By Blood and Iron

[Robin]

Okay, this'll take more than one post. Tell me what you think.

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The man in the orange hat leaned back in his chair at the truck stop, sipping nonchalantly at the cup of coffee in his hands. The coffee was lukewarm, and burnt, and the taste of it would have twisted another man’s mouth in disapproval of the bitterness, but the man in the orange hat was not another man. He was Richie Sykes, a practitioner of the Yat-del fighting style, and a descendent of the now obscure Freemen race, and to be even one of those was to be calm, cool, and collected. Well, Sykes was calm, cool and collected most of the time, but he lacked the detachment of the raised with the Freemen, and he lacked the fluid grace of those trained in the Yat-del fighting style. Sykes was reaching his late middle years, and his joints were stiffening despite the hours of practice he had put in up to a few years ago. He had stopped a couple years ago, knowing that no matter how much he stretched his joints, they would still stiffen. Since then, he had adopted truck driving.

It was not so much truck driving anymore as it was craft driving. His truck - if one could even call it a truck anymore - bore the basic structure of one of the ancient crafts that men had driven in the twentieth century, but it the dilapidated engine had been replaced with a newer engine that enabled it to fly short distances a few feet above the ground, and also to drive much faster than it previously could. The last time Sykes had cared to test it, the craft had gone five hundred miles per hour, and that hadn’t been the fastest it could go: it had been the fastest Sykes could go without getting arrested.

Sykes sighed, tipping back his cup and draining the rest of his cup. When the grainy dregs slid slimily down his throat, he did grimace, and brought the mug down with a brittle clang onto the counter, noticing vaguely that the side of the cup did not read ‘Dan’s Pitstop,’ but ‘Charlie’s Diner.’ Something told Sykes that Charlie was not the previous owner of the Pitstop. That didn’t really matter, though. Since the U.S. had slipped into anarchy, the whole world had gone to hell. Ironically enough, the least developed countries were the ones to last the longest, but eventually they too caught that visionary disease that strikes any nation climbing to the top, and so now all the countries were more or less on the same level. Crime went unchecked. Theft was rampant, but it was by no means the most popular crime, clocking in around fifth under murder, prostitution, rape, and defacement. Graffiti covered most walls in the cities like paint - no, it was thicker than paint. Nobody had bothered to paint any walls in the older cities. The new cities, of course, were all made of steel and metal, and didn’t need to be painted, and so people just didn’t bother making anything other than spray paint, and only that because of the high demand for it.

“More coffee,” Sykes said to the dumpy waitress, who threw him a dirty look as though he was damned to hell for taking advantage of their free refills service. Sykes had already had three cups of coffee for the price of one. She refilled the mug grudgingly, for fear that if she didn’t honor the free refill service, she’d be out of a job, and he smiled over the rim of Charlie’s mug at her. She looked like she had just swallowed a shot of Nyquil and had nothing to wash it down with.
“If you’re going to stay much longer,” she informed Sykes with a drawling, shrewish voice, “You’re going to have to pay rent for the chair.”
“I plan on staying here a long time,” Sykes said, regarding the waitress solemnly. “I’m waiting for a friend.”
She frowned as though she had been thwarted out of some great prize, although what had passed between them was extraordinarily lukewarm and mild, and huffed away to give a woman a refill on her coffee. From the way the woman’s hand was trembling on the mug, Sykes decided that she had already had many more mugs of coffee than he had had. Taking slow sips of the coffee in a habitual test of the temperature that was not needed with this cold, grainy stuff, he watched out the window next to him with mild interest. He was, in fact, waiting for his friend; it was not some cock-and-bull story made up to aggravate and/or appease the waitress. Well, the man he was waiting for wasn’t really his friend. Most did not find it in their best interest to really associate with the man; even fewer to call Jeff Bauer their friend. Sykes associated himself with Bauer only because of the money that came from doing small favors for him. Oftentimes, Bauer would meet up with Sykes only to tell him to cart one load of “illegal” substances from one place to the next. He almost never told him to do anything more important than that. He had been working part time for Bauer for five years, and he couldn’t remember the last time he had been asked to kill somebody. He didn’t think he had ever been asked to do that by Bauer, but he knew that he had killed his share of people. Never innocent people; Sykes was a stern man, but he wasn’t made of ice, but always fat cat business men who thought they could make a mint off the rogue businesses floating around the world. Sometimes, he had even been paid to take out the leaders of those rogue businesses. Sykes didn’t mind. Money was money, dirty or clean. It didn’t matter how he got it. Oh, it may have mattered thirty years ago, when he was still a kid, but now it didn’t matter at all. A lot can change in thirty years. Sykes learned that the easy way, from his Yat-del instructor. Daniel, his name had been. Sykes had always called him Danny just to piss him off. He smiled thinking of it, and started when a sour voice came from his left.
“What are you smiling at?” It was Bauer.
“Jeff!” Sykes exclaimed, the grin on his face widening. “You finally made it. It took you long enough.”
Bauer sat down, the sour apple expression still on his face. “Traffic was bad,” he said shortly.
“I don’t care about that,” Sykes said. “What I care about is why you told me to meet you here today. What am I trafficking today? Crack? Illegal immigrants from off-planet? Exotic hookers?” The almost silly smile was still on his face. Bauer was a fun man.
“None of that,” Bauer said, waving a thick fingered hand dismissively. “I’ve got a different kind of request, with a different kind of pay. Better pay, actually.”
“Better for me, or better for you?” Sykes leaned back, his hands hooked behind his head.
“Better for you, definitely,” Bauer replied. “Although the job will benefit me greatly.”
“Cut the bullshit and tell me what to do.”
Bauer sighed. “I want you to track down a man for me. I want you to track him down and bring him to me. Alive, if it’s at all possible. This man is going to be very important in the next few years.”
“Well?” Sykes drummed his fingers impatiently on the table. “Who is he?”
“I would have gotten to that already if you didn’t keep interrupting me. Anyways, his name is Seth Winter. He owns a pawnshop selling old relics from the twentieth century in downtown Engelville.”
Sykes was laughing at the name.
“What’s so goddamned funny?” Bauer demanded.
“I know Seth Winter,” Sykes said, wiping at the tears leaking from his eyes. “I taught him when I was working at the Yat-del center. He was the most hopeless student I’ve ever seen. When I left five years ago for my ‘life of crime,’ he was fourteen and still practicing with the nine year olds. The nine year olds were winning.”
“I don’t care how good he is at this Dat-yel nonsense, all I care is that you get him for me.”
“I don’t doubt that you want the Winter kid very much, but I don’t see how he can be important at all. He owns a pawnshop for Christ’s sake.” Sykes didn’t correct Bauer about Yat-del.
“Look, I don’t care what the back story on the kid is, okay Sykes? All I care about is you getting him to me alive, and get him to me quickly. It’s not your job to collect information on everything I tell you to do. Your position with me isn’t as firm as you’d like to believe. None of my colleagues would care if I blew your head off right now, and frankly, neither would I. There are thousands of other people perfectly willing to carry my goods everywhere.”
“Ah, but how many of those thousands keep your secrets as well as I do?” Sykes asked quietly. He wasn’t worried about his position with Bauer; Bauer wouldn’t fire him if his own life depended on it. It was just always nice to try and get the upper hand with Bauer. The man was deliciously fun to toy with.
Bauer flushed. “Just get the kid, okay? Slip some roofies into his drink, sneak up behind him and bash him over the head, I don’t care how you do it, just do it. And don’t go prying where your fingers might get smashed, alright?”
“Aye-aye, captain,” Sykes said solemnly. Bauer frowned, peering at the man in the orange hat uncertainly for a moment, before shaking his head and getting up and leaving. Sykes leaned back in the booth, his hands twined behind his head again. This job would be easier than trafficking hookers, which was pretty damn easy. And the good thing about it was that he would get paid extra, maybe even double, for doing it. Sometimes Bauer was good for more than just toying with.

----------------------

Nick Graves drummed his fingers on his thigh as he stared aimlessly at the inside of the bathroom stall. Despite the signs he had hung that stated “no graffiti inside the building,” the walls were coated with large bubble letters in neon colors. They all overlapped each other, but a few of them were almost readable. Graves thought one of them read “bitch master.”

The door to the bathroom banged open and two pairs of shoes - heavy boots - clunked into the bathroom. Graves heard two male voices begin to blabber in rapid Spanish.
“Spanish,” he muttered to himself. “I didn’t know anybody still spoke Spanish.” Then, louder, “I’m trying to shit, damn it.” His voice came out in a hoarse growl that betrayed his years more than the minimal lines around his mouth.
The Spanish talking quit for a few moments, and then the boots moved towards the stall Graves was in. Four brown fingers appeared on the top of the stall door, and then it slowly creaked open. Damn broken latches. He hastily moved to shield his crotch from their view, and made to pull up his pants. He glared at them, eyes darting from first one and then to the other.
“I’m taking a dump. What the hell are you doing?” The Mexicans exchanged a grin.
“The gringo has a colorful mouth,” the taller of the two said.
“Very colorful,” the other agreed. “Especially when you compare it to his pasty ass.” They chortled as if it was some great joke, although Graves knew it was relatively weak, especially for Mexicans. He buttoned his pants and pushed past the Mexicans, and turned on the faucet. Pumping soap onto his hands, although it was unnecessary as no transactions had actually taken place between him and the toilet, he began to wash his hands, all the while looking over his shoulder to glare at the Mexicans, who were leaning on his deserted stall. Graves wished that he had taken a dump, and then he could have made them eat his shit. See if they had those shit-eating grins then. He dried his hands and then turned around to face them.
“What are you doing?” he snapped at them. “Waiting for me to leave so you can take samples of my piss for a drug test? I hate to break it to you, but whatever you’ve heard from my customers, I don’t pee on the seat, and even if I did, it wouldn’t be at my store. I have to pay the maids, you know.”

He opened the door to leave the bathroom and ask Maya to order security into the bathroom to take care of them. The Mexicans weren’t doing anything wrong, really, but Graves thought that maybe they were illegal immigrants, and if they were, it’d be quite nice to land them in jail. However, before he could open the door more than a crack, pain exploded between his eyes and he crumpled to the ground. Before he passed out, the face of the first one who had spoken to him appeared above his.
“That’s for flushing our crack down the toilet, gringo,” the Mexican said, and then casually stepped over Graves and out the door. His last image before everything went black was of the second Mexican following suite.

When he came to later, he was back in his apartment and somebody was dabbing at the bridge of his nose with a damp washcloth. Somebody had taken his contacts out, and so he couldn’t see whoever it was. Squinting angrily, he shoved the person away and fumbled around on the nightstand for his contacts. He shoved them in as quickly as possible, blinked rapidly, and then groaned.
“What are you doing here, Mona?” he asked. The woman he had shoved looked taken aback.
“It’s normal time, Nicky,” Mona said, blinking slowly. As always, he couldn’t tell whether she looked more menacing with her golden eyes visible or hidden under black lids that blended into the rest of her skin.
“Oh.” His eyes fell from her face to the rest of her, which was, as always, naked. It was sometimes hard to tell with off-planet women, because oftentimes they were shaped like Earth women and sometimes they weren’t, and sometimes they simply had a membrane of tough skin all over that was as good as clothing to them. Mona was one of the latter, and while Graves had been confused when he first met her three years back, he knew now. It used to embarrass him that she walked around with no clothes on, but he had accepted it long ago as simply something she did. It wasn’t as though she had nipples or anything like that, although her breasts were rather large. That was the reason he had hired her in the first place. Graves had always appreciated breasts more than anything else. Richie Sykes liked big, light, apricot-shaped eyes, and another long-time customer of his, Stephan Marsh, always said he wouldn’t make the first move on a woman if she had legs that weren’t pleasing to the eye, but Graves wasn’t that picky. A woman could be a complete hag, but if she had nice breasts, he’d take her.

Not that Mona was a complete hag. She was actually quite pretty, if one could get past the fact that she was an alien. She didn’t have any hair on her head, or anywhere else for that matter (and if anybody were to know where she did and did not have hair, it would be Graves; she had been his whore for three years), but whereas most women would look incomplete or silly without hair, she looked simply more exotic, if that was even possible. Black skin with red accents on her arms, legs, palms, and the soles of her feet wasn’t exactly normal, at least not for Earth women. Graves supposed it was normal to have strange colored skin on her home planet: he had seen several women who looked similar to her in their high cheekbones and in their lack of hair, and they had been colored similarly, although not in black and red. Some had been blue and purple, others white and silver. It all depended on genetics, Graves supposed, just like Earth people had different hair and eye and skin colors based on their parents’ hair and eye and skin colors.

Graves realized that he had a cigarette held in his fingers, and his hand was trembling so badly that Mona had to chase the tip with the lighter before she got it lit.
“Thanks,” he said to her, and she nodded, sniffing slightly. He took a few calming puffs on the smoke and exhaled with relief. “So what really happened?” he asked Mona, who was stretching luxuriously next to him on the bed. “The last thing I remember is the fucker telling me that he had a stash of crack in my toilet.”
“You’re missing a lot,” she said. “Maya heard you crash to the ground; you make a big thud, and she got some ice on your face.” A grimace contorted her own face, the golden eyes disappearing under lids the same color as the surrounding skin. “If she hadn’t of, you’d be so swollen up right now I don’t think even I’d want to fuck you, and I’m not the pickiest of people. Anyways, I came a few minutes later, and took you back here. You’ve been out cold for four hours.” She shrugged. “Not a very long time, but just enough to irritate you. I won’t charge you for those four. You weren’t even awake.”
“When have you ever overcharged me, Mona?” he asked, rubbing the cigarette butt regretfully into the ashtray next to his bed and lighting another. “That’s why I like you. You’re a fair dealer.”
“I’d like to think you like me for more than my fair prices,” Mona said, sounding so convincingly hurt that for a moment Graves’ bleary mind thought that he actually had hurt her feelings. Then, she was on top of him, one arm on either side of him, both legs on one side of him, mouth on his. He hurriedly snuffed the newly lit cigarette in his hand and they began.

-cont-

[Robin]

Exotic dancers sure aren’t what they used to be, Richie Sykes thought musingly as he watched the off-planet woman gyrating on stage, the bells tied to her ankles jingling in tune with the faint music playing backstage. It was definitely very old; the quality was awful, and the instruments they were using seemed very primitive. Sykes wanted to call them guitars, but he couldn’t really remember. He had never been one for the cultural aspect of History class. Nobody cared in the 20th century that some savages clinked two pieces of wood together and made the first song some thousand years ago, and nobody cared now that some grimy middle-aged men claiming to be artists picked some strings on a piece of wood and made the millionth song some three hundred years ago. Sykes supposed that if he had been interested in even modern day music, he would have been at least awake during the teacher’s lecture on the rise of late 20th century music, but he didn’t give much of a damn about history unless the subject interested him, and even then things were iffy.

The one thing that he had suffered himself to learn about was 20th century weapons and crime. The design of many of the weapons had remained pretty much the same, except that instead of metal pellets that killed very slowly unless you hit someone in the sweet spot, they shot a variety of things. Poison, ignite-on-contact fire pellets, acid, lasers, and for the guy who liked to do things old school, metal pellets that release poison once they’re embedded in flesh. Sykes preferred the poison release pellets, himself; the other ones tended to make a lot of noise and a lot of mess, especially in tight spaces. And besides, Sykes was no assassin. He was, on occasion, a murderer, and sometimes violence was required in order for him to commit smaller crimes, but if Sykes were to go to a store and call himself an assassin, he would be laughed at. Sykes didn’t make many mistakes, but he certainly wasn’t a streamlined killing machine, and assassins don’t have room for any fumbling or mistakes of any kind. Besides, even if Sykes could be an assassin, he wouldn’t want to be one. Killing didn’t bother him, but he didn’t like killing. He didn’t even get much of a thrill out of it.

Crime, too, he had studied. He had mostly studied about smuggling between the 18th and 20th centuries, but he had also briefly read about the nightlife of the years before the world had gone to hell. The clubs had been much different from how they were. The strippers and prostitutes were human women, Earth women, not these strange off-planet aliens they had now. It wasn’t that the off-planeters were ugly or anything, but they just didn’t really suit Sykes’ taste. He liked human women, with normal skin tones and hair in colors that actually seemed to be made by nature. Human women were so difficult to find these days. They were there, yes, but not as strippers, and not as prostitutes. All the human women would talk about was marriage and security and preserving the race. Sykes didn’t blame them, for there were already a multitude of alien-human crosses running around, but he didn’t personally see the need to “preserve the race.” After all, the aliens were often superior to the humans in many ways: it was only because of their docility and the humans’ superior weaponry that had allowed Earth to conquer the few slave planets it owned before all forms of government had crumbled.

“Weapons, weapons,” Sykes murmured to himself. He had meant to stop by Nick Graves’ shop to buy some fresh ones for his most recent assignment from Bauer, the one about the Winter kid, but Graves hadn’t been there when we went, just his air-headed assistant, Maya or Kaya or whatever her name was. He refused to buy guns or weapons of any sort except from Graves, simply because he was a fair dealer and gave the best quality for cheapest. When he had asked the Maya chick why her boss wasn’t there, she had shuffled her feet and said that he was “busy.” Sykes had assumed that he was with his long-time whore, Mona or Mina or something like that. He had never really paid attention to the woman’s name because she was getting on in years and, more importantly, because she was an off-planet woman.

Sykes sighed and stretched his arms over his head, yawning. A customer of the same shop he got his weapons at, Stephan Marsh, had taken a wife from one of those alien slave planets. She had actually been very pretty, and pretty human looking besides her eyes. They had been so blue that they were almost purple, and were a violet color in the right light. It was a shame the way she had been killed, with a bullet wound through her forehead. She probably hadn’t even felt the damn thing cut through her brains. When she had died, Stephan had come to Sykes and asked him if it had been Bauer’s work, and it had pained Sykes to tell him that he didn’t know. Bauer didn’t tell him about his assassin work. It would have been better if he had been able to tell Stephan who had ordered his wife dead, but he had not known. For all Sykes knew, whoever had killed her had been some amateur robber who was too stupid to know when somebody was home or not, but that would have hurt Stephan more than helped him. When somebody puts a bullet in your wife’s brain, you want to believe that she was killed for a reason more important than the cubic zirconium on her finger and the paste pearls on her neck.

He was jostled out of his reverie by the elbow of a plump waitress chewing on a cigarette butt.
“You gonna sit there all day staring at the ceiling, buddy? ‘Cause if you are, you aren’t looking at the girls, and if you aren’t looking at the girls, you aren’t paying, and that’s stealing.” One of her rounded arms was holding up an empty tray; the free one was nestled in the hollow of her waist.
“A lot of people have been telling me I’m stealing, these days,” Sykes replied, stretching his arms out behind his head. “Just as well, I suppose. I felt like an interloper before.”
The waitress frowned. “You a smuggler, buddy?”
“Do you go around accusing all your customers of felony?” The cheeky grin that he had worn when dealer with Bauer about the Winter kid was back.
“You said…” she began, and then shook her head. “I only asked because we’re always looking for new girls, and they’re hard to find just wandering the streets. If they don’t get a job within the first week they’re on Earth, they usually end up getting found and deported.”
“I see.” The grin slowly faded, and he tugged his cap tight on his head.. He pulled a scrap of paper out of his pocket and scribbled down his name and number on it. “I’ll tell you what…Ruthie,” he said, leaning in to look at her name tag. Ruthie. That had been his wife’s name. She had given him the orange hat. “Give this to your manager, and tell him to give me a call when he needs me. I’m a little tied up right now, but I’ll be available a week from now.”
“She,” Ruthie corrected. “My boss’s a woman. An off-planet woman. She could get new girls easy enough if she wanted to, but she don’t want to draw more attention to herself than she needs to.” She took the paper and turned to go away, then paused and smirked. “A little tied up? Would that be why you’re pissing away your time staring at the ceiling in strip clubs?”
“Very funny,” Sykes said. “I was just leaving. Give that to your boss, okay?” He got up and pushed his chair in, and left the club, thoughts of Ruthie, his wife, floating through his head.

As he opened the door and walked outside into the damply dark street, lit by the colored neon signs that lined the streets of the neighborhood, he closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. Ruthie. She had given him the hat on his thirty-fifth birthday, saying that it would hide his bald spot nicely, trying to squeeze it onto his head and complaining that his head was too big. And he had replied that his head was all swelled up with pride for his daughter-to-be. He had been so confident that Ruthie would have a girl. Well, she did, but it didn’t live more than a few minutes, and Ruthie not longer after. Why she had died in a hospital with all the state-of-the-art technology that the hospital had, Sykes had no idea. He had threatened to sue for malpractice before the doctor had managed to convince him that they honestly had no idea what had happened. One minute she was reaching out to hold her baby and the next her blood pressure was dropping and her breathing was slowing. Septic shock, the flabbergasted doctor had called it, but Sykes suspected he only called it that because he didn’t have any better explanation for it. The symptoms resembled those of septic shock, he had said. Lazy damn doctors. If their standards for graduation hadn’t fallen so damn low, maybe they could save more people. Medicine is more than prescribing pills for osteoporosis and taking splinters out of fingers, even Sykes knew that.

“Watch where you’re going, dipshit!” A vehicle, lights flashing and horn blaring zoomed in front of Sykes. The driver leaned out the window to flip him the finger, and Sykes, resisting the backwards push of the car’s speed, returned the favor. Grumbling to himself about negligent drivers just as he was sure the driver was grumbling about air-headed pedestrians, he crossed over to the other sidewalk and continued on his way. He’d go back to his house and look up some information on the Winter kid, figure out his address and what he’d been doing besides run a pawn shop since Sykes had last seen him. Nothing much, he assumed. That kid had been a train-wreck from the start. An easy job, his judgment told him, and Sykes’s judgment was rarely wrong, except in his choice of doctors.

Ruthie…his mind whispered again, followed by a brief flash of her smiling face (why’d she have to have such beautiful eyes? his mind moaned), and he shook his head to clear it. Damn it, why was the point of all the damned technology if they couldn’t train better doctors?

--------


He drove up to the house, his hands locked on the steering wheel and impervious to his screamed commands to stop, to not go there. He knew what he would find when he got there. The door would be open; a laundry basket would be overturned under the stairs. Still, the house drew ever closer, tantalizing him with the white-washed newness of it. It looked like it had the day he had married her. One of his hands fell away from the wheel to shift the gear into park, and all the while he shrieked at himself to stop. But he didn’t stop. He unbuckled his seatbelt, took the keys out of the ignition, and got out of the car, beginning the slow walk up to the door. It was ajar, but though he could feel his eyes garbling out some twisted song of pain at the sight, his legs moved with a wooden determinedness that mirrored the carved stone of his face. Though he longed to open his mouth and scream and scream until he woke up, his mouth stayed firmly shut.

The wooden legs moved him forwards.

There it was: the laundry basket. It was overturned, like always. He could see their baby’s onesie tangled with one of her bras. Onwards the legs moved. The air took on a cold, damp feel. It felt like a tomb. And maybe it was, in a way. Nothing living was in it. She wasn’t alive, the baby wasn’t truly alive, and even he didn’t live in the house. It was a place where he slept and wept. If only he could forgo the former.

The legs gripped in the numbing vice of his dream moved him forwards.

But she wasn’t there this time. There was just a puddle of blood. The wooden legs walked right through it. He could see sticky red shoeprints following him. His dream self sat down on the couch and turned on the TV; it was Channel six news, and turned to gaze adoringly into her eyes, all pale and bloody as she was. The hole in her forehead gleamed sickly red in the dim light, and when she smiled her teeth were stained with something that may have been blood. Then, he did wrench his mouth open, but it seemed to be more of the dream self’s will than of his, for he leaned forwards and kissed her. Things were squirming in her mouth. And then, he pulled away as hastily as he could and screamed, a long, wordless shriek.

He kept screaming until he woke up and kept it up, sitting bolt upright in his bed until Ophelia, the latest woman in his life, rolled over and sleepily asked him what was wrong.
“Nothing,” he said shakily, easing back down onto his back and picking idly at his cuticles. “Just a bad dream.” Ophelia, who was still dog tired, murmured something that sound like ‘alright,’ and went back to sleep. He had kicked the blanket down almost to their knees, but her long blonde hair seemed to serve well enough for her. He looked at her back, covered with that ash-blonde hair, for a moment before rolling over and trying to get back to sleep. She was just the latest in a series of affairs he had taken on to try and fill the gap that Sylvia had left when she had died so brutally and quickly a few years back. Florence, Katie, Helen, Rosie, Phoebe, Tory…Their names played a kind of odd symphony in his head. He had left them soon after their relationships began, and had left the area soon afterwards. He doubted they missed him that much, but it was not their feelings he was ashamed about. It was Sylvia’s. Sylvia, beautiful Sylvia. He could think - or say - her name all day, and he had for many days right after her tragic death, one of the reasons they had taken Colette away from him. There had been many reasons that they had used to say he was an unfit parent. He didn’t really care anymore. Colette was nothing like her mother; she took after his side of the family. He didn’t want to be reminded of himself, he wanted to be reminded about Sylvia. It seemed that every day her face, so beautiful and so increasingly alien, would fade a little bit out of his head. He had hoped that the dreams would fade with her face, but instead they got more violent, more disrespectful to her memory.

He rolled onto his back and threw an arm over his eyes, breathing in the musky, smoky scent of the room. That would be Ophelia. Her smell permeated everything, and while it wasn’t an unpleasant smell, he did wish that it would leave with her, at least once or twice, so he could try and forget how he was betraying Sylvia. He supposed maybe he wasn’t used to human women. Sylvia hadn’t smelled like anything, except maybe like the air smells before it rains, and her smell never clung to everything. It was probably the alien in her. He certainly smelled bad enough if he didn’t shower, and his sheets certainly didn’t smell like the air before a storm.

And so slowly, gently, with the tenderness that only the dead tiredness that love-making can bring, his mind faded into little thoughts such as how his previous lovers had smelled, and whether or not they thought his smell stuck to everything. Eventually, even these thoughts faded into grayness, and he did not dream again that night.

-----

A little more than two weeks after receiving the assignment about the Winter kid from Bauer, Sykes had his whole plan figured out. It would be one of the simplest jobs he would ever do. What he had planned on doing was going to the kid’s pawn shop right before closing time, knocking him out with some chloroform, and then tying him up and throwing him in the back of his truck.
“A simple plan,” Sykes murmured to his dashboard. The tiny, silver letters on the edge of his cap reflected the green of the control panel, as did the rest of his face, giving him an eerie glow, an eerie glow that he didn’t think was suited to the plan he was about to carry out. The plan was rudimentary, even for a mercenary just starting out, and while Sykes was sure it would get the job done, he was kind of ashamed that he had thought up something so elementary. However, the fact of the matter was that he didn’t think he would come up with anything better. Seeing the woman with the same name as his dead wife at the strip club had been taxing on his mind, as well as everywhere else. He hadn’t done his laundry in a few days, and so the clothes he was wearing smelled less than pleasant, and he was in need of a shave as well as a meal. There were dark circles under his eyes and lines around his mouth and forehead that had not been there earlier, and his clothes were hanging loosely about him. “As soon as I can get this damn kid to Bauer I can work on my own problems,” he muttered to nobody in particular, peering into the rearview mirror and turning down the road that would bring him to the Winter kid’s pawn shop.

The woman beside him cleared her throat in a dangerous sort of way. He turned his head to look at her and raised an eyebrow. He had brought her along only because he didn’t like to do jobs alone and because he didn’t know how he was going to explain himself if somebody walked in while he was knocking out the Winter kid. She, that is, Maria, had always been good at talking her way out of trouble, ever since they had trained together at the Yat-Del center. And, though Sykes hated to admit it, she was better at Yat-Del than he was. If the Winter kid had any tricks up his sleeve - bodyguards or something crazy and soft like that - Maria would back him up. And, of course, she didn’t look at all like Ruthie. Ruthie had been short, slim, and dark-haired, with those dazzling hazel eyes. Maria was the exact opposite of that; tall, busty, slim but muscular, and light-haired. She had dazzling eyes, too, but hers were a dangerous blue, and they didn’t remind him of Ruthie at all. Usually, he couldn’t stand to be around any women for any period of time, simply because he could feel a bit of himself peeling away for every second he stood in their company, but Maria was alright. She wasn’t exactly sweet and accommodating, but if she had been, it would have, again, reminded him too much of his dead wife.

“Are you going to talk to me, or the dashboard all day?” she asked. “I don’t enjoy sitting in a car with nothing to do any more than anybody else does.” Her eyebrows, at least three shades darker than her hair, had almost disappeared into her hairline.
Sykes coughed and tried to hide a smile. “We’re almost there,” he told her, deciding to ignore her question. Replying to her questions, when they were aggressive, was a death sentence to all but the wittiest people, and Sykes, though he liked to think he was smarter than your average Joe, usually came out the worse for wear from their arguments.
“So that redeems you for the silence all the way here?” She sniffed in a disdained sort of way. “You didn’t even have the good grace to fix your radio before you took me away from Nathan so rudely.” One of her hands, so graceful - like model’s hands, strong only when she wanted them to be - gestured towards the antiquated radio he had equipped his car with. The only station that it picked up was the oldies station. He could just barely make out Jason Mraz lamenting about some lost love that he didn’t quite care about.
“To hell with you and your Nathan,” Sykes replied, amiably enough, taking a final puff on his cigarette before tossing it out the window. “Never could figure out what you see in him anyways.”
She crossed her arms under her breasts. “I find him very attractive, thanks very much. Just because he’s not fat and wrinkly like you and Nick, or just because he doesn’t stick so close to that Yat-Del nonsense that he bottles up all his emotions and…”
“We’re here,” he said cheerfully, cutting her off mid sentence and twisting the keys from the ignition in a very final sort of way. She glared at him, closing her mouth so firmly that he could almost hear her teeth click together. They opened their doors and got out of the car, their movements almost in unison; hers irritated and mocking, his just mocking.
“Remember the plan?” he asked her, a shit-eating grin on his face.
Her smile was molasses. “Of course I remember, dear.” She looked as though butter would not have melted in her mouth, though Sykes wasn’t sure if that was really a threatening sign, seeing as that was how she looked most of the time anyways. Still, she was fun when she was angry, and he held open the door to the pawn shop with a flourish, still grinning and barely holding back his laughter. The expression she shot him as she walked into the shop was one of utter contempt, and, barely concealed below that, amusement.

There he was, right there; the Winter kid: sitting at the counter with the same bored expression on his face that Sykes remembered seeing day after day at the Yat-Del center. Stupid kid. He could have been at least a passable practitioner if he had just paid attention some of the time. But now, what had made him fail his school was what was going to get him killed. Tragic flaw, Sykes thought. Aristotle, Socrates, all that happy crappy. The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing. Kid never listened. He shook his head and followed Maria into the shop.
“Can I help you?” Winter asked from behind the counter, mingled weariness and accommodation showing on his face. It was late at night, he supposed.
“We’re just looking,” she replied coldly, and Sykes stepped up behind her.
“We’re looking,” he amended, looking daggers at her, “for a ring. We’re a little tight on money right now, and since Maria here’s always liked old things, so we figured a pawn shop would be the right place.”
“Well, you have come to the right place,” Winter told them, with about half the flair and gusto of any other proper salesman. While he was bumbling around for something, Maria asked him where the little girl’s room was. When he pointed somewhere near the back, she merely walked casually behind the counter - he couldn’t notice with his head buried in a box - and knocked him out with a swift, sharp blow of the side of her hand to the back of his neck. He crumpled with almost disappointing swiftness.

“I thought you agreed to use the chloroform,” Sykes said, coming up behind Maria and surveying the Winter kid.
“I didn’t buy any.” She shrugged. “Quicker this way, anyways, with the way some people’s lungs are getting used to chemicals. I tried to use chloroform on this guy last week, and it took at least two minutes before he even got woozy.” She grimaced. “He nearly broke my nose trying to get away.”
“Fair enough,” he replied, reaching down to grab the Winter kid by his legs. “I’ll drag him out to the car and get him trussed up in the back, and you can go check for security cameras. If there are any, take the tapes from them.”
“Like anybody’s going to look at them,” she snorted, but complied.

Sykes bumped his ass on the corner of the counter when he was trying to drag the Winter kid out of the shop, and cursed a round curse that caused Maria to laugh from the back room where she was, presumably, sorting through the tapes. Other than that, he wasn’t held up that much. The kid hadn’t gained much weight since he had been training at the Yat-Del center - Sykes marked him at maybe a hundred thirty pounds, soaking wet - and Sykes easily dragged him to the car and plopped him inside. He thought about hog-tying him, and then figured that it would be cruel to do so when the kid was so painfully unskilled, and just bound his wrists and ankles tightly with lengths of yellow cording that he had had Maria pick up from the store earlier. He tested them to make sure they would hold, grunted in satisfaction, and added the final touch: a gag. He stuffed a sock into the kid’s mouth and secured it with duct tape. Not a very advanced technique, but it worked, and he just didn’t have the enthusiasm to do anything different. He slammed the door shut and was about to walk inside to get Maria when she walked out, brandishing a small disc at him.
“Security tape,” she said, tossing it at him. He caught it neatly out of the air and examined it. It was nothing special, and nothing state-of-the-art: Sykes had seen better in a poor man’s Nanny cam. It glittered softly in the moonlight, and he shrugged and tucked it into his pocket.
“Maybe Bauer will pay extra for this,” he explained, hopping into the car. She snorted.
“I doubt it. Bauer’s not stingy, but when has he ever given you a bonus?” He opened his mouth to reply that he had received a bonus on several occasions for transporting large groups of illegal hookers, but then decided against it. That may have spurred a feminist rant that would have lasted the whole car ride to Bauer’s office and maybe a little while after.

As it was, she gibbered incessantly about how he should fix his radio, and, after she had tired out the subject of his laziness, how they needed to play good oldies. Sykes chose not to comment.

-cont-

[Robin]

He had been born as Jonathan Blackburn on May first 5015, but nobody called him that anymore. It wasn’t even on his exit visa. The name on his exist visa was Isaac Shepard, but he didn’t go by that, either. He had been orphaned at a young age by an act of random violence, and had been left wandering the streets for a few weeks during the year he was six, and at the end of those few weeks had been taken in by a middle aged couple who called themselves Scarlet and Red, a couple who ran what could be called, for lack of better words, a gang of sneak-thieves. They took in young boys who were homeless or orphaned, and trained them to be pickpockets. Eventually, the boys left the couple as they got older, presumably to pursue either more honest careers or more dastardly ones. When he had been taken in by Scarlet and Red when he was six years old, they had started calling him Reuben, and after that Ruby, and the nickname soon progressed into an even shorter version of that: Rube. It wasn’t the coolest nickname in the world, but it was a nickname, gotten out of kinship with the other boys that Scarlet and Red had taken under their wing, and kept out of a unifying sort of fear of the law. They were brothers.

One of these ‘brothers’ came up behind Rube and gave him a light, friendly shove on the shoulder, a smile creasing his face.
“Hey, Rube,” he said. “How’re your rounds going today? Mine are going excellent.” He said the last word with such an inflection that it would be obvious even to somebody who was literally rube that he was poking fun at Scarlet. With a mischievous grin, he opened his coat and pulled out a woman’s purse. From the way it hung heavily from his hand, Rube guessed that it was filled generously. Most of its content would be worthless things, of course: makeup, and compact mirrors, and bits of random objects that the previous owner had just dumped in the bag, but some would be valuable. A purse that heavy would have a cell phone in it - a very old cell phone to be so heavy, but a cell phone nevertheless, and a wallet generously lined with money and credit cards.
“Where’d you go to get that, Milton?” he asked his friend incredulously, using Milti’s hated given name as a method of torture. Milti simply shook his head, ignoring the word, pressing a finger to his lips in a sign of secrecy as he returned the purse to a pocket inside his coat.
“It’s a secret,” he said, managing to keep his eyes dark and solemn. “I’d get myself into trouble if I told you.”
“Everything we do could get us in trouble.” Rube was now regarding Milti with a mixture of amusement and irritation. He always enjoyed playing this pointless game of deceit, and while he was sure that it gave Milti an extra edge when dealing with somebody who wouldn’t be fooled by ‘do you have the time, sir,’ it was a very irritating game when he chose to practice on you.
“Fair enough. But I’m not going to tell you who I lifted it from. You’ll just tell Roadie, and Roadie’ll tell everyone else, and then I’ll have everyone stealing all my turf.”
Rube grimaced. It was true. As much as Milti liked to play the fool, he was definitely more observant than most people gave him credit for.
“So what did you manage to get this morning, Rube?” he was asking.
“Not much,” he admitted slowly, digging around in the inside pockets of his coat and managing to fish out his only loot from the morning: a bracelet that he suspected was silver washed with gold. Milti whistled.
“Bad luck, eh? Or are you distracted about something?”
“I don’t know, it’s just…” Rube shook his head. “I don’t know,” he finished lamely. “Bad luck, I guess. Everybody’s watching their backs like hawks. I wonder if there’s been another robbery somewhere.”
Milti nodded sagely, a content expression on his face. “It looks like we’re about to find out.” He pointed towards a growing throng of people about the front of the electronics store, which boasted two widescreen television sets in the display windows. Many people were simply checking the News on their phones, which had become, as the years went on, progressively more confusing, more advanced, and more expensive, but none of the people that were squirming for a better view of the latest breaking news were rich enough to afford one of these phones. Scarlet and Red themselves had only one between them, though, arguably, they did only take the scant profits from the gang, spending the rest on feeding, clothing, and sheltering the boys. As it was, neither Rube nor Milti had one of these portable televisions, and had to be content with pushing their way through the crowd until they were both up front, their noses nearly pressed against the glass with the pressure and anxiety of the crowd behind them. The crowd was silent, an odd change that Rube wasn’t quite sure was for the better, and he frowned as it was back to Michelle Jordan, who began talking about breaking news.

“Thanks, Robert. There has been a rash of police raids in the slum areas of town that are meant to flush out any inhabitants who don’t have papers. They have released a list of those groups they will be targeting specifically.” Michelle paused for a moment as the screen cut from her face to a list of different groups. “The list includes, but is not limited to: aliens from all foreign planets except for Ormud and Yorfyl, unregistered human citizens of the United States, unregistered human immigrants to the United States, unregistered criminals of all classes, and families consisting of more than six people. The police will not release any more information until the day of the raid…” Rube shook his head and dragged Milti away from the window, pushing through the crowd of people and ignoring the acid stares and hushed hisses of “watch where you’re going, kid!”
“Why’d you take me away?” Milti asked sulkily when they were out of the cluster of people. “She was just getting to the good part.”
“I took you away because we have to go tell Scarlet about this.”
“Why? She’d tell us if she wanted information about the raid.”
“Maybe she doesn’t know about it, and if she does, she probably doesn’t know to what extent their going. At the very least, they’ll look in on the whole gang as a family with more than six people in it, and when they do that, they’ll find that all of us have fake visas and then they’ll find out how many small crimes we’re responsible for, and then they’ll throw us in jail.” Rube’s eyes were serious and tinged with a touch of irritation. There was nothing wrong with Milti and his games, but it sometimes irritated him that he didn’t know when to stop. Oh, it could be funny at times, there was no doubting that, but when you sit there going on and on and on with your charade, it gets bad.
“That’s stupid,” he retorted. “They wouldn’t throw kids in jail.”
“Yeah, but they’d throw Scarlet and Red in jail, and then we’d be out of a job, and out of a home. That’d be worse than jail, and they know it.”

Milti was quiet for a moment, absorbing it with none of his usual song and dance, and then nodded, reluctantly; as though he was loathe to break the magic of his show.
“Let’s go back,” he said. “Here.” He reached into his coat and pulled out the cell phone from the woman’s purse he had stolen earlier. “Take this so Red doesn’t breathe down your neck all week. It’s not likely that he would anyways but…” he trailed off, and shrugged. “Better safe than sorry.”
“Thanks, Milt” Rube replied, tucking the cell phone into his own coat with a swiftness that bespoke the training he had received from Scarlet and Red more so than did his speech to Milti.

Together, sauntering like a pair of disgruntled wolves, they made their way towards the home they shared with six other boys, Scarlet, and Red.
------

Nick Graves woke the morning after Sykes and Maria pulled off their kidnapping the same way he always woke up: next to Mona. He sat up and stretched his arms out over his head, lighting up a cigarette with the same casualness that he made love to Mona, and taking a puff with trembling lips that betrayed the falseness of his indifference more than any words could. As the acrid smell of the smoke curled around the room, Mona stirred and groaned, coughing dramatically into her hand and pretending to retch over the side of the bed.
“Stop being such a baby,” he said mildly, inhaling a delicate lungful of smoke and taking great care to blow it in her direction. He didn’t care much one way or another on the still hotly debated topic of smoking; the air was getting polluted one way or another, and he might as well pollute it in a way he enjoyed, but he took especial pleasure in pissing off people who were so opposed to cigarettes that they went so far as to make up medical conditions to get people to quit smoking in their presence.
“I’m not being a baby, you are,” she retorted, her eyes flashing hotly, though the sensual curve of her lips betrayed another emotion. “Sucking on that thing like it’s a bottle. I’ve never seen anybody so dependent on anything in my life.”
“But aren’t you dependent on se-…” He broke off at an amused, reproving glance from her, and took another drag on the cigarette. “You gonna shower this morning?” he asked. “I need one desperately.” She leaned over and tousled his hair and then rubbed her fingers together as though it was greasy.
“Yeah, you do. You’ll get lice if you aren’t careful.” He smiled at the old joke. Lice had become a problem that was nearly inconceivable to those who weren’t living on the streets. Before, anybody could get lice, but not, it was reserved for the lower classes. Graves felt bad for them to some extent, but dominant in those emotions was relief that it wasn’t him.
“I take it that’s a no?”
“I don’t need a shower. I don’t leak grease out of my pores like sweat.” She smiled. “And you forget, Nicky, that I don’t have any hair. Life’s a lot easier when it’s just skin to take care of.” She grimaced, and rubbed at her arm. “Although you do go through a lot of lotion. Mind if I use some of yours?”
“Never,” he replied, snuffing the cigarette butt in the tray by his bed and rolling out of bed with a thud that he was sure made the residents of the apartment below him wonder if they were being bombed. She got out of bed almost as quickly, and followed him into the bathroom where she stood with her hands on her hips and watched him undress.
“Ass getting a little saggy, love?” she asked softly, and he frowned and turned around, clapping two hands over his bottom.
“Why do you care? I pay you, don’t I?”
“Not at all,” she replied airily. “It’s just I think that a little exercise would do you good.”
“I’ll take a walk after my shower,” he said shortly, hopping in and closing the door with a suspicious glance at Mona. She was grinning and rubbing lotion into her legs.

When he had finished and dressed, they went for a walk.

-------

“A raid,” Scarlet said flatly. “A raid.”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” Rube asked. He was standing with his arms crossed over his chest in front of Scarlet who, though she was a woman, was taller than him by about five inches and probably outweighed him, too. She was not a fat woman, nor one particularly bulky, but despite her almost bird-like thinness she gave off not an aura of fragility or delicacy but one of being predominantly wild and red, of being a creature that should never have been taken into society and half-tamed. Down to her hair and clothing, she seemed this way, with her carrot-orange hair always in loopy tangles and tied back with a handkerchief that sometimes matched the clothing that she seemed to tie around herself each morning so carelessly but seldom did. She was an imposing woman, to say the least.
“Don’t get cute with me, Rube,” she said dryly, and though she kept her face carefully composed in a stern expression, he could tell by the tapping of her long foot on the floor that she was somewhat amused by the whole thing. “When is the raid?” Rube shrugged.
“Milt and I had to leave before we heard it.” She opened her mouth to reply scathingly, but he kept talking right over her. “You have a phone, don’t you? Why don’t you look it up?” She grimaced, and dug around in a pocket for the phone. After punching a few buttons, she sighed and put it away.
“They’re raiding our section Friday. We’ll have to get out before then.”
Rube whistled slowly, lowly. “That’s three days,” he said flatly. “That’s not enough time.”
“We’ll make it work,” she snapped. “Tell the other boys to start cleaning out their stashes and stuff. We’ll leave on Thursday. Red and I will figure out somewhere to go.”
Milti opened his mouth to protest. “Stashes? How do you know about them?” Rube elbowed him in the ribs, and he winced.
A grin slid across Scarlet’s face. “Red’s not as cloud-headed as you think he is,” she said, and went off to go plan with him.

------

“I’m very grateful that you did this assignment for me, Sykes,” Bauer said to Richie Sykes as they sat in his office, looking out through the one-way mirror to the room where the Winter kid was restrained in a chair. “And you, too, Maria.” For some reason, Bauer always called Maria by her first name instead of her last. Sykes thought that it would be more professional if he had just called her Morales, but he supposed that the man harbored a bit of attraction towards her and wanted any excuse to be closer to her. He didn’t blame him. He had found himself wondering, before he had met Ruthie, if he would ever have a shot at Maria. He didn’t think he ever would.
“When will we be paid?” Sykes asked, and Bauer grimaced.
“I’ll send you a check in the mail tomorrow,” he said, and motioned for them to turn to look out the window. “I’m going to show you why we needed this kid.”

Two gray clad soldiers - Bauer’s men, Sykes knew, the ones that he paid extra to sit around and do nothing - were walking into the room. The Winter kid was watching them warily and with a tinge of confusion in his eyes, as if he didn’t quite know where he was or what was going on. They began talking, the kid replying hesitantly and the soldiers talking in short clipped phrases. Sykes didn’t pay much attention; it seemed to him pointless, political banter, and then one of the soldiers brought a hand striking quickly across the kid’s face, sending a thin trickle of blood from his mouth where his lips had mashed against his teeth.

Sykes whistled appreciatively and glanced questioningly at Bauer, who was sitting there with a small smile on his face as if he knew something they didn’t know. He probably did, from all the crap he liked to put on. He wasn’t a mystery man, or anybody really important, so Sykes didn’t really understand why he put up such a show.

More talking. The soldiers hit the kid some more and about fifteen minutes into the whole thing one of them drew out a gun and shot the kid in the hand. This time, Winter yelled so loud that the three behind the mirror could hear it.
“What the fuck was that for?”
Sykes raised an eyebrow at Bauer. “What the fuck was that for?” he asked of him, but Bauer pressed a finger to his lips in a motion for silence. Sykes turned to Maria and gave her a beseeching look; she shrugged helplessly and motioned for him to be quiet, too. He snorted to himself and thought for a moment before he turned back to where the Winter kid was getting the shit beat out of him that Bauer and Maria would be perfect for each other. He watched disinterestedly as the mildly attractive boy got turned into hamburger.

When he was slumped over in the chair and didn’t appear to be alive save for the rise and fall of his chest, the two men walked out of the room. Bauer turned to them with a small smile on his face.
“So,” he said. “what did you think?”
“I think it was stupid,” Sykes replied. “And I think you need to tell us what the point of that was.” Maria nodded her assent next to him, and Bauer’s grin widened. It slid across his face like oil across water.
“Practice,” he said simply, and got up and left, leaving the two smugglers to marinate in the confused tension that had settled over the room with his leaving.

-----
Since they had decided to move on Thursday, Rube and Milti had gone out on their rounds together. The law had been known to pick up vagabonds they saw wandering around alone, just to see what they knew. It had been going on long before anarchy had spread over the world, but it had gotten worse now so that whoever had been in power before was trying desperately to have that power back. So, the two had decided that, at least until things had quieted down, it would be best to go out together.

Rube reached out and deftly snagged a wallet that was poking haphazardly out of a businessman’s back pocket. He grinned and tucked it into one of the inner pockets of his coat, and Milti flashed a grin back.
“Nice one,” he commented. “The idiot didn’t even notice that his wallet was missing.”
“I know,” Rube replied. “What kind of moron leaves their wallet sticking halfway out of their pocket, anyways?” He thrust the wallet into his back pocket, leaving it sticking out a great deal more than the businessman’s had been, and did a little strut with his hands on his hips. “Look at me, I make a six figure income. I went to college for four years and have fourteen different credit cards in my real leather wallet. I leave it sticking out of my pocket because I’m a fancy businessman, nobody would dare take it, and if gravity decides to pull it out, well gosh darn it, somebody’s going to die!” Milti snorted and shook his head, leaning over casually to snatch the wallet from the back pocket of a man about to buy a hotdog.

Rube looked over at about the same moment that the man reached back for his wallet and his and Milti’s fingers collided and opened his mouth to tell Milti to lay off when the man roared to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing. It was a blur at the moment, but later he would remember with startling clearness how the man had whipped around and delivered a walloping blow to Milti, knocking him to the ground and causing him to yelp in surprise and pain.
“Police!” the man yelled. “Somebody! These kids here tried to rob me!” At that point, Rube battled between abandoning Milti and abandoning the gang, and had decided that the latter was the lesser of two evils. Tucking his earlier victim’s wallet safe inside his back pocket, he rushed in between the two and gave the man a souvenir of his own: a punch to the eye that he reckoned would leave a pretty good bruise if the man didn’t manage to get ice on it. He was rewarded with a curse and a clop in the side of the face that sent him skidding across the concrete, dazed and satisfied. Milti had gotten to his feet, and was running over to pull him to his, his dark eyes darting around and his tongue coming out every now and then to wet his lips.
“Come on Rube,” he hissed. “Let’s get out of here before the law gets here.”
“Good idea,” he replied, taking the hand that the other offered and rubbing at the side of his face ruefully. “Say, where’d that man guh-“ He was cut off as both he and Milti were flung to the ground, Milt by the man he had tried to burglarize, and he by some person he didn’t know was involved. The newcomer said something about damn pickpockets, and kicked out into his stomach, knocking the breath out of him. He managed to squirm to his feet, and looked around frantically for Milti. Spotting him, he moved forwards to try and pull him from the man’s grip on his neck, but the newcomer grabbed him by the wrist. He twisted around to try and get free, but the newcomer yanked his arm back and upwards so quickly that he didn’t feel the pain until something gave in his shoulder and the man let go. Pain exploded in a hot wave and sent him to his knees. The sounds around him seemed to fuzz, the images to dim. He didn’t know if he could move the arm, and he didn’t think he wanted to find out. Two of the shapes that had begun to blur together separated, and he thought it was Milti and the man he had tried to pickpocket. Milti stumbled over to him and yanked him to his feet. The world tilted dizzily, and the other boy’s mouth was moving, saying something, and then they were both on the ground. There was a searing ember of pain in his arm that seemed to wish to compensate for the numbness of the rest of it.

Rube turned to try and see if Milti was all right, but he wasn’t there. The other boy was being dragged into a white car by two men in gray uniforms with guns. He moved forwards to try and pull Milti away from them, but one of them just swung around and pushed him away roughly, rapping at him with the butt of his gun. He floundered backwards and sat down hard, his head whirling and his eyes refusing to focus on one thing for any length of time. Awareness faded into a dim recording of the events around him, and then completely as two people crouched down in front of him.

------

“Jesus, Nick, what do you think happened to the kid?” Mona asked as they crouched in front of the semi-conscious boy who had propped himself up against an ancient fire hydrant. Graves shrugged, gently peeling back the boy’s coat sleeve to peer at the bullet hole there.
“He tangoed with the wrong guy, I guess.” She looked at him worriedly. It wasn’t that she was any more compassionate than any other person - or alien - out there, but it would strike a bad note in anybody’s mind to leave a kid on the side of the road to bleed to death, or to wake up in jail for loitering.
“Do you think we should take him to the hospital or something?”
“Naw,” Graves said, taking a cigarette out of the box in his pocket and holding it, unlit, between his lips for comfort. “You take him to the hospital, folks ask questions. Start blabbing about consent of the guardian and all that happy crappy. We’ll take him back to my place until we can figure out where he lives.” He raised an eyebrow at Mona, and she nodded her assent. “Come on, kid,” he said, pulling the boy to his feet. The boy swayed for a few seconds and then ducked into the gutter and vomited, his hair catching the light as it hung into his eyes, making what Graves had marked as an auburn color reddish-orange.
“Sorry,” he murmured when he straightened, brushing strands of his hair from his eyes. “It just feels like my shoulder’s on fire.”
“That’s alright,” Graves said. “We’ll go get you fixed up.”
At that, the boy recoiled, his eyes widening. “No,” he said. “I have to go tell Scarlet that the law got Milti. I have to go tell her.” Mona looked at her lover beseechingly.
“Just come on, kid,” Graves said. “We’ll get you mopped up and then we’ll get you home. Scout’s oath.” He almost grinned at the last part. He had never been a scout in his life and the thought had never crossed his mind. The sound of it was all he liked, really, like something clean and honest from a time when kids could piddle away their time learning how to be charitable and eco-friendly. Apparently, the boy liked the sound of it, too, or he felt that Graves was trustworthy to some extent, and he relaxed, nodding and swallowing so hard that they could almost watch the progress of it down his throat. Graves took the kid’s bad arm and he and Mona began leading him back to the apartment.

It was lucky, perhaps for all of them, that he and Mona had not walked far before discovering the kid. Otherwise, he didn’t think that the boy would have made it. As it was, he stumbled and bit at his lip and the insides of his cheeks often enough that Graves would have bet that the kid was in real pain, which really didn’t take that much thought, as there was a bullet hole in his arm and his face was pale beneath a dark bruise spreading across his cheekbone. When they got him inside the apartment and offered him a chair from the kitchen table, he plopped down in it gratefully, his knees buckling so quickly that it could have been a collapse more than a sit.

While Graves bustled around in the cabinets for a roll of the Ace bandages that he always liked to keep around, Mona bent over the boy to remove his coat. It came off the right side easily, but the shoulder of it was stuck on the left side. Frowning, she tugged harder, and the boy tensed, his face tightening and lightening a few shades.
“Nick,” she said, turning around. “Something’s wrong here. His shoulder’s all swollen up.” A roll of the Ace bandages in his hand, Graves turned around and set the white fluttering things on the table.
“Let me see,” he said, and pulled the coat back as far as it would go without force. He let out a low long whistle, and the boy grimaced. “What’d you do to yourself, kid?” he asked, his eyes wandering over the blue and black flowers blooming over the boy’s shoulder.
“Fucker twisted my arm back,” he said, and his voice was coarse as the words that came out of it. He cleared his throat with difficulty and repeated himself. “Some other asshole was trying to get Milti and I tried to go help, but this one got my arm.” Graves nodded sympathetically and slowly worked the coat the rest of the way off.
“You’re lucky,” he told the boy. “The bullet went all the way through. I won’t have to dig it out.”
“You mean you’re lucky,” Mona said to Graves. “You couldn’t dig a piece of food out from between your teeth.” He grinned at her and turned back to the kid, picking up the roll of Ace bandages and beginning to bind them about the bullet-hole.
“It’s still bleeding a bit,” he explained when the boy winced. “This’ll make it stop.”

-cont-

[Robin]

When he had wrapped it to his satisfaction, he tied it off and set the remainder of the roll down. “I don’t know what to do about the shoulder, though,” he said, frowning a little. “I don’t think it’s dislocated because your arm isn’t at a weird angle, but it’s bruising up pretty bad so it’s probably broken. I could make you a sling, but then you’d be a sitting duck walking home alone with a sling.”
“You can just drive him home,” Mona sighed. “I’ll go get some of that old fabric of your mom’s that you insist on keeping in your closet.” She grinned, and he grimaced at her. When his mom had died, she had been senile and had given Graves and his sister bags of old fabric. Both of them had been completely bewildered, as had the rest of their relatives. It wasn’t exactly disappointing, though; Graves’s mother hadn’t been exactly rich, and she had left all her money to the nursing home she had been in.

Mona came back into the kitchen with a large square of fabric that she had folded into a triangle. With it, she fashioned a sling around the boy’s neck and set his arm in it. Graves thought he looked very young and very fragile. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen. The ghost of a grin flickered across the boy’s face as he folded his coat up and slung it over his good arm.
“Prom, anyone?” he asked, and laughed softly.

Graves and Mona drove the boy to where he gave them directions to, and when he got out of the car, Graves scribbled down his phone number on a piece of paper and gave it to the boy.
“Look me up if you ever need me,” he said, and rolled up the window. The boy tucked the paper solemnly into a pocket of his pants, and waved goodbye. Then, he turned into an alleyway and was gone.

“How come you never take me anywhere nice anymore, Stephan?” Ophelia complained to Stephan Marsh, her arms crossed under her breasts and her hair hanging in her eyes. The entire effect of her pose was one of a little girl trying to justify her dipping into the cookie jar before dinner, and a thin flicker of amusement fluttered across his mind.
“Too expensive,” he said, and turned back to the book he was reading, trying not to let the smell of her, permeating his nostrils, take control of his actions again. It always happened this way. They would always have one little quirk, one little smell or mannerism that would completely intoxicate him. They would strut into his life, swaying their hips, filling his eyes with their hair, his hands with their long, supple thighs, and his nose with their smell. They always had a certain scent that he couldn’t get out of his head. Florence had smelled of chamomile soap, always, even after they had finished making love, a strange habit that Helen had seemed to have, also, though it had seemed to him as though she bathed in lily water instead of chamomile. And then there were Phoebe and Tory - both had smelled so young and so fresh, the spring to Florence and Helen’s summer, with a fragrance about them that did not fade after they had sex, but simply evolved, grew into something muskier, something that suggested at the summer that they were growing into, though not without strong traces of spring still. It was as though they leaked the aroma out of their very pores, natural as sweat, but perhaps not as natural. If it had been natural, Phoebe would have smelled of real strawberries, but she did not. She had smelled like the strawberry Chap Stick that girls will wear out to ski trips so that when they kiss you, they unwittingly become the mother that they all will in the end, giving up a bit of themselves for a bit of pleasure. Nor did Tory have that natural odor to her. Sunscreen had wafted about her in a perfume that had been enough, at times, to make his head spin almost as much as Ophelia’s musky, smoky bouquet: a girl at the beach caught between flattering her natural complexion with a tan and keeping the fashionable, dewy complexion that had become fashionable since the end of the ozone crisis. This indecision, this crisis, had made Tory one of the most amazing ones of the bunch, with her smooth, slick skin and lithe limbs. She had been built like a dancer, and moved like one in bed. It had been like making love to summer. They had all been like seasons; they had all turned cold in the end. Even Ophelia, who was ripe and full and bordering at the age where she would cease to be beautiful to most men, would turn cold in the end. They always did after he stopped making love to them. They would break up, make up with some pity sex, and then break up again, and never see each other again for the rest of their lives. It was always like that.

“Are you even listening to me?” she demanded, tossing her hair back from her face and glaring at him with those charcoal gray eyes of hers. He felt his mouth pull back in a smile that just barely curved his lips and looked up at her over his book.
“I’m listening,” he said.
“Then what did I just say?” Her eyes were flashing. She was so pretty when she was angry.
“Something about me never spending enough time with you,” he said. “Although I’m not sure why you added that in there. We spend a lot of time together.” Her expression softened at that, the little crinkles around her nose disappearing and the little lines around her eyebrows evaporating. She was pretty when she was angry; she was beautiful when she was happy.
“Stephan,” she said, sitting down on the arm of the recliner he had chosen to read his book in. “I don’t know how I could ever stay mad at you. I guess I just get worked up over the little things and forget that what matters is that you love me. Right?” She smiled down at him, and he looked up and tried to mask, quite successfully, the lie in his eyes.
“Right,” he said, dog-earing his place in the book and kissing her. Her lips tasted like the vanilla creamer she put in her coffee.

------

As Jude walked down the alleyway that would, eventually, lead him to the place that Scarlet and Red’s gang called home, he clumsily untied the sling that the alien woman had tied around his neck, letting it flutter to the ground. It was awkward and made him feel clumsier than he already was. The world still twirled lazily, and his eyes didn’t seem to want to focus properly. He felt a little better since his arm had been patched up, but he knew without even looking that blood was still soaking through the bandage, and the wound throbbed dully and painfully with the beating of his heart. Now that the sling was off, it didn’t seem like it was such a good idea to take it off in the first place. His arms swung when he walked, like any normal person’s, and each pendulum period sent a sharp wave of pain from his shoulder down through his whole arm.

I should have asked for some Tylenol or something, he thought mournfully, gingerly prodding at the bandage and wishing that he hadn’t. Too late now.

Cradling his bad arm in his good one, he made his way down the alleyway, keeping close to the graffiti plastered concrete walls so as to be able to find his way. It was late afternoon, and the light was beginning to dim - it had done so earlier and earlier since they had ‘repaired’ the ozone layer by adding more O2 molecules to the stratosphere or something like that. That had been part of the reason that the world had slipped into anarchy a couple centuries before Jude was born. The same people who had protested in the streets about the UN (which had crumbled a few years before the rest of the world crumbled) needing to do something about the ozone layer had started protesting about how the UN needed to do something to stop the thickening of it.
“It’s all shit,” he murmured in the dimness, and ascended the stairs that led to the entrance to his home. He habitually tested the door handle to see if it was locked, though it was rarely needed as Scarlet believed that all doors should always be locked, and his eyes widened as the door swung open. Slowly, he walked forwards and into the front room. The lights were off there, but there was a faint glow coming from the kitchen that told him that whoever was home at the moment was in there.

He made his way into the kitchen, stumbling a little and cursing the action that jarred his shoulder, and stopped dead in his tracks. Scarlet was pacing the kitchen, mumbling and cursing to herself, a bottle clutched in one of her hands, the other hand clenched into a fist at her side. She froze when she turned and saw him, and her eyes went very wide. He could see the whites of them even before she rushed at him and grabbed him by the shoulders, impervious to the grimace that came to his face when her fingers dug into the broken shoulder.
“Where have you been?” she demanded, her face the face of a wax woman in pain. “What happened? Roadie came in and said that Milti and you got into some trouble, and that the law was involved, and then you didn’t check in when you were supposed to I…” she shook her head and looked at the bottle in her hand as though she didn’t realize she had been holding it. Setting it down on the table, she looked at him steadily, though her face still looked waxy and pale.
“Milti got caught trying to steal a man’s wallet,” Jude said, looking back at her just as steadily. “The man called for somebody to get the law, and then tackled Milti. I went in to help, but another man decided to help, and I couldn’t help him. Somebody had a gun and…” he grimaced. At that, she seemed to notice for the first time the red stained bandage on his arm.
“And you managed to get yourself hit, didn’t you?” she asked, with some of her usual pomp and cynicism back. “And you got yourself patched up. Where?”
“I don’t know the guy’s name,” Jude said. “But some guy and an alien woman picked me up and patched me up and then dropped me off here.” He held up his good hand in a gesture of appeasement. “Not here. In front of the alleyway to get here. I’m not that stupid.”
She snorted, and straightened, her hands on her hips. “I wouldn’t put it past you.”
He smiled at that until his arm seemed to get annoyed at the lack of attention he was paying it and sent a bolt of pain through his nerves, just for kicks, and the smile melted downwards into a grimace. Her eyes seemed drawn for the first time to the folded up coat over his good arm, and then to the darkening around the part of his shoulder that was showing out from under his shirt.
“What else did you do?” she groaned, grabbing him by his good shoulder and snatching the coat off his arm. She examined the hole in the left sleeve and frowned, setting it down on the table in very matter-of-fact way that told him there would be hell to pay later for ruining a perfectly good coat, and then her gaze drifted to him again. “Didn’t they see this?” she demanded of him, pointing to his shoulder. “Why didn’t you do anything about that? It’s probably broken, too, isn’t it?” She paused for a moment, eyeing him with nothing but distrust in her eyes. When he nodded, she took a deep breath and started again. “You never do anything half-way, do you? Never. I’ve never seen a boy so incapable of doing a half-ass job.” As she talked, she dug around in the duffel bag that she had had kicked under the table when he entered. The table was one of the only things left there; Jude assumed that most of it had been taken by the gang when they left.

She came up with a sling, a cheap one, but better than the makeshift one that the alien woman had made for him earlier, and arranged it on him with swift, careless movements that sent little jolts of pain up his shoulder and made him wonder why she bothered to restrain herself at all around people; when she did, it only came out in her treatment of the hurt. When she was done, he looked up at her and raised his eyebrow, and she whacked him on the back of the head.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “Let’s go. Red took the car, so we have to walk.”

He looked at her reproachfully again and she laughed.

---------------

[Robin]

“I don’t know, Sykes,” Maria said doubtfully as he sat leafing through his address book, searching for the number of the owner of the strip club that the woman with the same name as his dead wife worked. “It sounds like a pretty bad trap to me. Nobody just asks you to smuggle for them.”
He looked up from his work and raised an eyebrow at her. “Bauer does,” he said around the fat cigarette in his mouth, and turned back to the address book.
“Bauer’s not an illegal immigrant who owns a strip club, either,” she told him. “Bauer has a lot of money. He can afford to do stuff like that. Somebody trying to go incognito doesn’t.” He didn’t look up, but took a piece of paper out of the address book with a flourish and fished his cell phone out of his pocket, punching in the numbers with a speed that belied his stiffening joints. She kept talking even though she knew he was on the phone talking with a possible client, and he ignored her. He was used to tuning out her words, and by now, he could reduce them to a faint buzz in his ears. Somebody picked up the other line with a faint ‘hello?’
“Hello,” Sykes said. “I’m Richie Sykes, is this Amber Fowler?”
“Yes.”
“I think I talked to you a few days ago about doing a job for you?”
“Yes, I think you did. Are you the one Ruthie asked for?”
“I think I am. Anyways, you told me to call you today so you could tell me what you wanted me to do.”
“Yes.” There was a pause. Sykes got the feeling that Amber Fowler wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box. “Do you have a pen and paper ready?”
“Ready for orders, cap’n,” he said solemnly, and Fowler cleared her throat.
“I need you to pick up a group of immigrants from Weber Airport on Friday at nine o clock AM. They’ll be using fake visas, so you’ll need to get them out quickly before anybody comes sniffing around, but I’m sure you know all the protocol.”
“Ayep,” he said. “Where do you want them delivered?”
“Not at the club, of course,” she said coolly. “At the old Quaker’s factory on ninety eight. You know it?”
“I know it,” he said, scribbling it down on the paper. “When do you want them there by?”
“At the latest, noon. Nobody can be seen waiting around there for too long.”
“I understand perfectly. I’ll take care of it. How will I be paid?”
“The guy at the factory will pay you. Goodbye.”
“’Bye.” He clicked his phone off and stuck it back in his pocket. Maria was looking at him with an odd mixture of amusement and irritation on her face.

“What?” he asked, getting up off the couch and shoving her on the shoulder lightly on his way into the kitchen to get a beer.
“You’re an idiot,” she said simply and almost laughed. “I’ve never seen anybody as stupid as you.”
“That’s good to know,” he replied, flopping back onto the couch with the beer bottle clutched in his hand. He nudged a stack of magazines aside with the toe of his shoe and propped his feet up on the coffee table.
“Not for me.” She sighed and got up out of the recliner, brushing the creases out of her jeans and patting at her hair. “I’m going to go. Do you want me to come with you Friday?”
“Yeah, that’d be good. Because, you know, I need somebody around to make sure I don’t stick a loaded gun in my pocket and shoot my balls off or something.” She smiled, possibly at the prospect of all the misery he would go through if he shot his balls off, and gave him a half-assed salute.
“See you,” she said, and then was gone.

----------

“Please, sir, ma’am, you have to listen to me, please, please!” The man saying these words was a pathetic character that nobody would have allowed a second glance had he been acting normally, but now they averted their eyes embarrassedly, looking, if they had to, at him for only a millisecond before their eyes darted away from him and onto something a bit more benign. Trying to discern the different words in the layers of graffiti on the walls was always a good pastime.

The man himself was not particularly disturbing to look at, but it was his appearance coupled with the insane things that were spilling out of his mouth that really set the people on unease. He was thin, dangerously thin, though not thin enough to bring to mind the hellish images that some libraries still carried of the wars that had gone on in Sudan and Rwanda in the twenty first century, but rather thin in a way reminiscent of Picasso’s Blue Period, with arms and legs that seemed too long for his body and a smudged, bruise look about his face that made his eyes seem enormous.

The other people in his state who wandered the streets jabbering nonsense and moaning were not as disturbing as this one. They talked of God, of aliens, of government conspiracies, things that had vanished out of any sane person’s suspicions long ago. This man, he talked of what he called mist men who those who had listened to him for more than a few moments had decided were simply men in gray. It was an absurd idea, of course, because he talked of the ‘mist men’ as though they were some sort of law enforcement officials, and while they did have a small militia sort of police force that they had created for the city when the crime rates got completely out of hand, any kind of law enforcement official that did more than clear up small disputes seemed ridiculous to them.

And yet, here he was, latching onto the legs of passerby and begging them to listen to him. And here they were, terrified of him, of what he said. Even Graves and Mona, who were normally pretty neutral about that sort of thing, and who both had hard stomachs for the tragic, were troubled by what the man said, and even more by his boldness. When they walked by his ‘post,’ he lunged out and grabbed Mona’s leg.
“Please, ma’am, listen to me,” he said, his eyes widening until they were almost freakishly large, quivering all over. She tried to jerk her leg out of his grasp, but he held on tight.
“Get off,” she said, frowning, her voice rising a couple octaves. “Get off.”
“No, you have to listen to me. They’re going to be after all of us, but they’re going to be going after people like you. Aliens. They don’t think they belong. They don’t think I belong, and I was born here. Please, listen to me.” He spoke with the hurried, nimble speech of the mentally unstable, and didn’t stumble over any of the words. Graves frowned, and assisted his lover out of the man’s hold.
“Sorry,” he said gently to him. “They won’t get anybody. Don’t worry.”
“Don’t worry? Don’t worry?” The man laughed crazily. “The mist men are coming to take his love away, and he says not to worry.” He stopped laughing abruptly. “They’ll kill you for loving her, you know. All the half-breeds, too. Do you have any children?” The last part was said in a voice so lucid that Graves almost believed him.
“We don’t have children,” he said, and began trying to walk away, his arm around Mona’s waist.
“Wait!” The man hurtled forwards again, and this time grabbed Graves’s pant leg. “You aren’t listening!” He looked up at them beseechingly. “You have to listen!”

He opened his mouth to reply to the man, but never got the words out. A tall fair haired man in a gray uniform had come up to the trio out of a van painted a shade that was a little darker than his uniform, a solemn and somewhat anxious look on his face. Both Graves and Mona blinked at that.
“Sir, please step away from that man,” he said. “We’ll make sure he doesn’t bother anybody else.” Graves extricated himself from the man’s grasp and looked from the soldier to the man and back again.
“What did he do?” he asked, and the soldier shook his head.
”Nothing, sir, but he’s obviously a danger to society. We’re here to take him off your hands.”
“Well, that’s nice,” Mona said, her mouth turning downwards. Graves elbowed her in the ribs, and the soldier’s mouth quirked. He bent over and grabbed the man and yanked him to his feet.
“Come along,” he said, almost cheerfully, and pulled him over to the van. The man was babbling some more nonsense of how they needed to listen to him, the mist men were coming, and was quickly reduced by the helplessness of his situation to an inane moaning that somehow disturbed Graves and Mona more than his jabbering had. Once he was in the back of the van, it sped off. Passerby spared it no more than a passing glance.

“Nick,” Mona said, her eyes roving over the sidewalk in front of her. “What the hell just happened?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, and wrapped his arm around her waist again.

--------

Stephan lay next to Ophelia in bed, staring at the ceiling and wondering why he felt so cold when she was so warm next to him. He could feel her body throbbing with the memory of the coupling, could feel the heat still radiating off of her in that faithful way that autumn does up until the day that winter becomes inescapable, and yet could feel nothing himself. Even the climax itself had been emotionless, though only on his part. If she hadn’t felt anything good, she was certainly a good actress, crying out and panting and convulsing on top of him. She could go into show business. He laughed at the last thought and she stirred next to him at the sound, murmuring something and drawing closer to him, seeking warmth that he didn’t think was there. Putting an arm around her, he smiled wryly in the dark, feeling her breasts press up against his side. They were soft, like suds, and so he was not surprised by the sudden rush of desire down his body, heating him momentarily and making the coldness afterwards seem even more out of place. It wasn’t like after Sylvia died and all he could feel was a burning restlessness in his limbs that forced him to stalk around the house, overturning and righting chairs and tables, an almost numbing heat in his lips that compelled him to say her name, over and over until it became almost a song in the house that rose to almost a scream at times and sometimes went as low as a hoarse whisper. It was funny how after she died, it was never his house, or their house, but the house. It didn’t seem as though anybody could live in or own it, not after she left it. Even when his lovers would talk about redecorating place, using the phrases that lovers do, he didn’t think of it as his house.
“We should do something do this room, our house looks so dull.” Helen. She had been into things being cool and fragrant, with pale, pretty colors. The house was anything but pale and pretty, not like her, with walls that he hadn’t painted since he and Sylvia had gone through and redone the place, and with carpets that hadn’t had a good cleaning in ages.
“I think we should replace that loveseat in the living room, the stripes are depressing me.” Tory. She had always been saying things like that, always wanted to freshen the place up. She didn’t know that the striped loveseat had been there since he and Sylvia moved in, that they had first made love on that loveseat, and that he had spent many of the nights resting his heated limbs there, murmuring her name until sheer physical exhaustion forced him to sleep.
“The bathroom doesn’t reflect your chi at all, we should fix it up.” Phoebe. She’d always been badgering him to open the windows or install skylights or something weird like that. She’d had a set of tarot cards that she’d managed to get a hold of God knows how, and had been forever begging him to let her read his palm. She didn’t know that Sylvia had decorated the bathroom and that he was always fixing it up when she wasn’t around, touching up the chipping, pale pink paint on the walls and replacing the little decorative soaps that were in a tray on the counter. Her toothbrush was still there. That had gotten a few looks from Florence, but not much else. It was as though, despite everything else, they had a small understanding of what he was going through, they had an inkling and were smart enough to stay away from certain things. They’d never bother to tell him to take off his wedding ring.

He took his arm from around Ophelia to finger the ring, feeling its smooth rounded surface, warm from Ophelia, and took a small measure of comfort in the fact that he knew all its inconsistencies and could see it, even in the dark. A simple gold band was all it was, a little scratched and a little dull, but nothing that Sylvia would have disapproved of. As he recalled, her wedding ring hadn’t been looking so great, and hadn’t even been there when he got home and saw her. His mind had been wandering almost pleasantly around until he saw her body again, the eyes wide and almost surprised, her mouth a little ‘o’ of surprise, her hair fanned out around her in ropy tangles and a hair clip lying a few inches away. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, a white dress that Ophelia had thrown carelessly on the ground when she bore him down onto the bed turned into Sylvia. A little, painful moan escaped his lips, and he snapped them shut with a start, closing his eyes again and noticing vaguely before he slipped into the uneasy web of dreams how hot the little, slow tears that trickled down the sides of his face were against his cold skin.

------

[Robin]

When Scarlet brought Jude to the new home that Red and she had procured for the gang, he just looked at her.
“This is what you got?” he asked, reproachful, and she shrugged.
“If I had known about the raids sooner, I would have started looking sooner and gotten a better one. As it was, this was the only district that they were raiding that had any places available in it.”
“Which is my fault, right?” He looked up at her, and she laughed, patting him on his bad shoulder, ignoring his grimace
“Always, little man,” she said, “always.” She opened the door, and they stepped inside.

The scene that confronted Jude was at once pathetic and tragically heroic: the place that Scarlet had gotten was big enough for all the boys to have gone to their rooms by then, but they all sat around a big table in the front room, some nodding off to sleep and some sitting with the flesh of their cheeks rumpled up under the heels of their hands, and some just slouching in their chairs, staring off at nothing in particular, or entranced by some small thing that they wouldn’t notice under normal circumstances; a tic going under somebody’s eye, or a spider waiting in a tiny cluster of webs set in a far corner of the room. One of the boys, Paul, who was at least a head shorter than most of the boys in the gang and about a head and a half shorter than Jude, was idling twisting at his earlobe, and was the first to notice Scarlet and Jude walk in, and his whole face lit up. He was always like that: easy to elate, easy to bring down.
“Guys,” he said, smiling. “Jude’s back.” They looked up, blearily, first at Paul and then at the duo that had just walked in, and slowly the atmosphere of the room warmed just the tiniest bit. The gang wasn’t related, at least as far as Jude knew, but they were family. They were brothers, and if your brother gets lost or hurt you feel bad, regardless of whether or not he’s your real brother. Jude gave a small smile and raised his good hand in a gesture of greeting, and saw other hesitant smiles come onto a few of their faces.
“Where’s Milti?” another of the boys, Liam, asked. “We thought he’d turn up with you.”
Jude was spared the trouble of answering by Scarlet, who spoke coolly, as she always had. It was as if she didn’t care at all about the situation, and if she did, only in a strictly businesslike sort of way, like she had just lost a good employee. Jude frowned at the way she said it, but said nothing. He didn’t want her arguing with him, much less about the way she said something, and much less in front of the other boys.
“The law got Milti,” she said. “And there was nothing anybody could have done about it.”
“The law doesn’t do anything,” Liam scoffed. “Paul saw part of it; he said it was men in gray uniforms, private soldiers or something.”
“Why would private soldiers want Milti?” Jude asked, and plopped down in an empty chair at the table next to Paul. “All he was trying to do was snag that guy’s wallet. I grabbed one just a couple minutes before he tried, and no private soldiers came after me.”
“Then why do you look like you tried to wrestle a grizzly bear?” Liam replied, and Jude smiled ruefully.
“I thought it’d be obvious that I tried to help Milti.” He touched the bandage on his left arm gingerly and winced.
“And unsuccessfully, it looks like,” Roadie, the loudmouth, said amiably on Jude’s right, and punched him lightly in his good arm.
“Hey now,” Jude said, leaning away from him and grinning. “I have to use that arm later. The other one’s no good.”
“Yeah, we can see that,” Liam said, and sighed. “Poor Milti.”
“There’s nothing we can do about it now,” Red said suddenly. “Milti will have to do something about it himself.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that it’s sad,” Jude said. “It makes me sick to not know where he is or what they’re doing to him.” He did feel rather sick. The dull ache in his arm seemed to have spread to his head, and his stomach was slowly twirling back and forth. The room seemed to want to imitate his stomach, and he had to blink more than he normally would to keep it from doing so. The warmth that he had felt entering the room was almost completely gone; it was actually cold in the room, he thought, and Scarlet had squirreled his good coat away somewhere.
“It makes us all sick,” Paul said in a conclusive sort of way, and stood up from the table. He looked around at the gang mildly for a moment, as if reveling in being taller than them, at least for the moment, and then said, “I think we should all get to bed now. We’ve had a long day, and we’re all feeling run down. It’s not like we’re getting anything done, anyways, staying up.”
“Agreed,” Jude said, and stood up, too. “I’m going with you, Paul.”
“Fine with me,” the short boy said, and the two of them went off to the bedrooms, shortly followed by the rest of the gang, stretching and rubbing at their backs.

“You can bunk with me,” Paul told Jude. He held out an arm and twirled around to face the other boy in a mad parody of accommodation. “I’ll even let you have top bunk.”
“How sweet,” Jude said absently, and laughed, beginning the difficult ascent up to the top bunk. “How did they manage to get a house with beds?”
Paul shrugged and shook his head. “Red’s really smart and has a lot of connections someplace. I guess he knew somebody who could get us a place with furniture already.”
“Red, Red, Red,” Jude said, and flopped back onto the bed; his shoulder aching and head throbbing. “How does he do all this amazing stuff when all we ever see him do is sit around?”
“Stephan Hawking was a paraplegic,” Liam informed them, climbing into the top bunk of the second bed in the room with the dexterity of a chimp and the grace of an elephant.
“Who?” Paul and Jude asked at the same time, and then looked at each other as though they thought the other had tricked them into something.
“Some important guy from the twentieth century,” Liam said, shrugging. “I think he was like Chris James or something.”
“So you don’t know what he did; only that he was in a wheelchair?” Paul shook his head disbelievingly, his eyes seemingly unable to decide whether to darken in confusion or sparkle in amusement. “You don’t remember anything useful, do you?”
“Nope,” the other boy replied cheerfully. “Never.”
“It figures,” Paul sighed, and sprawled backwards onto his bed. He frowned and made a small noise of discontent, spurring Jude to lean over the side of the bunk to look down at him and say,
“What are you pffting about?”
“There’s barely any space between your bunk and mine,” he said. “If I can get my feet on the bottom of your bunk, you know it’s really short. Of course,” he added, grinning, “It could be you making it sag so much, Jude.”
“Oh, hush,” Jude said, amiably enough, and withdrew his head.
“I will most certainly not hush,” Paul said indignantly. “Liam, tell him how fat he is!”
“You need to lay off the Twinkies,” Liam told Jude wearily. “You’re so fat that you make Roadie look anorexic.”
“Hey,” Roadie protested from the bunk beneath Liam, and the room of them snorted. He wasn’t really that fat, not that Jude could ever remember, but he was definitely pudgier than the rest of the boys, and was a great deal chubbier than Jude.
“Let’s just all shut up and go to sleep,” somebody, probably Donna, said from the bunk to the left of Jude and Paul’s, his voice muffled by his blankets. The other boys hushed immediately, but Jude heard Liam smother a snicker in his pillow, and thought he heard him say,
“Donna. Why do we call him Donna?”
He lay awake for a few minutes, his shoulder pulsating softly with the beating of his heart as if nursing its malice and plotting its revenge for the morning, pondering the rhetorical question, and for the life of him couldn’t remember where Donna had earned that particular nickname. He didn’t look girlish, and his name wasn’t anything like Daniel or something. Another boy, the one bunking with Donna, pattered quietly into the room, turning off the last light, and clambered into the top bunk with a noise that seemed enormous in the velvet dark of the room.
“Paul?” Jude asked sleepily after a few moments.
“Yeah?” the other boy replied, his voice muted by the blankets Jude knew he had bunched up around his face.
“Can you turn on the heater or something? It’s freezing in here.”
“I don’t think there is a heater,” he said.
“Oh. Well, good night, then.”
“Night. Rub your hands together like a hobo or something.”
Liam snorted in the dark, and Jude stuck out his tongue at him even though he knew he couldn’t see it.
“I will, Paul,” he said. “Night.”
“Just shut up,” Donna groaned, and Jude felt a pillow soar over his head and fall on top of Liam with a soft thump.
“Why don’t you shut up,” Liam muttered, but it was too soft for everyone in the room to hear. After that, they were all quiet, and nobody talked again until they woke up.

------

The idiots working at Starbucks had burnt their coffee. They always burnt it nowadays; it was all the damn aliens who didn’t bother to change their cooking times based on new pressure and temperatures. Sykes only took a couple sips before dumping it in a garbage can and casting a reproachful look at Maria who was choking it down so as to not waste money.
“Why don’t you just throw it out,” he offered, after her face contorted disgustedly for the third time. She shook her head and swallowed the mouthful of burnt coffee, glancing down at the Styrofoam cup in her hand filled with the vile stuff.
“I don’t waste,” she said. “There are starving kids in Uganda who’d kill for this coffee.”
Sykes scratched his chin and laughed thoughtfully. “Somehow I doubt that the little kids in Uganda would kill for a cup of burnt coffee, even if they were starving. You know as well as I do that they’re better off in a lot of ways than we are.”
“They hardly get any alien immigrants there,” she argued, her arm twitching as though she was fighting to keep the cup of coffee in her hands. “If they can’t get them there, they’re going to crash back down.”
“It’s not that they can’t get them,” he said, looking down at his watch to make sure that the alien women they were supposed to be picking up weren’t off the plane yet. “It’s that they don’t want them. They’re smart. They know that if they don’t let the aliens take all their jobs, their own people will have jobs, and their unemployment rate will be lower.” He shrugged. “They’re hard workers there.”
Maria took another swig of the coffee, presumably so she wouldn’t have to toss another one of her ‘save-the-third-world-countries’ arguments at him, and then hurled the cup into the nearest garbage can so quickly that, had there been a coffee-cup-hurling competition in the Olympics, she would have won a gold medal at it for sure. Sykes looked at her and fought back a grin, forcing his face into a grave reproduction of the face he had seen plastered on that of many news reporters as they told of the awful conditions that weren’t-so-awful in Africa, and said,
“What happened to the starving kids in Uganda?” She glared at him, a feral light in her eyes that would have freaked him out when he first met her, and he wrapped an arm around her shoulders in an amiable manner. “I love you,” he said, laughing. “Let’s go get us some alien hoes.”

They walked down to terminal C, Maria indulging Sykes’s attentions for once, and waited around for about five minutes for the ‘alien hoes’ to show up. They stood in a group, rather normal looking women, tittering nervously every now and then to try and hide their anxiety. When the duo approached the group of them, they seemed to heave a sigh of relief as a group.
“We were afraid you weren’t coming,” one of them, a pretty blonde who resembled Stephan Marsh’s dead wife, said in near-perfect English. “We thought maybe it was a bust.”
“No busts,” Sykes said, and grinned. “Just us. Let’s get you all out of here before security starts sniffing around.” He and Maria turned and began walking away, and the women followed gratefully.

Security was lax. Ever since the government had crumbled and lost almost all of its power, most institutions had gone to the dogs. The group barely got a glance from the zaftig security guard as they passed through, and they were able to get out to Sykes’s truck without difficulty.

-----------

[Robin]

“Nick, do you remember that crazy guy this afternoon?” Mona was reclining on Graves’s bed, her arms behind her head, the peach tones of the setting sun glowing on her face and softening her eyes.
“Yeah,” he said, flushing the toilet and zipping up his pants. “What about him?”
“He asked if we had children,” she said. “Did you ever think you’d want children?”
“I like kids,” he said. “But I never thought of having them, least of all with you. I mean,” he shrugged, and sat down on the bed next to her. “I love you and all but you have a career to think of.” She laughed and smiled wryly.
“My career’s almost over,” she told him. “I don’t get any customers besides you anymore.”
“True.” He looked over at her and she sighed and sat up. “What are you getting at?” he asked slowly, looking her up and down and noting in particular the twist in her mouth that meant she was gearing up to ease him into something.
“You aren’t going to like it,” she said, and laughed again. “But here it goes. I’m pregnant.”
“You mean you think you’re pregnant,” he corrected, frowning. “You can’t know now.”
“Yes I can,” she said. “I tested myself a couple weeks ago and went to the doctor yesterday.”
“But you can’t be that far gone. You aren’t even showing.”
“I won’t show for awhile now. It’s only been two months.”
“Two months!” His back stiffened and he sat ramrod straight, as though somebody had crammed a metal pole up his spine. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She shrugged, looking perfectly nonchalant about his sudden bout of anger. “I told you I only went to the doctor yesterday.”
“But you said you tested yourself two weeks ago!”
She sighed and threw him an all-suffering expression, draping herself over his shoulder. “I wasn’t going to tell you when I wasn’t sure, you wet end. Those tests aren’t right thirty percent of the time, and to top it all off I’m an alien. Those tests were made for human women.” He frowned at her, a half-joking expression.
“You should have told me,” he repeated sullenly. She peeled herself off of him and crossed her arms over her breasts.
“Why are you so pouty all of a sudden?” Her brow was furrowed in consternation. “You’re never sulky.”
“Well, I am today,” he snapped, trying not to look at her. His stomach felt all churned up, and it didn’t help that she smelled good, like flowers and honey. “Aren’t you too old to get pregnant anyways?”
She blinked a couple times at that, and then laughed. “I’m not that old, Nicky,” she said.
“Wishful thinking is all,” he mumbled, and cast a quick glance over at her. Her expression hadn’t changed, and her arms were still crossed.
“Quit hedging around it,” she told him. “If you don’t want me to have it, just come out and say it. It’s not doing either of us any good to keep it all bottled up.” Her voice was quick, authoritative. It was as though she had envisioned what would happen, and she probably had. Crazy bitch. Graves wouldn’t put anything past Mona.
“I don’t know what I want,” he said, his voice low and scratchy. Then, louder, “I don’t know what I want. What I want is a drink. What I need is a drink.” She raised an appraising eyebrow.
“Go get a drink,” she began to say, but he was already out the door, slinging his coat over his shoulder and shoving his wallet into his pocket.
“Crazy bitch,” he muttered as he rushed out the door. “Why’d she have to go and get herself knocked up?”

------------

Jude woke groggily to the sound of somebody calling his name, the smell of something burning, and a fierce ache in his arm. Despite the heat that he felt blazing all around him, he tried to roll himself back under his blankets. A hand shook his shoulder again, and it was the agony of that that brought him to consciousness.
“What’s happening?” he asked, his voice heavy and his words slurred. He blinked rapidly to clear his vision and saw Liam’s face, so close to his that they could have been faggots leaning into give each other a big slobbery French kiss. He had to suppress a snicker at that, and bit his fist, wondering how he could laugh when there was heat and the smell of burning everything all around him.
“The house is burning down, you idiot, come on.” Liam’s words were harsh; his voice was husky and anxious. He began pulling Jude out of the top bunk and, unsuspecting and feeling sick and weak, he tumbled out onto the ground.
“What’d you have to go and do that for?” he groaned. “I could have done it myself.” He looked around the room, frowning. “Is everyone else out..?”
“Yeah,” Liam said. “Everyone except Paul.”
“Where’s Paul…?” Jude trailed off as his eyes snagged on the room and caught sight of Paul, curled up in a ball so tight that he was almost invisible. He had drawn his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around his legs and was rocking back and forth on his haunches, a feverish glimmer in his eyes and anxious lines around his mouth. There was a shimmering haze of heat around him that Jude didn’t see around Liam, who was tugging him towards the door anxiously, a haze of heat that was not unlike the fog blanketing the house.
“What’s wrong with me?” Paul asked shakily, his eyes rising to meet Jude’s. For some reason it was almost painful to look at them. “I went to sleep and I was thinking about how you wanted the house to be warmer, and then I woke up and everything was warm so I just let it go on and now this happened.” As the words tumbled out of his mouth he sounded progressively calmer; by the end, he was even able to look around with a touch of distaste in his eyes.
Liam yanked at Jude’s arm again. “Come on!” he hissed. “There’s something wrong with Paul; leave him!”
“You can’t just leave him,” Jude said wearily, reaching out to grab Paul’s wrist. “You can’t just leave anyone; otherwise you wouldn’t have woken me up.”
“You say that, but you left Milti!” For a moment, during which Liam’s grip on Jude’s arm did not lessen, the two boys’ eyes were locked angrily, Liam’s blazing furiously, Jude’s burning feverishly, and then Jude looked away.
“Come on, Paul,” he said quietly, and closed his hand about the shorter boy’s wrist. He had barely had a hold of him for a few seconds when he yelped and drew back. “He scalded my hand!” He held it out, palm up, for nobody in particular, and Liam shook his head.
“I told you,” he said, but Jude wasn’t listening. Grimly, he reached out and grabbed Paul again, ignoring the burn.
“Let’s go,” he told Liam, who sighed and shook his head again. When Jude didn’t move, he yanked on his arm and began pulling the two other boys like a procession in some odd circus.
‘Cause that’s what we are, isn’t it? Jude thought dazedly, barely noticing the blaze around him as Liam tugged at him and Paul. It’s Liam, the boy with amazing endurance, and Paul, the amazing fire-starter, and Jude, taking a sad song and making it better!! Hallelujah, praise the LAWD. He started laughing at the last bit, which earned him a strange over-the-shoulder look from Liam and a logy look from Paul. The scorching heat that had come when he had grabbed Paul, the feel like the boy was a hot skillet, had subsided somewhat to a dully throbbing warmth, and while he would have been disturbed by that at any other time, his aching mind only registered it as one less pain on his body, and so he only felt gratitude for it. There was gratitude, and then there was dazed confusion as Liam yelled out in surprise in front of him and disappeared in a creak of wood and splatter of flames.
“Liam?” he said, and was disgusted when his voice came out as a hoarse husk. He turned to Paul, feeling the heat of the building against his eyes like a cold wind will feel on days when your eyes are wide open and downwind. “What just happened?” he asked, but Paul remained mute, his eyes fixed somewhere beyond Jude’s shoulder. At any other time, he would have tried to shake the nonsense out of the other boy, but he was feeling too sick and too damned sore to do much of anything, let alone shake a kid until his head snapped back and forth with a bum arm. Jude groaned, a noise that was halfway between a sigh and a shivery moan, and began dragging Paul after him, focusing on the doorway that seemed so far away. Why did Paul have to be so heavy? He was so short, why couldn’t he be light as well? He was just dead weight. He would have thought that the boy would have been grateful to be taken out of the burning building. Zip, zap zoobidy boo bop, all that happy crappy - but Jude was no Bill Cosby, and Paul was no kid saying the darndest things.

While his mind had been wandering, his body had been moving with single-minded (or was it bodied? He thought dreamily, and then forced his mind to the present) determinedness; he was out the door and in the air, the house a fiery warmth against his back, the night ice against his face. The combination was enough to send the whirlwinds of dizzying swirling through him again, and he sat down hard against a garbage can with Paul. I should move he thought, the blaze still hot against the side of his face. Unless I want to get vaporized or something when that hits the apartment’s water heaters. He laughed at that, a thin croaky sound that even he barely recognized as his own laugh, and Paul turned and looked at him with blank, consternated bovine eyes. Still laughing softly, he pulled himself to his feet mostly by effort of will, and yanked Paul to his.
“Let’s move out of line of fire,” he told the other boy, but before they had taken two steps the blaze reached something explosive and the shockwaves propelled both boys forwards onto their faces. Jude felt his teeth click shut over his tongue and his chin scrape over the concrete, adding the warmth of blood to the slick coolness of the rain on the ground. He lay there for a moment, catching his breath and forcing back the vertigo that had risen as he fell. After a few moments he pushed himself to a sitting position and shook his head lightly, reluctant to rekindle the tipsy feeling.

Scrubbing a hand through his hair, he turned to the other boy, who was still lying on his side, his face pale, hectic spots of color in his cheeks and dark circles around his eyes.
“Paul?” He shoved at the boy’s shoulder with his good hand and drew it back quickly. Before, Paul had been boiling hot; now, the air around him was freezing cold, as though something was drinking the heat out of it. “J-Jesus,” Jude said, and collapsed against the wall of the alley, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. A while later, he wasn’t sure how long, sirens began to wail and there was an enormous uproar that wasn’t coming from the fire.
“Hey,” somebody shouted, and whoever it was her voice seemed far away. “There are a couple of kids over there!” And then, there was a woman walking towards him, a tall woman, with her skin shining pearly white against the night. Through half-opened eyes he saw her come closer, her movements jerky and inconsistent, as if he was watching a badly made video, and then she was in front of him, her face angular with high cheekbones, a deluge of red-orange hair spilling to her shoulders. “You okay, kid?” he heard her say, and then she turned around, frowning slightly, as a tottering, drunken looking man approached, also.
“What are you doing?” the new man demanded, and through the haze that was rapidly engulfing his vision, Jude recognized him as the man from earlier that day, the one who had picked him up along with the alien woman. He laughed softly at that, a husky sound that caused the man and woman to turn and look at him oddly before going on.
“I could ask the same of you,” the woman said, sounding slightly amused. “There’s alcohol on your breath; it may be in your best interest to get away from the fire.”
“And leave my kid behind?” The woman raised her eyebrows. They were the same color as her hair. She dyes them, Jude thought deliriously, and had to suppress another cackle.
“He’s your kid?” She looked from the man to Jude and back again. “I don’t see the resemblance.”
“I adopted him,” the man said shortly.
“How’d he get out here, then? Shouldn’t you have been watching your kid?”
“Now I have to know what my fourteen year old is doing all the time?” His voice was dry, and he spoke each word with the careful enunciation that said to both Jude and the woman that he was having great difficulty keeping his words from slurring together drunkenly. “For your information, he was at a friend’s place. When I send my kid to his friend’s house I don’t expect it to catch fire.” The woman shook her head and Jude saw her biting the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. The gesture was beautiful, even with his vision blurred and fading in and out, and he felt a swooping squirm in his stomach, as if somebody had impaled an earthworm on a toothpick and was zooming it around in there.

The man cleared his throat and pulled Jude to his feet with a suddenness that startled him.
“If you don’t mind,” he said. “I’m taking him home now. It’s not doing anybody any good to have him just sitting out here.” The woman stepped back, her arms spread out accommodatingly.
“All yours…” she said, and raised an eyebrow, her mouth quirking as she waited for him to give his name.
“Graves,” he said shortly, clipping off the syllables in that curt way that hid the alcohol softened ones just below them. “Come on, kid,” he muttered, his fingers squeezing Jude’s shoulder with a bruising force that left him wondering whether he was completely lucid or about to pass out.

As the man led him away, Jude turned his head to look back, and saw the woman standing there with an amused look on her face, her hands on her hips.
“By the way,” she called after them, and her voice, clear and authoritative, sent shivers down Jude’s spine. “I’m Simone, Simone Bachman. Look me up if you ever need to send that kid someplace that won’t go up in flames.” Her laughter, a translucent sound of pure mirth, followed them out the alleyway and onto the street.

---------------------

It was a day for tragic events, wasn’t it? First, the kid in the morning, and then the crazy guy, and then Mona’s “revelation,” and then the kid again. Maybe it was all the kid’s fault. Graves’s fingers squeezed into the boy’s shoulder tighter at that thought, but he loosened almost immediately when the boy’s face, already pinched and pale, tightened and turned the color of milk.
“Sorry,” he muttered, sparing a glance over at the kid. He was surprised to feel a twinge of pity in his diaphragm at the expression on his face. It was a mixture of suppressed pain and overwhelming pride; his chin was held high, probably as much to keep the tears Graves saw trying to shimmer in his eyes from spilling out as to seem dignified. There was a finely chiseled look to his features as a gust of wind blew back the hair from his forehead that caused the pity in his diaphragm to stab sharply. “Jeez, I’m sorry.” The last words were almost a whisper, but, sick and dizzy though he seemed, the kid heard.
“For what?” The kid’s voice was nothing more than a husk, and, apologetically, he licked his lips and swallowed, but Graves shrugged.
“What’s your name, kid? That’s twice today I’ve saved your ass and I don’t even know who I’m saving.”
The kid muttered something like ‘I’m not saved yet,’ and then spoke up. “I’m Jude.” There was a finality with which he said that name that Graves thought it would be wise to not ask if there was a last name that went with that handle, partner. He wasn’t much surprised when the kid returned the favor, saying he had had his ass saved by the same person twice today and didn’t even know who saved him. Graves introduced himself with the pompous air that he would introduce himself to one of Mona’s friends, none of whom he was really very fond of, and Jude’s mouth quirked slightly, letting the ghost of a grin - like a memory - pass over his face, and then it was buried again in the tight reluctance to let any weakness show. They walked along in silence for a moment, and then the kid surprised him.
“You’re drunk,” he said bluntly. “Why?”
“Mona’s having a kid,” Graves said, so startled by the question that he answered immediately, without thinking. “I needed to get away from it for awhile.”
“Makes sense,” Jude said, and then Graves opened the door to the apartment he shared with Mona.

He found Mona sitting in the kitchen, sniffing distastefully at a cup of coffee as though wondering why in god’s name she had made coffee at nine o clock at night, and then she turned up and saw them. Her eyes were hard, ready to berate him for going off like that, but when she got sight of the kid they seemed unable to decide between hard and soft.
“Jesus, Nick,” she said, and got up. “This is the kid from this morning.” It was almost a question. Almost.
“Yeah,” he said. “He seems to have a habit of getting himself fucked up.” His eyes watched his lover as she bent down and looked the kid all over, which seemed pretty pointless to Graves. He probably just needed some aspirin and a good night’s sleep. He frowned when Mona made a clucking noise against the roof of her mouth and glared at him.
“You didn’t wrap his arm tight enough. He’s gone and lost a ton of blood.” She bent back to Jude and raised an eyebrow. “You feel dizzy, right? Headache? Kind of cold?” He nodded slightly after each statement, looking, Graves thought, a little taken aback by the fervor with which the alien woman was presenting herself. “And it’s probably infected, too,” she added matter-of-factly, eyeing Graves with a mixture of distaste and amusement. He threw his hands in the air, fighting an urge to roll his eyes.
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“First,” she said, straightening and thrusting Jude at Graves. “I want you to get some aspirin and water for the kid. Then, I want you to get that ratty thing off his arm and get him a new one.” She was motioning towards the blood-soaked ace bandage on the kid’s arm, and Graves winced apologetically. “Then,” she continued, “have him take a shower. He’s not sleeping in my bed or on my couch or even on my floor filthy as he is.” Jude, who had been taking all of this passively, frowned at that and swiped at a smudge of ash on his cheekbone. Graves shot another apologetic look at Jude, who relaxed and cast his eyes at the ground. He left the kid and Mona in the entryway and came back with a bottle of water and two aspirins, holding them out to Jude. With a speed that was startling considering his state, the kid reached out for the pills and popped them in his mouth, gulping them down with the water gratefully.
“Wait by the bathroom door,” Mona called as Graves led the kid off. “If he falls over or something you can fish him out.” She sounded almost detached. Jude scowled again, crossing his arms over his chest and rubbing absently at his injured one.
“I wouldn’t fall,” he muttered, but he walked too carefully, as though he was masking the same unsteadiness that Graves felt in his own limbs, though the reasons behind each man (or boy)’s unsteadiness was different.

He led the boy to the bathroom and briefly told him how to turn it on, and then waited outside the closed door for the fall that all three of them had expected. And the boy did fall, barely a few minutes after the door had closed. Leaning over to turn the faucet on, he had either lost his balance or lost his loose control over his consciousness and fallen forwards, his face pressed into the shower floor, hanging limp over the lip of the tub. He barely stirred when Graves yanked him up roughly by the scruff of his neck; just lay there, his mouth partly open, one side of his head wet and dripping, the auburn hair that Graves had found so interesting earlier clinging to his face, which had gone several shades paler. He opened his mouth to call Mona in, but she was already there, her face alternating between disgusted and disgruntled and motherly. He didn’t say a word, but got to his feet and pulled the boy into a slumped standing position and then passing the buck to Mona. Between them they got him up and into the ‘guest bedroom’ ( a room that had been meant for families with kids, but that Mona and Graves had just filled with junk and their old bed) and onto the bed.

-done-