by Alex Fedyr
Kalei stared at him. “You’ve lost me.”
Erit sighed. “I suppose I have not yet explained the mechanics of the darkness. When our hands touched, what did you feel?”
“Nothing.”
“And then?”
Kalei hesitated, trying to find the words to describe it. At the time, she had felt excitement and relief as the darkness was pushed away from her arm. Now that it was over, she felt as though this whole exercise was stupid. She didn’t see the point. She didn’t see any reason to go along with some ten-year-old’s games. She didn’t even know why she agreed to join SWORDE anymore. Franklin, SWORDE, all these people; it was all stupid. She just wanted to go find a place to sleep. She wasn’t tired, but she couldn’t think of anything else worth doing in this damn world.
Erit leaned forward, “Kalei—”
“Can’t you see you’re boring her?” Shenaia’s voice interrupted.
Erit stood up abruptly as Kalei heard Shenaia’s footsteps approach.
The footsteps stopped behind her chair, and Shenaia called out, “Come on, girl. Let’s go raid the closet!”
Erit stood up. “And what makes you think I’m going to let you take her?”
“Because I want to,” Shenaia replied. Kalei saw a cell phone fly over her head toward Erit. He caught it. “Take it up with Terin if you’ve got a problem.”
Kalei heard the slides from a pair of guns clicking into place. She turned around to see Shenaia aiming two pistols at Erit.
“I’ll take her by force if I have to.”
Erit glared at her for a moment. “If you lay a single hand on her—”
“She’ll be fine!” Shenaia replied, holding the guns out for a moment longer. She looked at Kalei and nodded her head toward the door. Kalei took the cue and obligingly stood and started moving toward the exit. As Kalei walked past her, Shenaia holstered the weapons in their concealed places behind her back and said, “I’ll bring her back safe and sound, little boy.”
“You know what I mean, Shenaia.”
She raised both arms as she shrugged. “What? I can’t control what she does. If she jumps me to get a high—”
“Shenaia!” Erit’s voice was strict.
Shenaia dropped her arms. “Fine.” She turned toward the door and casually raised one hand into the air to wave goodbye. “But only ‘cuz Terin told me to play nice.”
Shenaia took Kalei down the hall and up a different set of stairs than the ones Kalei had come down originally. Kalei went willingly; she didn’t have the energy to object.
Along the way, the walls they passed sported chipped and flaking paint, but were otherwise bare. Occasionally, they passed a spot where the paint was lighter, usually in the shape of a perfect square. Presumably, these lighter patches marked the places where paintings had once hung, and in some cases, it seemed that their removal had been violent as the squares sometimes sported massive holes in the plaster.
Then Shenaia stopped at one of the many doors that lined the hallway. She flashed a grin at Kalei and opened it.
Kalei was met with a massive room that had been cleared of all furniture and debris. The room wasn’t pristine, but relative to the rest of the hotel, it was sparkling. The walls and floors were bare, but for the most part, clean and undamaged. The ceiling was entirely intact, and the windows along the far wall didn’t have so much as a scratch. In the center of the floor stood more than a dozen racks of clothes and accessories. Tall racks, short racks, bright colors, subdued shades; rack after rack labeled by size and type.
"What's all this for?" Kalei asked apathetically.
“According to them that writes the checks, this is all for undercover missions. Wardens can blend in, go anywhere, be anyone. Sounds hella fun, right?” Shenaia leaned in closer and lowered her voice. “But you want the real answer?” She paused as her smile widened. “This is my fucking closet! Haha!" Shenaia left Kalei and fervently descended upon the racks.
Kalei wasn't comfortable with the thought of Estranged going undercover in the city. She filed the subject away as something to share with Landen Franklin, but otherwise, she let the subject drop.
"OO! How are we going to dress you up, Sister? Celebrity appeal or backstreet whore? Oh! You would look so damn good in a cocktail dress!" Shenaia flitted from one rack to the next, pulling out and replacing one garment after another.
Kalei found a chair in the corner and sat down. She didn’t want to raise suspicion by asking about the undercover operations, not that Shenaia would know anything anyway, so she brought up another subject instead. "Why do you want to be a Recruit?"
Shenaia squealed, "Because it sounds like fun!"
"You think it’s fun being an Estranged?" Kalei asked.
Shenaia held out an orange shirt and looked it over. “Hell, yeah!”
A flash of rage overwhelmed Kalei. "How the fuck can you say that? People die because of us!"
Shenaia swiftly turned her back to Kalei and put the orange shirt back. She stood there for a moment, not speaking, not moving. Then she said, "Hey, we've got it good, sis.” She turned around, and the smile was back on her face. “We’ve got bodies that never die! Looks that never age! And we can get a high that takes us higher than any drug on the planet! How can you argue with that?"
"Try endless pain! You think death is something to laugh at? What about the people who are left behind! What about the families ruined? You think that's something to laugh at?"
The smile slid from Shenaia’s face. "... no." A couple of hangers clicked together as she resumed sifting through the clothes. She shrugged. "Maybe that's why I want to join." Another pause. She turned and started on another rack. "Hell, that's why I quit Tusic."
Kalei was surprised. "You used to be with Tusic?"
A couple more hangers clicked. "Yeah." Shenaia took up a deep breath and her upbeat energy returned as she resumed her search. "Man, they knew how to party! None of this sober crap. Them boys knew how to keep a good high on the down-low.” She turned and faced Kalei. One hand danced to the tune of her story. “They could walk around high as a kite and you wouldn’t even know it by lookin’ at ‘em. Landen tells ‘em to go out and get shit done, and boy, they got their shit done. Don’t need to be sober for dat. And SWORDE wants everyone to stay clean? Ha! They can't touch Tusic, even with all this high and mighty goody-two-shoes shit."
Kalei had imagined Tusic to be straight-laced, but now this girl was telling her that they ran around high as a bird? She couldn’t believe it. Kalei wasn’t sure she believed anything that came out of Shenaia’s mouth. But that being said ... Kalei found that she had about as much information on Tusic as she did on SWORDE: not much. Perhaps even less.
Kalei asked, "If it was so great, then why'd you leave?"
Shenaia shrugged. "Eh, it's over. Oh! I've got it!" Shenaia emerged with a flowing summer dress. "Put this on!"
"It's almost winter, you idiot."
"So. We're Estranged, sis! The cold can't hurt us!"
Shenaia had a point. While Kalei still felt hot and cold, it didn’t really bug her anymore. The steady throb of the darkness made it simple to block out a trifling discomfort such as the weather. Still. A summer dress? Kalei stood and walked over to another rack where the labels indicated her size. She grabbed jeans, a black tank top, and a jacket. Then she went to the bathroom to change.
"Spoil sport!" Shenaia called after her. “Hey! Take a shower before you put those on!”
Kalei obliged. She didn’t want to, but she knew it was necessary. She stepped in under the faucet and the hot water slid down her shoulders and turned black before it slipped into the drain. A year’s worth of dirt and grime would do that.
As she worked, Kalei’s heart was weighed with stone. Not only that, but her arms and legs felt like they were twenty pounds heavier, and every movement felt like a chore. Nonetheless, she raised her weary arms to wash the shampoo into her hair, and she slid them to her face to scrub the grime off of her skin.
&nb
sp; Where Lecia had blown her brains out, Kalei’s hair was growing back as a short accumulation of fur hidden beneath what remained of Kalei’s longer hair. Kalei pulled at the longer strands, but the dense mass of knots wouldn’t yield. Kalei wrenched and yanked, and as the tangles held firm, her frustration grew.
Finally, she gave up. She sank down to the shower floor and began to cry beneath the water. Her sobs were covered by the sound of the water, and her tears were washed away even as they appeared on her cheeks. The shower allowed her to be utterly alone with her misery.
At the heart of it all, she missed Fenn. There were other people she had cared about. Her nieces, her old coworkers, her partner... But not like Fenn. Nothing could make her life whole the way Fenn did.
Kalei laughed to herself. Yeah, there had been days when she wanted to strangle him for spilling water all over the bathroom floor. But now... Kalei watched as the water from the shower splashed against the side of the tub and turned back to travel toward the drain... Now she would give anything to see his puddles.
A harsh knocking came at the door. “Kalei! Stop taking your sweet time and get your ass out here! I wanna see you in your new clothes, girl!”
Kalei shut off the water and walked over to the sink. She grabbed the porcelain with both hands and looked at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were red and swollen but fierce as they glared back at her. Her skin was pink and raw where she had scrubbed it, and her brown hair sat piled atop her head in a massive lump. As she looked at herself, the grief in her eyes slowly turned to rage, and from rage into pure hatred. She reached past those hateful eyes as she opened the cupboard. It held an array of toiletries, tweezers and such, and on the top shelf sitting next to a couple bottles of baby powder, she spotted a cardboard box with the picture of an electric razor. Kalei decided the knots in her hair weren’t worth dealing with.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Trust
Shenaia was thrilled with Kalei’s new haircut. “I knew I liked you! Man, you should’ve let me do it, though. I could’ve made it look so good!”
“It’s shaved. How could you have possibly shaved it any better?”
“There are lots a’ ways to shave a head. You make some parts shorter, longer – it coulda looked good! You shoulda told me!”
Kalei shrugged. “There was nothing to tell. I did it, it’s over.”
Shenaia pouted. “Fine.” She started walking toward the door and waved for Kalei to follow. “C’mon. Let’s go play hooky before teacher comes snoopin’ for us.”
Kalei followed. “Hey, you’ve been here a while, right?”
Shenaia stepped out into the hallway and checked both directions as she said, “Yeah.”
Kalei casually asked, “Do you know if there are any computers around here?”
Shenaia’s eyes brightened. “Just one. But, girl, you wouldn’t believe how big this thing is!” She slapped her hands together. “Yeah, dat’s a good idea. Erit will never find us there. Follow me. I’ll show you where they hide the brains ‘round here.”
Shenaia took Kalei further down the hall and stopped in front of a set of elevators. After seeing the elevators in the foyer, Kalei didn’t see any reason to trust these deathtraps. Quite frankly, she didn’t think Shenaia was going to prove her otherwise. “Why don’t we take the stairs?”
“The stairs won’t take you there. Trust me.” Shenaia hit the call button and the doors to their left slid open.
What was Erit’s first rule again? Kalei climbed into the elevator.
Once the doors shut behind them, Shenaia pulled out a small service key. “Hehe, took this off Walker the other day. Dumb bastard, probably doesn’t even know it’s missing!” She put it into the hole beneath the buttons, turned it, and hit “12” and “13” at the same time.
“Two floors?” Kalei asked.
“Nope, just one. Ever heard of nine-and-three-quarters?”
Kalei was baffled. “You read?”
“Of course I read! I may be street, but I ain’t stupid. I call dis floor twelve-and-a-half.”
“Twelve-and-a-half?”
“What? You got a problem with that?”
Kalei shrugged. “Nope, no problem.”
“You judging?”
“I’m not judging.”
With a light ding! the elevator doors opened. As the doors receded, Kalei found herself looking at a vast library of computer servers. She only knew what they were from the documentaries she had watched with Fenn. Otherwise, they just looked like tall metal cages with shelves of black boxes inside. The boxes themselves weren’t featureless; they had ports and buttons and small lights ranging from a dull yellow to bright green, and several menacing red ones. Server after server lined the walls like ominous sentinels, blinking and whirring at them from the chilly room. A narrow aisle stretched between them and Kalei and Shenaia followed it to an opening in the collection. Beyond the aisle was a small space about ten feet wide and twenty feet across where all the servers had been moved aside to form a small room. In the far corner stood an office chair and a plain oak desk, just four legs with a flat surface to hold a black keyboard and mouse. Behind the peripherals sat six thin monitors, stacked above one another in rows of three and angled toward the chair. From behind the screens, dozens of wires cascaded to the floor and slithered off into the forest of hardware.
“What do they do with all this?” Kalei asked as she peered into the shadows between the towers.
“This is how they control Downtown. Keep da fence juiced, spy through ev’ryone’s fancy jewelry...”
Kalei stopped investigating and looked at Shenaia. “Fancy jewelry?”
“Yeah, didn’t you notice?” Shenaia tisked and rolled her eyes. “Sis, since when do you wear studded earrings?”
“Those are the only kinds I wear.”
“What?” For some reason, Shenaia seemed to find this offensive. “Fine, but since when do you wear them one at a time? Didn’ you notice the stud in your left ear when you were shaving your pretty little head?”
Kalei had noticed. At the time, she had written it off; there was no telling what had happened during the year and a half she was high.
Kalei put her hands into her jacket pockets. “What are you getting at?”
“That, girlie, is how they watch you.”
“What?”
“Yeah, they watch all the Estranged that way. That ain’t no earring. That’s a camera.”
That was it. Kalei was sunk. If the thing in her ear really was a camera, then that meant they knew about Lecia, they knew about Tusic, they knew about her plan...
“But those things are useless as shit!” Shenaia said as she plopped down into the chair. The joints creaked beneath her weight, the wheels protesting as she dragged herself closer to the desk. “Them cameras are never pointin’ in the right direction, they’s always buried beneath piles of hair, they’s fuckin’ useless as—”
“How do you know?”
Shenaia looked over her shoulder at Kalei. “I’ve played around with the system a bit.” She turned back to the computer and pulled the keyboard closer. “The thing ain’ exactly password protected. Guess they figured the fancy elevator was enough.”
If they were as useless as Shenaia said, then perhaps... Kalei asked, “Do they save the video? I mean, for multiple days?”
“Damn right they do. What, you think these big-ass computers are just for looks? Here, lemme show you.” Shenaia started clicking and typed a command or two.
The five outer monitors continued to show various feeds from the city: a burnt-out storefront bobbing up and down as the camera moved, a motionless pile of bodies in a dim hallway, and a few more that were too dark to distinguish. In all cases, the feeds were black and white, but the definition was crystal clear. In the top left monitor, a small blue window displayed a series of numbers and codes in green, all of which meant nothing to Kalei, but it was the lower middle monitor where windows began closing and opening. The first few windows closed
before Kalei could see what they were, and then another opened with a blue background and grey square that prompted “Identification Tag Number” with a blinking cursor in a white box waiting for the response immediately below.
Shenaia spun the chair around and said, “Turn around. Lemme see the back-uh yo earring.”
Kalei didn’t like the idea of turning her back to Shenaia. “Why?”
“So I can see yo tag number.” Shenaia turned away and “tched” again. “Fine, I’ll use mine.”
“No, wait.” Kalei turned until Shenaia could see the back of her left ear. If she wanted to find out how much SWORDE knew, then this might be the only chance she would get.
“Yeah, now we talking!”
Kalei turned back around when she heard typing at the keyboard.
“A’ight, when do you want? Any day, any time. We got a whole year to play with!”
Kalei feigned contemplation. “Let’s start out with... yesterday at about—” she thought back to the display on the phone during her conversation with Landen. “Four a.m.?”
Shenaia looked at Kalei. “Really? No ‘what happened the day I got tagged?’ Not even curious about dat huge ice storm when ev’ryone was all snugglin’ up to one ‘nother?”
Ice storm?
Kalei shook her head. “Just do it.”
Shenaia “tched” again. “Fine, is yo cam.”
Shenaia entered in a few commands and then the video in the top screen flickered and switched to a new image. In this new shot, all they could see was black with occasional patches of lighter grey.
“Dammit! See what I mean? Yo hair was in the way.” Shenaia fast-forwarded and rewound, but it was all the same. “This is bullshit. Give me another day!”