by Nina D'Aleo
Diega gave him a bad look and Copernicus sensed her body-heat flare with jealousy. Frustration twisted inside him. A fractured team was the last thing he needed right now.
His communicator buzzed and he lifted it from his belt and read the message from Headquarters: Big news, big catch, first name starts with E, second name starts with K. No kidding – Eli.
The commander re-read the message and a rare smile touched his lips.
4
Eli opened the bathroom door the slightest fraction and peeked out. Across and down the corridor, United Regiment soldiers of all ranks and races massed outside the locked door of the interrogation rooms, where he had, approximately a quarter of an hour ago, placed his prisoner – or more accurately, secured his prisoner with several spans of the anti-dissipation, anti-telekinesis, anti-contortionist, anti-camouflage, anti-just-about-everything chains, which he had designed and produced some months earlier. He had secured the prisoner, double-checked the securing, triple- and quadruple-checked the securing, then walked with a nonchalant swagger out into the corridor, where already his colleagues were gathering. He’d locked the door behind him. He’d brushed away questions with a casual wave of his hand and a tut-tut, you know better, I have to wait for the boss, if you’ll excuse me, walked with the same swagger to the men’s bathroom, entered, closed the door with a smile and wave at the crowd – then dashed to the toilet and lost his dinner and, quite possibly, everything he’d ever eaten, including the entire set of playing cards he’d downed on a dare on his first day of school.
Eli swallowed and winced as foul, acidic bile burned his throat. Sweat boiled on his upper lip and dribbled in tickling streams down both sides of his body and down his back, making his unhappily bound, cramped wings damp and sticky. Shrugging his shoulders back several times, he blinked away the dizzy specks of light dancing across his eyes. The crowd outside the interrogation area was growing by the second. Commanders, guardians and new recruits alike jostled each other for a place in front of the small, circular, frosted-glass window of the door to the interrogation rooms. It seemed everyone in Headquarters was desperate for a glance, however brief and frosty, at the military’s newest prisoner. Eli had left the thoroughly bound figure lying face down and unmoving, making it impossible for anyone to tell if the rumours, spreading like a virus, were true – if this really was the legendary treasure hunter, Ev’r Keets, risen from the dead.
He had captured Keets in a moment of pure luck when the fugitive had literally fallen at his feet while he was installing some equipment in an outpost in the Matadori – equipment with the express purpose of tracking Keets. Now he found himself teetering somewhere between shock and horror that he, Eli Anklebiter, had not only managed to survive the encounter, but had also brought Keets in – all by himself. He couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry and found himself doing both, giggling hysterically with tears running down his face. Feeling a faint coming on he applied the usual remedy for his condition, counting back from forty-six, forty-five, forty-three, forty-two, forty-one, forty . . . His pet otter, Nelly, squirmed in his pocket and he said, ‘I know. We have to go back. We can’t put it off.’
His gran’ma had always said, ‘Don’t put off to tomorrow what you can do today’, yet the grandness of her philosophy was somewhat spoiled by her diet and exercise plan to lose substantial girth, which was always going to start tomorrow.
His nerves jolted as his communicator buzzed at his hip. He grabbed it up to his ear.
‘Yes, boss.’
The commander’s voice, precise like a razor cut, demanded, ‘Where is she?’
‘Interrogation cells. I bound her with the new chains. So far so good – I’m assuming.’
‘You’re assuming?’ the commander asked. ‘Where are you?’
‘Ah . . .’ Eli glanced around at the dingy Headquarters’ bathroom. ‘I’m . . . preparing her file.’ A loud and unmistakable toilet flush resounded from one of the cubicles. Eli coughed, hoping the commander hadn’t heard, but knowing well that he had. The commander didn’t miss anything.
‘Are you near?’ Eli asked.
‘Just landed. See you in a minute. End.’ The line went dead.
Eli burst out giggling and slapped a hand over his mouth. He spoke sternly to himself. ‘Get control, don’t embarrass yourself. Just be normal – be normal. Okay, I’m ready, we’re ready – brace yourself, girl.’ He tapped the otter in his pocket. ‘Let’s go on one, two and three.’
Sucking in a deep breath, he shoved open the bathroom door and stepped into the corridor. He managed to make it halfway to the crowd before being spotted. Then people descended on him from all angles.
‘Anklebiter!’ A sub-commander named Lucian from the Narcotics Squad grabbed him around the shoulders and squeezed him close with considerable enthusiasm. Eli’s neck squelched against the man’s very damp armpit. ‘Is it her? Is it Keets?’
Mo Modalias (Mo-Mo) from the Transflyer and Traffics unit snatched him away and said, ‘Eli, buddy, what’s the word? We’re dying here.’
Kev T-bor from Public Nuisance was next in line, grabbing him by the shirt and huffing disastrous moonshine halitosis into his face. ‘Little Kelli saw you bring her in!’
‘Eli!’ Tye and Tie McManus, the Siamese twins from Forgery, locked onto either side of his trousers and in their eagerness lifted him right off the ground. He winced as his underwear pulled uncomfortably upwards. Spittle sprayed his face from left and right. He gritted his teeth and endured, silently cursing his God, who had blessed him with an impossibly fast intellect only to turn around and leave him with the muscles and body span of an underdeveloped imp-breed girl, along with elephantine ears, episodic blackouts and a voice just slightly too high to ever command any respect. That was the imp-breed God – big on humility and ironic humour. A real prick, though he wasn’t entirely to blame.
Eli was keeping his mouth shut, not just because he couldn’t comment until the commander arrived, but because these situations of mass attention, or any kind of nervousness, usually brought out the worst in him – the worst being the profusion of speech, sound and movement defects for which he could thank his parents. Years of corrective therapy, while equipping him with skills to communicate and act almost normally, had never changed the fact that he was the by-product of an illegal love breed between a Golgi Glee and a Bracken Greer – both imp-breeds, but of non-compatible blood types. In short, he was a chromosomal cocktail for uncontrollable misbehaviour.
His parents, the geniuses that they were, had decided to defy both law and science. They got together, then fell apart and proceeded to dump him – illegitimate and a compulsive liar and kleptomaniac – on his grandmother’s front steps. There was a reason they hadn’t waited for her to open the door after they rang the bell, the same reason why the word smother primarily consists of the word mother. His gran’ma was big, loud, interfering and mean in the nicest possible grandmotherly way. Being weird with a crazy gran’ma at his side day in and day out had not made his childhood and adolescence any easier, to say the least.
Eli finally made it through the crowd. He brushed his hand over the sensor on the doors and they opened from the centre. From the doorway, he turned to face his gabbling audience. They strained to see around him into the room. Someone at the back was even jumping up and down trying to get a look.
‘Thank you, thank you,’ Eli said. ‘Anyone else wanting to touch my perfectly sculpted body can make an appointment.’
The crowd laughed the way people always did at all his comments, no matter how unfunny they were. He guessed it was a perception thing – he looked funny, he talked funny, so he must be funny. He gave them a final wave and stepped backwards into the interrogation office. The soundproof panels closed shut behind him. He dropped his arms, straightened his shirt, checked Nelly was alright and exhaled.
‘Tough crowd out there,’ a gravelly voice sniggered.
He turned to the two guardians on watch duty in the interrogation ro
om entrance. The guardian who had spoken was a Twitchbak, a sabre-breed with long yellow fangs and spiky dark hair that ran in a long strip over his head and down the length of his back. His name was Renoir Snaggles and he smelt so strongly canine that Eli’s eyes watered every time he talked to him. Renoir had the usual cutting humour of a Twitchbak, which was often mistaken as sarcastic spite, but he was really a friendly guy and, above all, staunchly dedicated to the Regiment and his job. The other guardian, Renoir’s partner, was Charles ‘Tiny’ Twigs, an immensely tall and wide soldier, part human-breed, part gargantuan-breed. He stood, huge, dumb and gentle, blinking at Eli with three childlike eyes. Eli could not imagine, even with his untameable mind, what feats of acrobatic daring and sheer stupidity Tiny’s human-breed father must have performed to impregnate the surly, huge and hideous gargantuan-breed woman whom Tiny called mother.
‘Lai Lai, boys,’ Eli responded with the imp-breed version of the Urigin phrase ‘Come on now’. ‘You try being funny with your underpants riding halfway up to your neck.’
‘I don’t wear underpants,’ the Twitchbak confessed and Eli shuddered.
‘That’s truly disturbing.’
Renoir gave a fangy grin and, after several moments of computing, Tiny boomed with laughter.
Eli glanced up from them to the holo-screen showing images of the interrogation cells, which were further down the corridor behind where the two guardians stood. His smile disappeared and something flip-flopped inside his gut. Ev’r Keets was well and truly up, standing – vicious, striking and perpetually unimpressed – in one corner of her cell. She was staring straight into the robotic spyer monitoring her – straight into Eli’s eyes. Being a one-way-spyer, the theory was he could see her and she couldn’t see him, but he was pretty sure the theory didn’t apply to Keets. Not many did. She was, to utilise a word used many times to describe him, weird, but she was also, to his immense relief, still definitely chained up.
‘She tried to bribe us,’ Renoir told him. ‘Said if we let her go, she’d give us the gold on her arms.’
Eli studied the bands of gold the fugitive wore up and down both her arms. From his study of ancient history, he guessed they were from the Forego Era and worth more than he could say without stuttering. They wholly concealed Keets’ bloodline marks – the twisted mass of dagger-like shapes of the Ohavor, the Blackwater Wolf family. During their many year-cycles hunting the fugitive, the commander had discovered that Ev’r Keets had been born Zingara Ohavor into a filthy poor scullion-gypsy family in the outcast village of Ont. Her tribe was large, violent, dirty and generally criminal.
‘We told her what she can do with her blood money,’ Renoir snarled.
‘We told her,’ Tiny echoed in his deep tones. ‘It’s blood money, that.’
Eli stared at the image of the prisoner and saw her full pale lips form one word. Eli gulped. He didn’t need his lip-reading skills to know what she had said – Snack-size. Keets had given him this unfortunate nickname the third time the commander had arrested her, only for her to be released by the courts on insufficient evidence. Eli had ridden along in the transflyer transporting Keets to the courthouse, and she’d spoken to him of a time in history when just giants, imps and human-breeds had existed on Aquais. She had said the humans were a meal to the giants, but the imps were only snack-size. The trackers had continued to arrest Keets with the same outcome until finally, the last time they’d brought her in, during the year-cycle of the Frost, a judge too old to be scared of death, too cunning to be charmed and too rich to be bought, had decided to make the charges stick. Keets had escaped just after being sentenced to death. It had been widely believed that she had been killed in the ensuing high-speed chase into the desert. The commander had never bought it and Eli hadn’t either.
The secondary entrance to the interrogation area slid open. The commander stood in the doorway, with Diega and Jude behind him. The guardians snapped to attention and each slapped an arm across his chest to salute their superior officer.
The commander entered the room, his steps soundless on the stone floor. He acknowledged Eli with a nod, then spoke to the guardians.
‘Stand down,’ he ordered, adding for Tiny’s benefit, ‘leave.’
Both guardians jumped to obey. They exited the room as Diega and Jude entered. Diega flashed Eli a beautiful smile that made her eyes shimmer like the stars of her bloodline marks. She went to stand beside the commander, both of them staring up at the screen monitoring Keets.
Jude came to Eli’s side. ‘Well done, my friend.’ He extended his hand and Eli clasped it, the metal cold against his skin. ‘Have I told you lately that you’re a genius?’
‘About an hour ago,’ Eli replied, grinning at his Ar Antarian friend and the spider robot sitting on his shoulder.
‘Well, I feel like I need to say it again,’ Jude said.
‘If you must.’
‘You’re a genius.’
‘Thank you. So are you.’
‘Well, birds of a feather . . .’ Jude shrugged and SevenM bobbed up and down.
‘Eli,’ the commander cut in. ‘Turn this off.’ He gestured to the monitor.
Eli went to the control panel in the wall and disconnected the signal. Keets’ image faltered and vanished.
‘Where did you apprehend her?’ Copernicus asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Eli said before he could stop the lie.
The commander watched him with infinite patience and waited for him to get it right.
‘I mean . . .’ Eli took a deep breath and Jude gave him an encouraging slap on the shoulder. ‘I do know . . . it was between the towns of Scudera and Fletchy, just beside Outpost 43.’
‘What happened?’
‘I was there installing the spyers to monitor if she was using the outpost as a hideout. I heard a loud thump against the outpost wall. I went outside and saw someone getting up off the ground. I told them to identify themselves. They went for their weapon, so I stunned them. When I went to cuff them, I saw it was Ev’r Keets.’
‘And she let you bring her in?’ Jude asked.
‘Well, she didn’t actually regain consciousness until I got her here,’ Eli confessed.
Jude’s eyebrows shot up and Diega said, ‘She must be playing at something. No way could a stunner knock her out.’
Eli hadn’t thought about it until then, but he realised Diega was right. Previously, virtually nothing could keep Keets down. She was highly resilient and resistive.
‘You’ve searched her?’ the commander asked.
‘Yes, boss,’ Eli said quickly. ‘I put everything in her bag.’
He moved to the far wall and swiped his hand over a sensor. A hidden drawer shot out from the stone. He dragged out Keets’ bag, the weight of it almost pulling him to the ground. The commander took the strap from him and easily lifted the bag onto the table in the centre of the room.
‘No triggers?’ The commander eyed the zippers.
‘None,’ Eli confirmed.
‘That’s not like her either,’ Jude commented, crossing his metal arms over his chest. Keets was notorious, among many other things, for the violent traps and triggers that protected her belongings.
‘She’s playing,’ Diega echoed her previous thoughts. ‘Must be.’
The commander unzipped the bag. All Keets’ equipment was there, including her infamous knife – the Morsus Ictus. Copernicus pulled on the gloves from his weapon belt then picked up the black blade, examining it. He placed it back into the bag and lifted out a bottle of green potion. He swished it around, studying the contents.
‘Run a full analysis on this and all other liquids in here,’ he said to Eli.
‘Now, boss?’
The commander shook his head. ‘After we talk to her.’
‘You want me to talk to her?’ Eli squeaked and his heart thudded faster.
A smile stirred the darkness of the commander’s eyes. ‘No, Eli. I will talk. But I want you to observe.’
El
i nodded, relieved. Observing he could do. Interrogating a super-intelligent psycho like Ev’r Keets was more the commander’s realm of expertise.
The commander left the bag and started down the corridor towards the cells. He paused and turned back. ‘Eli.’
‘Yes, boss?’
‘Well done.’
‘Thank you, boss.’ Eli managed to keep a straight face, but on the inside he did a jump for joy. The commander’s praise was, to him, like a rare, rare gold.
The commander continued to walk, Diega at his side. Eli waited a moment to bask in his own newly acquired glory. He lifted up and down on the balls of his feet, feeling like bursting into flight. Jude chuckled beside him and Eli grinned at him, only then noticing another person in the room, standing in the shadows of a corner. The person was a lovely-looking girl with an impressive lump and mean bruise on one side of her head, making her no less lovely.
‘This is our new tracker,’ Jude told him. ‘Silho Brabel.’
Eli’s grin stretched wider. The new recruit they’d been expecting for several weeks returned a small and uncertain smile.
‘I’m Eli,’ he said and went towards her. His legs got tangled in each other and he fell at her feet.
‘Careful, buddy.’ Jude picked him up with embarrassing ease. ‘You’ll do yourself an injury.’
‘Sorry,’ Eli said to Silho. ‘I’m sorry. I’m clumsy. I . . . ah . . . have problems with walking sometimes.’ He cringed at what he had just said, and yet still found himself saying, ‘And with talking too . . . and with just about everything actually.’ Eli noticed, though she was obviously a human-breed, she also resembled a pixie with an uptilt to her eyes and long lashes. From this close he could see from the grey tinge to her skin that she was unwell.
‘We’d better catch up.’ Jude nodded towards the corridor where the commander and Diega had disappeared. ‘Silho, follow us.’
Eli entered the interrogation cell last. The cell’s walls, floor and ceiling were all made from reinforced grey-rock – the most effective substance for muffling screams. In the centre of the room a table and two chairs stood bolted to the ground. They were made of steel and slightly reflective so, as Diega said, prisoners could see a distorted twin of themselves – and kiss it goodbye. The tang of disinfectant, washed over urine and blood, tainted the air. Eli pushed his hands into his pockets and clung to Nelly's warm comfort. She slept on, oblivious to the fact that she was in the presence of one of the most feared criminals of all time.