The Other Side of Life (Book #1, Cyberpunk Elven Trilogy)

by Jess C Scott

  Leticia raked her fingers through her tangled, bed head hair. “He’s so excited about it…he likes me there for support. He’s such a good actor—I keep telling him that.”

  Anya thought that Julius would need less encouragement if he really was a great actor, but she held her tongue.

  “Julius wanted some help with translating a Spanish website too, for a charity project. I don’t know where he finds the time to juggle so much at once.” Leticia was getting dewy-eyed and lovey-dovey.

  Another Tavia, Anya thought for a moment, before a reply came in from Nin:

  Stone church, 9pm.

  Ten hours feels like ten years, Anya said to herself. She felt she had to wait that long for another possible touch of Nin’s.

  “I’ll go.” Anya stretched out her arms. “Nin wants to meet at nine. Tell Julius my…mom, went to the hospital. Tomorrow, I’ll tell him it was just a scare.”

  Anya crossed her fingers that wouldn’t come true. Chloe had been admitted before, from health problems due to alcohol poisoning.

  Leticia nodded. “Do you need me around?” she asked Anya. “Would it make you…feel better?” She paused, thinking it over. “I can meet all of you at The Gilbreth. I should be done by midnight.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Anya didn’t want Leticia to feel bad, although she would have liked her to be there. If only for moral support. “The less people to see me sweating over the break-in, the better.”

  Leticia laughed. “Just call or text me if you really, really, need my help.”

  Just then, Leticia had a call on her cell. “Jule!”

  Anya wondered if she would float away to “the man in her life,” if she did have one. Leticia would drop all plans for a date with a boyfriend. People always seemed to be glued to “the other person” in their life.

  While Leticia was chattering and gushing over the phone, Anya went to her room and brought out a handful of DVDs from her collection. She glanced at the clock, settling in for an afternoon of TV-watching and pigging out on ice cream, to get her mind off what she’d be embarking on in the evening.

  * * *

  Anya jolted up off the couch when Lady Lala’s “I Will Survive (Lady L’s 100th Remix)” started blaring—it was the ringtone on her cell phone’s alarm setting. She had half an hour to meet Nin at the stone church.

  “Dammit,” Anya cursed. The ringtone had just interrupted a dream she had been having of Nin. Something…sweet. Bittersweet.

  Anya noticed some leftovers Leticia had left for her, on the table. A packet of Chinese food—chop suey—along with a fortune cookie, by the side.

  Anya cracked open the cookie first. She read the message on the slip of paper inside:

  A kiss is not a kiss, without the heart—often, you think of somebody.

  Anya gave a wry smile. She hummed a random tune, as she tried to recall drifts and drabs of her dream, as she stumbled toward the bathroom to freshen up.

  He had been holding her hand. He was teaching her how to ice-skate. Snow was gently falling in the air surrounding them, and the trees weren’t bare, but covered with little silvery leaves, which shivered in the breeze.

  “When the ice dragon breathes…” Nin said to her, “he breathes ice…”

  “Why don’t I feel cold?” Anya asked.

  Nin looked across the frozen lake they were standing on, then shyly looked away. “I don’t feel cold either.”

  Anya gazed up at him, a smile forming on her lips. It made her feel radiant—she could feel it, in the dream, whilst her human body was asleep—and drawn to Nin. His warmth, his heart, his…

  He turned to her. His gaze fell upon her lips, his hand resting on the inward curve of her back, as he leaned in…

  Before a bright light caused him to flinch—Anya raised an arm to shield her eyes against a sudden, illuminative flare…

  She saw an archer in the distance, with a bow and arrow—the arrowhead was a dull shade of gray—made of iron—

  “NIN!” she screamed—her throat felt like it had been lacerated by broken glass—as she lurched forward, pushing Nin out of the way, who had been the target of the arrowhead...

  And she felt Nin catch her, his eyes wild and wide open—had the arrow hit her?

  Her vision began to blur. Were her eyelids closing shut, forever?

  3…2…

  Anya gave a sharp exhale, snapping herself back to reality. Her heart was thumping, fast. She felt like she had almost really died, and been on the way to crossing over to the other side.

  The Other Side of Life. A chill ran through her, as she recalled the words from one of the poems on the parchment.

  She tried to rationalize. The ice dragon. What was that about? Had Nin ever said anything about an ice dragon?

  Anya splashed some water on her face, before scrutinizing her facial features in the mirror. Anything to get her mind off the eerie end to the dream she had, which had started off well enough.

  She lightly tugged at the sensitive skin, just below her right eye. There’d always been a fine line there, which she tried not to bother with most of the time. She applied some eyeliner—to keep the focus on her eyes, not the fine lines below.

  A dream. Just a dream, she told herself.

  She couldn’t say for sure if she had died, by the end of the dream. Besides, she’d already had several dreams about dying before. She’d once dreamt that she had been an army recruit in a computer game, gunned down by a psychotic inmate who had escaped from one of the high-security prisons in Zouk City. That dream had resulted from a 12-hour hardcore gaming session, prior to when Anya finally crashed and took a break.

  She found herself thinking of Nin, for a few moments, as she brushed her hair. It comforted her, in a strange kind of way. That he—that they—were still alive, in this realm of existence.

  She found herself daydreaming now, of his streamlined body, height, and lean frame. It gave his physique a fluidity that most guys she knew didn’t possess.

  Much better thoughts.

  Such pleasant musings soothed her inner worries and tension. For a minute, Anya’s mind even drifted off to imagine the break-in at Gilbreth doubling up as an impromptu date, between she and Nin. Music lovers attended rock concerts on a first date—the destination of choice for art lovers would be a museum or art gallery—what better choice could there be for two people who shared a thieving habit?

  We’re just friends, not lovers, Anya promptly reminded herself.

  She straightened her shoulders, and looked squarely at her image in the mirror. She had suitably calmed down, and was ready for the challenge she had been recruited for.

  * * *

  Nin was by himself, waiting outside the stone church. He was viewing one of the downloaded maps of the Gilbreth, stored in his N-Gage.

  He tried hard, to be honest with himself. He was envisioning a past conversation with Saerah, an Elven princess.

  “Humans are all useless,” he had said to the very young, demure, well-mannered member of royalty. “They run around like headless chickens, not even knowing it.”

  “They are…deprived?” Saerah replied with a conceited smile. There always seemed to be a trace of superiority in her tone, when she spoke.

  “They’re shallow…they don’t have good taste…they can’t tell the good from the bad…” Nin went on. He felt almost polluted, just talking about humans. “Human beings are wretched, and an utter disgrace.”

  A disgrace! he repeated in his mind, as he waited for Anya to arrive. He was the disgrace, not the other way around.

  He’d snuck into the elves’ SystemOD lab, when he had a few moments to spare earlier. Dresan spent the most amount of time tweaking their system. The system offered a simulated reality, which could retrieve events from one’s memory and enhance one’s imagination. It could be trippy—one could be plugged into SystemOD, and think that whatever was imagined had really been a reality, complete with the physical sensations which reinforced one’s experience via th
e system.

  Nin had plugged himself in through the system’s industrial goggles that displayed the images in one’s ongoing thoughts. He was simulating a date with Anya—what should he greet her with? “Hello?” “How are you?”—and wondering what she liked to do in her spare time. Smoke cigarettes? Drive faster than the speed limit—go skydiving—sleep late when she had work to do—buy some happy pills after clicking an ad in one of her email inboxes.

  He kicked himself out of the system halfway—why was he doing this, when he was going to meet Anya later?

  Nin thought it was slightly hypocritical—that he’d just recruited a human, after some of the awful things Nin had said about humans in the past, to his Elven acquaintances…

  Nin had spoke disparagingly about humans for a while. It was an orthodox Elven “thing to do,” though he stopped once he realized that he didn’t actually mind human contact. He joined in the trash-talk against humans, to fit in within the circle of Elven noble families. While humans were “guilty as charged” regarding certain things—he doubted that bashing the species was going to end up being of any real help to anyone.

  So he decided to enter the human realm instead—another “disgrace,” in his immediate family’s eyes. Most of the Elven elders did not keep in contact with those who decided to leave. But Nin knew where to find Tavia, who’d located Dresan earlier, through a mutual friend. The first thing Tavia had handed him was an updated cybernetics wardrobe.

  “Don’t forget karma.” Wasn’t that what he had said to Tavia and Dresan, when he had been listening in on their conversation the day before, as he pored through some blueprints of The Gilbreth?

  Karma was the law of moral causation. Every act done, no matter how insignificant, would eventually return to the doer with equal impact.

  Perhaps it was some kind of divine retribution that it wasn’t an elf, but a human girl, who stirred up his thoughts and feelings on life, technology, and everything in between.

  And now, here he was standing, about to meet and greet Anya, who was riding in on her motorbike.

  The sky was beginning to change color, signaling the arrival of nightfall. Anya first spotted his fine hair, which seemed whiter than the moon.

  “Where’s your friend?” Nin asked, when Anya alighted from her bike. He was completely unaware of his natural charm and grace having any effect on Anya, who enjoyed maintaining her “tough cookie” image. But she wasn’t sure how long more she could do it.

  “Can I ask you something?” Anya got straight to the point, before Nin could notice the rush of blood to her cheeks. Her blush would wear off quickly, but it was intense while it lasted.

  I had a dream, she wanted to mention. She had a flurry of things to say. Does it mean anything? I nearly wore spiked boots here, to be taller next to you—plight of the vertically challenged—but it would’ve been impractical, wouldn’t it? Oh, and I had a fortune cookie. Do you like Chinese food?

  Where should she even start? Then she remembered Nin’s question, and that Leticia was missing.

  “Do you…absolutely need…Leticia to be around for the briefing?”

  Nin seemed a little surprised—Anya’s face was as serious as her tone of voice. “Well, I was wondering if she could help Dresan with the surveillance. Is she all right? Is she upset or offended about something?”

  “No, that’s better, actually!” Anya relaxed a little, as she focused on taking slower, deep breaths. “She…” Anya waved her hands up and down in front of her, palms facing each other. “Had to meet her…boyfriend,” Anya ended flatly, half-hoping it wasn’t the lamest excuse Nin had heard, even though it wasn’t false.

  “Right…” Nin said, a lot more understandably—and with less sarcasm—than Anya expected. He ran a thumb along his slim jaw line, in thought. “Will she be meeting us at midnight?”

  “She’d like to.” Anya knew Leticia would.

  Nin gave a nod. “I suppose she could still help Dresan, then. We can tell her where to meet later.”

  Anya was glad she hadn’t antagonized an elf. She wasn’t sure what that might result in, and she didn’t want to know, either. Even the most beautiful of faces could hide the deadliest of natures.

  They started to walk in the direction of the train tracks. They were walking almost an arm’s length apart. Nin absent-mindedly ran his hand along the tattoo on his lower neck, before covering it. But Anya had spotted it.

  It was glowing, very faintly. It was the one thing that’d give away an elf’s emotions, even if their minds and expressions said otherwise.

  Nin shrugged, pretending not to notice.

  “Is that a tattoo?” Anya asked. “May I have a look?”

  Nin acquiesced, and dragged his shirt collar down a little bit more.

  “Very nice,” Anya replied, impressed at the aesthetic design. There was nothing worse than a cheap-looking, tacky tattoo on a beautiful body.

  “We’re born with them, and free to make our own interpretations of what the design means.”

  “Every elf has a different one?”

  Nin nodded. “Unless you’re from the same family—then there can be similarities, if you’ve a well-trained eye.”

  Anya had a good look at the design. It seemed to be a funky and calligraphic form of the letter “B,” with a Sanskrit script type of flair.

  “It’s a cool mix of…random, poetic nonsense,” Nin elaborated. “I figured it looks like the Arabic word for ‘words’…and then I thought it might have something to do with the word ‘Bushido’, which is a Japanese concept meaning ‘The Way of the Warrior’.”

  Even if it didn’t make much sense, Anya had to admit it was a cool mix.

  “You have any?”

  Anya shook her head. “Too scared of the pain.” She had a fear of needles anyway.

  “I had a dream of you, earlier,” Anya continued, in a casual tone.

  “Did you?” Nin said with a sideward glance. When he spoke to Anya, he gave her his full attention. He couldn’t sense if she wanted to say more. He was more cautious with keeping his own guard up. He suddenly realized it was because he liked the idea of being in love. Going through the emotions, however, was a new, somewhat unfamiliar experience. “What about?”

  “We were learning how to ice-skate.”

  Nin gave a nod, and shifted a little uncomfortably in his seat. Was she hinting at something? He didn’t feel like going there. Not just yet. “I used to wonder, what dreams were made of.”

  Anya listened, not knowing if she’d mention the later half of the dream. She also didn’t know that Nin didn’t often voice his spontaneous thoughts.

  “I came to the conclusion,” Nin continued softly, “that sweet dreams are made of these: the luxury of a voice that cares…a touch that says more than a season of words.”

  It was the sweetest thing Anya had ever heard someone else say. At that moment, she was dying to feel his luscious lips on hers, instead of watching them as he spoke. She didn’t even dare touch him—she feared her hand would be too rough on his invitingly soft skin. She decided not to mention the other portion of her dream. She didn’t want to ruin the moment with something morose.

  What Nin described was exactly what his own touch was like too. Did he know what she wanted?

  “So…are you…psyched up, for the assignment later?” Nin asked Anya, as they made their way to the tree which led to the elves’ underground abode.

  Anya wrapped one arm in front of her, across her midsection, as a cool breeze blew. “I just hope I don’t mess things up.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Nin said in a velvety voice.

  He asked if she had eaten anything.

  She nearly choked on almost mentioning the fortune cookie. She thought back on her day. “Two tubs of ice-cream.” Had she left the chop suey behind? She rarely forgot to eat, and never skipped meals.

  Nin was flabbergasted, almost stopping in his tracks in horror and disbelief. “You’ll need something more…substantial, to last till
after midnight.”

  Anya gave a laugh, which eased some of her tension. Before long, they reached the birch tree, and were making their way down the narrow stairs.

  Anya could sense the bustle of activity, as soon as she stepped into the room. She could hear someone furiously hitting a keyboard. She didn’t see the golden goblet anywhere.

  “Hey, thief,” Dresan greeted her with a sly smile. He had gloves on and was carrying a glass jar, which contained a light blue solution.

  “Leticia will be joining us later,” Nin told him, as he went to get some maps from the table, which he passed to Anya. He had marked directions in red ink.

  “Can Leticia be here at, say, eleven forty-five?” Dresan asked, taking a few short steps backward. He seemed to be in a rush.

  “Sure,” Anya replied, and messaged the information to Leticia right away, before focusing her concentration onto the papers in her hand.

  The first map was an official one, printed by The Gilbreth Institute. The “Omega” building, in the center of the entire Gilbreth complex, was circled.

  The map below was a blueprint showing the interior of the Omega unit. The “Key Room” and “Janitor’s Room / Secret Vault” were circled. Anya noticed a line of small text at the bottom, which read: “Copyright © 2035 by Dresan.”

  The map underneath the blueprint—the third and last map, Anya thankfully noted—showed the layout of the vault itself. One spot was circled, accompanied by a scrawl of passionately handwritten text: “X MARKS THE SPOT: Medieval parchment pieces, HERE.”

  Nin explained the first map to Anya. “We’ll enter by the back of the building, then grab the keys from the metal case on the wall—you, I mean. The combination on the lock is ‘2, 1, 7,’—Gilbreth’s exact time of birth, at 2:17 a.m.”

  Anya memorized the numbers by heart.

  “We’ll give you fake keys to replace the ones we’ll be taking. Look for the keys labeled, ‘Janitor’s Room’ and ‘V.’”

  Nin got Anya to repeat the labels out loud, twice, before pointing to the second map. “The head guard keeps watch at the corridor where the janitor’s room is at. Tavia will create a diversion to lead him away, and we can enter the secret vault.”