Chapter 96: Better Business
The Warden rocked sideways. He did not fall because the wall caught him. He touched the back of his head and looked at his fingers like they had betrayed him.
Obi stepped into the yellow wash of the broken street light like he had taken a cue. Taller. Broader at the shoulders. The same grin a fraction wiser, which meant a fraction more dangerous. He wore the city like a jacket, collar up, brass knuckle bright (The other one, that he decided not to throw, for now) where they clenched his right hand.
"Didn’t your mom teach you to knock?" Obi asked, "before you ruin someone’s evening?"
The woman stared. The Warden blinked, then remembered he was supposed to be offended. He swung. Obi ducked with a kind of courtesy. His elbow caught the Warden’s ribs. A baton hit air and learned humility.
Feris did not smile, but something in her posture uncoiled. Raizen felt a laugh he did not have time to let out.
"Walk away" the Warden said through a mouth that already thought it was bleeding. "This is Warden business."
"Then get a better business" Obi dryly replied. "I’ve got a girl waiting and I don’t have time to educate a uniform."
Raizen almost said the name out loud. Cinderette. He did not because the Underworks hated hearing you admit you loved anything.
The Warden charged. Obi stepped aside as if he had been planning to be elsewhere anyway. He tapped the man on the back of the head with the brass like he was correcting a drum beat. The baton clattered. The Warden swore in a wonderful manner. Obi clicked his tongue.
"Language," Obi said. "There’s a lady present. Two, if you count the uniform. I personally don’t."
He moved like a song he had learned by repetition. The brass knuckles flashed. A shin got reminded of its job. The Warden stumbled against the bin stack. Feris lifted a hand a fraction to warn him about the slippery patch by the broken pipe. He didn’t need to see it. He used it. The Warden slid where Obi needed him to slide and met Obi’s knee on the way down.
"Seriously" Obi said, mock injured. "you make me look bad. I said I would be quick."
"You will be quicker if you are not here" the Warden hissed, voice going narrow. He fumbled on his belt with a hand that had remembered a different sort of tool.
Raizen saw the shine before the spark. He opened his mouth. The Warden came up with a compact taser that had never had a citizen’s name on it. Obi was turning for another line when the prongs kissed his shoulder.
Electricity wrote its own sentence across muscle.
Obi jerked, teeth slamming together. The brass knuckles dropped like a fallen star. The taser’s crackling filled the alley. The Warden screamed something that had the shape of joy and the sound of a man who had just found a way to even the score.
Feris forgot what her plan had been. She was moving before she could name it. She pulled out something from her pocket, and threw it. The heavy part left a thin wire behind, tracing the trajectory. An object that reminded Raizen of his first prototype for the suit’s drum.
But it was enough to get the Warden to wobble a bit. Then the Warden’s baton came up again. She took the hit on her arm and felt the shock of it sing along into bone. Better her than the woman. Heat ran across her forearm.
"Run" Feris told the woman, already crawling toward the dark between two buildings. "Lock your door. Do not open it for anyone who does not know the name of your neighbor’s cat."
"My neighbor doesn’t have a cat" the woman exhaled, dazed, because sometimes the world is funny at the worst possible time.
"Pretend I said a name," Feris said, and sent her on.
Obi tried to stand. Electricity made his legs into somebody else’s problem. He got to his knees and stayed there, eyes bright with anger and embarrassment.
"Sorry" Obi said through his teeth. "I was having too much fun."
"And who are you?" Feris asked, already changing stance, again.
"I don’t know how to feel about the fact that you don’t know me" Obi let out a dramatic sigh. "But now’s not the time."
Feris let her breath drop to where it belonged. Not in the throat. In the ribs. She flexed her hands.
"Raizen" she called, quietly. And when i say Quietly, i mean the Feris kind of quiet, which is... close to shouting.
"Left" he answered, already moving.
They split like a mistake that was planned. Feris took the Warden’s flank with the lightness of someone who was very tired of being where she had been put. The Warden turned toward her because most men did when she decided they would. Raizen launched - not a flash - a shove. He hit the Warden in the side and took the baton across the ribs for it.
The world popped white, then came back with bad intention.
For a breath, it looked like gravity might pick a different favorite.
Then the Warden headbutted Raizen like a training dummy had nothing to teach him. More stars. The baton jammed again into Raizen’s side where padding was an idea and not a fact. Feris swore the kind of quiet oath that sounded like a promise to the future. Obi took one step, then two, and then his legs remembered the electricity again. He went down hard, both hands catching him before his face could learn a new shape.
The alley’s bad light flickered once. Twice.
The Warden grinned with half his mouth. He lifted the taser toward Obi again as if he were about to stamp a signature. Raizen saw the moment settle. He saw the city the way the Lighthouse saw it, in stripes and costs. Training halls and under-alleys. Walls you chose to hit. People who stayed hit when you were gone.
He did not know if anyone else would come. He did not know if Kori would skin him alive for being here or just take the harness apart and show him where the stupid lived. He did not know if the woman would find her husband or if the husband would be too sick to stand. He knew that if he let the taser touch Obi again, something would turn in a direction that did not turn back.
He took the breath that divided fear from use and moved with whatever counted for courage when your prototype had other ideas.
The Warden turned the taser toward him at the last second, surprised and glad to be surprised. The shock found skin. Pain wrote in a language his nerves did not want to learn again. He kept moving because stopping was what the Warden wanted. He slammed his arm into the taser and felt something give that was not his own.
The taser clattered. The baton rose. Feris’s hand flashed and the baton went somewhere under the bin stack where rats negotiated better contracts than citizens did.
"Now" Obi said through a breath that sounded like a sheep in her dying moments. He surged, because Obi always found a way to turn a floor into a launch. The brass kissed the Warden’s jaw. The Warden hit the wall for the second time that evening and slid.
Raizen let his shoulders drop. The taser’s echo still buzzed in the shoulder blade like a swallowed wasp. His right palm smoked a little where the prongs had kissed through cloth. Obi blew out a breath and rolled his shoulder until it clicked. Then he gave a small, theatrical bow that fooled no one.
"Name’s Obi," he said. "Professional idiot. Part-time civic improvement."
Feris’s eyes slid over him, then to Raizen’s hand, then back to the alley mouth. "You going to stay upright this time?"
"Only long enough to be charming." Obi grinned at her and then at Raizen. "You two were almost useful. I appreciate that."
Raizen snorted. "We’ll put it on our resumes."
"I would frame it." Obi glanced up, past the pipes and bad light, toward the levels that remembered sunsets. "Wish I could stay and argue, but someone will turn me into a cautionary tale if I am late. She has a temper and knives and I cherish both."
"Cinderette...?" Raizen said.
Obi’s grin softened in the middle, which was how you knew it was real. "You keep that name quiet down here." He tapped two fingers to his temple in something like a salute. "Tell your wall coach I said hi."
He started for the far end of the alley, favoring the leg that had learned electricity, and was almost gone when the Warden groaned.
The man dragged himself up the bricks like the building owed him something. His face was swollen at the jaw where the brass had kissed it. He smiled with the other half of his mouth.
"You think this ends here?" he said, voice thick and pleased with its own threat. "Marcus will hear about this!"
Obi paused. Raizen’s pulse stumbled. The name hit his head like cold.
"Marcus? Valerius?" Raizen asked, too quiet.
The Warden’s eyes brightened. He had found a lever. "That one."
Feris did not look at Raizen. "You know him."
Raizen kept his gaze on the Warden. "He was there," he said. The old door in his memory shut softly. "Back then."
"Good" the Warden rasped. "Then you know how far this goes."
Somewhere deeper in the Underworks, metal answered metal. Not sirens - the heavy, organized boots of men who never rushed because the city rushed for them.
Feris stepped between Raizen and the Warden with a movement so small it was almost a thought. "We’re done. Let’s go" she said. Not to the Warden - to Raizen.
The Warden wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and laughed, a short broken thing. "Run. I want the exercise."
Obi tilted his head, considering. For a second it looked like he might stay out of bad habit. Then he glanced up again, at the higher streets, and chose the living over the dramatic.
"Another night" he told Raizen. "Try not to get arrested until then."
"Try not to get stabbed. Or killed" Raizen responded.
Feris backed them down the narrow exit, never giving the Warden her spine. Raizen followed, ribs not throat, the harness humming like a tired animal. His palm still glowed dull where the taser had bitten. He could feel the shape of Kori’s fury later, numbered and labeled. He could also feel the shape of the name that would not leave.
Marcus.
They slipped into the maze. The echo of steps followed, patient and sure. In Raizen’s hand, the sting faded to a hard heat.
Progress felt like that - a new hurt with a use. And a name that promised the bill would be bigger than bruises.