Sixth circle of the Empire
The landfill
She didn't seem to be the kind of person who gave up easily; and, at that moment, I was the shortest bridge between her and her goal.
But that wasn't going to last, because she would never tolerate the mess of my life. My clothes on the floor would be hives, my secrets in the drawer would be poison, and, as soon as she took her first step inside my ship to face my nature, she would beg me to abandon her right there, in the middle of the vacuum of space. I would at least do her the courtesy of letting her into the nearest world.
She didn't seem to be the kind of person who deserved to put up with me... No one did.
"Do you know where they took your ship?" She asked, breaking the dangerous cycle of my thoughts. I confirmed.
"To a landfill. Which, according to the map..." I pointed to the drawing on the bus wall. "It's at the next stop."
Her eyes roamed the darkness behind the windows, full of questions. I got lost in the soft curves of her features, the golden glow of her honey colored irises and the hues of her lips reddening as she bit them, lost in thought. Her face was so different from mine, so much more delicate, that I just couldn't stop staring, as one ceaselessly observes an optical illusion in the futile attempt to understand how something so challenging could exist.
When she turned to me, her eyes were still full of questions. Apparently she hadn't found her answers outside.
"Landfill? Why would they discard an entire ship?"
Because anything that belonged to a criminal could have secrets too easy to retrieve if its parts weren't completely destroyed. But I wouldn't say that to her. Instead I just shrugged.
"One man's treasure is another man's trash."
"But what if inside it you kept a treasure that was precious to everyone?"
"Then may they keep thinking it's garbage." I smiled. "The best treasures are buried, after all."
She smiled and stuck her tongue between her teeth for a moment, as if trying to contain it. But then letting it escape:
"You've done this before." This wasn't a question.
"It's not my first rescue mission."
"And you like this." I raised an eyebrow. Apparently she also made assumptions about people she barely knew.
"Why would I want to have to fight for things that were already mine?"
She smiled, as if it were obvious.
"That's how they turn into treasures."
I avoided looking at her so she wouldn't see my smile, but the iatric watched me, making me decipherable; and I didn't like how easy it seemed to be for her.
"What's yours then? The treasure you fight for?"
She thought for a moment, trying to find out if I was trustworthy enough to know; but I already had too many treasures to fight for hers.
"I don't have one. Treasures are worthless if in the hands of those who don't deserve them." A disciplined seriousness took her voice, as if she were reciting a speech she had never let herself unlearn. "I make myself deserving before. And, eventually, I will have something that deserve me."
"Sounds harder than digging for a chest."
"What a chest contains does not satisfy me."
"What does then?" She led me into the trap of her smile... And her answer was like ambrosia to a mortal:
"The galaxy's core."
And I would give it to her.
Or else I would die.
There was no longer a way to escape. The more I stared at her, the more she became a snake, enveloping me, trapping me, Asclepius's own serpent coiling around my neck to empty me of all air... Until there was nothing left in me but the memory of her face with that smirk that seemed to know everything.
When the bus arrived at its destination, I managed to breathe...
For a while.
• • • ֍ • • •
"What's the plan?" The iatric asked, as soon as we got off the bus.
"We search for the ship, get in and flee."
"So easy?" She could not trust what was not impossible.
"The Empire does not usually insist on protecting garbage." But other groups did. And if we were discreet, we wouldn't have to deal with them.
We approached one of the control panels on the electric fence around the landfill and I plugged in my enhancement, turning off the electricity so we could get inside. I climbed over the fence, and when I was at the top, I thought about offering to help the iatric up, but she was already on the other side, tense and hurried as if she couldn't wait for us to be out of this situation she had no control over.
"Don't worry. You have a fevino on your side."
She sent me a sharp look, like I was just making the situation worse.
"I worry when things are tough." She muttered. "Not when they're too easy." Something told me she was always worried.
At that moment, I caught sight of a silver pendant on the horizon, gleaming in the blue sunlight like a blade cutting through the layers of sky. Its bullet shape hit me between the eyes and its intact glass reminded me of what I hid inside: a piece of me so big that there was almost nothing left on my feet. It was as beautiful as a work of art, as perfect as a concept, as powerful as...
Was that a scratch?!
At those times I wanted the fevino to emerge at my command, just to scratch those responsible for that crime.
I heard the quick footsteps of the iatric behind me and then realized I was running toward the ship, down the empty corridors among the mountainous piles of abandoned junk... Completely exposed. And such an easy target.
When the first beam shot toward us, I flew over the iatric, rolling our bodies close to a pile of garbage that served as a shield.
"What was that?!" She snarled as I held her in place under my body before she could jump into the crosshairs of another beam.
"Damn it... Now they know we're here."
"They who?!"
"The collectors."
• • • ֍ • • •
The Empire chose to destroy, and the collectors, a group of several species that lived in landfills and took what they could, chose to save. But, in that constant war for buried treasure, they ended up losing patience for intruders.
"Will they kill us?" She whispered.
"I'd be surprised if they didn't try."
I backed away from the iatric, my eyes replacing hers with the ship. It was being pulled by chains to a launch pad in the nearby sun, where collectors discarded things that were of no value to them - or that were chests too difficult to open. They wouldn't throw my ship away if they knew what it was holding... But they hadn't been able to find out.
"It would be nice to have a plan now..." She muttered and I rolled my eyes.
"They're taking the ship." I pointed to the platform, overrun with collectors, some searching the piles for treasure, others patrolling the region with stolen weapons to kill intruders who threatened their fragile order. "We need to go fast."
The iatric plunged her hands into the junk, while she practically thought aloud:
"There are human collectors, right?" I confirmed, without much confidence. "So we just need to blend in." She tossed me a piece of brown fabric so I could somehow turn it into a disguise.
"They're more organized than you're thinking." She watched me from the corner of her eye, rolling over her head the pants of a being with many legs. "Each species is like a tribe and they're always fighting for control of the landfill. You need to go through an initiation process to at least be accepted at the base of the pyramid. They don't accept anyone."
She was silent for a moment, processing my words only to ask what I didn't expect:
"How do you know all that?" My silence was an answer. "Have you been a collector before?"
And in her eyes I saw a definition of collector that wasn't strange to me: flies, feasting on droppings and fighting over the biggest pile of garbage to deposit their larvae. I couldn't blame her for thinking that; if it had been my choice, I too would have spent my life at the top of the food chain. Too bad we were both at the bottom now.
"I didn't go through the initiation."
So I covered myself with the fabric like a hood and walked to the launch pad.