Page 8 of Repossess My Heart

I jerk out of the full view so quickly my head feels like it’s been shut in a steel door. “What?” I can’t see Six roll his glowing eyes, but know he did all the same.

He flicks his chin towards Reverie’s apartment. They saw the feed from before you took out Two’s drone. You know his ass was always broadcasting. They don’t tolerate us fighting. Let alone a Repo Man dismembering another number. What the fuck were you thinking, man?”

“The Officials frown upon wastefulness. Was I supposed to leave his perfectly salvageable organs to rot?”

“The Officialsfrownupon Repo Men going rogue. You know, killing and butchering each other over a collection.” He deadpans, “What the fuck? She get to you?”

I laugh the same dry, humorless one I’ve always had. “Nobody gets to me.”

I don’t look over as he stands again, “Then kill her and report in before the Officials stop to reevaluate your worth.”

“I’m the best.”

“Second best….Nine.” He retorts, tossing my mask into my lap.

“For now.”

One slot until I’m at the top. Then… nothing can stop me.

Reverie

Work somehow feels even more pointless now, but without another visit in three days, I still need to eat. Considering I don’t have the balls to kill myself. That was the original plan, to kill myself in such a way that would render everything inside me unusable. Albeit a selfish way to go. At least I could die on my terms knowing my death didn’t line the pockets of murderers and the Officials. As if the Officials aren’t murderers themselves. No, they’re just too good to commit the crimes so they pay others. Above forbid the blood of civilians stain their perfectly tailored clothes. What can one person do to stop a well-oiled machine fueled and funded by the pure helplessness of others?

Nothing.

Not fucking shit.

So, if he- if they want me, they can come fucking get me. Above I hope it’s soon.

Somehow, I guess I’ve managed to find a semblance of peace in all of this. There’s the expected eagerness to get it over with, but it’s more too. I'm nearing the end of my shift and I’ve only looked over my shoulder eleven times.

Twelve now when the begotten gift rips through my calm.

That… Otherness alarms in my head, my senses kicking into overdrive as I meet a pair of chilled blue eyes. Ones that remind me of the ice glaciers CeCe told me about. The ones that melted long ago, sinking worlds beneath waves I can never seem to picture. Foaming cascades of water slapping at a rocky, warm brown surface children of the old world would build castles with. Castles that still stand Above.

Are there still oceans?

Surely powerful, unstoppable things like waves couldn’t be held at bay by metal and wires. I’m nearly positive I’ll die soon regardless of the waves in the oceans, and with endless questions. An infinite number of things I’ve never seen, never done, touched or tasted. I’ve never experienced a storm. The way lightning would illuminate a dark sky. Never seen a cloud on a sunny day. His eyes look like that.

Like everything the world set out to balance out the good.

Maybe we match, maybe this is what Nine- the Repo Man saw in me that made my eyes unworthy of death.

But that can’t be right.

The pristine white strands of hair covering his forehead and draping into his eyes do nothing to quell the burn of them. The utter… chaos? I whip my head around, slipping onto my knees on the platform. My nails scraping along the metal flooring as I try to come up with a word more severe to fit those eyes. Eyes that are trained on me with a lethal kind of precision. My heart flutters as I clench, my core tightening in anticipation of something I’ve never felt. Not in any desirable way. I watch him just as intently as he watches me as he sinks into a seat. You’d think he owns the club, owns the entire world.

There’s lust in his eyes. Matching the lust in many others watching. But what sets him apart is the unbridled determination… abhorrence.

Probably another creep looking for a core bot or Above forbid an Ender.

His midnight blue top might as well be painted on, outlining every plane of his sculpted muscular form. My face grows warmer as my core slicks itself, the bundle between my thighs pulsing in tandem with my heart under his glare. I swallow hard, trying to focus on anything else. More than half tempted to ask if he wants a private room with me. Maybe it would even feel good.

A gasp leaves my throat as he catches the arm of a nearby patron, another one fixated on my stage. The patron’s eyes widen, the whites of them nearly swallowing the pinpoint pupil. My grinding falters, making me miss a beat as the hem of the pale-haired man’s sleeve rides up, separating from his glove, exposing obsidian metal, metal people Above have killed for. Much less those down here. Something close to a squeak leaves the mouth of the patron as his arm is abruptly wrenched back.

“Delete it.” A throaty growl barely rises above the music, but a voice like that doesn’t require volume to command. Patrons are now ignoring the stages or the bots on their laps who are none the wiser, watching the scene unfold, and before I realize it, I’ve stopped dancing all together. My knees still pressing into the tarnished metal floor, the pads on them doing little to stop the hard surface from grinding into my flesh.

The pale-haired man wrenches again and murmurs drift above the music, above the man’s scream as his arm detaches from its socket, blood dripping down his wrist from the brutal force of his mechanical grip, “Okay, okay!”

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