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Ace woke up while the sky was still dark. He hadn't slept much; he never did, especially on days when he had to wake up before dawn. His dreams were warped echoes in his mind, flashes of heat and color fading quickly. His head ached, and he screwed his eyes shut for a moment as the last dregs of sleep faded from his mind.
He had almost drifted back to sleep when he was roused for the second time by a foot jabbing insistently at his shin, and movement from the form laying on the other side of the bed.
"Wake up," Black Static's voice muffled, head buried in the pillows. "You have to leave in like, ten minutes."
Ace groaned and pulled the thin blankets over his face, taking one last second to prepare himself for the cold, and then pushed them away and crawled out of bed.
"Why are you up," he huffed, stretching and stumbling to the other side of the room.
"Knew you had a run. And my class starts at 8."
"It's 5."
"Yeah but my computer was pulling scams yesterday and I gotta reconfigure it before I start."
“Oh. You need me to pick up any parts for it?”
“No, it’s a software thing.”
Ace gave an indefinite hum in response. Out of the two of them he wasn’t the computer expert. He wasn’t exactly sure what Black did to their rusty old desktop computer to make it run the online classes, just that it kept BLi from tracking their location and busting down the door to their little hovel. Ace struggled into his work pants, which were years old and a little too tight, and shrugged on his faded white tactical jacket.
He stumbled through the rest of his morning routine silently, careful not to wake any neighbors. It was probably fruitless, the Lobby was usually a noisy place anyways. But he did what he could to keep a low profile. He brushed his teeth and splashed water on his face in the rickety little sink in the corner and then walked back to the mattress.
Black blinked blearily up at him, face half buried in the pillow and covered by his long, tangled black hair. “You leavin’?” he muffled.
“Yeah.” Ace sat down and grabbed the boots sitting next to the bed, put them on and laced them up. Then he grabbed the little white bottle tucked behind the mattress.
He sighed as he shook out one of the round blue pills into his palm. It was a necessary evil ever since BLi had installed those goddamn biometric scanners, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. He threw back the pill, coughing at the bitter taste, and choked it down dry.
His brother made a face at him as he cleared his throat. “That's gross. You know there’s water right behind you.”
“I do not fucking trust that tap water,” Ace croaked. The pill was caught in his throat. He lingered on the bed for a moment, rubbing his eyes until he saw stars. A dull ache was growing already at the base of his skull. Then he heaved himself off the mattress and to the entrance of the apartment.
“Don’t forget to bolt the door after I leave,” Ace said. He offered his brother a halfhearted salute and stepped out into the empty street.
If the early morning bus rides had one saving grace, it was the relative peace and quiet of the city just before sunrise. Ace put on his headphones, turned their volume down to zero until he could hear the distant chattering of crows from behind him and the buzzing traffic ahead. It didn’t take him long to walk out of the Lobby and into the edge of downtown Bat City.
By the time Ace reached the station the bus was already hissing to a stop, and he scowled as he jogged to catch up with it, and got on just before the door whizzed closed. The flickering white light of the bus interior stung his eyes, and the biometric scanners beeped at him almost mockingly. The perpetual headache pulsing behind his eyes deepened. The pill was just enough to get him past the scanners without questions, but he could already feel it taking effect as it fizzed in his empty stomach.
When he arrived at the bus station in the midst of downtown, the Sun was up and the streets were full of milling white-clad pedestrians. The solar powered billboards flickered on one by one in the growing dawn, jumping right into a looping series of mind numbing logos and jingles.
Ace kept his head down and made the short walk down the street to the medic station.
“ID, please,” the woman at the desk chirped nearly the second he walked in. The smile plastered on her face made Ace’s teeth ache; her eyes were blank, their glittering steel gray irises marking her as a droid. He walked up to the desk, pulled the card from his pocket and placed it in her smooth gloved fingers.
She scanned the ID and the computer gave an approving chime. Ace breathed a sigh of relief. The card was a good counterfeit and had never failed him, but he constantly worried BLi might have improved their security.
“Medic #6107. Report to Unit 42.” she intoned, picking up one of the freshly restocked med kits from the rack behind her. She slid it across the desk to him, and then stared down at him with that same tooth-rotting smile. “Have a better day!”
Ace nodded, picked up the med kit and hurried out of the building.
Unit 42 was parked out behind the station. Static climbed into the driver’s seat of the small ambulance and dropped his head onto the steering wheel, draining the very last remnants of sleep from his eyes. Then he huffed, sat up and pulled the ambulance out onto the street.
The radio switched on by itself, blaring a Mousekat jingle clouded with white noise. Ace gritted his teeth, turned the volume down and started his patrol.
He didn’t go straight to his destination. He drove up and down the nearest few blocks a couple times, pulled into a parking lot and staged the ambulance there for a few minutes. He waited long enough for the BL/ind eyes to turn away from him. When he was sure the coast was clear, he drove away from the city center.
He pulled up to an alley off 14th street, parked the truck and got out. These streets were empty enough that there was no one to question him slipping into the alley. He glanced up at the security camera mounted on the brick wall beside him. The front was blacked out and the screen was shattered.
Away from the eyes and ears, he let out the breath he had been unconsciously holding and opened his med kit.
The clattering rainbow of pills inside the bag nearly spilled onto the concrete. He grabbed the translucent white bottles and stuffed them into his pockets.
He left the blue and white behavior pills where they were, instead pocketing painkillers, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories. He sorted through the bottles expertly and stowed any useful medications inside his jacket, along with gauze, needles and bandages, leaving behind just enough to ward off suspicions.
Once the med kit was considerably emptier than before, Ace zipped his jacket and prepared to leave the little blind spot. Back at the unit he would write a report of a possible threat in the alley that needed investigating. As long as he got back to the ambulance unnoticed, his tracks would be covered.
He was already drafting the report in his mind when he rounded the corner and nearly collided with the person hurrying down the street.
“Shit,” Ace muttered as he stumbled, and then slammed a hand over his mouth. The person stuttered to a stop, eyes wide. They stiffened and gaped at him as he reeled back.
He stared back at them. They looked about Static’s age, maybe a bit younger. They were clearly a downtown kid. Hazel eyes peered at him from behind huge round glasses, and their warm brown, freckled face was clean and blank. They wore an oversized white sweater and clutched a tablet. Ace looked them up and down and tried to gauge how much trouble he was in.
Before he could decide they spoke.
“Um. A-are you-“ they started. Their voice was soft and instantly disarming. They cut themself off and Ace raised an eyebrow.
The kid was staring down at him silently again. He shifted, suddenly hyper aware of the bulky contraband filling his jacket pockets. “Am I what.”
They opened their mouth and said nothing. After a moment they huffed and frowned. “Well, I guess not.”
The two stood, tense and eyes locked, for another moment. Ace wanted to do something, either run away or speak to the kid. But the effects of the medication hovered around him in shimmering pins and needles, covering his body like a straightjacket and kept him still and silent. He waited for them to speak, to shout at him and call him a thief, to reach for their cell phone and send an alert for an Exterminator. He wondered how long it would take his brother to realize he was gone.
Finally the kid’s scrutinizing gaze left him. It scanned their surroundings warily and then dropped to the sidewalk.
“F-forget it,” they stammered. “Sorry.”
As quickly as they had appeared, they skirted past him and away from the street corner. Ace watched, still dumbstruck, as they hurried off, tapping at their tablet.
As soon as they were out of sight he ran to the unit and scrambled up into the driver’s seat. “What the fuck,” he mouthed silently to himself as he tossed the empty med kit onto the passenger seat. The tires screeched as he pulled away from the alleyway, scanning his rear view mirror for Dracs.
For the rest of his shift, the strange encounter settled in his chest as a knot of anxiety. His wide eyes bored into the windshield scanning for patrol cars, waiting to be flagged down, and the pricking white noise of the medication thickened to a dense fog. By the time he pulled back into the medic station that evening his head throbbed and his stomach was bitter and twisting.
He dropped his med kit onto the counter. The droid picked it up and stacked it behind her desk, and offered him a canned goodbye that faded behind the static. He nodded stiffly and started toward the bus stop.
As the sun dropped behind the skyline and the shadows grew, Ace trudged from the edge of downtown into the Lobby, and up to his decrepit little apartment building. He wobbled up the stairs and knocked a familiar rhythm on the door with shaky hands. He could feel the medication draining from his veins, making his head pound.
His brother opened it after a moment, and Static managed a relieved half smile and dragged himself inside.
“You got the stuff?” Black murmured as he shut the door behind him. Ace picked up the worn out backpack hidden in the corner of the small apartment and it rattled with a weeks worth of stolen pills. He unzipped it and added the bottles in his pocket to the top of the stash.
A dim, blurry flicker of satisfaction sparked in his sore chest as he looked over the contents of the bag. “We probably have enough to make a Zone run soon,” he observed.
“Yeah. We might be able to hit the farmers’ market in One on Saturday.”
“Shiny,” he muttered flatly, tucking the bag back into it’s place and flopping down onto the mattress. As his head hit the pillow, the pain daggered down into his spine.
“You want dinner?” Black asked, and Ace could hear him shuffling around in search of a can opener. His stomach twisted nauseously at the thought of the stale canned food stacked in the cabinets. He gave a wordless mumbled no in response.
He didn’t sleep; he couldn’t with the drugs still seeping slowly out of his system. He laid still and silent for the rest of the night and let the static fill his mind, swallowing up the memory of the strange kid on the street corner.