Hallway of Lost Girls

“Don’t blame yourself,” Anma said.

Pisha lagged behind her as they trudged towards their quarters, the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. They tracked bloody maroon footsteps across the otherwise pristine polished floor like some abstract drip painting.

She scratched at the stiff blanket absentmindedly. The one Anma had given her, wrapped around her shoulders. At least it was better than walking around half-naked.

Too bad she couldn’t regenerate clothing, too.

They stopped in front of Pisha’s plain door.

Anma hesitated. “Sometimes, on the job, things…” She trailed off, shaking her head.

“Get some rest, Pisha,” she finally said, turning the door handle.

Pisha lifted her eyes up to the doorway. She opened her mouth to complain. To say it was all wrong. At the very least, to ask Anma why she wouldn’t look her in the eyes anymore.

Instead, she sighed and shuffled through the entrance. Anma eased the door closed, and the lock clicked shut pitifully behind her.

Pisha didn’t bother switching on the lights. Really, she wanted to punch somebody. Not hard, or anything. Maybe just a bit hard.

Darkness occupied her cramped quarters, only broken up by the green glow of a digital clock. Wrinkled clothes cluttered her unmade bed, though she didn’t remember which were clean and which were dirty anymore.

She drifted towards the steel bedframe. Without thinking, she punted her shin into it with a metallic thud that rattled up her leg.

“SHIT!” she hissed.

It was more painful than she expected.

An immortal losing to a bedframe. The thought might’ve been funny if her shin didn’t hurt so badly.

She watched as the flesh split and the purple bruise vanished. It stung with an ache that almost made her want to stub it again. She poked at the smooth patch of skin and searched for any hints of the bruise that’d just been there.

It wasn’t tender. It felt fine. Like nothing had even happened in the first place.

Her pacing footsteps filled the room as she counted the bodies again, one for each step.

They weren’t so lucky.

In the end, she was nothing but a cheap party trick. No. Even less than that. At least card counting took some smidgeon of skill.

That question tugged at her brain again. The same one she’d repeated the entire trip back.

Was it our fault?

She tossed her unwashed laundry aside and sat down at the edge of the bed. The clothes slumped into a heap on the ground without a sound.

It didn’t matter. Those people were still dead. Dead as could be. They should’ve been quicker. They should’ve stopped him, before he had a chance to hurt anybody.

Him.

She pulled the blanket tighter and tried closing her eyes. It was no use.

The digital clock ticked again. Each green flash brought back the child’s screaming face.

It’d be better if she didn’t know. Yeah, right.

Her eyes wandered to the segmented digits as the milliseconds rolled forwards.

It was late. Everybody else had to be asleep.

She crept towards the entrance and fumbled for the handle. If she turned it slow enough, it might keep the hinges from creaking and ruining her escape. But as she prodded the door open, it bumped into something unfortunately solid.

“Where do you think you’re going?” an all-too-familiar voice asked.

Pisha peered through the crack. Outside, Anma stood with her arms crossed, a leather loafer propped in front of the door.

“Were you standing there the whole time?”

“I could hear you pacing from three doors down,” Anma said.

“Fuck off,” Pisha groaned.

She took a single deep breath and settled on an excuse. “Look. I was just gonna grab a snack—“

Anma removed her foot.

The door swung wide open and Pisha stumbled forwards. Her hands pinwheeled out like wind turbines as she fought for balance.

“Ack!”

She clipped into the stomped drywall, managing to somehow stay upright. But for some reason, Anma didn’t seem too impressed.

“Zone three,” Anma said.

“Huh?”

“He’s in zone three.” She repeated herself before turning away. “Just… Try not to get caught, alright?”

Anma strode down the hallway without another word, leaving Pisha alone in front of the door.

Pisha stood there, frozen, until the halls fell silent once again.

“...Okay?”

* * *

It went without saying Pisha hadn’t thought up a plan before sneaking away. It went without saying that she should’ve, too.

As she reached the same exact fire extinguisher again, she lost count of how many times she’d passed it.

The colourful mazes on the backs of cereal boxes were already a struggle. Navigating the looping hallways of the A.O.A. was another league of impossible.

“Maybe I should’ve asked Anma to be more specific.”

She rounded what felt like her thousandth corner and finally found it. A steel doorway, propped open by plastic crates. The letters “Zone 3” were embossed into the drywall above it.

The rattle of wheels on concrete approaching sent her flattening behind the corner. A staffer rolled a cart stacked high with cardboard boxes through the doorway. They stopped in the middle of the hallway and pulled out a clipboard from their coat.

She held her breath as they scanned the sheet. After a hundred eternities, the staffer stuffed the clipboard back into their see-through coat. They spun the cart ninety-degrees and left.

Once the jangle of wheels vanished, she tiptoed through the propped doorway.

What was the worst that could happen? It wasn’t like the Director could kill her. At least, that was what she told herself.

Soon, the endless doors gave way to glass panes, the scent of pure alcohol stinging at her nostrils. And, according to Anma…

If the kid’s anywhere, he’d be here.

She risked a peep over one of the windowsills. Inside, an older man was strapped to a chair bristling with copper wires. Staffers in matching sheer lab coats crowded around him.

Of course, any one of them could spot her, but she’d come too far to care anymore.

She squinted at the test subject bound in leather straps. It wasn’t just any old man. It was the swordsman, the one from the alleyway. He was almost unrecognizable without his cosplay-esque getup.

The samurai heaved, the veins on his head bulging. A mechanical arm jutted from the side of his seat, gripping a sheathed sword between its steel pincers. He thrashed against his restraints until the bolted chair underneath him groaned.

One of the wannabe-mad-scientists flipped a switch, and the lights dimmed. Columns of red lasers fired from the ceiling. As the shafts of light approached the ground, they scattered across invisible planes in the air with muted fizzes.

It was the same as during their fight. But back then, he only held two or three up at a time.

“Dishonorable… Bastards…” the swordsman grunted.

Even through the glass, his muffled voice sounded laboured, like a sprinter trying to talk through their fifth consecutive marathon. There was no way keeping up that much could’ve been easy on him.

Sure. He was a murderer, there was no doubt about it. He’d killed tens of people before they’d arrived. She shouldn’t have felt anything for him. But still, her stomach twisted.

It felt wrong to watch. Like stumbling onto one of those illegal red rooms from the deep web. It wasn’t justice at all.

The lights flickered back on. For a moment in the glass, her muzzle’s familiar reflection rested right on his sweating face. Their two blurry figures seemed to morph into one.

Then, his eyes found hers.

“YOU!” he shouted. “It was you, Immortal!”

Blood rushed to his tired face. Just as the mechanical arm sheathed the sword again, he jerked his body forwards with a strength that made his previous thrashing look half-hearted.

The mechanism rattled violently, and the blade went spinning into the air. With an ear-splitting crack, the sword punctured the window. Zig-zagging fractures erupted from where the tip embedded itself into the glass.

Only a couple inches from her nose.

She staggered backwards, her trainers slipping against the concrete. Not good.

An alarm blared as the staffers all spun towards the window. She bolted down the hallway.

In the room past, there was another Othered strapped to a chair. The next window had another. And another. Like one of those recurring childhood nightmares, it was the same awful scene all the way through the zone.

Anma, If I make it out of here…

She wasn’t sure whether she owed her an apology for getting caught, or a knuckle sandwich for the whole thing in the first place.

Staffers might have been shouting at her over the alarm, but it all turned into background noise the moment her eyes landed on him.

The boy, there, at the very end of the hall.

He sat muzzled in the centre of the room, his sweater still caked with debris. Staffers wearing clunky padded headphones that looked like they’d be more at home on a movie set surrounded him. One prodded the child with a long metal rod. His mouth flung open, and the air rippled and distorted around him. The bulky headsets rattled against their heads.

Then, it stopped. The boy slumped over. An uninterested staffer jotted notes onto a tablet like they were ticking squares off some sadistic bingo card.

From outside, Pisha’s breath fogged up the pane. She pressed her hands against the glass as the vibrations died out.

It wasn’t fair.

When she’d decided to jump from that roof, the only thing she’d destroyed was her muzzle. But what if she’d had his ability? Or the swordsman’s? She probably would’ve gone on a rampage.

Just like him.

If she hadn’t taken the Director’s deal, would that be her instead? Strapped to a chair, shouting and pleading until her lungs gave out?

Anma’s blanket suddenly felt rough against her skin. She pulled a hand back, her damp palm smearing foggy fingerprints across the glass.

In the end… I just got lucky.

The squeaking of a rubber glove on her shoulder interrupted her monologue.

“Pisha,” a staffer said.

She whipped around, about ready to swing.

“The Director asked to see you.”

Pisha’s blanket nearly slipped off in response. Shit.

* * *

Chastie didn’t know what a good day was. The idea was more foreign than a U.F.O. Every time she tried having one, reality conspired to fail her.

Frayed bandages dangled from her arms as she reached for a glass of water.

The cup slipped from her grasp with a glassy crack just as her fingers closed around it. Lukewarm water drenched her already stained white dress before reaching the carpet of their abandoned-cinema-turned-hideout. She watched as it soaked into her hem and bled across the grimy carpeting.

The worn-down velour seat creaked under her. Its fabric smelled like stale soft drinks. Ahead, Moroya stood in front of the projection screen, bathed in the blue light of a news broadcast reporting on the chaos of the Koto protest.

“There… There was a lot of blood, today,” Chastie said.

Moroya didn’t turn. The projector clicked continuously behind them.

“There was,” they said, finally tilting their head to face her. “Thirty dead, at least. Human or Othered, the broadcast didn’t bother mentioning.” Their pale face was illuminated by the projector’s rays. “And the A.O.A. will have forgotten their names by tomorrow.”

Chastie glanced down, though it made no difference. The corpses remained even with her eyes shut. Alongside them, the young Excursor. The one who had crouched down to help the protestor.

She couldn’t wrap her head around it. Why would a pretty girl like her be in the I.E.? Why would she be helping humans?

It didn’t matter if you were kind to them. Humans would only ever see you as a monster.

* * *

Intercity Excursion Force, Case File #07

Othered: Chastie.

Ability: Failure.

Description:

TBD.