by K Alexis
"Can't improve unless you lose sometimes," Agra said with a shrug. He raised his hands as if in surrender—and then made a circular flicking motion with his right wrist. A crescent blade spun out from his hand and hit the knife Telia was holding. They both clattered to the ground. "If I lose, of course," Agra added.
They began to circle each other. "Look, it's pretty clear you've got some skill," the burglar admitted. "And I don't want you to spend the rest of your life chasing me on some mindless vendetta. Let's cut a deal. You give me your dad's stash of weapon schematics and I promise not to come back."
"Again," Telia replied, "in case you missed it, he keeps top-secret information in his safe—at work. And you're behind a bookcase." Telia used her foot to flip the blades up so she could catch them. The first knife she threw wedged itself between the wall and the bookcase, putting the set of shelves on a slight angle. The next dagger hit the first weapon and turned it into a temporary lever, forcing the heavy bookrack over. It fell on top of Agra and flattened him.
He peered out at her. "I feel a bit like Humpty Dumpty."
"That's a shame," Telia said. "Because there are no kings in Deroi to put you together again."
"Do you have a book of fairytale comebacks, or is this your normal speed?" Agra asked.
Telia sat down in front of the defeated thief, just out of his reach. "You don't strike me as a burglar," she said.
"It's a side gig. I'm more of book-reading man myself. I wasn't looking for a witty partner, but you can join me if you like."
Telia blushed. "You think I'm witty?"
"I think most encouragers in the neighborhood do. You've got a rep for giving them a bit of lip."
Telia pulled at her hair. "Are you fucking with me about looking for books?"
His bright-blue eyes sparkled. "One of the few things I would never joke about."
She lifted the bookcase off him … and banged her father's desk. A small compartment opened with an imagination recording in it. It was about six by six inches and had a glowing sphere in the middle. "It's encoded," she said. "But you'll at least have something to take back."
"I don't really need it," Agra replied. "I really do mean burglary is my side hustle. You're much more interesting."
"Well, I hope you're just as charming when we run the streets," Telia said. "Meet you tomorrow night on the roof?"
Agra was halfway out the window when he replied, "I'll meet you anytime on any roof. And my name's Agra." He winked at her and dropped onto the street below.
As per his promise, Agra came the next night and every evening after that. He came in rain and snow; he came to talk for five minutes when her father was home and sat for hours with Telia when Lekan was not. Telia told him everything, except her last name and where she had come from. She relished her status as a put-upon outcast taking on the world with her best friend by her side. Her being a princess complicated the narrative. So, she kept her heritage a secret, and they planned raids, stole books and read everything in Common they could get their hands on.
Some of the tomes they "liberated" described scenes of men ravishing women, and young bodacious mechanics ripping chiseled scholars' clothes off. They were Telia's favorite novels as they stirred an inferno deep within her. She found some descriptions made her loins burn, and when she traced the flame and played with it, its release brought her an ecstasy she craved more and more each night. An ecstasy that she imagined would be ten times more satisfying if Agra joined in. After all, she reasoned, he made everything else better. His gentle gaze, full lips and curly hair caused her to laugh louder, cuss longer and dance whenever he held out his hand.
One night in her fifteenth year, she leaned over and kissed him like the lovers did in the books. He pushed her away.
"Don't you like me?" she asked, hurt and confused.
"I … I do," Agra stammered, seemingly at a loss for words for the first time. "But … what do you want in trade for it?"
"Trade? Why the fuck would I trade you something for use of your body? That's awful." Telia went quiet and began to curl her hair. "I … I have these urges. Desires? And a lot of them involve you. I don't have to explain more than that, right? I like you. I want you." She ran her tongue over her top lip. Agra's saliva was wetter than she had expected, but the touch of saltiness in it made sparks shoot through her body.
Agra's cheeks went a faint crimson and he smiled. "I keep forgetting we're Neomers," he said.
"Is that cause we don't hold rallies demanding picture-equality first?" Telia asked.
"Also, we don't draw with every color of the rainbow when we write messages." He stared off into the distance. "Give me a week," he finally answered. "I want you too, but I need a week."
She felt her cheeks glow. "Any rooftop, any night," she said.
They did not get their week. On Thursday, a Starfire exploded in Sacramento and killed a million citizens. Nothing was the same for them afterwards.
Telia came home from her classes to a lit house and her father sitting in the kitchen. Strewn across the pine, four-seater table were pages and pages of doodles with bright red circles around half of them. The cabinets were open and plates had been pulled out and smashed on the floor. She carefully picked her way through the shards and sat next to Lekan.
"You're … uh … home early," she said.
"What?" he snapped. He pulled some of the loose leaves close to him. "I must have missed something. What did I miss? Where are the calculations?"
"Dad, are you … do you need help?"
He glowered at her. "Why are you home? Don't you have a boy to run off with?"
She clenched her fists. "No, I fucking don't. They've locked the city down."
"They would have to," he mumbled. "It could happen anywhere. Where are my calculations? Did she steal them? No, there they are." He re-read a page.
"What is this?" Telia picked up some of the pages and looked at the images. A few of the sketches appeared to resemble what she had learned about celestial magic.
Lekan snatched them off her. "Go to your room."
"Fuck you," she said. "I'm not ten anymore. If you don't want me here, let me go home. Let me go back to my real home. Let me see Mom again."
Lekan picked up the table and flipped it over. "You and your selfishness! 'Me, mine, me,' that's all women think about. I brought you here to be a crusader for the cause. To be bigger than yourself. Something your mother could never do. Sacramento was what I warned your mother about." He pointed out of the kitchen's window and toward the silver-colored skyline. "She did not listen. Selfish and deaf, that's what women are. Every woman I know seems unable to listen. You, Clarice, Chiamaka and Harriet—all of you with sticks in your ears. All of you unable to see the sacrifices I'm making to save our nation."
Unafraid of her father's outburst, Telia asked, "Clarice is your lab partner, right? Who's Harriet?"
Lekan leaned down and started to pick up the papers. "I will solve it tomorrow."
"Solve what tomorrow?" Telia pressed. "Were you involved with the Starfire? Was that your work out there? Was Harriet part of it?"
"No."
Telia breathed a sigh of relief. "Then I'm going to watch the streams. It's fucking crazy how that thing went up."
Lekan grabbed her; his brown eyes appeared crazed. "You must believe me," he said. "I advocated against field-testing. Clarice wanted to make sure. She wanted to find out how it worked in a live subject. You must make Chiamaka understand. She wouldn't listen to me tonight. She's beyond logic."
"You talked to Mom?" Telia asked, bewildered.
Lekan went back to collecting his papers and mumbling to himself.
"You talked to Mom," Telia repeated before wandering off to her room in a daze. "You talked to Mom without me."
Agra did not visit any night that week nor the next. On Wednesday, a month after Sacramento, he messaged Telia and asked her to help him escape from a researcher's private laboratory. His excuse for not visiting Telia was that he ha
d been seduced by a woman named Jacqui and led into a trap. He did not mention their first kiss, and Telia did not bring it up.
Their life settled into a tenuous routine: Agra would find himself in trouble because of a woman or girl he had dated—and Telia would save him. During the nights he was not trapped by his latest fling, he would visit Telia's house and sit with her on the rooftop and talk. He never sat right next to her anymore, but a hand span or two away. When Telia flirted, he ignored it … or made a joke about her sexual needs.
At home, Telia's life also found a rhythm. Her father stopped coming home during the weekdays, so she spent her time studying everything he left in the house. She learned about Starfires and how they were not things but people. She discovered how they were made and how Neomers publicly denounced them while continuing their research in their secretive labs. She went to every Deroi archery contest featuring Morehouse competitors and hoped her mother would be there in attendance. She was successful in seeing every royal family member … except the one who mattered. Finally, Telia consumed every piece of media she could find about why she longed for the touch of some men and women she bumped into on the street but not others. If Agra was not willing to help her treat her "condition," she decided it was best for her to solve it by herself.
Telia's life went uninterrupted and undisturbed until she became eighteen. At midnight, on the day she legally became an adult, her communicator woke her up. It beeped and advised she now had access to the full range of applications available on the device, including ones for dating and work. In the strongest language possible, it also demanded she find a job immediately and suggested, with her skillsets, she was perfectly suited for the life of a mercenary.
Telia cared little about finding her vocation after being torn from her bed, but she hoped, prayed, her N-Comm would finally allow her to contact her mother. She typed in the number … and discovered it was still blocked. Somehow, she assumed, her father was continuing his campaign to prohibit her from reaching the one person in the world she wished to talk to. Telia did not know how he was doing this nor did she care. All she thought about was how she could punish Lekan for the last eight years now that she was free to chart her own destiny. The answer to her dilemma came almost immediately—from the blinking N-Comm's job suggestion. Her father seemed to value her life over everything else, bar his research, so she decided to put herself at risk by becoming an adventurer. She took the first contract offered.
It was a first of many things. The first time she went out of the city. The first time she went hungry and became exhausted. The first time she realized how vast and dangerous the world was. The first time she fought against a more skilled opponent. The first time an enemy outsmarted her. The first time she was wounded on the battlefield. And the first time she killed someone.
It was also the first time she followed a fellow companion back to their room and celebrated her victory with their body. Everything she had learned about for years, she put into practice. She danced up and down the twenty-something man, making him grunt and groan until they erupted in pleasure. For a brief moment, the urges that had haunted her since meeting Agra went completely silent. And then they re-emerged and clamored louder and louder, so she tried to quieten them by thrusting and wiggling against her partner until she collapsed from sheer exhaustion.
In the morning, she watched the sleeping man snore and, unlike in all the books she had read, felt nothing for him. It was as if he had been used up and could be put aside for another. She did not despise him or feel guilty about what they had done. Rather, she enjoyed how they had met each other's needs under the glow of moonlight. It was a memory she treasured, but that was all. After their night of discovery, he had been transformed into one of the thousands of people she passed by daily and felt no longing for. His sword arm was all she required now.
She slipped out of the room before he rose and went back to her bunk. She wondered what would have happened if she had been able to savor Agra all those years ago. Would it have been the same? Would he have become a face in the crowd and nothing more? Would he have morphed into something akin to her favorite tutors—enjoyable in the moment, reliable when she needed their help, but forgettable the second she was away from them? She had no answer for this and counted the drops of rain pelting against her window until their leader called them all down for breakfast.
Once again, her life took on a routine. However, this time she found herself enjoying every moment. She fought, laughed, made love and embraced the smorgasbord of delights the world around her offered. And when Agra came on missions with her, she felt complete and as if she had found a home. For a while, she even forgot about her mother and sisters in Moreand.
Until, as always, her father happened. One night, while she was waiting for Agra, he joined her on the roof. He passed her a present. It was a brand-new bow.
"Happy birthday," Lekan said.
Telia glanced at it. "It's a little fucking late, isn't it? And ten birthdays short of what you owe me."
"Well, in Moreand you are not a responsible citizen until you turn twenty-one."
The name of her lost country made Telia snarl. "You fixed the Starfire yet?"
"No, but I know where the answer is."
"Good for you."
"And if I find the solution, Chiamaka will take us back."
The statement gave Telia pause. She snatched the bow to hide her swirling thoughts. It was a Clarice bow, nearly perfect except for the stringing. "What makes you think I want to see her?" she questioned.
"A few things," Lekan replied. "The money you put away each month for a boat ticket back to Moreand. Your old searches on how to prove you are a Morehouse and, of course, the endless attempts you used to make on yours, and stolen, N-Comms to contact Chiamaka."
Telia stood and scowled at her father. His hair was greying and wrinkles had started to appear on his face, yet she realized nothing had changed in all these years. She had grown, but he was still the same man waiting for white people to rise up and riot. "How the fuck do you know all that?" she demanded.
He ran a finger over his eyebrows. "I am a lead researcher for the United Country Parliament. It has some … benefits. For example, I can see everything you access on the N-Comm network. And I can block any incoming transmissions." He held up his communicator and showed her dozens and dozens and dozens of messages addressed to her from her sisters and mother. "And because N-Comms scan a person's life-force to determine what applications they are authorized to use, I have been able to stop you from acting irresponsibly with a black-market communicator."
Telia cackled. "And what 'irresponsible' action would I have undertaken, Dad? Talked to my mother?"
"You would have given Chiamaka our address and gotten me arrested. You would've erased my critical research and put our race on a path to enslavement. You would have 'fucked us over,' as you like to say. The war is coming, and you have to be prepared. You have to be ready."
"Just … stop it with the bullshit," Telia retorted. "None of your fucking race-war hard-ons are true. I work with white people. Yes, they're pompous. Yes, some of them are privileged asses and say shit they shouldn't. But they've put in the fucking yards with all their wild-ass book burnings. They're purging all their supremacies and ingrained bullshit as best as they can. If you want to see what real racism looks like, go the fuck downstairs and read some of the shit in my room. It hasn't gone away like the Grinners claim, sure, but there's nothing around these days like some of the erotic-rape-fantasy novels I've read." She threw the bow off the roof. "Leave me the fuck alone. You’re paranoid nut-fucker."
Lekan got up. He was only a little taller than her. "I have read your collection downstairs. That is why I am afraid … but you are an adult now. I will respect your foolishness. I promise. I will give you the freedom to be put into camps by skinny white men with glasses. And the freedom for you to be poked in the rear by pale waifs who disguise their intentions with robes and religion. All you have to do
is get a book for me. One book. Think of me as a client who can grant all of your dreams."
Telia contemplated the different patrons she had already worked for. Most of them were boring and unforgettable, a few overly generous and kind, but some had been the spawn of a devil. If she agreed to his terms, Lekan would be far from the worst she had sold her services to.
"Where's the book?" she asked.
"A sorceress named Ristie has it in her castle."
"Of course she does. Everyone's fucking heard of her trove and no-one has come back after trying to break in." Telia shook her head. "No-fucking-one."
"A million people died in Sacramento," Lekan reminded her. "I am attempting to fix Clarice's error and save Moreand from itself. I am making amends for my evils."
"By sending your daughter into a death trap," Telia countered.
"You are not my daughter. You are everyone's daughter. I have trained you to be a foot soldier for our cause. Yes, you may die. But it would be so millions of black souls could live. This is your destiny."
Telia shivered because of the chill in the air and wished Agra was here so they could watch the falling snow. She knew if this had been a mission outline on her N-Comm, she would have passed it by. But even a chance, a slim chance, to re-connect with her mother was worth all the money in the world. Both she and Lekan knew it.
"I'm going to need more people," she said.
"As many as you like."
"I'll need a mage, a brawler—possibly a mutant—and a strategist. That's five including Agra. If we can't do it with five, then it's a frontal assault, and we'll lose."
Lekan typed on his N-Comm and transferred over ten thousand credits. "It's all I have," he said. "Use it the best you can."
Telia took Agra to a bar before outlining her father's request. He drank his six beers in silence, put his jacket back on and went outside. Telia followed him. A faint layer of white covered the concrete pathways of Deroi. "The Grinner administrators don't patrol Ristie's keep," he finally said. "That should tell you everything you need to know."