Silence (15 page)

Pain suddenly exploded in his stomach
and he was flung at least three feet through whirling air, in
excruciating agony. Chain’s boot had ripped into Sheikoh’s stomach.
The child saw her put it back onto the ground as he landed in the
dirt, heavily. Silent tears tracked down his dirty face.

Sheikoh couldn’t breathe. His body was
wracked with astounding agony. He was shaking so violently that he
didn’t know if he could move. His stomach like it’d been impaled on
a jutting rebar. Sheikoh knew that he should have listened to his
first instincts; the truth was that heroes were nothing more
substantial than a figment of imagination. People created illusions
that gave themselves up so that they wouldn’t have to.

Heroes rush… in… and here
we…are,
Sheikoh cursed, bitter with
pain.

He made a mistake, and now he was
going to pay for it. And the consequences would be absolute, he
could see it in Chain’s sadistic smile. He clenched his eyes shut
and wondered if it was possible to feel more pain.

He was answered with a resounding
yes.

His hair was ripped up into the air.
Sheikoh choked out a hoarse scream. He could feel his scalp tearing
from his skull. Blinding tears drenched his eyes and cheeks. He
couldn’t take it anymore.

“
MOMMY! DADDY! HELP ME!” He
begged Daneil and Anima.

Anima’s face dripped with silent
tears, as she averted her gaze, and Daneil shook his head with an
expression of absolute terror. Sheikoh’s heart sunk to the absolute
pit of despair. Shock choked his throat. His scream died
down.

“
You heard him,” laughed
Chain. “Here’s your one and only chance to save your
son.”

Nobody corrected her as to the nature
of their relationship. The square was shrouded in still, funeral
silence. Even the other members of Redline had gone
quiet.

Chain scraped the electroblade along
Sheikoh’s side in sadistic delight. Pain flashed with specks of
red, and the heavy air resounded with another desperate cry. He
writhed in Chains strong hand like a fly caught in a spider
web.

Sheikoh’s shrieks ripped the tense
silence of the square to tatters. Watchers flinched. Members of
Redline glanced at each other uncomfortably, as blood dribbled off
the child in their leader’s arms.

“
No?” Chain taunted
sharply. “Too gutless?” Her voice held the unquestioned obedience
of the silence. “Afraid of this?”

She plunged the electroblade deep into
Sheikoh’s side.

Sheikoh gasped awake. His heart pounded, and his eyes darted
wildly around the safehouse wildly for a second. Then he realized
that he’d been dreaming. Adrenaline flowed through him as he sat
there, slow to recede. He twisted and punched his pillow, hitting
hard enough that a clang reverberated through the night.

Sheikoh shot a guilty glance over at
Dorothi, who was still breathing slowly and regularly with a
peaceful expression. He rubbed his eyes and twisted so he was
leaning against the wall. For a few moments, he watched Dorothi
sleep, thinking. She'd only been two when the memory had taken
place.

Had it really been so long?

Try as he might, Sheikoh couldn’t
forget. Surrounded by dark and the cold, he couldn't summon the
will and wrench control of his thoughts. Imaginings flickered in
the corners of his eyes, and memory burrowed through the pores of
his face.

After Chain had plunged the knife into
his side, it was all black.

Sheikoh couldn’t remember anything
else of the torture. He couldn’t remember Chain’s laugh or the fire
that’d burned the Namar Bakery to the ground, retribution for his
pathetic attack.

Or, maybe his
parents
had tried to
avenge him.

Sheikoh honestly didn’t care either
way.

The Namars had given up his compassion
when they’d stood by to watch him die. He’d put himself into their
hands, and they’d let him fall and shatter against the ground. The
next time he’d opened his eyes, he’d been blasted back to life by
Emili’s defibrillator.

The backs of his eyes began to tingle
uncomfortably, as her fiercely determined face swam in his
thoughts.

Sheikoh came to lying on a cold, metal table. Dying gasps
stuttered across his lips. He stared up at two hazy outlines,
stretched over his vision like ghosts. Or angels, maybe.
 

The two outlines slowly drifted into
focus. An old man and a blonde girl.

Alimiat and Emili.  

Emili Wray saved his life that day.
She’d carried the mutilated corpse of Sheikoh’s body back home, and
broken into Alimiat’s study, demanding he save Sheikoh’s life.
  

After Sheikoh had passed out, Chain
had played with his electroblade until she’d run its power dry.
Then she’d given Sheikoh up for dead and tossed his ruined body
into the dirt beside the street. The Namar bakery had been set
alight to blaze the gangster’s warning to anyone even considering
defiance. Messages passed faster by smoke signal than even texts.
In Interium's residential section, smoke only ever held one meaning
- destruction. People usually got the message.

The first time Sheikoh had seen her,
Emili’s hair had been hurriedly pulled back into a ponytail with a
scraggly, grey tie. Her cheeks were speckled with freckles along
with the drops of oil and perspiration. She bit her pale lower lip
with those slightly crooked white teeth as she leaned over with a
screwdriver inside the child’s gaping chest wound. Her hands
remained determinedly steady, but the rest of her body shook with
fear.

Alimiat wore a white mask and a pair
of latex gloves. His strangely yellowed eyes were his only visible
feature and they were almost menacingly intense as fixated upon the
bloody flesh that remained of Sheikoh’s body. Alimiat was Dorothi's
and Emili’s father. And, as the foremost expert on cyborgs, he was
partially Sheikoh’s as well.

After Emili and Alimiat had pulled all
six inches (not counting the hilt) of electroblade out of Sheikoh’s
chest, they'd set to work repairing him. The electroblade had been
stabbed and held in both of Sheikoh’s right shoulder, right thigh
and left hamstring for long enough to have completely destroyed the
nerves of his perennial nervous system. The limbs had had to come
off. Sheikoh totally got that. He accepted it.

But he couldn't help but resent the
fact that Alimiat had cut him at the hip instead of the damaged
areas of the legs.

“
A full waist replacement
is both easier for your nerves to adjust to and much less
susceptible to infection than two leg additions,” Alimiat had
explained to the overwhelmed child.

At the time, Sheikoh hadn't understood
what the scientist had been taking from him. But Sheikoh understood
now.

They’d removed the body part that made
him a man. An eight-year-old couldn’t have asked for anything more
than to be a half robot, but when Sheikoh had realized what he had
lost, a hole had opened in his self-perception. He’d been mutilated
into some kind of fraction of a human that had to hide his body
away to protect the eyes of the people he cared for. His genes had
been crippled and left to stagnate, until they eventually died
without heir.

Sheikoh knew that, even though he had
given up a lot and that there was so much he would never be able to
experience in life. At least he had a life. Even if Sheikoh had
just been a final test for Alimiat’s perfected immunosuppressant,
cyborg-creating formula.

Living with the Wrays, Sheikoh had
grown close to Emili. He could remember the girl massaging his
shoulder muscle when his small, surprisingly heavy, blacksteel arm
would threaten the horrible ache of his constantly-pulled shoulder
muscles. Emili was the one that patiently helped him through the
process of learning to walk again, while Alimiat spent endless
hours on hold for old business acquaintances that wouldn’t take his
calls. Emili helped feed and clothe the still clumsy Sheikoh, while
her father shouted and locked himself in his study days, with only
chemicals, test tubes, and a box with the worn label Humanoid
Cryomentalynsis specimen: 4 - Dientienide Chloroxyiate. The drug
that was known on the streets by the shortened ‘Four’.

Eventually, Emili had grown to trust
him enough to let him in the know.

Alimiat’s story was a sad one. Dr.
Wray had been a brilliant R and D guy for some company inside the
capitol of the empire, Intrasentient City. Alimiat had spent his
life working on the cyborgic body parts that were attached to
Sheikoh himself. He had thought them perfect in their connection to
a patient’s nervous system, and for a while, it seemed like he was
right. The people wearing prosthetics were fine anywhere from about
one to four years until their body just died. No one in the
scientific community could figure out why everyone was dropping
dead, much less cure them. Their organs didn’t even fail, it was
like they’d brain activity simply vanished. They scrambled around
but came up with nothing besides resentment for their colleague who
had pushed his pet project through testing.

Meanwhile, the Celestial had put in
some overtime and cured every single recipient within a few weeks.
They were able to empower a rune inscribed in the patient’s own
blood and energy that apparently blocked the metal from
inexplicably draining the cyborg’s life-force. For that, the
Emperor granted the Celestial the exclusive right to sell Alimiat’s
life work, while he looked on incredulously.

Since then, Alimiat had dedicated his
life to finding a scientific means of protecting life force and
getting credit for his work. While testing life force modulating
formula’s he’d developed on animal subjects, Alimiat had
inadvertently created the drug Four. Four literally converted life
force into minutes of an unadulterated euphoria so powerful and
pure that the minute it laid its incubus finger on an individual’s
blood, addiction was both immediate and irrevocable.

Alimiat had been desperate and
jobless, living in a shanty on the west side of the wall through
Interium. In the name of his research, he had become the first ever
Four dealer. Within ten years, the drug, younger than Dorothi, had
touched every corner of the continent and killed his oldest
daughter.

Four caught up with Alimiat first,
though. A man who’d lost everything to the chemical had confronted
him. Alimiat had arrogantly said that addicts had some choice in
the matter.

In answer, the man had pulled a gun on
Alimiat and extorted all of Alimiat’s Four and the notes on how to
synthesis it. The yellow-eyed Four addict had gone on to inject a
minute dose of the chemical into Alimiat’s arm. Then he’d left him
in a pile of drooling ecstasy. Apparently, he hadn’t wanted to
interrupt the first moment between a father and his child. The
addict had left and gone on and immediately overdosed. His
shriveled body had been found dead in an alley with a smile on its
lips. And Legacy had taken the recipe to Four.

From the outside in, Alimiat hadn't
changed his habits in the slightest. He had still spent all his
time with test tubes and chemicals, trying to retrace the steps
that had led to his creation of Four. He hadn't even had the drug's
chemical name to work with. He could’ve reverse-engineered the
formula long ago through a few, specific reactions, but each time
he had held Four in his hands, he'd found himself reaching for a
needle to satiate the unbearable craving.

Alimiat had quit sleeping and eating.
He had spent all his time buried in notes and chemical equations.
Ironically, Alimiat’s total obsession to resynthesize Four had led
to three different compounds that regularized life force. One
formed a semi-permanent quantum bound with the brain in a way,
Alimiat speculated, that would both stabilize and regulate life
force.

Alimiat had seen the repairs he’d made
to Sheikoh as a means to get money to buy himself the precious
chemical, but no one took the failed scientist’s calls. About a
month after Sheikoh had been reborn, the man had left him and Emili
alone with Dorothi. They’d never figured out what had happened to
the dude. Sheikoh privately hoped that someone had put that dude
out of his misery a long time ago.

Sheikoh climbed up the ladder and
slipped through the trapdoor overhead.. He knew the sewer was a far
safer course to take but he just couldn’t force himself out
there.

‘
My emotions can’t take the
awful smell. I’m soft as a cucumber from all of these feelings and
what not,’ He quietly laughed to himself, joking down the raw
feeling. And if he smelled funny the Celestial might think he was
chill with being poor and pay less. He had to have money. For
Dorothi.

Sheikoh pushed open the trapdoor and
squinted through the light that was streaming into his own personal
walled garden. Vines waved with a gentle breeze as though they were
welcoming him back. It was a good thing that no one in Interium
cared about nature, or he might not be able to use the passage to
his safehouse. Sheikoh smiled at the plants and swung onto the
grass.

He closed the trapdoor behind him. It
blended into the dirt and grass seamlessly. He straightened up and
looked at the ivy-draped walls. Then he laughed aloud, having
thought of another reason to have gone through the
trapdoor.