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The street was quiet and tree-lined, cut up in brownstones whose foundations had been laid with century-old brick. The hour was two a.m., and Khun stood alone under a blinking streetlamp, waiting. The first snow fell like confetti around him, powdering his blazer white and then staining it a deeper black. But he paid that no mind.
He listened, and there it was. Underneath the whistle of the wind, a murmur of activity. Ghost laughter, a wisp of rancor. It sounded at once both faraway and right beneath him, the way currents growl and crack under ice. He scanned the innocuous neighborhood for any tells. Ah, why didn't he see that sooner. The double parked Ferraris outside the bodega, standing out even under the camouflage of snow. Smoke was rising from the alley sandwiched between the four cars. Khun crossed the street and walked towards it, until his lungs were filled not with the crisp winter oxygen that felt like a blade between his nostrils but with the the foggy heat emanating from the potholes sunken into the dirt of the alley. Piggybacking the steam was the whiff of opiates and marijuana. Party favors.
Khun skipped past the first pothole, beside which a homeless person had claimed as a furnace. Definitely not the entrance. The second one then. He stood before the adjacent pothole a few yards away from the first and tapped on the lid with his patent oxfords. The lid flipped over, and then once again, spinning along the axis of the ground, releasing a skunk druggy breath into the frigid night. Khun pinched his nose, kicked the lid ajar. He thrust his Pocket into the air, letting it beacon a light into the cavity. He bent one leg on the ground as he sunk his other one into the blackness. His shin clanged on a pipe, momentarily sticking to it, skin velcroed to metal in the subzero temperature. Grimacing, Khun lowered himself into the underbelly of Jahad's city, oxfords having found purchase one step after another on a ladder crusted over with frost and rust. He descended purposely, slowly, like a devil at the homecoming gates to hell.
Well, that wasn't so far from the truth.
"Shibisu, places."
"Roger," Shibisu yawned.
"Stay alert."
"It's two a.m." Shibisu whined.
Khun rolled his eyes but decided not to mince any more words with Shibisu. Now underground and on even footing, he appraised the sewer green walls graffitied over with dried blood and cuss words. The echo of a party, which had been dull above ground, now began to sharpen as he zigzagged along a concrete footpath running beside the underground arteries of pipes.
Shibisu continued the way he always did when Khun said nothing back: with more words than necessary. "I would say I would kill you for doing this behind the team's back, and dragging me into this, but you're might be about to die out there anyways."
Khun snorted.
"So I might as well say I love you instead."
He snorted again but managed a smile.
When Khun found the party, he strolled in leisurely, as if he belonged in the parlor. He moved through the crowd of burly men and slinky women with nonchalance, in spite of the way the sticky malt of the floor followed after his shoes like a string of saliva pearls. The bar was located at the center of the room on an elevated rotunda. Once he reached the circular countertop, he stripped off his blazer to adjust to the temperature of the room. It was too hot, the byproduct of the body heat from a hundred men in close quarters. He wrinkled his nose; the heat came with an overripe smell. Fuck, now he needed to fumigate everything he was wearing tomorrow.
The bartender lumbered over, a mousy man not much taller than the countertop, a civilian probably caught in the crosshairs of a territorial Tower dispute. "Can I get you anything?", his voice teetered.
"A gin and tonic, if you will."
"Sure." The man grabbed glass bottles with both his left and right and began to mix. Slowly, he wound the bottle around a cocktail glass, letting Khun watch the liquids viscously swirl brown and clear into caramel. Khun threw a rubber-banded stack of bills onto the table.
"Put it down on my name. Khun. Aguero. Agnes." He enunciated every syllable, and with each one, the bartender's eyes widened a crack more.
The shift in the room was subtle but seismic. Now every goon in the bar had angled their body towards him, their hands palming or tapping the knives and guns concealed under oversized pockets. The room had fallen mute, as if the party had been nothing more than a soundtrack, and Khun had hit pause.
The room held its breath for a dozen heartbeats, an utter vacuum. Then, a voice cut cleanly through the silence. "If the term 'life of a party' exists, then so too should the term 'death of a party'. That my boy, is you."
Khun turned around to towards the source of the voice, a lumbering hulk of a man seated in a cushioned booth. Two women hung off of his shoulder, twin and svelte visions of silk, skin, and sequins. They slung over his lap in a symmetrically in a way that was so villain and cliche Khun almost found it comical. The woman lazily fingered the pins on the broad's jacket. They snuck Khun a onceover every time they sipped their cocktails.
"You must be Pachi."
"And you Khun, Aguero, Agnes." Pachi bared a grin. He was the warlord who monopolized the 123rd floor. His name was short for Pachinko, because he owned every pachinko parlor, red light hotel, and slot machine in the Lower West Side of the floor.
He motioned for an attendant to bring over a velvet tray, which held a pyramid of powder cubes. They were the color of ground opal, milky white with flecks of iridescence. "Care for a hit?"
"No thanks, I'm here on business." Pachi barked out a laugh.
"Regulars these days take themselves so seriously." He waved the attendant away. Khun watched as the tray of drugs floated away into the crowd, disappearing onto tongues and dissolving into shots. "If you were going to be so prim and proper, we could have done this over the Pocket. But you came in person, and on a Saturday no less. Let's talk it over a game, at least." He beckoned a lieutenant by the pool table. "Flamingo."
A man snapped to attention in his periphery, and Khun made eye contact with him. Khun felt a vague recognition when he took in the lieutenant's fluorescent yellow eyes, muddy brown hair, and ashen pallor. He had a familiar coloring. Like Bam, but if Bam was gold, this man was pyrite. Certainly, he didn't act like Bam, not in the way his stare dragged over Khun like sandpaper.
"Why not."
The attendant began to set the pool table, and Khun noticed a betting pool gathering meters away. Perhaps they were betting on who was going to sink more, solids or stripes. An equally likely supposition was that they were betting on who was going to rip out his entrails first.
The game began with the lieutenant taking the first shot. Pachi spoke as the balls scattered into chaos. "I feel flattered that you—can I call you Aguero?—decided to seek me out in person."
"You act like it was my prerogative. I'm here to hear the offer you mentioned in our last communication. You can cut to the chase now. I'm all ears."
He moved his poolstick between his fingers, and shot the cue ball forward with the momentum of a whip.
"Relax. Let's let loose a little." Pachi smiled, and he smiled back; two false smiles mirroring one another. A few more rounds transpired in Khun's favor, as he sunk the colors of the rainbow into the ratty pockets of their beer-stained table.
Someone whistled, "This proves it, pool is for prissies."
Khun bent down to take another shot, angling his face to the leather edge of the table. He aligned the poolstick with the eight ball in the direction of the taunt. But just as he was going to shoot, he felt the rough grain of jeans against his rear. The bar erupted as the shot flew wide from his poolstick, an unnerved misfire.
"Flamingo's at it again."
"Let's start up another betting pool here. Can Flamingo take Mr. Khun. Aguero. Agnes home? Throw down your points here!"
"Fifty he can!"
"Two hundred!"
"Fuck off, you're too broke to gamble!"
Khun straightened and exhaled, willing himself calm in the midst of their head-splitting laughter and demeaning banter as he rolled up cuffs of his sleeves. Heat burned the ceramic white skin of his red. Khun could hear Shibisu's keystrokes on the other side of wire coiled around his cartilage earring, but Shibisu was gracefully not commenting on the transgression.
"Pachi." Khun began placidly. "State the terms of your offer or I'll be on my way."
Sensing that a lethal turn of events could be around the corner, Pachi stood, cutting the pleasantries. "I'm interested in a collaboration of sorts. You, as a group of vigilantes, have been amassing an army. My empire over the 123rd floor is in its sunset years. We both have influence, and I'm thinking about how much we can do united."
"Go on."
"Think about it, we can give you what is true power within this Tower. Allies on every floor. People who can bribe Rankers and test administrators to lubricate the next and last ten floors for you."
"In exchange?"
"In exchange, you lend us your manpower." Khun quirked an eyebrow. "Help us distribute. Give us access to Viole."
"You seem to think that this is an even exchange. A couple of cheat codes on ten levels and you get a god under your thumb."
Henchmen began to pipe up unbidden. "You're real dim for a Khun bastard if you think you can even be negotating with our boss—"
"Khun, don't get provoked." Shibisu murmured through the static in his right ear.
Pachi held up a palm, demanding silence. "What is it you want then?" A smile crawled onto his face.
Khun placed his poolstick on the table, game now abandoned. "You act like you want to rub shoulders with Viole, and hence Fug, but I know the rumors. Maschenny's been here. You've been talking with Jahad. And I want to know why." Khun summoned his pocket, both to display the evidence he had amassed in a hologram and in the case he would need to launch his lighthouses in defense.
Pachi stroked his chin and bent over to have an attendant light a cigar. "That's confidential. But if it means Viole will work for us, maybe things can be declassified." His grin was full of ash. A dull note of indignance thrummed through Khun. People always acted as if Bam was a swiss-army knife for all their problems, a wild card instrument for their agendas.
"I'm afraid the terms will have to be negotiated slightly. We're not interested in becoming distributors for your drug empire."
A goon piped up from the sidelines. "Not interested, huh? So then why did Viole send his little bitch out to talk to us, huh?" Smoke wafted through the air towards him, diluting the already-thin oxygen with the odor of skunk and sin. They were high, and their inhibitions were low.
"I can make some concessions on behalf of FUG if we can talk about Maschenny." Khun bluffed.
"He's asking some big, bad guys to find his own sister and he won't even go out on the streets and sell some of our candy? Fuck this guy." One man whirled a waitress into his arm, pantomiming a kid crying with his hands while he crushed her within his biceps. Khun did not need to see her face to see her terror shaking her body epileptically.
Nonetheless, his smile stayed on his face, immobile. "Look it's me, or nothing." He took a swig out of the gin and tonic and set it back down onto the table.
The moment he did, a pellet ripped through his periphery vision, shattering his beer in an instant. Khun stared at the hops and foam fizzing into the pool table. What didn't land in the puddle at the center of it and fallen on him, sopping his starch-white shirt the color of piss.
"Flamingo did that on purpose! So he could have a show!"
"Do it again! But this time don't miss his head by a mile!"
As he lifted his shirt to observe how bad the stain was, a foreign hand fisted into it from behind him. Khun turned, coming face to face with a gaunt man smoking a cigar. The cigar was so close that the tip burned just a centimeter away his eyebrows.
"Maybe we need Viole, but we don't need this Khun, boss."
The man spat on him. Khun instinctively blinked, internally cringing as he felt something slick slide down onto his collarbone to meet the beer stains on his shirt. When he coolly cracked an eye open, he saw the man raising his fist, theatrically prepared to swing hard.
"Not my face please. Some of us still have appearances to look after."
The man swung, but Khun was faster. Within an instant, he had freed his tie clip and converted it into his miniature taser. He pointed it at the man's quad, and shot, holepunching through the sinews of his thigh with enough concentrated force that he wouldn't be able to walk for months. The man screamed as he crumpled. Just as his opponent was about to rear up to full height again, hands searching savagely for Khun's throat, a blur crashed before him like a comet.
The first thing that came into focus for Khun was twin glints of gold.
"Bam!" Khun blinked. "You came."
Bam dropped down into a crouch on the floor, alongside a confetti of metal shrapnel from where he had burst in from the ceiling vent.
Khun stared at the hole in the ceiling. "You could have been more careful."
A look of indignation passed over Bam's face. "I could have been more careful? You were the one who came out here alone, without telling anyone!"
"I had it handled. I have Shibisu on the other end of the line, so I had backup."
Bam's eyes roved wildly over Khun's state. Khun was messy; beer matted his hair, and spit puddled in his right collarbone. Bam positively bristled. "I am the backup! How could the others just let you walk away from the base alone like this? If Shibisu hadn't called me—"
"I didn't tell them. There's no need to blame Shibisu." Khun spoke fast but with a tempered tone. Why the hell was Bam being incensed with him, and not the opposition?
A whip of electricity suddenly snapped in between them, as a goon unveiled a cyber whip. Bam finally snapped to focus. Slowly, he turned to the rest of the room and held out his palm.
"I am giving everyone notice," A vortex of shinsu began to slowly pool within in his glove. "The air in this room will disappear in two minutes if you don't let my friend and I go." The air siphoned into a whirlpool over his palm, halogen blue at the fringes and white where the energy concentrated into a vanishing point. True to his word, all the oxygen in the room was beginning to funnel into it, consumed into antimatter. "This room will become a vacuum. We can keep going, or we can peacefully decide things."
A man finally put two and two together. Amber eyes, hair a shade off from midnight. That preternatural control over shinsu. "That's...that's Viole! Jyu Viole Grace! Everybody...run!"
The men began to run out of the underground bar, dashing for the doorway and stairwell like a pack of rats. They pushed the women off of their laps and out of their way as if they were toys and offending furniture. Fear precipitated in their hearts like never before. It was easy to talk shit about him when he was far away, but now that he was here—they all knew the rumors. If you were unlucky enough to go toe to toe with Viole, if you could see his amber eyes, and see your petrified self within them, you were as good as dead.
The bar cleared out, leaving only the civilians staffing it in their wake. They had been nervously and mutely watching the entire affair. Bam let his palm fall to his side, releasing the oxygen back into the room. Khun felt his body sigh in relief.
Bam cleared his throat and spoke in his most diplomatic voice. "Is everybody okay?" When nobody answered, he looked towards a waitress girl for an answer. She yelped and looked up at him nervously, tugging down the sides of a sequin dress that was too short to actually make it over her hips.
"Are you alright?" She nodded and stared up at Bam. Khun could only see Bam's back, but he could see the girl's face and the theater of emotions slowly playing across it. The shadows over her face slowly withdrew, as the kindness radiating from Bam's gaze melted the fear clean off her face. Now all that was left was a plain curiosity for the notorious celebrity before her. Her eyes roved over Bam's androgynous hair and his simple handsomeness. Ten seconds—that was all it took for her to already overlook the deadly potential she had just seen Bam capable of performing. Ten seconds more and adoration would surface. Khun looked away, not needing to see anymore. He had other things to attend to.
Khun walked towards the stairwell that the gang had depleted through, catching the bartender call out to Bam.
"Are you really Jyu Viole Grace?" As Khun made his way towards the stairwell the gang had depleted through, he heard the bartender get up from where he had been huddled under the bar's countertop. While Bam was distracted, Khun would finish his business about Maschenny. He still had one lead.
The bartender shifted around and yelped as his foot came into contact with a shard of glass. Behind the man, every bottle of booze in his gallery had been blown out.
"Yes, I am Viole." The man seemed unable to form a coherent response. He was in a state of stupor, so Bam asked a bit more.
"Are you alright?" Still nothing. "Did I damage that by the way, the alcohol gallery behind you?"
The man gave Bam a wry gaze, gingerly turned around and sighed. "My bar..."
"I'll replace it for you."
"Wha—" the man whipped around, stunned by the gesture. Jyu Viole Grace, one of the most notorious vigilantes in the city, was asking about his alcohol case with genuine concern.
More civilians started stirring, curious about Bam. Khun briskly walked up the stairs, his face deadpan as he calculated the needless cost of forty highproof bottles of gin, whiskey, bourbon...
"Sir, I'll help you clean up."
Khun managed to sneak out while Bam triaged the civilians. Once he found his way back up to the tree-lined street, he tapped his earpiece gently.
"Shibisu." A light snore halted into mild sounds of shuffling. "You still there?"
"Yeah, yeah. Sorry about that Khun. I drifted off since Bam and you seemed to have things under control."
"Why would you send Bam?"
"I was getting worried—you weren't doing your usual protocol. They were shooting at you, grinding on you, spitting—"
"You still didn't need to get Bam involved. You know how he gets when I—never mind. Listen, now you owe me a favor."
Shibisu stayed quiet on the other end for a moment. "What is it?"
"I'm tracking a lat-lon on my lighthouse. Get me the coordinates."
"Just what are you planning on doing?"
"If I tell you, can I even trust you to keep it from Bam?" he mused rhetorically. The lat-lon floated across his pocket a second later. "Just trust me."
Ten minutes later, Khun found the man he had been looking for in a pizza joint three blocks south. He slid onto the stool next to the man who had been playing pool with him. Flamingo. The same goon that had shot his pistol at his beer.
"You ruined my shirt." His shirt was stained, but Khun covered it up with a leather jacket he had copped from the bar.
"I had to keep up appearances."
"Appearances," Khun scoffed, looking straight ahead. The bartender side-eyed him, but did not come over pestering him to order. "Now does it still appear stupid to double-cross Pachi?"
"No, Viole cleared up what qualms I had."
"So you'll cooperate."
"Yes." That was the goal in the first place. Khun never needed a full-blown deal with Pachi. All he needed was an informant.
"What do you know about Maschenny?"
"She has been continuing to come back with the Colorless December to this floor every month. Using it on certain people. That's why the civilians haven't protested Pachi's presence. Because he visits her, and she spares the ones that are affiliated with him."
"What do you mean by using it on certain people?"
"She's randomly attacking civilians. It's almost like she wants to make a show of it, the way she never kills them." Khun's eyes widened at that. Senseless, performative violence. That was everything Maschenny was not. He could only think of one plausible reason for her sadistic performances—to get the attention of Bam and company.
The man flagged the waiter down and had him come back with two slices of pizza, one for himself and one for Khun.
Khun raised an eyebrow at that. "No thank you," he politely declined, and the waiter retracted the slice.
"Beer? For the one I shot out of your hand?"
Khun simply shook his head to decline. "Do you have anything more?" He did not want to deviate from the matter at hand. Khun straight in the eye. His eyes dilated and contracted abnormally. Usually that indicated a subtle shifts in attention, but Khun wondered if it was side-effect of the drug they had been snorting. That would explain the munchies, and the way Flamingo was scarfing down his slices.
The man said nothing, gaze glazed as he continued to rest his eyes on Khun. His eyes wandered absentmindedly over from jaw to earring to iris. Khun felt a note of ire. He needed to wrap this up quickly.
"I said—do you have anything else for me, or are we done here?"
"Next time we chat I'll tell you. I'll have more." The man moved his gaze away from Khun as if it beleagered him to do so.
"Sure, contact me when you do." Khun nodded and put down a few coins. Money always helped lubricate things. He turned out of the orange incandescence of the parlor into the sidewalk of the ghetto. While he took a second to stare up at the setting sun, he felt oiled finger tips wrap around his forearm.
He turned violently but stilled when he saw gold eyes. Then his own narrowed as he noted the way Flamingo's hand hanging off of his wrist like a vice grip.
"I can tell you more right now. If we find a more private space." His eyes wandered over to a hotel whose signage consisted of a single electroluminescent heart— a love hotel. Flamingo's eyes looked determined, as if he had finally done the calculus and decided that the risk of asking to fuck with a Khun was worth all the collateral damage thereafter.
Khun shoved his hand free of the man and turned squarely towards him. "I'm sorry, but what you're insinuating is out of question."
To his credit, the man backed off. "Let me at least help you get dry cleaning for your shirt." Khun did not know why he didn't recognize it earlier. The way his gaze had roved across him was the same way the damsel in distress at the bar had appraised Bam. With unabashed interest.
Of course between all the mayhem of violence, politics, and justice of the Tower, people sought every kind of carnal relief they could.
"I'm good."
"We can—"
"I'll contact you through the lighthouse from now on. Let's keep things professional." Khun reiterated.
"Alright." The man visibly deflated and sauntered away.
Khun watched him walk a block away for good measure before he turned around to wait for the crosswalk. His eyes widened when he noticed Bam on the other side of the crosswalk with an unreadable expression.
"How did you find me? I put my lighthouse on Bandit mode."
"Shibisu told me to pick you up while I was on my way back to the base."
Khun quirked an eyebrow. He really needed to have a word with Shibisu later.
"I would never be able to find you while you're actually being stealthy." Bam said as they fell into step with each other. "So what was that about?"
"What was what about?"
Bam sighed. It was just like Khun to not be forthcoming with information.
"The bar, the late night trip—you know, why I flew out here in the middle of the night just for you?" Khun's heart skipped a beat, but just one.
"They have information on Maschenny, and it's the first lead we have gotten on her in so long. It was worth the shot."
"I don't think we should work with them." Bam said definitively.
Khun raised an eyebrow.
"The girl earlier...told me horrible things about them. They're evil." Khun processed the information.
He looked sideways at Bam, who had a resolute set to his chin. He stared forward with a hard gaze, with eyes that could stare into the grunge of the city, the streets slick with oil and blood, the underbelly of society, and still see good. Choosing people based upon morality—perhaps that was really a luxury reserved for the gods.
Bam continued without waiting for Khun to respond, breaking him out of his train of thoughts.
"After that altercation...earlier on the sidewalk, you were with a man I had never seen before."
Khun glanced at Bam out of the corner of his eye. There was a rare tension under Bam's face, one he tended not to see outside of battle. "You saw that?"
Bam let out a breath. "Yeah. Was he bothering you? What did he want?"
"Information, just like what I wanted from him."
"Oh. So did everything work out? What did you learn?" Bam asked congenially. Khun smiled a little. For all his talents, he would never be able to pick up reconnaisance. The first rule of trading information was to keep it to yourself.
"We'll probably have to meet again. So he can update me."
"Makes sense." Bam sounded off-kilter, but when Khun looked over, nothing was amiss. Bam was just tying his fake hair up. He paused, making Khun pause as well, and looked over sideways at Khun. "But I still don't think we should work with them."
"Got it Bam. I understand."
They reached their base in no time. Bam said he needed to meet Hwaryun, so Khun made to go left towards his bedroom.
"Khun."
"Yes, Bam?"
"Next time...will you give me a heads up? It makes me sad to think that you go off to do so much on your own." In little instances like these, Khun felt deja vu. He felt like underneath the biblical stature Bam had now achieved in the tower, that little boy in the cave was still there. The one he had discovered first, the jewel he had dug up before anybody else. Just afraid of being left alone.
Khun smiled sadly. "Of course Bam. You too."
Bam had learned slowly throughout the years that women easily had a thing for him. Women chased him and offered him things.
But now that Bam was a rising god, people tended to keep him at arm's length, to look upon him reverential eyes. They offered their bodies to him with intentions beyond attraction. They offered him their bodies with abandon, as vessels. They pinned their dreams upon him. They looked at him as if he was light.
People never looked at Khun like that. Bam pretended he didn't notice it, but people often sought Khun out to rendezvous in the shadows of alleys, in the middle of the night, and in the dimness of lighthouse. Part of it was that Khun's line of work necessitated this sort of stealth. However, he could not help but feel bothered. Incognito meant the night and the bath of darkness he never wanted to return to. Bam had been lost within the night once, and he didn't want the same to become of Khun.