“Please, bitch. I used to own little sleets like you in Whitehold,” the Gray says. By the look of his knotted forearms, he could easily break me to kindling. I should just move on.
“Whitehold?” I scoff. “That’s odd. I thought they sent pig sodomizers to Deepgrave.” Both stand, blades shimmering in the low light. I stumble backward, too late in realizing my tongue’s drunker than the rest of me.
The Gray’s about to come and try to open me up with that cutter of his when he sees something behind me and stops dead. There’s silence in the bar. Something fiendishly unique has just walked through the door behind me. And anything unique enough to this sort of crowd could only mean one thing.
She came after all.
I turn to see a Gray woman my height, but built like a snub-nosed boxer with the physical dimensions of a concrete building block. Freckles, made dark by her time under the harsh Mercurian sun, maul an ugly, broad nose, while her hair, shaved on the sides of the head, shoots up from the top of her head like a surfacing great white. Her military uniform is all black, but every eye, wary bartender to dazed whore, scans the red flying-horse standard on the forearms of her jacket and the matted wolfcloak that hangs from her left shoulder. Pegasus Legion, Howler Battalion. One of the Reaper’s own.
The woman strides past me up to the men blocking our path to the booth. “Move.” They dip their heads politely and back away. She sits down and pours two shots of what remains of their whiskey into the glasses, wipes one glass for herself, and nods to me. I join her as she tosses them a gold Octavia. A hundred-credit Lune crescent. Still the currency of the day, despite the Rising’s sad attempts to mint new legal tender. “For the whiskey, citizens.”
They skulk away and conversations slowly start again throughout the bar. The woman looks back to me, flinty eyes searching.
“Holiday ti Nakamura, the Howler. In the leathery flesh,” I say.
“Ephraim ti Horn. The dumbass with a death wish.” She jerks her head at the two thugs. “What’s your damage?”
“The usual. Would you like a thank-you for saving my ass?”
“Don’t thank me yet; night’s young. Besides, the Obsidian with the railgun over there might be a bit too much for you to chew.”
“Huh?”
“Far side, second booth. Big girl with the bulge under the armpit.” She jerks her head to a shadowy booth where a large shape is hunched in the shadows over a drink with an umbrella in it. In the haze from the vodka and pills, I didn’t even notice her there. “You’re slipping, Eph,” Holiday says as she warily sniffs the whiskey bottle.
“Dammit.” I sigh. “I’ll be right back.”
“Do you need help?”
“Only if you have tickets to the zoo.”
“What?”
“Don’t ask.”
I stalk across the bar. Volga hunches sheepishly as if she can sink into the shadow of the booth so I won’t see her. She gives up when I snap my fingers at her. “Outside.”
Rain drips sluggishly down from the green awning over the bar’s entrance. The bar itself is in a block of restaurants and drinking holes directly abutting a multilevel thoroughfare. Past the small retaining wall is a precipitous drop down into the concrete canyon between the buildings. I push Volga in the chest. “You stalking me now?”
“No…”
“Volga.”
“Yes,” she admits. “I am worried about you.”
“Worried about me? You’re the one who can barely catch a cab without me.”
“I tracked you, did I not?”
“So I taught you something at least. But not how to mind your own business, you dumb giant.”
“You seemed sad….”
“Not your problem. You got enough of those, don’t make me one of them.”
“But we’re friends. Friends look out for each other.” She nods inside. “Who is that? Her cloak…”
“That’s none of your damn business.”
“But…”
“We’re not friends, Volga.” I push a finger in her chest and stare up at her bluff face. “We work together. Business associates. That is the totality of our relationship.” She stands there as if I’ve struck her. I sigh in annoyance. “Go home. And stop following me just because you don’t have your own life.” I don’t have to tell her twice. She hunches her shoulders against the rain and disappears up a flight of stairs to the taxi level above.
I head back inside, where Holiday has made some progress on the bottle, but her chair is shifted, like she’s just gotten out of it. Did she listen at the door?
“You know her?” she asks.
“No,” I snap.
“Right. Well…It’s good to see you, Eph.” She traces the rim of her glass with a callused finger. “To be honest, I’m surprised you came.”
“Ouch. Thought I wouldn’t care anymore?”
“Thought you wouldn’t remember Trigg’s birthday.”
“And I thought your messiah master wouldn’t let you off the leash for some R&R. Don’t you have a parade to attend?”
“That was yesterday. But you knew that.”
I shrug. “Well, this place has gone to shit.”
“Yut. I preferred the tiki torches to whatever this is…” She trails off and gestures to the green lighting and myriad lowlifes.
I snort. “Maybe we’re just getting too cultured. Still, has to be better than the Mercury sand belt.”
“Hell yes it is,” she says heavily. She’s never been a looker, but the latest tour has been hard on her. Still, most of the wear seems on the inside. She sits at the table with the weight of the planet pressing her down into the whiskey bottle.
“You fall in the Rain?” I ask. She nods. “Saw the newsreels. Looked like a shitshow. What’s one of those like? A Rain?”
She shrugs. “Good for weapons contractors. Hostile to the human experience for everyone else.”
“To the returning hero and her perspicacity.” I raise my glass.
She tips her glass to me. “To the malignant underachiever.”
We click our glasses together and down the liquor. It’s cheap enough I can taste the plastic of the bottle it came in, ration fare. My glass is refilled before it reaches the table. We do another. More after that. Drinking till it’s murdered proper. Holiday examines the remnants of her last glass, wondering how it came so soon. She reminds me of all soldiers who’ve come home from the war. Worlds unto themselves. Tense, eyes constantly assessing. She awkwardly tries to make conversation, because she knows she’s supposed to. “So…what’s new? You still contracting?”
“You know me. Kite in the wind.” I swish and swoosh my finger through the air.
“Which corp?”
“You wouldn’t know ’em.” She doesn’t smile. I wonder if it hurts her to see me as much as it hurts me to see her. I was afraid of this. Of coming here. Sliding back into it all.
“So, you’re living good and easy.”
“Only thing easy is entropy.”
“That’s funny.”
“It’s not mine.” I shrug. “I stay busy.”
“There are other ways to stay busy. Meaningful ways.”