The Thieves of Nottica

by Ash Gray

  Rigg took a seat on the barrel beside Kito, taking the weight off her injured leg with a wince. She wasn’t wearing her coat, just her long cargo skirt, her thermal undershirt, and the leather chest guard that was always strapped over it. On the lower front of her undershirt was a long rectangular pocket, and she slipped both hands into it, her shoulders hunched as she regarded the tired man.

  “How’s the leg?” Kito asked quietly.

  “Dunno,” Rigg returned, her face darkening. “I guess it could be worse. I coulda got left behind.”

  Kito bowed his head, letting the demijohn rest on his knee. “I’m sorry, kid.” He closed his eyes. “I’m sorry for everything.”

  “Why’d you stop speakin’ to us?” Rigg peered at him from her enormous wreath of black hair, accusation sharp in her eyes.

  “Rigg. . . .” Kito said wearily and his purring Tor accent rolled the R’s in Rigg’s name. “I had no choice,” he said in a feeble, pleading tone.

  Rigg shook her head in disgust. “Dunno. Seems you had plenty choices to me: help your friends or run an’ hide. You made ah choice. It was the shitty one, but it was ah choice.”

  Kito sighed. “Look, Rigg . . . It’s bad enough Morganith tore into me. Now you too?”

  “Mor’s gotta right to be angry!” Rigg burst, hating herself for her own hypocrisy: just ten minutes ago, she had chided Hari for the same anger. But the last six months had been hellish, and as the pain and humiliation of running and hiding and starving came flooding back on her, memory after memory, she went on furiously, “You didn’t see what Pirayo did to us, how he had us runnin’ scared from city to city! How we nearly starved! You didn’t hear Hari screamin’ every night as she fought the nightmares! You didn’t see Arda fall down in her own blood --!”

  “I know,” Kito said, voice soft as a sad song. “If I’d got there faster . . .” He swallowed hard and took a long, shaky drink from the demijohn, tilting it up to the ceiling. “If I’d . . .” He licked his lips and set the bottle on his knee again. The green glass winked in the lantern light, as did the gold platting on his mechanical arm. “I’m sorry, alright? I can’t take it back.” He closed his eyes. “I wish to god I could. But I was never like you and Morganith and Hari. I was never brave. I just wanted to be.”

  They sat in silence for a while, and though Rigg wanted to reprimand Kito further, she suddenly didn’t feel she had the strength. Her angry heart thudded slower and slower. Eventually, she reached for Kito’s demijohn, convinced he couldn’t see her peeling hands in the darkness, but Kito held the liquor at bay, and unfortunately, he noticed the skin flaking off her hands.

  Rigg quickly shoved her hands back in her shirt pocket. “I ain’t ah kid no more, Kito,” she complained with a laugh. “And even when I was, you realize I was drinkin’ long before now, right?”

  “Just the same,” said Kito and did not pass Rigg the demijohn. A pause and then, “So . . . little Riggy all growed up,” he teased, eying her shirt pocket. “You and Evrard’s robot, huh?” He made a disapproving face.

  Rigg frowned. “Her name is Lisa. And she’s not Evrard’s anything.”

  “A man like that . . .” Kito shook his head. When he looked at Rigg, his dark, watery eyes were frightened. “Be careful, Rigg, hmm?” he said, peering steadily into her eyes.

  Taken aback by Kito’s fear, Rigg hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah, alright,” she said, looking away. She heard the liquid swish as Kito took another drink, and from the corner of her eye, she could see the sad, thoughtful expression that crossed his face when he bowed his head.

  “How much do you love her?” Kito asked softly.

  Rigg went still in surprise. “How . . .?” she cleared her throat. “How did you . . .?”

  Kito’s lips twisted in a sad smile. “I saw the way Lisa reacted when you were hurt. That was love screaming from her voice. Only love can fear like that.”

  Rigg smiled sadly at the bloody bandages on her leg.

  “I didn’t think robots could . . .” Kito frowned and trailed off.

  “You didn’t think robots could what?” Rigg prompted irritably. “Feel? Fear? Love? Think?”

  “Yes,” Kito admitted in a soft whisper.

  Rigg looked away.

  “Be careful, Riggy,” he said again. “Loving a thing that can just be reprogrammed . . .”

  Rigg looked quickly, angrily at Kito. “Don’t call Lisa a thing.”

  Kito nodded apologetically and looked away. “You’re setting yourself up for a world of hurt, though. I’m trying to look out for you.”

  “It’s my choice to make,” Rigg said quietly. “And I don’t need you to protect me.”

  Kito nodded again. “So?” he prompted. He took another drink. “Just how much do you love her?”

  “I’d die for her,” Rigg said in a small whisper, as if she were vowing to herself what she would do. She didn’t see the look of pity Kito gave her.

  “You sound like me when I fell in love with Din,” Kito said wistfully. “When I met her, she was a slave. It was on this same ship that I saw her for the first time. Some rich human lord was keeping her as a pet.”

  Rigg looked at Kito quickly.

  “Yeah,” Kito confirmed, his expression twisted in disgust. “It was out of style to have demon sex slaves, but companion units are expensive, and this guy was as cheap as they come. Name was Lord Levon. He was a descendant of some ancient prince and believed he was owed the whole damn world. Wanted to save money. And he just had a fetish for women with horns.” Kito sneered into space, remembering.

  “So how’d you set her free?” Rigg asked, listening with interest.

  Kito frowned. “I realized I couldn’t.” He glanced at Rigg sadly. “I realized the world was too shitty. Killing her master and whisking her away wouldn’t end all her problems. Out there,” he nodded at the door, “she’d still be a slave in the eyes of most humans. So I didn’t do anything. I just watched and felt angry and helpless. I watched as Levon made her prance around in nipple tassels; I watched as he slapped her backside and humiliated her. She could tell I pitied her and started stealing chances to speak with me.” He shook his head wistfully. “Those four months were the most intense of my life. I fell head over heels in love with her, and I decided to hell with everything. We took over the ship and never looked back. Plenty of people were willing to join us, demons and humans alike. They’d been willing all their lives and had just been waiting for the right moment to break free.”

  “Wow,” Rigg said with a laugh. She looked at Kito with round, admiring eyes, and her lips curled into a smirk. “So what’d you do with Lord Levon?”

  Kito smiled. “Tied him to a hot air balloon and let it go.” He shrugged. “I’m sure a Regime patrol ship got him down. But the man was terrified of heights. You should’ve heard the screams.”

  Rigg swallowed hard. She could just imagine.

  “Anyway,” Kito dropped his eyes, “that’s the story.”

  There was a pause as they both sat in contemplation for a moment. Rigg stared thoughtfully at the wall, and Kito took another swig of his demijohn, the liquid swishing softly in the gloom.

  “Just tell me one thing,” Rigg said, eying Kito’s expensive mechanical arm.

  Kito didn’t look up.

  “What’s the reason you stopped talkin’ to us?” Rigg asked. “Did the Hand drop ah sacka riggits in your lap and tell you ta stay away from us? Or did Pirayo buy you out?”

  Kito’s face twisted with indignation. “As if Pirayo could buy me. That cyborg trash.”

  Rigg glanced at Kito and thought that he, like Morganith, was painfully unaware of the sad irony in his hatred for automatons and cyborgs, when he himself was a cyborg. Because Kito had grown up in a wealthy household with robotic servants, he’d long shared Morganith’s unfortunate prejudice against robots. He didn’t see them as people but as mindless inferiors, and it wasn’t for robots that Kito had rebelled against the Hand. And yet, he was content to wear robot
ic limbs and eyepieces that made his life easier. True to his upper class background, he didn’t mind benefiting from the same people he discarded, and in that sense, he was no better than the Hand. At least Morganith had learned better. Even long before she met Lisa, Morganith’s sheer hatred of robots had been dwindling the more she was exposed to them. But Kito? Kito hadn’t changed a bit.

  “I would have killed him myself if I could’ve ever found him,” Kito went on, faced pinched bitterly as he thought of Pirayo, “but just like all little worms, he had his many little holes. I looked, but it was pointless. He was always one step ahead.”

  Rigg held back a smile: not long ago, Morganith had called Kito a worm. Kito was glaring into space, slowly and angrily shaking his head. He took another swig from the demijohn and wiped his mouth with the back of his mechanical wrist.

  Rigg looked at the captain in surprise as she finally registered what he’d said. “You looked for Pirayo?” she prompted.

  “Yeah. That job was ah catastrophe, Rigg. We’d all been caught on the cameras, Arda was killed. It was a miracle we got away with the lockbox! I decided to lay low, figured I’d contact you in a few months when it was safe.” Kito shook his head. “Then I heard what Pirayo did to you, and I knew the son of a bitch had probably set us all up. But why? I couldn’t know unless I found him. Dinemi was afraid I’d get hurt, but I went after him. Looked for months and nothing.”

  “You coulda contacted us,” Rigg said. “We coulda helped.”

  “No,” Kito said at once. “It was too dangerous, Rigg. Your faces were already on wanted posters. It was better to let you hide while I went after him myself. After about the third month,” he stared straight ahead, seeing not the wall but his thoughts, “I ran into one of Evrard’s spies. Turned out she was looking for Pirayo too. Instead, she found me and dragged me back to the Hand.”

  “And you were tortured,” Rigg said and closed her eyes, trying not to imagine what it was like for Kito to have had his arm cut off. She did not see the guilty glance Kito furtively darted her way.

  “Yeah,” said Kito, dropping his eyes. “I was tortured. They kept me for months. I’ve only been free a couple weeks, Rigg.”

  Rigg looked at Kito quickly.

  “That’s right,” Kito answered her unspoken question. “A couple weeks. Wasn’t sure how I was going to face you. Especially Morganith.” Kito laughed sadly and shook his head, thinking of the halfling. “Everything is so black and white, so clear-cut to Mor. You’re either with her or you’re against her. There is no in-between.”

  “What are you sayin’?” Rigg said slowly. “Are things in-between for you?” She stared hard at Kito and felt her anger flare when the captain couldn’t meet her eye. “Kito,” she said firmly, “are you still spyin’ for the Hand!”

  Kito swallowed hard. “No, Rigg, it’s not like that.”

  Rigg stared at him, unconvinced.

  “I have to let them think I’m spying for them,” Kito said, the feeble and pleading tone returning. “If they think for one second that I’ve disobeyed, they will kill me, do you understand?” He looked Rigg in the eye, and his eyes were unflinching and unapologetic. “What I do, I do for all of us. You’re just going to have to trust me.”

  Rigg looked away and her face twisted. “Do I hava choice?”

  “Short of jumping off the ship?” Kito said with a sad laugh. “No.”

  “Did you tell Hari and Mor all this?”

  “I told them I hunted down Pirayo and that’s how I was captured. Did I tell them I’m playing double agent? No. Even Din doesn’t know.”

  Rigg stared at her feet and her brows up at the realization that she was the only person Kito had trusted this information with. It suddenly became clear why Kito was so unhappy: to save his own hide, as well as everyone else’s, he had to pretend to betray his own friends. Bearing such a burden had to be exhausting, and he had chosen to share it with Rigg.

  “So takin’ off and leavin’ us back at Coghurst,” Rigg realized, “that was ah act.”

  Kito nodded. “Yeah. If I told Hari the truth, she’d never speak to me again. And Mor would just accuse me of being a boy who romanticizes saving the little people.” He shrugged. “Maybe that was true once, but now? Now this is about survival. I play the game because I have to, to protect the ones I love.” He glanced fondly at Rigg. “It’s do or die, something Morganith would never understand. Ha. Morganith is so stubborn, she’d always choose die.”

  Rigg laughed sadly: that was true. “So the Hand gave you that expensive arm,” she realized, her lip curling in disgust.

  “Yeah,” admitted Kito guiltily.

  “And you took it. Why?” Rigg bitterly looked away. “D’you miss bein’ rich or somethin’?” It was one thing pretending to work for the Hand, but taking their gifts?

  “What should I have done, Rigg? Refused it? Shown resistance and maybe had my balls snipped off? The Hand thinks they can buy me with cookies and head-pats, and I let them think that for my own good.” Kito’s face twisted as if he’d smelled something awful. “Like money can just buy happiness and loyalty.”

  “I dunno,” said Rigg, shrugging. “Sounds like you were happier back when you was rich. You could afford to eat and clothe yourself. If you got sick, you could getta doctor. While everyone else was starvin’, you could prance off on vacation – ain’t that how you became ah pirate? And if you said somethin’ shitty in public, you could just throw money at ah charity, and you’d instantly be ah good person again. You had the whole world at your fingertips.” She snorted, and pulling a riggit from her pocket, she looked at it listlessly. “I’m startin’ ta think money can buy anything.”

  “It can’t buy love,” Kito said softly.

  The apologetic note in Kito’s voice made Rigg look at him quickly. His dark eyes were sad and tired. He stared at her for one prolonged moment, looking on the verge of some confession. At the last minute, his lip trembled, and he looked away. “Get some rest, Riggy, hmm?” he said, and before she could question him, he eased up from the barrel and went out the door.

  When Kito had gone, Rigg limped downstairs and to the second floor, where Dinemi’s bar echoed with music. Dinemi was Kito’s wife, a tall Anikye demon with bushy black brows and a long, narrow face very reminiscent of a deer. Her lashes were incredibly long, her nails were long and black, and she wore black eyeliner around her slanted eyes. Like Morganith, she had a mass of wavy, curly black hair that fell in a rustling bush past her shoulders, but because she was a full-blooded Anikye demon and not a halfling, she had a single long horn sprouting from the center of her forehead. For this reason, humans often derisively referred to Anikye demons as “unicorns.” It sounded somewhat flattering, but it was actually a derogatory term no better than “ram,” which was often used to refer to Alteri.

  Dinemi was standing behind the bar when Rigg limped in. She was wearing a stained thermal undershirt with the sleeves rolled up, across which had been strapped holsters for her pistols. Yet another pistol had been shoved haphazardly in her leather pants, curly with designs and glossy in the flicker of electric lamps and guttering candles. A pair of welding goggles had been draped across her horn like spectacles across a nose, and a cigarette was behind her ear. She was pouring a drink as Hari and Morganith sat on stools at the bar, chatting with her. Morganith was slouching and already looked intoxicated, while Hari appeared to be brooding over a bowl of pretzels but was not drinking. A third person sat at the bar with Hari and Morganith – a human – and he appeared to be chatting with them.

  Dinemi’s bar had been set up as a place for the crew to relax. Round tables spread through the room, covered in tattered cloths. Pewter mugs held crumpled and dying flowers, while empty bottles and dirty cigarette trays were scattered across every table and chair. Crewmembers dozed at tables with their heads down or sat in contemplation, drinking and smoking. A group of three were deep into a game of cards, frowning and muttering and playing the game with all seriousness. Rig
g remembered that gambling wasn’t allowed on the ship (to deter any drunken brawling) and was amused to notice the card players were placing bets with moldy crackers.

  A young female crewmember sat on a high stool at the end of the bar, playing an elaborate golden flute with many gears, pipes, and whirling contraptions, all working together to produce a soothing sound in the listless quiet of the room. Rigg remembered the young flute player with much embarrassment. Everyone called her Lee, and she was a very beautiful Ainmik demon: flawless brown skin, penetrating black eyes, a trim and fit figure. She joined Kito’s crew when Rigg was twenty and had insisted on calling Rigg “sweet tits” from that time on.

  “Hey, Riggy, honey,” said Dinemi and winked. “What’ll it be?”

  “The usual,” Rigg muttered, taking a seat on a stool. She’d pulled the hood of her undershirt up over her large hair, as if to hide her sadness from concerned eyes. Her sleeves were rolled up, and after her long discussion with Kito, she’d forgotten the skin on her hands was peeling. Each time she moved her right hand, it hurt, the muscles screaming in a silent agony that made her teeth clench.

  Hari noticed Rigg’s peeling skin with a shrewd eye but didn’t comment on it. There was no sign of Rivet in her coat, and Rigg could only assume the tiny robot was likely tucked away in her satchel.

  Morganith, thankfully, seemed too intent on drinking, smoking, and glowering to notice Rigg’s peeling hands. Rigg reflected with a smile that even Morganith’s and Kito’s drunken states were at odds. While Kito could drink an entire demijohn without becoming slovenly, Morganith would be in the land of no return after two glasses. It was said that demons couldn’t hold their liquor well, and as a result, demons were barred from taverns and from drinking altogether. Morganith had often hidden her ears to pass for human just so she could drink.