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Xion was a legendary playboy. A lover of all women who loathed the idea of settling down. He was charming and quick-witted, which had women flocking to him night after night. But, so far, he’d resisted any of their efforts to snag him. And from the looks of things, it would keep going this way. Until he met his match.
On the other hand, Kage was ready to find his one woman. Or rather, persuade the one woman he had in mind to consider a life with him.
‘Help you load up yourkinai?’ he offered, keen to return to his search for his missing intern.
‘Nada,’ Xion answered, turning his attention on the man at their feet. ‘You run on.’
Kage stepped back into his ride, waved at his brother and took off.
Deeper and deeper, he went into the underground passages until he slowed down at the entrance to one of the smaller crosscuts. He parked his machine, set it on secure stealth mode and loped into the pedestrian-only shaft.
He activated his metanoids and glimmered into the invisible. He pulled his jacket close to his body, feeling the cold lunar winds bite through it.
His stride slowed as he approached a pair of tunnel rats. Thin, angular and covered in tattoos that marked them as members of the East Pikani boys. A ruthless gang of koko dealers. They were patrolling the passageways looking for intruders. Their eyes, the only features visible above their tatted masks, were blood red from a recent koko hit. They’d be trouble if they intercepted him.
He pressed himself hard against the rock face, and they loped past with a nano whisker’s margin between them.
He breathed a sigh of relief and walked on, checking his node for the map leading to his desired location.
Soon the small corridor opened out to a broader avenue. Lined with hovels, tiny hairdressing outdoor bars serving the lethalkuratina- alcohol made by mixing rabi flour with whatever water source was close by, allowing to ferment and lacing it with koko and sugar. A few loaded Pikas lay on the ground, lost in the starry promise of the alcohol’s lure. He stepped over them and laced his way towards a cluster of huts. He pulled to a stop before one of them and checked his node.
Naam. This was the location.
He looked around and, satisfied no eyes were on him, deactivated his stealth mode. He then knocked forcefully on the cheap synth board beside the ragged curtain that acted as the front door of the shanty hovel.
There was no response except for a series of weak barks from within.
He banged again, and this time he heard the shuffle of feet.
A tired-looking woman pulled aside the curtain. Her drooping eyes ran over him, registering his girth and the power rolling off him in waves.
She sneered, the action pulling her dry, cracked lips away from her yellow-stained mandibles. ‘Shida?’
A pair of skeletal lunamute hounds growled at him from the recesses of the darkness behind her.
‘No trouble,mamin. I’m simply after Aran. He home?’
‘Who askin’?’
‘Hiskhan,’ Kage said, using the Pika word for boss.
She sneered again and spat out a tobacco-stained gob at his feet. It splashed over his thick boots.
‘Damn youkhans. All you do is slave us, work us to the bone -’
‘Has his internship not paid him well enough for you to eat well and pay off your debts? He’s told me as much,’ Kage countered.
The woman’s eyes fell as the truth of his words hit her.
He ventured with his probing once more. ‘’Ko wapi? Where is he?’
The tone of his voice told her he wasn’t going to play games with her.
She twisted her lips with derision. ‘He left.Nadabeen here since he walk. Said he failed his papers.’
‘Where he go walk to?’
‘To thekupigadens.’
