Page 20 of Xerxes Ascendant
Kyle deserved better.
With a worried glance at him – and Kyle’s inexhaustibly large heart meant Akira would undoubtedly receive many more such glances before the night was out – Kyle left the room. He heard the blonde call out to another employee on the stairs, his tonealready cheerful and chipper in that effortless resilience of his. All Akira felt like doing was collapsing to the floor and growling at anyone who dared bother him.
He sighed. He had four clients to service tonight, andgrowlingwasn’t listed among their requests.
Akira
I know you haven't responded to my other messages, but please don't delete this one without reading it.
Theta has resurfaced.
Kyle
Fuck. The Coterie have dealt with him, I assume?
Akira
Unfortunately not. Theta is denying involvement in everything that happened that night, and he has at least Omicron behind him.
Kyle
Do I have to give a statement or something?
Akira
Please don’t get involved. He's made threats that I'm not keen to test.
Kyle
So we just let him get away with it
Are you serious
Akira
I'll handle it. I just need time.
CHAPTER 7
Kyle
Kyle yawned under the dawn lighting, shaking out his shoulders as he followed the streets back to Indira and Bensen’s apartment. Eric had given him directions for making it up to Level D without getting stumped by the out-of-order elevators, and the new route made the familiar city feel foreign and strange.
“Could you spare a single credit, young man?” croaked a woman tarrying at the next intersection, stretching out a dirty palm as though expecting him to physically place the digital currency into it. Her face was plump and affable, with dirt smudged thickly across her pale skin. Kyle judged her to be a decade older than him, and only recently having fallen on hard times from the neat perm that still graced her red hair beneath the ratty shawl. But her clothes were old and ripped, her eyes steeped in anguish, and she’d asked for his help.
She would get it.
“Here,” Kyle agreed, fishing his new runepad from his pocket. The woman produced her own without hesitation. Even those with nothing owned the ubiquitous devices, for they were necessary to process every financial transaction that happened on Xerxes – including receiving pitiable donations from passers-by like him, and redeeming those micro-credits for watery soup or a thin blanket at the city’s shelters.
Or, when expressed more accurately, citizens who found themselves without even a runepad as the sum total of their worldly possessions didn’t last long, which was why Kyle had been unable to turn down the one he’d found waiting for him upon his return to the House. Without a runepad, a person would have to steal everything they needed with no way to ever accumulate money. People like that were the ones who disappeared into sectors run by the gangs, never to be heard from again.
Was that what had happened to Vin? He’d been a man Kyle met on the street and instantly taken a liking to, and by the time they’d finished chatting that first morning, he’d pledged to get him a job interview at House Epsilon. Vin was clever, polite, and had a good sense of humour, and Kyle had been sure Master Epsilon would have taken him in.
Only Vin had never showed. Despite being eager for the opportunity only a couple of hours prior, he hadn’t turned up to the interview and Kyle hadn’t seen him since. He’d assumed he’d had second thoughts about joining Kyle’s technically illegal profession, but what if his disappearance was for a darker reason? What if Vin was one of the hundreds of corpses that were tossed off the city every week to make room for the living?
Kyle swallowed, and then added another zero to the amount he was transferring to the homeless woman. He didn’t want to see her life end in the same way as he now realised Vin’s probably had, full of desperation and fear.
'Cause it's another day for you and me in paradise.
