Fragment #1 A Slippery Truth

“Tell me again,” she says, “how you lost the one thing that could save your life.”

Colored vapor exudes through cracks in the pavement, a toxic motley fog emanating from the sewers that vein beneath the city’s wilting skin. The coughing motors of airships, far below two moons that lurk behind a see-through cloak of clouds. Drunken shouts thundering from the legion of pubs a few streets away. He always meets her in doomed alleys that reek of death and decay, vacant places that lock down your nostrils and where you couldn’t smell a girl’s perfume, even if she had bathed in it minutes before.

Dead Eye tries hard not to breath in the fumes, replaying the story unravelling in his head. His one good eye focuses on the gun in her hand. “Mugged,” he repeats. “I was mugged.”

“Who,” she asks. “Who the hell would risk attacking an official runner?”

The steel mask she wears hides her face and muffles her voice. No eyes, no mouth, no feature, but smooth cold iron. No obvious sign of race. Her black latex outfit clings to her silhouette so tight, she could be naked and doused in a thin layer of petrol.

“Shub’nars,” he says. “Tentacle-faced bastards jumped me.”

She studies him. Dead Eye lets her inspect his clownfish bloated face, ripe ecchymosis glistening purple under the fallible street lights, dried up blood splatters, like unwashed war paint, wild cat scratches that will leave fat scars. Torn up government jacket graced by grime and mud splashes. He holds his cigarette with a trembling left hand, the right one claw crooked, after being stomped on by metal boots. He stands up somewhat hunched over, cracked ribs hissing sub-dermal pain spikes with each movement.

“You don’t mind,” she says, “if I scan you?”

“You’re the one with the loaded weapon,” he replies.

She lets out a sharp whistle, and out of the gloom, the hound comes running.

Dead Eye knows the hounds. Robotic canine-like beasts stalking the streets in packs, with metallic muzzles hardwired to sniff and report illegal substances. The militia’s teethed spies, programmed to radio-bark any hints of disturbance, a sure-fire ultrasound alarm that could unleash a flurry of armed men and steamers at any second.

‘Do not fuck this up,” Dead Eye tells himself. “Tell your truth. It will know if you lie. It’s what they’re crafted for. Answer the questions. Look it straight in its glass eyeballs, face the circuitry and do not shy away. Do not think about the alarm. Do not think about the rumors of tranquilizing needle launchers attached to their legs. Do not think about failure, leading to endless weeks of torture and acid drops on bare skin and missing limbs, gums like pulp and teeth smashed to fine powder by hammers.”

The hound prowls up to the woman’s side. She keeps the antique revolver pointed at Dead Eye. The dog’s skin is jet black, the same as her clothes. Slow-rising white exhaust leaks from its back. It looks up and down at Dead Eye, ember red glare processing information.

The woman says, “Dead Eye, human, born and raised in Nualla-Stem. Correct?”

“Yes,” he nods.

“You are a female, is that right?”

“No,” he replies.

“You have been working as one of our official runners for the past eighteen months, delivering and retrieving shipments on behalf of the government. Correct?”

“Yes.”

“You have sexual fantasies about children.”

“No.”

“Have you ever killed anyone?”

Dead Eye inhales, staring at the waiting hound. “Of course I have.”

He can sense her smiling behind her mask. “Compile test data,” she says, glancing at her pet.

The hound’s red eyes shut down for a moment, before burning bright green, then back to red. She says, “Good. Now, what happened to you?”

“I was beat up.”

“Did you see your attackers’ faces?”

“Yes.”

“What race?”

“Shub’nar. Squids. Calamari-bastards. Whatever you refer them to.”

“When did this happen, where, and what did you do next?”

“Earlier this evening, past the main bridge that leads to Anachronos’ Isle. Three of them, but only one did the beating. I woke up several hours later. Doc friend somewhat patched me up. I hid in my apartment until now, panicking, thinking you were gonna shoot me dead soon as I told I had lost the shipment.”

“I’m still considering it, so keep praying. Did you see them take the shipment from you?”

“No. I blacked out.”

“Why do you think they wanted it?”

Dead Eye ponders this, then says, “Why does anyone want anything?”

“Straight answer, please.”

“Because it contained something valuable. Because the mayor doesn’t like them much, and right now they’re tickled pink to have stolen something from him.”

“How do you know the shipment belongs to the mayor?”

“Please. No one else could afford this thing.”

“Do you know what was in that box?”

“Yes. I opened it.”

“That is breach of our contract,” she says. At her feet, the hound growls, its carbon tail wagging in excitement.

“I’m a runner, not a priest. I’m curious and greedy and sometimes I take a peak at what you entrust me with. Call me paranoid, I won’t blame you.”

The dog’s tail stops moving. “I understand,” the woman says.

Silence stretches slim between them as Dead Eye waits for the next question. Almost through. Almost there.

The hound’s glass orbs blink three times, and it spins around on nimble legs, sprints out of the alley without a sound. The woman places the gun back in its holster, extracts something from an unseen hip pocket.

“You will report,” she says, offering a card with gloved hands, “tomorrow, ten in the morning, and we will investigate and hopefully find the culprits. I’m afraid I don’t have the authority to pursue this further right now.”

Dead Eye looks at the golden card. THE CORE, twenty seventh level. One-time pass for Aaron “Dead Eye” Legan. A digital number and barcode below it. Black and white photograph of him. “I’ll be there,” he says. “Does this mean I’ve passed the scanning process?”

“Only the first part,” she replies. “I will see you tomorrow for a more thorough… interview. In the meantime, I recommend you remain at your apartment, in case we need you.”

“Of course.”

“Until then,” she says, and turns around on her heels, cooly walks into the multicolored mist and the reverberation of her footsteps flutters away.

It’s only when she’s gone, that Dead Eye allows himself to smile.

#

Back at his apartment. An empty studio with frozen clocks and posters of obscure bands and bullet holes peppering the walls. Dead Eye throws his gun into his backpack, a shirt and pants, a couple of apples, water flask, and his notebook, yellowed pages filled with his drawings. Whatever money he has left. He zips up the bag, picks it up. He tries to take it all in, the place that had become home for the past three years. The stained windows and broken heater, faded framed daguerreotypes of old girlfriends still on the walls, crumpled papers concealing aborted notes and scribbles. “So long,” he says out loud to the place he will never see again, and heads for the door.

#

Truth, much like reality, is easy to bend. Injuries and bruises that severe cannot be faked. Shub’nars really did whoop his ass. He did not lie to his boss and her beast-like lie detector. He simply omitted a few crucial details.

It was easy to place the blame on a race despised by the powers that be and the citizens of this city. The Shub’nar mafia. Bat-shit insane inbred clan of human-cephalopod hybrids who blew up half of their river-hugging government assigned district in order to flood it, just so the place would feel like home sweet home. But they have their honor. They may slice your cheeks off for failing to shake hands in the morning, but perhaps they bump into a child on the street by accident, spilling his ice cream cone and in order to apologize, they’ll pay for the kid’s way through university and throw in some extra lunch money too. Anger and defending their pride comes oh so easy to them.

#

He waited under a withering red sun, smoking and probing for the perfect victim. Or rather, the perfect culprit. It would be night soon, and he needed to act at once. Dead Eye found him stumbling out of a bar, a few hours before his rendezvous with the masked woman.

“Hey, squid-face,” Dead Eye said to a visibly wasted Shub’nar, “bet those tentacles make you a real hit with the ladies.”

The squid-kin and his friends stopped in their tracks, the drunkest one spinning around, mouth-tentacles flapping in fury.

“What’d you say?”

Dead Eye swallowed hard, prepared himself for what’s to come. “Your face, I said, is very striking. Like starring at a fucking roadkill. How’d you come out so pretty, brother? Was your mother’s pussy lined up by rusty razorblades, or did your dad’s ugliest swimmer somehow make it to the finish line first?”

The Shub’nar let out of a cry of pure rage, and lunged at him.

#

Dawn unwraps the city’s washed out beauty. Through the zeppelin’s windows, floating away from Nualla-Stem, Dead Eye sees it all: skyscrapers threatening to collapse at any second, swarming squadrons of airships stabbing through the clouds, the ferris wheel a tarnished freeze-frame until night-time, labyrinthine streets where he saw so many die, the industrial district panting black smoke, the inverted glass library where he stole books too often, the rivers that will surely carry swollen corpses, the overcrowded market where he lost his one and only dog, the Old City still on fire after two hundred years and looming over it all, the Core, the heart of the government, a sprawling fortress of coal-colored bricks. And everywhere, millions of lives shackled to their jittery zeitgeist.

He sighs, and looks around the zeppelin’s cargo room. Hobos, fugitives and criminals, children with sullied faces embracing their terrified mothers, stray souls seeking refuge anywhere, but where they were born, or perhaps returning home at last, far east of the continent where eternal snow shrouds the world and where hope still has a pulse.

Dead Eye makes certain they all catch a good glimpse of his ruined face, the gun now at his hip, and he smirks at them, oozing pure bad mojo. He needs to guarantee he can sleep sound tonight.

He holds the golden card. The meeting at the Core is in a few hours. They will be looking for him before too long, a hefty reward for his capture. He does not say farewell to the city, but adieu.

As the only place he’s ever known blurs out of view, he lowers a hand to his pocket and pats it, feeling the apple-sized pink diamond inside, its black market value enough to keep him fed and safe for another decade and opening the door to a new world blossoming with bottomless possibilities.