"He's not coming."
"He has to come. He's made it this far,
crossing one City on foot shouldn't stop him."
Katsai frowned, his deep-set eyes narrowing as he
stared distantly out the window, as though he could find what he sought simply by scouring
the massive Platinum District with his piercing gaze. "I hope you're right, " he
rumbled. "You'd damned well better be."
This.....
This is everything.
Can this truly be all that there is?
No. It is not.
Wind chimes.
Instruments without sound, for there was nothing to
stir them in a City where the air shifted only in the stale breaths of the living.
They danced in silence, in stillness. Raze exhaled.
Koto and shaimsen. Music. His only music, for he
knew none other. It drew him, night after night, to sit opposite this sightless statue,
staring into those maggot-white eyes in a quiet search for understanding.
And around him, there was music. A symphony of iron
decomposition.
He felt the stranger before he saw him. He was
music as well, tinkling and bright gold to Raze's darkened silver. Contrast vibrated in
the air, and natural law drew two opposing forces together.
The dark shadow crouched on the edge of the
rooftop, but could not hide. The fire crowning his head and spilling down his back in its
tightly twined containment blazed and burned, and Raze nearly flinched as the vibrancy
reached out to consume his cool skin.
Waiting. He wondered if the stranger was a spider,
a beady-eyed black spider.
The fiery one walked in silence. The old man did
not move, nor did his younger counterpart, and the dark-eyed stranger stopped between
them, looking from one to the next.
Raze drowned in sunlight and music, and the light
and notes wove themselves into words.
"I need a guide."
This was what Raze had been waiting for.
How long, he did not know. Certainly longer than
tonight.
In silence, he rose and moved towards the stairs,
drifting wraithlike and pale. In silence that rang with the sound of gold striking steel,
sunlight followed.
In silence, a thread of black spidersilk spun
itself.
"My name's Throttle, " the newcomer
attempted. "I know it's a rather odd name, but......" He trailed off helplessly
as this, as well as everything else that he had said, elicited no response. His voice was
the only thing that had broken the silence that had stretched between them for hours, as
the white-haired waif led him from rooftop to rooftop, leaping from one to the next with
the grace and quietude of a fluttering feather. He did not seem real, beneath this cold,
silvered light, and Throttle found himself giving way to flights of fancy--anything to
alleviate the monotony of mile upon mile of concrete flattops.
He imagined that the boy was some phantom, or
perhaps a faerie from the stories that where whispered by those rebellious enough to still
tell their children bedtime stories of fantasy and wonder. He imagined that he was a
wraith, come to lead him to his doom. He was certainly thin enough to be a ghost, and with
his translucently pale skin and stark white hair and the cold, fragmented shards of
golden-stained glass that were his eyes.....he was an oddly chilling sight in his fragile
beauty.
He had spoken not a word as Throttle asked him how
much he would charge to guide him to the Platinum District, and only nodded once,
minimally, as the red-haired boy had suggested a number.
Other than that....he only listened.
Part of Throttle was relieved, for he had no wish
to answer questions about his insistence to travel a continent-spanning City on foot--but
another part of him was strangely disturbed. The boy was so....not dead, but not alive,
either. Mechanical in his smooth movements, in the sleekness of his lithe body. Alien.
A human machine.
"Raze."
The single word fell in a shattering of panes of
glass, sliced the air in mirrored tones of coolness; Throttle jerked his head up to look
at him, falling still as he saw that the other boy had paused in his flowing steps.
"That's your name? Raze?"
There was no response. The delicate point of a pale
chin nearly touched a bony shoulder as his head turned, and one eye fixed on Throttle,
burning and scoring his skin with its frosted Apathy.
"Sleep now, " came the next soft,
dispassionate utterance.
Throttle looked around at the square rooftop around
them. They might as well not have moved from their previous location, and yet the
white-haired boy seemed calmly certain of their whereabouts.
"Here?" His tone was one of disbelief,
and he gestured towards the unyielding cement beneath them.
He blinked, and Raze's body folded.
He crumpled and stretched in one movement too
swiftly flowing to be followed by the human eye....and then he simply laid there upon his
back, arms at his sides, hands curled loosely....like a pallid invalid resting on his
deathbed. Calm eyes looked up at Throttle, inscrutable and empty. "You are
tired."
He was tired, though he had given no outward
sign of it nor spoken, and it occurred to him to wonder how the boy had known--but he had
no chance to ask, for soft white lashes fluttered down like snow, and Raze slept in
deathlike peace.
Sighing, Throttle sat upon the concrete near him, a
respectful distance away. Well, I guess I have no choice then, he thought, his
colorful accent tinting even his thoughts. "Sleep now" it is.
What an odd boy.
"He's on his way. He found a local boy for a
guide."
Frustration. "I don't see the necessity for
this. If you can track him, you should be able to bring him in. We could be waiting months
for him to make the trek."
"Patience, Katsai. We need time to prepare for
his arrival. If we are not ready when he comes, then we will find death."
In silence, the large man fumed.
He could not sleep.
Tense and restless and wary, Throttle crouched at
Raze's side, standing a weary vigil over the slumbering boy and toying with the bloody
copper of his braid.
He felt anxious and exposed, here on this rooftop.
Anxious, exposed, and alone...even in the presence
of this fey automaton.
He looked down at Raze, studying him in his sleep.
His frail body did not stir, and for a moment he wondered if he even breathed--but there.
Molecules fluttered, and a breath was inhaled...hardly enough to give life to an infant,
but who could tell if creatures such as this required air?
Curious, Throttle touched the pulsing within his
neck.
Oneness.
Frozen, hearts beat in unison.
Vertigo. Dissolving.
A sharp gasp, and he withdrew, staring at his
fingertips in shock. They tingled, chemical-hot and not unpleasant.
Raze laid oblivious beside him. A corpselike shell,
so pale and fragile that he seemed to melt into the artificial moonlight before Throttle's
puzzling eyes.
Twitching. Something alive twitched and spasmed
beneath the skin of the boy of the dead. Something alive and not alive, writhing black and
silent.
Bursting past his skin.
Scuttling. Growing. Breeding.
Oozing and climbing from his fingertips, spreading
over his hands in a gleaming webwork of dark liquid. Solidifying, iron-dark but
hematite-bright, a second skin of intricately woven metal like a complicated crystalline
growth. It crept up his arms beneath Throttle's stunned stare, slowing with each passing
nanosecond, its fungus-like growth spreading thinner until it faded to nothing just below
his elbows.
Stillness. The white-haired boy had not moved. Only
his fluttering breaths attested to his life, his painfully thin chest rising and falling
and marked erratically with patches of the same growth that nearly covered his hands.
Throttle exhaled a deep breath that he was not
aware that he had been holding. Only moments, less than five seconds, and the boy had
inexplicably changed. Even his face and neck were marred by those odd gleaming fragments,
somehow reminiscent of circuits--and yet rather than scar him, they gifted him with a
sinister, broken delicacy and loveliness.
Was he a machine?
No, for all his emptiness and silence. The
heartbeat and shallow breaths had been too erratic to simulate.
He was...other, less and more. And Throttle was
confused. Confused, and mesmerized.
He touched Raze's flesh again. Pressed his fingers
lightly against his throat, compelled. Skin strange beneath his fingers--cool and damp and
oddly smooth, like moist satin.....moist satin in stark, silvered white. A ghost's
raiment.
Acid-pitted eyes abruptly opened.
The moon sputtered and extinguished.
Throttle drew back his hand with a sharp gasp as
darkness swooped down to smother them in its thick black wings. An apology hovered on his
lips, but he could not speak. Frozen, a wild animal trapped in the hot golden stare of a
predator. Pools of amber liquid, chemical and corrosive and slitted through with cat-slash
black. Hot honeyed ooze that crystallized and cracked and crumbled beneath a desert sun.
The City beneath them groaned, and he felt it
dying.
"Sir. We've found him."
