Aviator
the ghost of pimping past
Lieutenant Cyrus Njeri // “Janhari” // Age 30 // Interdimensional Messenger // Former Privateer
Finally, Cyrus cracked one eyelid open. His gaze was bleary and shapeless in a way that told him his contacts had been knocked askew. He darted his eyes around in an attempt to recenter the lenses. Shadows collected in corners and where iron bars met floor in the jail cell he was in, clumping together like dust bunnies in a room untouched by human occupancy. His tired brain perceived a flash of motion, and Cyrus flinched, readying himself for some fanged, feral creature to tear itself from the shadows and embed its talons in his chest. Nothing of the sort happened, and his body reluctantly untensed. A soft, mocking snicker seemed to float on the air toward him as he imagined the amusement of the well-dressed scoundrel who had tormented Cyrus with living figments of night before locking him away.
Cyrus had been raised not to hate anyone. Hating others went against the beliefs of the Agaciku tribe. Hatred festered in the heart, shriveling the soul, making one’s body more accessible to the demons who prowled this mortal plain in search of a host. Even when he had been taken from his family and sold to a Somalian duke, he had not hated the noble family who had housed, clothed, and fed him without charge. Even when Dawit Elya, Cyrus’s son-of-a-bitch brother-in-law, had beaten Makena dead in a fit of rage and the local authority had not batted an eye, Cyrus did not resent him for long. Because he’d paid a visit to the drug lord’s grounds and had a conversation with him that would become Elya’s last conversation with anyone, and Cyrus had uprooted the seeting pool of malice from his heart. While killing the source of his enmity might have been cheating slightly, yes, Cyrus believed that dealing with the problem for once and for all was a better alternative to letting his hatred consume him and turn into dark obsession. He found that, with Elya dead, he’d thought of the man much less than he had when Elya was alive and his sister was not.
These thoughts circled in his head as he lay with his cheek pressed into stone. Cyrus was sure that there had been some point to them, but he couldn’t remember what. The slime enshrouding his senses was too thick. He summoned his strength yet again, expecting to maybe get an inch or two off the floor before flopping back down, unconscious while he was still midfall. The world tilted as if Cyrus had a belly full of liquor, but he forced his eyes to stay open. Finally, miraculously, he achieved a sitting position, his legs bent under him awkwardly in a way that probably would have elicited some discomfort if he could feel them. Cyrus groaned, a sound that produced a ghostly echo amid the desolate hallway. His only halfhearted source of illumination were the pale, waxy nubs lodged in the wall in generous intervals, so that only a handful of cells had any real light by which anything productive could be accomplished.
He half-crawled and half-dragged himself toward the metal bars at the front of the cell for support. Grasping them as tightly as he could (which was much more fruitful with his cybernetic hand than with his biological one), Cyrus gradually coaxed his feet beneath him. He pushed into a standing position. The world spun like a carousel, and there was a dangerous moment where his vision went black, but Cyrus clung to the bars with a literal iron grip until the dizziness passed. There was a parasite with unknown intentions on the loose in Belle Reve, and it was his duty to crush it. Cyrus no longer had family and he no longer had love, and there were some days he questioned whether he had any more freedom than the hundreds of inmates he presided over, but he had a job to do. A responsibility. A calling, and it was important because it was the one that his Kikuyu saints had bestowed upon him.
Now came the even more skilled, coordinated task. Cyrus looked down at his tall, Kevlar work boots grimly. The otherworldly prince had taken his coat, and with it, the fob key that would cause the scanner on the cell door to flash green and unlock for a two-second window. But Cyrus was no fool. Within only four months of working at Belle Reve, he knew a guard without powers, such as himself, was a walking target for inmates who desired to bust out of their cells and rabble-rouse for a fraction of an hour until they were inevitably caught and moved to more secure lodguings. He’d been divested of his fob key twice, and after the first occurrence, he’d seen to it that he carry a backup in a more discreet location. Mumbling to himself incoherently, Cyrus pawed at his right shoe with his left one, kicking and scraping until he’d finally dislodged it. He crouched down, swaying a little, and rooted around until he found the small, hard piece of plastic. He closed his fist—the left, organic one that had a greater sensitivity to texture—over it.
There was a small electronic buzz! as the cell door briefly unlocked. Cyrus pushed against it, hard, before his window vanished. It clanged open, striking the stretch of wall next to it with a metallic noise that resounded endlessly within the gloom, until he wondered if it was just the ringing of his ears. He stumbled into the cold passageway beyond, clutching at things for balance. His hips bumped against the adjacent cell door. Strength was returning to him in tiny increments, yet Cyrus still felt like a shipwreck, so full of gaping boards and fallen walls that it was only a matter of time until he sank and was united with the ocean floor.
At first, he was convinced that it was just the sound of his own blood pumping in his ears. But as the rhythmic thudding grew louder, Cyrus held his breath. No; there was definitely someone else down here, and they were moving fast. Faster than any guard had reason to be racing to the Pit, where Cyrus was currently the only occupant. Unless of course someone was running to his aid? However, Cyrus had no delusions of his perceived importance in the eyes of his coworkers. He was still the new hire around these parts, and Warden Hollows and her immediate subordinates were the only ones aware of his true function as an interdimensional traveler. No one would break their ass to come to his rescue, unless it was to deride him for allowing a dandy with monogrammed handkerchiefs to pull a fast one on him.
Having been apprenticed to a warrior in his village’s militia at the age of eight, Cyrus had been fighting for all his life. He felt a shift inside of him. It was the kind of shift that sent a tingle down his spine, alerting him that something was not right and that he best prepare for combat. Cyrus changed his breathing, holding each inhale and exhale as long as he could, increasing the flow of oxygen to his brain. His gloved hands curled into fists—one noticeably more loose than the other—and he pushed himself upright, so that he was standing unassisted. By now, the drumlike beats of running footfalls were almost on top of him. Cyrus carried most of his weaponry in his coat or on his belt, both of which he’d been divested of, but he wasn’t without a few tricks up his sleeve. Well, within the deep breast pockets of his denim shirt, more accurately. Mindful not to cut himself, his gloved hand withdrew several bladed snowflakes with a variable number of points. There were those that had six, those that had four, and those that had three—the most deadly of them all. Cyrus hastily unbuttoned and peeled back the clear sheaths on all of the shuriken.
Feet pounding so hard that they created ghastly echoes in the abandoned cavern, the runner rounded the final corner. Cyrus focused, willing his eyes to sharpen, and gave a flick of his wrist so precise that it would have been the envy of even the world’s best surgeons. There was a cry of pain, and then an angry chime! as the shuriken struck the steel of another cell. A glancing blow.
Clutching her shoulder, a figure stumbled into the half-light. Actually, stumbled was the wrong word, because even wounded, she moved gracefully, like a bird flying into formation. As if this world were made of smoke and she was just passing through. A normal foe’s fingers would have been slick with blood from trying to stanch the ruby flow, but the only indication that not all was right with Liling was the glint of silver beneath the hole in her orange jumpsuit, where synthetic flesh would be if she were whole.
Cyrus had thrown a nonpoisonous shuriken at her, unwilling to break out the ones coated in platypus venom—which would have an ordinary foe rolling on the ground and shrieking in excruciating pain—or octopus venom—which would have the aforementioned effect in addition to neurotoxins shutting down their respiratory system in a way that, unless counteracted with antivenom fairly immediately, would prove fatal—until he’d ascertained the identity of this newcomer. His heart sank. He did not want to have to administer deadly or excruciating force, but doing so was no longer an option. He was familiar enough with Liling’s files to know that venom would have no effect on her, an automaton with cold eyes masquerading as a human. She was a knife wrapped in velvet. Apparently, though, she did have pain receptors, because a beat passed before she removed her unbloodied hand from her shoulder. Liling appeared to steady herself until she was again standing in that very erect, almost bouncy way that acrobats carry themselves.
“Prisoner Eighty-Four Fifty-Three." Cyrus’s voice was as rough as a serrated blade, but he ground the words out. Liling was no stranger to causing trouble, and he knew her number by heart after having to write it in multiple reports. “What are you doing unaccompanied in these parts? There’s only one way inmates get escorted to the Pit, and it’s rarely on their own power.”
A soft snort. The machine in the shape of a girl glided another two steps forward, and Cyrus tensed, automatically readying another shuriken. “Do you really ‘ave to ask, you unsteady lug? Wha’ does it look loike I’m doing?” came the reply, in an accent that was somehow insolent before it was British. Normally Liling’s accent was thick but understandable, but right now Cyrus really had to strain to catch her words. “Moi, but you look like you’ve a ‘ell of a ‘angover. Tryin’ to drink yuhself to deaf, Jan’ari? I guess I’m pre’y shi’ ou’ o’ luck if tha’s the only way ou’ o’ ‘ere.”
Liling took another step forward. Mentally cursing the British’s general unintelligibility and unwillingness to adapt to new ways of thinking, Cyrus flung another shuriken. With a deft twist of her torso, Liling dodged it, and it clattered off the wall behind her. He only had four left, and she was closing the distance between them. Cyrus normally wouldn’t have worried about an advancing little girl—even if said little girl had thighs that looked like they were regularly worked out by crushing a man’s skull between them—when he was an accomplished martial artist. But said martial artist was still reeling from the influence of a powerful anesthesia. If it had taken him, most likely, several hours to stand up, Cyrus did not want to find out how long it would take him to execute a proper roundhouse kick. But it seemed as though he was not getting a choice. “Prisoner Eighty-Four Fifty-Three. Liling,” he added beseechingly. “Please halt. I do not wish to hurt you, not least because your unique physiology evades my medical understanding, as it does the medical understanding of most of our trained surgeons. I ask you to reconsider your approach before you become the modern-day Humpty Dumpty no one can put back together.”
Liling paused and cocked her head. In the semi-darkness, Cyrus could not see her face clearly, but he heard a staccato of laughter. “I like ih when men beg. Really, I do. But now’s nah the toime for talk.” And then, like a knife flipping end over end, there was a handspringing blur cutting toward him.
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