The first sensation Enna became aware of was blood dripping down her chin. This wasn’t particularly useful for figuring out what was going on- blood on her face could mean anything from a recent injury to an extremely fun night out. But then again, none of her senses were being very helpful right now. Touch was mostly just pain, and the sticky warmth of face-blood. Taste was a lot of copper. Smell was blood, sweat, and the sharp tang of antiseptic. Sound was mostly silence, her own labored breathing notwithstanding. And sight….
Enna slowly opened her eyes, giving herself time to adjust to the harsh brightness of fluorescents. Okay. Time to take inventory. Her head was hanging down. She could see, without moving, the following: her legs tied to the chair she was sitting in, a whole bunch of dried blood down the front of her ripped shirt, a small pool of blood in her lap, a concrete floor with the marks of a recent scrubbing. Alright. She rolled her shoulders experimentally and discovered the reason she couldn’t feel her arms- they were bound behind her, possibly for hours based on the soreness of her shoulders, and had gone to sleep long ago. She tried rocking back and forth in the chair. It was bolted to the concrete. Cool! Cool cool cool.
“She’s awake,” snapped a voice from in front of her. Oh, shit. She was probably supposed to have been pretending to be unconscious. Well, no point in that now! Enna raised her head (and fuck’s SAKE was her neck sore) to see who was talking to her. On the other side of a brushed-steel table was a woman. Tall, but not as tall as Enna. She had short cropped white hair and a jawline sharp enough to cut glass. Her eyebrows were drawn together in what looked like a permanent scowl over piercing eyes, and on one high cheekbone there were the faint white lines of a scar shaped like some sort of bug. Weird. The woman leaned forward and placed her hands on the table. “Do you know where you are?”
“Uuuuhhhhhhh….” Enna managed. Honestly, she didn’t. The being-tied-to-a-chair combined with the dominatrix vibes this lady was giving off could either mean a fun and sexy time or an extremely unfun and unsexy time, and she didn’t have a goddamn clue how she’d gotten here. Context was pretty important when deciding whether or not a situation was sexy!
The woman across from her smirked (pretty sexily). “Tor? Jog her memory.” Enna felt a freighter crash into the back of her head and slam her face into the table. Oof. Definitely unsexy.
It did help her remember, though, her brain apparently deciding that she was hurting enough now that it wasn’t much use repressing what had happened. Now she knew how she’d gotten here.
It had gone about as badly as it was possible for a heist to go. Well, they had actually gotten to the files, so that was pretty good. It would have been embarrassing if they’d gotten caught without even getting to the objective. And she hadn’t even been on the heist team in the first place! Her job was to be the getaway driver slash lookout slash battering ram if things got fucky. So there she was, letting her car idle a block away from the Palace, eating some meat on a stick that she’d bought from a streetcart. Pretty standard stuff. She’d done it before. Drop the heist team off, let them do their thing, get them home safe, maybe do a daring police chase if she got lucky. And there wasn’t any reason to believe this would be different. The Shorty Squad (plus Lyle and Fuse) were experts. They’d broken into a dozen oligarch’s houses before. Why would Donlevy’s be any different?
They hadn’t put a lot of stock into the fact that Mayor Donlevy hadn’t gotten where he was from blind favoritism. They’d figured that he was the sort of military hero who’d gotten a reputation because the people under him had done cool shit, and that the stories of him single-handedly taking back the Keep were just another part of the state’s propaganda machine. Unfortunately, they were pretty fucking wrong.
Enna’s earpiece beeped, and Highhill’s voice came over the speaker. “Go to the Palace. They’ve been compromised.” She didn’t get a chance to finish her sentence before Enna was back in her car and peeling down the road, and in the two minutes Enna took to drive through the busy streets the AI told her how they’d triggered a trap in the main server room and how they needed immediate extraction. Her synthetic tone was even, as always, and Lyle always swore up and down he’d never installed anything resembling a personality. But Highhill still sounded worried.
Enna screeched to a halt behind the Palace. “No time for stealth,” Highhill told her, popping open her glove compartment. “The center window on the twelfth floor.” Enna pulled out the gun and took careful aim. “Now.”
With a knockback that would have sent a normal person flying, a cable shot out of the muzzle and buried itself in the steel crossbeam under the window. The force of the reverberation alone was enough to shatter the glass. Enna heard sirens blaring from the hole in the wall, but whether they had already been tripped or were the result of her blatant property damage wasn’t clear. “The other side. Hurry,” Highhill urged, and Enna fired the other end of the cable into an adjacent parking deck, its piton sinking deep into the concrete.
“They’ll be able to get out now. The deck is clear,” Highhill said, voice modulated by something approaching relief. Enna was relieved too, at least until she heard footsteps coming around the corner.
Well, apparently she hadn’t been fast enough. That was probably okay, though. It was probably a good thing that she was alone, because it meant they hadn’t gotten the others. Or did members of anti-government coalitions usually get interrogated separately? Enna really wished she’d paid more attention to Jaria’s lectures.
The motherfucker behind her smashed her head into the table again for emphasis. Unnecessary and rude! While Enna’s eyes tried to focus, the woman crossed in front of her, a blur in black synthetic leather. She slid the table back and sat on it, reaching out a hand and grabbing Enna by the chin. “I’ll ask you once more. Do you know where you are?”
Enna squinted at her, brow furrowed from concentration. She had some idea. The Harpers had told her horror stories about the shadowy paramilitary force known as the Crimson Talons. The red right hand of the government, not officially acknowledged by any politician or oligarch and likely unknown to the majority of the population. Boogeymen of the denizens of Lowtown, the people even hardened crime bosses spoke about only in whispers. Their leader, Andromeda the Crimson, was rumored to be the most ruthless woman in all the Cold Cities. They were elite, near-omnipotent, and inhumanly cruel. The few rebels who survived encounters with them were haunted for the rest of their days. Most refused to ever go into the field again. Enna only had one chance to convince this woman that she was valuable enough to keep alive, but not enough of a threat to kill immediately. She had to be careful.
“You’re, like, really hot,” Enna slurred through a mouthful of blood.
The woman pulled her hand back like she’d been burned and kicked Enna contemptuously in the stomach. Enna convulsed, coughing up blood, and had to grit her teeth to keep from vomiting on herself. Cool.
The guy behind her grabbed her hair and yanked her head up to face the woman, whose face was nearly white with bloodless rage. “You will not mock me,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Now, tell me what your little friends were planning on doing with that data, or I will have my associate here break each of your fingers individually.”
“Wellllllll,” Enna drawled, wincing from the pain, “see, the problem there is that, I don’t really super know what they were gonna do with it.”
There was a beat of silence. The woman blinked at her, eyebrows raised. Enna wasn’t good at uncomfortable silences, so she kept going. “I’ma be honest, uh, most of the plan didn’t really apply to me, so I pretty much zoned out during the briefing?” She shrugged as much as her bonds would allow. “I mostly only paid attention to the parts that were like, go here and wait for the signal, if we take longer than an hour then leave, that sorta thing. I’m not, like, the main heist guy or anything, you know?”
She felt the guy behind her tighten his grip on her hair. “Vilexi, should I-“
The woman- Vilexi, probably, Enna had context clues down- raised a hand to stop him from smashing her face again. “No, Tor, I don’t believe that will work.” She got up and walked somewhere behind Enna, rustling around in something or other before walking back. “We may have to get a little more….. invasive.” Vilexi held up a syringe filled with clear fluid and wiggled it at Enna. “Do you know what this is?”
Enna considered her next words carefully. “Uh, probably not a Jell-O shot?” Tor jerked her head backwards and she flinched from pain. Okay, so not that carefully.
Vilexi frowned in annoyance. “No. This is a serum which will lower your inhibitions, make you more susceptible to…. suggestion.” So it WAS a Jell-O shot. “Knowing how it works will not enable you to resist it. In fact, nothing you do will enable you to resist us.” Vilexi approached her with the needle. “So if you would just relax, it will be much easier for me to find a vein.”
Tor pulled her head to the side. The lady had a point! She wasn’t in much position to resist, and she didn’t want to bleed out from getting stabbed in the fucking neck, so she let it happen. Vilexi depressed the plunger and emptied the syringe into her neck, then stood back. Enna felt a bandage being pressed to her neck, which felt kind of redundant at this point given the metric fuckton of blood that she’d barfed onto her own shirt, but maybe that meant they weren’t trying to kill her yet? Tor released her hair and stepped away. “We’ll give it a moment to kick in, and then we’ll be back,” Vilexi said, moving out of her line of sight. “Try not to go anywhere.”
Enna heard a door open behind her, then close. Cool. Not much to do now. Enna couldn’t feel the serum moving icily through her veins or whatever. It mostly just kinda itched under the bandage. She tried leaning her head to the side and wiggling to scratch it, but it didn’t do much. Well, fuck. Enna decided to close her eyes and see if she could get some rest.
She was woken up by- you guessed it- a blow to the head. At least these guys were consistent. Vilexi was in front of her again, sitting with legs crossed on the table. She was frowning, apparently more out of confusion than intimidation. “Were you actually asleep?”
Okay. Interrogation time. Every member of the Harpers had gone through training to remain tight-lipped in the face of intimidation, to never sell out their comrades, to die for the good of the mission. All very good and important hero stuff. Enna had played cards with Emiel in the back for most of it. “Oh yeah, I try to get my naps in when I can, you know?” she babbled. “Never know when you’re gonna get woken up in the middle of the night by some asshole knocking over the garbage cans, haha! Man, you’d think they would have come up with a better solution for trash than garbage cans, we have like hover cars and email and shit, come on.” Vilexi was openmouthed, her scary facade cracking under the revelation that Enna was, unfortunately, a chatty drunk. “And I’m like why don’t we just burn the trash or whatever, but apparently that’s “bad for the environment” and we “don’t need any more smog” and then I’m like why don’t we just push it somewhere else and-“
“Shut UP!” Vilexi’s voice cracked like a whip and Enna shut her jaw with a click. “Now, you will tell me what you were going to do with the Mayor’s information. And you will do it in five words or less.”
“Uuuuhhhhhhh…..” Shit, did that count as a word? Better count it to be on the safe side. “We… weren’t… after…. him.” That was good, that was a good answer. Technically true (and for some reason her brain kept fogging up every time she tried to think of some lie to say) but also not super revealing. Nice!
Vilexi raised a perfect eyebrow. “In five words, tell me what you were after.”
“His…. shitty son… Nikolai… sucks.” Man, she had GOT this.
A beat of silence. Then laughter, very loud and right behind her. Tor sounded like he was doubled over, his deep booming laughter interspersed with wheezing. “Oh shit!! She’s all fucked up on truth serum, you know she can’t lie!!” She felt her chair rock as Tor grabbed it to steady himself. “Vilexi, come on, that was great.”
Vilexi’s mouth was twitching. “Tor, need I remind you that we are professionals?” She stood up and glared at Enna. “No more talking. Only nods. Were your friends attempting to blackmail Nikolai Donlevy?”
Enna shrugged, thought about it, then nodded. That was probably what they were doing. She was pretty sure she had been busy trying really hard not to make eye contact with her ex at the part of the meeting where they’d been explaining that. Vilexi glared at her again, and Enna shut her mouth as she realized that she’d said that part out loud. Whoops.
“That’s enough for now, I think.” Vilexi motioned to Tor, who started messing with something at Enna’s wrists. “Tor, put her in a transport to the Keep. We should be able to get more out of her later, when she’s been more…. incentivized.”
Enna was yanked roughly to her feet, and she staggered, almost falling over onto Vilexi. Tor grabbed her by the upper arms, and she turned to look up at him. His deeply scarred face was creased in a leering grin, so she smiled back. “Wow, dude, you’re huge! I mean, I’m like six foot three, how are you taller than me! Holy shit!”
Tor looked at Vilexi, who had her arms crossed. “Are you sure we can’t keep her?”
“Absolutely not. Now get her to the transport.” Tor shrugged and marched Enna to the door. He basically had to carry her through the halls as she babbled about how fuckin asleep her legs were and wow isn’t it weird how your body just does stuff without your input cause like she didn’t tell her legs to fall asleep but they sure did anyway! She was still babbling as he stuffed her into the passenger side of a two-seater transport and started driving. The car moved through a dark underground tunnel, lit at intervals by safety lights, for about five minutes. At some point, Tor shoved a black bag over her head, which she took as an indication to shut up. The car eventually stopped. Enna could hear muffled voices, then the sound of a hatch opening, then the whine of the engine as the car rose into the air. Tor turned on the radio.
“-listening to smooth jazz on the air. Coming up next is another hour of commercial-free easy listening, but first, a message for one of our listeners. Enna, grab onto something.” Enna heard Tor grunt in surprise, and she only had enough time to bring up her legs and assume the crash position before she felt the car jerk hard to the right and start a stomach-flipping barrel roll. She heard Tor yell, and the car shook with impact as something crashed into it. There was the rush of a door opening midair, and Enna curled tighter into a ball. She could hear thuds, yelling, something electrical, more yelling, and then the car stopped spinning and cruised to a smooth landing. Enna tentatively uncurled and tried to roll into a sitting position, but was not very successful. Her head was swimming, and it could be anything from the drug to the blood loss to the fact that she was pretty sure she’d hit it on something in the car. She felt the wall she was resting against- probably a door- open, and hands caught her before she fell out. They guided her to a sitting position on what felt like concrete. Someone carefully untied the bottom of the bag and lifted it off of her head. Enna’s vision burst with light and she had to blink a lot before she could focus on the face in front of her. Light brown skin, deep brown eyes, candy-pink hair- Madison.
“Holy shit, I love you,” Enna mumbled before the concussion caught up with her and she fell into unconsciousness.
It was only a couple of hours later. She’d woken up back in the base, stretched out on a table with an IV in her arm. Felix- dear, sweet Felix- had explained that she had lost “more blood than she should have!” and had told her that if she tried to rip the tube out and walk around he would personally sit on her to keep her in place. When she had waggled her eyebrows and said that that didn’t sound like much of a punishment depending on where he was sitting, if he knew what she meant, wink wink, he had rolled his eyes and left the room with a smile. Enna had laid back down and was staring at the ceiling, trying to remember what had happened, when she heard a knock at the door.
“Come on in,” she said, pressing the button thingy that tilted her up to see who it was. Gemma entered the room and sat down by the side of Enna’s bed.
“Do you have a moment?” the leader of the resistance asked, her hands folded in her lap. Enna nodded, indicating the shunt in her arm and the general immobility of her situation. Gemma smiled warmly at her and placed a large hand on her shoulder. “I know you’re probably tired, so if you need to rest just let me know. Could you tell me about what happened?”
“Uh, so, I don’t think I spilled too much info,” Enna mumbled. “Mostly because I didn’t know too much.” She brightened up. “Hey, I guess I was like the perfect person to get captured, yeah?”
Gemma frowned. “Ideally, nobody would have been captured at all. I’m sorry we weren’t able to extract you sooner.”
Enna shrugged, then winced at the pull of sore muscle. “Hey, it wasn’t too bad. I’ve had worse.” Gemma frowned again and was about to say something when there was another knock on the door.
“Come in,” Gemma said reflexively, and the door creaked open.
“Hey, Enna, um, I was wonde- oh!” Madison’s eyes widened at the sight of the highest-ranking Harper sitting at Enna’s bedside. “Oh, shit, uh, sorry ma’am, if you’re in the middle of something I can wait until you’re done!” She was frozen in the doorway, one hand on the handle. Gemma chuckled.
“No, actually, I can wait.” She shot Enna a knowing look. Enna was not knowing what it was for, but she smiled tentatively in affirmation. “You two probably need to talk.” Gemma left the room, leaving Madison standing awkwardly in front of Enna’s bed.
Enna really wasn’t good with awkward silences. “So, uh, new hair color?” Madison snorted a laugh and came to sit beside her. “Cause it, uh, you look nice. In, like, an aesthetic sense.”
“Did they drug you?” Madison asked, looking at the fresh bandage on Enna’s neck with concern.
“Yeah, uh, I think it was a truth serum. Felix said it shouldn’t have fucked me up too bad, it should be mostly out of my system by now.” Enna frowned. “Which was like, rude of them, cause now I have to be stuck here under observation or whatever, and I’m bored.” She looked up at Madison with fake-puppydog eyes. “Did you bring any booze?”
Madison laughed. “I think Felix would kill me if I brought alcohol in here. The last thing he needs is you trying to do shots with two broken ribs.”
Enna’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh shit, my ribs broke? Fuuuuck. That’s why everything hurts.”
“Oh my god, Enna, how did you not know your ribs broke?”
Enna shrugged. “Dunno, figured they just hurt from getting hit in the stomach a bunch.”
Madison stared at her. “Enna, you’re lucky you don’t have internal bleeding, you could have punctured a lung!”
“Well, internal bleeding‘s fine, right?” Enna said. “I mean, that’s where the blood’s supposed to be.”
Madison put her head in her hands. “I seriously can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic right now.”
“Nope!” Enna beamed. “Lyle says he thinks my sarcasm centers got cauterized as a child in part of a secret supersoldier project that got scrapped for budget cuts and left me six feet tall and incapable of irony.”
“That honestly wouldn’t be too surprising,” Madison said, smiling. Then she looked away, and the smile left her face, replaced by something Enna couldn’t parse. “So. I wanted to, uh, ask you something.”
“Yeah?” If this was about the upcoming base-wide karaoke competition, Enna didn’t think she was gonna be able to be Emiel’s backup dancer anymore.
“When I rescued you-“ Madison trailed off, looking at her hands.
Oh! Enna knew what this was about. “Shit, I’m sorry, I forgot to say thanks! Did you kick that guy out of the car midair?”
Madison smiled a little, still not looking at her. “Nah, I tased him, knocked him out, tied him up and Highhill sent the car as far away as its fuel would take it. She gets most of the credit for the rescue anyway, she’s the one who hijacked the transport.”
“Thanks Highhill!” Enna addressed the general air. The AI was probably listening. She generally was.
“How much of that do you actually remember?” Madison asked, finally looking at her. “Like, the end of it.”
Oh shit. Ohhhh fuck. Man, Enna had been hoping she’d said that in her inside voice, but Madison wouldn’t be this weird about it if she hadn’t. Okay, okay, she had options. One of them was pretty good! She could lie, tell Madison that she didn’t remember anything, that she was already mostly concussed, and then they could go back to being friends and not really talking about the breakup anymore. That was what her inner Emiel was telling her to do. It was foolproof.
“Um.” She could hear Emiel now, telling her that nothing good would come of this, that all she had to do was dip out of this and she’d be home free. You’d have to be an idiot to tell the truth here. An absolute moron.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to- I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable or anything.” Fuck. Emiel was gonna kick her ass. “I wasn’t going to tell you, cause, uh, I was a huge jerk to you, and it was pretty reasonable that you broke up with me, and I really like being friends with you, and I didn’t want to ruin that, and, uh.” She was babbling again, and she didn’t even have the truth serum excuse. Fuuuuuuck!
The moment stretched, and Enna didn’t think she could do much to fill it. She looked away from Madison, feeling awkward. Love confessions were supposed to be on the back of a beautiful horse, or while swordfighting pirates on a sinking ship, or while dangling from a helicopter or something. Not post-breakup, half-concussed, and with a follow up discussion in a medical ward. And definitely not blowing up a perfectly good friendship in the process. This sucked.
“Did you mean it?” Madison asked.
“Yeah,” Enna answered. “Sorry.”
“You, um. You don’t have to be.” Madison stood up all at once. She placed a hand on Enna’s. “You really don’t have to be.” She leaned forward and, with the barest brush of her lips, she kissed Enna’s cheek. Holy shit!!!!!!!!!!!!
Madison walked towards the door. “We should talk about this later,” she said, looking back at Enna with her lips curled in a smile. “When you’re less on the edge of death.” With that, she left the room, and left Enna with her heart in her throat and her jaw on the floor.
“Holy shit,” Enna whispered to the empty room.
“You really are stupid,” Highhill said over the intercom, and Enna could only nod in agreement, speechless for once in her life.
Author's Notes:
Written 6/16/19. Bless Enna's heart, she's doing her best.