He hadn’t said anything, but Therazine knew what Vexxer was thinking.
It had been two hours since they’d left Maddy’s gun shop. Two hours of walking up and down Ivy Street and its neighbors, picking out vagrants apparently at random and shaking them all down for information. Most had been entirely out of their minds with addiction or despair. A few had been unconscious and wouldn’t rouse. None were helpful. It was well after midnight at this point and Therazine’s legs were starting to hurt. Her farmer’s boots were rugged and made for tromping through mud and Lormian hills—but they weren’t adequate for walking along cobblestone and concrete. It had been over a decade, but she missed the firm comfort of the light, flexible steel toe boots that she used to wear when traveling the city. Almost every shop down these crowded avenues was closed, and the crowds were thinning. The neon from the bars and gentlemen’s clubs to the south end of Ivy Street burned bright through the haze, but the lights of apartments had gone out. The foot traffic that remained was sparse and paranoid—they avoided eye contact like they thought it could kill them.
Therazine knew what Vexxer was feeling, and she wished he would just say it. He thought they were wasting their time, thought that she had rushed to find a lead out in the night with no clear aim. He thought that this was all pointless, and yet he kept his mouth shut. Why? Because he thought it polite? Because he just liked being around her, regardless of the situation? She remembered him like this back in the day, soft-spoken and considerate, but never as quiet as he was now. If he thought this was all a waste of time, then why didn’t he just say that?
She wanted to turn around and stop him in his tracks. Stare into his wide-set eyes and confront him, ask what he thought they should be doing instead. But she knew how childish that would be. How fragile and small that would make her look. Better to just keep her head down and push forward, and pretend like Vexxer wasn’t even there.
They turned a corner. Down the street ahead the canopy above them opened up. Dusty rain mixed with the white glare of street lights, obscuring the government building that capped the intersection at the other end of the block. She narrowed her eyes, trying to remember the building. Its columns and domed towers were clear indicators of its public nature, but the identity of the building itself eluded her. She recognized the neon-lit fish shop on the corner, closed down for the evening. The bank across from it, with its large edifice and heavily barred portals.
“Justice Depot,” Vexxer said behind her.
She frowned. “I know.” The 17th Ward Justice Depot. The local prison and safehouse for the persecuted. JDs were epicenters of crime and degeneracy, towering monuments to just how low and damaged humanity could become.
“We’ll not find anyone we need in there,” Vexxer said.
“Where will we find them, then?” Therazine snapped. She did not look at him.
Vexxer was quiet. A tall man in a heavy trenchcoat approached out of the rain. As he stepped under the canopy he shook himself, like a dog. He took off his hat briefly to shake the water from it, revealing a large scar that ran from the base of his skull and over to in between his eyes. Therazine shuddered in instinctual revulsion. The man replaced his hat and walked on by.
“Thera,” Vexxer whispered.
She didn’t respond. Only stared out into the rainy street beyond.
“Thera, what are we doing?”
“Finding a lead.”
Vexxer sighed. “There’s no one out here. What are we looking for?”
“Don’t call me that.”
Vexxer was quiet for a moment. All Therazine heard was the patter of rain against stone, and somewhere, distantly, a fog horn. Buried in the steel and concrete of these streets she almost forgot that the harbor was so nearby.
“Can we step out of the rain for a moment?” Vexxer said. “Get a warm drink, maybe?”
Therazine ground her teeth, then looked back at him. Vexxer had droplets stuck in his red beard, stray rain blown in from outside the canopy. His head was slick with sweat and rain, and his eyes were turned down in a sorrowful way.
“Yeah,” she said.
They walked into the nearest bar—a violet-lit place with a wooden hanging sign that read Eimbry’s Taproom. The heavy door reluctantly permitted them ingress, and the room beyond was warm and softly glowing. It was a large space, with four columns punctuating an otherwise empty room. A few tables were scattered, all full of people, and the bar itself was wide-set with twenty seats in front of it. Dark red paint covered the walls, muffling the already contained atmosphere that the candle-lighting gave the place. Planks of wood decorated otherwise brick walls, each piece with a plaque underneath. Without getting close enough to read Therazine knew that these plaques advertised that their associated lengths of wood were from offworld. Every bar had its own gimmick.
She sidled up to the bar, Vexxer in tow. They sat between two perfectly quiet men who both appeared to be only a few drinks from unconsciousness, and they seemed to be happy in that place. Behind the bar Therazine saw ornately carved shelves containing dozens of bottles of dark liquid. Those shelves were undoubtably local bogwood—cheap and unremarkable, which explained why the shelves didn’t have a plaque of their own. She glanced at herself in the mirror behind the bottles, and was unhappy with what she saw. A sunken-eyed, long-haired woman matted with rainwater and grime, her heavy clothes clinging to her body like the wet coat of a shaggy dog. Vexxer beside her sat like a giant—a head taller than her and shoulders twice as wide.
The bartender was chatting with a patron at the other end of the bar. Therazine didn’t even try to signal him. Vexxer patiently thrummed his fingers on the bartop.
“You’ve gotta be tired,” he said.
“No time for sleep.”
“Always time for sleep.”
Therazine felt like she’d had this conversation with him in the past. Ages ago, when they were killers together. He was always the practical one, the one who made sure they had a warm place to stay and hot food every night, no matter how far out into the Real they were.
“Thera.”
“Dammit, man.”
“Sorry.” Vexxer blinked rapidly and shook his head. “Old habits. I… You seem frantic. You’re not thinking clearly, I don’t think.”
“Excuse me?”
“Not saying that—Not saying that you ain’t thinking. That’s not what I’m saying. You’re focused, is all. Too focused. What is our plan tonight?”
“Weed through this shitty neighborhood until I pull up the one plant with roots.”
“To what end, though? What are we looking for?”
“Anything.”
"That…” Vexxer bit his lip. “We need direction. We need a course.”
“I have a course,” she said.
“Could you… enlighten me, perhaps? What are we looking for, and how will we know when we find it?”
“I don’t know, Vexxer.” She clenched her fists and stared forward, into the mirror. “I don’t fucking know, okay? I just… I just need to keep looking. I can’t rest. Not now. Not yet. Not while my family’s still—”
“What do you want?” the bartender said. Therazine hadn’t even noticed him slink up. His words were sharp, aggressive. She understood immediately that he wasn’t asking what they needed to drink. And he was staring at Vexxer.
“Kalaphan rum, please,” Vexxer said. “Two. Over ice.”
The bartender stared at him. He had a pencil mustache, and tiny, bat-like eyes that refused to blink. The bartender couldn’t have been half Vexxer’s weight, and yet he stared at Vexxer like he was about to pounce on him and bite his throat out.
“We ain’t got Kalaphan here.”
Therazine glanced up at the carved shelves. Half a bottle of reddish liquer caught her eye, its label reading KALAPHAN FINE IMPORTED RUM. She sat up straight, brushed her hair behind her ears. A glance over her shoulder saw that two men had stood up from the nearest table. They had long coats, and their hands hovered at their hips.
Vexxer’s eyes shot to the bottle on the shelf, and then immediately back to the bartender.
“No problem,” he said. “Coffee will do, if you got it.”
“No coffee for your kind.”
Therazine froze, bolt straight, with her head tilted so that she had one eye trained on the bartender and the other on the slowly approaching patrons.
Vexxer grinned and nodded. “I think we might have stumbled into the wrong place. Sorry about that, friend.” He pushed his stool back and stood up.
One of the men stepped close. He was tall, with a thin, hideous beard and wool skullcap. He placed a hand on Vexxer’s shoulder, fingers digging into Vexxer’s thick coat. Therazine kept her eye on the other man, and on the two more who stood up from the same table.
Vexxer turned, his wide bulk gently and naturally shaking the man’s hand off. His eyes were still downturned, still kind.
“Is there a problem?” he said.
“Yeah,” said the man with the skullcap. “About thirty years back when you stepped into our world, rock-eater.”
Vexxer pursed his lips. “I’ve only been here seventeen years, friend. You must have me mistaken.”
“Only mistake here is you showing yourself out at night. Constables can’t protect you now, Javadoan. No law’s gonna stay our hands this late.”
Therazine watched the other three men form a half circle around Vexxer and the man with the skullcap. One of them reached into his jacket and placed his hand on the hilt of something—a club or a knife.
“I made a mistake. Didn’t come in here looking for trouble,” Vexxer said. “The war was a long time ago.”
“Not for us, it wasn’t. Your kind killed more of my friends than I care to remember. Kept me in the cold and the dirt for six years of my life. And you have the audacity to show yourself here?”
“As I said, this was my mistake. I’ll leave.”
“Not before we take our reparations, you won’t.”
One man stepped forward, his hands coming up in fists. Therazine shot up and kicked her stool out, sending it sliding across the floor and knocking the man’s legs out from under him. He went down and his jaw cracked on the floor.
The bar exploded in noise and movement. The man in the skullcap threw a punch and Vexxer caught his fist. The two others came at Therazine, one drawing a truncheon from his jacket. Therazine reached behind the bar blindly and whipped a bottle at the man in front, hitting him between the eyes and sending him crashing backwards into a table. The other man rushed her with the truncheon. She got her arms up as he struck her, taking the force of the blow on her leather-clad forearms.
Vexxer broke the wrist of the man in the skullcap. He screamed, foam bubbling across his unkempt beard, and he fell to his knees. The man on Therazine struck at her viciously, again and again, but there was no technique to his blows. No skill. It was like he was hacking away at an overgrown plant. Therazine absorbed another hit with her forearms and waited as he pulled back to strike again. In that moment she reached out and grabbed his curly, greasy hair and drove his face into her knee. He went down with a wet shout.
Vexxer kicked aside his barstool and stood next to Therazine. Four men were down, two were weeping. The drunk who’d had his legs knocked out from under him by the stool wobbled to his feet. Another man massaged the bleeding lump on his forehead where Therazine had cracked him with the bottle.
Therazine breathed in deep and held it. She stared at these two, and in the corners of her eyes she watched the other patrons in the bar. She could feel the moment balancing on a thin point. Either she and Vexxer had been quick and brutal enough to discourage any further action, or the violence had been galvanizing and the moment would fall to the other side of the point. Her hand twitched above her gunless hip. She dared not move, lest the patrons be provoked.
She heard the spin of a thumb wheel, and turned just in time to see the bartender raise a rifle. Her hand shot out and snagged the barrel, forcing the gun up—the bartender shouted in shock and his finger slipped off the trigger.
With that, the bar plunged headfirst into chaos. Three men charged them, knives and bottles in their hands. Therazine shoved the rifle into the bartender’s neck and sent him crashing into his ornate shelves and bottles. The sound of breaking glass was melodic to her ears.
Vexxer met the first man with a punch that would have floored a bull. The assailant’s head cracked back like he’d been shot and he went tumbling into a table. Therazine spun with the rifle held like a club and broke another man’s teeth. She had just a split second to step closer to Vexxer before the next man reached her with a punch the swung far too wide. She grabbed the rifle with both hands and struck it forward, breaking his nose. Vexxer grabbed another man by the arm and flipped him onto his back, just as a knife came at his shoulder. Therazine swung for the attacker’s head just as Vexxer parried the knife with a slap from his left hand. The knife-wielder spun, blood spurting from a broken jaw, and fell.
Two more dove for them and were put down just as quickly. A third fell upon Vexxer as he kicked one of the downed men in the stomach. Vexxer didn’t see that man, and that man had a steak knife. Therazine aimed the rifle at the attacker, her finger settling on the trigger. For the briefest moment she was aware of what she was doing and what she held in her hands. The gun had come up so naturally, so simply. It had obeyed her commands without question. She demanded that it kill, and it rose to the occasion. The taste of mortal fragility flared suddenly on the end of her tongue. She squeezed trigger.
Vexxer turned just as the rifle went off. The man was taken aback by the Javadoan’s remarkable reflexes and vigilance, and he paused in his stride. The rifle fired, and the bullet passed just in front of the man’s nose before shattering a dark wood plank that hung on the far wall.
Everyone in the bar froze. The men ceased charging, the people at the tables stopped their jeering. All stared at the woman by the bartop with the rifle in her hands.
Therazine felt a rush of fear sweep through her veins. The rifle shook in her hands, and without a directive thought she spun the thumb wheel and chambered another round.
The man with the knife went white. He opened his mouth as if to scream as the harmonica clip of the rifle slid into place, feeding another bullet into the chamber.
Vexxer loomed large and grabbed the man by the back of the head, and then slammed him face first into the corner of the bar. A wet crunch, and blood and teeth splattered against the glasses on the bartop. The man fell to the ground in a pile of screaming, writhing agony.
Vexxer looked at Therazine. The rifle went limp in her hands.
She turned, and saw everyone staring in horrified silence. Their eyes shifted between her, Vexxer, and the mangled people at their feet.
Vexxer breathed heavily through his nose. Flecks of blood dotted his already red complexion.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. Then, to the crowd: “Vekrath’egh Javadahg denu arrkechit.”
Therazine nodded, and let out the breath she had been holding the entire time. She grabbed the clip on the side of the rifle and yanked it out of the gun, throwing cartridges across the floor. The brass clattered and glittered in the candlelight. She pocketed the clip and dropped the rifle, then followed Vexxer out of the building.
The stepped out into the wet night, heaving and pulses pounding. She watched the heavy door swing closed, and the latch itself. Vexxer leaned up against the wall and flexed his hands into fists over and over. Dark spots on his knuckles flared with each movement. Therazine stared at him, waiting for him to stare back. When he finally did he dropped his hands to his sides as if he had been doing something unscrupulous. She only stared. He nodded, and the two of them stepped up the few steps into the open street.
“That surely escalated,” Vexxer said.
“I’d thought the animosity from the war would have burned out by now.”
“It has, mostly.” Vexxer sighed and cracked his neck. “But there are still holdouts of salty veterans. People who see red hair and think, ‘if I kick that guy’s ass, then maybe my dead friends will come back.’”
Therazine frowned. “‘If I kick that guy’s ass, maybe my wife won’t leave me for being an abusive, drugged-out prick.’”
“‘If I kick that guy’s ass, maybe I won’t have picked up my alcoholism during my tour on Javadoa.’”
“‘Maybe if I kick that guy’s ass,’” Therazine said with a small chuckle, “’my government won’t have sent me to get my own ass kicked by those red-haired barbarians in the first place.’”
Vexxer laughed, and shook his head. “Heh. ‘Barbarians.’ Thanks, Thera. I’d almost forgotten about the posters all across this city when I first emigrated here.”
Therazine remembered the propoganda about the Javadoans when she was a little girl. Posters that depicted them as axe-wielding devils with bright red skin and wild eyes. Radio shows where they spoke in gutteral, alien tongues. Stage plays where strong-jawed Celedinian heroes rescued busty women from the salacious clutches of hulking Javadoan barbarians. The memories made her hate this city even more. As a child, she had assumed Javadoans were brutes and monsters. Vexxer was the kindest, gentlest man she had ever met. By the Aether, how old must he have been when he traveled here from Javadoa? Fifteen? Sixteen? How the Celedin must have looked to his young eyes. A superstitious people less than a generation from a grizzly war—people who still hung signs on the doors of their shops that proclaimed NO JAVAS.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” Vexxer said. “People are just people. Scared and stupid.”
“I almost killed a man in there, Vex.”
Vexxer looked at her curiously. “Yeah? So did I. If I’d put a little more oomph into that last guy, I’m sure I would have got him.”
“No,” she said, clutching her shoulders tight. “I almost killed a man. With that gun. And I didn’t even think about it. It… it just came naturally.”
“Yeah. Heat of the moment. That’s what you do when you’re fighting for your life.” Vexxer furrowed his brow. “Are you alright, Thera?”
“I almost killed someone.” Therazine stopped and stared at the cobblestone, shaking. “I haven’t… I haven’t killed anyone in a decade. Not since—I haven’t. And this just came so… so… If he hadn’t stopped short, I would’ve… just…”
Vexxer stopped too, and turned fully to her.
“Thera? What’s wrong?”
“I didn’t even think about it, Vex. I just grabbed the gun and went to do it. On reflex. On instinct.”
“That makes perfect sense. It’s alright. You’re just conditioned. Even after ten years, you’re back in this place. It’s what you did here. Just falling back on old habits, that’s all.”
Therazine clutched her head and shook violently.
Old ways, old ways,
Falling back on old things
Gone back, gone back,
Old birds still like to sing.
“I’m not that person anymore. I’m not. I’m… I’ve changed.” She fell to her knees, and felt rain soak through to her skin.
Vexxer was down beside her an an instant. “Thera, what’s going on? What is this? Are you okay?”
“I’m not the same,” she said. “I’m not. I left. I left everything. I’m a wife. I’m a mother. I’m—” Her heart jumped, pumping acid pain through her chest as she remembered Bren. She tucked her head into her knees, clutching her hair with trembling hands and sobbing into the street.
Vexxer wrapped his thick arms around her. She fell into him, weeping uncontrollably. He held her tight, saying nothing.
No comments:
Post a Comment