6

“I didn’t find her. Not even a trace,” Sekera mumbles into her palms.

I sigh. “That’s alright. I don’t think anybody could find Amethyst if she doesn’t want to be found.”

“And you? Did you manage to talk to your brother and Zor…”

“Zorikan? Yeah, I did. Kind of. He was drunk. Not sure if I even had to, I don’t think they would’ve attacked again. Zorikan knows he made a mistake aggravating the police force.”

“He’s already lost, hasn’t he?” Sekera asks, looking at me through her long colorful locks.

I grind my teeth together. “If it were anybody else in his situation, I would say yes, but Zorikan could drag himself from the pits of hell if he wanted to. I’ve no idea how this is going to unfold.”

Sekera’s hand interlocks with mine and she pulls herself closer to me, resting her head on my shoulder. I stare at the cement between my knees. It’s bitterly cold, and the metal street bench we’re on is working in league with the sun blotting clouds to freeze us to death. I squeeze her hand tighter. “What do you want to do now?” she asks.

“As usual, I’ve no idea. What can we even do? This is above us, all of it.”

She nods. “Do you… remember our plan?”

“Plan?”

“Yeah. From the Dunes. That night, in the cave. We made a plan.”

“Oh yeah, with the bikes and the arcade and everything.”

“How about that?”

“Well, you’re slightly… incapacitated… with your injury, aren’t you?”

I look her in the eye, just as her face lights up with a sharp, elvish smile. “Or am I?” she asks.

I raise an eyebrow.

She sits up and rolls up her loose trousers to the spot on her thigh where she was shot. It’s no longer a dark red, fleshy mess as I remember it. Now, there’s a gleaming piece of metal, wedged into the wound.

I squint at it. “That… doesn’t look healthy.”

“Ahh, don’t worry about it. I talked to the doctors. They put this little gadget in my leg, and all my mobility is restored! Plus I got these dandy pills for the pain. I mean, it won’t heal any time soon, but I can be injured later, am I right?” she grins.

I can’t help but smile. “Are you serious?”

She leaps to her feat, stepping onto the bench and cartwheels off. She reaches the road just as a burgundy pickup barrels past, she scuttles back to my side, giggling.

“Jeez, Sekera don’t break it again.”

“C’mon,” she laces her fingers into mine and pulls me along the grimy street. A splash of tie-die in a concrete world. “When was the last time you had fun? You know, fun that didn’t revolve around sex and drugs?”

“Well I did get drunk the other day. That was pretty fun.”

“Dumbass,” she jibes, running faster.

Then, something unexpected happens. My heart flutters with excitement. You know the kind of flutter that kids experience on Christmas morning, mixed with a teenage about to lose his virginity, with a hint of receiving your final exam back. Yeah, that.

~

“Screw you aliens, goddamnit!” I holler, slamming the gun down onto the control board. It slides off, dangling by its plastic cable.

“Hey you’re not dead yet!” she cries, swiveling around as she blasts more of the hideous creatures to gory splotches.

I frantically pick up my gun and aim at the horned brute of an alien that charges towards us. I hammer the trigger, but nothing comes out. “Sekera I’m out of ammo! Help!”

“I’m pinned! Use your electro-sword thing!”

“What button is it?”

“The green one!”

I look up, seeing the brute a couple meters away. I hammer the dive button, sending my character leaping out of the way. The edges of my screen turn red as the brute barely hits me.

“Yes!” Sekera cries, standing up and blasting at our traitorous space crew members.

“Leave them! Help me with this thing!”

“But we can’t allow Captain Koris to escape! He killed Halia!”

“Sekera I’m going to die!” I holler as the brute stumbles to a halt. Still clumsy with the controls, I race up behind it, hacking away with the sword.

“Relax, you’ll just respawn,” she tells me, ducking down to reload.

“Yeah but I’ll lose all my shit!”

“You can have some of mine.”

The brute swings it’s massive gnarled hand, collides directly with my vision, sending my sprawling to the floor. Most of my screen is red now. “Sekera it’s over.”

“Yes! I shot the bastard!”

“It says I’ve been taken down. I’m still alive. Sekera I can’t move! Why can I only crawl?” pathetically, I crawl away from the brute, swinging my electro-sword in front of me defenselessly. I watch in horror as it raises a massive foot to crush me… and then the screen goes black.

“What?” Sekera shrieks. “I had him in my scope! He was dead!”

“What happened?”

A shadow sprawls over us. “Arcade’s closed,” says a man in an ugly had, upturned nose and more chins than I can count.

“Aw, c’mon, we didn’t even get to do the VR,” Sekera whines.

“Who told you to spend so much time playing Alien Invasion Lunaris Expansion Sixth Edition?” he asks.

“We only played it for so long because that family of butter-filled hot air balloons was hogging it the whole time!” I protest.

“Now that’s just rude,” he says.

We stop, giving him puppy eyes. It’s difficult to do that when you look like a half starved, mange ridden street dog though.

“Get out,” he articulates.

Sekera curses under her breath, and we slide out of the miniature game room and amble out. The chins dude locks a chain through the handles of the glass doors to the arcade. We’re still standing there.

“Can you kids like… go do drugs or something?”

“Have you got any?” I ask, eagerly.

Sekera elbows me in the ribs. “We’re good thanks.”

“Alright, suit yourself,” he mumbled, trudging away into the night.

“Bastard’s got a stick up his ass,” I mutter.

“And stones in his brain if he thinks this door is gonna keep us out,” Sekera says, a mischievous glint in her moonlit eyes.

“You wanna smash the door? Aren’t… alarms going to go off?”

“Idiot. We just need to find a way up there,” she points to the roof. Rooves; my expertise. “There’s an air-shoot that leads down.”

I shrug, and grab hold of the gutter. Sturdy enough. Using my upper body strength, I haul myself up onto the thick letters of the neon arcade sign. Lying flat across the lumpy surface, I dangle my arm down.

Sekera jumps, grabbing my forearm. I grip her and swing her, just far enough for her to grab the bottom of the E. She hooks her legs up like a sloth, and like a slinky, gets up.

As I stand, my feet are suddenly midair. “Shit,” I grunt, falling. I grab hold of the loop around the D just as the A crashes to the ground in a mini explosion of sparks.

Sekera laughs maniacally as I haul myself back up.

“This Tauren girl’s been feeding you too much.”

“Not all of us want to stay anorexic our entire lives,” I mumble, grabbing the edge of the roof. Sekera scuttles up me, being too short to reach the ledge herself. I clamber up after her.

“You’re one to talk about being anorexic.”

“Hey, I’m lean,” I tell her, with a quick, moonlit flex of my wiry bicep.

“There it is,” she points at the air-shoot, sticking out of the roof like a periscope.

“You sure this is safe?” I ask, gazing into it’s gaping black maw.

“Safe as anything else you do in your daily life,” she grins, hoisting herself inside. She disappears suddenly with a giddy scream, swallowed by its hungry darkness.

“Shit man, what the hell,” I shrug, clambering in myself. I’m enveloped in darkness as my stomach leaps into my mouth. I’m shooting vertically down for a moment, before it gradually slides me horizontal, where I go crashing into Sekera, who’s waiting on her hands and knees. In a tumble of tangled limbs and colorful hair, we bundle out of the air shoot, falling onto the geometrically colored carpet.

“C’mon,” she giggles, disentangling herself from me and scampering through the darkness.

“How did that not hurt you?” I groan, pulling myself up. I can feel a bruise forming at my ankle, but what the hell. Arcade games loom like a hunched army, waiting to spring up. Like an elf of mischief, I slip by them, unnoticed.

I follow the cackles and glints of plaits to what I would think to be a futuristic wrestling arena. Except it’s circular. “You wanna go first?” she asks, picking up a massive pair of VR goggles. “Wait, never mind, there’re two.” She tosses me one. I lunge forwards, fumbling it and nearly stepping on it in the darkness.

“I’m supposed to put these on?”

“Yeah!” she says, grabbing the control pad. She takes my hand and leads us to the center.

Uncomfortably, I do as she says. Suddenly, a world of unnaturally bright visuals flood my vision. It takes a moment for me to realize that it’s a skyline. I’m above a city. It’s not West Side. “Where is this?” I ask. “Why does it look… plastic?”

“You’re asking questions?” Sekera asks, incredulous.

I look to her, seeing an avatar of her, a virtual replica, balancing precariously on a metal beam that stretches towards me. I look at my virtual feet, and see that they too, are on the beam.

“Ahh!” she shrieks, tottering to the left.

Instinctively, I lunge forwards and grab her. “Chill man. Relax it’s only a simulation,” I tell her.

She sinks into me with laughter. “Just a simulation, huh? Watch this.” She pulls the control pad from her back pocket, at least, a virtual reconstruction of it, and punches in something I can’t see. “Turn around.”

I do, and see a large purple orb, with a door, impossibly balanced a little way down the beam. “Do we… get it?”

“Heck yeah!” she totters to the orb, with me in close pursuit. We get in. I grimace at the sterile virtual material.

“And now?”

My words are snatched from my mouth as the orb plummets, with us inside it, and the world outside turns into a blur. Sekera and I are sucked together like magnets as we cry out. I can literally feel with world whizzing past as the orb swings back up to the original position, like a giant, messed up pendulum. The skyline comes into view again, and I release the breath I didn’t know I was holding.

She detaches herself from me. “Jeez,” she exhales. “That was-”

The next thing I know and we’re plummeting again. Sekera moves for me, but my muscle memory sends me springing into the air. The vision of the floor moving away from me, whilst the real floor stays as is, cripples my landing and I fall into a heap. My stomach crawls back up my throat again as I see the world whizzing past. I tuck my knees up to my chest, waiting for the dizzying feeling to pass.

When it stills, I hear Sekera laughing hysterically. She staggers towards me, her entire form shuddering with giggles. “Just… a simulation-”

Oh no.

Just as I’m picking myself up, we’re plummeting again. Sekera’s knees buckle, and she tips directly into me. I catch her, barely, losing balance and sliding against the smooth floor. I grab fistfuls of her mismatched hair as her laughter fills my ears. I open my eyes, and we’re still again.

“Oh few. Ok, I think I’ve had enough of-”

A thud reaches my ears. Sekera and I look at each other, and then outside. The metal beam literally snaps halfway down, so the orb and half the beam are held by a tiny fiber of metal, or however that works.

A string of curses fly out of my mouths as I leap at her. She grabs me, topples over and we scream together. The orb makes an entire circular rotation, stopping higher in the sky than ever before. Both of our eyes flit to the feeble holding of the orb. My heart stops as it snaps clean off.

I’m not a screamer, but I did literally scream as we plummeted towards the ground. The concrete zooms into us at the speed of light, then repels us like we’re a bouncy ball. A slow motion three seconds pass in the air before we’re zooming back down.

I wrench the headset from my face, dropping it carelessly. “Shit,” I gasp.

Sekera does the same, flopping onto the ground. “Oh god, solid ground.” She rolls onto her stomach, comedically trying to hug the ground.

I run a hand through my hair. It comes back wet. “That’s supposed to be fun?”

She twists to look at me. “Yes.”

Both of us burst into giggles in unison. “Ok you’re right. That was awesome,” I admit.

“Oi!” Somebody hollers. A floodlight pours through the frontal glass doors. I can’t see who it is, but it’s no doubt they’re police. Luckily, we’re too deep in the arcade to be seen. “What’s going on in there? I heard screams. Is everybody alright?” He’s managed to open the door lock, but not the chain, and is hollering through the gap he’s pushed.

“Yeah!” Sekera yells back.

“What are you doing?” I hiss.

“Relax. He can’t get to us,” she chuckles.

“What’s going on in there? Why are you there after hours? How did you get in?”

Sekera grabs my hand, and we slink nearer to the entrance. I can see him now. A tall, stocky, blue sunglass sporting cop, I recognize as Yugan Vosnik, the partner of the famed Heller Tash. What’s he doing roaming around the streets at this hour?

“Too many questions!” Sekera replies. “Slow down.”

“Um…” Vosnik stutters, confused by the response. “What are you doing inside there?”

I catch wind of our security in the situation. It’s not everyday you get a chance to mess with a cop like this. “Sex!” I shout at the top of my lungs. Sekera’s mouth is agape and her eyes are sparkling with mischief.

“Sex? Sex?” Vosnik asks, mortified. “Here? That’s illegal!”

“Don’t worry officer, we’re both sixteen so it’s allowed!” Sekera shoots.

“No! No it’s not! Let me in, now! Or I will break this glass and arrest both of you for underaged intercourse, and trespassing.”

“Oh no, I’m sorry officer,” I respond. “I don’t think you can join us at this time. I’m not into threesomes.”

“On the contrary,” Sekera butts in. “I’d quite like a threesome. You know that you’re just not as… filling as you used to be.”

Now my hands are on my belly and my legs are kicking out with muffled laughter.

“You disgusting runts,” Vosnik hisses. “That’s it, I’m orchestrating a legal infiltration.”

I hear glass shattering. Sekera shoots me a worried glance, but my wry smile overtakes me. I grab her hand and lead her back into the alien invasion game we’d been playing and directly under the console. Invisible to the naked eye.

I hear a torch click on. “Little cunts. Where are you?” he demands.

We hold in our breaths and laughter as he sifts through the arcade. Just as he passes us, I give the signal and we take off.

“There you are!” he hollers, scrambling after us.

I leap onto his scooter, the keys still conveniently in place, and turn it on. Sekera’s right behind me, wrapping her arms around my midsection as I rev the handles, sending it gliding forwards at an astonishing silent speed.

“Bastards!” Vosnik hollers, pounding his baton in the air. “That thing’s tracked! I’ll find you and arrest you little cunts!”

I snort. “What an idiot that guy is.”

“I know right, thanks for telling us about that.”

“So where to next?” I ask, over my shoulder. The cold, musky night air whips my dirty my hair behind me, sending a ripple of liberation through my wiry frame. Sekera forces her face through the barrage of black ribbons, resting her chin on my shoulder.

“I dunno. Wherever the hell we want to.”

~

I push the door open into the little, scintillating fast food diner. The smell of fatty oil and oven grease blasts me.

Sekera inhales. “Ahh, what a smell.”

“You like this shit?”

“Fast food? Of course! Love it.”

“Alright. You order then. Haven’t eaten at one of these in millennias,” I say, glancing around the empty booths. A neon sign that says “Open 24/7” flickers at the doorway.

Sekera peers over the smudgy counter, to see the waitress utterly passed out on her keyboard. I can see an endless stream of Js on the screen. “Um, excuse me miss? We’d like to place an order?”

“Huh?” the fossil of a woman snorts, shooting upright. A receipt is stuck to her saggy cheek. She fits her tiny glasses onto her nose and looks us over. “Sorry about that, young’uns.” She’s got a typical, innocent, little old lady voice that’s always made me think of the demonic cat eater I’d read of in a book four years ago.

“Ummm, two Wowchik-burgers please. Extra pickles on one.”

“Delightful choice. And to drink?”

“A chocolate swirl milkshake, and a…” she looks me over, judging me severely with her maple eyes. “Lemon slushy?”

I shrug. Doesn’t sound very good, but neither does anything else.

The old lady punches some buttons, and two paper wrapped burgers slide into a tray. She fills the drinks from some ungodly machine, and rests them beside the meals, picking up the trays and handing them to us. “So, tell me, how come you dandy little couple are out so late?”

“Oh, we’re not a couple,” I say quickly.

Sekera snorts. “He’s shy.”

I shoot her an arched eyebrow.

“Oh, are you dear?” the geezer asks. “Well you’re not going to accomplish anything if you’re shy. And if you want to impress her, you shouldn’t be taking her to such a place you know. You should take her to a real restaurant, with waiters and candles and wine.”

“Yeah, well it’s kind of hard to do that when you’ve got no money,” I shrug, as Sekera pulls a small crumpled wad of cash from her pocket.

“How preposterous!” she cries. “You’re making her pay?”

I turn my pockets inside out. “I’m broke. Spent all my money buying her all those hair extensions.”

That sent the old lady into cackles. “Alright, alright,” she sighed, wheezing. “You two enjoy those.”

Sekera led us into a booth, propping her feet up as she sat across from me. She unraveled the wrapping of her burger and began devouring it like a black hole. “Jeez, are you that hungry?”

“Yeah! We haven’t eaten in ages! How are you not hungry?”

“Well, I guess I am. I think I’m just used to being hungry by now,” I laugh. I cautiously take a slow sip from my drink. I quickly recoil with a screwed-up face.

“What?” she asks. “Too sour?”

I nod. “I love it.”

She smirks. “Know you too well.”

I crunch into the crispy grown-chicken burger. “This tastes like a heart attack.”

“I didn’t know heart attacks were delicious,” she giggles between mouthfuls.

~

RAIN RULEZ

I shake the red spray paint again, glancing over my shoulder. Sekera’s cackles make me shoot her a look in her direction.

He spray can rattles, and she presses it nearly to the wall, making a long line. It takes me a moment in the hazy grey of dusk to realize that she’s making a massive purple dick. Along the side of it she sprays, SUCK’ERA.

I pull down the bandana covering my mouth. “Can’t stay too long. He must have cams.”

“Screw it. Screw the mayor. Screw his damn white-ass house,” she hisses, spraying dozens of mismatched gang symbols to throw off the police.

I spray more; CAPITABITCH. LAW-JERKER. SLIME-FLESH.

Sekera’s head cocks. Sirens in the distance.

“Shit,” I hiss.

“Shit,” she giggles.

We careen towards our bikes. Mine’s been sprayed black with blue hazards, and hers is a drunken rainbow with unicorn barf all over it. She literally leaps onto hers, from years of riding as a child, while I’m forced into a running start, awkwardly swinging onto the seat just as the cops roll onto the clean road, sandwiched by impossibly green, buzzcut grass.

“Hey! Stop right there! Hooligans!”

My bike wobbles from side to side as I pour all my adrenaline into my legs, quickly catching up to Sekera.

“Bitches… can’t do shit,” she pants, grinning as I overtake her.

We make it into the urban sprawl before the cops catch up to us, sinking into the refuge of the high-rises. With the cars being too big to follow, and foot being too slow an option, we’ve already escaped them.

~

“C’mon!” I yell. “Just leap up. Grab my hand. I’ll catch you I swear!”

“You’ll slip! I’m sweaty! Kallix if I fall, I die.”

“Don’t worry, I do it every day!” The first ray of sunlight greets my pupil like an overly excited puppy. “We’re gonna miss the sunrise!”

Perched atop the tallest building in West Side, I hold one of the poles supporting the tiny room above it, leaning over as far as I can, where Sekera remains, stuck, against the smooth metallic curvature that had daunted me so many months ago. I’d climbed this building the first time so I could get away from the world. I’m climbing it now so that I can see all the world.

“Can I just go back down and get the rope ladder? It got me this far!”

“No! Hurry up! Relax I will catch you!”

“God damnit Kallix I swear I’ll haunt you if I die.”

“I’ll be grateful of the company.”

She throws herself upwards, perfectly into my grasp. The brief second of limbo exposure to a flattening death is over in an instant, and I pull her to the top.

“Woah,” she gasps, eyes twinkling with infant sunshine.

“Hold on, we’re not there yet.”

I lead her up the metal rungs, into the dusty old, empty, purposeless room. It kind of reminds me of myself. Except for the old part, of course. Perhaps I’ll come back in sixty years. If I’m still alive. Unlikely.

I open the window, and climb onto the small section of flat roof, helping Sekera up afterwards. She takes in a long, awe-filled breath.

I’m captivated, hypnotized.

The yellow rays spearhead an assault against the ever-retreating grey of pre-dusk. The night. The night that was my ally. My only friend. A sprawl of orange unfurls itself from the horizon, perking up like West Side where there had once only been the Dunes. It reaches to the north and south in a warm, motherly embrace of the metal, grit rattled world. I expect a glow of red to wax from its heart, like a reversed sunset, but it doesn’t. Instead, the fiery might of the sun itself crests the dappled horizon. A beaming knight, appearing on a hilltop as a bleak, endless battle wages before him. The grass is grey. The swords are black.

I feel Sekera’s head on my shoulder, and her soft, small hand slide over the back of mine. Her delicate, crazed palm, over my veiny, scarred knuckles. The psychopath and the street mutt.

“Remember that bitch I told you about? Rieka?”

Sekera nods against my bony shoulder.

“This is where I first met her. Up here. I came here because I thought I would be the only person in the world who could, only to find that somebody else was already here.”

Sekera’s silent for a moment. “And? How did it go?”

I swallow, forcing myself to draw my mind from the painted liberation on the horizon, and back to the memory, drowned in emotional turmoil. “Well, we talked for a while. She seemed… alright, at first. Then we kissed, because, you know, that’s what horny teenagers do…”

“Trust me, I know,” she says, with a soft laugh.

“And then she ended up sucking me off. I came like a volcano. I remember being so damn captivated by her blue eyes. God-damnit I was a fool.”

“You still are,” she says, running a finger from my hairline down my nose.

I huff. “Your eyes are better. They’re not as arrogant. Perhaps they aren’t striking, but they’re delicate, and hearth-like, and intricate and…”

“Kinky?” she asks with a smirk.

I nod. “Yeah, kinky.”

She smiles and nestles closer to me.

“Hey… after all this… after everything is over,” I start, looking into her warm, innocent yet devilish maple eyes. “After Qiara’s dead and Ravven’s gone and Amethyst is sorted and Kaloaan fixes the Bansilin and everything… after all that… it will be like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like this… like right now… like last night. It will be like that every day.”

She pouts a little. “That seems like a long time away.”

I exhale.

“Couldn’t it be like this… now? Forever? Ok… sorry… that’s stupid.”

I put my arm around her and pull her closer to me. “It won’t be too long. I’ll make sure of it.”

Silent admiration of the beauty before us falls.

“That would be nice though.”

“What?”

“What you said. About every day. I’d like that.”

I rest my head back against the metal, transfixed by the seemingly endless sunrise. I wish this moment could stretch and prolong until the universe bundled itself back into whatever box it sprang from.

“You know, sometimes I wish you weren’t lesbian.”

“Yeah… sometimes I do too.”