[
Author's Note: I'm sure there'll be questions on this one, if not only for the spastic switches between time, and the pile of accents and slurring. This is very much Fara beginning to think for herself, for the first time in a long time. What's more, it's Ooidal finally perhaps thinking that she can. Required Listening - it's not a bad idea to listen to this one before reading, rather than during.]
“Who is he?” the words were hoarse chirps like a cricket’s song. “Who is he, an’ who’re you?” The girl’s face was a car wreck, headlights broken, and odd fluids pouring from any hole they could.
“Y’urr not okay, Fara,” he had stopped using her name at some point, he recognized briefly. “Y’uvven’t been h’okay f’ur a lon’ time. An’ Dante, I jus’ thought yhoo’d always been s’uh much like’um back when-” he cut himself off. She had never been okay. When he was plucked from the comatose, comfortable life of regret in Erehwon and tossed onto the Equinox, a Tetragrammaton talking-head had handed him a board-stiff envelope, the dossier on 341102 - twenty-two pages whose meticulous findings had been skewered by a broadsword of black ink. But the first time he laid eyes on her, he did not want her to have a history.
The Hovercraft Archon was a thundercloud mountain of gleaming silver, each nook and cranny punctuated by a rafter stabbing blindly into the dark, cold, narcotic real world. Ooidal stood at the bow of the Equinox - he had been living alone aboard the rodent for nearly a week already. As the Archon’s stomach slowly began to bleed light from a small incision, he mused that the captain would be a stoic old bigot that had won the big for the new ship simply by seniority.
Here’s hoping.She was barefooted, with the type of rubbed-down-with-turpentine redness in her skin that meant she had only recently lost her shoes, and had not yet gotten used to it. An odd white line, a scar, was drawn between two toes and up to the cuff of her pants. A cuff that was, as most, frayed and filthy, pants a sort of black that in normal light would seem like farmland at midnight, but when brought against the true darkness around her, paled to a grey that was much less sure of itself - a sentiment that would repeat itself. They were tied with a spare length of thick cable. He could only tell by the set of plugs hanging at her inseam, though, as a grey shawl with the mocking Tetragrammaton insignia branded into its shoulder covered the pants’ top few inches. Her torso was wrapped in the ripped ribbons of her bed sheet, though he could not tell at the time. Most parts of her arms were exposed, the skin a horrible patchwork of windburn outlined by the white jet stream of far away scars. Her hands were tightly balled, wrapped in the rest of the sheet. She carried nothing with her.
The girl’s mouth wore an unsteady smile, a young one, perhaps too big for her face but he had not thought of it back then. In the months she had been aboard the ship, her hair had reached just past the bottom of her ears, clawing desperately at her face, so as not to be swept away by the tide of cavernous wind and uncertainty. It was at the length where hair just stops standing up of its own will, a dirty mix of red, orange, and filth, like salsa that sits out for too long. As her whole head came into sight, his mouth hung agape, unsure of whether social standards mattered, unsure if she could see him, anyway. The girl’s right eye was a puffy almond shape with a yellow tint that would have been notably odd on anyone else. Bruised redness and a fracturing white interchange converged at her left. The eyeball itself was not. It was just a gooey white cataract that no longer did what it was supposed to. She gave her captain, a silverback in human clothes a hug, the top of her head barely level with his chest. It made her look about twelve years old.
He was going to be a father.“There’s no confed’uracy, no Demiurge,” he wondered why he said it backwards, why he said it with such sweeping insensitivity. “Y’left th’Tetruh-grem’muhton beh-cuz I convinced’yhoo tooh. I was on’y lookhin’ ou’fur y’er bes’ intrust, an’ I thought our bes’ hope would be’h Dante. He whuz m’eh captain, Fara, bef’ur the war ended, be’fur y’whurr even in ele-huh-menturry school. Y’ove t’uh know tha-”
“Who th’ell d’you think you are? I ‘ed a-”
“Y’had nu’vvink, Fara. Y’were ‘uh litt-hull brat in a black dress th’shoots would trot out wh’un they neeh-did t’pretend t’beh human. I wan’ed sum’vink bett’urr f’er yhoo, an’ I knew we could geddit w’hif his help. He jus’ needed ‘uh favor.”
“Why didn’t he j’ess get Domino himself?” she begged, the words a mountain that suddenly stopped the semi-truck of explanations speeding fifth-gear from Ooidal’s bloated jowls.
“I don’…” he struggled, teetering on the edge of a tremendous truth.
…an ivory sedan driven by some Noone and his lackeys.“He did. We need’uh leave.” The Hovercraft Fawkes disagreed with all of this action. It had enjoyed sitting idle in that arctic wound for so long. Noone, his characteristically classic-movie features slack, sat far from helpless in a rat’s nest chair, his eyelids fluttering delicately, like a dying butterfly, except more like a newspaper caught in a gutter grate. Next to him, his cumbersome, messy hair much more grey in this reality, his skin eroded and muddy limestone, sat the master of misdirection, ready to pull a Houdini on all of them. Noone had always seen Dante as a father figure, but so had everyone else.
He had been struck by a freight train when the behemoth died, and another when he returned to New Antigone very much alive. By his word, they hit Erehwon, hard, emerging with nothing but black-and-blue memories and a one-armed blonde. Another train when he was told to give the girl to Dante’s other favorite son and his little pixie of a captain. In response to why, he got a typically brilliant answer.
“The more’uh you I involve, the less like-uh-ly it’ll be that Noble’ll predict what’s next. I’d bet by now he’s foun’ I’m still alive an’ kickin’. I can’t let him get to her before I get to him. An’ I can’t jus’ take her without a fair amount of insurance. It’s bad enough already, this should’ve ended when Peg died.”
A tear shed for lessons learned and thrown away.He was in front, half-pulling-half-carrying her from the room. The frail little brat was still demanding answers, her voice a whiny sort of animalistic snarl that he had not heard since her days with the intelligence department, just before the relapse.
In truth, probably during it.“Listen,” he stopped, his voice the booming eastern-European bass that made more sense than the subdued slur that he typically poured. “Dante jus’ wan’nud us trap’t in’urr so that he could ge’rron t’th’Equinox without trouble. He’s gonna kill Noone, and all th’poor saps from New Antigone wh’ivvum. Then he’s gonna kill Systemic, an’ Domino, and then he’s gonna kill us.” The stoic old bigot’s eyes were wide, and he was panting; he had lied to her again. He already knew that Dante was not going to kill him, and that Domino would be left alive, at least until he could bring Noble out of his protective shell. But he could still save her.
Dante was trying to break through the face of the clock and spin the hands backward. But nine years will always be nine years, and eight minutes will never be enough time.
“We’re all jus’ fu’ghing rats in his claws, and’as goin’ t’chew on all’uv us ‘til there’s nu’ffink left, because rats are nu’ffink t’a worthl’uss, remor-suh-less bas’surd like him.”
“But what d-”
“No, no more ques-suns.”