by Alex Fedyr
Thankfully, Shenaia’s arm and the gun dropped to her side. “Who needs gun safety? It’s not like a bullet is going to kill any of us anyway.” In one swift motion, she raised the gun back up, swung around, and without even taking a moment to aim, she let off six bullets at the nearest target. From what Kalei could tell, Shenaia had given the paper man two eyes, something of a mouth, and a small hole where any manly parts would be.
Over the severe ringing in her ears, Kalei heard Erit say, “As a Warden, you will be working among Untouched as well as Estranged, and they will not recover from an accidental bullet wound as well as you or I. In order to become a Warden, you must learn to respect gun safety, Shenaia.”
Shenaia tossed the revolver onto the table. “Yeah, yeah...”
This time, Kalei got her earplugs in before Shenaia could reach for the shotgun.
Sitting at a poker table in the hotel lounge – aka: the rec room – Kalei and Erit faced off. The table sat in the back corner of the room, and Kalei could see the whole lounge spread out behind Erit. Two more poker tables lined the hall to the right, a couple pool tables sat in the middle of the room, and at the far end sat two couches back to back, each facing a TV. The room was full, and the sound of movies, pool cues, and general conversation filled the lounge, but Kalei ignored it all as she studied her opponent over her small mountain of poker chips.
Erit had a fair-sized pile himself. The two players each had split the chips nearly in half over the course of the game. Mar, who had been knocked out early, dealt the cards. The game was Texas Hold ‘Em. House rules stated you had to play with at least one hand exposed on the table. That was what killed Mar. She might have had a poker face, but her nails sure didn’t. Mar had chosen a smiley for her emblem. As they played, she had tried her best to maintain a neutral line for the mouth, but the occasional twitch at the edges gave her away every time.
Shenaia had chosen a steering wheel for her nails. It was supposed to turn different directions, but for most of the night, it had taken her entire focus to maintain the outline. Her poker chips hadn’t kept her company for very long either.
Kalei still had her simple swirl with its long stem anchoring it to the base of her nail. She had developed a subtle pattern throughout the night: a slight squeeze of the swirl for bad hands, a slight loosening for good ones. Erit had picked up on the pattern, but now was time for the end game. She planned to use the pattern to her advantage.
Mar dealt the cards. As Kalei reached out to look at her own, she mentally prepared to give her swirls a slight squeeze when she lifted the cards. As she lifted the edges, she saw a pair of aces. Sweet! Belatedly, she remembered to look at her nails. Not only had she remembered to squeeze the swirls, but she had squeezed them so tight that they were now black circles on her fingers. Casually, she flexed the lines back open again and looked up to see Erit’s reaction. He watched her, one eyebrow raised.
She didn’t even bother to look at his nails. The damn books were useless.
Kalei tried to downplay her excitement at seeing a pair of aces in the pocket. When Mar prompted her, she casually checked. Erit, testing the waters, raised her with a couple red chips. Kalei moved quickly to give off the appearance of being anxious, and called. Mar drew the next set of cards.
A Queen of Spades, a six of Hearts, and a Jack of Spades.
Hoo, that’s dangerous. A queen and a jack of the same suit meant it was possible for Erit to get a straight flush. If he had the King and Ace of Spades, he could get a royal flush, the best hand in the game. But that wasn’t likely. Her partner Marley had once told her the odds of getting a straight flush were one in 650,000. Kalei only remembered because they had argued about it at length on one of their patrols.
Kalei checked. When Erit raised again, she feigned a slight squeeze before calling.
Then came the flop: the King of Spades.
Three cards of the same suit, all in a row. Even if Erit just got a flush or a straight, he would beat her pair of aces. Unless... was one of her aces a spade? She didn’t dare look. Instead, she looked at Erit. He looked at her. Kalei checked. Erit raised again; this time, he doubled his last two bets. Kalei called.
The turn came and both players watched Mar as she reached for the next card. The old woman lifted it from the deck, took a peek for herself, showed it to Shenaia, who was now watching over Mar’s shoulder, and then grinned as she set it on the table.
A ten of spades. Without even checking her cards, Kalei went all in. She’d done it. Somehow, she had hit those one in 650,000 odds and landed a royal flush. All spades! She was grinning so wide her cheeks hurt.
Erit smiled too, although his grin was more composed. “Nice try. But I shall call your bluff and take the pot.” He flipped over his cards. A pair of nines, one of which was a spade. That gave him a straight flush, king high.
“Nope.” Kalei smiled triumphantly and turned over her own pair. “Royal Flush!”
She began to reach for the chips when Erit said, “You may want to check again.” Kalei looked down at the red and black inked aces. Hearts and clubs. She had two aces, but neither was the right one.
“I’ll take these off your hands,” Erit said as he cleaned her out. Luckily, they hadn’t been playing for anything more than pride.
After neatly stacking his prize on the table before him, Erit addressed his defeated students. “Now, it seems that you have all come a long way in these last few weeks, and Terin has noted your progress. While I feel that some still need work,” he glanced at Shenaia, “Terin feels that you are all ready for the more practical levels of training, such as fighting, combat tactics, etcetera, etcetera.” Mar grunted her approval. Shenaia returned to her seat on Kalei’s right and glowered openly at Erit. Kalei, formerly slouched and recovering from her defeat, now leaned forward with renewed interest.
“Does ‘etcetera’ mean killing Estranged?” she asked.
“That will come after you become a Warden.” Kalei sat back in her seat again, dejected. Erit continued, “Now, before you can fight an Estranged, you must first understand the mechanics of what happens the moment one Estranged touches another. In that instant, the darkness from each Estranged reaches forth and rips a piece from the other individual’s darkness. Then, it returns to its original body where it devours the new piece. In Estranged, this results in a high. In Untouched, this foreign entity ripping at their dormant darkness is the trigger that releases their darkness and begins the process that can either kill them or turn them into Estranged.”
Erit paused to evaluate the effect of his explanation on his students. After a moment’s silence, Mar’s jaw flopped open to spout, “What?”
Shenaia took it upon herself to explain, holding out her hands as she said, “I have a chocolate cookie, and you have a chocolate cookie. We hold out our hands and I take yours while you take mine. Then we eat them.”
“Oh, I get it,” Mar rumbled.
Shenaia turned to Kalei and said, “Y’know, cookies sound really good right now.”
Kalei agreed, then asked Erit, “Can we even eat cookies?” She couldn’t recall eating anything since becoming an Estranged.
Erit sighed. “Yes, you can eat. But you don’t need to. And if you do, your body will process the food as normal and you will have to use the facilities. Which I strongly advise against.”
“Why is that?”
Shenaia answered, “Because they don’t have any fucking toilet paper in this entire Goddamn district!” She turned an accusing eye to Erit. “How could you let me eat an entire fucking plate of burritos and not tell me that we don’t have any Goddamn toilet paper?”
“I told you not to eat it.”
“That doesn’t mean jack! Out-of-toilet-paper is need-to-know! Dammit!”
Erit turned away from Shenaia’s ranting. “It seems we have drifted off topic. Let us proceed to the fitness room to commence our combat training, shall we?”
On their way up to the third floor, Erit explained how several
rooms had been converted into fitness rooms. Walls had been knocked out, wrestling mats added to the floors, padding installed along the walls, but no weights or treadmills. Estranged were pretty much frozen in the bodies they were converted in, so no amount of exercise would make them stronger. Instead, the fitness rooms were primarily intended for training reflexes and combat skills.
When they finished climbing the final set of stairs, Kalei followed Erit out of the stairwell and into the hallway. The flat, green floor was ripped and torn at regular intervals in front of the open doorways along the hall, the cuts and tears reminding Kalei of a remodeling project she had seen at a friend’s house, leading her to suppose that construction work was probably the cause of this damage too. As they passed the open rooms, Kalei saw that they were indeed padded with light blue mats across the entire length of the floor and halfway up the walls. The padding on the floors appeared to be made of a sturdier material than that on the walls, but both seemed newer than the rest of the hotel, albeit worn with years of use.
Erit took them to one of the smaller rooms and handed out long-sleeved workout shirts, pants, gloves, and even cloth ski masks that reached all the way down their necks. He insisted that they tuck in the garments wherever the seams met so that not an inch of skin was showing when they were done, apart from around their mouths and eye sockets.
Shenaia made a comment about being dressed for robbing a bank, then the students waited for Erit’s instructions, sweating before they even threw a punch.
“I understand that the level of combat experience among you three varies considerably. Kalei was trained traditionally by the local force, Shenaia has what she would call ‘street’ training, and Mar has almost no combat experience at all.”
Mar scoffed. “Yeah, right. You don’t get to be my age without learning how to knock a few heads around.”
Erit ignored the comment. “To rectify this, we will go through the basic hand-to-hand fighting styles that are accepted and used by SWORDE.”
For Kalei, this meant the rest of the afternoon was a test of patience. She went through the motions as Erit instructed, she listened to Shenaia argue with everything the instructor said, and she tried to help Mar wrap her head around the importance of fighting stances.
“Why don’t I just stand here and punch you in the face?” Mar asked. “Why do I have to do all this weird shit with my feet?”
“Because when you stand like that, your abdomen is an open target. If you turn to the side, then there will be less for your opponent to hit.”
“They won’t be hittin’ nothing after I knock ‘em on their ass!”
Kalei sighed. It was a very long afternoon.
Once the physical training started, the recruits got their own rooms and started to receive weekends off. That first Saturday, they all went their separate ways: Shenaia disappeared into the city, Mar would go do whatever it was Mar did, and Kalei would head down to the shooting range to blow off some steam. By the time Sunday came around, Mar joined Kalei at the range, muttering about having nothing to do.
The next weekend, Shenaia joined them with a dozen pistols, and after they blew through a small mountain of ammo, the range officer cut them off and kicked them out, so they went up to Shenaia’s hotel room where the two younger women taught Mar how to disassemble and clean a gun. It was an important thing for Mar to know, although Kalei suspected that Shenaia just wanted an excuse to put the work on someone else.
After they cleaned the first pistol together, Shenaia went to the closet and came back with three more pistols, one for each of them.
“Where the hell do you get all of these?” Kalei asked incredulously.
“Don’t worry about it,” Shenaia replied with a grin.
Kalei took one look at the .50 caliber handgun Shenaia plopped onto the bed and decided not to ask again.
Kalei took the pistol Shenaia had assigned to her and went to work. She got as far as pulling off the slide when she heard Shenaia ask, “So, Mar, why do you wanna join SWORDE?”
“I don’t wanna talk about it,” the old woman grumbled as she pushed a wire brush down the barrel of the revolver.
Kalei noticed that Mar had forgotten to take off the cylinder. She reached over to take the gun. “Here, let me help you—”
Mar pulled it out of her reach. “No, I’ve got it.” She noticed what Kalei was getting at and started to pull the cylinder off.
Shenaia started up again, “If you don’t tell me, I’ll pull out my hollow points and see how many it takes before you talk.” Again, she smiled.
Mar stared at her blankly. “What are hollow points?”
Kalei replied, “Not something you want to learn about first hand. It’s probably better if you just answer the question.”
Mar grunted and went back to work on the revolver. The smiley on her nails took on a deep frown, and its new eyebrows alternated between sharp downward angles and a level plane. Shenaia started to get up from the bed when Mar finally answered with a barely audible rasp, “The past doesn’t matter. What matters is, I’m gonna set it right.” She picked up an oiled rag and made a couple of swipes down the barrel of the gun. Her smiley’s mouth flashed into a full frown, then an angry grimace, then struggled to maintain a flat line. Kalei glanced at Shenaia, and Shenaia met her eyes. They would let it lie at that.
After a moment, Mar looked up and asked, “So what about you girls? Why do you want to join SWORDE?”
Franklin’s plan flashed through Kalei’s mind, she thought about her desire to wipe Estranged off the planet, and she thought about her hatred for Xamic and Terin... but instead, she answered, “I’ve spent the last six years of my life protecting the people in this city. I’m not going to stop now just because the darkness shows up in my nails.” Kalei hadn’t forgotten about all of the trouble-makers and screw-ups, all of the victims and civilians she met in her former line of work... some hated her, some loved her, but in the end, she was able to make a difference in their lives... what she did meant something to the world. Kalei had never realized that before. Joining the police force had just been a means to make her way into SWORDE. The people she worked with were just coworkers. But the thing was, they weren’t just co-workers.
Every Thursday, Debbie would visit Kalei in the locker room to talk about the latest episode of Professor Where, and Talwart was always shining his flashlight in her eyes, or pretending to check if she was intoxicated. Even their chief would sometimes come out and joke with them for a few minutes before brusquely sending them on their way. And then, of course, there were all those hours she had spent on patrol with her partner Marley... After being with these people five days a week for the last six years, they had become her family. And she missed them all. But thanks to the darkness, she could never get that life back.
Mar asked Shenaia, “What about you?”
Shenaia shrugged and looked at Kalei. “I became a Recruit because I care about my family.”
Mar and Kalei glanced at each other and started laughing.
“Hey, I’m being serious, guys!”
Kalei wiped a tear from under her eyes. “Sorry, but the thought of you, being all lovey dovey—” She started to laugh again.
When Shenaia started to load the .50 caliber, Mar and Kalei ran for the door.
After two weeks of patiently walking through the basics, Kalei was beyond ready to start throwing some real punches. In fact, she was tempted to pick a fight with Mar just to speed things up. But, luckily, Erit gave them the go-ahead to spar before Kalei had to resort to such tactics.
Kalei and Shenaia were paired off first.
As the two walked out into the center of the mats, Erit preceded the match with a few words. “No need to worry about hurting one another. We are all Estranged here, so I can assure you that any injuries, mortal or otherwise, will meet with a swift recovery. Now fight!”
They didn’t circle or dance. For a moment, they simply stood there. Shenaia playfully stretched her neck from side to side
while Kalei shifted her weight to the balls of her feet. When Shenaia smirked, Kalei raised an eyebrow.
Shenaia feigned a lunge to Kalei’s left, and then swung at her right. Kalei dodged easily. It was a tactic Kalei had seen many times. Somehow, it reminded her of her childhood, when she would— Shenaia ran at Kalei and cocked her right arm back for another punch.
With all the confidence that came from years as a cop, Kalei blocked Shenaia’s first punch, grabbed the second one, and then twisted Shenaia’s arm behind her back while kicking in the back of her knees. The counter-attack would have been successful, except that in mid-kick, Kalei lost her grip on the darkness. It went punching through her limbs, slammed into her head, and left her dazed and doubled over. Shenaia readily escaped, but she must have lost control as well because she ripped off her gloves and charged after Kalei with the ferocity of an animal ready to feed, the whites showing in her eyes, her lips bared in a ferocious snarl. Erit intervened, small as he was, and with an arm around the woman’s abdomen and a small leg behind her calf, he easily threw her to the mat.
Both Recruits were sent to opposite sides of the room to recover while Erit worked with Mar on her stances.
As she sat in her corner, Kalei was forced to face the fact that the darkness would not be so easily tucked away and forgotten. Some battles never ended, no matter how much training you put into them. Even now as she tried to regain control, she could feel it pulling, digging, and consuming her soul from the inside out. The all-too-familiar sensations burned at her heart and spread once more. She struggled to pull herself away, but she only felt it sinking deeper into her bones.
Slowly, she put the darkness back under her control, but the leash was tenuous. She stood up to fight another round.
Over the next few weeks, Kalei eventually learned to maintain control while sparring with Mar. Yet always beneath the skin, she could feel the pressure of the darkness and the slight tang of its presence in her heart. She resented its presence even as she knew she would never be without it.