Silence (6 page)

“
I wasn’t sent by the
Centaurai,” Dekla retorted. “You have no idea what sort of powers
are in play.”

Dekla held out the envelope
again.

“
You don’t have to decide
now,” Dekla told Sheikoh dismissively. “When you come to your
senses, you will find your rendezvous point in-

“
I don’t do rendezvous,”
interrupted Sheikoh.

“
You’ll do what the empire
expects of you,” Dekla retorted firmly.

Sheikoh laughed in
derision.

“
You’re
joking, right? You give me the details here and now and I’ll see
what I decide to do, mate” Sheikoh told Dekla.
“
You
came
to
me
.
Remember?”

He watched Dekla’s imperious, arrogant
face, and realized that this dude wasn’t going to give in.
Apparently this glorified message-boy was used to getting things
his way.

“
My master-

“
Do you think I’m stupid?”
Sheikoh vehemently cut Dekla off. “Oh yeah, I’m gonna play follow
the leader, like a dutiful, good boy, no questions asked. Never
mind the fact that the leader’s holding a gun to my head, and he
can’t wait to pull the trigger.”

“
I can see why most of the
people that you know might want to put a gun to your head!” Dekla’s
fists were balled at his sides.

“
Yeah? Well it’s not like I
can trust you; it’s obvious you’re a Century stooge, trying to lead
me into a cell,” Sheikoh spat back. “Go on. Deny it.” Sheikoh
crossed his arms.

“
As far as I know, fully
exonerated citizens aren’t usually placed in cells,” Dekla
responded icily.

Sheikoh’s mouth was already opened
with a retort. Then he understood what Dekla was implying. His face
froze with shock.

“
. . . What are you
saying?” Sheikoh asked quietly.

“
Your record was
prematurely cleared. As an added incentive,” Dekla told him
sharply. “There’s a deputized Century badge in here that will
guarantee that another Century won’t pick you up… on accident.” His
lip curled.  

“
So… that’s what you’re
saying…” Sheikoh murmured numbly. He shook his bangs from out of
his face, and asked Dekla; “What kind of disaster did it take for
an offer like this to pass through?”

Dekla cleared his throat
uncomfortably.

“
I am not at liberty to
exchange the details-

Sheikoh’s irritation burned back
through him at once.

“
Prince
of
hell
,
why are we even talking?” Sheikoh exclaimed hotly. “You obviously
aren’t telling me anything and I am obviously not to play the
dumbass you think I am and walk into your ambush. Tell me what’s
going on or I’m leaving, exoneration or no!”

“
Fine. I don’t know what’s
happening,” Dekla admitted coldly. “It’s above my clearance level.
All I know is that innocent lives rest on your shoulders. What is
that worth to you?”

Dorothi’s face beamed in his thoughts,
and Sheikoh swallowed the lump in his throat. He mentally shook
himself steady.

“
Then why
didn’t someone
useful
come?” Sheikoh asked, a little harshly, so he
added, “Someone who knows what’s going on.”

“
I couldn’t tell you,”
Dekla assured him in a quiet voice. “but I’m sure there’s a
reason.”

The messenger handed Sheikoh the
envelope, and this time he took it. It was heavier than he’d
expected. Sheikoh scored it open and turned it upside-down. A
crystal-clear, octagon fell into his palm. The words ‘Intrasentient
Deputized Agent; Codename- Silence,’ were carved into its surface.
He looked up at Dekla, thrown.

Dekla coughed into a fist.

“
The time and location of
the meeting place where you’ll meet your… erm… contact is on the
paper,” Dekla went on doggedly. “In the envelope.”

Sheikoh met his gaze
silently.

“
I guess
I don’t need to tell you that whatever is happening is big,” Dekla
muttered. “And, as much as I dislike rewarding killers, this… is
important.” The middle-aged man held Sheikoh’s eyes with a cold,
calculating stare. “So… Good luck…
Silence
.”

Dekla’s tone was sharp with
accusation. Sheikoh translated the messenger’s last statement to
mean something like,
‘you’d better not
screw this up, filth, or I made a trip to the west side for
nothing.’
If Sheikoh hadn’t been so
irritated, he would have laughed. Dekla was the child, not him. Not
Dorothi. The east sider had never had to look at the world through
dying eyes. He’d never stepped around a Four addict rotting in the
back of an alley. And yet, he thought he could try and judge the
people who had.  

“
It’s funny how you east
siders shove all your trash down here. Then when things go wrong
you’re bringing criminals gift baskets,” observed Sheikoh,
mockingly shaking the envelope. “Not that I’m complaining of
course,” he added cuttingly. “Don’t worry, I personally promise you
this job is in the best possible hands. In fact, even if you’d
given it to least useful West Sider that’s still a step and a half
above what any east sider could get off their ass and put
together.”  

Sheikoh winked at Dekla, wearing a
cold smile. Dekla’s expression didn’t waver. He just nodded at
Sheikoh and then at someone behind him, before walking away
briskly.

Sheikoh turned around to look for the
person the stuck-up, old messenger had nodded at. His met a pair of
wide, terrified, white-blue eyes, and his heart caught mid-beat. An
electric shiver traced its way down his spine. Sheikoh turned and
looked full on. She stood there, looking uneasy. How much had she
heard? Out of everyone in Interium, why did those eyes have to
belong to Dorothi?  

Sheikoh quickly pulled the
sheet of paper out of the crumpled envelope. Its message was terse,
like whoever wrote it hadn’t thought Sheikoh possessed the
attention span to read more than a dozen words. It said;
‘Location: Myzeik square, statue of St. Burate.
Time: 4:00 - Thursday.’
And then just
beneath it;
‘Your contact will make
himself known.’

Sheikoh pushed the hair out of his
eyes and then rubbed his temples. He suddenly felt sick. His gut
squirmed beneath a leaden chest. Half because of Dekla and half
because he was going to take the job. He was disgusted at the idea
of being paid to kill someone and even more so because he was going
to do it anyway. This message had just managed to found its way
into his priorities. He crumpled the paper into a wad and jammed it
into his pocket.

Dorothi deserved better than a piece
of scum brother like him.

Chapter 2

The Ganglord

The drone of conversation was just loud enough to compete
with the factories’ clanging din. Countless masses of faceless
individuals forced their way against each other in the name of the
almighty alarm clocks.
Around Sheikoh, the
crowd fought against itself with driving chaos and a mad frenzy in
their fight against time. Rush hour was one of the few times that
citizens of the West Side didn’t bother to leave the usual pathway
through the center of the road. Potential riders could never get
through the nameless, expressionless sea of shouting and bloodshot
eyes that pressed and pushed against each like the ocean's
tide.

He patted his pocket, even though he
could already feel the bulky octagonal Century badge pressed up
against his right leg. As he walked he wondered what he was getting
himself into. He’d had an eclectic multitude of jobs, but none of
them nearly as aboveboard or as mysterious as this one. Then
something managed to distract him from his reverie. The crowd
behind him began to ripple with angry mutters.

Sheikoh turned and instantly
identified its source. A triangular blacksteel cart drove itself
through the crowd. Its blacksteel weight assertively pushed
front-running pedestrians to the side. The cart carried bouncing,
plastic containers of animals including dogs, purmynx, and a single
aquarium underwater animals. The vehicle barreled through the
crowd, knocking people left and right.

As the vehicle came his way, Sheikoh
caught the eyes of a petrified, little Goldenfish. It was
surrounded by a bunch of color-changing water lizards, Draiblai,
which were tumbling around the tank in oceanic free fall. They
slammed into the clear walls wearing little expressions of fish
terror.

Sheikoh nodded at the frightened
Goldenfish. ‘This is for you,’ he thought at it. He kissed a finger
and subtly pointed it towards the cart. Then Sheikoh was on the
move. He cut through the crowd, riding a slipstream of people
towards the cart. When Sheikoh was level with it, he stopped. As
its blacksteel grazed by, glaring, frustrated people tried pushing
around him. Sheikoh ignored them.

He waited until the man forcing the
cart through the crowd finally came into view and then eyed the man
pushing it with distaste. Sweaty, wormlike veins wriggling across
his skin. His face was arranged in mindless determination. Sheikoh
spun beside the man, then tugged his belt (and attached purse) out
with a dramatic swish.

A few of the surrounding people that’d
been irritated before now laughed appreciatively, while the pet
store dude struggled with his pants. One woman even applauded him.
Not noticing that Sheikoh’d just scored a purse as well as a
practical joke. The crowd forced the man and his cart forward,
until his shouts of outrage were overwhelmed with the west side’s
industrious murmur.

Sheikoh dodged diagonally across the
traffic and ducked into an alley. He dusted off his torn, black
pants, smiling to himself. Thieving rarely got a cheer for a job
well done. Eyes sparkling with satisfaction, Sheikoh tossed the
leather belt aside and flipped through the money. When he’d
finished counting it, he shoved it into his pants pocket. Then he
scanned the city’s corridor that he’d happened upon.

Down a ways, a large bearded man
fumbled for something in his pocket while a red-haired man, dressed
in studded leather, looked on with narrowed eyes. Sheikoh noted the
silver-blue Legacy bandana wound around his waist with no change in
expression. These days, the Legacy’s silver and blue were all too
common a sight. The gangsters were like ants; kill a hundred of
them and a thousand more swarmed to take their place.

Sheikoh’s fixed smile slipped when he
noticed the bearded man’s eyes. His pupils were jagged, and their
woodsy hazel was streaked with yellow. Sheikoh’d seen enough Four
addicts to know what sort of transaction was going down.
 

“
Come on, what did your
mommy tell you to do when someone brings Four to the party,”
Sheikoh murmured under his breath. His tone held equal measures of
disgust and pity.

Pity...

Pity
?

Wait,
what
?

He was on the
job
. He wasn’t allowed
the luxury of pity. Morals were everything that had ever screwed
him
over. Silence doesn’t feel pity,
Silence is just there.

“
And word around the street
is... I'm Silence…” Sheikoh murmured to himself.

His chest panged in response. Sheikoh
shook his head, furiously pushing his feelings back where they'd
come. He told himself to get over it. That it was the dude’s own
choice.

Emili’s face slashed into his
thoughts, and the rationalization fell hollow. His cold-hearted
self-deceptions didn’t change the truth.

They didn’t change the
knowledge that Emili Wray had been lost somewhere within the world
of Four. They didn’t change the fact that
the brilliant, caring, loving girl who had saved his life had
died a
statistic,
all because of Legacy and their disgusting Four-peddlers.
They didn’t change the tiny hole in his chest or the gaping one in
his and Dorothi’s life. They didn’t change the fact that he was
lying to himself, every second of every minute of every day that he
told himself that choice had
any
place in addiction.

Even now, four years later, Sheikoh
could still see her face as clear as yesterday. He shuddered at the
memory of her eyes dashed hungry yellow and sunken into her skull.
Her formerly beautiful skin lined by Four’s brutal whip. Her
quivering lips as white as death, trembling as she whispered her
last words, the words that still blasted through Sheikoh’s liquid
composure like a rock. How could those two words, words he heard
every day, still sting him with fresh tears every time.

I’m sorry.

Sheikoh squeezed his eyes shut a
second. Then he opened them and looked at the addict. Overlapping
the heavy man… It was almost like…   

He could suddenly see-

‘
No!’ Sheikoh thundered at
himself. No. Not now, hopefully not ever. He couldn’t let that old
weakness play itself out. Legacy still had his number flipped. If
the Four-dealer recognized Silence, there was every chance he’d
shoot.