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“You’ve got a visitor, mate. In the library – and she’s brought decent whiskey again.”
Rythian strode onward, a muffled shadow lost in thought, as he made his way through the twisting passageways of the long-abandoned mine complex that had been something akin to ‘home’ for over a year now. Lamplight flickered and danced on the surface of the dark walls, picking out old patterns chiseled into the rock, but never really managing much illumination. The tunnels were Dwarven, and some of the markings were vaguely familiar to him – from his visits to the few Wild enclaves of that decimated race, a lifetime ago in many ways – but there was nothing he really understood.
Zoey had nicknamed their new home ‘Blackrock Depths’, for whatever reason, and the name had stuck well enough. Dwarves were a rare sight these days, lacked even their varied company, so Rythian just had to assume the builders wouldn't have minded much. Still, in the late hours when the general chaos of the sprawling safehouse dulled and the bedrock-silence seemed to fold back out of the walls, it could be a little like living in a tomb.
Right now though, his attention was more occupied by wondering what his midnight visitor might want. There was only one person who would turn up in the middle of the night, bypassing most of the outer defences with aggravating ease, and waltz through the inner ones in a swirl of malted smiles.
The library doors were closed but unlocked when he got there, and he stood outside for a moment, collecting his thoughts.
Minute. Her first name was variable and seemed to change by the week, but his own full name got used so infrequently that wasn't much of a surprise. Pseudonyms were safer. Nicknames never resulted in a cut-short gasp, a sudden, shockingly emptiness in the air, and the wrong-footed horror of new loss blooming in the snatched-out space.
If the Labs had your name, they had you, somehow. Rythian’s teeth gritted behind his mask. One day he would find out how that was done; he had to, because the only way that made any sense was the only one he knew – with the very heart of him – to be impossible.
Focus, Rythian.
The unexpected blonde inside had always unnerved him. He couldn’t fault her skills, or the efficiency with which she deployed them – but he knew perfectly well that those skills came at a price, regardless of who was paying. But she was professionally mercenary, he’d give her that much, and selling out one client directly to another would be… rude.
So you could trust her, after a fashion. Not the kind of trust where you’d turn your back entirely, unless there was an invoice pending, of course, but it was better than nothing. It was unusual that she came to him, and that was probably going to be expensive. He sighed and pushed the door open.
The ‘library’ – as woefully-optimistic as the description might be – was a long, low room, lined with shelves that held mostly books or files, although the general background clutter was bleeding in around the edges here too. A mismatch of tables and chairs had been brought in, clustered underneath the occasionally-flickering pools of light from overhead lamps like huge, sluggish moths.
The incongruously-petite figure was sat in the centre, lamplight turning her hair into a pale halo. There was a fat bottle on the table in front of her, two glasses, and a carefully laid out set of thin, vicious knives. At the sight, Rythian snorted quietly.
“Here's me thinking they’d disarm you at the gate."
“Here’s you thinking any of your merry little band’d be able to.” Min looked up as she spoke, white teeth flashing in the light, and her slim fingers trailed around the rim of one glass. The full one, Rythian noted. “I left the rifle. And my crossbow.”
“Sign of good faith?” Rythian moved in closer, and a small frown nipped onto his own brow. His visitor was well-dressed, as ever, but there was something a little less sleek about her than how she usually presented. Her boots were scuffed, up to the knees; the bandoleers of assorted and mysterious contents that slung around her chest were visibly depleted, one pinned to the other at an awkward angle – and she was wearing an eyepatch that looked a lot more functional, and less stylistically-piratical, than he had first assumed.
She looked tired, too.
“What happened to you?” he asked, and Min’s smile resurfaced – although there were distinct overtones of grimace in the bared teeth now, as he moved closer. She tapped the bottle with one polished fingernail, and raised her visible eyebrow questioningly. Rythian shook his head.
“I don’t drink.”
“Liar.” Min topped up the second glass, and pushed it towards the opposite seat as he carefully sat down. He didn’t touch the drink, although Min picked up hers and took a long sip, and fumes curled up into the air.
“What ha - ” Rythian started again, cut off by a more insistent click of nail on glassware. He gave a small sound of irritation, but the blonde had always seemed to have a nearly-ritual need to drink and negotiate. He picked up the glass and drained it in one go, failing to completely suppress a cough as the liquor hit the back of his throat like a peaty fist, and burned its way downwards. He set the glass back down, a little harder than necessary, and the tckh-crack bounced around the shelving.
“What’s this about?” he asked, more sharply, while Min leaned over and refilled the glass. Her hand was shaking slightly, he realised, as she sat back and her lips thinned.
“You’re aware, that you aren’t my only... patron,” she said, quietly, and there was an odd inflection on the word. Rythian snorted.
“I’m not a complete idiot. You’re damn good, Minute; but you aren’t one of ours.”
“No. I’m not.” She stopped again, and swirled her glass thoughtfully. When she looked up, there was another quirk to her brow. “Never taken in one of yours, though.”
“You take work from the Labs,” Rythian was aware his voice creaked a little, at the word, and he was suddenly very aware of the pull of his own misshapen lips. “That’s enough.”
“Not anymore.” The reply was abrupt and Rythian blinked again. This was the most direct that she had been in some time, and he wasn’t sure what to make of it. His eyes narrowed.
“Had a change of heart?” He didn’t try to keep the sneer out of his voice. Min laughed, flatly.
“Change of perspective, perhaps. I was offered - ” she paused for a second, swirling her glass a little harder and her lips twisted, twitching in something akin to distaste. “Alternative employment. A permanent position, as it were.”
Rythian kept his visible face blank. What was this?
“The kind of offer you couldn’t refuse?” he hazarded, skimming a look down the signs of disarray across her figure. Min snorted, then knocked back her remaining drink, almost violently. She reached up and caught the edge of her eyepatch with two fingers.
“In a way. I didn’t much like the terms.”
A swift movement flicked the material aside, and Rythian’s breath caught in his throat at what it revealed. Where there had once been an eye – the sharp twin to the half a gaze pinned on him now – there was now an gaping, empty socket. Metal gleamed across the inside, smooth in places and wound through with the angular marks of circuit-attachments in others, but the raw gleam of the cut surfaces was even more obvious against that. A stumpy, breaking brush of wires hung down the centre of the hollow, ragged at the ends, and the remaining flesh around it was bruised and bloody. It was an incongruous piece of horrible punctuation in Minute’s otherwise appealing features, and Rythian didn’t bother trying not to stare.
He had seen quite a lot of cybernetics by now, and the particular style of the Labs’ resources was clear even in the mess – and it was a mess. The skin had the sickly-sheen of rising infection, and the actual cybernetics looked to have been…
Rythian blinked, as shock cut down through him like a strike.
“ - you cut it out?” he managed, weakly. Min gave another short laugh and suddenly there was a thin blade spinning between the fingers of her free hand. It was meticulously clean, and gleamed in the gloom of the room like a slice of moonlight.
“Like I said. My terms are mine.” Anger bubbled, dark and sharp under her tones, and her remaining eye burned like a cornflower-coal as she let the patch fall back. “No one makes changes to me.”
The knife buried itself in the table, midway between them, but Rythian still didn’t miss the shiver in those neat fingers, or the way she grasped immediately back for the bottle. She was shaken… no, more than that. She was scared.
He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her seem so human.
Silence poured in around them, layered through with a hundred different things unsaid, and Rythian tried to make sense of even half of them. He didn’t trust her, not properly, but she had never turned her back on an agreement. Plus, she could quite easily have sold them all out, a hundred times over, by now.
And the image was rising up behind all his thoughts, of that stark-sterile room, smelling of bleach and blood and with terror laced through the air like a web. Of glistening metal augmentations, sitting neat in their racks, beside a dozen razor’s gleam. Of countdowns.
“That… eye needs looking at,” he said, finally. Min didn’t move. He wasn’t entirely sure that she was even breathing. “Zo – well, she’s got the most experience.”
“There’s other. Bits,” she replied, and the shake in her hand was in her voice now, as she grimaced and poured again, this time splashing a little of the amber liquid onto the tabletop, accompanied by a short intake of breath. “I got – most of them, but – ”
“We’re used to it,” Rythian continued, almost surprised to find a note of reassurance creeping into his voice. “Believe me.”
Min sat back and it was as if a string had been cut; her shoulders sagged and she slumped against the chair back, which creaked warningly. She licked her lips and managed a half-glare in Rythian’s direction as he stood up.
“I’m – not in, you know,” she said, firmly, as she accepted his extended hand. “With this doomed endeavour. Not all the way.”
“Not yet,” Rythian replied, with a wry twitch to his lips that she probably missed. “It grows on you.”
Min snorted, but she let herself be helped up, leaning heavily against him as Rythian steered her back towards the door. Zoey wouldn’t be asleep, and the medical-rooms operated rest on a hair-trigger anyway. They’d get her sorted, get whatever shit the Labs had managed to get into her, taken out, and then…
Well. Then they’d see. He didn’t trust her – not yet – but he’d already relied on her, probably more than he should have done. And honestly? They needed everyone they could get, right now.
The double-footstep echoed down the midnight corridors, and Rythian stared into the shadows that pooled between torches, as new threads of possibility began to trace across his mind.
You can’t save everyone, Rythian.
No. But I can try.
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