by Tyler Vance
Sheikoh desperately tried to force his body to move, unsuccessfully. It was as though his body wasn’t attached to him anymore. He was forced to watch in horror as the Arch Centaurai leaned down until they’re eyes were on the same level. Cylium Vest reached behind his back and pulled a glittering, silver blade from under his blood-red overcoat. Then he held it to Sheikoh’s throat.
Sheikoh felt the blood drain from his face. He knew that he was about to die. He couldn’t believe that it was happening like this. After everything he’d been through. Then Vest straightened up and removed the cold instrument from Sheikoh’s skin. He waved it through the air as if to illustrate its beauty. All Sheikoh saw was the blade that had almost tasted his blood. From the scythe’s handle stretched eight inches of pure silver blade forged into a perfect crescent. Its edge narrowed from hilt to tip, ending in a razor-sharp point.
The face of its blade was adorned with countless intricate runes and pentacles, presumably of Celestial design. The scythe must be how the Centaurai was controlling him. Cylium Vest admired the cell’s fluorescent light gleaming across the blade’s silver. The Centaurai gently held it up in a light caress. Then he began to speak.
“Years ago, one of the Celestial went rogue. We recently received confirmation that he’s here, hiding somewhere within Interium. He has acquired complete terminal access to the Century databanks, and joined forces with the so-called Legacy,” Centaurai Vest mused to himself while Sheikoh listened, paralyzed. “The emperor himself is personally interested in your mission.”
“I can’t use my Century, and I can’t hire a Legacy hit man, so I’ve been forced to work with you. I attempted to keep our communications discreet, hidden behind contacts, but apparently the Celestial has unearthed my plans.”
“Your reward would for this mission would have been ten million glow. Sadly, that offer has fallen on the dust. Our new, amended bargain is this; either the Celestial dies by your hand or you yourself die as his accomplice,” Vest told Sheikoh with contempt. “Consider yourself lucky that circumstances deem your services necessary. For the moment.”
Cylium Vest strode to the cell door, tucking the silver weapon beneath his overcoat. He pulled out a controller and the cell door clanged open like the gate between the East and West. Sheikoh watched the Vest’s red coattails flow backwards before he realized that he could move.
Sheikoh shook himself like a dog, trying to shake off the weight that had settled in his bones. He was embarrassed upon finding that Vest had stopped in the cell’s doorways and was regarding him with cold amusement. The Centaurai clicked another button on his remote. The chair’s left manacle snapped open. Sheikoh rubbed his left wrist, eyeing the Centaurai warily.
“Take care of the Celestial, and you will regain your full pardon,” Cylium Vest told him coldly. He wasn’t sure that he believed the Centaurai.
“Okay, how am I supposed to kill this Celestial, then?” Sheikoh called after the dude.
“Use your imagination.”
Centaurai Cylium Vest swished out of the room. After a couple of minutes, Sheikoh tentatively crept after the Arch Centaurai. The Solitarium was confusing, even though he’d been here before. He didn’t feel comfortable asking anyone for directions, so it wasn’t until about an hour later that he managed to find his way out. Then Sheikoh got out of the east as fast as he could. When he had to pass through the gate, he did so with his head down, eyes on the dirt. He didn’t want the Century standing guard to make any not of the loathing burning in his eyes. They might report back to their Arch Centaurai.
In his head, Cylium Vest’s face had been forged together with burning hatred then tempered by disbelieving wariness. ‘…How is it possible that he controlled my body?’ Sheikoh asked himself anxiously with a crease in his brow. An icy tingle traced his spine. He knew that it must have had something to do with that strange, silver scythe that the Centaurai had held up to his throat.
Should he take Dorothi out of school and run away from the city that the two of them had spent their young lives in? Were they supposed to live on the run, stealing from the Daisha farms that dotted the countryside? That wasn’t the kind of life that Sheikoh wanted Dorothi to have.
As Sheikoh walked, he puzzled through things. All he knew was that whatever he decided, it wouldn’t involve working with Vest. Even trusting Indigo seemed safer than working for the madman. Sheikoh pursed his lips, thinking about the mysterious Celestial. That was the key to it all. Once Sheikoh met the Celestial then things would begin to make sense. And if anyone knew how to nullify the strange blade, it would be a Celestial. Things were starting to look up. Sheikoh postponed fleeing Interium until after he’d met this dude. When Sheikoh was sure that Dorothi was safe than he was going to give Vest the finger and join Indigo and the mysterious Celestial.
Sheikoh just hoped that the mysterious Celestial wasn’t Vest’s political rival. If so, then Sheikoh was most likely trapped in a dead-end situation. It didn’t make sense that the Celestial was into politics if he was using a ganglord like Indigo as a messenger service though. The Supreme Centaurai wanted the Celestial dead and all Sheikoh could hope for was that the man mirrored the sentiment. He knew that he was gambling blind.
He wondered what he and Indigo had been hired to do. What could require hiring both himself and a ganglord? Indigo had acted as a messenger to something that he despised. Sheikoh didn’t suffer any delusions regarding the underworld politics of Interium. He knew that whatever he had made from his most lucrative heist times ten wouldn’t spark a ganglord’s interest. Whatever this job was, it was a big one, and Indigo needed Sheikoh. If he could’ve used another Legacy guy, he would’ve offered them at half price. He thought about what he and Indigo had faced together today and suddenly realized that the ganglord wasn’t that bad of a dude, underneath it all. Especially when compared with the Centaurai.
Sheikoh had a feeling that he was about to get Vest one back.
Sheikoh stepped onto an icily familiar street, Temptation Street, and a sudden streak of memory stopped him in his track. This had been the very street… all those years ago… Sheikoh shuddered; he could still feel the blood tracing his right side. Remembered pain slashed as sharp as broken glass. No matter how long ago his body had ‘healed’, it was always there. Some wounds ran too deep for the years to ever cover. If not for Emili, this was the very street he would’ve died.
His eyes misted over. He walked through the faceless crowd, and no one looked his way. Sheikoh remembered back to how Emili would disassemble the couple of monocles and the piles of cellpads he’d been able to get his thieving hands on. She’d used the computerized components in her other projects. Sheikoh glanced over at a smoking cowboy-looking dude, leaning up against a brick wall. A puff of smoke drifted out of his mouth. It intertwined with a breeze and danced like a floating ribbon. For a moment, Sheikoh watched the smoke drifting until it dissipated into the sunset.
Suddenly, he desperately wished he could see Emili one more time. Fall in her arms, and have her lift this terrible burden from his shoulders. Sheikoh could borrow her answer to the question bouncing around his head.
Was he making the right choice?
Chapter 6
Skin Deep
Sheikoh felt nauseous. He trotted through the sewer pipes, breathing through his mouth. He was careful not to inhale any of the noxious, eye-watering fumes that radiated out of the black, clumpy surface of sludge following beside him. It slithered through its concrete cradle, modeled after some desecrated travesty of a river.
The reason that his and Dorothi’s secret safehouse was secret was because it was located in the sewers. Not the drainage sewers, mind, the sewers at the end of your everyday toilets and trashers. These were the sewers that were home to everything with the ability to rot. The area was uninhabitable… unless you had the key to the single vacuum-sealed apartment down here.
Sheikoh had inherited his safehouse from a dirty homeless recluse that he’d stayed with for a coup
le of months just before he’d met his ‘parents’. His face twisted at the thought of the Namars, and a shudder of putrid air slithered into an unguarded nostril. The disgusting air seemed to catch in Sheikoh’s throat and he retched so hard that he fell onto his knees. He pushed himself up, taking carefully tiny breaths through his mouth.
The strange hermit had taken to the infant Sheikoh, for some reason. Neither of them talked well so they spend most of their time in a somewhat wary silence. Giz tolerated the company of nobody other than Sheikoh. The hairy bum would pounce and bite down hard on people that so much as tried to talk to him.
In the few months Sheikoh had spent with Giz, he’d learned a lot about slinking around and hiding in plain sight. Giz had a way of teaching the younger Sheikoh with only his eyes and gestures. Sheikoh’d learned to steal, to defend himself, and how to survive the streets all from the unassuming Giz.
Then one day the smelly, dirty man disappeared off the face of the city and Sheikoh had been more hurt than he knew how to put into words.
He had spent the next month in his and Giz’s house in the sewer, waiting for the man to come back. Giz had made or found a shelter in the gut wrenching stench of the irredeemably disgusting section of sewer where the entire city plumbing invariably led to. Giz never came back, so Sheikoh took over his house.
Whoever had built it had done a good job hooking it up with the propensity to withstand the toxic stench hanging in the air like a corpse from a tree branch. Its heavy aluminate casing held the inside room in a vacuum-sealed chamber. Fresh air constantly circulated in through ceiling vents. It was long and circular like a swollen worm and set solidly on the ledge of the sewer, placed with great care so that not even the tiniest piece of its base was overlooking the thick-flowing slime lurching along its concrete pathways.
The walk to the doorway always seemed to take forever. Finally Sheikoh made it. The different metals welded together to make the safehouse’s exterior wore a coat of rust. The two chamber doors on either side looked like that of a vault.
Looking at it, one could see that the building was obviously the handmade work of an individual rather than a company. Sheikoh had always wondered if Giz had made this place himself. But it was much more likely he had just discovered it. Looking back, Sheikoh wasn’t completely sure that Giz had been totally mentally competent. Or maybe he had been until the sewer’s toxic fumes had damaged his brain.
Sheikoh shivered, as he fumbled with the door’s center wheel. Then he swung it open and stepped inside. It closed behind him with a heavy thud. Sheikoh flipped a switch. Lights flickered on, along with a deep rumbling noise hummed overhead.
Sheikoh waited, bored, while the air cleared. There was nothing to do or even to look at. He wondered why he’d never put a poster up in here or something. The hum of machinery finally modulated to a purr, and he was blissfully free from sewer’s smell. He sprayed himself with a can of air freshener and then silently opened the second metal door. It glided away from him on smoothly oiled hinges to reveal the long, slightly claustrophobic room.
Sheikoh saw Dorothi at once. She was reading a thick book with her ear buds in and her back to him. She wore a long, pink pajama shirt that was almost a dress on her petite body. Next to her was that circuit board thing she’d told Sheikoh she was messing with half hidden under piles of wire clippings.
“Hey, Do-do! How’ve you been, kit?” Sheikoh called loudly, waving at Dorothi. She jumped up in surprise, pulling her music out of her ears, and smiled hugely.
“Sheek!” Dorothi exclaimed. “I thought you said you were gonna be gone the night at least! What happened? What’s going on this time?”
“Well, my contact was a guy who might want to kill me a little, and then we were ambushed by guys with some freaking technologic guns… Also tomorrow I’m meeting a Celestial,” Sheikoh listed to a wide eyed Dorothi, ticking each item off his fingers. He intentionally neglected to mention his meeting with the Arch Centaurai. He didn’t want to overly worry her.
“That’s my brother all right… always so good with people,” Dorothi murmured in response, rolling her eyes. Sheikoh smiled back.
“I got you something to eat,” Sheikoh offered.
He pulled out the two sandwiches he had jacked from the lunchboxes of a couple of construction workers and tossed one over to Dorothi. Before taking a bite, Sheikoh looked under the bread and frowned.
“Ugh!” Sheikoh complained. His face fell despondently. “Mayo…”
He ripped a piece off the corner of the sandwich and put it gingerly in his hungry mouth. His shoulders shuddered involuntarily and it was all he could do not to throw up. Even for mayonnaise it was nasty. It tasted like sewer. Dorothi took a bite of her own and grimaced. Then she put it to the side and stared at Sheikoh with concern. He offered her his sandwich with an innocent smile. Dorothi shook her head looking queasy, and Sheikoh glanced around, searching for something else to eat.
“What can I say..? People love me… so… Anything else eat by any chance?” Sheikoh asked with a distracted smile, shifting through the boxes of cleaning agents and repair parts that were stacked up in the makeshift pantry.
Dorothi tossed him a bag of half-eaten chips. Sheikoh caught it and reached a claw shaped hand inside, ravenously. Dorothi laughed softly, as Sheikoh stuffed a giant handful into his mouth. He raised his eyes in bliss.
“Are you okay, Sheek?” she asked him, her anxious eyes combing his body for any sign of injury.
Sheikoh waved away her concern as he tried and failed to swallow the massive mouthful of soggy chips he’d shoved into his face. Under Dorothi’s obvious scrutiny, Sheikoh made his eyes wide and jumped up and down like kangaroo that had gotten a foot stuck inside of a jellyfish. A reluctant giggle escaped out of the girl’s puckered mouth. Sheikoh attempted to swallow the chips again and this time he succeeded. He sighed with relief.
“No really Sheek, are you okay?” Dorothi asked again, seeing that he had finally swallowed.
“Honestly, it was touch and go for a minute there. I thought I was a goner,” Sheikoh admitted earnestly. “But then I managed to swallow the chips.”
Dorothi hid a giggle and punched him in the arm. “No, really?”
Sheikoh poured a smaller bit of crushed chips into his mouth noncommittally. Then he stretched his arms back and arched his feet, to try to feel any discomfort beyond the familiar ache of sore muscles. He flexed his right hand and remembered with a jolt that he’d broken his right index finger. He held his hand out to look at the finger that was hanging limp, noting with chagrin that he’d also ripped a few holes of skin in the immediate vicinity of his hand and wrist. A normal finger wouldn’t have let him forget that he’d broken it. Sheikoh cursed under his breath.
Flashes of blacksteel peaked out at the two from beneath the tattered synthetic skin that stretched over all of Sheikoh’s ‘augmented’ sections. Dorothy looked at the dark metal, transfixed. Her face was pale. Dorothi was horrified by the sight of Sheikoh’s damaged body parts and he knew it. He looked away from her, his cheeks tinted with embarrassment, and Dorothi turned to sift intently through her backpack.
Sheikoh knew that she didn’t want to have to look at the metal peeking out of Sheikoh’s hand, and he bit his lip with remorse. The two or three times that he’d removed the synthetic skin that covered the right half of his body in front of Dorothi, he woken to Dorothi, screaming his name into the night for a week. Dorothi had never said anything about it and Sheikoh was too ashamed to broach the topic, so it was one of the few unspoken conversations between the two of them.
He didn’t suffer any illusions about his cyborgic parts; he knew that the blacksteel limbs, partially mummified with eerie, flickering synaptic wires and hung with pus-like motors looked horrible. They looked like they’d been born in a nightmare. If it wasn’t for the Synthskin that perpetually hid their monstrous appearance, Sheikoh wouldn’t even go outside. He sighed.
Why couldn’t he ever remember to stash so
me of his spares in the safe house? Sheikoh didn’t want to have to ask Dorothi to help him work on the insectoid machinery that made him into a maligned freak, but had to. Sheikoh didn’t have the dexterity to build another finger with one already out of play. Creating fingers was a much more delicate process than attaching them. The synaptic wiring had to be measured exactly and wound with perfect precision, in order to connect all of the hundreds of miniscule digits and motors perfectly.
The process would take hours, and even though he didn’t have to walk Dorothi through every step. (She was already a better mechanic then him) It would be much easier to pick up a finger from his house, but after the day that he’d had, Sheikoh wasn’t leaving the safehouse without backup unless he was sure that all of his fingers worked fine. He didn’t want to run into the Centaurai again. The thought of Vest sent a chill down his spine.
Sheikoh opened his mouth and shaped it to form his request, but something strange happened. Instead of a question he’d intended a tiny, strangled sound came from his throat. Sheikoh didn’t want to ask Dorothi to help him. He didn’t want to force the girl to touch the most loathsome, disgusting parts of himself. He didn’t want to be the reason that Dorothi woke up screaming in the dead of night.
There just wasn’t much choice in the matter. Sheikoh looked at the young girl, rifling through her overnight bag. He steeled himself and opened his mouth again, but as he did so Dorothi turned towards him. She was wearing a triumphant expression and holding something in her small hands. Dorothi had brought his plastic blue case, the one that held a bunch of his cyborgic spare parts. Sheikoh felt a smile of relief trace his lips.
“I thought you might need this, Sheek,” Dorothi explained with a tight smile. Her voice was both proud and nervous, like she thought that Sheikoh was about to rip off his skin right in front of her. Sheikoh had no intention of doing that.