Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity (20 page)

In its own strange and anxious way, the darkness was comforting. Enveloped completely within it, Byron’s nerves merged the signals from the cold, the humidity, and the loss of light together into one cohesive whole, so that he thought of the dark as a frigid, dank curtain; a wet blanket thrown over the world. Being nestled ever deeper into the folds of that slick, heavy cloth, he could relax, squint his eyes, and watch the sparks of random optical misfires ignite in his periphery.

The dark was better than this, anyway – better than the pressure of leadership. In the light, whilst taking the lead, Byron was acutely aware of the awkwardness of hands. Should he embrace hers strongly, to provide comfort? What if she found that painful, or worse, pathetic? What if she could discern that he was putting on a show of strength, and found the gesture appalling, or laughable? Should he barely breach her palm, embracing her limply, so as to best give the illusion of confidence? Did that imply that he was so relaxed he did not need to clutch at her like a child lost in the woods? Yes, perhaps that was the proper course. Or was a middling approach prudent: Maximize skin contact with minimal force so as to give the impression of a shared kind of intimac-

“Fuck your mother’s mouth, Byron!” QC screamed, sharply knocking a shin on an archaic spool of fiber-optics.

“Oop, apologies, my dear! My attentions were drawn elsewhere momentarily and-“

“Shut up. Shut the fuck up. Take stock of your fucks, Byron, and be sure to shut them all immediately, because I swear to God there’s a storm coming, you hear me? There’s a god damn typhoon bearing down on you right now with a righteous fucking fury. So you batten down those fucks, okay? You just be as quiet as you can be, and you concentrate on getting me back where I can see as fast as you can, and without bashing my fucking shinbones to pudding in the process. Or else I swear to Christ, as soon as I can see again, I will hold your prissy head underwater so long It’ll make a giant batch of asshole tea out of the entire fucking Reservoir.”

After enduring several hours of such creative obscenities, Byron began to find the tirades rather endearing. Peculiar urges arose within him whenever QC began composing her sonnets of filth and squalor. He wanted to soothe and placate her, even though she requested absolutely nothing of him beyond his self-inflicted death, or for him to fornicate with himself, his own mother, for his mother to fornicate with herself, or for them all to join together in an unholy orgy of incestuous self-molestation and suicide.

“We have arrived,” he stated grandly, then carefully brought QC to a stop, pointed her head away from the light, and stepped in line behind her.

He felt her unlatch her free hand from over her eyes, and something in the quality of their grips altered subtly. Perhaps it was psychosomatic, but Byron swore he felt a quantitative change in palm contact when their roles were swapped: He was happier when he was led; she was kinder when she was leading. It was for the best, really. Byron fell into the nervous, shuffling gait of the newly blind, and attempted to silence the unceasing monologue of doubts that plagued his every waking, sober moment.

O, the Gas, the Gas! His kingdom for some Gas! Or rather, his kingdom for
any drug at all right now
. He’d even take a barbaric amphetamine or the thick, syrupy haze of an opioid. Regardless of the method, to simply not be Byron was the central driving motive of Byron’s entire existence.

“Step up and forward here,” she said, pulling him along.

He obeyed, though his foot contacted a shallow ledge, and he barely managed to haul himself up it.

“See that?” She continued harshly, “that’s how you lead a blind motherfucker without bashing their knees to a god damn pulp, Byron.”

She wrenched his hand down and pushed back against it: “Wait. Stop.”

They froze.

“People ahead,” her voice dropped to a harsh whisper, and she yanked him down into a low crouch.

Byron doubted very much that ducking was a necessary maneuver, in this darkness, but QC at least could see perfectly, and her instincts operated under those parameters.

“Maybe they’re friendly?” Byron ventured gently.

“Nobody’s fucking friendly down here, Byron.”

“A point,” he conceded, “Can we go around them then?”

“Yeah…yeah, I think so: There are two of them off to the left here about fifty feet up. They’re on some kind of flat little boat tied to the side of the pier. I think they’re sleeping. We’ll go, but you stay flatter and quieter than roadkill, you understand? It’s dark now, and I can see fine. But if they get up and switch on some lights, we’re fucked. Ready?”

“Not really,” Byron muttered, but she paid him no mind.

Byron did his best to be both stealthy and fast, while utterly blind, on a rickety dock, and huddled up into a shuffling, duck-like waddle. But he could not will his legs to relax – the Gas cramps coming on again - and they burned unbearably with every mincing half-step.

“How close are we?” He whispered nigh inaudibly in her general direction.

She squeezed his hand sharply, viciously.

“Ow!”

Another squeeze. He felt her turn.

“Quiet! Fuck! They’re right there!” She rasped, so quick and hushed it was almost lost in the shifting, rhythmic creak of boat against pier.

He felt his face flush with chided embarrassment. They waddled on in terse silence for another half-dozen paces, before the sharp, searing snap of light. QC screamed. She released her grip on Byron instantly and used both hands to paw at her eyes. She knelt on the ground, hands to her face, and rocked there, moaning. A spotlight was shining directly on the pair of them from a space in the darkness a scant few meters to the left. Byron’s eyes were rapidly adjusting, but not rapidly enough. He put himself between the girl and the boat, and tried his best to look intimidating. This consisted of puffing his chest out and furrowing his brow; a posture even Byron knew read less of ‘anger’ and more of ‘gentle paternal disappointment.’

“Two rats,” one voice said flatly.

“One rat, one lass,” said another, long and mean and thickly accented.

“Nah, looks like two rats to me. Ain’t much of a lass.”

“I like ‘em little. You know.”

“I say,” Byron spoke loudly, trying to make up for the quiver in his throat with sheer volume. “Hold your tongues! You are in the presence of a lady.”

“Oh ho! We was wrong.”

“So wrong.”

“You see that? What is that?”

“That’s a high class motherfucker, right there. That’s what that is.”

“Maybe we ain’t got no rats here at all.”

“Looks like one lass, one purse.”

“We let rats go: Ain’t good eating, ain’t good pay, ain’t good fun. We take lasses,” the first voice said, oscillating fluidly now. Moving. Stepping off the boat, Byron realized.

“We cut purses,” the other finished.

“Run, shitbird!” QC screamed, reaching out one hand to plead with the open air.

What few withered and useless instincts that remained in Byron’s neglected body wholeheartedly agreed with QC. But his rational brain interjected: It politely abutted the idea of him and QC stumbling through the cluttered dock pathways, in the dark, while large-sounding men with boats and searchlights pursued them, up against his own craven impulses. Miraculously, desperately, Byron opted not to hide in the dark this time.

Instead, he reached down and grasped a long, thin length of nano-bar at his feet. It was perhaps two and half feet, and solid, but still rather lightweight and springy – one small strand of the massive retaining webs that kept the city above from collapsing in on the empty dome of the Reservoir. Byron had never taken any of the defense classes his father pushed on him. He had no defensive nano-strains; he had no strains at all, actually, beyond a basic credit rig and a high end Rx induction setup (nanotech tended to obfuscate the Gas, occasionally cutting the trip short or landing him too far into the timeline). He had, in fact, done absolutely nothing but spend his entire adult life biographing his beloved Lord. And so Byron adopted the only combat posture he knew, from years of watching bloody battles and playful sparring; he adopted a fencing stance.

“Think he want to tangle.”

“Ha! Nah, he just want to dance a little.”

The two voices laughed harder when Byron moved his body to en garde. He raised the bar in front of him and saluted, by reflex.

“Looks terrible scary, don’t he? Think we should give him what he wants? Think I give him the tangle.”

“Maybe I give him the dance.”

One form stepped forward toward him, and Byron’s heart soared: The light was directly behind the man now. His every movement was broadcast crisply and clearly by his looming silhouette. Without thinking, Byron had already sidestepped the attacker’s oafish charge, and brought the whip-like bar down on the back of his knee as he passed. Byron turned quickly, using the momentum to fling his arm out in an arc, and contacted. The man had fallen into a crouch after the initial attack, and the slash engaged his skull. The hit landed solid, there was a nauseating kind of suck, and the obstacle yielded in a horrid way that made Byron quite certain the man would not be rising again.

“Byron!” QC had picked up the sound, “Oh shit! Oh no!”

Byron did not respond. He kept his gaze on the other form behind the light. This one was bigger. It moved slower, more cautiously.

What few fights Byron had participated in throughout his objectively boring life were all via the Presence strain of gas, and he simply did not have enough training for the moves. They came slowly and sloppily, he knew. The real Lord Byron would have mocked him for an imprecise child, but the muscle memory was there, as long as he didn’t focus on it. The movements seemed almost to function on their own, if only Byron could keep his own panicked thoughts from intruding. He pushed down fleeting seconds of intense anxiety, the flawlessly logical doubts as to the inadequate levels of his own martial prowess, and the pronounced sense of embarrassment he felt at attempting to pass himself off as a warrior before this stranger. But he did not let it take: Byron shoved all higher functions violently away, and stared impassively toward the light, blank and waiting.

There was no blind charge this time, and the man’s silhouette revealed something wicked and serrated in one hand. He circled Byron slowly, trying to put him in front of the light. But for every step the assailant took, Byron responded in turn. They jockeyed for position in this fashion for a few tense moments, but then the form conceded the better ground to Byron, and attacked regardless. He came in with a long, slow overhead strike, but something about it did not ring true: There had been too much careful positioning to be followed by such a clumsy stroke. Byron identified the feint for what it was, and responded with a false of his own: He flicked his wrist up to feign a block, keeping his forearm down. When the man suddenly twisted and reversed his blade to bring it in low, Byron enveloped it with his own bar, and flung it aside. The knife slapped against the dock and skittered away into the water with a plop. The bar reverberated in Byron’s hand, softly thrumming. The form froze for an instant, as if in shock, and Byron took the opportunity to execute a Passata-sotto, lunging with full force, one hand on the dock for support. He had expected his attacker to be thrown off guard, and was already moving into position for a Fleche to place the light at his front again, but instead, the shadow simply stumbled and went down into a heap.

Byron numbly strode over to where QC sat huddled on the docks, and bent to pick her up. She slapped at his arms, clawed at his face.

“It’s me! I won!” Byron said, “They are bested.”

“Bullshit,” QC spat in amazement, “where the fuck did that come from?”

“I think you’ll find me a little more formi-” Byron began to brag, but the floodgates chose that moment to burst. His voice terminated in a strangled croak instead, and he vomited onto her shoes.

“Fuck. No, it’s okay. It’s over now. You did good. Listen, can you put out that light? I’ll take it from here,” QC slipped her hand into his reassuringly, and Byron practically shook with the relief of it. He led them cautiously over the shadowed, slumped forms, and snapped the spotlight off.

“Jesus!” QC exclaimed, taking in her surroundings.

“What is it? Are there more of them?” Sweat instantly sprung up through his skin.

“Nothing. Just…wow. You really messed these dickheads up.”

“I did? Will they be all right?”

“I really don’t think so,” QC said, a skeptical admiration in her voice, “This guy’s got half his head busted open, and – did you make this other guy
eat
a piece of nanobar?”

“Lord, no! I’m not a
savage
.”

“Well, it looks like somebody tried to turn his fucking mouth inside out, savage.”

“Ah, yes. Hm. He did cede rather quickly after the thrust. QC? Can we please continue? I…do not wish to linger here.” All the energy bled down Byron’s legs, and dissipated into the ground beneath his feet. He had never been more tired.

“Sure, one sec,” she said, then led him over to a spot a few steps to their right, where Byron guessed the first man must have fallen. She made a hocking sound, and he heard the fat, wet thwack of something wet contacting skin. Another two paces forward, and the sounds repeated.

“Okay cool, let’s roll,” she said cheerfully, and once again led Byron limply into the dark.

It was no more than a brisk walk, but Red found the pace dizzying. After a night spent navigating first the darkened tunnels of the lower levels, and then the cramped, stifling ‘Wells, he had grown accustomed to taking quick, shuffling half-steps. His sense of what was an appropriate pace adjusted itself drastically downward, and now, traveling at a normal rate of progress felt like stepping onto a people mover -- as if covering twenty feet in under a minute somehow defied the fundamental laws of physics that governed mass and speed.  With King Big Dick’s influence, doors flew open without negotiation. Even after they’d left his own disconcertingly sparse, empty territory, other gatekeepers took one look into the impassive mirror slabs of his guards and tripped over themselves to throw their doors open. One tiny fiefdom, barely the size of a catwalk stall and tucked entirely into the upper corner of a single landing, went so far as to appoint a blonde-haired serving boy to their entourage. He rigorously avoided eye contact while tossing glimmering, shredded pieces of nano-fiber at their feet as they passed through the territory – all twelve horizontal feet of it. As the door swung shut behind them, Red stole a glance back, and caught the boy nervously vomiting on his own shoes.