Her men gripped their blades tight; leather handles screamed in anticipation. Would she at last give the order to kill this dog?
She continued. “Perhaps I should pay your ebony beauty a visit?”
“I apologize.” Radzinski bowed. He held the pose far longer than he was comfortable with. The act had become familiar. “The fight ran over. It won’t happen again.”
“You lie.” She slapped his face. “Some of my men were at the fight. We are everywhere, or have you forgotten? They saw you talking with a gaijin whore. Perhaps I’ll speak with her too.”
He stayed silent. Radzinski was sure he could fight his way out of this and back to Underworld proper if need be, but as far as he knew, there were knives at the throats of Isabelle and Sona at this very moment.
“I have something to show you, and then I will see you in my chambers.” She stared directly into his eyes. “You won’t be pleased with either.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Lady Setsuko led Radzinski and Vadim through her domain, out to the stairwell, and up into Underworld’s main hall. There they were joined by Ken and Mamoru. A fire dancer was performing on the main stage; she quickly gathered her things and disappeared behind the curtain. As did many of the denizens of the place. Radzinski’s bartender friend Mike nervously wiped down glasses in a vain attempt at looking busy.
The Hooligans were gathered at the center of the room; they had been taking in the show and celebrating one of their own’s recent victories in the Pit. A dozen or more of Lady Setsuko’s black-suit-clad soldiers surrounded the gang and kept them at bay with their knives drawn. Other men mixed with the crowd around the Hooligans revealed themselves by brandishing their own blades. Even more still were hidden among the gathered masses. They were disguised as normal Underworld patrons and only made themselves known when those around them fled.
The Hooligans’ leader stood. “What the hell is this?” he demanded.
“Now!” Lady Setsuko shouted.
The slaughter began. Blood flowed in Underworld as one by one the Hooligans were cut down. Their leader was left alive as the single survivor of his once-proud gang. Badly wounded, he was brought before Lady Setsuko and forced to his knees. Rottweiler breathed contempt but did not plead.
“Gaijin.” Lady Setsuko turned to Radzinski and handed him her personal blade, a family heirloom passed down from generations. “Kill him.”
Her men surrounded Radzinski with knives of their own. They would strike him down without hesitation should he give the slightest hint of moving on their master.
“He’s beat. All of his men are dead or dying. You don’t need to do this,” Radzinski pleaded, more for himself than the man on his knees.
“Get on with it,” the Hooligan cursed through bloodstained teeth.
“Remember,” Lady Setsuko hissed. “I know where you sleep.”
Radzinski cut Rottweiler’s throat. It would be quickest that way—he hoped. The Marine dropped the knife, and blood danced around his feet.
“I have another task for you, gaijin.” Lady Setsuko waved a few of her men over.
A frail older European man in rags was brought before them with a young girl in tow. She was no older than five.
“This worthless fool has taught his daughter that stealing from me goes unpunished.” She grabbed the man by the jaw.
“It was only a little food,” the man sobbed. “I can work for it. I promise.”
“You should have thought of that before you stole from me.” She turned her attention back to Radzinski. “Gaijin, dispose of him.”
“What? No.” Radzinski stood firm, even with multiple knives at his throat.
“You kill him or Jinsoku kills the child.”
Jinsoku unsheathed her katana and held it at the child’s neck. The little girl cried, desperate for her father’s help. The man pleaded and begged for forgiveness. Lady Setsuko’s men laughed. Radzinski eyed Jinsoku; the assassin gave the slightest nod in the negative.
Radzinski sighed heavily. “I’m so sorry, kid,” he said as he pulled the father close.
The frail man was helpless against Radzinski’s strength as he put an arm securely around the man’s neck. With his other hand, he cupped the man’s mouth and nose. The defenseless father furiously beat on Radzinski’s arms, but to no avail; he was as helpless as a child. The little girl tried to look away, but Lady Setsuko forced her to watch as the life drained from her father. Radzinski let the man go and he crumpled to the ground at the Marine’s feet. Radzinski fell to his knees with his head lowered in shame.
Lady Setsuko’s slaves were waved on. “Take this child away. Dress her appropriately and mark her. She belongs to me now. As for you”—again she turned to Radzinski—“I’m not through with you yet.”
Her men forced the Marine to his feet and pushed him toward the stairwell at knifepoint. Lady Setsuko’s chambers awaited.
~~~
Alex took advantage of a passing late-night rain to shower out by the Pen. The closer Haven traveled to the tropics, the more frequently these random squalls popped up. It felt like home: the freedom of the road minus the ever-present danger. The animal enclosures mostly hid her from the prying eyes of passersby, if there even were any at this late hour.
“I thought the rains would never come,” Ames commented as he washed her back.
She smiled and lifted her hair. Alex had shared with him her proclivity to shower out under the stars. The ritual was something she taught herself on the road after witnessing a downpour that washed months of accumulated grime from a group of carriers she was studying.
Alex approached Ames a couple months back. She noticed him noticing her at Trix’s bar and other gathering spots throughout the ship. Alex never intended to spend her time aboard Haven tied down, but there was something about the mechanic that piqued her interest.
“Can I change your mind?” he asked while guiding a tiny bar of soap over her skin.
“I’m sorry, Ames. Not everything is meant to last,” she said with sincerity and an evenness in her voice; she wanted there to be no miscommunication on that front. Alex would often remind him of her plans to leave Haven for good. With each excursion that she joined Cortez and the team on, she brought all her belongings in the world with her, just in case that was the spot she chose to resume her trek. Some random, unforeseen detail would call to her and she would stay.
Ames was always on hand for the excursion team’s arrival, and every time when he saw her face bobbing up and down in the return craft, he breathed a sigh of relief. He began imagining that she was indeed returning for him, but he knew better. One day, and probably soon, that boat would return minus Alex.
~~~
Mensa wiped the fog from his bathroom mirror. Small luxuries like hot running water helped ease the frustration of people who so carelessly disregarded his worth. If Kayembe wouldn’t enforce a stricter policy on food allocation, then why should he waste his time coming up with formulas? Mensa’s reflection was weary; his salt and pepper beard did little to hide a million lines on his face. It seemed like a new one was added each day that he had to deal with these cretins.
His wife moaned from the other room. She was bedridden; she had been for months.
“I’ll be in in a moment,” he said, but he wasn’t sure that she could even hear him.
She was given four months to live before the crisis even began. Stage four pancreatic cancer. Mensa thought a tropical vacation and the warm Caribbean air would do her good. It didn’t. Over the summer, her symptoms worsened. She lay down one afternoon and never got back up. Mensa knew that Doctor Nazneen was in over her head and a sick old woman who was beyond care certainly wouldn’t be a priority. The idea of letting Todd throw her in de-cons or worse was completely out of the question, so Mensa kept his wife’s illness to himself.
Mensa had one of her legs strapped to the bedpost for fear of the turn. If she were to come back to him, he could release her bonds, but if not… He was pragmatic b
ut certainly not heartless, at least where his wife was concerned. He spoke with her daily as if there was nothing wrong. Somewhere deep in her psyche, the sound of his voice was getting through; he was sure of it.
He sat beside her in his reading chair and took her hand in his, as he did daily. “We deserve to die, all of us.” He waited for a response that never came but continued as if one did. “I do mean that. Absolutely I do. Humanity is a parasite. We kill everything we touch.” Again, he waited. “I won’t go to bed. I can’t. Not when there’s so much to do.”
She moaned and he wiped her forehead with a cool, damp towel.
“I’m saying that we’re dinosaurs. When the earth was done with them, when she realized that they had no more to offer, she killed them just like she’s doing to us now.”
He gripped her hand tightly but gently before he continued. “Just look outside of our door. I’ll show you when you get up. This ship is a floating reminder of everything that was wrong with humanity in the first place. Instead of a clean start, instead of forging ahead with a better way to do things, it’s just more of the same.”
Once more she moaned.
“No, you get some rest,” he insisted. “I’ll join you shortly.”
~~~
Sona sat alone on her sofa; she was flanked by two obelisks that stretched to the room’s ceiling. They were replicas she had commissioned: new additions to her growing ancient-Egyptian-themed private quarters. The display was mostly constructed from scrap wood and papier-mâché with a heavy base to keep them from tipping over. The focal point of these pieces was the paintwork; it was exquisite. Even up close, the obelisks looked as if they were carved from solid stone, right down to reproductions of pockmarks and weathered hieroglyphs. She toyed with the idea of redecorating all of Frost to match her fondness for ancient Egyptian architecture, but she wasn’t sure yet if it would clash with a sea of skin-tight leather and latex.
Earlier in the evening, Sona grew a little too rambunctious with a client under her whip. During his session, she pulled something in her shoulder, so she was icing it down as she rested. She cursed her mistake, and she would have liked to have been able to apologize to the man, but that meant breaking character. He seemed to enjoy her passion, after all; the stain on the front of his pants adequately encapsulated his stance on the issue.
It wasn’t like Sona to take out her frustrations on her clients. It was an accident, pure and simple, as she was worried about Radzinski’s meeting with Lady Setsuko. It was no secret that Sona and the Marine had become an item of a sort and were living together. Neither she nor Radzinski had entered into this arrangement with the intention of it going any further than a business transaction with maybe a little fun on the side. Over the months and without either of them realizing it, they had broken down each other’s barriers. It took a comment from Amaranth for Sona to admit she had fallen for him, and before long, he was sleeping over multiple nights a week. Eventually she asked him to stay. Unfortunately, their bond was a weapon that their enemies, most notably Lady Setsuko, could use against them. They would need to be more careful than ever if they were going to successfully navigate the days to come.
A knock at the door roused Sona from her book. At this hour and as a precaution—safely in her domain or not—she tucked a blade beneath her silken robe before answering. Sona dropped her weapon on the nearest table after she opened the door to find Radzinski standing in the hallway. “When I heard the knock, I thought…” she began but she was taken aback by his demeanor.
Radzinski appeared more haggard than usual after a long day of doing Setsuko’s bidding. “I’m sorry. I must have left my keycard this morning,” he said with almost no emotion. He stood with his head down; he looked defeated. Shame permeated the man like an aura.
“What is it, John?” She put her hand on his chest.
Without warning, Radzinski slammed the cabin door shut, then punched it more than once. He pushed on the door with all of his weight as if he could tip over the entire ship from this room and dump all of his frustrations into the sea.
Sona ran her fingers through his hair with one hand, and with her other hand she caressed his back. “Hey, it’s okay. Talk to me. Whatever it is, you can tell me.”
Radzinski turned and leaned his back heavily against the door. He pressed his palms to his forehead and closed his eyes.
“It’s okay, John,” she said softly as she gently caressed his head. “She can’t touch you here.” Sona was on an emotional roller coaster. One minute she felt deep compassion for Radzinski, and in the next a rage boiled over at the thought of what Lady Setsuko could have made him do to break him so. “It’ll be okay,” she repeated as she stared intently at the damage done to the door. She imagined that at any moment now, Lady Setsuko’s thugs would come crashing through. She welcomed it.
Radzinski took a moment to compose himself before straightening his posture and touching the now-damaged portion of the door. “I don’t know what came over me. Sorry for that.”
“Stop. You’re human, John. That’s all this is.” She led him to their modest kitchen where she fixed him a drink. “If you don’t want to talk about it, we don’t have to.”
“No. When we started this thing, I told you I’d be an open book. I’m not about to start cutting you out now,” he said as he took a slow pull from his whiskey.
In Radzinski’s mind, any show of emotion more than a few clicks left or right of neutral was considered weakness. Maybe, just maybe, he and Miller had more in common than either man was willing to admit. He had come to trust these people in Underworld, for the most part. He understood that most of them simply wanted to live their lives unfettered by the systems of control instilled on them from those who lived above.
But now the facade of freedom offered by Underworld was beginning to lift. A different sort of control was all too apparent, and that revelation was combined with the ever-present danger of running afoul of one of Underworld’s various gang lords and their many underlings. The Yakuza, the Haitians, or the Vatos—they were everywhere. Any one of them could start a violent skirmish in Underworld’s main drag, and that would result in lives lost. Mostly innocent lives. That was the way these things tended to shake out. Radzinski had no plan, he had no next play, but however he chose to move forward, he knew it would have to be done cautiously.
As he finished his first drink and motioned for another, Radzinski began his tale. “I killed two men tonight. In cold blood. One of them probably had it coming, but the other… Jesus Christ.” Radzinski replayed the entirety of the day in excruciating detail, from a chance encounter with Isabelle to another round of degradation in Lady Setsuko’s private quarters. For the duration of his tale, Sona listened.
~~~
Unlike their counterparts up above, the bars never closed in Underworld—the staff rotated in and out, but you could still get just about anything you wanted, even at this late hour. Oftentimes the night presented opportunity not so easily had during the day. Drunks and addicts spread out in these hours; they could often be seen passed out in heaps in darkened corners, and navigating them became commonplace.
Isabelle had company at the River Styx. Word had spread about her and Soraya’s return. Nisha had been trying unsuccessfully to break through her friend’s shell for hours now. She might as well have been talking to herself. If Isabelle was still the woman that Nisha thought she knew, then perhaps she might have noticed how dour Nisha’s mood was; or maybe Isabelle did notice and she just didn’t care. Still, Nisha went on about how she just wanted to go home. How she hated it here and didn’t know how to make it work. But now that Isabelle was back, maybe they could really make a go of it together.
An occasional “mm-hmm” or a grunt was about all that Isabelle had to offer in the way of comfort for her lifelong friend. Nisha continued to try; it was the most talking she’d done since arriving on Haven months ago. In her mind, they both needed saving, and just maybe, if she could get through to Isabelle, she
could save them both.
Lillian crept through the dimly lit expanse between the stairway and the River Styx. Day or night, it made no difference down here; it always looked the same. The only thing that changed was the number of people wandering about. Lillian knew she shouldn’t be in Underworld alone, especially this late, but the fact that her mother was alive gnawed at her all day. She had to see her.
There she was, across the room at a bar with Nisha. It was true; her mother was alive. Nisha looked awful. Maybe she was just tired—it was approaching four o’clock in the morning. Her mother looked fine, though; she was a little battered and dirty, but all things considered, she looked great. Isabelle still had on her gray, road-worn spaghetti-strap dress that Lillian last saw her in months ago. Her left arm was bandaged from her hand to her shoulder. Was she injured? Should she be in the infirmary? Was she planning on living down here like this? Endless questions raced through Lillian’s mind.
Lillian approached slowly, cautiously. She stood behind and between her mother and Nisha.
Nisha spoke up in a monotone and withered voice. “Hi, sweetie,” she said before suggesting that Lillian take it slow.
“Mom, it’s good to see you.” Lillian took a step toward her mother but stopped just short of touching her.
Isabelle offered nothing in return, not even the grunts she had been communicating to Nisha with. She sipped her drink in silence and stared at the other side of the bar.
“I missed you,” said Lillian tentatively with another step forward. “I really like living here. I work at a bar with Vanessa just like back home.” Lillian couldn’t help herself; she wanted to blurt out everything that was on her mind.
Isabelle interrupted. “Let me stop you right there.”
“Oh my God, Mom?” Lillian clasped her hands in front of her face. She was trying to hide her smile and was desperate to hold back tears.
“I want you to listen to me very carefully,” Isabelle instructed. She never took her hands from the bar top, but with two fingers, she motioned for a couple of guys across the way to come over. They had been watching her for the past hour or so. She returned her attention to Lillian. “When your father and I discovered that we were pregnant with you, Tobias was over the moon.”
The Roaming (Book 3): Haven's Promise Page 31