Under Dark Sky Law (8 page)

Xero shrugged. “So sue me,” she said, unable
to help herself. She was really slipping on this trip. Good thing
she could blame the drugs for her cheeky behavior.

The nurse snatched the tablet from the bed
with a careless speed that seemed to surprise her, and Xero smiled,
knowing that she’d successfully gotten under the nurse’s skin. The
nurse took a second to collect herself, and with deliberate
carefulness she placed the tablet back into its rightful cradle at
the foot of the bed. With a very purposeful breath she smoothed
down her white scrubs and a smile pushed itself out to her lips
like a tube of old play dough.

“More than one can play at this game,” she
said, the creepy smile slowly drooping towards her chin.

Xero just kept smiling innocently. “Play
what?” she said, knowing messing with the nurse wouldn’t lead
anywhere good, but not really caring anymore. It had been a rough
week, and she was only hastening the inevitable anyway.

The nurse finally couldn’t maintain the fake
grin any longer, and it died on her face like a fallen soufflé.
“Lights out for you,” she said and grabbed a capped syringe out of
her scrub pockets. As Xero suspected, the nurse must have been
contemplating it even before she messed with her, considering she
had a syringe ready to go.

Thankfully there wasn’t much more Xero could
do before healing further from her injuries, so an early sedation
wasn’t much of a punishment. The nurse stuck the syringe into one
of Xero’s IV lines and gave a little miffed cackle before slamming
the empty syringe into the sharp’s container on the wall and
plodding out of the room. The door slammed and locked again behind
her.

She began feeling woozy, but she smiled a
little bit more knowing that the nurse had just violated some of
her own sacred hospital policies. Unauthorized sedation of a
patient for one, and not monitoring a sedated patient for stable
vitals before leaving the room for another. If you pushed anyone
far enough, they would break, and Xero had a knack for figuring out
what would make someone violate their own code of ethics. It was
one of the things that had made her an excellent psychiatrist.

The lights dimmed on her vision again, and
she silently hoped her intuition was right, and the nurse wouldn’t
take any further steps towards vengeance. Then again, waiting for
catastrophe was half the fun.

CHAPTER 8

Fate smiled on her gamble, and she woke up
once again in the hospital, this time significantly more intact
than she had been before. Rapid healing protocols were one of the
few things they didn’t have out in the pits that they she really
wished they did. It didn’t work well for chronic or infectious shit
like cancer or lung zaps, but it was a goddamned miracle for
straight forward wound healing. Less than a day had passed, and she
felt nearly 90% improved. Medical personnel must have agreed
because within hours of waking up they began preparing to have her
transported to another facility.

Very little in the way of communication or
answers was provided during the course of the transfer, but it was
all pretty standard bullshit. Once she was out of the locked down
hospital environment she’d have a lot more leeway to get access to
the kinds of equipment and information that she was accustomed to.
Everyone she’d dealt with during the discharge and transfer process
had been low level peons. Some of the higher level officials she
was used to doing business with were conspicuously absent, leading
her to think there was even more shit going down than she
originally thought.

She was proud of herself for behaving for the
majority of the experience. The nurse she’d had so much fun with
never returned, likely having been fired or transferred to another
ward for her insubordination. When she was younger, she had trained
herself to be a professional and hide her true emotions from her
clients. She had a natural talent for being a chameleon—for
observing the behaviors of others and mimicking them. But when the
exiles happened, when everything changed, she had let go of those
inhibitions and those feelings of captivity. She wasn’t proud of
everything that she’d done in those days, but she had learned new
skills that she still used today. However, she still fought against
the urge to just let it all hang out and watch everything burn
around her. These days she had bigger responsibilities, which she
sometimes felt like living up to when the mood struck her. There
was a whole colony that relied on her to keep shit together, which
was probably a mistake on their part.

At the end of the day she found herself
unceremoniously dumped at a fancy hotel room. It was odd, the way
she was so brusquely handled, but taken to such expensive
accommodations. The kind of treatment they received and the
lodgings they were given varied by dome city and by the current
political attitudes of any given area, but usually the two matched
up—if they were given shitty quarters they were usually treated
like shit too. Since the majority of their business ran out of the
Phoenix, they were usually guaranteed a relatively posh experience,
and she was indeed being given the highest standard of everything
from first rate healthcare to a top ranked hotel room, but she
hadn’t seen a single familiar face since she’d passed out on top of
Sanchez.

The hotel was in downtown Phoenix, a place
she’d been in many times, but it was actually a few rungs up in
extravagance from what they were used to receiving there. The
Niagara Hotel was supposed to be the epitome of modern comfort, but
there was something almost sad about it. The front of the building
was all shiny chrome and soft baby blue neon tubes flowing across
the wide picture windows in an attempt to simulate running water.
Everything about it seemed to promise a bright future where nature
and technology would merge into some symbiotic harmony. As Xero
gazed at the sign she laughed internally at its ludicrous pretense.
This whole place was one big lie, a symbol of the propaganda parade
that everyone in the domes was surfing. Their resources were
dwindling. Their days were numbered. It was only a matter of time
before they lost their false visions of glory and superiority and
were buried under the dirt and despair that everyone else had been
living with for the last twenty years. But until then, Xero would
happily enjoy their swanky hotel.

After an uncomfortable ride with a cadre of
military personnel in a vehicle that was not unlike the one she’d
crashed several days prior, she was more than happy to leave the
company of the all the grunts and the hospital personnel and
finally have some privacy. Or at least relative privacy. There were
always eyes watching. A true professional managed to do their
business despite prying eyes, but sometimes extreme measures were
necessary. A quick sweep of her surroundings would give her a good
idea of what approach to take. She was so thirsty for information,
she felt like some poor sap in the desert constantly crawling
towards an oasis mirage.

After reaching the precipice of the new room,
a recruit that looked young enough to be her son roughly thrust her
across the entry way. She bit her lip and smiled. “Is there a
problem?” she said, trying to keep her voice as neutral as
possible.

The young man was wearing a blue dress
uniform so crisp it looked like it had come right out off the
assembly line. He was thin, and his buzzed hair was such a pale
blond that she almost couldn’t see it. He reminded her of some of
the nondescript serial killers and mass murderers that had
periodically made headlines in decades past.

The recruit’s eyes stayed cold, but his lip
curled in disdain. “You’re the problem,” he said and stopped,
clearly holding back further expletives.

Truth be told, Xero felt kind of
uncomfortable, which was funny for a woman that had the confidence
to directly command a legion of several thousand people. After
she’d gotten past medical clearance they had issued her a woman’s
military uniform, which consisted of a dark navy coat that buttoned
up to her chin, and a matching navy skirt that hugged her legs and
stopped well above her knees. The uniform itself was fine. She’d
spent more than enough time dressed in all manner of outfits, and
she could wear anything comfortably given the right circumstances.
It was just the dissonance. Attitude-wise she was having problems
controlling herself for reasons that she wasn’t totally sure about.
The uniform was clashing with how she was feeling like portraying
herself, and stripped of her wig and makeup, her wilted neon Mohawk
flopped backwards across the center of her starkly nude head. She
didn’t feel quite like Xero or Anastasia, and those were two
personas that were not ready to play nice with each other.

Xero raised her eyebrows and inhaled,
relishing the rich smell of the suite, making sure the enjoyment
showed on her face. “You jealous or something?” she said.

The recruit’s mouth wrinkled into something
resembling a craggy lemon. “I would never be jealous of something
like you,” he said.

Xero closed her eyes and let a gregarious
grin plaster itself across her face. “Yeah, good thing, considering
someone like you would never be able to appreciate luxury like this
anyway. It would be a total waste,” she said, not letting her smile
slip for one second.

The recruit’s fists clenched so hard she
could see the blood draining across his knuckles. “Some people work
for their rewards,” he said almost too quietly to hear.

Her smile persisted, but any traces of
Anastasia were gone. Her eyes were dead, and the change had an
immediate effect on the recruit. His lemony mouth froze into
fear.

“I…I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. His
fingers fidgeted inside his pristine white gloves.

Xero walked towards him, one foot crossed in
front of the other like she was going down a catwalk. The
government issue pumps had enough of a heel, and the military skirt
was short enough that she may as well have been peddling skin for
money. The recruit took a hasty step backwards and tripped on his
own feet once before righting himself against the back wall of the
hallway.

She advanced until she was just a few inches
from his face and leaned her arm against the gilded wallpaper
beside his head. “I’m pretty sure you meant it just like that,” she
said in a voice that dripped with seduction, but her eyes remained
cold and empty. They were honest eyes, eyes that said she’d slit
his throat, fuck his dying body, and think nothing of it.

He swallowed, using his eyes to scan both
ways down the hallway, hoping to find backup without having to
chicken out and verbally call for them.

She cocked her head to the side. “Don’t
worry, I’m not going to hurt you,” she said. “Your own life is
punishment enough.” As much as she would have liked to actually
kick his punk ass to teach him a lesson, it probably wasn’t worth
the paperwork. There were too many other variables at work at the
moment, and in the hotel hallway there were definitely cameras
about. The rest of her permanent detail was downstairs attending to
tactical or administrative details, but they could return at any
moment.

She pulled away and stood a few feet from him
with her hands on his hips. He made an attempt at straightening
himself out, and ventured one last attempt at redemption. “You’re a
filthy rebel. You don’t deserve any of this,” he said.

Xero thought of the front of the hotel with
its ornate façade and all the lies it represented. She almost felt
sorry for this young piece of shit. “Honey. You have no idea what I
live through on a daily basis, and you have no idea what awaits you
in the future. If you ever run into me again, you might think about
being nicer. You never know, one of these days I might just end up
being your boss for real,” she said, poked him in the nose, swayed
back into her hotel room, and slammed the door in his face.

It was another politically questionable
event, but it had felt so good. Totally worth it. Although it was
somewhat frivolous in terms of actual safety, she slipped the chain
lock on the door so that she would at least have a heads up if the
mouthy recruit or some other dick wad decided to bust in on her
while she was trying to relax.

She leaned her head back against the door and
closed her eyes, overjoyed at finally having some privacy. The room
followed the style of the rest of the hotel—all chrome and soft
blue lights illuminating things that really didn’t need
illuminating. The curtains were made of a blue fabric that had
blinking fiber optic cables interwoven into the panels. An
executive desk made out of more chrome and stainless steel was
pressed against the opposite wall, and if it was half as soft as it
looked, piled high with feather pillows and fluffy chenille
blankets, she was going to sleep well tonight despite all the
fuckery. Piles of soft blue and white towels, pajamas, and an
oversized bathrobe were neatly stacked in rows on the metallic
dresser next to a large flat screen television.

It was going to feel really good to wear
something that wasn’t a hospital gown or a misogynistic uniform.
This was the kind of place she would have stayed at back in the
early days of Alphamine. She had never been caught, and if the dome
exodus hadn’t happened, she probably would have been staying at
places like that every weekend. As nice as places like that were,
she still missed their headquarters down in the pits. It wasn’t
clean, and it wasn’t pretty, but there was no where else that she
could have such complete freedom.

Just as she stepped away from the door there
was a knock. Through the peephole there was another pair of
soldiers, but these two were older and higher ranking than the
other she’d been dealing with since waking up at the hospital. It
was about time they sent someone of an appropriate rank. She was
having fun fucking with the rookie scum, but eventually that could
get her into a difficult spot.