The Many Misfortunes of Lady Luck - Chapter Eighteen

The Many Misfortunes of Lady Luck - Chapter Eighteen

The Many Misfortunes of Lady Luck
Cerulean Lee // Spynmaster
Chapter Eighteen

"I knew I smelled telflenna on you," Nico grumbled. "Just like Marlin to send me a plastered operative. Like my job ain't hard enough."

"I'm not drunk." Rowena wiped her eyes. "Do you know what a Nexus is?"

Nico sat down and picked up his phone. "Yeah, one unlucky bastard, that's what. Got the weight of the universe on his shoulders."

"Surprising." Rowena felt spiteful enough to recompose herself, though her voice was still thick from crying. "You actually know. Here I was thinking you were too full of yourself to think on a universal level."

"Get to the fucking point," he snarled.

"It should be obvious then. If a Nexus holds together a universe, an Antinexus - ?" Rowena rolled her hand open.

Nico gave a blank stare, then dialed a number without answering her. "It's me. Need two lengths of tabonite." He paused, then groaned. "Yeah, little bitch got me good this time. Thanks." He hung up the phone and continued to stare.

"You need to learn some new insults," Rowena said.

"Minty," he said with an exaggerated shrug. "I'm getting old here."

She thought it was odd that he knew what a Nexus was even though he had not recognized the symbol of the Abstracts. There weren't many people in Nialda that would know about the Nexus and the same people would probably know about Abstracts. Then again, she knew firsthand that Sainlevie was very selective about the information he gave away.

"An Antinexus is the opposite. They unmake the universe. Most of them can only do minor damage, but with the right lineage they can be much worse." Rowena rested her elbows on the desk. "Psi qualifies as a 'much worse.' Not here, though, she's an Antinexus of Accilea. She can take it apart pretty easily."

Nico froze. "Who the hell told you about Accilea?"

"I'm pretty sure all the executive operatives know about it," Rowena said nonchalantly.

"No. Not all of them." He was almost yelling again. "If she's only dangerous to Accileans, why were you screaming? You Accilean?"

Rowena didn't have the chance to respond, he answered his own question in a much calmer voice. "You can't be. You'd be insane if not dead, long as you been here."

She choked back a laugh that came partially from anxiety. "How can you say she's not dangerous? She completely flattened you back there. Look at you, you're bleeding all over the place."

"That don't prove shit," he growled. "She snuck up on me."

"From the front?" she pointed out. "You must have terrible eyesight. I remember you looking up, not back. "

Nico sneered at her. "I remember I was about to print the rules on that pasty-ass face of yours with my shoe."

She raised her hand stiffly and bobbed her head. "Whatever. Something's different about Psi. I don't know what," she admitted, "but I could feel it from across the room. It was like instinct, like she was much bigger than you or me or even Sainlevie put together."

"I always knew she was a freak."

Rowena pulled out her screenplate. "I wish I could have gotten her ID. It would help if I knew whether she was born or created."

"The boss says she was born." Nico winced and rested his head on the desk, keeping the shirt tightly pressed down on his skin. "I'd call it bullshit but there ain't no reason for him to hide it. All you other exec ops are engineered, we all know that."

Rowena recalled that Ignace Haas had also assumed she was an artificially-created human. She chose not to contradict Nico for the moment, it was a convenient cover for her lack of a Malumnian history. "Who are her parents?"

"Her mom's Osprey." Someone knocked at the door and peered in through the blinds on the window. Nico welcomed him in with a gesture. "Dunno who her daddy is, no one does. If Osprey got around like she does now before she was processed, it could be just about anyone."

The man was dressed in the red uniform of the medical department. He dropped two vials on the desk and left in a hurry. Nico wiped his forehead as clean as he could with the shirt and pressed down again. He grimaced and a hissed a string of vulgarities as he unwound the top of one vial. "All we know is who it isn't, and that's Fishstick himself."

Rowena picked up the remaining vial and examined it. Nico set the first vial down and snatched the other away from her. "Get your hands off that. I dunno whose balls you been feeling up lately, I don't want that shit in my medicine."

"Would you calm down?" Rowena said. "At this rate you're going to age yourself worse than Sainlevie. How do you know he isn't her father?"

Nico dabbed his fingers in the open vial and smeared it across the gash. A chemical tang pierced the overall musty smell of the room. "He wouldn't need to file for adoption for his own kid."

"I know just asking Osprey isn't off limits here," Rowena said with narrow eyes. "So did no one ask or does she just not know?"

"Seriously?" Nico laughed. "The courts tagged her, sent those dumbasses over at Galaxy Security after her to find out. She wasn't having that. Scorched the living shit out of em! Their own families couldn't even recognize their faces. She would've been thrown into endline if the boss didn't keep her on a leash."

"Hold on," Rowena said. "Why would the government care about Psi's lineage? They wouldn't know what an Antinexus is."

"God damn it, Minty. Every time I think you asked the dumbest question possible, you gotta prove me wrong. What's next?" He raised his hands in mock confusion. "Do these stairs go up or down? What level is the first floor on?"

"Lay off," she shouted. "I'm not from around here!"

"No shit. Even the 53 sleepers aren't this stupid. Osprey must've bought you from one of the satellite stations. I bet you didn't ev-"

"You know," Rowena's glare broke with a sly smile, "you seem to know a lot about those 'sleepers.' I wonder why that is. Where exactly did you work before you came here?"

After a moment of simmering quietly, almost invisibly, Nico dropped the shirt from his head. The wound had sealed up and the bubbles were gone. "No one has kids without a license," he said. "Both parents gotta have approval from the courts and their companies."

Rowena felt her throat tighten at the thoughts that flashed through her mind. "What happens if they aren't approved?"

"Then they don't get primed."

"Primed?"

Nico huffed and rolled his eyes. "You know what I'm talking about."

Rowena shook her head.

"We're all born sterile here." Nico drank the contents of the remaining vial. "It's been that way for a long time. You want kids, your company has to pay for an operation to make it so you can. If you move your family into Nialda like Osprey did, the courts gotta know the parents of the minors and where they are. Then you get sterilized until you get approved again." His expression turned bitter. "Marlin must've coughed up a fortune to keep both of em here."

"He's got a few hundred fortunes." Rowena suddenly felt as if she had just been asked to board a craft. She laid her head on the desk, letting the coolness of the metal seep into her skin and still her spinning head.

"What are you doing?"

"I feel sick."

"Uh-uh. No way in hell I'm letting you go back down to the meds. Who knows who you'll drag with you this time. You're probably just hung over anyway." He grabbed a bottle off one of the shelves behind the desk. "Look familiar?"

"I told you I'm not drunk."

"Then we're going back to work." Nico pushed the bottle aside. "Psi ain't gonna be here to babysit you all day, she's got her own job. Should've been mine, but my daddy ain't the CEO. Wise up and do what I tell you. That means you're gonna help clear the floor when these morons out there start stirring shit up, just like the rest of us. We don't send them off to God knows where on the company's malum."

Rowena raised her head, reflecting his annoyance. "I told Sainlevie I wouldn't kill for him, and there's no way I'm going to kill for you."

"This is what exec ops do. You're telling me Sainlevie just lets you off after you say to his face you're not going to do your job?"

She put her head back down. "I wouldn't call sending me to your department letting me off."

Nico slammed a fist on the desk, startling her back into a sitting position. "Do you know what I had to go through to get here? Just here?"

Rowena snickered. "Please. So far, all I've seen you do is sleep, chat up the ladies, and gripe at everyone else."

"Fuck you. You been here two hours, you don't know me."

"And you've known me just as long. What makes you think you know so much more about me?"

He jammed a finger on his desk. "Because I seen all the girls with your attitude get carted out with a quetal cone lodged in their brain. Every time. You just been lucky so far."

The mention of her concept snapped her into anger instantly. Even the thought of Sainlevie couldn't stop her. "And I've seen all the idiots like you before that think they're special for no reason. Let me clue you in, sweetie. You don't amount to anything and you never will. I mean, even the security guards laugh at you, you're such a joke."

He jumped up from his chair. "The fuck did you just say, bitch?"

Rowena also rose, fists clenched. "Sainlevie himself told me he doesn't take you seriously."

"You'd better -"

"I can't stand people like you," she shrieked, her body trembling with the force of her voice. "You sit around all day and whine about how you never get what's coming to you and how your luck is so terrible and what do you do about it? NOTHING! Nothing but whine! You have free will, do you know how lucky you are to have that? Of course not!"

Rowena calmed a bit. Nico opened his mouth, but she kept her voice loud enough to override him. "Sainlevie likes ambitious people. He wants to be surrounded by people that work at making themselves the best they can be. So picture one of these executive meetings you go to. He sees Drystan, willing to take on a whole enemy force alone to kill one man. Dominique watching every little window and door in this building like a hawk. Osprey going the extra mile to make new recruits feel welcome. And here you are, complaining about how boring the meetings are, how they're a waste of your precious time, accusing everyone else of not doing their jobs so it looks like you're doing more. You want to move up, you're the one that needs to shut your mouth and go do something about it. You've got some control over your own destiny, unlike some of us."

There was a long silence. Nico rounded the desk. Rowena held her arms out. "You're going to hit me again? That's not going to help you. But don't let that stop you, it never has before. Go on."

He stood close, his face flushed, but he didn't so much as raise a fist. "I knew it," Rowena laughed. "You're afraid Psi's still watching."

"I ain't stupid enough to get in a fight with Marlin's kid." He turned a deeper shade of red.

"Yeah, but it isn't because of who she's related to like you try to pass it off as." Rowena sat back down. "It's because you know she'd tear you to shreds in a fight, Antinexus or not. It's the same with Osprey. They're better at the job than you could ever be, that's why they're operatives and you're not. If you can accept that, maybe you can get better."

Nico turned and headed for the door. Rowena tilted her head. "Where are you going?"

"Go to lunch." She couldn't see his face, but she caught a touch of weakness in his voice. "Be back here in an hour."

As he disappeared into the finance crowd, Rowena recalled that this time would be the weakest she encountered him. As victorious as she felt about making him walk away, she couldn't help but wonder the dangers of a stronger version of Nicodeme Shier. He looked as stringy as he did and he already did have substantial strength. Being on the receiving end of his attacks a couple times, she knew that.

What have I done? she wondered, but couldn't help smiling.