Post 50

You’re at a parts counter, diligently running your hands over a ion drive converter when you feel the air change. Your heightened senses catalogue the air pressure differential and note the temperature spike as well as the burnt metal and ozone scent emanating from his adrenal gland. Hoshi. You don’t turn or acknowledge him in any way, just keep your hands on the converter, reveling in the specifications flowing through your brain and picturing how you are going to incorporate it into Shori.

Hoshi takes it away from you and you feel a hole of emptiness open up in your chest without the sensory stimulation. It makes you restless and angry. Hoshi slips a side look at you and then puts the converter down. You itch to pick it back up, but Hoshi is in the way and you don’t want to touch him.

“What are you doing here?” you say instead, cross and annoyed with him now that your brain has nothing interesting to focus on. When you look up at him, you automatically start cataloguing faces and registering station conditions and you can feel your lips moving slightly as you start taking it in. You abruptly avert your face down to the counter to avoid him noticing, but he does.

He grabs your jaw and wrenches your head around to look at him. You can tell he sees the electric ring of light around your pupils and you can help but notice his skin temperature and bio-markers. You whisper them to yourself unconsciously. His lips curl up in disgust. “I see you made some friends,” he says, in his usual light, I-don’t-give-a-shit voice, but his expression is so cold. You focus on his eyes, on the patterns in his irises. They remind you of start charts or maybe cellular growth. Very complex but very regular. You’re having trouble hearing his voice, registering instead his pulse and blood pressure, skin temperature, and pupil movement. They seem to be changing with some kind of emotion. He shakes you and motions to the ion converter. “What’s this and how did you buy it?”

“Ion converter,” you say, and the words feel like purple in your mouth. You’re briefly intoxicated by the feeling and want to taste it again. “I fixed some of your junk to trade. Some of it was actually pretty nice, once it got cleaned up.”

He frowns at you. “Of course it was pretty nice! I’ve been collecting it for years! You can’t just—” he stops, as if annoyed with himself. “I leave you alone for ten minutes and you’ve already hocked all my stuff and gotten high.”

“I’m not high,” you say compulsively, but the lies taste like orange blossoms and you sigh a little in response. He drops your face and surveys the items you’ve bought as if resigned.

“Well, fuck it. No help for it now. You should have trusted me a little. I had a plan.”

“Why would I trust you?” you can see these words slip out of your mouth like blue smoke. They swirl around Hoshi in patterns that mimic his irises. “You’re the devil.”

“So I am.” He glances around briefly and then takes your elbow. “Get your stuff, we’re leaving. Where’s the rest of it?”

You’re briefly confused, not thinking he would know how much his treasures are worth, but mentally shrugging. “Vendor has a servo transporting the big stuff to Shori this afternoon.”

“Good,” he says, giving you another sidelong glance and yanking you to his side as he starts making his way back through the crowd toward the docking bay. You like the feel of the air pressure differential against your skin and the constant changes in light and audio levels in the crowd are suddenly fascinating, as opposed to this morning’s terror. You breathe in the sensations and let your brain investigate the shifting patterns, unconsciously pressing the vial shoved into your coverall front pocket. You feel Hoshi’s sharp attention at the movement, but you don’t care. Your brain is humming with little fizzles of vibration and you feel like yourself for the first time in a week.

Hoshi hauls you into the ship and you dreamily start exploring Shori’s bio-markers, even more complex than Hoshi’s, although, they are strangely similar. Genetically, maybe? Patterns flow through you and your find yourself closing your eyes to follow the faint thread of the DNA similarities more easily, except Hoshi slams you up against one of the walls and starts frisking you.

“Where is it?” he says and you’ve never heard that growl in his voice before. It’s not smooth or charming or light or anything familiar. He rams his hands in your pockets and starts pulling off your coverall to inspect. “Where’s the Snow, Burke?”

“I don’t have any,” you try to lie, but the words get confused in your mouth and come out as a long sigh instead. Hoshi wrenches you around to face him and he starts shoving his hands into your front pockets.

You shove him away. “Stop!”

He puts his hand over your mouth and leans hard into you, pinning you against Shori and continues his search. You bite his hand, and he yelps, but keeps it smashed into your face. “That’s alright, pet. I like it a little rough,” he says, but his eyes are distracted. He’s found the vial. You struggle harder, shoving against him and trying desperately to bring it back to you, but he shoves it in his own pocket and then slams your hands up against the wall. “What the fuck, Burke? Did you sell one of my treasures to buy yourself that?”

You glare at him, but he doesn’t move and your muscles are weak from Snow, so you say, “Yes. A pocket anti-grav device.”

He shakes you a little and you can feel his heart rate and blood pressure increase. “What the fuck? That was mine. Do you know what I had to do to get that stuff? Do you know where they came from?” He was hissing now and you can feel spittle striking your face. You can see the thin scars from his bio-modifications or whatever they are and you can feel his whole body shoving you into the wall.

“No,” you manage to say, “but you owe me. You blew up my ship!”

“Fuck your ship,” he says. “We had a deal. I thought you were going to come clean, Burke. I told you I’d help you. There’s no drug use allowed on Shori. None. Zero. Zip. Especially not this garbage.”

“But I need it,” you say. You’re starting to breathe heavily. The fog will be back soon. The cold, miasmatic fog stopping you from thinking. Stopping you from building. Stopping you from being right. Stopping you from seeing how everything fits together. You’re afraid that you’re not smart enough without it. That you can’t fix Hoshi’s ship without it. “I need it,” you repeat softly. “to help you. I can’t do the repairs without a little help.”

“Yes you can, Kas.” You start a little at your first name and Hoshi smirks at you. “What? You think I wouldn’t find out who you are? You’re top notch, according to all the Citizen Records I could find. Why did you think I wanted you so badly, Kas Burkenthiel. Former head of research and development for Thiel Industries? Did you honestly think I didn’t know?”

The words hit you like a sledgehammer and you feel a violent black hole rising up in your gut. No one was supposed to know. The shame and sense of failure you always manage to keep stuffed below the surface start rising up with your real name and you swallow hard. “That’s not me,” you manage to grind out of your swollen vocal cords. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But you hate the lie as much as the fact that you’re too shitty a liar to make it work.

Hoshi pulls out the vial of electric blue liquid again and shakes it in front of you. You can’t help but track it with your eyes and you’re sure that Hoshi sees the hunger in your expression. Without breaking eye contact with you, you see the skin around his hand holding the vial ripple and change. Become almost clawed and scaled. Larger by 10% your beautiful, broken mind registers. With a savage gesture, he crushes the vial in his palm, letting the volatile mixture spill and evaporate within seconds. You cry out, reaching for the faint wisps of blue atoms disappearing into nothingness and battering against Hoshi’s restraint. “I NEED IT,” you scream at him. “DON’T DO THIS!”

Hoshi slams you back into the wall twice, two quick, staccato impacts that startle you enough to stop your screaming and he clamps his lips on yours. You can feel sharp teeth and violence from him. You bite him back hard enough to draw blood and he rears his head back. His eyes are wide, pulse racing, and you can see odd tremors racing through his skin, as if some tiny filament creature was sprinting all over his body at the speed of light. Faint luminescence seems to follow his blood vessels and you can feel his temperature spike. But it’s over in a flash. You would never have noticed it, if you hadn’t been doped. You blink at him in surprise and he can tell you noted it. He lets you go and takes a step back. “No drugs in my ship, especially that one.” he says, back to his light, easy charm. “It’ll be fine, pet. I have faith in you.”

But you don’t have any in yourself.