Silence (32 page)

   
Sheikoh
could always count on Indigo for a good distraction.

    “
It’s
date. I’ll tap you all night, Loverboy,” Sheikoh giggled into the
monocle.

    “
You
are one weird, little freak,” Indigo responded with
disgust.

    “
What
are you talking about, Indie? I thought you and me had a thing
going on? I thought you… I thought you loved me,” Sheikoh whispered
in a hurt voice.

    “
I love
this Swifthooves more than I love you… and I wouldn’t care if I
rode the animal till it died,” Indigo shot back.

Sheikoh turned his helmeted head to
look at Indigo and the big grey Swifthooves that the ganglord rode.
The enormous helmeted man lifted his hand and shot an obscene
gesture at Sheikoh. He just watched the ganglord silently for a few
moments. Indigo laughed, under the rare impression that he’d had
the last word. Finally, Sheikoh responded.

   
“
So you’ve
loved
that Swifthooves, huh?” He
smirked. “Good choice, mate.” Sheikoh heard the ganglord draw in a
breath for retort.

   
“
Shut up, you pair of infants,” Ghost suddenly
cut in sharply. “We’re about to fight for our lives and all you
want to do is spend what might be your last conversation pissing
off the people that have your back? That’s a
really
well thought out
idea. In the meantime, we’re going to go through the forest
right…
here
.”

   
They
reined their Swifthooves to the side, wheeling the animals around
and then plunged into the leaves and branches and hugging the backs
of their jolting, jumping Swifthooves. Sheikoh hung on for dear
life as the animals dodged and bounded through the dense foliage.
He was content to let Ghost lead the three animals through the
Schizn Canopy. They rode for what felt like hours.
 

Suddenly, Ghost’s Swifthooves stopped,
rearing up onto its hind legs. The android’s waist was
perpendicular to the ground. Sheikoh and Indigo slowed their own
beasts to a stop just before they overshot him. Silently, Ghost
pointed two fingers at a solid hill of piled rocks just outside the
clearing that the three of them were.

Sheikoh instantly knew that his was
it. They were there. He turned to Indigo, remembering Ghost’s
words.

“
Hey, Indigo, sorry, mate.
It’s just before a fight, I get all this nervous energy and that’s
just what I do with it, dig?” Sheikoh confessed into the radio
silence.

The ganglord didn’t respond for a
while, so Sheikoh mentally shrugged and turned back forward. Then
Indigo answered him. The ganglord’s voice was a sinister crackle in
the fuzzy channel.

   
“
You get nervous? That’s weird, I just
get
pissed
.”

    “
Well
on that pleasant note, we’re here,” Ghost whispered
sarcastically.

Despite themselves, Indigo and Sheikoh
exchanged a helmeted glance at Ghost’s proclamation. Neither of
them had volunteered to go on this suicide expedition. Even though
Sheikoh couldn’t make out Indigo’s expression, he had a feeling
that the ganglord was probably about as nervous as he
was.

They dismounted and pulled their shiny
black helmets off. Sheikoh tossed his into the dirt and then tied
his Swifthooves to a tree branch with shaking fingers.

    “
Well…
we’re here then,” Sheikoh repeated, clapping his hands and rubbing
them together.

Indigo drew his assault rifle, and
Ghost pulled a pair of sleek, metal pistols out from his grey suit
jacket. Not wanting to be the only one unarmed, Sheikoh pulled out
his electroblade and flipped it around his fingers with easy grace.
Then he looked at Ghost’s weapons with interest. He could
immediately tell that they both lethal and considerably expensive.
Their silversteel sides were streaked with twin pulsating, green
strips that flickered like snakes.

    “
Anyone
of you guys want to go over a plan?” Sheikoh asked. He didn’t wait
for them to respond. “I’ll be the distraction. Uhh… you two
distract it from the distraction and the distraction will run up
and lasso the demon-

Emili.

-with this here amulet until it
faints. You two do your thing with Vest and then we ride off into
the sunset.”

    “
Simplistic, but sound general ideas,” Ghost murmured. Indigo
nodded, looking at Ghost with shiny eyes.

The three of them stared at one
another for a moment. Sheikoh tried to pretend that the demon the
three planned on attacking wasn’t wearing the face of the girl he
loved. He was riddled by shaking nerves, and he did his best to
hide them from Indigo’s and Ghost’s sight. Sheikoh had never had to
work so hard at repressing his feelings. Even the gut wrenching
time long ago that he’d stood up to Skyrace and its leader,
Chain.

Sheikoh’s stomach lurched,
shying away from the massive explosion of force that Emili-
no
Khryzt
had
punched him with. In all of Sheikoh’s cyborg life, the demon had
been the only adversary to knock him unconscious. Even without its
magic, Khryzt was inordinately strong and blindingly fast; Sheikoh
knew that if he fought with anything less than every speck of his
strength and determination he would die. At the hands of Emili, no
less. The girl he loved.  He wasn’t sure if he could fight a
creature wearing Emili’s face with every speck of strength and
determination.

   
Ghost
interrupted his thoughts. “Let’s do this.”

Sheikoh glanced over at Indigo, half
hoping that the ganglord wasn’t in agreement, but the ganglord was
nodding. Indigo turned to look at him, as Sheikoh realized that
Ghost was watching on with narrowed eyes. Sheikoh gulped down his
fear, clenched his fist around the cold hilts of his ML5 and
electroblade. He nodded at the two of them. They turned and made
their way towards the rocky mountain that jutted out of the endless
forest like a knife.  

Sheikoh followed the two fingering the
cold metal of the amulet around his neck. As they walked around a
corner of the rocky, tree-speckled mountain, a dark hole in its
side crept into view. Sheikoh flipped his hair out of his eyes, to
better see the gaping maw of the cave. It seemed to have suddenly
opened in the hill. Within its depths, Sheikoh could hear a
tell-tale dripping. Stalactites and stalagmites jutted from the
roof and ceiling like fangs.

    “
After
you,” Indigo smiled at Sheikoh. His voice was edged with sharp
ice.

Sheikoh took the giant’s queue and
darted into the welcoming shadows of the cave. He heard a tiny gasp
from Indigo as he crouched behind a giant stalagmite. Sheikoh knew
that he’d disappeared from the ganglord’s sight. Grinning, he tried
to pierce the heavy darkness around him. As far as he could tell,
the demon wasn’t anywhere near here; they would have to go farther.
Sheikoh waved Ghost and Indigo over and the three of them crept
through the shadowy underground passage.

   
Ghost
stopped and pressed the buttons on his silver cuffs. The blue light
of his projected keyboard flared, a blinding beacon in the cave’s
dark. Sheikoh pulled Indigo over Ghost so their bodies blocked most
of the light from traveling down the tunnel. Cursing under his
breath, Ghost lowered the brightness. The man with a slashed face
tapped at the projected keyboard for moment. When he finished, a
loading bar appeared on the screen of Sheikoh’s monocle, and he
could see a similar program loading on Indigo’s. Within seconds,
both of the bars filled up. Sheikoh’s and Indigo’s monocles went
into infrared vision.

    “
Great,
now I can see out of one of my eyes,” Indigo muttered under his
breath.

Ghost glared at the ganglord and
jerked a finger up to his lips. Sheikoh’s own eyes tore into Indigo
as sharp as daggers. As much as Sheikoh appreciated good
conversation, he was totally with Robocop on this one. Time and
place. A sheepish expression flashed across the ganglord’s face
under their looks. Sheikoh turned away and led the two others
quietly through the dark.

It would have been silently, if not
for Indigo. He and Ghost crept through the gloom like a pair of
panthers. Compared to them, Indigo’s heavy footfalls and splashes
were deafening. The ganglord blundered through puddles and kicked
hidden pebbles, sending echoes skittering through the cave.
Indigo’s clumsiness grated on Sheikoh’s nerves until they’d been
stretched taunt, like a rubber bands just before they snapped. They
weren’t going to sneak up on anyone with Indigo stumbling around
behind them.

Sheikoh stopped and pulled a mini
keyboard out of his pocket. He used his thumbs to type out a
message. Ghost and Indigo watched his shadow with the same question
in their eyes. He finished and sent it to Ghost’s monocle.
 

    ‘
u 2
wait. ill go ahead. dont let me die pls.’

   
Ghost nodded his assent, looking at Indigo and
back to Sheikoh in a way that told him that Ghost
really
did
understand his message. Indigo looked between the two of
them, confused and annoyed. But Sheikoh didn’t have time to soothe
the ganglord.

He went on through the shadows.
Alone.

Sheikoh faded into the darkness like
he’d never been there in the first place. He flashed a glance
behind him. Indigo’s head spun around, searching the dark and Ghost
stared at a vaguely human-shaped stalagmite to Sheikoh’s left. He
grinned.

Still got it.

Even with night vision, the gangsters
couldn’t follow his imperceptible ripple of motion. Sheikoh’s hard
life had taught him how to slip out of the eye’s grasp, like he was
covered in visual oil. The brain just wasn’t good enough to follow
his glide.

Sheikoh glowed with quiet pride for a
second and turned to face forward. He continued on in absolute
silence. The cave appeared green to his monocle. Shadows crept in
his scarred right eye, but unlike a normal eye, his right could
more-or-less see. His grin hardened into a grimace of concentration
as he made his way through the cave. He turned a corner and his two
companions were lost to view. Now, he was really alone.
Nonetheless, he felt oddly at home here in the dark, slinking
through stone hallways. It was just Interium on a particularly dark
night. This was his every night. Nobody was better at this than
him.

Sheikoh stayed as silent and as smooth
as the shadows at his sides. He glided through the dank cavern like
a wraith. He turned a corner and suddenly caught the sounds of
breathing. He stopped and listened for a moment. There it was
again, like a whisper of cold breeze.  They were just around
the next bend. Sheikoh sidled up to the cavern wall and fired a
quick glance into the chamber, quickly turning back. His heart
hammered like he’d just run a tri marathon.

There she-

There
it
was.

The room beyond was gently illuminated
by the cold light of the white fires that burned in Emili’s eyes.
The demon-possessed Emili sat cross-legged, poring over an open
book lying at her knees. Sheikoh knew that it was the codex. He
also noticed that Emili’s body still wore her baggy, faded jeans
and the collared mechanic shirt that she’d had on in his living
memory.

Sheikoh dragged his feet towards the
cavernous room, forcing them to step around the corner that hid
him. Huddled at the shadow’s edge of Khryzt’s white fire was the
Centaurai, slumped unconscious on the floor. Sheikoh’s eyes
flickered over him, before coming to land upon the reason that he
was here - Emili.

No,
Khryzt
.

But if it wasn’t Emili too, he
wouldn’t even be here.

He shook himself. It wasn’t Emili
until he took care of her little demon infestation. Sheikoh
intentionally kicked at a pebble by his foot. It skittered across
the stone floor, echoing off of the walls. He wasn’t about to fire
on Emili. Not unless he had to.

Emili’s head rose at the sound.
Khryzt’s gaze of leaping flames focused on Sheikoh. The fires spat
a flurry of red and purple sparks out to frame Emili’s now-tangled
blonde hair. Flickers of alien recognition rippled in Sheikoh’s
stomach, simultaneously cold and nauseous. He forced himself to
stare into the Sycrarian’s burning eyes. For a long moment, their
two impassive faces stared at one another in tense
standoff.

“
Khryzt,” Sheikoh greeted
with a cold nod. “You never told me that you were a demon. Anything
else you forgot to mention?”

“
I am
a
Sycrarian
, the most honorable of all of the gods’ creations,”
Emili’s mouth retorted in the double-timbre of
magic.  

The demon’s eerie voice was all the
impetus he needed; instinct blurred his hand until his pistol was
aimed at those flickering white eyes. His gun fired a barrage of
blood-red plasma at the figure. The shots flashed straight at her
face.

Emili-

-No,
Khryzt-

Khryzt just sat there, holding his
gaze with supreme unconcern. His trigger finger suddenly stopped
twitching shots off. His chest plummeted with despair. Emili was
going to die. The demon was going to make him kill Emili. He was
sure of it.