SILVER: Acheron (A River of Pain) (The SILVER Series) (15 page)

She doesn’t mean that, and Luka knows it. She’d rather die at her own hand, on her own terms, than face the barrel of an Omega instructed Enforcer.

Contemplating this, they fall into silence again. Her shirt is soaked through from the rain, and there, upon her glistening chest, lie her old Hunter Division dog tags … and Alex’s.

At the faintest breeze, goose bumps begin to prick the landscape of her flesh and send droplets of rainwater tumbling and rolling downward with the pull of gravity. One drop cascades slowly crossways over her neck, past the pulsating jugular vein and veering onward toward her breasts, soon disappearing beneath the neckline of her shirt.

Silver catches him looking, but pretends otherwise.

Shirking off his jacket, Luka coaxes it around her shoulders.

“I’d be an asshole if I didn’t.”

“Then why deviate from the norm?” she winks.

She teases him, but the truth is she’s been more of an asshole to him over the years than he’s ever been to her. In fact, he’s been nothing short of valiant in the face of her constant—often brutal—rejections.

He had half a mind to pursue her once, but that was forever ago. Accepting that she’d already fallen under the spell of another, Luka had respectfully withdrawn his bid for her affections, and chosen to keep his distance.

Now, though, the paradigm has shifted. Alex, trapped on the other side of the bridge, impotent, is grieving Silver’s ‘death’. Her loss is different, but she’s in mourning for it all the same. In time, Alex’s life will move on—and so should hers.

“I have another assignment for you,” Luka ventures finally.

Silver seems surprised. “Already?”    

“Maydevine’s got a list as long as your arm.”

“When do I get paid for the last one?”          

“Check your balance, it should be there. You’re on the payroll now, don’t forget.”

She had forgotten.

“I can’t believe the Governor actually signed off on that, given the lengths he went to trying to get rid of me.”

There’s the conspiracy theory again.

Luka ignores it.

“He signed off on the idea, in principle. Let’s just say that Maydevine didn’t exactly divulge all the specifics of it.”

Silver lets out a half-hearted ‘ha’. “He doesn’t even know it’s me he’s funding? I guess that’s mildly satisfying, in some sort of way.”

“Maydevine thinks so.”

“Well, you’ve got to find the shining light somewhere,” she sighs.

“You
are
the shining light.”

Silver doesn’t know if Luka intended that to be funny, but she laughs anyway. She hasn’t been clean since the morning she was hauled out of Alex’s apartment under the armed guard of no less than six Omega security officers. From her skin to her attitude, there’s nothing ‘shining’ about her.

“If you’re seeing anything glowing around here, it’s entirely in your head. I imagine it’s probably some sort of seizure, so you should get that looked at.”

Realizing his attempt at flirtation was fifth grade clumsy, Luka tries a different tactic. He shuffles down on the sandbags so that he and Silver can lay face-to-face, his ever cheery grin meeting her weary half-smile. Too tired to argue with the proximity warning bells going off inside her head, Silver closes her eyes and tries to forget that she’s lying on a ‘bed’ of sand and dirt in the middle of a Fringe District rain storm.

Intending only to close her eyes for a few minutes, she just wants to wait until the worst of the rain has passed. Except … Luka wants something else, she can tell.  As he tugs at the sleeve of the jacket around her shoulders, she opens one eye to look at him.

“Come on, share,” he urges her. 

Bells still ringing between her ears, Silver obliges and rolls closer to him, letting him drape the jacket over both of them. In doing so, her hand brushes against his and he snatches it up.

“Christ, your hands are cold.”

Scooping up her other hand, he clasps them together between his, rubbing them up and down to entice the blood flow back. Bringing them close to his lips, he huffs warm air around her fingertips, the moisture in his breath turning to tiny droplets on her fingernails.

If she closes her eyes the tenderness of his companionship feels good, and she edges in a little closer. Even the smell of him is comforting tonight. On other days, she hates his cologne. Today, he’s spent hours with Maydevine. The scent of Maydevine’s cigarettes lingers on his clothing, and she tucks her head in against him, pressing the fabric up against her cheek.

Alex smokes those cigarettes, too, and since she was fifteen years old, she’d often lain her head upon his chest in just this way. Without thinking, Silver clutches a handful of Luka’s shirt in her hand and holds him tight against her.

“We’re here for the night. You know that, right?”

Luka doesn’t answer her, but he doesn’t object to the notion either. The rain shows no sign of stopping, and he can think of much worse ways to spend a few quiet hours of another long, cold night.

Her fingers separated from his skin by only a layer or two of thin woven hemp, she can feel his softly beating heart beneath. Not even the touch of his lips on the top of her head is enough to shake her out of the daydream she’s having; she just wants to feel some familiar sort of comfort.

His arms around her shoulders, drawing her in to him, she begins to forget where she is. Right now, it could be a month ago when she and Alex snuck away to a secluded South Town beach and made love on an old truck bench seat. Or it could be her last birthday, cocooned in a blanket together underneath the stars on the rooftop of his apartment building.

It could be anywhere—anywhere but here.

Suddenly sleepy, and too tired to fight it, Silver says nothing when Luka lifts her chin to face him. Giving her no warning, he brushes his lips against hers, so gently—testing her reaction.

She doesn’t move. She doesn’t pull back.

Her lips part, just a little.

An invitation.

Accepted.

He presses his lips fully against hers.

Just a peck, at first.

“Goodnight,” she mumbles after the peck is withdrawn.

Only, it doesn’t withdraw completely. Still able to feel the warmth of his breath against her skin, she isn’t completely surprised when his lips begin to reengage her. Instead of the friendly pucker of before, though, his lips start to softly caress hers. His head tilted to the side, the tip of his cold nose pressed against her cheek, he gently pinches her sensitive lower lip between his …

Yet, it lasts only a moment.

“Goodnight,” he whispers back to her.

Yearning for the wrong kind of companionship, Silver tries to ignore her body’s cravings until sleep comes.

And it does, eventually.

*************************

At the sound of his pager, Luka wakes up alone in the boathouse.

Silver is gone, but she’s left behind his jacket, tucked carefully around him still. Rising to his feet, Luka’s joints creak and groan in protest to the hours of discomfort they’ve endured, and he feels damp right through to his bones. Reaching for his pager, he discovers the reason why he also feels about ten pounds lighter: his weapons, handcuffs and ammunition are conspicuously absent.          

“Wench …” he mutters, with a smile on his face.

Something else is missing, too—the Police Division printouts he stashed in his pocket, with details of the next Dodger on Maydevine’s list.

Already back in Mid Town, Silver’s wasted no time in beginning the hunt. After stopping back at the theatre with groceries to make breakfast, and selling the bluff that she’d arisen early for just that purpose, she made sandwiches for herself and Alice. Rather begrudgingly, and after much conversation on the matter, she conceded that Alice may accompany her this day.

After all, what excuse did she have to deny the request? With a fresh tag and colored contact lenses, Alice was no more or less of a person than anyone else in the District. Besides which, she might be helpful. Another pair of eyes, another pair of hands.

First, though, they must narrow down the search field. While opportunistically raiding a burnt out building for charcoal for her makeshift barbeque, Silver begins to put her plan together. Finding a whitewashed wall left untouched by the fire, she scratches out a crude charcoal drawn diagram of the Fringe District, using jagged dotted lines to represent the divisions between Towns.

Pulling a crumpled piece of Omega watermarked paper from her back pocket, she begins to mark locations on her ‘map’. Along with a portion of the file containing the Dodger’s photograph and stats, Luka ‘gave’ her a printout of all the locations where the Dodger’s tag had been recorded making purchases within the last few weeks.

Butcher shops, mostly. What little money he had, it seemed, he threw away on flesh. Either Chimeran or human, or both. Pay for a fight or pay for a fuck, and drop the rest in a bottle in the spirit of celebration or commiseration—whichever is most fitting.

In any case, he’d be stumbling home in the end, and that’s the most important part of it all. Silver marks the butcher shops and draws a small circle around them; no rat scurries far from the sewer it festers in.

All the purchases were made in Mid Town, and none was more than a mile away from another. Virtually on her doorstep, she thinks, and one location in particular jumps out at her. Butting up against the sewage-ridden sand dunes of the eastern coastline is a butcher shop she and Alex used to have a particularly good trade agreement with, back in the day.

At Silver’s urging, Alex had put his techno-super-geek skills to work and found a way to hack into the Omega V&V mainframe. The V&V—Victuals & Vivisection—wing of the Dual Division Headquarters building is comprised of a meat locker, for fresh Hunter Division kills brought in from the Out District, and an underground facility for the containment of live Chimera.

Live captures are eventually divvied up between the autopsy table for viral studies, the Academy for live target practice, and the dairies for milk production. In the meantime, though, before the specimens have been catalogued, they’re just sitting ducks. All crammed together like battery chickens, pissing and shitting in each other’s faces. If one or two or three went missing at a time, nobody would ever notice.

So, all they needed to do was generate some fake credentials, slip in under the cover of darkness, and bypass the V&V wing’s security system.

Easy.

Hacking Omega wasn’t exactly a challenge for Alex. He’d been doing it since he was twelve, and it became a regular thing. Once a week they’d sneak in and make off with as many live and heavily sedated Chimera as they thought they could get away with.

Hijacking a Police Division transport truck to get the drooling, stinking beasts from A to B proved to be the tougher nut to crack, but Luka had helped them out with that. They hadn’t much choice but to let him in on it after he caught them in the loading bay, rolling an unconscious Chimera out of a laundry basket into the back of an armored car.

Luka got to accompany them on their adventures, and they got to commandeer a company vehicle for ‘legitimate’ Police business: patrolling the Fringe District, according to all official paperwork. Together they traded the Chimera to the butcher shop, in exchange for free liquor and, in Silver’s case, a few extras.

Alex called the whole thing off when he found out about the ‘extras’, and she hadn’t been back to that venue since.