A/N: I'll be away for a week and a bit...wish me luck...i'm seriously going to need it :/
After I come back, I should be able to look at my other neglected works...if anyone has a preference as to which one i should update first, please tell me :)
Also, I have edited a bit of chapter 25. Nothing major...it just felt off tempo for me
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Chapter Twenty-Six: City Sights
We headed down the in the basement level of the building on the elevator in dead silence. Gauging X's moods is really impossible. At the moment it seemed that he didn't want to acknowledge my existence. As the doors open I was hit with a wall of humidity that sucked the cool air from my lungs, leaving me breathless. Coughing while looking out into the stark darkness, I realise that we were in a dimly lit carpark and it brought back the fresh memories from Bellasera harsher than the air.
Am I going to have to do that again? The look on the nameless boy's face as he disappeared pulled apart my heart and I was unable to stop my right hand from clenching on the fabric in front of my chest.
I felt someone's gaze on me and I look up, realising that I had stopped and X was the one looking back at me. I look away from his gaze and tried to get out of his line of sight. A little ways passed a number of thick round columns I could see Siem, an extremely unhappy Rain and a new guy who could have only been Seth as he leans against a wall, smoking on a cigarette absentmindedly. He was of mixed Caucasian and Asian heritage.
Siem looks over at X and I felt there was a hidden message in their eyes, before Siem's slide over to me, "Kae. You know Rain," he motions to Rain who just glares at me before turning away, "and this is Seth."
Seth looked about X's age but his dark eyes held something else in them as he measures me with an appraising look. I surprisingly didn't feel any hostility from him...or anything at all. Which had my guard completely up. It was the same feeling I got from X. They could kill without emotion. Death without reason wasn't a foreign concept for either of them.
"They will be your protectors-"
"You mean babysitters," Rain growls.
I'm never going to make his Christmas card list.
Siem did nothing to combat his words. "Seth will directly receive orders from me. Need or see anything, tell him directly." He then addresses Seth, "Don't be out in the open passed dawn."
"Understood," Seth slightly moves his head in acknowledgment. He drops the cigarette butt and smashes it under his boot.
"Kae. You should know that all three have orders to take you down immediately if they suspect any of your movements."
Just sign my death warrant why don't you? Rain will probably wait until Siem's back's turned and pop bullets into my chest.
"Hold your end of the bargain," I growl at him. I've just about ran out of patience with these people.
Siem's eyebrow slightly twitches. "Indeed. Normally, I wouldn't send someone of questionable ability and...origins out into the open like this. But if a tool presents itself as a better option than sacrificing my men, I will exploit it."
Knows how to make me feel all special. "I got it." I got it the first time round when he fucking wakes me up at three in the morning.
"Good. Seth, it's all on you."
Seth straightens from the wall and heads over to a streamline shiny black thing that looked like a sports car at first but then it had similar parts of the aircraft and no wheels...it's a flying car...holy fuck. "I'm taking this." Why is everything black?
"Oz won't be happy," Rain states but still moves to get into it. Does Oz like black?
"Don't care." Seth opens the driver's side and turns back to me, "Get in."
I look back over to Siem.
He saw the look in my eye and lets out a breath, "I will promise a further discussion on finding your family when you return. This takes priority."
More like 'if' with Rain's attitude. But I nod anyway and turn back to Lady. 'I've got to go.'
I feel her accept what I say and I reach out to pat her head. 'Until dawn. I will be back.'
'Wait for sunrise?'
I nod and pull back from her and she didn't follow and despite knowing her for only a week it was killing me to leave her behind.
I get into the backseat of the car-thing as it has four doors just like a car and the interior was similar to what I remember from a time when none of this was real. The faded memories had the similar texture and smell. Two seats at the front and the three seats in the back. Mum and Dad in the front. Cody on the left side. I was on the right and baby Anne was in the middle. The same. The memories almost overlap and I shake myself of it when X opens the other passenger door.
I look out the window to shut these memories off.
"Everyone strapped in?" I see Seth eyes flick to mine in the rear vision mirror and I quickly look for the seatbelt. It was over the right shoulder, just like any car and buckled in.
The engine vibrated through me as it came alive. The energy was alive. Similar to how the Fence's electrical orb felt. The pulse I remember feeling when I touched the door sends a shudder done my spine as the energy builds and the car lifts from the ground and shoots up the ramp without hesitation into the dark cityscape of an alien world I was never part of.
In the darkness, I couldn't see the streets save for the lights from buildings and other cars. Lights from stop lights and signs. It was all overwhelmingly nostalgic, tainted with a futuristic utopia of flying cars and airships. I look up to see that the Fence reflected the dark starry sky, invisible to us form the inside as if it wished to peer at the far lights without interruption of pure light pollution that I would have expected from a city of this size.
"This isn't a joy ride," Rain growls at me, snapping me from my amazement.
I look back over at him for a moment, "I'm only looking." How often does he think I get to be in a flying car, inside a city...no a 'city-state'?
He completely turned around to look at me, despite the lack of light in the car, "I didn't have a choice and I didn't want to do this but I'll be clear. Give me a reason and I'll kill you. I dare you."
What has his frilly panties in a twist?
"Chill, Rain," Seth's voice was a spectacular baritone, almost as alluring as X's. "There is no reason to work yourself up so quickly."
Rain goes back to looking out the front, "Just get this night over with," he mutters.
"Mist's still angry at you, isn't she?"
Rain meets him with silence and I swear he's pouting.
"...Where are we going?" I openly ask.
"What the point in telling you, Outsider." Rain snips.
I hold back a sigh.
"...To the lower sections. It's a lower economic zone." Seth instead indulges me with the answer but his tone was chilling to the bone when he addresses me. I knew then that he had no judgement towards me. Nothing that would make him hesitate from burying a blade into my chest.
"It's where the poor gather. The homeless, drug-addicts, gangs fight turf wars...it's typically a very violent, very dirty business." He continues.
So it's the underbelly and black market. Wonderful. They couldn't pick rainbow unicorn land where clouds were made of cotton-candy?
"Where the wound has already festered, who would notice another adding to the rot?" X says absent-mindedly.
Is it just me or is he starting to make sense? Who would notice Hexers rising in population in the city's underside before it's too late? I frown at the thought. Was that how Bellasera was taken down> The area was almost completely construction, no one would be allowed near that area until the developments were completed.
"Awfully talkative tonight aren't you," Seth speaks quietly. "...Your name is Kae?"
"Yes..."
"And an Outsider?"
"Yes."
"Can you actually get closer to a Keystone?"
"...So far." What was he getting at?
The car suddenly drops from its height and skims over the lower area and even in the car, I could feel the air shift. It was humid and choked with smoke. The forgotten and desperate emotions clung to the air like slime in a bog. It was making me sick and I shut my eyes as I feel a headache beginning to throb softly behind my eyes as we get further down.
"We're almost there," Seth's voice cuts into my brain and I open my eyes and looked out the window, almost shocked at the difference in atmosphere.
From what I felt in the air, reflected in the streets. The lights were bright and chaotic. The streets and buildings were made of old, cheap, flaking and crumbling materials.
A thought struck me, "This is the original city." Before the city went up. The infrastructure of the old world left abandoned and filled with those thrown out with it.
"Good eye," Seth agrees and it was almost praise. "This is one of the furthest areas from the Tower. The further from the Tower you are, the high the poverty."
That means we're close to the Fence's wall.
Seth pulls the car up and lands it inside an old broken and abandoned warehouse filled with empty shipping containers and trash. "We're going to wonder around for a bit. Kae, X, if you sense anything, tell me immediately and from there we'll wait for Siem's instruction. Avoid going into the main streets." He states all of this while turning off the engine and unbuckling himself.
As I get my own seat-belt off and open the door, I immediately wanted to close the door again. The air was more putrid than what I was expecting. Even in the backstreets here where there was little life, it hit me like a steel-wall. The heat mixes with a sickening sweetness and acid...bile, piss and shit. Stagnant water mixing with salt and toxic breeze. It was an onslaught of taste and smell. I wanted to gag. There was an undercurrent of rage, despair and desperation hitting my every cell, telling me that death wanted nothing more than to choke every last life in this place. The city has abandoned this place and everyone living in it. I hold it together as I step out of the warehouse and into an abandoned street filled with more litter, hearing a calls from prostitutes in a street over, begging for business and becoming sassy when they were ignored.
I look over at the others who simply ignored the city's stigma and walked into the darkness towards what looked like a pier.
Pity and sorrow plagued this place as much as the rage, violence and hatred. There was nothing to be done except cling to life or accept death. No one would notice.
This was going to be a long night and I don't think Hanna gave me strong enough medication for this shit.