by Ben Stevens
Maya awoke with grace and ease and welcomed the ladies into her chamber. Lucy gave Maya an inquisitive look and Maya signaled her with a slight nod that all was okay and to relax.
“Señorita Sapphire,” the lead girl said as she bowed. “We are here to prepare you for Señor Fernando.”
“So I’ve heard.” Maya crawled out from behind the canopy. “Let’s go ahead and get to it; I wouldn’t want to keep him waiting,” she said playfully. She brought her thumbs up to the straps of her nightgown, paused and looked at Ratt.
“Time for you to go, boy,” Lucy ordered.
Ratt stood still with a dumb look on his face, his double eyes blinking as if they were petitioning her demand in Morse code.
“Ratt, why don’t you put on your glasses and scope out places where we may be able to hold the show?” Maya suggested, winking at him.
Ratt nodded his understanding and grabbed both his tinted goggles and his leather jacket, which he draped over his Dead Kennedys t-shirt as he ducked out of the suite.
Lucy was a watchful ghost while Maya allowed the girls to lead her into the bath chamber, disrobe her, and draw a hot bath. They poured generous amounts of oils, salts, and soaps into the running water, making it smell of honey and flowers. They scrubbed her skin tenderly and washed her hair by hand, massaging her scalp.
Two of the girls stationed themselves behind her, one folding shampoo into her hair, the other tenderly mopping her shoulder with a soaked cloth, while the third sat in front of Maya and asked for her leg. Taking it once it was offered, she raised it out of the tub’s water and began to apply a creamy lotion of some kind to Maya’s short, slender legs.
The serving girl turned around and squeezed another dollop of lotion into her hands, then leaned back over the tub to apply it to Maya’s upper leg. As she leaned over, Maya could see a peculiar marking on the nape of the girl’s neck, perhaps a tattoo—a pictographic symbol that she did not recognize.
Before Maya could study it in detail, the serving girl turned around again, wiped her hands on a towel, and then faced her once more, this time with an ivory-handled razor in hand. The girl’s bushy ponytail had fallen over the tattoo now, obstructing it from further scrutiny.
Forgetting about it for the time being, Maya watched the young girl carefully pull the razor along the contours of her leg, peeling off her stubble, dead skin, and the lathered lotion. It felt good, invigorating.
The girl, while young, was skilled at her art and never once cut Maya’s skin. Maya watched the polished edge of the razor run up her calf and noticed another anomaly on the serving girl: a small, rectangular piece of plastic seemingly embedded in the underside of her forearm.
Cybernetics? Maya wondered and frowned subconsciously.
The girl shaving Maya’s leg noticed the frown as she leaned up to wipe clean the blade before another pass.
“Is something wrong, Señorita Sapphire?”
“Oh!” Maya’s cheeks flushed. “I, um, was noticing your neck tattoo and that, um... Well, what is that on your arm, if I may ask?”
The serving girl looked a mix of amused, confused, and scared. Maya caught one dubious eyebrow raise on the girl’s face before she remembered her place and dismissed it. Maya also felt the momentary pause in the scalp massage and shoulder-arm wash from the girls behind her. The girl holding the razor looked over Maya, presumably to read the face of the girl washing Maya’s hair. Apparently satisfied at what she saw, she turned her gaze downward to Maya.
“I beg forgiveness, Señorita, but I’m not sure what you mean.” The girl was clearly trying hard to be polite but was confused. The situation seemed to make her uncomfortable. She behaved as if she were afraid to give offense. Her voice was softer than the squeak of a church mouse.
“Umm.” Maya, too, was feeling awkward now, wondering if perhaps she was making a social faux pas. Maya brought her arm out of the hot water, shook the bubbles off as best she could, then pointed at her neck first before touching her fingers to the inside of her arm. Maya watched the dawning of comprehension in the young girl’s face, followed by the return of confusion, although the nervous tension seemed to have evaporated into the air like the steam rising from her bath.
“This is my stamp of citizenship.” The girl pulled her ringed, loose braid of raven locks aside with her left hand, exposing her neck to Maya’s gaze the way a lover would open a blouse. Maya could see the tattoo well now and leaned forward in the tub to get a closer look. It looked to Maya like a shield, a device, a family crest of some kind. Framed by a square no bigger than five square centimeters, there was what looked like a deformed rabbit under a full moon, perched on the ground before some half-buried root.
Then the girl released her fingertips from their duty and turned her arm over. Maya studied the square of plastic that embossed the girl’s skin. The plastic was whitish, semi-transparent and had a nipple-like, stunted tube protruding about one centimeter from it at a 15-degree angle.
“What is it?” Maya asked and reached her hand out to touch it. The girls all giggled a bit. The one whose arm Maya was examining shook her head and wrinkled her nose.
“What’s so funny?” Maya smiled at her embarrassment.
“You don’t have one?” the girl asked, stretching her neck to look over Maya’s body.
“No.” It was Maya’s turn to wrinkle her nose. The girls seemed genuinely confused now.
“You have neither? No Citizen Stamp nor tax connection?” the girl asked.
When Maya shook her head, she may just as well have told them that she didn’t have a nose or that she didn’t eat food and breathe air.
The girls were clearly confused and taken aback. The girl who had her arm out for Maya to examine recoiled a bit, her sense of place and duty unable to suppress the rising tide of xenophobia within her. Maya knew that something was off, so she played it cool and changed the subject quickly.
“Please, shave my armpits too, when you’re done with my legs.”
After the bath, the girls dried her off with soft towels that smelled of lemons and anointed her with oils on her neck, wrists, behind her ears, and her breasts. When they went to dab the same oil on the insides of her thighs, she stopped them with a gentle hand and said, “I do not think that is necessary. I have no intention of anyone coming close to that area.” She received another look of scared confusion from the serving girls but paid it no mind.
Maya then allowed the girls to dress her in the undergarments and gown they had brought with them. They were opulent and finely crafted, clothing worthy of a goddess indeed. The gown was a rich cream color, more eggnog than white, with sewn-on pearls and lush ruffles flowing down the sides of the princess seams. The raised and regal collar, along with the long, trailing train, gave the dress a formal and expensive appearance. She looked like the mistress of a manor. They brought her jeweled earrings also. When they had finished, Maya presented herself to Lucy, who had been waiting in the suite’s foyer.
“What do you think?” Maya asked playfully, executing a pirouette while holding her dress up off the floor.
“Better you than me, my lady.” Lucy smiled saucily. The serving girls, having gathered up the dirty towels and their things, politely made their way to the door and bowed out, explaining that Maya could expect an escort to dinner within the hour—a promise that proved to be true.
Her escorts arrived not thirty minutes after the girls’ departure, two men in fine suits. Their black hair was slicked back, with golden bracelets adorning their wrists, and tuxedo-style holsters housing pistols under their open jackets. They were polite in demeanor, though Maya could detect an undercurrent, an edge of something sinister, telling her that these guys were toughs and had dealt out their fair share of cruelty in service to their master.
It was what Lucy noticed, though, that put her on high alert.
“Neither of them shows heat signatures in my thermal optics,” Lucy whispered into Maya’s ear.
“Is something wrong?�
� one of the men asked, his question obviously prompted by the whispering.
“No, nothing at all. Everything is fine. Please, lead the way.” Maya, ever the professional performer, maintained a superb poker face and secretly hoped that she knew what she was doing. She assured herself that Lucy was with her, and besides, she could bet that either Jon or Carbine or both had just noticed the same thing as Lucy, and hopefully even now had the goons in their cross-hairs.
Jon had been watching when the serving girls arrived. Carbine had taken Maya’s advice to get some rest and was sound asleep. After a quick crash-course from his bud on how to operate the scope, Jon was soon settled in for a long evening of sniper stake-out.
He watched the young girls enter and quickly ascertained that they weren’t a threat to the goddess. However, he soon became flustered when Maya began to disrobe.
A battle between the Olympian desire to keep watch over Maya and the titanic desire to be a gentleman and look away, to not watch Maya in the nude, commenced in his mind.
He couldn’t make up his mind quickly enough and watched as Maya dropped her nightgown to the floor moments after Ratt had left the room.
His eyes bugged, and his heart skipped a beat. He could feel heat rising, among other things, and his cheeks flushing.
He quickly turned away, cursing himself as he did so.
Shit, shit, shit.
He lay with his back against the rock he had been leaning on and stared up at the black sky, his breath ragged.
This is no time for embarrassment and courtesy, soldier. You need to be watching her, protecting her. But it’s just a couple of serving girls. And besides, Lucy is there.
At least a dozen times, Jon went back and forth in his mind, his dual duty as proper man and effective guardian exchanging blows with each other in a savage fight to the death. Finally, his sense of duty overcame his inner gentleman with a knockout punch.
Spinning around, Jon flattened himself back out and thrust his face and eye back up to the oversized scope.
He moved the reticle around the room to find Maya and located her. In one quick glance through the matter-penetrating telescope, he beheld the scene. There was Maya, facing him, sitting in the pool, legs apart, one up and out of the water as a serving girl ran a razor along it, up toward her—
Nope!
As quick as the involuntary gulp in his throat, he pulled his face from the scope and decided that audio monitoring through the earpiece would suffice.
Jon listened to the conversation in the bath, to Maya’s uncomfortable situation over her question and her lack of a tax connection and Citizen Stamp—whatever the hell those were—and therefore didn’t question the prolonged silence that followed.
He did, however, hear the occasional splash of water or rustling of fabric, and when he eventually didn’t even hear that, didn’t hear anything for several minutes, he began to wonder.
Not wanting to play the peeping Tom, but knowing he needed to check in, Jon again returned to the scope to investigate the mysterious silence. He returned to the railgun, which had been set up on a bipod as well as having the new modified spike driven into rock. It hadn’t moved an inch. Jon peered into the scope, apprehensive, guiltily hoping and yet not hoping to see Maya in the position he’d seen her in earlier, with the tub’s water and bubbles only slightly covering the most private bits of her body.
His heart immediately stopped its twitching when an empty porcelain tub greeted his eyes instead of a naked goddess. Panic set in like a flash flood. Jon took the weapon in his hands and pivoted it on the bipod stand, scanning the penthouse suite for any sign of life. Nothing. No one. They were all gone.
Then something glinted off the counter near the tub. Jon zoomed in on it.
The radio necklace.
Oh no.
11
The escorts brought Maya and Lucy through the byzantine palace to a large banquet hall with high, vaulted ceilings from which gaudy chandeliers hung, each bearing the weight of what seemed like a hundred candles, bathing the cavernous chamber in their light and warmth. As soon as they were all past the archway that separated the banquet hall from the hallway proper, the men abruptly turned on the girls, impeding further entry.
Lucy bristled, and her right hand parted her long coat in the fashion of an old western gunslinger. Not wanting to jump the gun, she kept the BFG hidden away inside the speed holster that was her right thigh.
“Your servant girl will wait outside with us,” one of the slick men said to Maya.
“The fuck I will,” Lucy snapped back instantly. Maya could tell that Lucy’s tolerance for pleasantries was quickly coming to an end. The men, for their part, remained unmoved. Maya quickly diffused the situation.
“It’s okay, Lucy. I will go on alone. I’m sure our host is as gentle as he is gracious.” She smiled at the men and then turned to Lucy. “I will be fine.” Her statement sounded like an order.
Lucy stared defiantly into the goddess’s eyes.
“Go, now. Find Ratt and wait for me,” Maya ordered her friend and then turned back to the men, smiling and nodding.
The men nodded back, one of them adjusting his gold bracelet as he did so, and they showed Lucy out, leaving Maya to enter and explore the hall.
Columns dotted the long sides of the hall, the tops of which were connected by arches, all decorated in Spanish Colonial style and adorned with well-placed flowers and fire baskets. A wooden table of fine artistry ran the length of the rectangular room. Chairs, like guard towers along New Puebla’s wall, interrupted the flow and studded the perimeter of the table, while a runner of bright silk ran along the top, spotted here and there by floral arrangements and condiment trays. At the far end of the table, Maya spotted two figures, casually reclined. She made her way down the side of the table and approached them, doing her best to appear as cool and confident as Lucy would. When she was halfway there, she could make out that the two figures were a man and a woman.
The man, a clean-shaven Hispanic fellow with gelled black hair pulled tightly into a long ponytail, sat at the head of the table in the only chair there.
He wore simple but expensive-looking black slacks and a tucked-in button-down white shirt with sharp folded collar flaps. It was a third of the way unbuttoned, presumably to show off his gold chains and not his chest hair, but Maya couldn’t guess. The man was reclining deeply in his chair, slouching really, looking relaxed and aloof. A jeweled goblet filled with a deep burgundy wine hung in his limp-wristed hand. He had one of his legs draped over the armrest of his chair. An empty plate and glittering silverware graced the table in front of him. He spoke to the woman to his left as Maya approached from his right.
“Sofia, look, our guest has arrived.”
The woman glanced over at Maya, a look of disapproval on her heavily made-up face. Sofia was sitting, legs spread wide in her chair and, like the man, with her chair pulled away from the table. She wore shiny black baggy pants and a matching short-sleeved top that was tight and exposed her copper midriff and diamond-studded navel. Her arms were as smooth as the fabric of her silky pants and ended in a display of long, painted fingernails.
She was well-endowed, her cleavage prominently displayed by the push-up quality of the top. The look was framed by a red and black plaid vest, buttoned at the top and opening in an upside-down V. She wore a chain similar to the man’s, but with some fine stone-crusted medallion hanging from it. She had long blond hair—Maya could tell it was dyed—which was piled high in two places, bunched up before being tied down by a black and white paisley decorated bandana, tied on the top, near the crown of her head.
Her eyes were heavy with makeup, but the dark complexion of her skin helped to mitigate the raccoon look. Still, Maya wondered how Sofia’s eyelashes didn’t stick together when she blinked. Her natural eyebrows were clean-shaven and replaced with sharp drawn-on curves. A solid black teardrop tattoo adorned her cheek. Paisley water drops, bigger versions of the same image printed on her ba
ndana, ran down the side of her right arm. Her lips were painted a red as deep and dark as the wine, and pencil-outlined in a thin black. Dangerously large hoop earrings dangled from her ears, which bounced as she turned her head to study Maya.
Sofia drank from her wine glass without taking her eyes off Maya, watching her as a bird of prey might watch a vole venture from its den. She pulled the cup away, revealing a drop of wine that lingered on her thick lips. She opened her mouth in an over-exaggerated display of animalistic sexuality to lick the drop from the edge of her mouth.
Maya instantly noticed her teeth—clad in solid gold, with long and large imposing canines, curving slightly and ending in needle tips. When Sofia’s eyes flashed bright red for a single absent heartbeat, Maya knew that the display wasn’t simply a queen hen displaying her sexuality, but that Maya was meant to see the teeth, meant to see the eyes and the demonic power behind them. She was meant to be scared, or captivated, or both.
“Yes, lover. I wonder if she is as hungry as I am,” Sofia said, her voice dripping with cruel humor. Maya knew well what Sofia was, and what she was hungry for. The man pulled his drooped leg back from over the armrest and stood, extending his goblet out in toast-like gesture.
“Please. Although it is unforgivably tardy, allow me to personally welcome you to New Puebla, Señorita Sapphire. I am Don Luis Fernando, the father of this city, and this is my wife, Sofia.”
Maya closed the distance and stopped just short of the corner, now standing opposite the table from Sofia. She curtsied and thanked him.
“I accept your welcome most happily, Señor Fernando. Thank you.”
“Please, call me Don Luis.”
Maya could feel Sofia’s eyes burning holes in her, but pretended not to notice.
“We would be so very happy if the famous singer Lily Sapphire joined us for dinner. Wouldn’t we, dear?” Don Luis said as he placed his goblet on the table and walked over to the chair closest to Maya, pulling it out from the table.