Page 12 of Alliance
I turned down the leftward path, mesmerized by their faint echoes. If I wanted to follow them, I wouldn’t have long before they were gone.
A wall of amber and silver pushed straight through my trail, and I bounced backwards with a wide-eyed gasp.
“No!”
I scrambled past the person that had interrupted my trail and tried in vain to gather the wisps that were quickly dispersing, shoveling them together like a raccoon trying to stop cotton candy from disappearing in water.
Was that a reference to something?
No time to investigate. Must gather.
“Scocite.What the hell?”
The voice of the man behind me was confusing. Guttural and growly with a piercing whimper deep in his chest. The digital noise of his holotab and language bionics floated through my hands and I paused, squinting at it.
That signature looked so familiar. I’d seen it intersect with what I’d been following many times down this road. Even now, if I looked up at a distance, I saw his echoes here and there, some stronger, some fading to nothing. I realized it was the course of many sols, traversing this same road by foot, just as he did now.
I turned to look at him as he brushed furiously at a neck and arm covered in amber-spun fur, a pair of large, rounded ears angled back in alarm as the nano-foam clung to his coat and clothing. He shook his clawed palms, trying to dislodge it.
“What are you?” I asked, cataloging his features. He wasn’t venandi, hjarna, or shilpakaari. These were the species I was coded for, and he resembled none of them.
He was tall but very thin, with a cowl of fur hanging loose from his neck. Icy blue eyes with horizontal pupils were set slightly wider than my own thanks to a flat, expressivenose. Above them was a thick forehead where the velvet of his face grew wiry and shiny, covering his head in a thick spray of short fur.
His brow creased. “What the hell does that mea—oh shit,” he breathed, freezing the moment our eyes met.
My face brightened as if I’d caught a mouse between my paws.
“You recognize me!” I gasped breathlessly, taking a step towards him. He fell back a pace.
“No.”
“But you know I’m human!”
He looked me over slowly, a crease in his brow, then shook his head. “I don’t know what that is. Excuse me.”
He gave me a wide berth, then practically ran down the road, discarding the shirt being quickly destroyed by the nano-foam. I stumbled over it, then picked it up, rushing after him.
“Wait!”
He turned around and I stopped short.
“I can’t help you, okay? I have enough shit to deal with right now. I can’t—”
“Please,” I begged, clasping my hands together. I had no way to regulate my responses anymore, and all the desperation I…felt…was visible on my features. The man swallowed hard and turned me around by the shoulder, pointing in the opposite direction.
“If you go straight for half a turn, you’ll run into a guild outpost. It’ll have a red door. Knock and ask for help there, alright? I can’t help you, so don’t follow me.”
His calloused, biting grip disappeared and left me staring in that direction with bated breath. [Analysis] I could follow his instructions. Maybe there were other humans like me in this guild outpost…
But he knew the one I wanted to find. My chances were stronger with him.
I defied his instructions and turned around. He was gone, but the digital noise of his holotab remained. I picked that ribbon out of the mess of signals and followed it around the corner, his shirt clutched in my hand.
The shadows were deep as I veered off the main road. Lightning arced across the ashy black clouds above, illuminating two men talking over a glowing pipe at the end of the alley. They watched me as I picked my way along the narrow path, following the man’s data. He didn’t want me to follow him, so I would be careful not to make noise, but I needed to. To know which of these little metal shacks was his and make sure I couldn’t lose him like the trail he’d interrupted.
Finding it wasn’t hard.
Though the alley was abandoned, the interiors of every ramshackle home along the path bustled with life. Radio feeds, murmured discussion, pots and plates being jostled around, snapping fabric, little sniffs and grunts and hums. All but onewith a corrugated sliding door on oily hinges. It was nestled between homes, and though there was no light seeping from beneath the door, [thermal vision] a warm body pressed against it from the other side. Listening and still.
