Silence (14 page)

He’d had to learn to kill at the age
another child might wake up for their first day of school. Sheikoh
lived the life of hand to mouth, blade to throat, and constantly
practiced the hard learned lessons of disappearing into shadows. At
that point in time, Sheikoh had only existed to stumble through
puddles of blood as gangsters looked on and laughed at the children
scrambling to kill rather than be killed. The gangsters placed bets
and threw scraps at the savages gleefully, treating them as if they
were rabid Purmynxs rather than the human beings they were. Fear
and blood had been the pattern woven into Sheikoh’s life. Up until
the fateful day that had changed everything.

Sheikoh paused in his recollections,
carefully setting the gleaming screwdriver to the side. He pulled
Emili’s diamond-edged steelsaw over and began to polish its
blade.

He had clumsily stolen a shiny and new
Trinity XI from a balding man’s coat pocket. He had recently
discovered that gangsters would give him money, dots that he was
able to trade for food, in exchange for shiny bits and pieces he
found in other people’s pockets. He had been wondering how many
dots he would get for the cellpad when he was roughly slammed
against the wall.

“
What do you think you’re
doing, gutter rat?” the giant had demanded of him.

Sheikoh hadn’t understood what was
happening. To him stealing was a game. Take whatever he could find
in people’s pockets and then run away. He usually could make it out
of the owner’s field of vision, laughing happily, before they’d
realized what he’d taken. It had been fun.

He hadn't had any fun this time
though. Hanging against the wall from arms as thick as he was,
Sheikoh had never been more terrified. To this day, he remembered
his body's violent shake. Sheikoh’s stomach had felt sick. He
hadn't felt that desperate discomfort since the time that he had
made a child's come dribble out.

The child had suddenly thrown up on
the man, who, incredulous, had lifted the quivering infant and
brought him home at arm’s length. The man’s wife had cleaned the
two of them up. Then they had asked him endless questions. Sheikoh
had been petrified as they had tried to coax any knowledge of his
family out of him. He hadn't known anything about his family other
than his name. He had stuttered it out and nothing else for a long
time.

Finally, frightened and bewildered,
Sheikoh had gasped out a sentence.

“
My family wan’ me to go. I
wish they had kept me. But Canniria said I’m an ugy’ lil’ shit and
no one’ll ever love me,” he told the couple.

The strange women had started crying.
She had picked him up in a tight hug. The man's eyes had been
gleaming. He'd walked forward and embraced both his wife and the
confused child who had tried to steal his cellphone. From then on
the two bakers, Daneil and Anima had become Sheikoh’s adopted
parents.

Sheikoh’d lived happily for a few
years. He’d even taking the couple’s last name. It’d been one of
the simpler chapters of his hard life. It hadn’t been perfect,
though; Daneil and Anima had struggled to make ends meet. They had
spent all hours of the days in their bakery, trying to earn the
money to take care of him.

Once Sheikoh had adjusted to what had
seemed to a starving orphan the very definition of luxury, his
sharp instincts had detected a discord within Namar household.
Their business was failing, as was the eventual fate of practically
every commercial business on the eternally poor West Side. Between
the exorbitant protection fees from the various, competing gangs
(before Legacy had absorbed them all), Centaurai Vest’s
aristocratic taxes, and the general economic limitations of the
unlucky sector of Interium, practically every integrated business
had fallen by the wayside.

At eight, Sheikoh had deduced that the
solution to his family’s problems had been more money. So he’d
secretly dropped out of school and become an errand boy for gang,
Redline, the only people willing to offer a job to an
eight-year-old. They had actually paid rather well. And it’d been
good experience; Sheikoh had learned to dodge kicks and blows
leveled without reason.

It’d been his inductive glimpse into
the underground - where succession was paid for in blood and the
glow was backed by drugs.

For a few months, everything had been
great. Their glow troubles dissipated; Sheikoh had persuaded
Redline to ease up on the Namar bakery some, and business had
chugged solidly.

Everything had been in easy
equilibrium.

That is, until Daneil learned that his
son was bringing him Redline’s glow. He had shouted himself hoarse
at Sheikoh, screamed hate for every bit of love they’d wasted on
him. As though he’d personally been the one to come at the end of
each month and bled them dry.

Sheikoh winced. Then his
face smoothed over half an instant later.
The past only hurts if you let it,
told himself.

But he knew that was a lie.

Pain hurts regardless of
wants. Whether you, ‘
let
it
’ or you don’t, it was
always there. By its very nature, pain is immutable. If it could
just be ignored, the concept wouldn’t have ever come to be. And
Sheikoh knew that better than anyone.

He finished polishing the last tool,
and he picked himself up, shrugging his jacket on. Then he set a
brisk pace through the sewer. A few moments later, he was back at
the safehouse. He quietly went through the decontamination process,
and eased the door shut behind him. He could see that Dorothi was
already asleep in one of the sleeping bags, curled up in the far
left side of the room.

Sheikoh carefully replaced Emili’s old
tools and then swung through a door into the only other room in the
safe house - a tiny, closet-sized shower.

For the second time, he pulled his
clothes off. Sheikoh tossed his clothes into a pull-out compartment
and flicked the shower’s knob on ‘hot’. An initial icy shiver, and
then the temperature began to rise. Warmer and warmer, until he was
surrounded by steam and relaxation.

His muscles went loose, dropping
tension until his eyes went heavy. His body felt as soft a jelly.
He leaned against a wooden wall, trying to summon the drive to grab
the soap. The warm water was magical.

Magical…

Sheikoh yawned.

Was he really meeting a Celestial
tomorrow?

Sheikoh was too tired to
speculate, however.
He grabbed the bar of
soap and rubbed until suds overflowed his hands. Then he scrubbed
his body down. And again. And then one last time, until he no
longer felt covered in a layer of filth. Then Sheikoh flicked the
water off and dried himself. He wrapped the towel around his waist,
pulled on a clean outfit, and then quietly curled into a sleeping
bag on the floor.

As soon as his head touched down,
Sheikoh was out for the count.

Chapter 7

Once Upon a
Crime

Sheikoh prowled the familiar maze of streets and alleyways in
an effort to distract himself from the bubbling nervousness. He
passed metal-spackled houses and broken-down wooden cabins, his
face furrowed and intense. Sheikoh had less than half an hour left.
He stepped forward with brisk, measured paces, identifying
landmarks with the passing wonder that came at the knife’s edge of
a battle.

This might well be the last time he
ever saw any of them.

He couldn’t sit still. Staring at the
creeping dangers as time slowly slotted them into place was
draining. And he was going to need to be sharper than ever if he
wanted to survive this ultimate confrontation. This battle between
good and evil. He’d always been destined to play this
part.

The part of the hero.

Sheikoh knew that heroes didn’t always
come out on top. He’d lost years to the hurricane of conflict,
swirling with blood and violence, and there wasn’t a shred of
heroism anywhere in there. Only desperation and death; screams and
silence; the living and the dead.

Sheikoh gripped the comforting hilt of
the six-inch-long, blacksteel electroblade, courtesy of a hood
who’d drunk himself unconscious. It’d been simple for Sheikoh to
shift the blame on another game member. He’d always been a good
liar.

But the lies had died on his lips that
horrible day. The day Daneil had found out where Sheikoh had been
scrounging his money from. The thought of the kind man’s face
twisted in fury and the pain of betrayal as Sheikoh’d felt at the
man’s screams like blows. He quickened his pace to the bakery. He
was going to make this right.

The street spilled into a square, and
his eyes found the small bakery cowering in the corner. It was
Saturday, the end of the work week, which meant that a group from
Redline would be collecting protection fees from each of the
struggling businesses that lined Temptation Street. If any of the
business was empty or if their owner hadn’t accumulated enough
profit to satisfy the cruel brigands, they were instantly made an
enemy of the gang.

At a business’s first offense, Redline
stripped the unfortunate victim of every item of any possible
value. That was the shopkeeper’s warning. The second offense
resulted in the trashing and then sacking of the offender’s
building. If anyone was unable to pay for their third week, their
building was burned to the ground, usually along with the unlucky
buildings directly beside it. Consequently, it was rare for a year
to go by without some raging wildfire burning its way through the
West Side.

Sheikoh could see the swaggering,
leather-clad gangsters making their rounds, laughing and joking as
they sauntered through the street. His chest went ice cold with
fear. He was a single child against seven fully-grown men and
women. Every single one of them was armed with a rifle, a handgun
or some form of a blade, most with some combination of the three.
The eight-year-old Sheikoh might as well plunge his own
electroblade into his chest; there was no hope of survival. His
body dropped into a ball, shivering uncontrollably. Sheikoh closed
his frightened eyes, brimming with terrified tears, and the child
rested his tiny head on his knees. His heartbeat pounded throughout
his body.

Unbidden Anima’s voice rose inside his
head.

“
No matter how desperate
the future looks we will never take the easy way out.
Self-sacrifice is what separates humanity from animals, and
humanity looks after its own,” Anima’s soft voice echoed inside of
him.

Sheikoh’s chest felt a little bit
warmer. He could see the mother figure in his mind’s eye, wearing
her yellow apron. Her glossy brown hair was pulled into a loose bun
the lines of her face were lightened underneath a twinkling smile.
Sheikoh stood up and looked at the cocky gangsters with blazing
eyes. He knew that at the time Anima had been explaining why she
and her husband had taken Sheikoh in, but it gave Sheikoh something
to hope for.

“
Humanity looks after its
own…” he murmured aloud, thinking.

If he ran down the street and showed
people a child was willing to stand up to the bullies, others would
follow. He was sure of it. Daneil and Anima, at least, would fight
the gangsters with him. They'd see that he was sorry.

Determination lit the innocence in his
fearful, dark eyes, and he drew the electroblade. He took a deep
breath and then ripped the still air with a wordless battle cry, as
he ran towards the hoods.

Shopkeepers’ surprised eyes turned
towards him. Their faces twisted into categories of despair, fear,
or that curious, blank-eyed jealousy born at the dead end of
desperate life. The two Namars had focused their eyes on the child
with twin stares of dismay and horror.

Sheikoh’s scream drew the attention of
the laughing, incredulous gangsters. They’re eyes narrowed
dangerously on the child running their way, armed only with a
knife. A few of them recognized their errand boy and a couple more
raised their guns at the screaming eight-year-old.

“
Don’t shoot. Let him
come,” a savagely grinning woman told them sharply. Her face
gleamed with a sadistic grin, and the others criminals hurried to
obey. Nobody dared disobey Chain, the leader of Redline.

Sheikoh brandished the humming
electroblade as he raced towards the gangsters. His battle scream
raged loudly in his pounding chest. A stone’s throw away, the
gang’s leader, a woman named Chain took a few quick steps towards
him. With a surge of hate for the gangster that had beaten him more
than any other, he thrust out his arm to stab her chest. Only his
hand was suddenly empty. The wild looking woman had plucked the
blacksteel blade from his hand, faster than thought. Then one of
Chain’s feet kicked out and tripped him.

Sheikoh face-planted onto the dirt,
knocking up a cloud of dust as he slid. When he lifted his head up
to take a terrified breath, he took in a lungful of the floating
dust. He choked desperately, trying to make force his incompliant
body to its feet as Chain walked toward him with an evil grin. He
rolled in the dirt desperately while the other gangsters laughed at
their former errand runner.

Sheikoh managed a gasping
breath of air. He shot a pleading look his parent’s way but their
faces were down. ‘
Please help
me
,’ Sheikoh mentally pleaded.