Chapter 14: Chapter 14 – Rosewater (1)

It was one of those particularly cold autumn nights when you went out of the house in good spirits and realized by dusk that you weren’t wrapped up warm enough.

Ember was a head shorter than Wave, so her clothes were just in the range of being too small to fit her, but not small enough to set a new fashion trend. Her synth suit protected her entire body, except for her head, which she had left bare, but slowly the cold crept through and caressed her skin, tingling.

Wave exhaled, and a cloud of warm breath mingled with the exhaust fumes pouring up from the manhole covers of what should have been a disused sewer in Ring 7. After synth technology was perfected and toilet contents could simply be sent to nirvana, sewers had become obsolete. Technically.

The anglophone neighborhood affectionately called the area around the former sewage treatment plant 'Rosewater' and gave it a wide berth. The city had abandoned the area at some point or forgotten to restructure it, and therefore, a self-sufficient subculture of hard-core dropouts who didn’t want to leave the safe walls of the city was able to settle here. They had disconnected themselves from all the city’s networks, produced energy through biogas, grew their own food in the abandoned housing complexes, and tried to live as they had in the pre-Ice Age world. Or how they imagined they would have lived. Wild and free.

Wave loved nature, yet she also appreciated the benefits of modern conveniences. It just wasn’t great having to dig a hole in the jungle earth first if you had to go to the toilet while being surrounded by hungry dinosaurs,.

She rubbed her cold nose and Hammer looked at her with pity. In the dim light of the streetlamp, the shadows on his face looked like archaic war paint, fitting for her brave Viking who accompanied her to this meeting.

"Wave, I can give you my coat if you’re too cold." He was already undoing the buttons of the dark green and black plaid coat, one of those cool, long pieces that came down to your calves. On her, it would surely drag on the floor and her hands would disappear into the sleeves. She had clearly picked the wrong friends to borrow clothes from.

She eyed Hammer at length, starting at his feet and working her way up to the ends of his blond hair. Then she squinted one eye, held her thumb between herself and him, and gauged him.

"It’s all right, Wave. It’s not like I can help being half a giant."

"Oh, you’ve never stood next to a brontosaurus before, have you? I’d say you’re pretty small by comparison. Sadly, your clothes still don’t fit me."

He laughed.

"What did you actually tell Marielle about why you had to stay out so late?" Wave asked.

Hammer grinned. "I didn’t lie to her if that’s what you mean. Well, not exactly. I said I was going to be with you. I just forgot to mention that the rest of the team wasn’t with us, as well."

Well, it wasn’t the first time the team had ever met in the real world, even at such a late hour. Since Ember came of age, at the latest, there had been frequent opportunities to do so. And if everything worked out, his wife wouldn’t find out where Hammer really spent this night.

"Enjoying the thrill?" Wave pulled up one corner of her mouth. That was her audacious grin, as she believed.

"I have to admit that I wouldn’t dare come here alone, but with an experienced outworlder like you, I’d jump right into any adventure."

"Hammer’s a nice guy, isn’t he?" the voice in her ear commented on this scene. "Even if he’s not completely honest with his wife ... and with you."

"Hmm?" grumbled Wave, for she could hardly respond to that question with Hammer standing right next to her.

"Well, he’s not uncomfortable in this place, at all, I can tell by his posture and the tone of his voice. Especially by the tone. At the same time, he makes you feel safe with him. He’s a smart guy."

"Well, Hammer is just a born team leader."

"What?" Hammer raised his eyebrows and looked at Wave in confusion.

"Oh, Aki just mentioned that you’re a little liar. You’re perfectly fine being here. It’s like you’re one of the villains who wreak havoc here every night."

"I did ...", Aki was about to protest but stopped when Hammer grinned broadly. "... oh, you knew that, didn’t you? That he was doing that?"

"Yeah, we’ve known each other long enough that I know what makes Hammer tick. But that’s okay. As long as he’s using his tricks, I know everything’s fine, too."

Hammer grinned even wider, then his expression turned serious and he took a wide step toward Wave. She backed away, against the wall behind her, and he braced himself against it, arm outstretched, looking her in the eye.

"You know what really drives me crazy, Wave?"

Wave smiled. "That you had to wait this long to show off the cool guy who roams the streets at night to attend secret meetings?"

Hammer couldn’t keep up the serious expression and grinned again. "That, too. No, what really drives me crazy is that I can’t hear Aki. I figured that out right away after our team meeting earlier, so I started thinking about it at work." He unbuttoned a side pocket of his coat and pulled out an earring. "It probably wouldn’t have been a good idea to mess with your hearing aid directly and maybe erase Aki in the process, so I brought this."

He held out the earring to her.

"What’s this?" Wave asked.

"A speaker that can pick up and amplify sounds in a certain volume range. Put it on your ear where you wear the hearing aid, and I can finally understand what he’s saying, as well."

"All right," Wave said, taking the useful trinket from him. "If Aki doesn’t mind."

"If you want your privacy, you can just cover the earring," Hammer followed up.

"I don’t mind," Aki agreed.

Wave put the earring over her earlobe and they fused. " Now, say something, Aki."

"Test, test. One, two, three," Aki’s voice rang out as if he stood between the two. "Hey, don’t look at me like that, who said my first words in public had to be particularly creative?"

Hammer nodded, clearly being proud of himself. "Well, that worked out pretty well." Then he pointed to one of the buildings. "We’re here."

It didn’t look very inviting, and the closer they got, the more obvious the miserable condition it was in. Wave spotted bullet holes in the walls and the plaster was crumbling. Shimmering greenish liquid poured from somewhere far above to the floor, where it seeped into the cracked asphalt. An old hover car door had taken the place of a window, and instead of a door, only a black opening invited them to enter.

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Confidently, Hammer strode forward, scaring up a gaggle of rats that had been feasting on the carcass of another, unidentifiable animal. At least it looked like an animal. The back of Wave’s neck prickled, not because of the remains, no, she suddenly felt someone watching her.

Wave grabbed Hammer’s sleeve and held him back. "Wait!" she murmured to him. She looked around, back down the street they had just passed, and she felt as if she had seen two shadows over there, pressing against the wall. She blinked and they were gone. A hallucination?

"What’s wrong?" asked Hammer.

"I had a feeling and I thought I had seen something." Wave tilted her head and squinted her eyes. "But now it’s gone."

After years in the outside world and training by her parents, she could rely on her instincts. There had been someone, but now they were hiding better.

"I saw something as well," Aki whispered beside her, "You’d better be careful."

Hammer nodded. His calmness had faded away and he unbuttoned his coat. With his right hand, he held the cloak aside, and inside, something metallic flashed in the dim light of the lantern that still reached them here. With his other hand, he pulled out what turned out to be a clunky multi-function tool, long and heavy enough that it matched his Arena preferences.

"It's different to use a weapon in the real world," Wave said, giving him an inquiring look. "You know that, right?"

"Oh, I’ve used it to turn some failed prototypes into scrap, so don’t worry."

Wave could tell he wasn’t one hundred percent confident but that wasn’t a bad sign. If they really got into a dicey situation, he was better off being cautious than overconfident. "Okay, let’s go in then."

Darkness engulfed Wave as she entered, blocking the path of the little light that filtered in from the street. She held Hammer back with her arm, who had followed her and was now standing beside her. A few seconds passed as she listened to the surroundings and her eyes adjusted to the darkness. There was noise in the distance, men bawling and something clanging, so far away, she didn’t care.

She pulled her arm back and followed the corridor that led further inside. Dodging debris and other ... things that lay on the floor. Hammer, with his weapon in his hands, close on her heels. Further back in the corridor, it got brighter. No artificial light, but the natural light of night, rays of sunlight, deflected by the moon, cast upon the earth in a more pleasant brightness.

The end of the corridor turned out to be the entrance to a spacious yard. Columns supported several floors from which, protected by cast-iron railings, one could look down on a piece of nature. The railing could be made of anything the synth had spit out, and the courtyard garden had perished over the years. Instead of bushes and trees, it now housed junk and chunks of concrete.

She almost missed it, but in the midst of all the garbage stood a figure that had to be even smaller than Ember. Clad in gray rags, it barely stood out from its surroundings, but the gleam of its eyes, a reflection of the moonlight, had given it away. The figure raised its arm and beckoned her toward it.

"That must be him," Hammer whispered. He didn’t know what the hacker looked like himself, he had explained to her. They were cautious, coming out from the Underground only when they had to. The idea of meeting someone trapped inside a machine had lured him out of hiding. Since Aki couldn’t simply be hooked up to the network to examine him, a face-to-face meeting was the only way to be able to verify such a curiosity.

"When will the three of us meet again?" the figure asked. Her voice was tinny and the high-pitched tones scratched uncomfortably in her ears. Wave couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. But as they got closer, she at least realized that it wasn’t the eyes reflecting the moonlight, but two round, blackened lenses of a pair of welding goggles.

"At night, when the moon is high above us," Hammer replied.

The hacker’s arm locked on Wave and he pointed his index finger at her as if his hand was a gun.

"But actually, there are four of us," she added to the password they had agreed upon.

The hacker lowered his arm and let her come up to him.

"Did you bring it?" he asked. He was indeed completely encased in gray strips that hung far down his body, forming a cloak. Around his head they were tied tighter, leaving only his glasses exposed. His fingers looked strange. They were either crude prosthetic hands or gloves that ended in sharp iron claws. The kind that made your teeth fall out if you scraped them across the right surface.

"I’m here," Aki replied.

The hacker raised his hand again and pointed to the spot between Wave and Hammer where Aki’s voice seemed to be coming from, but then tilted his head and looked directly at Wave.

"He’s in your hearing aid?"

Wave nodded.

"Come closer to me, girl."

Wave stepped closer to him. She didn’t feel threatened. It had to be for his size. Small and unassuming, the hacker seemed fragile even, like a child.

"Bend down and look at me," the hacker said. "I need to touch it."

Hammer took a step and was beside them, clutching his weapon tightly. So tightly that his knuckles stood out white. "Don’t do anything stupid, hacker, or else ..." he murmured to him, leaving the consequence unspoken, yet unmistakable.

"Don’t worry, I won’t hurt your girlfriend," the hacker croaked. "My glove contains analysis tools. It’s the only way I can tell what’s really inside this hearing aid."

Hammer relaxed and his grip loosened. He didn’t correct the claim that Wave was his girlfriend. He usually would have, he was very clear about that. Was this meeting putting more pressure on him than he had let on earlier, after all?

"Hammer, relax," Wave said in a soothing tone. "We all agreed on this. We went into this pit, and now we’re going to see it through."

That reminded her of the outside world, where she grimly saw every mission through to the end, no matter the effort and no matter how long it took. Once she had had to deliver spare parts to a settlement on whose route two Wanderers had already gone missing before her. A horde of compsos, tiny predatory dinosaurs, had settled there. Wave had lured a family of brontosaurs into the area over a period of days and driven the predators away. This allowed her to deliver her wares and also clear the way for others. The compos, though dangerous themselves, had instinctively sensed that they had no chance and the brontos knew that they had nothing to fear.

It was the same here. Wave felt no fear. If the hacker did something stupid, he could only lose. He had to know that himself. Besides, Wave was determined to finish this mission, too, successfully. She bent down to him and he reached out with his finger for the hearing aid.

A clacking sound broke the silence of this scene where only two inches separated finger and hearing aid. Bright light flooded the courtyard, taking Wave’s vision away.

"Security Corps!" it echoed over a loudspeaker. "Put your hands up and don’t move!"

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