Opposition Shift

by Sarah Stone

  Watching her, Hayden kept waiting for some sign of shock or hysteria. Some sort of reaction to Thompson's death. As an engineer, she was just as sheltered from true carnage as he was, even more so, having missed the marketplace bloodbath weeks prior. She’d seen bodies at the HQ before they’d swept them up, autopsied one of the Akiaten, but that had all been post-violence.

  Here, she’d seen the blood spilled in the moment, seen it spread across the concrete and even now listened to Cabal call the owners of the club, a group of sympathizers, and tell them that there was a body behind the bar (where he had dragged it) and gave them the number of an Akiaten who would know how to dispose of it.

  Hayden wondered if dispose meant dispose. If someone would drain the blood and donate it to the cause or if it spoiled after death. Hayden wasn’t sure he understood yet, but it seemed to him to be more about life than it was about blood, given what he'd seen thus far.

  As they left, carefully avoiding the blood smeared on the floor, he kept watching her, but her steps didn’t falter. When she moved past him, he noted the slight shake of her fingers where they were caught tight around the strap that held her rig at her side, but he could chalk that up to adrenaline. He was confident that if he held his own hand out straight, he would see a tremor there to match. Even dressed in clothing reinforced with armor, gunfire so close still made him nervous. Maybe people like Laine and Thompson were so cold and hard for this reason, to avoid the after effects of such violent deeds.

  Hayden looked more closely at Cabal as they waited in front of the door, Hayden on one side with Nibiru, Cabal on the opposite. He looked at the rents in the armor, where several of Thompson's rounds had penetrated the mesh and torn into Cabal's flesh.

  “You good?” he asked.

  He heard something like a smirk in Cabal’s harsh voice.

  “Mosquito bites,” he replied, his hand curled around the doorknob and eased it open until the lock clicked free. “We’ll be moving fast, on foot,” he said to the slinger and the engineer. “Can she keep up?”

  Nibiru snorted. “Thanks for saving me and all, but I'm right here, dude, and the better question would be, can Hayden keep up?” she said, stepping around Cabal and out the door.

  Cabal's face was covered in the mask, but his body language made it clear he was taken aback by the chiding, and Hayden let himself grin for real for the first time in days. At least no one could say the recruit he’d brought to the table couldn’t hold her own.

  They moved quickly across the city, Cabal nearly leaving them behind several times despite Nibiru’s initial confidence. It was just a front; she knew as well as he did about the Akiaten’s physiological differences, though there were still certain things she wasn’t yet privy to.

  At several points, Cabal cut around obstacles, taking one alleyway while they took another, leading Nibiru in one direction while Hayden met them at the opposite end, his hand never far from the handgun he’d been given along with his armor.

  Cabal had learned a thing or two about how to baffle the augmented tracking capabilities of operatives such as Laine and was doing what he could to throw off the inevitable investigation.

  As they moved, Hayden tied the mask back across the lower half of his face, there was no longer any need to put Nibiru at ease and it might make it harder for any civilians questioned to identify him as anything but part of the resistance.

  There were still plenty of people not part of the resistance or its network of sympathizers who would relish the chance at knifing a corporate goon, more so now that both Asia Prime and E-Bloc had stepped up their military presence.

  He wished they had thought to bring something for Nibiru. Her blue hair didn’t help matters, and he was sure she was the only person he’d glimpsed on the streets with such a memorable shade. Thankfully one of the other Akiaten escorting them seemed to agree and insisted that she wear his hooded jacket.

  He and Nibiru were winded by the time they reached the black site, but Cabal’s breathing was as steady as it had begun. He barely spoke to them once they arrived, though he did have Hayden send messages on his HUD to have Risa check for any progress on the part of their possible pursuers, but nothing had cropped up yet.

  Thompson had ruined not only his own chance to survive but any chance the Union had of capturing them on this particular run.

  Hayden wasn’t surprised in all truth. The slinger knew little of the man, but he seemed the sort to be more vindictive than smart, believing his ruthless aversion to compromise would help him win.

  It could be another fifteen minutes at least before someone had the thought to check their progress on the mission. The man’s tracker would still be alive even in his cooling body, so all they could see if they had the thought to look, was that he had been in one place for too long. Thankfully it was also the rainy season, so even now a light spatter of rain was doing its own part to mask their trail.

  Hayden worked to disable Nibiru’s mission tracker while they waited. The procedure was simple and involved simply hacking the software as opposed to ripping it out.

  In the space of the three minutes it took him to accomplish the task, Nibiru worked in an impressive amount of jokes about him killing her accidentally.

  The number of bootleggers around was sparse. The majority, of course, were killed in the last firefight with Hirohito, but the rest, Risa told him, were needed elsewhere. Since Asia Prime had stepped it up with their purge of both resistance and the various illegal operations in the city, much of the tech black market had sided with the resistance, much more openly than before, and they had been divided into the various cells that kept the movement decentralized.

  They both sat on the ground, Hayden leaning heavily against the wall and Nibiru cross-legged, still vibrating with energy despite exhausting herself on their trek to the black site. They’d only just begun to catch each other up; Hayden telling Nibiru about his survival of the recent attack and his induction into the group, while Nibiru told him, with exaggerated horror, the perils of being on lockdown and the utter boredom of playing along with Overdog’s plans.

  Less exaggerated were her mentions of the worry that one of the operatives would be able to look at her and see her conflicting thoughts.

  Neither of them felt good about Laine's continuous deployment away from HQ. Both suspected that if neither they nor the resistance had much of an idea where she was and what she was up to, that had to be a bad thing.

  It wasn’t long after Hayden’s breathing had almost returned to a pace he would call normal, that Cabal returned from where he’d been talking to the handful of bootleggers that remained.

  “There’s a clear path,” he said, and that was it, obviously expecting them to follow when he left.

  Nibiru cocked an eyebrow, as though she found the whole thing indescribably amusing, and rose from the floor, reaching down a hand to pull Hayden with her.

  When he gripped it, he could feel that her muscles had stopped trembling.

  Chapter 10

  There was little chance for small talk during the long journey to the cabin safe house where Hayden had first met Cabal and Alejandro. They took a path that was just as complex as the one Una had led him on when Hirohito was pursuing them.

  Many streets and several cab rides later, they found themselves walking up the narrow and overgrown path, sweating in the heat despite the hour growing later as they made their way.

  Nibiru seemed less intimidated by the jungle growth than Hayden, in fact, once they reached the encroaching green, her mood lightened noticeably. She wiped at the moisture on her brow, swatted absently at the mosquitoes that assaulted her skin every few steps, and replaced any burgeoning complaints she might have had with relatively cheerful commentary considering the circumstances.

  It was as if passing out of the city and past the threshold of the jungle treeline had awakened something in her. As far as Hayden knew she was just as much an avowed urbanite as he was, having never set foot outside an environ
ment not crafted by the hands of humanity.

  Where Hayden had found himself off balance and overwhelmed by all the life that teemed about them, drawing inwards into himself, Nibiru's response was quite the opposite. She was like a child exploring a new world, or a prisoner just released into the open air and light outside a cell, almost as if she'd forgotten the ever-present threat under which they all now lived.

  Cabal kept glancing back, each time looking surprised that she had managed to keep up in addition to keeping enough breath for the constant array of questions.

  They ranged from the curious, “Are the safe houses out this far? Not that I’m not enjoying the, you know,” she spread her hands wide to encompass the forest around them. “Nature. This just seems like a bit much. No one at the Union would be crazy enough to hike all the way out here except for Laine, so much open space and no hard cover to get behind. But I guess that’s the point of a safe house.” She dipped her head at Cabal. “I concede if you gotta hide, do it somewhere pretty right?”

  And then, not five minutes later. “How do you cope with all the insects? Is there like a natural repellant or do you go in for the usual pesticides? I mean, it's great, so much life, but aren't you afraid of malaria?”

  It went on like that. The man’s answers were short when they came at all, and he seemed genuinely shocked that Nibiru was venturing to speak to him. Even after several days on fairly good terms, Hayden was still uneasy about speaking to the man mostly because of how uncomfortable he seemed in conversation with those who weren’t Akiaten themselves. He even seemed hostile and guarded with Alejandro, though he had obviously been working with the man for a long time.

  Despite the brevity of his answers, the suspicion with which he regarded most humans didn’t seem to be there with Nibiru, or if it was, it was fading. It was unlikely that he'd ever met someone so enthralled by simple nature, or perhaps it was something else, regardless, by the time they reached the safe-house, he had stopped tensing at each question.

  Hayden had meant to explain a few things about the Aswang, predominantly the blood-drinking, to sit her down and map them out in detached, technical terminology that she might understand without freaking. So far, he hadn’t found a moment where he felt comfortable disclosing such…well, such sensitive information. He couldn’t think of a way in which, at the mention of it, he wouldn't fuck up the mutual understanding he and Cabal seemed to have reached about being on the same side. Such a conversation might easily come off as accusatory or disgusted when neither of those things described how Hayden had come to feel after a few days of getting used to the idea.

  However, when they entered the safe-house to the chaos of many feet and many voices, he knew that his chance for a comprehensive report on the subject of exactly what the Akiaten were would have to wait. Nibiru would have to wait, and whatever she saw inside was going to be on her to process.

  “We’ll be moving again soon,” Cabal offered, looking pointedly at Hayden as he lifted his facemask just enough for the slinger to see the glint of fangs before returning it to its position. “The two of you could wait outside if you prefer.”

  There was an edge of nerves in his voice, though Hayden could just scarcely detect it, as though he worried this might the thing that made Nibiru turn on her heel and leave, or at the very least reconsider just exactly what cause she was dedicating herself to.

  Nibiru seemed offended at the mere assumption of missing out on anything and stuck with Cabal as he entered. Hayden thought about grabbing her, trying to tug her back at least long for a few explanatory words, but then he thought that Nibiru had always been the type to want to see things for herself. And some things were better witnessed than simply believed. He settled for walking in behind her.

  It was immediately clear that another firefight of some sort had taken place. The smell of blood was heavy, and there were at least a dozen unfamiliar faces milling about the smallish space. It wasn’t a big house, and it felt smaller still with so many bodies crammed between its walls.

  Alejandro was sorting through them, both Akiaten and humans, as it appeared that perhaps there had been a raid on one of the neighborhoods that gave them regular support, trying to figure out who was hurt and who was a witness with valuable information to share and who was capable or willing to help. His calm voice was perfect for cutting through the rising din, and despite no other similarities, it reminded Hayden of Captain Mitchell’s ability to take immediate and complete control of a room with a few yelled words.

  “Alejandro,” Hayden said to Nibiru, in place of an introduction, and she nodded, committing the name to memory.

  It didn’t take long for Cabal to abandon them again as he helped restore order, to ask about what had taken place in his absence. As far as Hayden knew, there had been no attacks planned for that day save for his own mission to extract Nibiru, which likely meant that another black site or safe-house had been raided.

  Most of the activity seemed to center on the largest bedroom and Nibiru made the same mistake that Hayden had, bee-lining for it, though her intentions were far nobler than the nap he had hoped to catch. For this being her first day as a revolutionary, Nibiru was taking to it with gusto, and Hayden had to laugh to himself despite the grim chaos all around them.

  She even revolted with enthusiasm.

  “I still have my med-kit on me,” she said. “And more training than most of these people probably.” It was plain that she meant to foist her kit off on whoever needed it most, perhaps even sticking around to apply the aid herself. Nibiru had more background in medical than Hayden, and, in any other circumstance, he would have considered it a good idea.

  “Nibiru,” he started, but she was already moving and the door was wide open so that the activities within were easy enough to see once one was within a few feet of the doorway.

  He was at the right angle to see her freeze, stare, and then mouth a silent, 'oh fuck' before heading over the threshold regardless.

  Hayden shook his head in mute disbelief, half wished Cabal had been standing behind him, now that he was unmasked for once so that Hayden could see the shock on his face, and followed.

  There were several Akiaten with various injuries being seen to by one frazzled looking woman in civilian clothes overlaid with a blood-stained nurses jacket.

  There was another civilian allowing an Akiaten to feed at her throat, the warrior's wounds already healing, but his body was weak in the aftermath, evidenced by his gentle collapse once he'd drunk his fill. In fact, it only seemed to be the most grievously wounded that were bothering with healing at all.

  As Hayden watched another one of the Akiaten feed, he noticed something he had missed before. This warrior, unlike the others, had discarded his mask for one reason or another. His face was altered, twisted into something horrible, all jagged fangs and too-bright eyes.

  Hayden felt an odd ache in his gut as he realized that that was a version of the face he’d seen on Una in the dream he’d had after they spent their first night together. After his revelation, he had realized, of course, that she had fed on people or at least on blood, in some manner. She would have to in order to survive, but he’d thought his dream of her as something truly monstrous had been just that. It seemed impossible that his brain had managed to conjure up an image so close to what he was currently seeing with no context.

  He half expected the lower half of the Akiaten’s body to twist away from the top, leaving a mess of dangling intestines below, but that bit didn’t come true.

  Not yet, anyway.

  Hayden did his best to banish the troubling thoughts, focusing instead on the way Nibiru moved through the room like she belonged there. She offered her med-kit to the flustered looking maybe-nurse, who looked at first irritated with the interruption and skeptical of the stranger who’s tongue she did not share. Then she realized what it was that Nibiru was holding and let her explain, in halting Tagalong, that perhaps she could do something to help. The woman pointed her toward a female
Akiaten digging bullets from the mess of riddled flesh that used to be her leg.

  Nibiru caught Hayden’s eye as she headed there, giving him a look that he could tell meant, later, and sank into her task.

  How the engineer could witness, process, and get over the blood feeding of the Akiaten was beyond him, though perhaps, the slinger thought, having dissected one of these warriors had given Nibiru some degree of familiarity with their more monstrous qualities.

  Alejandro told him later, when he asked, that the nurse was called Leda and that she was retired, technically speaking. According to him, she’d even set up a system that allowed prospective donors to come by the safe-house she ran just outside the other end of the city, and give there, for use at a later date. It wasn’t as good as fresh blood he said, but could get the job done in a pinch.

  There were four badly injured Akiaten more or less unconscious, but healing, when Nibiru left the room. It seemed that modern medical attention, even if it was from a basic Union field kit, was nearly as much help as the blood from willing veins.

  The others, some sporting the odd bullet wound, were in good enough shape that giving Alejandro and Cabal the rundown on their experience wasn’t out of the question.

  As they spoke, Hayden realized with a chill that the reason most of the injured were Akiaten was because those humans who had been equally injured were left behind, the warriors being forced to triage who they could extract and who they must abandon.

  It had been Asia Prime, on Hirohito’s orders Hayden assumed, trying to shake down the rest of their black sites to track down the ‘high-value targets’ he’d missed on his last attempt.

  The Prime alpha augment had waited, bided his time while E-Bloc and the Union brawled with each other and the resistance, then struck when the moment was perfect. It seemed, for the moment, that E-Bloc had been replaced by Asia Prime as the top military power in this clandestine struggle and the resistance was reeling from the increased pressure.