Parasite (Completed)║🏳️‍🌈 LGBT+

18: Out of the Riot

18:49, Fifthsol 6th M6, 2226

The corrosive tang of ammonia wafts into the alley around me, making me sit alert. I camouflage myself under boxes and shredded tarp.

Curtains of smoke part. A steel-grey uniform materialises out of the gloom. My muscles bunch ready to flee when I catch a mop of frizzy hair. The apparition comes closer. I make out a neon yellow bindi that has taken a walk across a forehead creased with terror.

Jaya staggers into the alley cradling their arm tight against their chest. Blood soaks their uniform from wrist to elbow. Their pulser-hand shakes as it rises towards me.

Seemingly unrecognisable to them in the gloom, I'm about to poke my arms out from my shelter of detritus in a gesture of surrender, when stomping footsteps echo off the alley walls behind Jaya.

A bearded attacker crashes into the alley wielding what looks like a fuel pipe ripped from the bottom of a hov. Jaya spins and slams backwards against a wall, thrusting their pulser aloft in a quivering hand. Dread clouds their eyes.

The man lunges and swings his pipe, catching the slender collimator of Jaya's pulser. It flies out of Jaya's hand and hurtles towards me, brushing millimetres past my ear before ricocheting against recycrete into the darkness beyond. I fumble for the pulser in the gloom but all I find is its collimator, snapped clean off. The remains of the weapon's diode and wave-trigger lie somewhere in the black behind me, smashed into splinters against the alley wall.

But I don't need a pulser to help Jaya.

I am a weapon.

I leap out of the dark.

The man turns abruptly to find my palm closing around his bare forearm. He tries to spring away but I'm faster. My fingers manage to get purchase, encircling his wrist.

Pure energy flows from his skin into mine.

Shiro had been right. I'm not evil. I'm not a monster.

I'm destruction.

The man attempts to bludgeon me but his pipe-arm slows in flight, halting mere centimetres from my face. The pipe slips from his fingers. Feeble arms buffet my chest, but his strength is all mine now. His eyes bulge in realisation. He paws at my locked knuckles like a trapped butterfly fluttering to smash through a window. A final attempt to claw at my hand, then he crumples to the ground.

I look up to find Jaya staring at me in horror and incredulity. 

"You're bleeding."

They dash across the alleyway, stepping over their now-unconscious attacker, and tug at my soft-pink automaton uniform. "Is Daiyu OK? What the fuck did you do to that man?"

I scramble away from them. "Press your wound and hold your arm high."

"I'm fine! What did you do?"

"I'll explain later. We need to get you somewhere safe. You're losing blood."

Jaya snarls so close to my face that I can feel their breath. "Where the fuck is Daiyu?"

I push Jaya into an alcove made by two parked hovs and tear a strip off my uniform sleeve, tying it tight around their wound. It's deep; Jaya will deteriorate quickly with no antiseptic or analgesic. I root around in my soft-pink Kida uniform pockets but all I find is Shiro's shade pen and the broken collimator from Jaya's pulser. I push the shade pen into Jaya's hand and bid them suck, at least to dull the pain until we find medicine.

My heart aches like an open wound at the sight of Jaya sucking a mighty lungful of shade. Shiro had given his shade pen to me just before his attempt to leave for Earth; I was supposed to have used it to fall asleep on my final night alive. How far away the old Heems's sad little world seems, now that tonight is Shiro's final night alive.