Ouroboros

The slanting ruins of Hoover loomed, casting the sort of shadows that reminded me why I’d made a habit of giving Hoover a wide berth. Everyone knew the stories.

I heard there were groups of roving bandits. No, that’s where Parliament sends the worst criminals, the ones they don’t even trust the prisons to hold. I thought Hoover was the ghost town, the one where all of those civvies died when they set off the bombs?

Gideon’s lackeys hadn’t been far behind since I broke out of his complex and the hitch in my side reminded me that I hadn’t exactly escaped unscathed. The cut ached, too shallow to kill me, but deep enough I couldn’t keep running. It was a thin, wretched thing.

At first, I assumed a shard of glass from the window I’d broken had left its mark, that was, until it began burning.

That left only one option-- Razorite, the favored weapon of Gideon’s guards. It was sharp enough to cut a man clean in two, and if the blade didn’t do the killing, the poison it was laced with would finish the job. I was a dead man walking if I didn’t treat the wound.

My breath caught in my throat with each pounding step. The cut continued to burn, to throb, to threaten.

I’d been to Hoover, once, when I was a different man, before the bombings knocked the buildings into crags and splintered all of my edges just the same. Nothing looked familiar. None of the shattered remnants stood out as anything other than that, remnants. They sat empty and haunted as tombs.

My steps faltered and I stumbled to a lurching stop. I braced my arm against a downed concrete beam to keep myself upright and felt my weight sag. My side throbbed with its own heartbeat.

I glanced around. The squalored buildings sat low to the ground, packed in together without room to breathe between them. Everything looked the same no matter which direction I looked, broken piles in dingy grays, sallow browns, charred blacks.

The truth about what had happened to the city were woven throughout songs and stories that children sang on playgrounds. Hell, if I threw my memory back far enough, I knew I’d catch on one and pull it back up to the surface.

Yellow, orange, then red, Hoover-town is dead. Running and rubble and brick, it didn’t happen quick.

The song was morbid and as I stood in the ruins of a city the world worked hard to forget, I could feel its immeasurable loss. All of those people, dead.

And for what? Because Parliament, people like Gideon, needed to test out Regen to see just how far they could stretch their healing drug’s power?

My side twinged and I was forced to push the fears from my mind.

I cast another look around and ignored the growing desperation clawing at the back of my throat. I abandoned my pack back in the cell. Everything had moved too quickly during my escape.

If I’d managed to grab my pack, I would have everything I needed to survive on the fringes until I could make it back into the city, but, all I had with me were the clothes on my back and the switchblade I’d stashed in my boot.

The exhaustion I’d been ignoring crashed down onto me like lead.

For a moment, I felt disconnected from my body as I stood in the remnants of this place, surrounded by the remnants of all those people. The grief of it all threatened to consume me whole.

I threw my eyes upward, as if there would be any answers or a saving grace for me in the sky. Instead, all I saw were the traces of color losing to the night.

I watched as darkness suffocated everything in between the thin wisps of clouds and created patterns I couldn’t place, reminding me of people I could never be again.

If Gideon managed to find me again, I was as good as dead.

I’d only stolen a handful of vials of Regen, not enough to sustain a person to near immortality, but enough to right a handful of wrongs, enough to put a mark on my head.

My hand drifted up to the locket again and I gently tugged the thick chain to pull it out from under my shirt. The tarnished gold heart fit neatly in my palm. It was an innocuous thing, but it reminded me of why I’d done all I had.

My fingers curled around the locket and I tossed a prayer up to whatever god might deign to listen before I tucked it back under the collar of my tattered shirt.

I’d have to use one of the doses if I made it back to my safehouse alive. I hadn’t forgotten the burning ache from the Razorite in my side and I could feel the tendrils of its poison as they unfurled throughout my body and toward my heart.

The colors in the sky were swallowed by the unforgiving darkness of night and I knew my moment of rest had come to an end.

And so, again, I ran, for minutes, for hours. I didn’t know.

My feet thudded gracelessly against the rubble-strewn ground and my limbs pumped out of time.

A shape moved in the darkness and I knew in my gut I’d been found.

My eyes stayed locked onto the darkness as I stumbled to a halt and bent down to yank the switchblade from my boot. My side spasmed in pain, but I straightened up and flicked the blade from its sheath.

Behind me, Gideon’s men.

In front of me...this unknown terror.

Whatever it was, it moved too softly to be an animal, too carefully, too quickly--

I blinked and my eyes adjusted in the darkness to the shape of a gun aimed squarely at my face.

My blood ran cold.

The gun, silver and dangerous looking, was connected to a hand with slim fingers, the hand to a delicate wrist, the wrist to a lithe arm, and the arm to the lithe body of a woman, just as sleek as the gun easy in her grip.

I swallowed, rocked my weight into the balls of my feet and prepared for a fight.

The woman, pale and incandescent like moonlight in the dark, cocked her head to the side as I stared at her through the feet of darkness between us.

I heard the gun click.

Her dark hair hung over her shoulder in a whip-tight braid, a few strands hanging low over her sharp brows, over her eyes.

No...her eye.

An angry, jagged scar cut across where her left eye should have been, white against her already pale skin and pink around the edges.

I swallowed once again as recognition tumbled in.

“Seven,” I greeted.

I didn’t lower my switchblade; she didn’t lower her gun.

She set her jaw and took a step closer toward me. The distance gave her more substance and shape. The gun was no less friendly.

“Rafe,” she replied, tone flat, dry. “We have to stop meeting like this.”

Seven. Gideon’s favorite bounty hunter, sent after me more times than I could count.

She’d caught me, trapped and wounded like a desperate animal and from the glint in her eye, she knew it.

I laughed but it sounded more like reeds whistling in the wind. The Razorite in my system wasn’t doing me any favors.

“Then stop taking the bounty, easy as that.”

The corner of her lips twitched; it could have been a smile just as easily as it could have been a frown.

Her arm didn’t shake; the gun didn’t waver. She stepped forward.

I remained primed to run.

Seven rolled her eye. “Do you want what Gideon has decided your head on a pike is worth, Rafe? Two million credits-”

I opened my mouth, a protest half past my lips. Seven continued on anyway.

“- and a dose of Regen.”

The air around us seemed to still like it was listening. Gideon had offered a dose for my death?

My mind tumbled over idea after idea of how I could escape. How to survive, survive, survive.

In the end, it was simple.

I held one hand up in a show of peace as I reached down to tug the heart-shaped locket from under my shirt again. In a swift yank, I ripped the chain from my neck and held it aloft like a prize clenched in my fist.

“That’s what he’s offering you?” I called out to her in the dark. “I can give it to you now.”

The words flew out of me, careless, desperate things as I clutched at hope like straws.

I watched my words as they tumbled through Seven’s mind and played out on her face.

“You stole a dose,” she said and the words might have been revenant if not for the gun aimed without discretion.

“Lower the gun.”

Seven didn’t tear her gaze from the locket as she lowered the gun and I felt my heart start to beat like a drum against my ribs.

“Now, drop it,” I breathed out the words and watched as, to my bewildered amazement, Seven dropped the gun.

It clattered noisily at her feet and she took a step toward me, then another.

My hand was slick with sweat around the handle of my switchblade and I kept the knife tucked and primed at my side.

“Throw it here,” Seven demanded once she stood a few feet from me.

“And risk breaking the vials inside?” I gave a firm shake of my head and prayed I didn’t sound as desperate and maddened as I felt.

But, the words worked and Seven stepped closer to me. She moved warily, like I was a skittish, feral animal.

I’d never been this close to her before and it felt wrong in a way I couldn’t place. This was more weapon than woman and my body pulsed with nervous energy as she grew closer.

One step and we’d be nose to nose, cheek to cheek.

I lowered the necklace and her eyes followed my movements like a trained predator.

Everything moved quickly from there.

Her hand hovered in the air with needy, aching fingers.

My hand shot out from my side as I lowered the locket into her waiting palm and the switchblade sunk into her gut with an ease that felt wrong. I jerked and felt the skin and muscle give way to the unforgiving sharpness of the blade.

My stomach roiled.

Seven’s lips parted in a soft, desperate gasp and she ripped the locket from my hand. She stumbled back from me with my switchblade still protruding from her gut. Even in the darkness, I could see the color draining from her face and the blood falling to the ground in fat, heavy drops.

She wrenched open the locket and an animalistic, mournful scream ripped from her throat.

I knew what she saw and I pushed away my feelings of guilt as she dropped to her knees with the locket still wrenched open in her hands.

A small photo fluttered to the ground.

There were no vials of Regen in that locket.

Seven continued to wail and curse and I knew that the sounds would come back to me in all my worst moments.

But, I didn’t linger and wait for her to recuperate, to pull another gun, to be the weapon I knew she’d been made to be.

Instead, I bent down to snag the paper-thin photo from the dirt. I tucked it into the breast pocket of my shirt, nearest to my heart for safekeeping, as a reminder.

Hoover wasn’t gentle after dark, but neither was I.

There were miles to go before safety, but I had a life to live and a promise to keep.

And so, I ran.