. By the time I had finished my two-hundredth round, every bag in the gym was a patchwork of duct tape, with the hardwood floors covered with a thin layer of spilled sand.
Still no sign of Vash and friends.
Maybe they really had forgotten about me, or decided to let my trespasses go. It couldn’t possibly be that they didn’t know how to find me. My identity wasn’t really a secret. Half the local kids still called me Champ when I walked by, and everyone knew where I trained. The only reason this gym hadn’t been shut down by now was because the building was in such disrepair the authorities wouldn’t be able to use it for anything other than a leaky storehouse.
As I was changing the goss and wrapping on my hands—yeah, one of the side effects of my nerve condition was the fact that I never really noticed when I broke skin—I felt a presence.
I spun toward the back of the gym, and peered out the manila-colored rectangular windows that looked out into the back parking lot that was now a tire dump. I thought I had seen a shadow there. I knew I had.
“Might as well show yourself,” I said. “Get this over with. I’m tired of waiting, and I bet you are too.”
No answer.
“Come on, Vash!” I called, wrapping my hands with black cloth this time, so they couldn’t see the blood. “These windows are paper thin and hardly airtight. I know you can hear me. What’s say you come in here, with your boys and your fucking batons, and we see what’s what.”
I wasn’t bluffing, but maybe they would back off. If I was crazy enough to invite a Syndicate in—an armed Syndicate—and fight them in my underwear, maybe I was just crazy enough not to be bothered with.
I sighed. “Coward.”
“Who’re you calling a coward?”
It was a woman’s voice, and it sounded familiar. It was also coming from inside of the gym.
I twisted around, nearly slipping on the sand, and peered thr
ough the ropes of the boxing ring and into the darkened corner of the gym, where an old set of lockers leaned in on themselves.
There was a figure standing there, arms crossed, hips tilted just slightly … and then it hit me.
“Scarlett?”
“You remembered.”
She stepped out of the shadows wearing the same black Kevlar suit she had been a few nights earlier. Her hair was tide back in a tail, and, all told, she looked even better than she did in my imaginings, and a hell of a lot better than Vash.
I stared dumbly at her while I finished checking the wraps on my hands out of habit. She quirked an eyebrow and walked around the ring, examining the patched up bags as she went, and kicking piles of sand out of her path with her tall leather boots.
When she was on my side of the ring, in the open workout area, she looked me up and down, and I was suddenly conscious of the fact that I was wearing close to no clothing. I was also conscious of another fact, and according to the slight, intentional widening of her eyes, she was too.
“Hot in here,” I said by way of apology and explanation. Just as it did when you were a teenager in grade school, trying not to think about the bulge in your pants often caused it to grow.
“Mmhmm.”
I looked around for a long shirt or maybe some actual pants, but they were in the wash, and trying to change the angle I faced Scarlett at was only making it worse.
“So,” I said, “what brings you here, to my humble kind-of abode? Come to pay your respects?”
“The Syndicates have been keeping tabs on you,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Vash and the sparkle gang. I already kn—”
