by Logan Jacobs
“How humanitarian of you,” I said sarcastically, Again, though, what she said made a lot of sense. There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do to protect my friends. Could I blame her for doing the same? Or, was it all a fucking ruse to get past my defenses? I didn’t know which.
I walked around behind her and sat down on the edge of another, dark, vanity station next to Trillium just to change up our dynamic. I had a sinking feeling I was being played, and I needed to switch it up a bit.
“Scoff if you want,” Trillium said plainly as she fixed a few stray hairs in the mirror. “But Darry knew my background. I’m not the only one who does research you know. So, when I had a security issue, I asked for his help. He agreed, I’ll admit, reluctantly at first, but after I explained my situation he was more than happy to help.”
“And what is that situation?”
“I fear for my life,” she answered simply.
“Trillium,” I said with a cocked eyebrow as I met her gaze in the reflection of the mirror, “that can’t be a new experience for you. Plus, I’ve seen the gaggle of security goons you travel with. They make our Secret Service seem like a bunch of Cub Scouts.”
“Oh, I’m used to having my life threatened,” Trillium said and smiled. It was meant to brush my comment off, but I made out a hint of something more behind it. Sadness? Regret? Once again, I just didn’t know. “It’s part of the job, and yes, I have the best security money can buy. And until recently they had served me very well.”
“And?” I asked. She was dragging this bit out.
“A few months ago, right around the time of your arrival coincidentally,” Trillium explained. “I discovered I had a stalker.”
“Come on, Trill,” I said and folded my arms across my chest. “Can’t have been your first one.”
“No, it wasn’t,” she replied haughtily. Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly and I could tell that the nickname had started to get under her skin. “You asked me to explain, Havak, so I’m trying to explain. If you let me finish that is.”
“Pardon me,” I fake apologized as I held up my hands in front of me. “The mic is yours.”
“You are something else, Havak,” Trillium grinned. “I’ll give you that. I’ve dealt with more than my fair share of crazed fans, haters, would be suitors, and everything in between over the length of my career, and had gotten very good at either ignoring them until they went away or having my security team suss them out and convince them that there were other, more appropriate, celebrities to affix their attention to. Then someone got into my apartment.”
“How would that be possible?” I asked incredulously. “You’ve said you have the best security money can buy. Your home has to be locked up tighter than a virgin on prom night.”
“I don’t know what that means, Havak, but I assume it is a crass metaphor,” Trillium said.
“Yeah, it’s pretty crass,” I responded. “Means it has to be very, very difficult to slip into your home unwanted.”
“It is,” Trillium nodded. “But it happened nonetheless. I came home from a very long day of work and had just stepped out of the shower. The bathroom was full of steam, I like very long, hot showers at the end of my day, and as I went to wipe away the condensation from the mirror, there was a man standing behind me. He grabbed me and covered my mouth so I couldn’t scream and held a vibra-blade knife to my throat.”
She reached up and pulled the collar of her crisp, blue top down a few inches to show me a very thin, barely there two-inch scar at the base of her neck. I looked keenly at it for a long beat. It wasn’t fake. Which meant what she was telling me was the truth. Shit.
“Trillium, I’m sorry,” I said honestly. “There is no love lost between us, but that must have been a terrifying experience.”
“It was,” Trillium agreed softly. The telling of the memory had brought it to life for her, and she was visibly shaken by it. “I felt helpless. Utterly and completely helpless. I’d never, in my entire life, felt that way before.”
“What happened then?” I asked, trying to move the conversation forward.
“He told me that no matter what I did, however much security I had, that he would always be able to get to me,” she replied almost blankly, as if telling the tale of someone else. It was a classic dissociation caused by severe PTSD. “He said I was his, and his alone, and to prove it he laid the edge of the blade ever so gently against my neck. I hardly felt it. But it left a mark. A mark that he said showed I was his. Then, he was gone. I hit my panic button and security came and scoured my entire apartment. They scrubbed every second of video footage from my many, many security cameras. Bio-detection bots were brought in and went through every inch of my building.”
“And?”
“They found nothing,” she answered. “Other than the scar on my neck, there was no trace that he had ever been there at all. Like he was some kind of ghost.”
“Jesus,” I whispered. “Did you get a look at his face?”
“He had a facial scrambler,” she replied. “His features were blurred as if seen through rippled water. As was his voice. For all I know, it could have been you, Havak.”
“Hey…” I protested. It was a dig to get a rise out of me, and it worked.
“Please,” she waved me off with a smirk. “I know it wasn’t you. You are many things, Havak, but subtle and sneaky are not one of them.”
“True,” I agreed. “So, that’s why you contacted Darry. To see if he would devise a weapon that you could always carry on you to use on the sneaky fuck if he ever showed back up.”
“Yes,” Trillium nodded. “It was a tricky job. He was working on nano-armor that could be injected subdermally that would both protect me and emit a powerful electrical shock strong enough to fry ten men. When I spoke to him last, the night before he was found dead, he was very close to being done.”
“That’s interesting,” I said and stood. That was the bit of info that I had been searching for. It was a lead. Someone who had motive to kill Darry. “Very coincidental that he should choose that night to kill himself.”
“Yes, very,” Trillium said. “Without that nano-armor, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“With any, luck,” I told her reassuringly. “The guy will be caught. Grizz and I are working on finding him.”
“You’ll have to excuse me if I am not overflowing with relief,” Trillium huffed. “I’ve had a team of private investigators searching for him for the last few months. They’ve found nothing.”
“Well, now you’ve got Team Havak on the case,” I grinned cockily. “We tend to specialize in the outlandishly improbable.”
“Ha,” Trillium laughed. “That you do, Havak. That you do.”
I was about to take my leave, the convo had gone on way longer than I had expected, when the studio door opened, and the backlit silhouette of a security guard filled the doorframe.
“Is this man bothering you, Ms. Vou?” The guard asked and began to walk into the studio. The door closed behind him and he almost disappeared into the dark.
“No, he was invited,” Trillium replied and began to pack up her belongings into a small, sleek, attaché case. “Thank you… I’m sorry, who are you? Are you new? You can go, I’m fine.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the guard replied, still shrouded in shadows. “Started last week. My name is Toe-Massi. I came to remind you of something.”
“Oh,” Trillium nodded but then stopped herself. “Wait--”
“You’re mine,” the guard whispered and came into the circle of light cast by the vanity mirror. His face rippled and blurred in undulating waves, and he held a nasty, serrated vibra-blade in his right hand and a compact stun-gun in his left that crackled suddenly with bright blue energy.
Trillium gasped in shock and started to scrabble away, but he had gotten too close. Toe-Massi lunged forward to try to jab her with the stun-gun.
My combat mods came online in the space between heartbeats, and I threw myself in between the two
of them. The stun-gun hit me in the side, and hot fire flared through every nerve in my body. It was like someone had coated my synapses with battery acid. It was possibly the worst pain I’d ever felt in my entire life. And it pissed me right the fuck off.
“Arrrgh!” I grunted through a grimace of pain and fury and willed my hands down to grab Toe-Massi’s wrist. The Krav Maga struggled through the electrical blast, and I twisted the wrist violently. Toe-Massi yelped, and the stun-gun clattered to the ground. The pain was gone as fast as it had come, and my regen mod began to repair whatever damage it had done.
Toe-Massi was committed and swung the vibra-blade around to swipe at my face. I stepped inside the swing as I brought my right arm to block his knife hand while my left elbow came around in a tight jab that hit Toe-Massi in the chin.
He stumbled backward, and I turned into him so that my back was against his body to grab his knife arm with both hands. He yanked back and tried to reverse the blades direction, but I’d hoped that was exactly what he was going to do and dropped my right knee so that I came up and under the knife arm. I then used my newly gained leverage to twist and pull as hard as I could which hyperextended the elbow.
Once again Toe-Massi yelped and then he dropped the knife. He kicked out, and his thick, heavy boots caught me in the shin. It caused my grip on his arm to loosen just enough so that he could slip free.
There was a beat where we all just looked at each other.
Then he bolted.
I turned to see if Trillium was okay.
“Go!” she yelled at me from where she laid on the ground. “Get him.”
Without another word, I spun and sprinted after the would-be stalker. He didn’t go back the way he came, though. Twenty feet to my left another door opened, and he was again backlit from the light of a service hallway, then he was gone.
I hit the door not two seconds later with my shoulder and practically bounced off the wall of the hallway as my momentum carried me through the doorway.
Toe-Massi was thirty feet ahead of me and running for his life.
Which was a good thing, because if I caught the bastard I was pretty sure I was going to kill him.
I took off after him again as he began to twist and turn through the labyrinthine hallways. He tried to barrel through another access door but it was locked, and I thought I had him but the wily son of a bitch jumped onto a maintenance ladder bolted into the wall and began to climb like a fucking monkey.
I jumped up onto the ladder and did as best I could to gain on him. He crawled through a small door hatch and once again was gone.
“Goddamn it,” I muttered to myself. “Why is there always another doorway?”
The doorway was only two feet high, and I had to crouch-crawl my way through. I caught motion from the corner of my eye and rolled out of the way just in time to avoid a heavy fire extinguisher that had been thrown from a few feet to my right. I pulled up from the roll into a crouch and scanned my surroundings.
We had come out onto some elaborate catwalk system that rose fifty feet above the studio. There were no cables or anything holding the catwalks aloft. I looked up and saw the underside of some of the ones above us and realized they worked on some kind of hover system.
Toe-Massi was on one ten feet in front and two feet above me. When he saw that he’d missed with the fire extinguisher, he took off again.
I launched myself forward and vaulted the railing onto his catwalk and chased once again. Toe-Massi had started to tire from the chase, and I caught up to him quickly. With my right hand I grabbed him by the collar of his security guard uniform and yanked back hard.
Toe-Massi gagged as his shirt cut into his neck and tried to throw a wild elbow at my face but I reversed direction and turned the yank into a hard shove. He spun on me and threw a wild haymaker that I was able to duck easily and threw a punch into his stomach.
Hot breath washed across my face and Toe-Massi crumbled easier than I had been expecting for some deranged psychopath with ninja like abilities and his sudden weight on me took me by surprise.
“Oof, fuck,” I cursed as our legs tangled, and he fell completely on top of me. The asshole began to squirm and kick like some kind of trapped animal full of blind panic. Before I could do anything, his forehead smashed into the bridge of my nose, and I saw stars for a second and then felt the coppery taste of warm blood fill my mouth.
I sputtered and gasped as I attempted to spit the flood of my own blood out of my airway. I don’t care how much combat training you have or how many fights you’ve been in, if you catch a blind shot to the nose unexpectedly it is going to cause you pause. My eyes watered furiously and more blood poured from my nostrils.
The mass of Toe-Massi’s limbs scrambled on top of me as I tried to roll away from his knees and elbows. Toe-Massi got to his feet before I could grab him, threw himself through the railing and out into the open air.
“No!” I yelled wetly and spit out more blood.
I grabbed the railing and pulled myself up to look over the edge. The lucky son of a bitch had landed on a railing twenty feet below us that lead to another access hatch. He got to his feet and limped toward the hatch.
“Ah, fuck me,” I muttered and then vaulted over the railing, hoping that Parkour mod would not lead me astray.
Air whooshed in my ears, and then I hit the railing hard. My knees came up into my chest, and I almost knocked the wind out of myself. I pushed through the pain, and my lungs burning need for air, and willed my legs to move.
This hatch led to yet another fucking hallway.
“Why are there always so many hallways?” I wheezed and then heard a clang from a doorway down the hall. I burst through it not two seconds later and found myself on a very crowded pedestrian walkway that connected several buildings together five stories above the ground.
It was the end of lunchtime, and the walkway was packed with all kinds of aliens returning to work. I scanned the crowd in both directions, desperately searching for any sign of the security guard.
Some pedestrians began to look at me funny and give me a rather wide berth. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirrored reflection of a window on the building I’d just come out of.
I looked like I’d gone a few rounds with Tyson in his hayday.
For a second I thought about trying to muscle my way through the crowd, but decided against it.
Toe-Massi was gone.
Chapter Ten
“I lost him in the crowd,” I told Trillium as I stood before her in the green room which had been turned into a makeshift med-bay slash room where all the people now were. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be, Havak,” Trillium said as a gaggle of folks swarmed around her.
After I’d come back inside there had been a whirlwind of chaotic activity as Trillium was rushed to safety as if she were the POTUS. Once four different doctors, and two seperate security chiefs, cleared her, I’d been allowed back into her presence. She’d regained her composure and was back to being the calm and collected Trillium Vou I’d known. “If you hadn’t been there, I don’t know what would have happened.”
“Is that you saying thank you?” I smirked.
“Yes,” she sighed.
“You’re welcome,” I shrugged. “Don’t get used to me saving your bacon, Trill. I still don’t like you.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Havak,” she grinned like a shark at me. “And the feeling is quite mutual.”
“Well,” I started to say as I turned to leave, “since no one in here is going to ask how I am or if I need any medical attention, I’m going to go.”
“That would probably be best,” Trillium intoned and then turned her attention back to her security chiefs. “Gentlemen, we need to talk.”
I didn’t stick around to see her lay into them, but based on their expressions they knew they were in big trouble.
After an awkward hover-cab ride, I walked through the doors of the gym which was, as I had hoped, empty.
/> I’d thought about going home, but didn’t want to have to explain my bloody and bruised countenance to any of my alliance mates. Or Woodhouse for that matter.
It was odd being in the gym without the normal hustle and bustle of a training session, almost like the room was asleep. I went into the locker room and took a quick shower to clean the dirt, grime, and blood off my face and then changed into a pair of my normal coveralls and combat boots. Then I went into the med-bay and rummaged around for something that would help the swelling in my face. The regen mod would take care of it by the morning but at the moment I had bruises forming at the bottom of my eyes, and the bridge of my nose looked like someone had stuffed a tiny balloon in it.
I found some pills labeled “anti-inflammatory” and took a few with a couple of swigs of Blue Betty. It was a wonderful Gatorade like cocktail of amino acids, electrolytes and mild painkillers. I wanted to keep straight but just take the edge off the pain a bit so I didn’t go for a whole bottle.
I was just about to try to contact Grizz when the big oaf appeared right in front of me and scared the hell out of me.
“Gah!” I yelped.
“Here you are, Havak!” He said exasperatedly. “I have been looking everywhere for you.”
“Well, I’m here,” I said as I regained my composure. “Man, do I have a story to tell you.”
“It is going to have to wait, Havak,” Grizz said. “We need to meet Neophor.”
“What?” I blurted out. “I thought we weren’t supposed to meet her until after the next match?”
“Nor did I,” he explained. “I was chatting with a few of my fellow holo-trainers when I got an urgent message from her. I have no idea how she figured out how to beam a message directly into my position. But she wants to meet us immediately.”
“I’ll get on the horn to Tempest,” I started to say.