2. ROOK

Cass gets acquainted with Rook.

Rook wore his arrogance like a natural. Strutting ahead of Cass, with each of his thumbs hooked into the edge of his belt, and his pelvis jutting out. But somehow the tough guy stereotype worked on him. Like he was a frontiersman in some lame Unitan propaganda flick, surveying his newly acquired ranch-estate. 

Cass imagined him as just such a frontiersman, walking around the historic tribe-lands that he ripped away from some poor Kaval family, planting heavy feet in ground soaked with innocent blood. Killing the parents, and forcing the children to work the land until they starved. 

She felt that perhaps her imagination wasn't that far from the truth, but instead of a poor Kaval family, he was strutting ownership over Blackwyrm -- a district that the White Dawn were increasingly successful in snatching up control over.

Cass walked behind at a good length, knowing that rough men of this sort of confidence were the types you'd normally want to keep a distance from. But the want for more absurd buttloads of money, and a need for steady work kept her in tow as they made their way through that dark Blackwyrm Park trail. She followed, further away from the park's numerous shanty lean-tos, further away from the park's population of would be eavesdroppers.

This is stupid. The terror in her head attempted to reason with her. This is how women get murdered, the terror argued. "This is how criminals make money," she rebutted, conversing with herself in the cold silence.

"Huh?" Rook called back, with a tilt of his head that made Cass feel a little bit embarrassed over the fact that she was talking to herself.

Cass considered what she was going to say in response.

Looking around the darkness, a mechanism in her left iris began to whir. Her eye glowed sky blue, contrasting her naturally brown right eye, and a blurry overlay adjusted in her left field of view. "Jus sayin I'm ready to make money," she retorted, in time for the visual overlay to brush a transparent blue-green blob over the otherwise pitch-black surroundings. She narrowed her focus as she strafed her vision from left to right, noting distant orange-red points of light elsewhere in the park, and a similarly orange-red smear over Rook. "No one nearby on infra."

"Good." Rook stopped abruptly, which put Cass' nerves on edge once more. He turned to face her. The orange-red smear highlighted the heat of his face, revealing a rough outline of a box shaped head.

Cass nodded, frantic, and nervous, not knowing if Rook could see the motion. But of course he could. He lived in darkness. How could he not see it?

She hurried to take off her left glove, pulling it off by the index finger in a practiced singular motion, and held out her hand, palm up. In the centre of her palm, soft light flickered from a circular implant, and her left eye's EYE-ris implant simultaneously etched a holographic image into the light. 

A prepared resume appeared in the cross-hatching glow of the two implants, listing her various skills. Covert network access, virtual theatre manipulation, and remote data retrieval resolved in bullet points over the holographic image. The resume continued to type itself out in an impressive and stylized animation that must have taken Cass a good deal of expertise in coding to put together.

"Put that f****n holo away," Rook barked, and Cass scrambled to cover up the light projecting out of her eye, faster than the mechanism inside could work to make the images vanish. "I don't need to see s**t I already know, f****n brat." He sparked a stick, and the embers glowed in front of his face, revealing enough that Cass could make out a thick scar across the ridge of a bulbous nose, and cavernous eyes perched ravenous on high cheek bones. In less than a moment, his features disappeared back into the darkness, and only the orange tip of the cig-stick remained visible.

Cass couldn't fight back the shivers this time. Between cold, darkness, and thug, she felt helpless to her body’s convulsing.

"You do good on this job." Rook paused to take another drag. "We'll consider you for your hacking skills."

Cass withdrew into herself, holding her arms in a crossed fold, each hand clasping the opposite elbow tightly. "If not a hacking job, then what?"

"We need the Blackwyrn Bandit," Rook spoke with emphasis on the last two titular words. With a singular snort, followed by a globular thud of spit on packed dirt, Rook emptied his nasal passage before clearing his throat to continue. "We could use… her… skills," emphasis this time on the word 'her.'

Panic itched along Cass' goosebump-riddled skin. Her. How could he know the Blackwyrm Bandit was a girl. Cass swallowed down a lump growing in her throat. "What's the job?"

"Hit job. Not the usual kind, though." He tossed the cig-stick to the side of the path, sparks danced around where it struck ground, then disappeared in the darkness as the stick extinguished. "Can't kill this guy. He has friends who’d hit back hard. Just want him out of the game. He's in this new three man merc crew, and they're givin us Dawns a hard time. Some baby face, and hot headed muscle guy who can handle heavy guns. Used to be a tech-junkie in Underlow turns out. Well you know those tech-junkies," he asked without really asking, and stopped to give Cass a bit of time to soak in the info.

Cass rubbed the developing itch on her neck, at the mention of tech-junkies. She knew, and she knew all too well. "So," she began, "you want me to slip this guy somethin that takes him back off the rails."

"Ya," Rook blurted.

"You think a good looking and hot headed muscle guy has any interest in scrawny, pale chicks, with buzz cuts? In my experience they're usually more into big butts, big tits, and big hair."

"That ain't what this is about," Rook laughed. "This mark is inta big c***s."

And then there's that, Cass thought, as the prospects of swimming in a bathtub full of cash began to evaporate from her list of realistic short term goals. No suite in Beijie, no breast implants, no personal VR engine. No new life.

"Why you even want me then?" Cass asked directly.

"Blackwyrm Bandit is good at covering her tracks. No one knows who she is. No one ever caught her. Stole all over Blackwyrm for years and years, right in broad daylight even. Never caught, security feeds scrubbed, and then she disappears. Goes dark. Well we need skills and capabilities like that, and if it works out, we need a hacker on retainer too."

"Okay." Cass was beginning to feel encouraged. "So you want me to slip him a drug and not get caught. How the hell do I get close enough to a gay boy to slip him the goods?"

"Guy lost his companion not too long ago, but instead of shootin up juice, finds somethin else to occupy his mind when he ain't shootin up our business. Drinks and f***s every night that he ain't workin. Well he goes to this gay joint north of the park."

"The BlackWyse Club," Cass interrupted, knowing all too well. Besides being from Blackwyrm herself, she was also once a serial attendee of the BlackWyse, preferring the company of some of its other serial attendees, over those of straight joints. "I know it."

"Course you do," Rook said with a playful drawl that told Cass he was smiling somewhere behind that drape of shadows covering his face. "So, you go in, catch up with your friends, be all casual like. Or whatever the f**k. You do your thing. Slip him the drug, and don't get caught."

"Okay," Cass transitioned her shivering crossed arms, holding her chin in a more confident pose, contemplating. "But how you know this drug is gonna work. How you know he doesn't just go back to displacing by living the drunk fuckboy life?"

Rook laughed out loud. "Oh he won't be able to resist this drug. Course he won't know what it is, but he'll look all over for it. This stuff is the hottest s**t since Tricone got pushed out by those CCG pigs. We're gonna flood the city with it, but you're gonna give him a jazzed up dose. When he comes down, he’ll be all over the streets lookin to score."

"Huh," Cass' interest was piqued, curious at something that could boast a high that compared to Tricone, and feeling the itch of desire to have good feelings again. "What you callin this s**t again?"

Rook bellowed another laugh, tossing Cass a vial that she could hardly see, save for the glint of tempered glass against the dim light of two moons. "It's like a whirlwind in your brain," he chuckle-talked, "we’re callin it Maelstrom."

Reviews

[Wathanya.5KY3]

I hope the pandemic isn't hitting you as hard as it's hitting me, physically or emotionally. I'm quite happy to read more of Cass' adventures. I wonder how she's gonna slip Maelstrom into her hit target, but at the same time, I am suspecting the Blackwyrm Bandit is Cass herself. Haha Well, maybe that one's a little too clumsily deduced.

I don't see any typos; this is surely one of the cleanest writings I've ever seen on this site. The only things I noticed are about Rook's way of speaking and one formatting glitch.

- I noticed that Cass and Rook don't pronounce certain letters in their speech, and that's something that readers can add to their character profiles. However, when writing shortened words, it's a good idea to make good use of the apostrophe. So, "Jus sayin I'm ready to make money," should be, "Jus' sayin' I'm ready to make money."

- As for the formatting glitch, the paragraph that starts with, "Guy lost his companion not too long ago..." has extra space before it. You don't have to fix this one though, unless you're a perfectionist like me.

[JT Godin]

Hey! Good to hear from you again. Pandemic is a grey cloud with many silver linings for me. Its giving me time to catch up on a lot of stuff that was falling out ablity to manage. The downsides have been harsh, and devastating in some cases, but temporary freedom from the 50+ hour workweek has been great.