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The lock whirrs; the door slides open. Aria doesn’t need to turn around to know it’s Nyreen on the threshold. She can hear the gasp, see the tall shadow fall parallel to Aria’s own over the tiled floor, over the lumps of dead flesh littering the narrow hallway. Feel the disapproval, the disgust pierce through the biotics still rippling over her skin, needle its way past the bloodlust still thrumming through her skull.
“I told you to wait in the car.”
“You said you had business,” Nyreen says. These days she speaks in accusations.
Aria steps over the body and further into the small, cramped apartment, through the quickly growing puddle of blood on the floor. The stench from the contents of the human’s bowels, emptied before she ripped his torso to pieces, lingers in her nose and revulsion hits hard before yielding to indifference crafted over centuries.
“This is business.”
“This is murder.”
“Honestly, Nyreen.” A pointed glance over her shoulder at the gun in Nyreen’s hand, the half spent heat clip. “Moral outrage, at this point?”
“That was-”
“Whatever you need to tell yourself, do it quietly. I’m here incognito.”
The apartment has three rooms. A tiny bathroom, untidy. Aria sticks her head through the door, judges the damp towels on the floor, the dried shaving cream in the sink, and moves on into the kitchen. It is, in contrast, pristine. She runs her fingers along the edge of the counters, stainless steel gleaming in the reddish light seeping through the reinforced window. White napkins on the round kitchen table, the logo from the volus takeout place on the bottom floor in the corner. Bottles of liquor on a shelf, labels turned outwards, on display. The letters tell her nothing, and even if they did she wouldn’t much care. She rarely drinks. Drinkers are good for business, but she prefers her own head cool.
She goes back into the hallway to get to the living room. Only a small sliver of tile remains unsoiled by the blood by now, its strange bright red color, cartoonish and unnatural. Aria would register it as paint if it wasn’t for the smell of it filling the air: sweet, with an iron bite. Not wholly unpleasant, certainly preferable to the excrement still fouling up the space.
She crosses the hallway in one quick stride. The blood splashes underfoot and, again, she doesn’t turn her head to look at Nyreen, doesn’t have to to know just what she looks like, the disappointed outrage in her quivering mandibles.
The living room has parquet flooring. Aria taps her heel against it - that’s real wood, exorbitantly expensive on Omega. The trail of bloody footprints in her wake will seep into it, ruining the extravagance for good. Her lips quirk.
What she’s looking for is in a drawer in the marble-top desk in the center, the combination lock easily broken with just a light touch of her power. Why they bother she’ll never know. The contracts on the pad are behind an encryption she can’t smash her way through but she has people for that. She’ll have them in hand in time. She can be patient when she has to, when the reward is sweet enough.
A final look around the room, the cramped opulence. Someone will make a fortune today, after she’s left, some of Omega’s scavengers will crawl out of their holes and pick this gilded carcass clean. If Aria knows her subjects right - and she does, she always does - a good portion of this, stolen from her in the first place, through bad deals and dishonest contracts, will be returned into her establishments, her drug trade, her markets and brothels and information brokers. It’s the circle of wealth. The system works.
Nyreen has her back against the door. She’s inched away from the blood, her feet still impeccably clean as she balances on tiptoe, even for a turian. Aria meets her eyes, coming back out into the hallway for the last time. The blood is getting sticky, squelching, now, as she walks. She’ll be glad to be out of here, too.
“Drop you off at home, babe?” Aria says, tone flat against the anger radiating from Nyreen, the woman who soon won’t be her partner anymore, who thinks the scales piled between them has fallen only from her eyes.
Nyreen’s mandibles, thin and elegant, flare. “I’ll take a cab.”
Aria leans past her, indifferent by force of will, and opens the front door.
“Watch the fare meter,” she says. “Those people will bleed you dry.”