Flux: Chapters 11-19 (Patreon)

11: Jezau Dawnkill

Jezau Dawnkill's fingers traced the rim of her half-empty glass, eyes on the screen of her datapad.

"…follow after the opening performance. A million thanks for our spot on GonGon Channel," the dwarf said his due before the buzzer signaled the start of the match.

Jezau sipped her Angelo Azzurro as the combatants — a short but muscular human versus a well-known urk quantity — launched across the arena. Sword and spear, a classic matchup, and Jezau would have bet on the urk if the vid had been an official release.

Jezau's eyes wandered to the edge of the screen, watching the greenscreen cutouts lining the arena more than the fight itself. This piece of raw footage was all the rage on the darknet when it's been leaked about a week ago. She had it saved on her device before the authorities had a chance to swoop in. Not worth the trouble of recurrent visits, but… the vid was an octave more interesting than the majority of mass produced slop found on the net.

Jezau took a drag from her smoldering cigarette in the tray nearby, the tar induced death hitting her alcohol levels just the right way.

The slaughter was well on its way — the dwarf having received the bloody ocular piercing — when Jezau's phone began vibrating against her thigh with an incoming call. The low murmur and the droning bass of the bar would have drowned out the ringtone, even if she had one.

She glanced up, catching the 'tender sharp enough that he quickly flinched away. Dust particles danced in rosette vape clouds, and the low ceiling chandeliers kept her side of the bar in an ominous half light. An ifrit, her ebony skin washed to spectra of gray from a complete lack of illumination, watched from a far table.

She took another drag of her cigarette, looking at the caller's name. She had gone through innumerable jobs in the past decade, but her newest contract was mainly a palette cleanser. Her racial magics did not interfere with taking down drones, so the upstart businessman's little hit squad suited her just fine. Not like that corporate mess a while back.

Jezau Dawnkill frowned as she recalled her previous contract, now labeled as 'not adequate: revised'. The letter of her objective was to 'cause enough damage' to her targets. She had splattered out the brain matter of the hydra multiple times. It had proved ineffective, but she caused more than enough damage to satisfy the written word.

The corpo contact argued it did not satisfy the spirit of the deal, and closed the contract down with half the payment.

No, the keres thought. It did not satisfy the spirit at all.

Jezau kept him waiting for a minute longer before she accepted the call.

"I want to modify the contract," he began. The voice was different from the one she usually dealt with.

Jezau swirled her drink, sipping on the steady stream of death and decadence permeating throughout the bar. Desperate joy tasted so much better than the hopeful acceptance of hospitals.

"The personage involved will remain the same, and you'll be paid twice the creds you previously got for a single drone. Three times — if you can make it look like an accident."

"Ten," Jezau rasped.

For what he was asking, for what she was… she could afford to demand a much higher price for people than for mere drones.

The speaker remained quiet for a blissful length of time.

"Four, as a baseline, per target. Double that if the blues won't come looking for us."

"Mmh." Jezau blew smoke from the corner of her mouth. Greedy human. "You know my limitations."

A boon or a limitation. Depends on the job.

"Yes. Putting them in a coma is fine, too. So long as they never wake. I need them to be silenced. They’re loose ends."

"Everyone?"

She could hear him grip his phone tighter. "Everyone but the two of us. As I'm sure you're aware."

She was. Sentimentality was a chink in the armor to exploit. She was certain she could wring out even more money from him before the deal was sealed. But she had to be discreet; because if there was one thing Jezau Dawnkill was known for, it was her resolve to execute exactly what the customer paid for.

Nothing less. Nothing more.

"I'll have the modified document ready within the week," the man said. "Good luck, and good hunt."

12: Flux

The clatter of trays and muffled conversations drifted up from Vinny's ground floor as Flux perched on the railing of the café balcony. She balanced her miniature laptop on her miniature knees, and if someone was perceptive enough, they might've even spotted the small pixie sporting a new set of synth-sapphire earrings, too.

She usually started her day by inhaling some pixie dust to appease human sensibilities and become 'normal' sized. Today, however, she felt daring. The confidence boost from the weekend was still going strong — even if she did get several bottles of extra dust from all the fuzzy feelings she'd been feeling.

Despite it being a gov secret, pixie anatomy was simple; negative emotions vented dust through the eyes, positive ones from the privates. And nothing could compare to the love-glitters she'd been getting from down there recently.

Flux swung her legs back and forth, watching the automation script run through the daily scan of the monitored sites. Her job at NullCorp was to check out reports of illegal activity across the net, observe, and if an unlawful act was spotted, record and document the crime. Build a library, which was then used for any case NC has been paid to investigate. If a crime was not relevant to NC clients — so like, ninety percent of them — then after a year the antiquated data got sent over to the blues. She had no clue what they did with it, but the security corporation didn't care unless there was profit to be made. Other than that, she just had to remain on standby for assistance in ongoing cases and plug vulnerabilities in their systems.

When she found out she'd just be a glorified data entry clerk for most of her time, Flux wrote an auto-checker first week of the job.

She let out a sigh, tabbing over a dozen different social platforms while the algorithm ran in the background. She only used two of them regularly, but the rest either had dependencies for other shit, or they were group chats for family stuff. Two pending messages from Mom. Flux looked them over with half-lidded eyes, snorted, and closed the tab down.

You're starting to sound desperate, Mom. It's ill fitting for a prim valley queen.

In place of the closed window, an old vid-call app popped up on Flux's screen. She frowned, looking over the logs. Liya, the caller had been.

Flux faintly remembered the girl. Blonde? No, she had black hair, but she kinda had a blonde impression of her anyway. She was a distant cousin — thirty or forty gen removed, maybe. A dime a dozen in the Sirrej pixie community.

The pixie had gone missing, though, and she was probably the reason Flux got the job at NullCorp. There was an investigation to find her, involving a bunch of nomads and a weird story about lending cars to some motley crew. Even Flux had been summoned to give her account of the events. Which, admittedly, wasn't much. A simple copy-paste from one paddie to another was probably 'hacking' to some of those dinosaurs.

Long story short; the case never went anywhere. Squished in the bud by the thumb of some higher up. Flux never heard from the Liya incident ever again, and a few days after her interview, received an offer for a new job opening at NC.

Someone with a better moral compass would have suspected foul play. After all, you can't spell corruption without corpo.

Eh. Flux was too busy thinking about all the sweet skins she could buy for her grindy ARPGs to care. And to finally have her own place, no longer dependent on her family's credcards? Somewhere to invite her Roen?

Sorry, Liya-bug. I'd sacrifice ten of you for one tenth the reward.

Flux closed the window down and switched over to their gaming server with Korella. Her bff's avatar — a statuette with a lilac rose hanging from its drooling mouth — was grayed out, and so were most people they usually hung with. Weekdays were kind of chill for the most part; except for, of course, Friday nights. That's when the server usually went full degen.

Ugh. Egirls could be a real nasty bunch, if they wanted to be. If net particles once learned to transit smell, they'd eventually have to quarantine the Shortstack Guild chat for the good of the entire server.

Instead of writing in global, Flux opened her DMs and shot a private message.

Ayo any progress on the Project R. stuff? Call me anytime.

She glanced down toward the café entrance. She adjusted her butt on the railing.

Actually nvm. Ping me first, think I'm gonna be busyyyy. (I hope).

Project Roen, aka. girl force rescue horse, was basically a laundry list with four pieces of info Korella was trying to find out. Number one and two were investigative work regarding the evil brother's crime group; keres were an endangered species, and so tracking down the sniper chick could be a decent lead. And two; why were they shooting down courier drones in the first place? Pretty fucking basic as far as questions went.

She didn't know what they'd do with the info, but… better to have it than not. She'd build a little library not unlike the one she maintained for NullCorp.

Number 11 and 100 — or three and four, for those without binary brainrot — were about the sticky question of just how they could extract Roen from the whole situation. Korella would contact one of her family lawyers, with full confidentiality, and ask if a fictional Mr. R. would be held accountable for some fictional assistance to a couple of shady characters.

And last, as a backup-backup lifeline — Korella would look up prices on djinn wishes.

Yeah. Reeeal desperate shit. NullCorp was one level of premium, but djinns… Flux did not have spare millions lying around in her hoodie's side pocket.

Korella had her work cut out for her, but Flux trusted her four-legged bestie. And while she trotted about the place, Flux would work on a much more delicious, Roen-focused angle in the meantime.

Oh yes. She wanted to work his angles so fucking hard. Frequently and in many different positions.

Flux puffed out her cheeks, alt tabbing back to her script. She checked if anyone reported a site to add to her algo, then finding none, decided to go over the code and look to shave some redundancy. Contrary to popular belief, a regular day of a coder was mostly just sitting around, surfing the net and looking up answers on SnackOverflow only to find out they've misplaced a single semicolon. And even AI assistants weren't omnipotent.

Her steady descent into boredom was saved by the jingle of the café door.

It was him.

Flux quickly checked her hair, her makeup, reciting the battle plan as she did so. Story, check. Confidence, at an all time high. Coming across as weird, not damn likely. She had normal-people answers ready for all the obvious stuff.

Okay, here we go. Showtime.

***

Roen settled into his usual corner at Vinny’s, head kept down and mostly without worries about getting caught in the crossfire of stray looks. It was earlier than his usual visits, the neon linings on the walls muted against the overcast daylight streaming in through his window. A treant stopped for a smoke outside, his leafy canopy casting him in shadow before moving on. Huh. Maybe there was something to exposure therapy.

Sweeping a hand over his table, Roen pulled out his pencil set and a single piece of white bristol board — A5, on the smaller side — as well as his new datapad. Unlike the one in his basement drawer, this datapad was a sleek model he'd barely broken in, in a physical sense or otherwise. He stopped tinkering with screen-based devices early in high school. There were only so many things you could do with so little space, especially when most of it was occupied by electrostatic fields.

His other project was more fun, anyway. A combination of art and tech; it meant he could freely choose between abandoning his brain or spiking it into overdrive. Or a mix between the two.

His datapad was still booting — those pesky automatic updates — when Zoe approached his table with a tray on one arm. Her apron was still spotless.

"Someone is here early," Zoe said, lowering the tray to his table. Taking the chance to rest, probably.

Roen tapped at his datapad to dismiss a terms of service change notification. These updates were gonna be the death of him. "Hi, Zoe," he shot her a brief smile. "I, uh. I think I'd like to get a large drink today. Maybe a couple of classic scones, too — I might be working for a while."

"Oh? And what kind of work is that?" Zoe said, beginning to unload the contents of her tray onto the center of his table. One medium and one tiny shake, a box of nachos with some cheesy sauce and some blue fry-like sticks he didn't recognize.

"Well, it's not really, you know… work work, but, um." Roen watched her unload the goodies in confusion. "Why are you, ah. I don't think I ordered all this stuff."

"I know that you didn't, dear," Zoe said. She smiled mysteriously as she finished stacking the table — not intruding on the property line of Roen's paper, thankfully — and straightened, cocking one hip. She gestured her head toward the bar. "It looks like you have a secret little admirer."

It was with a nervous surge in his stomach that Roen looked over to the bar. He didn't notice her at first, but then…

Flux, his night-time rescuer, was right there on the counter in her small pixie-form. She was casually leaning against the XXL cappuccino of a distracted customer with her arms folded over a navy blue zip-up hoodie. Minimally torn black denim shorts and a pair of azure thigh-highs completed her outfit.

And she was staring right back at him.

She gave him a little wave.

If he wasn't frozen with a strange cocktail of joy and terror, Roen would have jumped in place. She was here. In Vinny's. Just a few days after a chance encounter in one of the largest and most dense megacities known to creature-kind.

The chances of that, the insane levels of luck involved…

Was still not as large as the likelihood of a cute girl buying someone like him stuff.

His paralyzed state broke when he saw Flux take off and slowly begin to drift over to his corner of the café.

"Zoe! When did, please, I," Roen struggled to form sentences as he sought a way to... what, escape? Vocalize a cry for help? "How did she find me?"

Zoe looked at him with amusement. "Who, Flux? My boy, she'd been frequenting this place for some time now. Similar to you, actually — she mostly keeps to herself and you wouldn't catch her drinking coffee if your life depended on it." She put a dramatic hand on her neck. "Imagine my face when she, once, asked if we served energy drinks. The canned kind. Tsk, you young'uns these days…"

Today, Zoe was clearly looking for blood. The more he squirmed, the more that wicked crone grinned. "Ah well, would you look at the time," she turned with an expert flick of her tray. "I think the ice dispenser is calling my name. Just remember, young man — no shagging on the tabletop. I'm on cleaning duty today, and I've seen my fair share of messes that pixie girlfriends can make when they aren't large enough to keep all the sauce inside."

Roen nearly choked on his own tongue.

That familiar buzz of rapid wings accompanied Flux as she weaved around Zoe's retreating form and emerged above the seat opposite of Roen to hover at eye level. From this close, he could see a pair of techie-aesthetic earrings glinting in bluish hues.

"Heyooo. Fancy seeing you here, night boy."

"Ah. F-flux?"

"Yup. That's me!" She did a little twirl in the air. "All in my eleven inches of natural glory."

Yes, yes she was. Roen wasn't sure if her non-humanness helped his anxiety or not.

"Um. Hi. Hey," Roen said. His fingers tightly clutched each other underneath the table.

Come on, don't freeze up now. Compliment her, ask how she's doing, say something.

"Thanks for the food."

Fuck.

"Mm don't even mention it. I wasn't sure exactly what to get, but you can never go wrong with the sippers and the dippers." Flux flew over to the smaller shake and grabbed the straw like a microphone stand, before pausing. "May I?"

"Of course! I mean, um, you're the one who bought it, so…"

Watching a pixie suck on a piece of plastic rod that barely fit in her mouth was not something Roen would have expected before walking into the café today. Unsure what the polite course of action would be, he hurriedly mirrored her and drank from his own, much larger glass cup. Strawberry.

"So, uh," he began. It took a gigantic amount of effort, but he forced himself to fight through his insecurities. Now more than ever before, he didn't want to mess this up. "I just heard from Zoe that you actually come to this place pretty often." It was supposed to be a statement, but it curled into a question toward the end anyway.

Flux's eyes widened for a moment before they squinted together. "Huh, did she now?" She cleaned off a remnant of cream from the corner of her mouth thoughtfully, before touching town on the table. Her wings settled against her back. "I mean, yeah, I have been to Vinny's before. Once or twice. But imagine my surprise when I look down the balcony and see you walk through the door. Dude, I had no idea we'd run into each other again! It must be, like, fate or something."

Roen allowed himself a soft smile. It did sound kind of like a fairy tale. "I'm glad it happened, though."

That must've been the right thing to say, because Flux wings began beating on their own, making her rise with a dreamy expression on her face. "Yuhufff…"

It was short-lived, though, as a motorbike roaring down the road outside shook her out of her daze. "Right," she said, smoothing down the edge of her hoodie. Roen stirred when she flew forward, hopping down on his side of the table.

"Ooooh, what's this? Paper?" She leaned over the thick bristol board, poking a finger at it. "Are you, like, an artist with drawings and sketches and stuff? That's so cool."

Oh shit. Roen had forgotten all about that. Suddenly self conscious, he moved an arm in reflex to hide his drawing set away — but the pixie was in the way. Something that he realized too late.

His arm bumped into Flux from behind like a runaway train with screeching breaks. Losing her balance with an audible 'oof', she fell back and managed to perform something akin to a circus move as her legs were swept from underneath her, caught the tabletop with her outstretched hands on the other side of his arm, and sprang right back up to her feet.

If Roen wasn't so flushed with mortification, he would have appreciated her insane flexibility.

"I… I, um… Shit, I'm so fucking sorry, I don't know what—"

"Ayo, that was FUN!" Flux's high-pitched yell was loud enough to raise heads from all over the café. "Do it again, do it again! Now in fuggin reverse!" She hopped left and right in place, like a small boxer with a dining table as her ring. She eyed Roen's arm with a fired up expression. "Oooh, just wait until Korella finds out I have my own hummie obstacle course."

Roen just stared down at her, mute, with an incapacitating dose of 'what the fuck'.

There was… there was no way to even begin conceptualizing that in his mind. His brain was short circuited; without the momentary capacity to even feel ashamed.

He slowly raised his arm and tucked it back out of sight, under the table. He blinked down at the pixie in silence.

"Ugh, fiiine," Flux pouted. "But you owe me now."

"I already owe you," Roen slowly said. He could get used to this odd sense of detachment.

"Yeah, well, you double-owe me. Ow-ow me. Owo."

Ignoring the no-longer perfectly arranged pencils, Roen watched Flux hop closer to the other curiosity on his side of the table.

The datapad had finished updating in the meantime, though the screen had already darkened. When Flux unashamedly pressed the unlock button — using her entire hand to punch it in — the datapad lit up to arrive on the main hub. Roen hadn't bothered with a pass code. Maybe, in retrospect, he should have.

"Alrighty, let's see what we're working with," Flux said as she began scanning through his hub.

Roen curiously peeked past the pixie tapping her feet on the edge of his datapad. He didn't know why, but he felt like he was at the doctor's office.

"Cam, calendar, all the factory basics…" Flux muttered. "Is that PearStore? You're in serious need of a house cleaning, oomfie."

"My actual datapad is back home," Roen said defensively. "This one is brand new. Well, relatively new."

"Uhuh. I can tell."

Turning her attention to the bottom bar, Flux looked through the 'most recent' apps. It was a short list — browser, weather forecast, calculator.

Flux glanced back over her shoulder. "May I disturb the sanctity of your very thoughts?" she asked with a solemn tone.

Roen stared at her in question.

"I wanna check out your browser, dummy."

"Oh. Um, sure, go ahead," Roen said, idly playing with a pencil between his fingers. He only used the net for research. It was probably the last place anyone would find ammunition against him — not that they needed to look far, considering how much was already wrong with him. "Are computers just a hobby of yours, or…"

Flux paused for a moment before tapping the icon. "Ah. Yes. Just a hobby." She shrugged, letting the tabs load. "You know how it is. Fam gets annoying, girl plays a couple of games online, then slowly proceeds to get sucked into the whole package. Learned to write code — N-Java first, then picking up the forked version of C-square as well. Even went into gamedev for a few months, if you can believe it."

Roen drew little circles on the paper absently. "More than half of my classmates were into one game or another." Another thing in which he'd been an outlier.

"And you? Not a fan?"

"Mmh." Roen drew a few horizontal lines, uncertain. "I honestly don't know. I was too busy trying to keep my grades at straight fives, taking extra lessons, you know. Being a nerd." He let out a little laugh, watching his scribbles. "Well. The other kind of nerd, I guess."

"You mean the actual, smart kind of nerd, eh? Eeeh?" Flux teased. "Gamers are the norm, dude. You can find more sweaty egirls with their hands down the chip bag than nails in a Hullwork factory." He saw her tilt her head at him from the corner of his eyes. "What about now, though? Have you given it another try? Assuming you're not too busy with work, I mean."

Work. The topic threatened to pull him back toward the edge of a chasm. He just cranked down on his pencil harder.

"I'm, um. Kind of between jobs at the moment. I do part-time in a local sciences university — assistance work for a chemistry professor. It doesn't pay, but…"

Where am I even going with this?

Roen felt like an idiot. He couldn't just admit that his brother was taking care of him like a child.

"Smart and charitable, oooh," Flux bumped a small fist at his wrist, making Roen startle. "Slow down, mister panty-dropper."

"Um, wh, what? I don't… I should be fully independent by now, especially with the qualifications that—"

"That's, like, standards from a hundred years ago, Roen. Nearly everyone in downtown Sirrej lives with their folk until their late twenties to cut down on tax and rent prices. And maybe half of them with an actual job — aspiring vid celebrities don't count."

Flux shrugged, then turned back to his datapad. "You gave a damn about school. That alone firmly puts you above my four brothers and nine sisters combined."

Roen's hand stilled above the paper hearing that. He knew that the local pixie community was large, but… thirteen siblings? An impossible thought.

He wondered if, with so many people around, his home would've felt empty all the same.

"'Travel planner between Lux City and Justafa.' What's this?"

Leaning past the pixie standing on his datapad, Roen saw an aerial drone map of the globe, currently focused on a specific region between two cities and several lines of Mega-Nexus lanes highlighted in red. The world government's crowned dove sigil blinked on the website banner.

"Oh. It's nothing."

Flux put a hand on her hip. "You're not planning to ghost me, are you?"

"No no, nothing like that. Just doing some research for a long-running project of mine." Roen said with a dismissive shake of his head. "It's, um, really boring stuff."

"What, like cartography? Drawing maps and stuff?"

"That's part of it," Roen admitted. He didn't want her to dwell on his lame interests, so just threw some scraps out there and hoped to satisfy the beast. "You know people who do model railroading? I've been tinkering with something like that, or something faintly similar."

"Huh," Flux said. Her eyes widened. "Could you make, like, a pixie rollercoaster?"

Roen winced at the thought of putting anything alive inside the mechanism's launching port. "I'll need to think about it."

"Naah, you're good. I'm just messing with you. Your project does sound fuggin awesome, though." Flux turned her attention back to his datapad. She scrolled through a few tabs, most of which Roen forgot he had even opened. Nature ambiance, a few how-to vids, some random searches.

One of the tabs reminding him, Roen chanced a question. "Hey, do you know about how datapad updates get interrupted by notifications all the time? Is there, I don't know, a way around that? Sorry if it's a dumb question, it's just that you seem to be an expert when it comes to…"

"You mean the latest OS updates getting cock-blocked by the ToS notifs?" He could hear the smirk in her voice. "Ayup. That, right there, is the wonders of modern software engineers pushing their half-baked shit when their corpo overlords have to meet a deadline. Gimme a sec."

Nearly going prone to reach the X button at the top of the browser app, Flux navigated to the settings screen and turned on the 'pair nearby devices' option. Meanwhile, Roen did his best to ignore the miniature pixie-ass clad in those tight black shorts practically glaring in his face.

She straightened up and reached in the back pocket of those same shorts to pull out — a datapad of her own. Except this one was the size of Roen's fingertips and scaled to Flux instead. He'd never been around her species before, so it was a new experience to watch her tap away and try to pair the tiny device to the giant she was standing on.

Pixie magic was very strange.

"Llll-right-yyy…" Flux muttered, tongue poking out from between her lips. "So I have this macro injected to run before the operating system begins startup. It ain't kernel level — and fuck companies who try to push that shit — but it should catch those pesky notifications and overwrite the priority." She tapped away, bobbing her head like the happiest little techno fairy. "Notifications will still appear, but the update will load properly in the background. I'm also including a lil backup package that allows you to rollback your OS version if a new update is too buggy and bricks some essential shit. They stopped including this basic-ass feature a few years ago — don't ask me why."

Half of that flew over Roen's head, but he got the gist of it; datapad bad, now datapad slightly less bad.

Even if she made him sweat rivers… the pixie was a wonderful person to have around.

The thought made a spark catch in his head, and he immediately seized it before his overactive brain could pull the emergency brakes.

"So um, I was wondering if I could maybe get your phone number just in case that—"

"Yo, so how about we exchange numbers and shoot some virtual shit when—"

They blurted out at the same time, then stopped talking right on cue.

Roen felt his face heat up as Flux turned to him fully. A manic grin was plastered on her face. "Holy shit, we're so on the same wavelength." She extended a forceful arm in his direction, hand opening and closing rapidly. "Gimme-gimme."

Roen scrambled to get his phone out. While datapads could do most things — from entertainment to legal identification — people still carried their phones around to receive mobile signal that allowed communication inside city bounds.

Only when he held it in his hands did he realize; he didn't know his own number.

"Um, I…"

Is there a more pathetic way to admit that I have absolutely zero social life?

"Yeah, yeah, I'm too small right now to write myself in there. Just add me to your contacts," Flux mirrored him, tapping at her own miniature phone. "It's nine-oh-seven…"

Roen wrote down her number, and it felt as though a boulder rolled off his shoulder when he saw the little 'your number:' flag at the top of his mostly empty contacts menu. He recited it for her, and the exchange somehow managed to end without disaster.

Afterwards, Flux had this smug look on her face. "Nice."

Roen figured the pixie would leave after that — he wasn’t exactly interesting, and kindness could only go so far. But the pixie just settled on the other side of the table, and then proceeded to simply… talk.

About school, about viral vids, about meaningless stuff that you could always see those show hosts and podcast people go on about. Summon storms where he could only catch raindrops.

He didn't contribute much, which tracked. But unlike with anyone else, he didn't feel like he needed to. She spoke enough for the two of them, and he listened, and she invited him to reach out without that forceful challenge that whispered 'you're a failure' if he failed to say the right thing.

When she flew over to pluck a single nacho from the stack, held it with both arms to dip it inside the sauce, then lifted it to her face to munch on it like an oversized sandwich… Well. She managed to kill his self-consciousness about eating in front of her with a single feat of magic.

For just a moment — even if he knew it wouldn't last — Roen let himself believe that his own self was someone worth fighting for.

13: Flux

Flux flew above the swirling neon veins of the megacity.

Sprawled between the outer walls that protected them from the wilds and gods-left storms, the city beneath was a forever waking dream people could lose themselves in. Gargantuan screens splashed marketing vids across towering skyscrapers, their lights plummeting down to street levels but unable to pierce the smoke-machines that bathed the sidewalks in flickering ads. Between them, miniature cars zipped along regulated pathways, circling, dancing like red grooves in a circuit board.

But as she veered northeast, the cityscape transformed. Up there, carved like a piece of cheese near the titanic walls, Sirrej's concrete yielded to rolling green lawns and manicured gardens. Darker than the rest of the city at night, it gave off a dignified air next to a noisy neighbor. Even as Flux began to descend, the air previously thick with exhaust now carried the crisp scent of pine needles and blooming orchids.

The upper glade.

This enclave, a sanctuary for the city’s elite families, hosted a long series of sprawling mansions and open fields that screamed 'old money'. No mere ad-smoke was to be found here. Used as dividers between the roads, a thin spray of water fell and rose to create a miles-long fountain glittering in diamond hues, connecting in roundabouts like gems on a suit cuff.

Flux's path evened out as she flew above flat rooftops, the elevation no longer required to dodge hundred-floor giants. Though not to her taste, it was undeniable that each home was an architectural masterpiece. They ranged from gothic mansions with squat turrets, to family houses that could house a concert, and to historical nymph-grown chateaus where premium wine fermented in underground cellars. She knew of the latter; her parents owned a quarter of the industry.

Turning down past a lake-repurposed-to-swimming-pool, Flux soon approached a mid sized estate gated off from a dead end with black iron fence. She flew past the property boundary and righted herself in the air just in time to land at a slow run in the circular driveway around a rearing pegasus statue.

Save from a single black van, no cars occupied the place.

"Peachy," Flux muttered, slowing to a walk as she fished out a tiny vial from her pocket. A quick snort of some pixie-dust later, she was back at full human size.

Which, funnily enough, still wasn't large enough to take up even a fraction of the main entrance.

"Eyo, open the fuck up!" Flux took the circular door knocker — with the carved head of a gargoyle — and banged a couple of times. Violet light streamed out from beneath the ancient magicked wood.

It took a minute, but Flux eventually heard the clop-clops from inside coming closer. The door opened inwards to reveal a centaur dressed in an attention catching back-and-white ensemble; her lopsided blouse cut down the middle to reveal just a hint of cleavage covered by fishnets. Today, her lipstick was a dark silver, and dottings of white stars glittered at the edge of her smeared eyeshadow. A black skirt obscured much of her lower body.

"You do remember I keep the third-floor relaxation room window open just for your dumbass, right?" Korella asked.

"Sure, but that's for emergencies when you're hosting an upper glade party."

Korella flicked her tail in annoyance, but she clopped out of the way. Not that her fat equine ass was blocking much of the barn-like door, anyway. "Which one is it that you're avoiding now? The elvin or the pixies?"

"Pretty much," Flux said, darting inside.

Korella's mansion was something upper glade bitches would call 'modest'. The neo-gothie centaur, being an only child, had inherited a wooden abode of several spacious interconnected rooms that were designed for large species from the ground up. As in, it almost entirely lacked internal walls. While the aesthetic was warm — and bathed in violet by the overhead plate lamps — both the pixie and elvin families of the area had a tendency to sneer at the 'waste of good real estate'.

Big girls like Korella or her aunt needed space. Which basically meant empty, by pix standards. And the elvin who had recently moved into the neighborhood, well, they were just following the trend.

Flux ignored the massive double staircase — sporting elongated steps for ease of four-legged travel — and went to the right, toward the iced shelves near the bowling section. "You want chocolate or vanilla?" she asked, yanking open the freezer.

"Neither. I have a whole carton of bubblegum-blue with me upstairs."

Flux pinched her nose. "You're a sick person."

"Tell me all about it, Miss Strawberry-boycream."

Korella's bedroom on the second floor — as in the entirety of the second floor — was lined with darkened panels and corner lights to provide that patented poison witch vibe. Gloomy like a club goer's dream, the only natural light that could penetrate the space was through the massive glass walls that looked over the back lawn of the mansion property. Her bed and her gaming setup were strategically placed right by that nifty overlook.

Flux made a small detour to check on the new additions to the cloven section of the shoe rack, tossed the ice cream wrapper in the electric trash bin, and finally settled down at the edge of Korella's massive bed. It was a bit too properly made, and it needed character.

"Mmmh," Flux lapped at the icy goodness with a satisfied sigh.

Korella navigated through the empty lanes of her room with a pair of porcelain plates in her hand, eyeing her warily. She stopped at her pillow-seat in front of her desk and silently extended one of the plates to Flux.

Don't look a judge horse in the mouth.

"TY," Flux emoted, plopping the whole ice cream down on the plate by the stick. She didn't know which one made Korella wince.

"Cave men have invented smarter ways to consume their daily slab of meat, Flux."

"Buttthe onnnly slabbbof meaat that Iiiam gonna eeat—" Flux sang to herself.

A pillow bounced off the side of her head.

Korella settled down in her cot, her white LED-lined PC booting with a soft whir. Her skirt spread out around her like a dark island.

"You're just jelly that—" Flux began, but caught herself before the sentence could escape.

Her and Korella ribbed each other a lot, yeah. But Flux rubbing her boyfriend progress — no matter how perfect Roen may be — under her friend's nose would be a step too far.

Most non-humans were uniform looking enough; urk, elvin, goblins and vamps — they all had four limbs and the same shape, just with slight energy drink color variations. Hell, even werefolk or pixies had the ability, a state of being that looked 'normal'. But some species, such as arachnid and centaurs, had it a lot worse in trying to find a romantic partner.

What human wants to fuck a horse pussy? Not a whole lot of them, that's for sure. And the fraction who do, well, it's probably not considered a good thing by any metric.

With a good ninety percent of the population comprised of human-shaped folk… Korella's kind was the exception left on the sidelines. The fact that Flux couldn't recall her friend complaining a single time was a testament to her incredible dignity.

"…jelly that I got a sweet fuggin job away from all the wine clinking and ass licking of the glade."

Korella thought about that for a moment before digging into her yucky gum-flavored ice cream. "Jealous, no. The downtown city life didn't suit me in college, and it doesn't suit me now." She cast a glance past her setup and out into the evening expanse of her garden. She smirked. "I can always invite the city to me."

Korella could throw a mean party. Especially so when her aunt was around.

"How is Brigenn doing with her tours?" Flux asked, sucking on a chocolatey finger. "I read she's gonna be on Jewels of Lux City, in what, three months from now?"

"Mmhm. After her visit up north at the Lifts, she's been traveling the Nexus to knock out one interview after the other. Her route is gonna take her through Tonovo, sooo… I don't know. I hope she takes a detour to Sirrej, but it's not too likely." Korella looked at Flux. "Paparazzi is trying to catch her with a lover."

"Dude."

"Uhuh. Every second TV host is frothing at the mouth of just the idea of it. Like, okay, I know Brigenn has the biggest fucking melons in centaur history, but a boytoy half her age is probably the last thing she's interested in. She's too…" Korella searched for the word. She punctuated with a thrust of her spoon when she found it. "Too refined for that."

"Oh yeah, she's definitely a mommy."

Korella's eyes narrowed.

Ice cream successfully banished into her tummy, Flux raised her hands in defense. "Hey, I'm just saying how it is. Prolly half the guys online fantasize of a stacked rich lady taking care of them and calling them 'good boy'."

"Net gooners are not a realistic demographic to draw conclusions from, Flux."

Flux just shrugged at that. She had already stared into the abyss, and the abyss had stared right back.

Korella put her ice cream aside to grab the mouse — a priceless model with cellular identification — and her monitor lit up with a gentle light. Her desktop, as always, was neatly organized with online programs such as browsers in the upper left corner, image converters and vid cutters at the bottom, and folders and game shortcuts in the upper right. A slowly shifting labyrinth logo served as the background.

Flux scooted closer to the edge of the bed when Korella clicked a notepad labeled as "Project R".

"I'm gonna go over everything I learned while you were wooing a certain human. Now, don't get your panties in a bunch when you hear something you don't like, okay? The…" Korella paused, eyes on the screen. "I can hear you chewing through my blanket, Flux."

How did she know it was her blankie? Sorceress.

Flux spat out the fabric in question, instead wrapping the material around her body in a cocoon, with only her wings peeking out against her back like antennae. "Yeah yeah. Stop stalling."

Korella's skirt rippled as she adjusted a hoof somewhere below.

"The first inquiry: what could be the point of shooting down courier drones? So this is more a thought exercise than any kind of research you could find on the net. You caught them in the act setting up for… something clearly illegal."

"The guy who took the suitcase from Franklin said something about rigging," Flux interrupted.

"As you already told me earlier, yes." Korella took a deep breath. "I think it's pretty fucking obvious, girl. Even if you don't want to face it. The simplest explanation just makes the most sense."

Flux pulled the blanket tighter around her.

"The suitcase housed a bomb. The courier drone was delivering a package. And the rigging was to turn the drone into a tool of assassination that self-destructs, that leaves no trace behind, and that can only be tracked back to the unaffiliated sender of the original, harmless package. A perfect crime."

"I, they… surely the courier companies would think about protecting their drones from interference along the way."

Korella shook her head. "Sure, but their two layers of security come from height and alarms. Most species can't reach up to the courier drone pathways, and even if they could, the companies would immediately get notified of tempering and shut down the transfer," she said, highlighting a part of her notes. "And since guns are real fucking hard to come by, they're not gonna plan for a neo-tech sniper rifle hitting their speedy drones with an EMP charge from a hundred meters below."

Flux bit her lips. It made sense, and she hated the fact that it made sense. Her sweet, shy, her gentle Roen couldn't possibly be a murderer. "He resisted, Korella. He stood up for himself, staring down the barrel of a gun, and refused."

"Which is admirable. A lot. But based on everything we've overheard, back when Franklin showed up at Vinny's and then during that night, it's very clear they have done this before." Korella's voice turned softer. "Clearly he's not a willing participant, Flux. But we can't ignore what's in front of us."

Her Roen was good. Flux knew this as firmly as breathing air.

And if he had been forced to kill, in the past… then it was twice as important for Flux to get close to him. They could plan, they could scheme with Korella — but it would be all for nothing if the boy she loved ended up destroying himself from the inside.

"Okay. What else?"

Korella looked at her with concern. "Maybe we should…"

"What. Else?" Flux ground out.

A few clicks. A flicker of the screen as notes scrolled past.

"The keres angle. Since they make up less than zero point zero-zero-three percent of the population, it's possible we might track our sniper down. Keres enjoy some hefty endangered privileges," Korella said. "They're an offshoot of vampires who, according to some history books, used to roam the bloody battlefields like vultures, feeding off the slow death of mortally wounded soldiers. Nowadays in civilized society, the gov provides extra funding for any establishment that labels themselves as 'feeding-inclusive'. Many hospitals fall under this category, selling blood bags for regular vamps."

Korella scrolled further down her document, a screenshot of Sirrej's map at the side. "For keres, this label specifies that the establishment must set aside a guest room their species may use free of charge, at any hour of the clock. In our beloved megacity, there's five such establishments."

Flux leaned in closer from her spot. She could see the little red circles marked on the map — three were hospitals, and two nightclubs.

"If we want to find our criminal, we should look in one of these places." Korella shifted her upper body toward her. "Should we look in one of these places?"

Flux frowned. A hospital or a nightclub. If she had to guess, she would've bet on the latter. "Raveine and… the Origami Club?" she read the names out loud.

"Mhm. It's far from guaranteed our keres would make use of these privileges, but. If one was to go looking for her kind, there could be worse places to start."

Maybe so. Flux wasn't too keen on the idea. Of the whole criminal group, the keres seemed to be the most dangerous one by far. Humans like that Franklin idiot would be way easier to exploit.

Flux let out a slow breath, forcing herself to relax. Getting her blood pressure up right now wouldn't help anyone.

"Okay. All this is good to know, but I think it's enough for now."

"What, you don't want me horsing around in some dingy den of sin?" Korella smiled.

"Nah. Staying around Roen should be our best bet, I think. If we decide to take a looksie, we could always hire a private eye or something. You'd look awesome as a desperate damsel in one of those noir crime novels."

"I think auntie has one of those long cigarette holders Victorian ladies used to puff on."

"Of course she fucking would. Like I said. Mommy material."

Korella quickly moved on from that. Her screen lit up once more as she switched windows, now going to her emails instead of her notes.

"Investigation aside, the ultimate goal of Project R is to successfully extract our subject from the evil grip of his brother — who, by the way, I did look up and found very little on. Arlo Travall is a squeaky clean normie on all fronts of the net."

"I fuggin hate normies."

"Uhum. So I sent over those questions to our family lawyer, and his answers were… fairly conclusive." Korella clicked on one cluster of emails. Legal jargon, from what Flux could see. "If a hypothetical Mr. R. were to create and/or rig explosives onto any transportation device — such as cars, trains, et cetera — he would be fully responsible for the act and all damages it caused, be it property or personnel. Even if he was coerced into it."

Korella looked at Flux patiently.

She just stared back. "That's it? Just… just like that?"

"I'm afraid so." Korella played with her hair. "Flux, I know you're blinded by the pink little heart emojis whenever you even think about him… but sending off live explosives into a busy megacity is really fucking bad. Like, death penalty kinda bad."

"Hey, courier drones stay out of the population's reach until they arrive at their private destination."

"Which is the only reason why it's not classified as a terror attack."

Flux closed her eyes. "Fuck."

"Precisely. Now, I think it's safe to assume they're using a tiny, concentrated charge that's only capable of hurting the person holding it. Anything more than that, and it would be plastered all over the news."

Flux leaned back on the bed, her head hitting a pillow. "Plus, phones n' shit have been known to randomly combust. If a single drone bangs apart out of millions being sent every month, companies may just assume it's faulty hardware."

"And so we're back to square one," Korella confirmed. "In the eyes of the law, Roen is guilty of murder."

"If this all began a while ago, then a kind-hearted kid was coerced, threatened and forced by his older brother into something he didn't want to do. He doesn't deserve that," Flux said roughly.

"And?" Korella sensed it coming.

"And even if he did, even if he's responsible on all levels of reason and logic and moral justice — I don't fucking care."

Flux was done pretending to care about what people considered as 'right'. Two years ago, in a little café balcony shaded by neon lights, she had lost the ability to see the world in anything but 'him' and 'not him'.

If something stood in the 'not him' category, it could die in a fucking fire.

Korella remained silent for long minutes. Not a sullen or resentful silence, but a peaceful one. A dignified air that said: 'you've got time to get yourself together, girl. I'll be right here when you do'.

Flux traced the faint violet patterns on the dark ceiling. When did everything become so complicated? All she wanted was a simple story of boy meets girl — even if the boy was a little shy, the girl a little unhinged. They were made for each other.

She kicked a leg against the foot of the bed. Thump. Thump.

"Not much on the djinn front, I take it?" Flux asked eventually.

"I've got a few notes here, but, mm…" Korella sighed. "The whole thing is kind of a moot point when you need to drop a million creds just to set up a meeting with one of the three djinns operating in Sirrej. Commercial wishes have a month-long wait time, they leave a paper trail that's immediately picked apart with a microscope by the gov, and even djinn magic has its very restrictive limitations. You wanna hear 'em?"

"No. Not really. Not right now."

Flux could hear a few more clicks. Then some clops, and then the bed lurched as Korella settled onto the other side of the monstrous bed. Flux turned her head to see the centaur swipe at her datapad, putting on some melodic dnb to murmur from the stereo system.

"Long day for me, too," Korella said. "Some of the new maids are so messy that I needed to clean after them."

"The horror."

"And then I had to wire some payment to the gardeners keeping the hedgerow trimmed, get the fountain's water changed… You know. All the shit you don't want to deal with."

"Yup. Now I've got a cozy little apartment where I can leave out pizza sticks and not a damn soul is gonna judge me for it."

Korella sent her a look over her datapad. "But it was a good day, right? You made some progress with him?"

"Yeah. Oh yeah, actually…" Flux perked up a bit. Rolling to her side, she fished out her phone from a pocket and began tapping away. "Guess what I just looted, oomfie." She held up the screen toward Korella. "A legendary human phone number!"

"What? Gods, why didn't you say so sooner," Korella gasped with a hand on her collarbone. "You're aware that it's tradition to shoot a message over to the dalliance partner you're trying to woo, as a signal of courtship, on the very first day?"

Flux's eye twitched. "Fucking what?"

"Mhm, eeeveryone knows that. Why, poor Roen is probably holding back crocodile tears right now, glued to the screen of his phone in hopes that a fair maiden perhaps deems him a worthy paramour—"

If she's lying, I'm gonna kick the ice cream bucket down her fucking stairs.

Flux quickly tapped on the contact 'Roen <3 <3 <3' and, after a moment of frozen indecision, typed out a message. Her finger hovered over the send button.

The centaur made some chicken noises.

Flux: Yo whats up.

She felt her wings begin to flap to the rhythm of her heartbeat, watching those three words with bated breath. If this went to shit, she would so blame the whole thing on Korella.

Miracles still existed, because she barely had to wait a minute before a reply came.

Roen: Hi, Flux. Nothing much, thanks.

"Dude, he replied," Flux rolled to her other side. "With like, words and shit!"

Roen: Just watching some vids.

Flux: Oooo you baiting me or what? You know what I gotta ask now :3

Flux laughed to herself. There was no way he was talking about watching those kinda vids, right?

"Flux, dear. You are fucking giggling." Korella stated blankly, watching from her centauren high ground.

"Sssh, he's typing!"

Korella snapped her mouth closed with a look resigned for lost causes.

Roen: It's a documentary, actually. About the dark zones and how they've affected the construction of the Mega-Nexus.

Roen: Boring stuff haha.

Flux: Nah thats nothing, u should see my coding tutorials

Flux: They're dryyyyyyyy

Flux: But yea I'm just chillin too. Went over to Korella's

The centaur in question flicked a tail as she read along. "I did not consent to becoming affiliated with your awkward mating rituals."

"Oh shut it, you attention whorse."

Roen: You mentioned her today. Is she a friend? Or one of those thirteen siblings lol.

Korella cackled in the background, but Flux was too busy imagining Roen 'lol-ing' out in real life. It was just so darn cute, she wanted to reach through the screen and squish his cheeks like a stress ball.

Flux: Uuuuh friend lmao. My fam wouldn't be caught in a neo-gothic getup if their life depended on it

Roen: Oh? I figured if you were anything to go by, your relatives must be very stylish.

"HE COMPLIMENTED ME!" Flux screamed. Her jittery wings threatened to float her off the globe like a helium balloon.

Best friends or not, patience was a finite resource, and Korella was just about to reach the final drops of hers when Flux nearly kicked her eyes out. "Girl. Stop. You're degenerating into those drama queens we used to make fun of. You need to relearn how to act like yourself in his presence."

"I am!"

"No. The real nightbug I know is calm and aloof and snarky. She doesn't give a fuck about what others think of her. Excitable sometimes, when she's doing something she likes — but smart about it. Not this," Korella sniffed, "this squealing valley girl."

Flux frowned at her. "And what if I became that? Hm? Because that would be right up the alley of not giving a fuck."

"Then I'd be right there with you. I'm just trying to hold you to your highest standards, girl. For your sake — and for his. Showing him your true and awesome colors is the greatest gift you could give a boy like him. He's falling hard already, I can tell."

Ain't nothing like a horse kicking you in the feels.

Flux blinked a few times to clear her eyes. She adjusted the pillow under her head and raised her phone once again. Roen's last message — his compliment — glowed brightly on the messenger's gray background. He was typing, now.

Roen: Sorry.

Flux's fingers tapped quickly and with confidence.

Flux: Nah ur good, oomfie

Flux: Was just talking with Korella. There's this new patch coming out for a game we play anddd… she's hyped af

Roen: Are you looking forward to it, too?

Flux: Yeah, kinda

Flux: :3

Roen: Hmm. Maybe I need to give gaming another try sometime in the near future. I'll have to ask my contact about some recommendations.

Flux: WHAT whos ur contact????

Flux saw him begin typing, then stop. Then typed again.

Roen: You are. Lol.

Flux: Oh.

Flux: :3

"I wonder if he even knows what that emote means," Korella commented.

"It's my smug face," Flux said. She did a little contented smirk like a cat who’s got the cream. "A very prevalent cultural piece in net talk and animated vids."

Flux: We're gonna need to get you a Vapor account and uuh

Flux: Wait, u got a decent pc?

Roen: I think there's an old computer gathering dust somewhere in the attic. Hold on, I'm going to go check.

Flux: Nonono staaay, I'll build u a new one!!

Flux watched in desperation as her message went unread. She didn't want to make him dig up a skeleton, for fuck's sake. Give her a single afternoon, and she'd slap a beast together good enough to run Bee Crisis Reloaded at one-twenty frames per second in 8K.

"Could always be worse," Korella said. "Imagine if he was a console user."

Flux hummed in reply. She always wondered what Roen's house looked like on the inside. Two years was a long time to resist scouting out his bedroom, but a certain centaur always managed to talk her out of it. There was stalking — confined to a single location like Vinny’s — and then there was stalking.

One needed a restraining order, the other was kinda like visiting the zoo.

Korella stirred next to her. "Hey, my vid player is bugged out or something." She repeatedly tapped a finger against her datapad. "No way it's supposed to be doing this."

Dropping her phone, Flux sat up and scooted over to see what the issue was. Korella handed it over without a word.

Her playlist was open, currently playing the hour-long mix that streamed through the speakers, the visualizer painting the screen to the rhythm of the beat. Seemed fine to Flux. Though sometimes the adblock failed to catch some of those pesky nightmares, so she immediately went to the extensions tab to see if everything was up to date. A simple cache reset often solved shit, too.

It took a few more seconds for Flux to notice Korella holding something close to her face, with her thumbs quickly flying over its surface.

"My phone!" Flux yelled, bodily launching herself at the centaur.

She was too late.

The wrestling match that followed couldn't have lasted more than a dozen heartbeats, but the damage was done. Flux gripped her phone with a sinking feeling as she read the new line of text standing proud in the messenger.

Flux: Hey, wanna go out with me this weekend?

"Fuck fuck fuck no fuck you stupid damn idiot mule, what have you DONE?!"

Flux smashed her phone down into the mattress face-down, unable to look at the string of words her traitor of a friend had uttered in her name. What would he think of her now, just nailing up a question like that? It was too pushy and too forward and probably scared him off rather than—

"I am not sorry. That one sentence, right there, was about two years overdue."

Flux was about to growl something nasty when, like the hammer of a judge silencing the crowd — a single ding came from her downturned phone.

Flux and Korella stared at each other.

She felt like one of those third-person game characters observing themselves from afar, as Flux slowly reached out. A constriction of fingers, a grab, a twist of her wrist. The conversation flashed before her eyes, and then Flux arrived at the very bottom of the screen.

Roen: Sure, I'd love to.

Her vision narrowed down to that short reply. It felt unreal. It felt impossible, felt better than finding the last piece of code for a program she'd been working on. No fucking video game could even hope to reach a single percent of the dopamine running through her veins in that moment.

In those moments when she internalized what it meant. What it truly meant.

Holy shit. We're going on a date!

14: Roen

"…and when the heat drops, it forces the residue to solidify. You can see the venom separating itself from the mixture and pushing to the edges."

Roen watched the bottom of the beaker darken to an almost burnt gray color, with a greenish yellow layer gathering on the sides. One of the undergrads — Gavva, his name was? A goblin fairly tall for his kind — held the test tube carefully above the mouth of the beaker.

"Stone — more precisely, granite, is what you'll now find in the middle," Professor Newrock clinked the glass with the pointer. "Had we used iodine solution instead of ethanol at the beginning, we'd be seeing the reverse — the venom pulling to the center and repelling the granite over to the sides. Though in a more forceful manner."

Roen wasn’t a chemist, but even he had seen the ads urging medusa folk to donate their venom at the dentist's office. It was some potent stuff.

Roen silently took one of the spent vials, wiped down the residue stuck to the table with a rag, and moved to the sink at the side of the lab. He rinsed out the vial and placed it to dry alongside the other ones. Regular solvents came out easily enough. It was the non-human materials that tended to be particularly stubborn.

The lab was fairly empty at this time of the day, with only a few undergrads scattered around and occupied with their own experiments. The steady hum of overhead exhaust fans softened the low conversations to create an atmosphere reminiscent of a more industrial library.

It was a good day. Exchanging text messages with a certain pixie last night contributed a lot to that.

Fighting the urge to take out his phone and reread their chat logs for the hundredth time, Roen washed off his hands instead. It was hard to believe the guy who could send concise paragraphs in the snap of a finger was the same bumbling idiot unable to look a girl in the eyes for longer than three seconds. He'd never had an issue communicating in text. Like an impossible stunt reduced to a simple paper-formula.

'Wanna go out with me this weekend?'

Flux's question echoed in his head. When he had first seen it, carrying his dusty computer over to his bedroom table, he barely avoided dropping the whole thing on his feet. A girl asking him to hang out? It was surreal. It was unprecedented.

And it was happening.

It wasn't a date, though. Surely not — he shouldn't read too much into it. She just wanted some new blood for their gaming group, probably. Flux definitely came off as a super extroverted person, just flying up to people in a busy café like that. She wouldn't think twice about shooting a casual question over to an unremarkable human. He needed to remember this; no matter how much he wanted it to be more. No matter how much space the pixie was already taking up in his mind.

Roen snorted to himself, wiping his hands. When you have no connections, even the smallest act of charity can feel like a declaration of love.

As he walked back across the lab, a bookish gargoyle working on a solo project waved a hand at him. His other was submerged inside a torn open bag of — Roen tilted his head, reading the label as he hurried over — cellulose powder. Harmless, especially to someone with rock solid skin.

"Could you help me out with this?" the gargoyle asked. A puff of powder rose from around his clenched fist. "I can't leave the ectoplasm in the open or it's gonna phase through my fingers."

"Sure! Yeah, of course," Roen said, leaning over the prepared equipment. A magnetic scale, a sealant glass cage, some open notebooks — he didn't know much of their purpose, but he didn't need to. "Um, what do you need?"

The gargoyle pointed over to the locked cabinets. "Point two grams of ifrit ashes."

"Oh," Roen said. A shiver of fear traveled across his back.

"I hope we're not low. It's the last reagent I need to document to get the full list."

"No, um, we shouldn't be. I'll get it for you right away."

The key threatened to slip from Roen's sweaty hands as he approached the glass cabinets. He opened the section at the bottom, labeled as 'combustive under specified conditions'. Dozens of little red bags were piled in the leftmost drawer. 'Air pressure', a sticker warned.

It was just a substance like any other. A tool for a plethora of normal uses, Roen told himself.

But it didn't stop the image of Malcolm's gloved hand reaching out for the bags. It didn't stem the memory of the test drone flaring up in a controlled blaze and engulfing the head of the target dummy.

Roen hovered above the open drawer, staring down with eyes that recalled slipping a dose or two into his pocket. Taking the plunge, a foot in the door, when Arlo asked for it. An easy slide from innocence.

Roen quickly grabbed two little bags, locked the cabinet and sharply looked away. It was done. There was no forgiveness for him and none that he deserved, there never would be… but it was done.

"Here, pour it from the top. Thanks."

Somehow, Roen managed to keep his hand steady as he let the reflective, obsidian-like powder flutter down into the sealant cage. Rather than settling at the bottom, some of the ifrit ashes remained hovering in the middle as if drifting on an invisible wind.

The gargoyle then brought his hand over and dropped a white fistful of… something inside with an uncertain state of matter. Solid, but dripping. Smoothly fraying at the edges. Roen took a step back.

"Do you know where ectoplasm comes from?" Professor Newrock's voice rang out from his side. Roen glanced at the student first, then at the professor having walked up to the counter, both watching the sealant cage lock and begin to pressurize. Was he asking him, or…

"Um. Wraiths, professor?" Roen said.

"That's right. More precisely, it's something that forms during a wraith's exertions to turn solid — something they can maintain for a few hours a day, depending on the person — and gathers in the large intestines. It is then forcefully expelled upon shifting back to an immaterial state."

"Oh. So it's…"

"Wraith excrement, yes." Professor Newrock watched the ectoplasm mingle with the ifrit ashes curiously. They were flaring now, but the white wisps somehow coated the flames in a peaceful cloud-like state.

“You could wave a hand right in the middle of that, and wouldn’t feel a thing,” he nudged the glass with his pointer. “Makes it impossible to control without specialized equipment, too, since the immaterial – though harmless – heat now phases through any solid object.”

“Does it work in a regular environment?”

“Well, you need some initial pressure to combust the ashes, but yes. Until the ectoplasm dissipates in the open air – which it does. Rapidly so.”

Professor Newrock gave the gargoyle a pat on the back. "Easy with this, will you? There's a few combustibles with harder reactions, and your dissertation is solid enough already."

The gargoyle adjusted some settings on the sealant cage. "This is the last one I need, professor."

"Good." Professor Newrock turned and slowly made his way through the lab, walking between rows of empty work desks. Roen followed.

Their steps quietly echoed in the sterile space. Something bubbling rose and faded a few rows down.

"Are you feeling okay, Roen? You look a bit paler than usual."

Roen wasn't sure what to say. He gave a little shrug.

The professor rarely pushed. He must've looked bad if even he took notice. "I can finish up here alone. Not a busy day, right now, and Gavva is always happy to score some extra favors with the cleaning."

"No need, professor." Roen smiled a bit. "I'm not ill or anything. Just… you know. Stress, a lack of sleep. I think."

"Mmh. The usual banes of student life."

"Ha. It didn't change much for me, after graduation."

"Unfortunate," the professor said. He paused for a moment as Roen stopped to put a thermometer someone had left out back in its casing. They continued walking. "That's unfortunate," he repeated.

Roen looked down, shrugging again. Fortune had little to do with it. It was a sort of justice, for one to reap what he sowed.

"But it's not all bad. I have a lot more time to dedicate to my hobby, you know, crafting and wiring. Drawing. Using my hands to make stuff."

"Sirrej needs more of that. The world as a whole does. Nowadays, creation is an activity that's mostly reserved to the net archives. A sad state of things."

"No," Roen said, a bit louder than he intended. He relaxed his tone. "No, I mean, sure the net is a mixed bag. But there's some wonderful people doing wonderful things online, too. Like, she's the kindest—"

Roen bit his tongue.

Look at you. A desperate fool so lonely, you start ranting about your nonexistent love life to a teacher you hardly know.

Professor Newrock looked at him sideways. "I'm not a gov official, Roen. It's fine to just outright say that I'm wrong."

Roen smiled. "Maybe you are. Just a little bit."

The professor put his hands in his lab coat's pockets, silent for a minute. When they arrived at the front of the lab, stopping in front of the whiteboard, he gestured toward the chair by the door where Roen had put his things. "Go."

"Professor?"

"You've helped a lot. I can manage by myself from here on out." He scratched at his side through his coat. "Go home for today." He tried to, but the professor didn't let Roen get a word in. "That's an order," he said, writing a quick note and extending it toward him.

Roen looked around, seeing the handful of students methodically working in the lab — none of whom seemed to need an extra pair of hands. A lazy streak of sunlight tried and failed to penetrate the tinted windows from outside.

"Okay," Roen said, taking the note.

He reached for his backpack and slung it over his shoulders. "Same time tomorrow?"

"Take tomorrow off, too. Get some sleep, Roen."

"I will. Thank you."

Some beeps, sensor unlocks and a quiet farewell to Quintin later, Roen was walking past the vibrant lawn of the university grounds. It was barely past noon, and the white marble of the campus made his eyes squint when he glanced to either side.

Roen fiddled with the small piece of paper still clutched in his hand, lost in thought.

He turned the note over.

He then laughed silently, putting it in his back pocket. The professor had snuck him a pickup line.

Maybe some of the early summer light had started to rub off on him, too. Weather patterns could affect the human mental health, Roen remembered reading a long time ago. He never noticed it. Sirrej was a city of rain. Maybe that's why it was, sometimes, harder to smile.

He hefted his pack, turning down to the sidewalk when his phone began to ring.

Roen slowly came to a stop, and just like that, his mood began slipping away from him. Not many people had his number. Not many reasons for anyone to call him.

He pulled out his phone. Unknown number, the caller ID said. Despite the warmth of the day, he shivered.

"Hello?"

"Roen." Malcolm's voice crackled through the device.

Silence. The rhythmic thud of a billiard ball echoed in the background. "Roen, my favorite man, how are you doing?"

Roen wet his lips. "I… I'm fine. Doing fine," he said, hearing himself back on the speakers. The statement was turning more and more a lie with every passing second.

"Great. You're at Derilect-Helix Co-Opt still, if I have your schedule pegged right," Malcolm said. There was a pause, then another ball hit coupled with a pleased release of breath. Lapel microphone brushing against fabric and picking up far too much detail for comfort.

"No, I've already left. I'm finished for the day," Roen said quickly. Anything to create distance between him and the implied task hanging in the air.

"Oh? You're not coming down with some virus, I hope?"

"I'm not," Roen said. He would have scrambled to fill the silence, back in the early days. He didn't elaborate, now.

The steady crackle on the other side cut off, deafening entirely, as Malcolm likely switched to another call. The connections guru, the others sometimes called him. A self-made intermediary, managing both client interactions and the flow of money between them. Keeping an ear in several rotten pies.

All the incriminating threads that the blues or sec-corps could hope to follow on the net about their jobs; it all began and ended with Malcolm. Because, despite being as ordinary a human as they came — he could never be found.

The call switched live once more.

"Good. Not even the flu has caught up with me in the past decade. No runny nose? You're not coughing, right?"

"I'm not sick."

And if he was, the company he kept was probably worse anyways.

"I'll have a mask ready, just in case," Malcolm noted to himself distantly. Roen could hear him adjusting the mic. "When was that, mmh, that outbreak with the imp pox? Remember, the one that had the blues cordon off the entire southern city block?"

Slowly, Roen sank down onto the curb wall. He had read about the imp virus on the net. A spell gone wrong. "That happened in Pulford," he said. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"Calm, calm. We're just making conversation, Roen. We're all civil governmental citizens on this line."

An electric whine followed his voice, a rapid roll of billiard balls as the table reset to a null game state. Cue sticks rattled in the metal holder.

"You want to call a meeting," Roen guessed. He had guessed the moment Malcolm started talking about masks.

"Of course I want to call a meeting. I would have contacted your brother and then he would've told you, but he can’t really spare the time to babysit. He gave us some orders and dropped off the grid," Malcolm said. If Roen knew better, he would have guessed the man was annoyed. "How’s the bigboss doing, anyways?"

"I don't know, he just… just shows up, usually." Roen's hand was going numb, but he didn't dare move a muscle. "He has spoken to you? What did he say?"

"I’ll tell you later. With everyone present."

The snap of a pressurized can. Liquid splashing against glass.

"Why, is there something you’d like to share with the lowly folk?"

Yes. He promised that things would change. That I wouldn't need to do this anymore.

But Roen remained silent. Because he didn't know of Arlo's plans, of why he was telling him one thing and them something else. Because he was terrified that despite his brother's words — he would need to kill again.

"Mm. I forget that you don't know much of anything. It's fine. Expected it, really. You're the hands, not the brains."

Malcolm drank.

"Well, I have news to share with the good people, since Arlo is too busy and all. He asked me to bring the boys together and give some updates. I just wanted to give you a little heads-up."

"When?"

"Expect it within the week. At the usual place," Malcolm said. He clinked a finger against his glass. "Or… you guys could gather at 75th Founder's Street, hm? What do you think, Roen? Wanna play host?"

"No."

Malcolm knew he didn't.

There's only one reason why a person like him would directly reference both the location of your workplace and the location of your home in a single call.

We don't just know where you live — we have your entire life down on a paper sheet.

"Alright now, I'll keep in touch. Go easy on your brother while you're at it. He should have everything well in hand."

There was a rustle of the microphone, and then the call ended.

Roen immediately went to call Arlo.

"Please pick up. Please, please, please…" he muttered, sensation creeping back to his hand in a riot of sharp tingles. It only made the tremors worse.

The call rang out for ten seconds. Thirty. A whole minute, and when the duration ended, he repeated the process — to the same effect. When he wrote out a message instead, he had to try multiple times to get all the words right.

Roen: Malcolm is setting up a meeting. He asked about you. I thought this was over, Arlo. CALL ME.

Roen watched the message blink in the chat box. The status at the bottom remained unread.

Panic started to claw around his neck. Sweat, the freezing in the veins that somehow ran hot and cold underneath the skin. The eyes looking down the street, across shaded corners of the nearby store — the animal part of the brain responding to a threat, to fight or to give in. Except, unlike with Franklin on the bridge, he could neither punch nor jump off the edge this time.

His fingers moved automatically. He hadn't even realized what he was doing until he was staring down at his contacts — the so few that remained — and his finger tapped on the one single name that had yet to betray him, had yet to abandon him in the dirt.

'Flux, calling.'

He didn't know why he did it. There was no process that could rationalize calling someone that he wanted firmly distanced from the hellscape he was living.

He called her anyway. She picked up before the second ring could finish.

"Hey hey hey, it's your favorite pixie speaking!"

She paused for a short second when no answer came. "What's up, Roen? Thinking about getting that PC built?"

"I…" Roen breathed. He didn't know what to say. A thousand words appeared in his head before they all coalesced into the same thing — selfish.

He thought, maybe, that this would make himself feel better. Because he couldn't handle the weight and sought the closest method to offload. To shield himself — with no regard to the pixie on the other end whatsoever.

This was a mistake.

"Roen?" he heard Flux shift on the other end, coming to attention. "Roen, are you alright?"

"Yeah," he whispered.

A single tear rolled down his face.

"Yeah. Everything is fine."

Just wanted to feel alive. Just for a moment. I'm so sorry.

Her breathing was quiet and close in his ear. Intimate. His finger hovered over the end call button.

"You know what?" Flux said suddenly. "I'm a bit busy right now, buuut since I've been bored outta my mind anyways and need to spice things up…"

His heartbeats paused, stuttered, then started up again. But for a different reason now.

"…how about we bring forward that weekend date of ours?" Flux asked. "Does tomorrow afternoon work for you?"

15: Flux

Flux needed to bring in the heavy cavalry, and she needed to do it now.

The distant roar of engines filled the air in a constant hum that enveloped the parking lot outside NullCorp’s headquarters. Towering above, the security corporation’s glass-and-steel skyscraper cast a long shadow, blocking out the sight of the busy traffic beyond. Nestled at the base of an on-ramp leading to Sirrej’s ring of the Mega-Nexus, the parking space felt stuffy despite half the car spots yawning empty.

Flux sat on a low brick wall that housed a decorative section of potted plants — the fake kind — with her chin resting in her hand. To the outside observer, she would have looked bored out of her mind. Which was exactly the point. She needed to channel her utmost 'idgaf' energy for the challenge ahead.

Which was really, really fucking hard at the moment.

'Everything is fine.'

His voice echoed in her head, but it was not the words that filled her stomach with lead and her wings with a constant ache that demanded, 'fly to him!'. It was the tone, lost and hopeless and withdrawing further still. It was that small tremor in his breath. A ship without a lighthouse when the storms were only rising.

She needed to get closer to him, to win his trust, and even her obsession with those caramel brown eyes took a backseat to that. However deep this rabbit hole with his brother went — it was eating him alive. There was no world in which she would let that happen.

When her butt nearly floated off the brickwork, Flux stilled her unruly wings with a mental snap.

Focus, girl. You need to be firm today — for his sake.

If everything worked out within the next hour, Flux would get a chance to make an impression on him tomorrow. She wanted to dazzle him until he saw little pixie-shaped stars. She wanted to inject herself into the framework of his neurons until she rooted out every single hurt and worry that threatened his system.

But first things first. She ground her chin harder into her palm. Family time.

It was ten full minutes after the agreed-upon time when the Bentley Mulsanne rolled into the parking lot, a polished snow-white jewel from an era so distant that only thirteen remained in circulation. The tinted windows in the back obscured the view from onlookers. Flux scoffed when she saw the chauffeur sitting behind the wheel. She explicitly told her mother to come alone.

The driver's frock coat billowed in the air as he walked around to open the back door, bowing at the waist as he did. Human, powdered face toward the ground. Old money and older traditions.

The pixie that emerged from the car was in her natural form. Because of course she was.

A noble of pixen breeding and co-owner of the uppder glade's lion share of ancient wine properties, Lady Luminelle was every bit the queen she professed herself to be. Eight-inch-nothing, her white hair was done up in ringlet coiffure and secured by a platinum pin at the top. Ribbons were attached to her wings like two silken flags of some pre-Godswar nation. Her business dress, while utilitarian for a common outing in the city, still carried enough shinies to serve as a mobile jewelry store.

They said data was the new oil. For anything before that, go find a pixie in a haystack.

Flux watched her mother approach with conservative bats of her wings from the potted slice of greenery she was perched on. She drummed her fingers on he cheek. Nope. Human size suited her just fine. She wasn't gonna shrink to an even playing field.

Luminelle's glass-tipped high heels touched down on the brick parapet next to where Flux was sitting. She smoothed out an invisible crinkle in her blouse before craning her head up toward her lazing giant of a daughter.

"Hello, Flux."

"Hi Mom."

The wind nudged a torn piece of flyer across the parking lot in slow motion.

At least the chauffeur had gone back inside the car, occupying himself with his datapad. Probably as good as Flux was realistically gonna get.

"You look," Flux felt her mother's eyes give her a quick once over, "healthy. Like one of those fashionista influencers in a trendy vid."

"I watch my figure," Flux said. She was telling the truth, nightly snacks notwithstanding. Plus, pixies were hard to fatten up with their wings burning the calories by the thousands.

Flap, click, flap. Exercise while gaming, bitches.

Luminelle hummed, taking the edge of Flux's pullover in a tiny — and obnoxiously ring-dotted— hand. "Cobalt? I like the coloring. It clashes well with the white of your locks." She tugged at it once more before letting go. "You should really let your hair grow out more. The blue tint is…"

Flux's eyes narrowed just a tiny bit.

"…is fine with this boyish cut you have going on. A full, clear white mane would bring out your natural beauty, though. Maybe with some curls at the ends — it signifies a free and adventurous spirit."

"Huh. I am pretty fuggin free and adventurous, aren't I?"

Luminelle pursed her lips. She then patted her daughter's leg. "You are, indeed."

Flux adjusted her chin, watching a pigeon peck at a utility pole.

I am sooo bored. Yup. Look at how little I am caring right now about stuff, Mom. Totally not trying to get anything out of you.

Or you out of me.

"How is work treating you at NullCorp?" Luminelle asked, following her daughter's gaze to the large building. "You're the third from the glade to consider a corporate line of work in the past year. Two of those didn't end well."

"I like it. Kinda-sorta. Gets a bit annoying on days like these when I have to report to the office in person, but otherwise it's just having a laptop on the side to monitor."

"Working from home reduces productivity. By twenty-two percent, according to the annual report."

"I mean, sure. Maybe. I still manage to do a perfect job, and I get paid some very handsome digits for it. Like, six times the civilian average."

Luminelle scoffed. "You get paid scraps."

Theeere it was. Flux was starting to wonder when the silver cuffs were gonna come out.

"I was hoping to discuss this over dinner, but the present works just fine. Look, the reality is that—"

"I want a pair of reservations in Le Petit Rêve for tomorrow. "

"…is that—" Luminelle mouth snapped closed with an audible click. She stared up at her daughter. "What?"

"The old restaurant, up by the city wall. You know, the little establishment that we partially own and supply with some bottles?" Flux said. A finger tapped rhythmically. "I'll need a reservation. Two spots. For tomorrow evening."

"You mean the most premium, crème of the glade invitation-only dining place in the entirety of Sirrej? The one where we showcase our award-winning wines every year, that Le Petit Rêve?"

"Yup."

Flux barely kept herself from rolling her eyes. Dramatic much, Mom?

Never mind the fact that she wanted dramatic. Never mind that she wanted Roen swept right off his feet and into her waiting lap. He deserved nothing but the best.

"Huh." Luminelle said, thoughtful.

Flux expected a much more vehement reaction than that. She dared hope that maybe, just maybe, there was enough parental goodwill lost somewhere within their bottomless wallets for them to consider throwing her a bone.

"It shouldn't be impossible — provided you've a fitting dress still tucked around somewhere in a wardrobe. An appearance like that would make you be seen. Which is something we all want, Flux." Luminelle nodded up at her. Approving, almost.

"So… you'll help me?"

"I will," she smiled. "So long as you make some concessions."

With that, Luminelle reached inside the little purse at her side and pulled out a rolled up piece of paper. When she shook it out, the bottom nearly touched her stomach. "As a direct descendant of the purest of pixen lines, you shall be expected to abide by these standards to lay claim to your slice of the inheritance."

"No."

"Item number one: you shall maintain and inhabit at least one upper glade mansion that meets the family standards, where you must be seen at least four days of the week. The garden lawn must be two acres in size, but preferably three to better accommodate guests, and the grass cannot exceed the length of two point five inches — or six point thirty-five centimeters, depending on the measurement you prefer."

"Jesus fucking Christ, Mom."

"Ahem!" Luminelle cleared her throat. "Item number two: my beloved daughter shall be a gracious host and organizer to monthly parties that include at least twenty guests from the most influential pix, elvin, or centauren families of the glade. During these social events, the regular minimum of six daytime servants must be bolstered to a comfortable fourteen, with a musician or DJ booked if she wishes to appear tasteful." She nodded towards Flux with raised eyebrows. "Which she does. Item number thr—"

Flux slammed her hands down on the parapet. "Mom, I am not going back to glade-living!"

Luminelle shrugged. "Then I'm afraid whatever little boyfriend you're trying to court will never get to experience fine dining."

"You can wave your bullshit checklist all you like — but do not fucking bring him into this," Flux said, staring down at the tiny woman with venom.

"Flux, dear." Luminelle said, lowering her list. "You could marry a darn cockroach and me and your father would give our blessings. Matters of the heart are to be respected and celebrated. Always. We're a modern, progressive family. I'm sure he's a nice boy if he managed to catch your eye, of all people. No — it's your lifestyle that is the issue here."

Luminelle gestured vaguely at her, from top to bottom. "While comely enough, within the pitiful price range, your outfit is a small disrespect toward the hard-earned wealth our pixie ancestors have toiled for and amassed over their long lives. That's one thing. Your cheap apartment is another. A lack of tea parties, missing the perfume, et cetera… You could get away with one rebellion, my daughter. But the family cannot tolerate a whole truckload of them."

"Eh. I don't see it," Flux said, looking at the list with distaste. "It's just a bunch of ass licking, and I really hate the taste of shit in my mouth."

Luminelle's ringed fingers curled around her scroll. "It's not— Power is half money and half illusion, Flux. Wealth is made to be flaunted, or it does not exist. We owe it to our station, no, our species, to show the world government and the billions-value corporations that we matter, too. That we have mattered a long time before they ever did."

Flux sighed. "Mom, it's okay. Seems weird as fuck to me, but I know how much you and dad and all the others care about looking prim to the neighborhood. I'm not trying to change your mind or anything."

"So you'll agree to come back?"

"I was just hoping that you'd extend the same courtesy toward me, is all."

Luminelle watched her for a moment. She slowly placed the list back in her purse. "If we didn't care about you, Flux, we would have stopped pestering you a long time ago."

Flux waited a beat or two longer, chin back on her hand.

"So. No dinner reservations?"

"No concessions?"

"Nah. Sorry, Mom."

"I'm afraid I can't, then, either." Her mother folded her hands in front of her. "Sorry."

Welp. At least she tried. There was, like, a fraction of a fraction of a chance of it actually happening.

Flux smiled softly into the distance. She really would have liked to treat Roen to a magical night.

"You should visit your siblings, when you have the time. Milly and Sojan have been asking about you the most."

"You guys all know where I live," Flux said. "But — but yeah. I guess I'll do that, eventually. A visit to integer five and ten ain't gonna hurt."

Luminelle smacked her leg with the back of her hand. "Stop referring to your sisters as numbers, Flux."

"I do it with my brothers, too, and we're a modern family that's all about equality and shit."

An engine started up the far side of the parking lot, the driver slowing to gawk at the white Bentley at the electric gate before pulling onto the road. The pixies — one big and one small — watched the passing traffic from their perch on the potted section.

"Regardless. It was nice to catch you for a bit," Luminelle said. She adjusted her hairdo, then raised a hand to signal her chauffeur. Her rings in the sun gleamed like a signal flare. She gave Flux another glance. "If you want a night out with us, I hope you know we'll indulge you in any of our homes or restaurants for a little get-together."

"Sure. I may indulge so. We'll see. I do a lot of indulging nowadays. I may find myself out indulged af."

Luminelle winced. "That's another one. Your net vocabulary wouldn't endear you to most, I'm afraid."

"Yeah. I'll try not to throw too many of the exceptions."

Luminelle fluttered her wings, but paused before taking off toward the Bentley's door and the human holding it open. "Your father wishes you well. He would've come, too, but you know how things are right after tasting season."

Flux just made a shooing motion. She didn't hold it against Dad; her call for a meeting had been spontaneous enough to be unreasonable. Even she had enough self awareness to realize that.

The sluggish weekday reasserted its presence in full force when the snow-white luxury car disappeared down the asphalt lane. Distant thump-thumps echoed over the hum of traffic as turrets carried out their bi-weekly weapons drill beyond the city walls. Sirrej, like an uncaring taskmaster, whipped the populace forward with its technocratic synth wire. Produce, market, consume. Make 'em all bleed creds.

Flux took her datapad out, connected to the NC wifi and loaded up the browser. The easy way was a bust; and so now it was time for improvisation. Where to bring him? She wanted something memorable, but without being cliché. Some activity to fill those moments where nothing comes up, but grounded with enough downtime so they could actually talk. A rendezvous for the ages.

She thought for a moment before giving the query a go.

'Cool spots for a first-date with the guy you're crazy about.'

16: Roen

Roen stood in front of his mirror, hairspray in one hand, gel tub in the other, and a confused looking guy staring back at him with a 'what the hell now' kind of expression.

His mop of brown hair was short, slightly tussled, and more than seven years down the road of neglect. He gave the spray a little shake — the digital indicator showing it was half-full, a relic from a bygone highschool era. It would probably do the job without making him look like a plastic hedgehog. He pushed the hair back around his temples and managed to find a decent hairline as a literal silver lining. Maybe he should…

He let his hands drop dejectedly to his sides, putting both products back on the pile. Never mind. No amount of cosmetics would magically transform him into date material. Better to just leave his hair as is; it seemed to be working alright so far, and suddenly growing a pretense of a fashion sense would only draw attention to the futility of the gesture.

Effortless charm, Arlo used to say. Effortless charm — if you look like you're trying too hard, you've already lost. Style is just a score multiplier for confidence. You can't fix the latter with the former.

Roen watched himself in a way he rarely did. Ordinary eyes, one pair of a thousand. Pale skin. A smile that he knew would have looked empty if he tried. He tried picturing the white-and-blue haired pixie standing by his side. Even that elusive drawing of his imagination was more remarkable than the flesh and blood human male in the mirror.

What a ridiculous pairing.

It's just charity. She's doing this because she feels bad for you. Anything else is pure delusion.

He rubbed at his forehead. Fuck. Then why did he feel so damn nervous about today?

Roen went upstairs to his bedroom and quickly began sorting through his wardrobe. When he looked at his phone, his stomach flip flopped a bit upon seeing that it was already 13:48. The day was running away from him at record pace.

Okay. Okay-okay-okay, what to wear. Aside from the blank shirts he usually pulled on at random, his wardrobe had a section with a wide selection of button-downs that ranged from luxury-formal to everyday casual. Roen didn't recognize a single one that he had bought himself.

Following a similar logic that he did with his hair, he ended up choosing a dark blue piece that was bordering on black. Based on the articles he'd read on the net, you could never go wrong with the grayscale as your canvas. Black shoes. A plain pair of beige jeans, crisp and simple. Sorting through his stuff laid out on his bed, his hands hovered over the gray backpack he usually wore to the lab. That would look… odd, wouldn't it?

Did guys usually bring a bag to a date? I mean— to hang out with a friend! Yes. Just that. Not a date.

Maybe the waterproof single-strap could work. Subtle enough to be inoffensive to the eye, and, well, he needed to store his things somewhere. What if they stayed out late and it got chilly enough to warrant a hoodie? An umbrella would be a must, too. The weather forecast predicted a clear day, but a fall could always swoop over the city.

He checked the time again. 14:29.

Datapad, credcard, check. Some blank pieces of paper and a pencil set because, uh, for his own peace of mind, also check. He stared at the row of deodorants on the bottom shelf near his wardrobe, two of which were cologne. Um. He tested a sleek red one with a tauren logo on the case. Maybe just a pinch. Something to distract from his bland humanness.

Roen double checked everything one final time, then after packing everything back to their proper place, rushed down the stairs and into the kitchen with a cocktail of nerves and excitement bubbling to the surface. He paused in the archway. Slower now, he walked into the living room. Both spaces were large, richly furnished with warn colors that would have delighted a whole family. Empty, both.

The ghost of a shapeless mother lingered by the sink. The silhouette of a bookish father, lost in the schematics laid out on the coffee table, flickered only in his mind.

The house was as silent as it has ever been.

Roen blinked away the sudden pressure behind his eyes.

Flux — you're spending an afternoon with Flux today. Get your head on straight.

15:01.

He sat on the couch, running his palms across the fabric of his jeans.

They were supposed to be meeting in an hour, around the St. Gorgon Square in a busy part of town. Roen figured he could be there via metro in less than twenty minutes. Being a proper megacity, Sirrej had a very robust public transport system, and going underground was often quicker than driving through the crowded streets yourself. Especially during the rush hours.

Restless and knowing that just sitting there would only spiral his mind into an endless loop of worry, Roen got his datapad out and opened his most recent tabs. Bold letters at the top proclaimed the title: '55 Ways to Masterfully Make Conversations With Girls — The Ultimate First-Date Guide', and the manicured model smiling at him from the front page didn't make him feel much better. The list below was about equally useful.

'#1: Express your confidence with these simple methods.

Oh shit, yeah, just be confident! Silly me — why didn’t I flip that switch ages ago?

He scrolled past the usual suspects; straight posture, eye contact, a lowered tone of voice, asking open ended questions. They were… well. They were something to keep in mind, he supposed. The problem was that all these required a constant running of the brain, and Roen only grew comfortable in a new environment once he got past the thinking phase. The two states of being were mutually exclusive — and made a 'show of confidence' pretty much impossible. Either he was, or he wasn't.

And right now, the needle was pointing deep into the negatives.

Roen checked the time, then stood with a final glance around. Thirty-five minutes left. Better early than late.

The route toward the nearby metro station was in the opposite direction he usually went, taking him partway into a commercial sector before turning deeper into the city proper. The streets took him past automated vendor kiosks that lined the sidewalk in the pre-smoke-machine daylight. He descended the concrete steps of the station, bought a ticket with a touch of his credcard, down the escalators, and then boarded the train when it showed up after a brief minute of idling in the crowd.

Too nervous to sit still, Roen clutched a grab handle above as he stared out the windows, tunnel ads swimming past in a blur. The passengers around him might as well have been invisible.

He was really doing this. There was no turning back now. Today was either going to be another line in a long list of embarrassments to make him retreat deeper into his shell. Or it could be the start of something beautiful. A rare memory to look back on, and be able to say, 'I have done something right'.

Even if it doesn't become a habit — it doesn't have to. The only obligation he had tonight was to make a special girl feel nice about having him around.

St. Gorgon Square was square only in name; like a flat almond carved between the busy blocks of the megacity, it was an oval shaped walkway of triple-crossed boulevards with benches on the perimeters that would light up with neon lights upon sunset. In the center, a giant screen stood with so little support that it almost looked like a hovering balloon, all outer benches faced toward it so that the populace could admire the 24/7 broadcast of nonstop corporate ads.

From skater gangs to gov propagandists trying to force their pamphlets down the pedestrian's throats — like 'vote for the New Data Plan' or 'join the railworks' — and the endless stream of faces that passed before you could even make them out properly.

Downtown Sirrej was like a shot of gin; quick to move and quicker to make you forget.

Roen arrived at the foot of the square with a good fifteen minutes to spare for their meeting. And so, as he adjusted the strap of his bag and looked around idly, he didn't expect to spot the full-sized pixie sitting on a nearby bench right away.

Flux made the city retreat into the background; in place of the usual cut-off hoodie, she had a sleeveless cream-colored shirt clinging to her frame with black cargo pants that housed a thousand pockets — though both of them cut just short enough to leave a hint of tummy showing in-between. A light azure scarf was wrapped around her neck, and her thick combat stompers bounced up and down the asphalt as if the limbs were living lives of their own.

She's… perfect.

Roen took a deep breath, put his phone away, and approached her bench.

"Hi, Flux."

The pixie's back straightened at his voice, then fully stood when she noticed him. "Roen, hey, hi! You're here early — awesome!"

There was just the lightest dotting of glitter on the subtle lip gloss she wore. As if strategically placed just to be brushed away.

"Oooh. You busted out the whole nine yards, didn't'cha? You look great."

Roen looked away at that, feeling the blood rise to his face. "Thanks. You, um. you look nice, too." He scratched at his arm. "I especially like the scarf. What… what material is it made out of?"

Damn it. Him and his stupid mouth and the stupid things he said. Roen wanted the ground to swallow him.

"Silk chiffon, I think. And I can only think, because it's one of those preem types that come with the label removed." Flux unwrapped one end from around her neck, holding it out as she took a step closer to him. "Wanna grope?"

"Yea— I mean, huh!"

The phrasing of that sent Roen's brain in a firmly not-friendzone direction.

Flux dangled the scarf in front of him like a flag of truce.

"Yeah, it's… definitely silk." Roen said, taking the scarf between his fingers. The physical touch was something to focus on to distract himself from the pixie leaning in so close.

Flux waited a beat longer before wrapping the end back around herself. She let out a little laugh. "Ha. Summer is booting up at a record pace and here I am, going full necc protecc."

"No! It…" he risked a smile in her direction. "It suits you."

Flux stared at him with an open mouth. "Yeai aimm ift kinduh fhuh?" her words slurred over each other. She then gave herself a doggish full-body shake. "I mean — alllllright, golly jee, would ya look at the time! We gotta hurry if we don't want to be late for our booking."

Turning on her heels, Flux waved him to follow after her as she began stomping down the walkway leading toward the leftmost boulevard. It took a few hurried steps for Roen to catch up. He couldn't be sure, but he didn't think he offended her — she had looked more flustered than mad.

"So where are we going?" Roen asked a minute later as they left the square behind, turning down the corner and walking past the buzzing entrance of a plaza.

"Nuh-uh. It's gonna be a surprise, oomfie."

"Okay. I'll stop asking," Roen said. Another thing the guide had mentioned. "So long as you let me pay."

Flux glanced at him. "Then you'll have to keep that tongue rolling, because there's no way in a million lightyears I will rescind the payment."

"But—"

"I invited you, I'm older than you, and I've already bought the tickets. Going back on it would just be a headache. C'mon — it's my treat for tonight."

Roen wanted to protest, but he paused on small detail in her reply. "Um… how do you know my age?"

Flux's steps faltered for a microsecond. "Oh, that!" she exclaimed. "Uuuuh, you know those yearbooks every highschool posts on their sites? Well, after you mentioned your engi studies I kinda looked you up on the net." She shrugged nonchalantly. "I was curious. Then one thing led to another and I saw your birth date on the uni database and — damn, a BSE at twenty-one, in robotics? You're a fucking genius, dude."

"I'm really not," Roen said. He looked strictly ahead, eyes on the pair of dwarwes walking ahead of them. "So if, if you already know that was a year ago, how old does that make you?"

"It's unknightly to ask a girl her age."

Roen picked at the sling of his bag. "More so than digging up info about guys on the net?"

"That — okay, that's fair." Flux flicked her hair. She thought for a moment. "I'm four years your senior. Breaking into that upper range of the twenties is definitely an experience."

"Good or bad?"

"Good, if you like doing math before every birthday because you forgot your age again."

They walked across to the other side of the street, up a set of outdoors escalators that led to a nook between two unmarked blocks, and then Flux slowed her steps until they arrived at a door with the government's dove sigil by the knob.

Roen surveyed the place, but he couldn't see any windows. "You uh, brought us to have our IDs renewed?"

Flux snorted like a pig. If pigs were cute enough and pranced around with wings. She clamped a hand on her mouth, but the sound had already escaped. "Dude. Don't give me ideas." When she removed it, she was grinning. "We should totally file our taxes together."

Roen laughed nervously. Together, as in, going at the same time. Not a joint tax payment.

The gov-marked building, predictably, opened into a lobby — but his expectations ended there. The interior was an eclectic mix between industrial and rustic, with rocky cavern walls and a skeletal frame of wooden beams overhead. A few high-top tables were scattered around, each with a digital tablet showing wait times for the queue. More than half of them were already occupied.

Flux's combat boots echoed extra hard as she stomped past them all.

On the far side, the receptionist read a magazine on a swivel chair behind a long counter stretching across the wall. Above him, a chunky neon sign of two crossed axes blinked.

"Yo." Flux said, placing her datapad on the counter. "Me and my buddy's got a reservation for some action."

The receptionist's eyes stayed glued to his magazine a moment longer before setting it aside. "Good afternoon. Name?" He noticed the datapad and took it to scan the open ID document into his system.

Roen jumped when Flux elbowed him to the side. "They'll ask for your ID, too, probably."

"Sure," Roen said, placing his own info on the counter as well. He glanced at the neon sign again. "Wait, are we going to be—"

"Yup. Who needs darts or bowling balls when you can split artificial skulls with some spinny-spinny blades of doom!"

Axe throwing. Flux had brought him to an axe throwing venue.

How the hell did you manage to stumble from a bridge and into the arms of the coolest fucking girl in the city?

Apparently, luck was just one of those things that could elude a person for most of their lives, only to smother them in silk and pixie wings in the span of a single week.

After confirming that, yes, a reservation had been made and both participants were above the legal age, the receptionist directed them past the desk and down the hallway decorated by a series of framed photographs and certificates. They had some recognizable names up there, from politicians to athletes to even an official commendation from Wildrunners Inc.

"You've been here before?" Roen asked with a low voice.

"Nope!" Flux stage whispered. "So you'll have no excuse when I mop the floor with your big human butt."

Another brief security scan later they emerged into the main area, one that looked more like a pub than a lethal weapon's range. Dozens of axe-throwing lanes stretched out before them, each one separated by waist-high wooden barriers. Every two lanes had a single table associated with them, and overhead lights illuminated the whole space with a warm amber glow to make the venue an eat-and-compete nook perfect to kick back after a hot day.

When asked if they wanted assistance, Flux promptly refused and pulled Roen to the empty table with her signature on it. Despite the bar being close to full, there was enough distance between the patrons to isolate them in their own bubble of reality. Slowly strummed guitar chords provided a backdrop to the chatter.

The table was low, equipped with digital menu screens, and surrounded by four high-backed seats. Roen took the one closest to him.

"Huh. They had some renovations," Flux said, using both hands to style her hair upwards and to the side, adjusting her white-and-blue spikes — not that there was anything to fix, in Roen's opinion. "The pics on their website had this little alcohol tastery at the back."

Satisfied with her perfect hair becoming even more perfect, Flux sat. But rather than taking the spot opposite of Roen, she slid into the cushions next to him.

That was good, because it meant he wouldn't have to constantly look away to avoid eye contact. Made it feel more casual, not quite as rigid. But it also put the pixie's body in uncomfortably close contact with him, to the point that her shoulders were almost touching his. A constant, intimate nearness.

He coughed, clasping his hands on the table. He wasn't sure whether the pros outweighed the cons.

"I didn't know Sirrej had a place like this," Roen said, conscious of the way the words stumbled from his mouth and the effort it took. He was back to overthinking everything. "For uh, for us civilians, at any rate. Seems like this is just one step removed from firearms."

Flux stretched out languidly on her side of the table, resting her head against her palm to gaze his way. "Box-bars, martial gyms, staves-n-flails schools; it's all there, if you're deranged enough to look. I even saw a muscle-girl club where guys could ask buffed out chicks to spank them over the counter."

"Wow. That's… a bit too much."

"Meh. Violence is, apparently, the way of life anywhere outside of city bounds. You know; nomads and slavers, mutants and wildrunners. Meanwhile the average civvie has grown fat and content behind the cannon-guarded city walls."

"Oh no, that does make sense. I meant the…" Roen trailed off. Flux's face was bored, but her eyes sparkled at him. He cleared his throat. "I mean — it's a good thing that people are safe now. That was the whole point of the WG."

"True, true. And we have the net."

"You could say it's a net positive."

"Nooooo," Flux groaned, thumping her forehead down on the table. He did catch the upward tilt of her lips just before, though.

Turned out, the menu in front of them was already topped up with pre-paid credits so they simply had to browse and choose their poison with no added pressure — Roen likely would've stressed about ordering too much, otherwise. He got himself some honeyed duck and a bottle of light grape cider, while Flux went with two large-sized mystery pizzas that she insisted he try. Her Liftic cocktail was a cold delight of ice and proud national independence. To him, when she offered a sip, it tasted like plums.

The service was by peppy waitress rather than by drone. Roen thanked the dead gods with a silent prayer for that. A spontaneous panic attack would not endear himself to the badass pixie treating him so well.

Their table was soon a battlefield of half-destroyed liquid courage and pizza slices that blended toppings like a color gradient. The sauce that came with the package was almost as spicy as the pixie herself; munching, ranting, and living life fast enough to make Roen forget about all and every guide he'd recited in his head. She had this… this magnetism about her. An aura that made you feel like you could do anything — from embarrassing yourself to not speaking at all — and it would be the correct thing to do.

If thoughts were bumps in the road, she was the open highway after miles of potholes. And the city lights had never looked more glorious than during that evening ride.

"…and then we called her on voice — the moderators still raging and trigger-happy with the ban button — and, and it was," Flux let out a small giggle, waving a slice of pizza around. "It was an older gobbo lady picking up. Apparently, we'd been playing with her mom all along."

Roen sputtered, some of his drink going down the wrong pipe. "Wait, and she'd been tanking for the whole group?"

"Yuhup. Good thing her daughter had an auto-taunt spec going on, or we would've wiped on the first boss. Still, the experience was traumatic enough that half the girls decided to quit playing Field Wars 2 for the rest of the month."

"I didn't know things could get so heated on the net."

"That's multiplayer for you. When you pit a couple of competitive bitches together — even in a co-op environment — they're gonna toss and screech and tear their hair out when anything goes even slightly not-their-way."

Flux finished off her slice with a tiny burp and then leaned back in her seat, one foot propped on the edge of Roen's chair. A smudge of sauce dotted the end of her nose. "Man, I am full." She lifted her other leg and rested it on a free spot of their table — and with both limbs raised and angled his way, her cargo pants were stretched to their limits.

Roen had a hard time looking at anything but the space between her legs. The man-spreading — girl-spreading? — pixie's pants pulled taut, outlining the shape of her thighs and the slight gap between them.

"Now, time for our own multiplayer sesh," Flux said with a bite to her lips. She nodded behind Roen, toward their lanes of the throwing range. "You go first."

"Uh." Roen's brain smoked for another moment before he could tear his eyes away. This girl was a force of nature — and he desperately needed a distraction to get his head out of the gutter she'd dragged him into.

Right. Right, steel and blades and spinny things. He could focus on that.

Extracting himself from their table, Roen stepped up to the barrier that housed an orderly row of nails and a wide selection of axes hanging from them. Small hatchets and mid-sized lumberjack's tools that looked like they could destroy the most stubborn of logs with a single fell. Above his head, a small screen played a tutorial vid showcasing techniques for beginners. How to grip, how to stand, how to let loose. Ways to adjust after the throw.

He chose one of the smaller hatchets, gripping it around the base. He tried to ignore the pixie, so close and watching at his back, and adjusted his stance with the dominant foot back and shoulder-width apart. Throwing shoulder aligned with the target — a regular target board painted with concentric rings, though a dozen different options were available on their table's control panel.

"You score a hundred, and I'll pay for your next order at Vinny's!" Flux hooted from the back.

Roen let out a breath and looked at the vid once again. He might've been nervous and his hands might've stained the wooden handle with sweat, but he was good at following instructions. Axe straight over the head, elbows by the ears. He needed a straight release and his wrists locked solid.

In quick succession he reared back, added a bit of extra momentum with leaning slightly forward, and released at eye level.

The hatched spun and spun in the low amber light, flying down the lane straight as an arrow and — bang.

The butt of the blade bounced off the outer circles of the target board.

'Red - 0 points', the screen above declared.

Damn it. Roen kept his hands from shaking too much by swiping them in his pants.

"Hey, you actually hit it! That looks so fucking fun," Flux said, joining him at the range with buzzing wings. Her shoulder brushed his as she took her spot at the neighboring lane. "My turn."

Instead of the small ones, Flux hefted a proper axe in her hands. Roen noticed the display above her showed a different grip — recommending to use both hands, like a baseball bat — but Flux didn't give it a look. She just mirrored his earlier position and, squinting her eyes and pulling the axe back, rammed it forward with a sudden move.

The axe blurred.

Too fast to even follow with the naked eye, the weapon was like a massive blaster shot — and the clang from the far end followed right after. It had missed the target entirely and bounced off the steel panes behind.

"No! What? No, fuck, that doesn't count," Flux said, hovering a feet up to see down the lane better. She tongued the inside of her mouth. "I sent it, like, super hard. That should be worth some points, right?"

"Maybe there's a mode that measures impact power," Roen said. He looked at Flux with no small amount of respect. "You're strong, Flux."

She blushed. Her boots touched back down on the floor, half turning toward him with a hip cocked against the barrier. "Weeeell, you know…" she gestured airily. "It's one of those racial traits; pixies are actually quite strong after ingesting du— I mean, uhm, turning full sized. Would be a real shame if I randomly shrunk down halfway through our contest, haha."

"You would manage even then — you're incredibly competent."

There was a sharp intake of breath, but Roen had already turned back to his own side and picked another hatchet. He glanced at the vid, then took a single step back.

"What are you doing?" Flux asked.

Roen smiled. "Winning."

This time when the hatchet hit the target, it was with a muted thump that sent wood chips flying. The blade stayed firmly lodged inside the third ring.

'Red - 25 points'.

When you lack street smarts, muscles, or a force of personality, a quick uptake on the technique is a worthwhile substitute. For him, handling tools was so much easier than handling people.

His following successes only emboldened Flux — mostly to just throw her axe harder. She even started giving herself a little wing-boosted run before letting loose. It was working, kind of. Her aim was getting better, but her erratic positioning failed to land the axe with its blade forward consistently. With one erratic skid she almost bowled herself over the barrier, so — what she lacked in skill she made up for in entertainment value.

The controls had some pretty cool features; like a mode where the target board began moving vertically, and little coconut-like targets dropped from the ceiling to create a challenge where you had to throw the axe in an arc, shattering as many balls as you could on the way. The smaller hatchets were more easily knocked off course by each collision, keeping them about evenly matched.

"Are you an urk in disguise, dude? An undercover wildrunner or something?" Flux said as she returned from their table with two slices of pizza. She handed him one with a lucky bacon and onions combo.

"Nope," Roen said. He pressed the button for the mechanism to ferry his axes back from the other side, then took a bite. "Still the same old, boring human. Just with an eye for details."

"Huh. Okay, so uh, can you tell me what it is I'm doing wrong?"

Once again, Flux took up position and, once again, she shuffled around like she couldn't stand still. Her jerkily flapping wings probably didn't help with that.

Roen pointed at the screen above with his pizza. "I just follow the instructions. See how the figure is holding the axe — using both hands, above the head and with the legs slightly bent? You have to choose a spot and stay there. Then you have a reference to adjust the correct distance."

"Yeah, I've been trying, but like..." She put one leg forward. She then thought better of it and switched. Like an expedition charting out undiscovered lands, her axe above her head shifted to a new position with each move. "Can you show me? You're a visual learner. I'm more of a… kinesthetic chick."

"Kinesthetic?"

"Oh, y'know." She wiggled the haft of her axe. "Touches, movements. Need some hands-on experience for my brain to really get it."

"Oh! Um," Roen paused with the pizza halfway toward his mouth. He slowly lowered it, the indoors air becoming a touch more suffocating. "Erm, sure," he said, looking for somewhere to put his meal that he did no longer had the appetite for.

Are my hands greasy? Oh shit, um. I think my hands are greasy.

"One moment."

He stepped back to their table to deposit the pizza, tore a napkin out from the holder, then was back at the pixie before his brain could catch up with his actions. The lights were vivid, the background music a soothing buzz. The present a bullet train that required skipping all stations just to keep on rolling.

And Flux — she had never slowed down to begin with.

"So my left leg is the dominant one," she indicated, making an exaggerated step back with the aforementioned — and very well-shaped — leg. "But it wants to jerk forward the moment I start putting strength into the throw."

"You, um. That's too far. You need to have just slightly behind you."

"Oooh-kay," Flux said. She moved it toward, but now it was too far in the other direction. She looked over at him. His thoughts must've shown, because her eyes narrowed dangerously. "Yo, mister prodigy, are you gonna help me or not? Hoarding your wins over a defenseless pixie is not a good look."

Startled out of his trance, Roen went to step up to her — and found himself right in her personal space.

Yes. That's what happens when object A subtracts its distance from object B. The rocket knows where it is, but you sure as hell don't seem to.

She was so close her wings were tickling his face. So close that he could make out that one individual bead of sweat in the crook of her neck. Evidently, a Flux without a hoodie was a weapon more dangerous than the axes they were chucking.

"It's, um." Unsure what to do with himself exactly, Roen put one hand on her far shoulder. Her skin was hot and soft even through the blouse. "Just, back… just a bit…" he said, indicating the leg with the lightest — just the lightest feather touch of her thigh. She had something in her pocket, but she got the message because the leg moved toward him slightly.

"Like — like this?" Flux asked. She was staring ahead, axe dipping for a moment before correcting her grip above. Her voice was breathless.

"Yeah. Now keep straight, just so— woah!"

Roen's hands automatically went to her waist when Flux swayed in place, steadying her. Her erratic wings even created a slight upward force of her body, and Roen got a nice slap in the face by the pixen appendages for his trouble.

"Ohshitfuck, did I just—" Flux began to jerk around, but Roen wouldn't let all their progress be for nothing.

"No, no, I'm still in one piece," he said. He ducked away a bit, but her wings had frozen still already. "You're, um. You're good like this. Maybe bend your knees just a fraction."

His hands felt incredible on the curve of her waist. That went doubly so when he felt her weight drop, and his arms followed it down.

"Hmmw waha bawuttadis?"

"I'm sorry, uh, what was that?"

Roen felt it — just the softest movement of her belly — as she let out a breath. "Ah, how about this, then?" Flux said.

"Good. Good, yeah, that's perfect," he said. It felt like blasphemy to do so, but he let go of her waist with one hand and reached up to grab a free spot on the axe's haft. "Now we just need to — to…"

Warmth washed over his fingers. Flux's lower hand had slipped down and on top of his own.

What is happening. What the fuck is happening.

"And now… we're ready?" Flux whispered.

"Y-yeah."

She pressed back into his chest, bathing his front in unspeakable softness and her wings going flat in the trap of their bodies. When she arched her upper body backwards to gather momentum, he went with her, pushing his crotch into her in an effortless way that makes you wonder if you're not just a piece made to complete someone else.

It wasn't erotic so much as it was romantic. It was about presence and micro-awareness. When your action causes her reaction, then spirals right back at you. Looping like her while-statement to his feedback circuit.

The world then lurched forward via pixie muscle. The axe left their joined hands and sailed through the air, rotating, shattering through one, then two coconut targets.

And then narrowly missing the target board that had just dipped out of the axe's trajectory.

"Oh fuck off!"

Flux burst out in laughter, throwing her head back with infectious joy that made him laugh with her, too. She started to spin around on the heavy heels of her boots, but their collective balance got dizzy somewhere along the way and they got tied in a tangle, legs and arms and wings and all. Roen had just enough presence of mind to direct them back toward their table and keep them upright for an extra crucial second — before they collapsed together into one of their seats.

He ended up wedged awkwardly in the gap between the seat and its backrest, with the small of his back pressed into the plush cushion and his feet planted on the floor to balance a waist that was dangling precariously over the edge.

And with a very cute pixie sitting on top of him.

Flux's face above him was cast in darkness, looking down, with the spiky outline of her tousled hair bathed in amber by the lamp directly overhead. Roen could just barely make out the tilt of her lips, the feel of her hands on his shoulders. So many sensations, and not enough attention to catch them all when every single one deserved its own museum to admire.

"Slick moves, oomfie," Flux breathed down at him. Her face was smug, probably. And close. Her smug face was probably very close.

"Thanks," Roen said. "You've got sauce on your nose."

The chair creaked ominously below them.

She could've scooted back; she could've slid down the side. Instead — while running a hand along his jawline — the pixie rose off of him by flying directly upwards. Wings blurring, she hovered there horizontally looking down at him, one hand on an elbow and the other on her chin, as if pondering one of life's great mysteries — and very much liking the answers. The philosopher pix, he dubbed it.

Using the armrests, Roen pulled himself upright in the chair. He then looked up at the pixie, and, unsure what to say, reached out for another slice of pizza instead. Huh. Corn and sour cream.

"Mmmh, may I?" Flux asked, swooping in to loot his half-eaten bacon slice. She then did a little flip in the air and deposited herself in her own chair, legs dangling over the armrest. Chomp, chomp. "Yo, wanna see something cool?"

"I am seeing something cool, Flux. Or someone, rather."

He was slowly starting to get how this game was being played.

"Haaa-owfmph!" Flux somehow managed to miss her bite. She recovered with a shake of her head. "Okay, okay, no but for real." She held the pizza out of the way, then once she made sure Roen was paying attention, she stuck out her tongue and stretched it all the way up until it reached the tip of her nose. Her eyes crossed like in one of those lewd animated vids.

The smudge of sauce didn't stand a chance.

17: Roen

The night had transformed the city into a smoke show.

A recent shower slicked the pavement, casting a wet sheen on the giant screens of megabuildings to flicker more like electric hallucinations than discernible ads. Colors bled together in oily puddles and interrupted by the vents below the sidewalk. A thousand hurrying feet splashed water, kicked up airborne toothpaste commercials with their billowing leather dusters. A digital cheerleader danced inside a boxed-in booth, her blue miniskirt bobbing together with the energy drink she swirled around.

Roen walked, hands in his pockets. A pixie walked with him.

Often, when he rode the bus home alone, staring out at the city through streaked glass, there was something unsettlingly soothing about the way lights and crowds blurred together. The sheer mass of people turned individuals into mere silhouettes, drifting through neon haze, while the flickering red-blue billboard stretched out pixelated hands to plead for the spare change of someone’s attention. People forgot why they came and why they stayed, and he — he wondered if they noticed if he slipped away.

Being ignored was easy. Safe, too. He had been a wraith in all but name for most of his life; gliding, seeing, but never touching. To touch was to acknowledge that you actually existed, and all those opportunities that had passed right before your eyes? They were mistakes. Roads not taken. Made you wish you could go back in time, and then you woke up gasping for air in the middle of the night when you realized you'd never see them again.

A city at night was a reminder. That others raced with turbo speed while your life hadn't moved an inch.

Tonight, Flux had made him think that maybe touching was okay. That she wanted him to touch.

She wanted… him?

It was crazy, but he was finally starting to believe it.

"…and it’s insane how weird pigeons are. Like, they just strut around like they own the place. I mean, it’s just a rat with wings, right? But peeps go crazy over them! Like that one guy at the park who feeds them bread. You know the type — floppy hat, mismatched socks — seriously, who wears socks with sandals anymore?”

Flux was saying, gesturing wildly with her ice cream and punching right through a shampoo ad.

Roen just walked, and he listened. He liked the feeling that she, somehow, treasured that.

“Right? And then there’s the whole ‘birdwatching’ thing. It’s like a cult. I once overheard some dude at the café talking about spotting a rare blue-footed booby or whateverthefuck.” She gave a lick to her ice cream. Her tongue was pretty long. "Booby. Can you believe that? What's next, tits? Bazongas? We're gonna look up one morning and see a pair of humongous fucking milkers just streaking across the sky."

Roen tilted his head. "Well, that would give some legitimacy to this whole birdwatching business."

"Ugh," Flux scrunched up her nose. "I bet it's, like, a sexual thing for some people. Just go fuck a harpy if you want to jizz on feathers."

"I… doubt that watching birds is considered arousing for anyone, Flux."

She mimed peering through some binoculars — or a looking-glass, since she only had one hand free. "'Oi, look at that pair of boobies bouncin' around! Fucking… Fucking jiggly-ass little things I just wanna, MMPH, smack right off that birch.'"

Roen just raised a brow. The girl had some wild theories. Probably happens when you spend enough time on the net.

"People have their quirks," he said. "Like, for example, how you hate coffee?"

"What! Where'd you hear that?"

"Um, Zoe mentioned something about it. Back when you sicced her on me at Vinny's."

Flux gave an indignant raise of her chin. "First, I didn't 'sic' her on you, I am very polite and cordial to all employees of that establishment…"

Doubt.

"…And second, I don't dislike coffee at all. It's just that I think it's overrated as AF."

That was… well, fair enough. Roen personally didn't have a strong horse in that race. "Huh."

"Like the amount of vids and ebooks — yeah, I do read sometimes — that make the protag just raaaaave about their coffee addiction is so fucking annoying. I get it; it's a drink that tastes like a seven-out-of-ten and smells even better. There, headpats and fairy farts. Now shut the hell up and grow some fuggin creativity."

"You're very passionate about some very random things."

"One sec, gonna think of another topic," she slowed her steps, closing her eyes and furrowing her brows. "Print, open parentheses, random dot randint, open parentheses, zero, comma, nine-thousand, close parentheses, close parentheses."

Roen didn't get it. But he was happy Flux was having fun.

The busy, winding streets slowly changed to become less crowded and more familiar as they neared Flux's apartment complex. Not quite there, but still too close in Roen's opinion — because he didn't want tonight to end yet.

They might have just been on the same wavelength, because Flux pulled him to a stop before a storefront window. Two rows of mannequin heads rotated on the display shaves, each with their own headsets ranging from business black to LED framed candy pink — the latter with a fluffy pompom as the microphone. And cat ears.

Some… werefolk accessory? Very strange.

"Oh shit, look," Flux pointed at a headset on the right, a dark muted brown piece with a leather headband. "That model might be a few gens behind, but it beats out anything else in the comfort department. Didn't know they were running a discount."

Roen saw the opportunity to even the scales. "Do you want me to buy it for you?"

"What? no! You need to buy it for yourself, dummy."

"Oh."

Roen looked at the plastic display slowly rotate in place. "I uh. I don't think it would be very useful to me."

"Roen, gaming on speakers is like playing a piano with oven mitts on; so many of the details get lost." Flux said. "Plus, you don't want to wake the household at midnight when your vampire DPS yowls like a cat because she accidentally filled her cup with A instead of AB."

Roen shrugged. "There wouldn't be anyone to wake."

It was Flux's part to say, "oh." Her hand dropped from the glass display. "I didn't know."

A cold breeze passed the street, blowing a light dusting of rain from the rooftops.

"I live alone — has been, for a long time now," he shrugged again, watching an airborne cigarette disappear below the grating. He didn't want to linger on it, to make it a bigger deal than it was. "Well, with my brother, technically. He's rarely home, though."

"Are you…" Her voice got caught for a moment. "Are your parents…"

He looked up at her, then sharply away when he saw that much... feeling etched on her face. "No! Hah, no, I'm not an orphan or anything," he said. "My parents, they just…"

Left. Packed their stuff one day and simply left without so much as a goodbye. Little Roen wasn't worth their time.

"…live somewhere else."

An electric truck honked at a pair of students jogging across on the far end of the road. They stopped to huddle underneath a metal awning of a magazine shop when another gust of breeze picked up an army of spent droplets. Not much protection to find there, though.

"…been abandoned a lot, haven't you," he heard Flux whisper so low he might've been imagining it. He flinched when a small hand wrapped around his. He didn't move. Didn't pull away either.

She was content to simply hold him like that until he gathered enough courage to look at her.

"Come on," Flux said, smiling softly. "I might not have earned a culinary degree since last time, but I still make one mean bowl of granola."

"No breakfast this time?" Roen said.

"Weeee'll see about that," Flux's eyes narrowed cutely. "No handsome hummie is starving to death on my watch." They walked then, and she didn't let go.

The shiny bulbs above Flux's apartment building were still glowing like an off-season Christmas treat. The city's constant hum was quieter around here, or maybe it was just his awareness that was hyper focusing on the feel of fingers threaded through fingers. His nerves were long buried beneath a mix of exhaustion and a sense of accomplishment.

She had wanted to hang out more after their axe throwing session. He had agreed to escort her home. Now she had invited him to spend the night.

The real Roen would have been freaking out.

The real Roen had apparently taken a vacation today.

Flux came to an abrupt stop near the entrance, so quickly he almost began dragging her after him.

"What the hell!" she growled, stomping forward and ripping the glass door open with enough force to make it rattle. A rubber wedge had been jammed under the frame, keeping it from closing and the locks disengaged.

Roen followed her in and spotted the pixie. Not Flux — the other one leaning against the handrail of the stairs leading up.

His outfit dripped wealth. Cashmere turtleneck with gemstones sewn above an out-of-place breast pocket. One arm — the one he used to lazily spin a flip-phone between middle finger and thumb — was almost entirely covered by red-gold bracelets that stole much of the lamplight above. He was a bit shorter than Flux, but her thick combat boots might've been a culprit to that. His snow white hair was held back in a ponytail.

In short, he was about as natural in the mundane lobby as a clown at a burial ceremony.

"Flux," the pixie said, pushing off from the railing. He stretched his wings with a few languid flutters, then looked around as if he hadn't been the one camping at the stairs. "Interesting accommodations. Very… civil."

Flux threw a middle finger his direction. It was not the light-hearted kind.

Roen's hands automatically started to stray back toward his pockets and himself into the background, but Flux reached out and held onto him possessively. Her grip was like a bear trap. It was a bit scary.

"Asterim," Flux said with an even voice. "Roen, meet brother number two of Flux's snobbish pixie family. Asterim here is one of the first brats my parents shat out into this anally fucked world — as if Sirrej needed another silver spoon rammed up its ass."

"Always a delight to converse with you, Flux," Asterim said. He took a step closer and extended a hand toward Roen. "But the information is correct enough. I'm Asterim. Nice to meet you."

Roen shook the pixie's hand. He introduced himself. He still didn't like the way Flux was tensing up, her fingers wrapped around his arm like a viper's coils.

Asterim shook out a napkin and wiped his hand — not the one he had used for the handshake, though. So it probably wasn't an insult. Probably.

"So would you care to tell me what it is you're doing here?" Flux said.

Asterim didn't immediately answer. A tic, he kept swiping his hand down that napkin like a cheese grater as he looked Roen over. His eyes lingered on the sling of his bag. "Mh."

That much was enough for Flux.

"Mh WHAT motherfucker," she exploded forward, using both her hands to shove her brother backwards.

Asterim caught himself with his wings, holding up both arms in a placating gesture. "Hey. Hey! Jesus and Vejopatis – calm down, Flux."

"Why. Areyou. Here."

"I just wanted to see where my little sister was holed up, okay? When Mother mentioned that you two had a semi-cordial discussion yesterday, my curiosity started to get the best of me. I simply had to visit."

He adjusted his bracelets, napkin forgotten on the floor. Gold jingled. "So, Roen, yes?" he nodded to him. "She brought you to a, what. Burger joint?"

"Axe throwing bar."

"An axe throwing bar," Asterim repeated. "Huh. An axe— Not bad. I mean, circumstances and budget and all… not too bad." He ignored the steadily increasing buzz of Flux's wings. "Did you have a good time tonight, Roen? Was it pleasant?"

"No. It was perfect."

Until you showed up, Roen added silently.

"And what do you think of this humble nook? Plain and mostly clean. But uh, charming, somewhat?"

"It is," Roen said.

"It is, isn't it. I suppose it would be — if you knew just how much better she could be giving you."

"That's enough," Flux said.

"No, little sister," Asterim looked at her. "That's the whole point — it's far, far below the minimum threshold of what we consider enough."

"I don't ca—"

"Do you know how many times I've had lévasse approach at a ball and, front and center, ask about 'that one sibling'? Thrust a rapier straight at my chest using the black sheep of the herd? And all I — all we have to do is swallow our pride and nod along with a smile as they discuss how Sirrej had infected the glade. A limb rotting, smelling foul right under the nose — and the doctor is denied amputation on account of it being family."

Asterim's cold eyes turned back to Roen, and said, "Do you get it now, human? Flux is of pixen blood — and every single day she decides to throw it against the curb. She stomps on her dignity, she speaks like an imbecile, and she works at fucking NullCorp of all places. If she had even an ounce of empathy for what she puts us through, if she cared about her legacy, she'd be living in the upper glade and lavishing you with a sea of gourmet and diamond city lights at your feet."

Her brother said more, much more. But Roen had stopped listening halfway through, his mind stuck on one word — one word on repeat, like a faulty radio snapping back the signal to the same static-filled syllables.

NullCorp.

She worked for NullCorp. The region's security corporation.

A reel started playing in his head, and he was helpless to watch his thoughts piece the puzzle together on their own. He recalled tumbling over the edge and the seemingly random miracle of a pixie swooping to catch him just in time. He recalled her unnatural interest in him; how she invited him for no discernible reason. Recalled the coincidence of Flux renting an apartment right in the middle of the triangle drawn by Vinny's, his home, and his university.

Their continued meetings were not lucky chance encounters. She'd been tailing him for a long time now. To get close to him, and through the unwitting, socially withdrawn boy, gather enough evidence to take down the criminal operation taking place on the dark streets of the megacity.

Everything made sense now — how a girl like her would approach a guy like him. Why she would ask about his family. How she seemed to know so much about him despite never having met her.

He was her job. Nothing more.

Roen looked at Flux — saw her face turn from mildly upset to one of abject horror as their eyes met.

"You're… you're a cop?" he asked.

Her eyes widened, and her mouth opened. But no words came out.

She didn't deny it. She didn't deny any of it.

Roen turned and fled the apartment building.

There was yelling at his back, but it all got lost in a jumble. He felt a hand on his shoulder — insistent, desperate — but he wrenched himself away and pushed through the glass door and heard it shut with a bang behind him.

The street outside — what he could make out of it — was no longer an inviting place as the street lights washed in mosaic blur. The raindrops that painted the asphalt seemed to have risen to eye level, casting a crystalline clarity over the thin ad-smoke that trailed in from the far end of the block. A biting gale tossed it back against the alley.

His legs were on auto pilot as Roen found the bus stop just outside, then ignored the shelter and the figures waiting underneath and walked farther down the route. Lit-up boutiques, traffic signals going from red to orange to green, and slick intersections fell away behind him, an ordinary human on his way with his hands in his pockets to gods knew where.

His face streaked by tears.

The human psyche was an interesting thing. It introduced a little voice in your head, that, while had the capacity to lie, did everything for the good of your own sanity. Even an animal beat enough times with a cane eventually learned to fear it, and would never become a service dog for the blind. Call it adaptation, call it evolution; getting hurt time and time again chipped away at the soul. It changed you.

Healing was possible. Medication did exist. The real problem began when the doctor itself turned on you and poured hot oil down your throat instead.

Be glad if numb is the only state you can exist in afterwards.

18: Roen

The morning alarm came with a headache almost strong enough to drown the incessant beeping out.

Roen turned over, fumbling for his phone on the bedside table and managed to hit the snooze button after the third try. The position left him lying on his stomach, one arm dangling over the edge of his bed and the other stuck beneath his pillow.

He remained like that for some time. The headache didn't pass, though it was reduced to a dull throb at the base of his temples. At least until the alarm started up again.

He let it ring this time.

Beep-beep.

Sun filtered through the window of his bedroom and warmed his back, the dark fabric of his button-down drinking in the heat like desert sand absorbing moisture. As always, the curtains were drawn just enough to keep the rays from reaching his head. Sometimes temperature worked as an insurance policy where the alarm failed.

Beep-beep.

The discarded pill bottle pressed against his side, wedged between him and the bedsheet. The cap had come off, if the little bumps scattered all over the place could be trusted. One of them was right up against his cheek. If he moved his head just an inch, he could have popped it in his mouth and back to dreamland he would go. He remained still.

Beep-beep-beep.

A breath tore from his lungs as Roen pushed himself up in bed. He paused for a moment, then began picking up the sleeping pills and scooping back in the plastic bottle. The headache was a small annoyance, and the glaring sun didn't help with it. The exhaustion was worse.

The alarm had gone to sleep somewhere along those minutes he spent pawing through his crumpled blanket. Roen swung his legs over the edge of the bed, the soles of his shoes hitting the hardwood floor. He ran a hand over his face, pushing back hair that stuck to his forehead.

Bathroom. Teeth and shower — neither of which he had done last night. New pair of jeans and a faded gray shirt. Nails were growing pretty long. He'd cut them some other time. Passed the mirror and left the bathroom door open on his way out.

His phone buzzed once on the bedside table. Text message.

He stared at it for a minute. He then went downstairs to prepare a cup of coffee.

It was a specialty brand, apparently — beans transported from a brewery operating in deep-wilds. Arlo had gotten it for his twentieth birthday. The bag was still more than halfway full.

Steaming drink in hand, went down into the basement and, executing the coffee in a few long gulps, made some progress. The research part typically required him to get into the zone first, but welding, gluing and connecting — the physical part — was just busywork that his fingers automatically slaved away at. The newest iteration of the launching ports still needed some brainstorming to figure out how to reach those sonic speeds, but extending the lanes was simple enough. The tip of the soldering iron glowed a dull orange above the rail joiners, once, twice. A few more times. He set the iron down, then.

He sat in the swivel chair at the other end of his work area. He entered the password, and the monitors lit up to show the outside surroundings in sharp grays; the porch, the road, the small garden in the back. The neighborhood was quiet. He then checked the loops he'd recorded to feed into Arlo's view. The whole security system had been rerouted to Roen's control a year after his brother had them installed by the workers. A small rebellion, maybe. He wasn't sure why he had bothered.

He watched the screen showing the road. It took eleven minutes until a car rumbled past.

By the time he went back upstairs, his phone had grown silent.

The lock screen showed messages from three different senders; probably an all-time record.

Arlo: Sorry, Roen, but my schedule is full. I'm meeting with corporate off-city so don't expect me at home. Not sure until when. Just go along with Malcolm and the guys for now — I'll handle everything else. Ps.: no more drones, I swear.

He stared at his brother's message. Someone barked a single laugh, and then quieted when he realized it was him. There had been no mirth, just that animal sound. Expectations and reality were sometimes one and the same.

The second message was, at least, honest with its intentions.

Unknown: Today at 13:00, at the usual palace.

The message had been sent around six this morning. Roen looked at the time, and he didn't feel much of anything. Been a long while since they had visited Malcolm's hideout. Felt like a long time, anyway.

No more drones. Okay. He could stand in for Arlo for the meeting. It's not like Roen had any other use.

The other messages — creating an endless wall on his screen — were all from…

Flux: Roen i work for nc but its NOT what u think it is!!!!

Flux: im so so so sorry i shouldve told u long time ago but im a fckin idiot

Flux: call me pls i can explain

Flux: god please

Flux: ROEN I WOULD NEVER—

He pressed the screen lock button and the texts disappeared in black.

Something choking wanted to break free from his chest and shatter the serene numbness over him. He took a deep breath, put his phone away, and shoved the feeling back inside. He wouldn't be able to get through the day otherwise.

Or maybe he would. He wasn't sure. Didn't want to find out either way. There was safety in pretending that your problems didn't exist.

Roen grabbed a jacket from the back of a chair and slipped it on. Downstairs, he paused at the entrance.

Right. No electronics. He threw his phone out on the kitchen table, made sure his datapad wasn't on him, and took a bill for the tickets. Then a few more just in case. The locks engaged around the house as he stepped off the porch and turned onto the street.

An overcast sky hung over Sirrej with a promise of the light rains of yesterday. The collar of his jacket dug into the side of his neck — he'd forgotten why he never wore this piece. He rubbed the spot to jumpstart circulation, kept his gaze fixed ahead, and ignored the storefronts and pedestrians weaving around him.

The bus ride was a brief one. Not in terms of actual time, no. He'd boarded the vehicle, took a standing spot at the back of a double-seat by the window, and the world seemed to blur around him as the robotic announcer declared their arrival at the last station only moments later. A zombie muttered a curt apology as he stepped around Roen and went for the exit. Roen followed the gentleman off.

He stood there in the midday rush, coated bodies gliding between spinning adboards and the low wall of a car dealership. Spent cords of a music festival hung askew from the roofs of the slums nearby. Puddles gathered in the dents of the sidewalk, no grates or drains or smoke machines to properly filter the path a hundred boots trudged on. The bus pulled away from the stop, and he had to step farther out to avoid the spray of the triplet wheels.

Despite the clouds above, it was bright enough to make Roen squint. He glanced around and, seeing a car step on the breaks to let him pass, jogged across the street toward the blocky mass of low buildings shuffled together. The main road shot off into several alleyways to choose from. He walked for a minute before choosing a narrow opening between a fenced off single story and an out-of-service currency exchange automata.

It had been a long time since he walked the slums. Never been an experience he relished, even back when he didn't know better. He knew now.

He knew a lot more things he should have known earlier.

The old dragon graffiti had faded somewhat, but it was still clear enough to follow toward the left turn. Down the short steps. Cigarette smoke began to drift on the air. Roen pulled the jacket closer around him, cast one more glance up at the sky, and then made the final turn.

They were all there, minus one.

Franklin sat on the rusted remains of a drainpipe at the edge of the dead-end alley. The only entrance was a sagging chain-link fence, its metal frame bent and worn with time and already open with a smoking keres leaning against it. Blank concrete walls boxed them in the little corner, their surfaces stained and peeling, and even Bull's tauren height barely reached a quarter of the way up toward the nearest roof.

Roen walked past Jezau Dawnkill without a look, brushing against the tip of her propped up knee. The end of her cigarette smoldered orange in the corner of his vision, then was swallowed by an exhale of smoke.

Franklin glanced up at him, muttered something to himself, and went back to tapping his phone against his thigh. Roen took a seat opposite of him, next to a discarded bike frame missing both its wheels. The alley floor was dry, likely thanks to the small overhang jutting out from the highest roof above.

Bull continued his leisurely pace to the dead end, stared at the blank wall for a minute, and eventually made his way back toward them. "That's all of us, then?"

Franklin stretched a foot. The sole of his shoe was ripped. "Should be. Bossman is out of town and Hank… I don't have a clue about Hank, actually. Last I heard of him was after the botched drone job." He looked at Dawnkill. "How about it, keres? Are we good to go you think?"

Dawnkill shifted her cigarette from one side of her mouth to the other. She then stepped back from the chain link fence and lifted a sports bag off the iron crossbar at the top, letting it rattle shut.

"That a yes? Hm? 'S that a yes I hear, keres?"

Dawnkill stared down at Franklin with the bag over one shoulder. Smoke slowly rolled from her nose.

"Frank."

"What, Bull?"

"Stop provoking the gun."

The drainpipe creaked underneath Franklin's not insignificant weight. He nudged Roen's feet with his. "What do you think, miracle boy? Am I being a cunt?"

Roen watched the peeling wall above his head. "Not any more so than usual."

Franklin laughed. He shook his phone at Roen. "Eeeeheh. Cheeky fuck."

But even someone as dense as Franklin didn't miss the fact that he was making everyone wait. Idling in an empty alleyway in the ass end of nowhere was nobody's idea of an early afternoon well spent. This was a meeting of necessity, not one of indulgence.

They gathered around in a circle. The acrid stench of tobacco intensified, but that was the least of the worst things the keres smelled of. Old things. Dead things. Roen had never been to a slaughterhouse, but he liked to imagine she was comparative to a mobile one.

Bull, towering over the others like an exclamation point, tilted his head Roen's way. "Is everything solid with your brother?"

"Yeah," Roen said. "He's busy. Handling the money. You know how it is."

"What money? My last paycheck took a nosedive off the industrial district," Franklin snorted, covering the screen of his phone as he swiped off the password. He then looked up. "Everyone's got their gadgets off?"

There came some prodding from Bull's direction. He grunted, pulling a buzzknife from somewhere behind him and tossing it toward the back of the alley. It impacted the wall and rolled against the drainpipe, but the battered thing had probably survived worse. "All clear," he said.

"Good then," Franklin said. The screen of his phone showed his contacts — a list of enviable size — and his finger hovered over Malcolm's nametag. The number next to it was a jumble of spazzing cryptonic symbols that made Roen's brain rattle in his skull. "Lady and gents — see you on the other side."

His fat thumb pressed down on the call button. For a breathless set of seconds, nothing happened.

And then the world warped around them.

Lights and forms elongated, as if a god put the world between their teeth and pulled it like a chewing gum. The slums and the cold stone of the alley broke down into a gray mass, stretching, extending, and just when the consciousness would fall through the non-matter that should've been right there — it snapped back.

An abandoned field with wind turbines felled like trees.

An estate overtaken by moss and gelatinous web that blotted out the sky.

A snow-blown mountain range split by a lone highway.

Roen was nowhere and everywhere, observing space through a hamster's wheel that kept rolling and rolling until his eyes shut by their own volition. He'd never before dared take a glance at the djinn magic at work. His headache came back with a vicious bite.

His ears unplugged as reality reasserted itself, and then they were standing somewhere else.

Straight out of a high-roller casino movie set, Malcolm’s bunker was a bunker only in name. Their entry spot on a circular pallet draped in red velvet was stuffed inside one arm of the star-shaped den. The room’s centerpiece was a massive roulette table, repainted black and used as a desk with dozens of monitors piled on top – showing graphs, cameras, changing numbers like a stock broker’s playground. Of the bunker's five wings – each large enough to be considered a decent sized room – three were curtained off. Roen remembered one kept generators and other self-sustain systems, and he could make an educated guess that another probably contained living facilities.

They stepped off the entry pellet one by one. Franklin planted himself on the long couch that spanned from the entrance wing and into the central chamber, a billiards table next to it. Though clean, the fabric sagged under Franklin's weight, its once smooth surface marred by faded patches and thinning seams. "Malcolm," he said.

Acknowledgement came from the chair — one of those recliners you could convert into a bed — situated in front of the roulette table's flashing screens.

Malcolm was not a man people would call 'well kept'. His beard was a bushy, shapeless cloud around the lower half of his face and his pate was besieged by a severe case of hair loss. Eyes a startling blue, a bit chubby around the waist. Scruffy, yes, but not filthy — his shirt was freshly pressed, the smell inside his den a pleasant salt of the sea, and his teeth a gleaming white. Maybe being a highly sought-after middleman came with its own innate set of standards.

Malcolm finished typing out a message on the keyboard with far too many buttons — it even had one of those cabled telephones you only see in a museum. He surveyed one of the top screens. He then sniffed. "What is that?"

Franklin looked at Roen, then at Bull, and back at Malcolm with his hands held up. "It wasn't me. I don't do sneaky ones."

Malcolm, after taking out an earpiece and setting it down on his roulette table, joined them in the guest wing. Bull stood near the couch, muscular arms folded and the iron loop through his nose dangling earthward. Roen sat on the far end of the couch, right by the pallet.

"Dawnkill," Malcolm said. He grabbed the ashtray from the edge of the billiards table and held it out to the keres. "If you will."

Dawnkill tipped her cigarette with her tongue. Ash fell and smoke pooled in the ceramic holder.

Malcolm plucked the death stick from between the keres' lips and ground the stub out. "Thank you. Now if we just didn't have to play this game every single time, that'd be great." He covered his nose and brought the ashtray over to the bin in the corner, dumping its contents. The mechanism whirred online and air freshener sprinkled from the holes at the top.

Franklin nodded toward the billiards table. "A rematch, Bull? Bossman isn't here to wipe the floor with the lot of us, and it's been a hot minute since my last casino visit. I'm rusty, I'm thinking. You've got a chance, now, I'm thinking."

Bull hummed. It sounded more like a startup of an engine. "I broke the pool cue."

"Bring your own, then. One of those sturdy pokers designed for the non-human," Franklin said. He looked at Roen. "Wanna team up with the other side? Me and Malcolm — two versus two, and the tauren can use your beanpole as the stick."

"I'm not thin enough for that," Roen said. "But I'm sure you'd make a passable ball on the table."

"You calling me fat?" A light bulb sparked to brilliance in Franklin's head. He looked at Bull. "I think he's calling me fat," he said, to which Bull just shrugged.

"Civility, people," Malcolm said. "We should at least pretend to get along for five minutes. There are a couple of things we need to discuss, and none of them are very pleasant."

"The job?" Bull asked.

"The job." Malcolm leaned against the side of the couch. "The client who requested the hit paid in advance — as usual. And since the target is still alive, I sent a full refund back their way — policy, as usual. All of which accounts to a disappointed customer who likely won't do business with me again."

"And no money."

"Sure. That, too. Bring that up with Arlo, though — he's the head of your operation. I'm just the hired connector. And he pays me, too." Malcolm scratched the side of his beard. "I'm with you people, but not with you, if you catch my meaning. Bossmen like Arlo are like fish in the sea, and I cast a wide net. Hell if I know how each of them manage their employees."

"Fine," Bull said. He didn't look happy, though. "What's next, then?"

Roen adjusted in his seat as Malcolm's eyes swept over him, then passed to address everyone present.

"Arlo told me we should pause with the drone ops for a bit. After getting found out by a civilian, it's better to lay low. We have no idea how long they've been observing you, no idea if they managed to snap a vid."

Roen's heart lurched in his chest. He'd been asking these questions himself, too. It would've been all too easy for Flux to record the events on the elevated railroad — just the possession of guns would be enough to get them behind bars.

But it wouldn't be enough to catch the entire group. The explosive was small enough to not be obvious through a grainy vid. Arlo, Malcolm and even Hank may escape the grasp of the law with so little evidence. To catch them all… the NullCorp agent needed to gather significantly more intel.

Stupid. I'm so fucking stupid. A naive loser so lonely that he falls for the first girl that shoots a pretty smile his way.

He missed some of the conversation, but emerged from his thoughts when he heard Malcolm speak.

"It was an imp, you said, Roen?"

Roen sat silent, staring at the white cue ball on the table.

"Roen? You were the only one close enough to the civilian. He, what. Used a spell to catch you?"

And still… still he couldn't do it.

Stupid.

"I don't know. I think so," Roen said, his voice lifeless and monotone. "I remember flying. I closed my eyes and something caught me, and then… then I was safe on the ground." He met Malcolm's blue eyes across the room. "He was small. Light red skin. Imp."

Nobody broke the silence. Malcolm scratched his beard again. Dawnkill tilted her ashen head just a fraction, watching Roen.

"Annoying," Malcolm muttered. "Imps are one of the few races with magical capabilities. I put out some peepers, but if he doesn't want to be found, the bugger will likely manage it." He shrugged. "Ergo, we cease the drone interception for now. If the blues set up camp around the delivery routes, we'll need to find some holes in their perimeters. That will take time."

"That will take not-fucking-getting-paid," Franklin growled. "I need to feed me and myself."

Bull nodded in agreement. "Frank has a point. You and Arlo might have the creds to afford patience, but we need work."

"Money, Bull. Money."

"We could shake out the old rugs," Bull continued, ignoring Franklin. "Beat them until bills fly. It's been a long time, sure, but drone rigging isn't the only way we've ever made cash."

Franklin pursed his lips. "Huh. Or that." He gave Malcolm a look. "Put the muscle of the team to some old-fashioned use. The last few years of this drone business had made my fists — itch. Itch badly."

"It also made you more creds than you'd ever get for a shakedown," Malcolm said wryly.

When Franklin was about to say more, he raised his hands to get ahead of it. "Hey, if you want to bloody some noses, you bring this up with Arlo. I'm just the spokesperson here. He told me to get you guys to chill, hm? We lay low, we watch, and we get ready for when the next job can be realistically taken."

Roen didn't like the looks both Bull and Franklin sent his way. Without Arlo here, his little brother was the next best thing to try and fix their financial woes.

He would have been terrified, probably. Once he somehow got himself to care enough. He wasn't in a rush, though.

"Roen, can I count on you to get another batch of ifrit ashes?"

"A batch of— why? You just said…" Roen trailed off.

"Just as a precaution. We'll prepare for another hit and I'll monitor potential clients, but we'll hold off on hitting the accept button." Malcolm smiled at him placatingly. "And don't worry about last time; you locked up, but you're still young. We get it. The pressure got to you — happens. All you can do is learn from it and be prepared to act on the next opportunity. Just… get those ashes, and we're square."

"We're square," Franklin repeated. His eyes glittered.

A thin ringing came from Malcolm's central systems. He remained with his guests and took out a datapad instead, remotely dismissing the call. He looked through some notifications before stowing the paddie and putting his hands on his hips. The move drew Roen's eyes to the blaster strapped to his side.

"So anyone's got more news to share? Where the hell is Hank anyway?" Malcolm asked.

"Fuck knows," Franklin said, nudging the torn sole of his shoe against the billiard table's legs to make it bend. "He does that, sometimes. I'll check out that parlor in the red light district that he—"

A thump of the sports bag interrupted him.

Everyone looked at Jezau Dawnkill, holding the strap of the bag with long-nailed gray fingers in the middle of the billiards table. The impact had scattered the balls in every direction, two of them finding their ways down the holes with resounding clanks.

"Double on the break," Malcolm said. "But we don't typically change into gym gear."

"Hey, if the keres wants to strip, who are we to stop her?" Franklin said.

"You asked about Hank," Dawnkill rasped. She jerked the zipper open. "I found Hank." With that, she upended the bag on the table.

Hank's severed head tumbled between the numbered balls.

"Fucking hell," Franklin spat, jolting in his seat. His foot caught on the underside of the table, hard. "Fucking cunt shit hell, keres!"

Malcolm covered his mouth with the crook of his elbow, staring at the desiccated head with wide eyes. A choked off nose emerged from behind limb and beard, and then he rushed forward — nearly going flat on his stomach across the table — and grabbed the head by the hair to shove it back inside the sports bag. "You moron! You're ruining the furniture!"

As for Roen — he felt some distant part of him scream inside. Sweat broke out across his forehead.

Soon. You'll get your chance to break down soon enough.

Bull followed the passage of the head back inside the nylon container. "A clean, clinical cut. Almost looks industrial — except for that hole in the middle," he said. He stared down at Dawnkill. "What happened?"

"Two days ago. Woke up, heard something," Dawnkill said. "Looked out the balcony. Head's perched right there, shoved on the spike of the railing. It was still dripping — a recent kill."

She pulled a fresh cigarette from beneath her jacket. Malcolm slapped it down on the floor before she could light up. "Sweet mother of— Do I need to cuff you savages?" He grabbed the sports bag, peered inside with a grimace, then zipped it back up. "You don't bring jokers to my place. If you have an incriminating object on you, you snap a picture with a burner, connect to a public locale and send that across the net."

"Fuck, but Hank… how?" Franklin asked. "Who did this?" his shocked whisper was directed at Roen of all people.

Roen shut his eyes for a second. The cage rattled.

"Inconclusive," Dawnkill said. "Climbing on the balcony would require one of four things; agility, magic, tech, or flight."

Malcolm and Bull shared a look. The former strode back toward his roulette computers — dropping the sports bag near the electric bin on his way — and leaned over his control panel. They couldn't make out most of the screens from their angle.

"Are you sure it was an imp, Roen?" Bull asked. "What did he wear? Describe him."

"Shit, flight and magic. Two of the four checks out," Franklin muttered.

Bull ignored Franklin.

"Overalls," Roen said. "Um, denim and big pockets, a bit torn I think. He was bald, and… I don't know. It was dark, still."

Factory district, right? That would make sense.

His voice trembled a single time. Desperation sheared through him, clawing, tearing itself toward the surface. He couldn't afford to fall apart now. He couldn't.

"How old was he?"

"I'm not sure. Non-humans are— it's hard to say."

"Guess."

"Thirty. Thirty-five."

Bull tapped a finger on his biceps. Kept staring at Roen.

Roen stared back.

A central call rang out and was dismissed immediately to bring the silence back.

"Heard all that, Malcolm?" Bull looked his way.

"Yessai heard it. Light shade bald factory-bound imp worker in his thirties. It's something to stand on. Maybe. Maybe-maybe-maybe."

"I don't think it was him, though," Roen said. Not too loudly, and not with looking at anyone in particular. But he said it anyway. "He helped me. He was… nice. Someone like that wouldn't — wouldn't do that."

Like how a beautiful pixie you thought was a hero wouldn't lie to you and betray your trust?

That devilish voice in his head almost broke the dam. His eyes hurt, moistened. But he forced — it — back.

Franklin snorted. "Good and likeable are two very different things, Roen. I'm shocked you haven't realized that yet — what with the company you keep."

"It could be the imp. It could be something entirely unrelated," Malcolm said over from his console. "But it's the best lead we have. I'll look into it, and—" he typed something out, swearing to himself. "Shit. Yes. If someone is targeting us, we need to watch our backs and communicate. From now on, I'll text each of you every day at a random time — reply with 'lentil soup' within twelve hours. If no response comes, I'll assume you're dead. And some measures will have to be taken."

Malcolm looked over at Dawnkill. "This could also be a you-problem, mercenary. The killer reached out to you, specifically. Sweep your side of the aisle, hm? Your kind makes enemies by the thousands. If they saw you with Hank and that's why he was offed, then the pool of potential targets could be a much deeper bucket than just us."

"I'm good, then. I never showed my face in public with a keres," Franklin pointed a finger at her. "Never have, never will. Humans stick with humans. We're all safer that way."

Roen wasn't speciest nor overly superstitious, but maybe there was something to being a living embodiment of death, a spirit literally evolved through magic to harvest the energies of the dying. The space between him and the gray woman felt too close all of a sudden.

"Say, how well did you and Hank get along, Dawnkill?" Malcolm asked.

"Professionally."

"No spats? No sudden urge to throw him off a skyscraper and stick a slice of lemon to marinate in his cracked skull?"

Dawnkill smiled. "Like I said. Professionally."

"Huh," Malcolm said. He turned back to his screens. "I wouldn't blame you if you did something to him. Accidents happen — even for someone who cannot outright kill. Colleagues do not always see eye to eye. You can be honest with us, Jezau."

"You're a middleman."

"Yes. And?"

"Then you've seen my resumé."

She didn't say anything else. Neither did Malcolm.

Roen watched them both, and he didn't like the way the air of the bunker seemed to electrify. He held back a shudder, then stood. "Is that all?" he asked in the group's general direction.

Malcolm said, "Mhm. You guys kick back, remain on standby, and I'll ask around about the imp in the meantime. Hear that? Do not stir up any more shit. Unlike you people, I can afford to push."

Having an interdimensional bunker sculpted from a djinn's figment of imagination probably helped with that.

"And Roen; don't forget to collect those ifrit ashes," Malcolm said. "Franklin, go grab it from the Travall household, and then standard item delivery — you call my number, step away from the phone, and I'll accept the port in five seconds. I'll then return the key if the package is fully intact."

Bull grunted. "When?"

"Eh. No rush, give it like a week. I'm sure Roen will manage it by then."

A sharp laugh tore from Roen's throat. The looks the others gave him were catalogued in some corner of his mind.

After that, they gathered around on the pellet once more and Franklin hit 'end call'. There was another warp, another set of images flashing beyond Roen's eyelids as the world folded upon itself. Ears plugged and unplugged — and then they were spat back into the shaded alleyway they had started from.

By the time he opened his eyes, Dawnkill was already halfway down the lane and turning to disappear past the corner.

Franklin put his phone away and shook out his shirt, reaching beneath the fabric to air it out. "Shit," he said. "Hank. Wouldn't have thought that would be just… that. Poof. One more for the crows. You know," he looked at Roen.

Roen turned to go.

"Like if you— oof!" he heard one large body bump into another. "Watch it, tauren." Roen looked back to see Bull step around Franklin with an apologetic grunt. A non-human his size, a light shoulder bump likely would have knocked Roen off his feet.

Roen didn't belong here. With Arlo, with the operation — maybe even with Sirrej as a whole. Everything here was a cutthroat horse race toward the highest penthouse that money could buy. The finish line barred with a break tape of your morals. No weak-willed human would make it out alive.

He walked past the chain link fence, down the serpentine suggestion of the slums and out into the open cityscape. The bus, when it came, was empty. Traffic buzzed around the lone metal container on wheels, rattling underneath him. People came and left. The concrete jungle remained the same.

Time passed. Deceleration, then a jarring stop, on and on and repeating several times over. A bit of green bled into the gray outside the windows. He stepped off the bus at some point. Storefronts were replaced by yards and pruned shrubs somewhere along the way. Mailboxes that overflowed with unopened letters. Gravel driveways.

He arrived back home, then. His footsteps stirred up the silence, a squirrel disappearing behind a white picket fence. Up the porch, past the glare of the cellular scanner. Overhead cameras catalogued every movement. The locks disengaged. The door opened, then closed behind him.

The rug in the foyer was empty, had little bits of dirt all over it. Boot prints — not sure whose.

Roen took a single step forward. He grabbed the coat rack at the side for balance. Wool slipped and tumbled under his grip, failing to combat gravity and instead joining him on the way down.

A head bounced on the billiards table, torn veins and sinew trailing from the ruined stump. Greedy men stared at him with a promise of violence. A beautiful pixie smiled at him.

On the cold floor of an empty house, where memories forced themselves from the roost of his throat, he fell on his knees with blurring vision.

And Roen screamed.

19: Jezau Dawnkill

Jezau had used her arm, a spear, and the local butcher’s cleavehouse.

By all means, Hank had been an interesting kill. The human had lived in a surprisingly upbeat part of town and only stepped outside camera ranges for a job — the lawless type — or to visit a brothel and rent a cheap fuck. Typically in that exact order. Which meant that she had to get him somewhere on the move.

Easy in theory, hard to get the minutiae details to align in a way that didn't blow up in your face. She had ambushed him as he was crossing a park, waiting in her smoke-form under the cover of night. Appeared right behind him and pulled him into a headlock. Hank had struggled — half her side was still bruised. She had choked him long enough to pass out, and then longer still to induce coma, brain damage.

After two hours of continuous starvation from air, the human had finally ceased his desperate hold on life. She had gotten a nice feeding out of it. But damn, her ribs hurt.

Jezau pursed her black lips, assembling her modded Kefefs 84 Zeus on auto pilot as she crouched on the chilly floor of the for-sale apartment room. She winced when she made a move too sudden. There was a reason why she rarely did 'close and personal'. A bullet to the brain was so much easier.

She hefted the sniper in her lap and began aligning the scope on the rail. But no. Hank had been a necessary 'clean' kill. It was crucial for the head to remain intact for her story to work. She wanted to present the body personally. For several reasons.

One: misdirection. It was common knowledge that her kind couldn't kill easily, and when they did, it was usually a bloody mess. A clean beheading? Impossible for a keres — unless the body was already cold and decomposing from some other cause. Something that would take far too much effort for very little gain. She could have made him disappear without a trace, leaving no evidence behind. Instead, she appeared and handed over proof of her own crime.

Malcolm was a logical man, and he would bury himself beneath his own conclusions.

Two; intimidation. There is something about the moment when people come face to face with the fragility of life. It demands honesty, and it makes them remember that they're little more than hunks of meat marching toward the grinder. Makes the hands shake and the eyes fidget. Composure breaks, cracks, reveals raw emotions.

The ancients knew well the power of putting the head of your enemies on a spike.

And three; information. She wanted to be present the moment the team found out abound the demise of one of their own. Had she taken Hank out in the background, then Malcolm would have likely found out alone, sitting in his safehouse. He would have called each member in privacy, making her next kills much more difficult. But with everyone there in the room — she instantly learned all that she needed to. What they would do, where they would go.

Which brought her back to the present, looking out the twelve-story window with the comforting weight of her rifle settled in her gloved hands. From here, she had a passable vantage point down toward the little duplex home at the edge of central. No fence, a shared yard — Franklin's home did not inspire confidence regarding his future. And even less so through the sight of her crosshairs.

The human was… moderately annoying. Not enough for Jezau to want to kill him, but a job was a job. He had been correct, though — spending time around a keres was not the smartest thing in the world. Unless you were undead, you were meal. Or a potential wad of bills that paid for the pre-packaged kind.

She checked the connector on her wrist. It flashed yellow. Flipping it to expose the belly of the rifle, she slid back the lock plate and redid the wiring. Red goes red goes purple. Zero the electronic charge, divert to half ballistic and boost subsonic absorption.

She then frowned and, balancing her rifle on her knees, pawed around for her datapad. Tech was a damned thing when she had all these priceless gadgets, but they couldn't fit a simple clock on any of them.

It was just about time. Jezau lifted her rifle, resting the suppressor on the edge of the window, the blinds pulled down just enough to let her see through the scope. With her forearm propped on her knee, she settled the stock against her shoulder and slipped into an easy ready position. And then she watched.

For long minutes, the city flowed. A reptoid family waited for the right of way, electric cars coasting down the road. A cyclist swerved off the lane and down the sidewalk and passed the front of the duplex without stopping. Walking the other way, a girl bobbed her head to whatever racket was blasting through her earbuds.

Jezau had become a statue, like a rock protruding above the rush of a river. She waited. She didn't have to wait too long.

Franklin's blue Suzuya appeared from the south and, after idling before the lights for a hot second, pulled into the little driveway of the double-home. He got out without any particular hurry. He went around to pull a bag of groceries from the trunk, casting a squinty eye around the neighborhood as he did so. He then walked up to his side of the building, unlocked the door, and disappeared inside.

Jezau's crosshairs had been locked right on his cranium the entire time.

She had vision through three separate windows; one looking at the kitchenette, the other two inside his bedroom.

Franklin appeared before the fridge, opening it and—

Jezau pulled the trigger, a faint 'pop' sound emitted from her rifle, the duplex's window shattered and was swallowed by the busy city life, and Franklin dropped like a stone.

Two down. Two more to go.

Jezau disassembled her rifle, initiated the folding sequence, and tossed the one-foot-nothing sniper back in its case. She shook out her hair and tied it back with a rubber band, then began cleaning up after herself.

Five minutes later the elevator dinged and, bike helmet already on to hide her features, she stepped out into the streets. She got on her motorcycle and slowly made her way toward the duplex in the steady stream of traffic. Being seen or recorded was inconsequential — the vehicle she was straddling was a stolen one.

Wheels spat grass as Jezau turned onto the front lawn of Franklin's home, maneuvering around the blue car and turning the engine off right by the door. He hadn't locked it behind him. Even if he had, it wouldn't have mattered.

Jezau shuddered when the wave of delicious mortality hit her even before she reached the kitchenette. Franklin's unmoving body was right there on the tile floors, lying on his side with a 7.62 hole through one profusely bleeding temple. The bullet likely missed a vital part of the brain by a miraculous inch, her racial magics nudging the kill just barely enough to keep him alive, to keep him between that precarious line between life and death so that she could feed.

Taking off her helmet, Jezau grabbed a clean glass from the shelf, filled it from the sink and leaned against the counter to sip. If the man received medical attention right about now, he could probably be salvaged still. Jezau rolled the water around in her mouth before she swallowed. Ashes and chlorine, but she drank more. She was parched.

A few glasses later she crouched down in the puddle of blood gathering next to Franklin, though she did so carefully as to spare her bruised side. She began at the top, hands roaming over his body in a methodical pat down. She then moved on to his waistband — he didn't have his gun on him — and then across the pockets of his pants. Feeling something rectangular, she pushed the dying human to flop onto his back and reached in to pull out a credcard. She frowned, flipping it. A low three-digit number on the display.

The other pocket held some keys, the back pockets a few crumpled tissues and a library subscription. Jezau stared down at the human body. She started the pat down again from the top, her movements now jerky and carrying some strength.

She found a folded knife around the ankles on the second go. And that was it.

With both hands, she heaved on the body with enough force to slam the head against the low freezer compartment, making it bounce. She then stood, and with her hair flailing around and wanting to escape the bun around her nape, she attacked the counter and the shelves and any surface that may have held that damned thing that she came for.

It wasn't on him, and it wasn't in the room. She searched the entire house and came up empty. Even after pulling on the motorcycle helmet and breaking into his car — the only electronics she found were chargers, household appliances and old datapads.

Jezau Dawnkill, spirit of death and renown mercenary, when she left the dead human's messy rental, saw red.

Because the phone that was holding the middleman's number and the key to Malcolm's hideout — was nowhere to be found.

---------

Thanks for reading these early chapters. If you haven't yet, please leave a review for the first book in the series (Zevara)!