Chapter 7
Hey there, if you haven’t read any of the previous chapters, you can find them HERE!
It felt like I was airborne for a really long time. Like, really long. Way longer than I expected to be. Then again, I had never expected that my evening would involve launching myself from one building to another, three hundred stories from the skin.
As soon as I left the terrace I felt the guards’ bolts soar past my head. The gravity didn’t feel like it had fluctuated all that much and the roof of the building I had aimed for was approaching far too fast for comfort. I held my breath as the certain-death-drop scrolled past underneath me and the next roof pitched up to meet me. It wasn’t until I landed that the realisation came. The fluctuation in ‘gravity’ had not only reduced the speed at which I fell, but it also allowed my inertia to carry me much farther than I had anticipated. I almost overshot the roof entirely. I landed with enough force to knock the wind out of me when I tried to roll through and spread the impact, enough, or so it seemed, to carry me over the edge. I dug every extremity into the steel rooftop, using whatever disruption in the smooth steel I could use to stop my forward momentum. I skidded to a stop. My head hung over the edge and it took a second to get my bearings. I spotted a way down the side of the building. I series of ladders, platforms, walkways and drainpipes. I couldn’t quite distinguish a path to the ground but the first few steps were a good enough start to pull myself over the precipice.
My shoulder took the brunt of the fall. The grated platform bounced and rebounded when it took my weight. The bolts that held the platform to the facade creaked in a way that shifted something in my stomach, thinking they were about to snap. Nothing happened. I lay there for a minute, on my back.
Seriously though, which one of you is in charge of luck? I owe you for that whole thing.
My breath was ragged. I was pretty sure I had broken at least one of my ribs. My left ankle was throbbing, protesting any further attempts at movement. I rolled onto my side with a lot of effort and an involuntary grunt, using my hands to pull myself into a crawl towards the ladder I knew was there. A finger on my left hand screamed at me. My middle finger was poised at an oblique angle from the middle knuckle. I didn’t remember feeling it happened. But I felt it then. I examined it.
Dislocated. Not broken.
I took a few deep breaths and clenched my jaw, then pulled it straight. I felt it pop back into place with a jolt of fire that shot up my arm. I flexed my hand into a fist twice to make sure I could still use the hand then climbed onto the ladder. The finger still protested but not so much that it didn’t comply.
It must’ve been a path like this that the lukshae took down the rear of Ferro’s building. I thought, climbing from ladder to walkway, walkway to drainpipe. I had to admit to myself, from the brief glimpse I got, it did look like Del. They had the same lean build, square shoulders and powerful legs. Even the facial features that stood out, high cheekbones and heavy brow, were reminiscent of the data dealer’s distinctive scowl. The way they dressed, too, didn’t look out of place for Del. Cargo pants, thick tread boots, and a utilitarian jacket. I replayed the scene in my mind as I clawed my way down another ladder, hand over painful hand.
Below me, a few shorter buildings rose up to fill the gap between the two taller ones. I glanced over the edge of the next platform to see if my pursuers were waiting for me. An image appeared in my head of my final dismount, only to be met with twenty aimed bolters and a set of cuffs. I couldn’t see much beyond the edges of the roofs under me but I could hear the commotion coming from the nearby street. They’d be clearing out the area, making it so there was only me and Khal-Sec within a radius of where I was last spotted. That’d be the top of the building I’m still on, about a third of the way down, I guessed.
Could be the protest causing the ruckus. I hoped, idly.
The sudden appearance of my shadow on the platform drew my eyes upwards. The spotlights hadn’t quite found me, yet, but they were scanning down the side of the building I’d just been scaling. Back and forth, descending floor by floor. I still had more stories than I cared to count to climb down, and I didn’t have much time. Khal-Sec drones were fast when they needed to be and excellent at keeping a target in their sights. They were small, smart, fast, and damn-near indestructible. If I was spotted by one, I’d never be able to shake it.
Sometimes, when there were buildings like this one that housed work-spaces next to each other, there would be walkways from one to another. There had been one further up that I’d disregarded in my haste, and there was another, a few stories below. Maybe ten. I’d thought if I could make it into the adjacent building before the drones caught up to me, I might have a chance to make it out of Sheim.
One thing at a time.
My ankle still throbbed, and I could tell from the pressure my boots were placing on it, that it was badly swollen. Until now, I had been doing my best to ignore it but when I landed on it at the bottom of the next ladder, it refused to take my weight. It buckled under me on the narrow walkway outside a window that opened as soon as I passed it. I would’ve tumbled over the edge were it not for the strong grip on the back of my coat.
Shit. Interrogation here I come.
I was pulled into the building and landed on my back. The figure stepped over me and closed the window, then put their back against the wall beside it.
“What the fuck are you doing here, En? And where the fuck is Cora?” Del’s scowl seemed twice as severe from the steep angle.
“Del?! It was you! What are you doing here? And why did you kill Ferro?”
We stared at each other, each waiting for answers to our questions.
“Well, I asked you fucking first!” She said, annoyed by the stalemate.
Lukshae took to human languages much more easily than the other way around. They have a far more developed larynx than humans, several sets of laryngeal folds, or glottises, which can function independently or in harmony. An evolutionary feature that makes for some spectacular performances in their musical spheres. It also allowed them to develop a hugely diverse range of regional languages that employ many of the artefacts that can be produced by the lukshae larynx. It also meant that, to them, human languages that were primarily just different sounds made by a single glottis, were fairly easy to grasp. And, as it often does, english became the default when first contact between our two worlds came about. The lukshae present at the time tried to teach the humans some basic Gheran, one of the least complex lukshae dialects, but humans lack the laryngeal dexterity, or the biological equipment to physically make the sounds. So the official language of The Bond, the mutually beneficial arrangement between Earth and Luksha, became english. Unofficially, it was mandarin. The lukshae studied a number of human languages over the following century and, on Khalo, it wasn’t uncommon to hear Xhosa. Lukshae teenagers started using it as a kind of slang.
Del, on the other hand, liked english a lot. She especially loved swearing in english. She used it like punctuation.
“Do you fucking hear me, En? What in the shit are you doing here?” She placed her hands on her hips like a school teacher awaiting an explanation.
“Ferro!” I said. “We’ve got a contract to scrounge up some dirt on the guy, but thanks to you, we’ve got nothing, he’s dead, and Khal-Sec is up my ass!” I hadn’t intended to come across as aggressively as I did but I hurt almost everywhere and Del’s questioning didn’t sit too well, especially because there were more questions surrounding her, and I knew she knew it. She was deflecting.
“And where the fuck have you been?” I rolled with my frustration.
Her expression softened slightly, as much as it ever did, then steeled again.
“I’ve been busy!”
“What happened to your stall?
“Quiet.” She said, pressing her back against the wall again and looking to the side.
“What–”
“Shht” She said impatiently. Her small radar-dish ears adjusted their position, listening. A spotlight shone through the window and I flattened myself on the floor until it passed by. The moment stretched on for far longer than I was comfortable with.
“We have to move, follow me.”
“Not until you tell me what’s going on. And, seriously, what happened to your stall?”
“Somebody torched it! Obviously!” She said with her eyes wide, then turned away. “Stay where you are if you like.” She was already at the corner of the corridor, peering around it stealthily. Then she vanished.
I weighed up my options and couldn’t come up with a better plan. At least if I stuck with Del, I might find out why she killed Ferro, if she did kill Ferro. Another thought struck me that with Del’s help, I may have inadvertently done Adio a huge favour.
***
I followed Del into the guts of the apartment block, through low ceiling-ed maintenance corridors and stuffy boiler rooms, even a couple crawl spaces, until I was more lost than I had been before. I wasn’t even sure if we were still in Sheim. I guessed not. Del carried on, as confident as ever of where she was and where she was going, never even stopping to consider the options.
“Where are we?” I asked like a five-year-old.
“Be quiet,” she said like a parent.
Del looked less somehow. Smaller, or leaner. She had swapped her usual scruffy overalls with the printed logo, long since faded from time and use, for a sleek, utilitarian getup. It looked like something Cora would wear. In fact, it may even have been something I’d seen Cora in.
Her shaggy hair hung languidly around her ears and caught what little light there was in a greasy sheen, cutting through the black. Her skin had a dark purple hue, though had a slightly washed-out quality that spoke of years spent on a space station with no direct light from O’na. Or any other star for that matter. The Heart’s light emitters were equipped with ultraviolet radiation propagators to try and mimic the effects of real sunlight, but even still, Del was pale.
At an intersection of corridors, she stopped and considered each direction. I was going to say something before she held up a finger, as if she knew what I was going to say, or just didn’t to hear whatever it was. She quickly peeked around the side and stepped back, ushering me into a small nook beside a pillared bulkhead. She looked at me and put a finger to her lips. I stayed quiet and heard what she was hiding from. Footsteps. It had to have been a maintenance worker. We stayed shoulder to shoulder, backs to the bulkhead, for what seemed like five minutes but what was probably ten seconds. I willed the maintenance worker to just keep walking past the intersection so we could skulk off in the other direction, but she rounded the corner and headed straight for us. Del pounced on her. Ropey forearms bit down around the surprised worker’s neck and her eyes widened with the shock. She tried to say something but all she could manage was a sound like “Gluk!”
It may have been just the empathy I felt for her after my sparring match with Cora earlier that day, but I instinctively put my hand out in a gesture that said; Del, don’t do anything stupid.
“What’s the plan here?” I asked.
“What do you think?” Del looked at me as if I had asked a stupid question. “She’s seen our faces, heard our voices.”
If I don’t do something here, she’s going to kill her.
“She’s not going to say anything to anyone. Look at her, she’s just a terrified kid.”
“Of course she’s fucking terrified, her life is in very real danger!” She squeezed the girl’s neck as she said it. I noticed, for the first time, the youthful plumpness of her skin as her dark cheeks flushed. Lukshae made up around three quarters of Khalo’s maintenance crew, usually younger folks on an engineering path, learning their lines or cutting their ropes or whatever confusing idiom came from Earth about that kind of thing.
We were so far into the substructure of the station that we had to have been closer to hard vacuum than the inhabited inner surface.
“She wouldn’t have been down here alone.” I said, deciding to try convincing Del that a body being discovered would be worse than a description of us making it’s way to Khal-Sec.
“A body turning up would just draw even more attention to us.” Del’s eyes flickered as she considered it.
“No bodies are going to turn up. I’m sure there’s a furnace around here somewhere. Or an airlock. Right?” She growled the last into the young engineer’s ear. The girl’s eyes widened and pleaded with me. She struggled some more, wrestling against the locked-down hold.
“C’mon, let her go. She won’t say a thing, will you?” She shook her head vigorously, as much as she could within Del’s grip.
“See?” I said.
The next few seconds stretched out as Del decided whether or not to kill her. I held still as I considered how quickly I could intervene, and if I could do anything before Del broke the girl’s neck.
Something in Del’s face changed, and, for a moment, I thought she was going to kill her, but she released her, letting her fall to her knees, gasping and coughing. It was a pain-filled and grating sound as the glottal stack wracked air through it. Del bent over and pulled the woman’s ID chip off her stained overalls’ shoulder.
“K’rota Gehzh.” She said as she studied the chip. She squatted next to K’rota, letting her get her breath. “Now I know you. Now, I can find you. Understand?” Del didn’t blink when she spoke to her.
K’rota just nodded. She scrambled back towards the bulkhead and her hand rubbed at her throat.
“Fucking go then!” Del growled, throwing the ID chip back to the terrified girl. K’rota Gehzh clambered to her feet and bolted back round the corner, heading in the direction she came from.
I exhaled for the first time in five minutes.
“Let’s move.” Said Del, and continued as if none of it happened. As if it wouldn’t have phased her if she had killed K’rota and thrown her body out an airlock.
I didn’t say anything after that, just followed Del through more of the station’s inner workings. From then on, we seemed to be travelling more ‘up’ than ‘down’, or, I guess, more ‘in’ than ‘out’, through more recognisable architecture. I had explored a lot of Khalo in the fourteen or so years I had lived there, but there were still many places I’d never been, nor knew existed. It still held its secrets.
Eventually, Del led us back to Heartlight.
We emerged from a heavy steel hatch on the side of an arcology in Cho. I had been thinking about what I was going to say about Cora, but I hadn’t managed to come up with a satisfactory way to broach the subject.
So… About Cora… seemed a little too nonchalant and imprecise.
Listen, Cora has been really worried about you for the last three days. The least you could’ve done was drop her a line or something.
Too forceful.
Del, I want to say something about Cora. She doesn’t like many people. In fact, I’m not even sure she likes me that much. But she told me about you two getting close and I could tell she’s been really worried about you since you disappeared. I don’t really care what your reasons are but I think, from what I understand your relationship has been for the last few months, you owe her an explanation.
That could work.
I dusted myself off after climbing out of the hatch and gathered my courage to bring up Cora.
“Del, I want to say something–
“You’re welcome.” interrupted Del, looking up and down the narrow alley we’d clambered into.
“What? No, I wanted to say something about Cora.”
“Oh. Where is she right now?”
I’m not sure I want to tell you.
“Listen, she told me about you guys and I think you owe her an explanation. Y’know for, like, disappearing for days. So, you should do that. K?”
Eloquent.
“Yeah, that’s why I was asking where she was.” Del said, her thick eyebrows hoisted in a sardonic recital.
Liar.
“I’m going to meet her now at The Pink Room.”
“Let’s fucking go then.” She pulled a huge hood over her head and donned a pair of goggles that obscured half her face.
It took us 10 minutes to weave our way through Downtown Cho. The familiar sensory tableau gave me a sense of almost-peace. It felt comfortable, even safe to be back in Cho, knowing how unlikely it was that Khal-Sec would come looking for me or Cora here. Or Del, I guess.
I don’t think I like Del. Like, as a person. Was she really considering killing that kid?
It wasn’t that Cho was lawless, far from it, but Khal-Sec never seemed to come to Cho unless something really demanded their attention. That being said, I am probably now their prime suspect in the murder of Ryker Ferro. And here I was, swanning around Downtown Cho with the actual murderer. I think. I gulped as the thought hit me.
We walked into The Pink Room through a set of pink drapes that had replaced an actual door. Me first, then Del behind me. Cora sat at a table a few meters from the doorway, a faint smile of relief as she saw me. Then it dropped as she looked past me. Del had taken down the hood and the goggles were pulled down around her neck. Cora barged past me and swung a huge right hook. The noise of the contact, something like a tenderising mallet hitting a chunk of cold meat, attracted most of the patrons, who looked with surprised gawks as Del staggered backwards into the door frame and bounced through the drapes. I heard her limp body hit the floor outside. She was out. Cold.
Astrid was looking at me quizzically from behind the bar. I waved, smiled and gestured that we were just leaving.