Chapter 12
Zaraq
Zaraq’s reconstructed helmet kept knocking against the back of his head as the pod zoomed haphazardly toward Vexis’s house in the rich part of town. He was pretty sure one of the wires Elena had put back in had come loose again, and along with the banging from the bouncy pod ride, he got a small electric shock every so often if he bumped it too hard.
“Ouch!” he muttered under his breath when the pod screamed over a particularly deep pothole.
He wanted to tell the driver to take it easy on the bumps, but he decided the risk of drawing attention to himself just barely outweighed the risk of concussion and electrocution.
So he kept quiet, trying not to think of what Sofia and Vexis were doing. She’d said they were going dancing, leaving Vexis’s place empty, but “dancing” in the underworld was rarely an innocent affair.
Worse still, Vexis had decided to take her to Goendir—one of the planet’s shadiest clubs, known for its sleazy clientele, frequent bar fights, and illicit drugs. He’d warned Sofia to always keep an eye on her drink, to refuse any “cigarettes,” and to stay alert. But beyond that, he knew he couldn’t do much.
He pulled his pack across the greasy transport pod seat and double-checked its contents for the night’s mission. Conspicuously missing was the blaster he’d carried everywhere since escaping this wretched planet. But he silently thanked Sofia for insisting on taking it with her. He could probably do without it tonight, but if anything went wrong for her…
Something else tugged at his mind, though, something he couldn’t let go of. Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t help but get flashes of Sofia’s skin and then of Vexis sliding his hands under her dress as they danced along to the club’s pulsing music.
“Oh, gods no,” he muttered to himself, his voice filling the helmet.
The thought of it was enough to make him want to hurl, but that wasn’t an option for obvious reasons. Besides, it would put him squarely inside the “drawing attention to himself” category, which could ruin everything. Tonight, of all nights, everything had to go perfectly.
Trying to distract himself from thoughts of Sofia and Vexis’s date, he turned and peered out the window at the dark streets. They were driving through the slums now, an area known for its constant power outages—an area where he had lived in for a while before finding work at the casino.
He took back his wish for the poddy to slow down. He knew all too well that stopping in a place like this almost guaranteed a pod-jacking, especially when the streetlights were out like they were now.
He thought back with shame to the time he’d spent there. It wasn’t as if he’d stolen any pods himself, but he was only one step away from that being his life. And what he’d done for Slik in the end wasn’t any better. It was arguably worse.
Outside, the streets had become illuminated again, the power shuddering back to life, and soon the ghettos were behind them. Zaraq only hoped he could leave them behind for good.
His thoughts were broken by the pod coming to a violent halt.
“That’ll be eighteen Rikuuns, pal!” the poddy shouted without bothering to turn around or even look in the mirror. Ordinarily, this would have annoyed Zaraq, but considering he was trying to stay incognito, he let it slide.
He tapped his wrist comm to the meter, waiting for the ping that confirmed the payment. The moment he heard it, he was out of the pod, not even turning to watch it leave.
Instead, his eyes were on Vexis’s house. The place was set back from the street, and Zaraq knew from his own days in Rikuus’s criminal underworld that this was intentional. The streetlights didn’t reach that far back, which meant anyone coming or going by night was shrouded by the building’s shadows.
Usually, this was to obscure shady deals, protect the identities of sex workers, or hide mob connections. But tonight, it worked in Zaraq’s favor.
Sticking close to the fence and using a large salika tree to obscure him, Zaraq crept toward the house. It appeared still, and when he saw and heard nothing for several minutes, he hurried forward to the front door.
As he approached the security panel, he reached into his pack and pulled out the reader Sofia had used to hack the door the day before. With one press of a button, he saw the huge obsidian doors slide open, and Zaraq slipped inside before anyone on the street could notice.
Inside, he pulled off his helmet, relishing his first breath of fresh air since leaving the hotel. The house smelled all too familiar, like shaka smoke and alcohol—the same way the casino and almost every gangster’s home smelled. Still, it was better than being trapped behind the glass of the helmet, and he could see better, too. Setting the apparatus down on the foyer table, he let his eyes adjust to the dim light.
The house was enormous, but Sofia had already given him a good idea of where to look for the proof he needed. He crept through the silent foyer, making his way to the living room.
“There you are,” he muttered as he caught sight of the gun cabinet.
It was just where Sofia had described, and as he approached, he caught sight of the large silver digital lock that held the thing shut. On a whim, he tugged at the handle, just in case, but it didn’t budge.
“Guess we’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way,” he said, putting down his pack and pulling out a series of wires connected to a small black box.
During his time at the casino, he’d broken into his fair share of debtor’s houses, waiting for them in the dark with a baseball bat or sometimes a garrote. He could still feel the struggle of the men he’d choked just enough to scare them, still hear the crunch of kneecaps breaking and the cries of his victims as they begged for mercy.
The thought made him shudder, and he tried his best to push those dark memories aside. He reminded himself that finding justice for Ryka’s murder was his job now. It wasn’t enough to make up for all the harm he’d done, but it was a start.
At the very least, his former career meant he knew a thing or two about picking locks. The box in his hand was a lexor, and he popped the lid to the digital lock before connecting the lexor’s wires to the glowing control panel inside.
Within seconds, the lexor showed dozens of lines of code. Complicated but child’s play compared to some of the home systems and safes he’d hacked. It didn’t take more than a minute for the lock to chime its opening bell and slide open.
“Whoa,” Zaraq muttered as he pulled open the cabinet doors. Blue light spilled out, momentarily blinding him, but when his eyes adjusted again, he knew he’d hit the jackpot. The gun cabinet was stocked with dozens of weapons—solaris guns, zapfa rays, semi-automatic blasters, and gamma knives along with an assortment of smaller weapons intended to intimidate. He knew these weapons all too well from his own time at Constellation Casino.
But the one weapon he was looking for wasn’t there.
He knew from the warrant out for his arrest that the cops were also looking for a sigma blaster connected to Ryka’s murder—a thin, straight tube about the size of a man’s hand. It didn’t look like much, but it harnessed ions in the atmosphere to shoot a small but highly concentrated energy blast. It would kill a victim in perfect silence and never needed to be reloaded. Sigma blasters were highly illegal and hard to obtain, even on Rikuus, which meant the chances of finding one were slim. That is, unless he was in the house of Ryka’s killer.
He scanned the cabinet again, but nothing in there matched what he was looking for. He was about to turn away and search the rest of the house when something caught his eye.
There, in the bottom corner of the cabinet’s floor, a small patch of the plush blue lining was worn away. It seemed like a strange spot for that amount of wear, and absentmindedly, Zaraq brushed his fingers across it.
A sudden voice emitted from the cabinet, startling Zaraq.
“Open,” it said, as the floor to the cabinet slid back and a small cache was raised.
Inside, Zaraq found a small white box that almost glowed under the blue lights, and when he opened it, his heart skipped a beat. There, half-hidden under some papers, was a sigma blaster. For a second, all Zaraq could do was stare. His heart pounded and relief flooded him as he realized his nightmare might finally come to an end.
With his pulse still pounding in his ears, Zaraq pulled an airlock bag from his pack and carefully bagged the weapon, making sure not to touch it. As he did this, the papers that had been lying on top of the blaster spilled onto the floor. Zaraq shoved the sigma blaster into his bag and was about to put the remaining items back when he saw something that momentarily froze him.
Among the papers were several fake galaxy IDs, each under a different name. What they had in common was that they each featured a picture of someone he knew from the slums, someone he had practically grown up with.
Vexis was a common enough Rikuan name that he hadn’t even considered Slikrim’s new right-hand man might be known to him, but as he looked at the sneering face on the cards, Zaraq felt his face grow hot.
“I told you not to turn any lights on when we’re doing the rounds,” came a sudden voice from the other room. It was high and weedy, but unmistakably threatening, and Zaraq suddenly shot up, leaving the spilled contents of the box.
“You think I don’t know how to do my job?” came a second voice, this one gruff and heavy.
Panicked, Zaraq knew he only had seconds before the guards followed the source of the light and found him. Grabbing his pack with one hand and a zapfa ray in the other, Zaraq scrambled away from the cabinet just as the men entered.
“Hey!” the weedy one shouted, but Zaraq had already run, darting through another doorway that led into a grand dining room.
Undeterred, the guards followed closely behind, yelling for him to stop.
But Zaraq hurtled through the room, knocking down chairs behind him in a desperate bid to block their path. He was pulling over the chair at the head of the dining table when he heard the first shot.
The telltale sizzle of a blaster whizzed past him, just narrowly missing his ear, and instinctively, he ducked. The zapfa ray was still clasped in his hand, and using the table as cover, he sent off two shots. One of the yellow rays connected with a frosted glass sconce just beside the doorway. The other just narrowly missed the gruff guard who Zaraq recognized now as Joran—a thug in the security team he’d always disliked.
Before the two men could recover, Zaraq fired a shot into the glass door beside him. In a flash, he emerged from the table and ran through the shards to the house’s vast walled garden.
He could hear the guards inside, scrambling over the chairs and through the glass.
“Was that Zaraq?” he heard Joran yell.
“Who?” yelled the weedy one, but Zaraq aimed to be far away from there before that question was answered.
With all the energy he could muster, he sprinted through the garden until he reached the street. A new pod was in the drive —the guards’ presumably—and Zaraq silently hoped they were stupid enough to have left the code unlocked.
Knowing Joran, I might be in luck.
The two men were coming from around the corner of the house just as Zaraq jumped in the pod’s driver’s seat. To his utter relief, the DriveAI welcomed him as soon as he closed the door, and within seconds, he was speeding away from Vexis’s home.
Several blaster shots followed him, one hitting the pod’s side mirror, but nothing that would slow him down.
As Vexis’s home grew smaller and smaller in the rear mirror, Zaraq let out a deep exhale, emptying the air from his lungs as if to breathe out the remnants of his adrenaline. His hands were still shaking a little as he pulled off the blue gloves he’d been wearing this whole time, stretching his fingers back and forth.
Apart from some chafing from the suit, and a small cut on his cheek from a piece of flying glass, he was entirely unharmed.
“I got lucky,” he reminded himself, playing over the last ten minutes in his mind.
He knew he should have been more careful and staked out the place longer before entering.
Of course, Vexis had guards , he thought.
Yet…
As he directed the pod through some of the lesser-known back alleys and smaller streets, he felt a sudden elation course through him. Against all odds and in spite of his mistakes, he’d made it out. A broad grin crept across his face at the thought.
He’d been running from his past for so long, convinced he’d never come back to Rikuus, and even more convinced that no one would ever believe his innocence. But tonight had changed everything. His heart rate began to slow as he breathed in again, and he reached over to the pack he’d thrown into the passenger’s seat beside him.
Zaraq moved aside the zapfa ray he’d thrown on top and, patting the pack, felt the familiar shape of the sigma blaster. This, he knew, was his ticket to freedom. Now, not only did he have proof that he didn’t kill Ryka, but he also had a whole family of people who believed him, who had fought for him.
He couldn’t wait to get back to the room and show Sofia. But as the pod pulled up outside the Kaylian Hotel, Zaraq’s comm suddenly chimed.
If he hadn’t still been wearing the purple makeup, anyone watching would have seen the color drain from his face as he read the incoming message.