Chapter 80 – Say Something

The next several days passed by in blessed peace. It was like the Pyre Lord Himself was actually looking out for me for once… or something like that. Either way, I was thankful for the peace and quiet. It did feel like there was a mounting pressure on my shoulders, though. My cheer from the weekend steadily faded into the monotonous neutrality I usually felt as the week progressed.

Quinn put out feelers to try and find out whoever hired Ghostscale. As far as that whole thing, it was a wait and see until either something happened or we caught a break in the case. I wasn’t too worried about it, though. Missing anomalies had a way of turning up. And I was sure that Arnest’s paintbrush was an anomaly. There was no other reason to want it.

Oh, and I heard Ghostscale cut a deal to work as a PDF soldier on the walls. They were always looking for Beyonders to take care of threats right around the city walls. The future the both of us thought was inevitable—him hanging in his cell—didn’t happen. I wasn’t sure if Quinn kept her word, or the world just wasn’t as dark of a place as we both thought it was… heh, yeah right. Quinn definitely played a part. 

The reports we had to write up were as annoying as always… though there was some good news in everything that was only tangibly connected to the case. The power restrictions on the east districts were finally being lifted. Gravestar ‘finding and killing’ a Reaprat definitely played a part.

The news stations claimed Shade Energy started to pressure the mayor and support his political rivals. From the muttering inside Harbor, it had more to do with the threat level spiking. Every day without power was another day a Calamity could slip in undetected. It was only a matter of time till they spread to the rest of the city. Harbor was already understaffed enough without having to worry about no power in a quarter of the city.

With everything slowing down, that meant I could just focus on school. That was exactly what I did. I actually left my office for once, and sat in on dozens of classes spread across the school. Not to learn—well, at least not fully. That was just a nice bonus. Instead, I was carefully watching the instructors for hidden infiltrators. I had a few suspicions, but nobody I’d feel confident pointing out directly. My focus was mainly on people Gravestar would’ve had contact with when he was here.

A sigh escaped me, and I closed my laptop. Although the week was silent for me, the city most definitely wasn’t quiet. Now that the eastern districts were back online, half the city was doubling down on riots. The PK were cracking down hard, but the streets were definitely going to be chaotic for the next couple weeks.

I carefully took control of my psions, and spun them into a thread. The thread shakily stretched out between my thumb and pointer finger. It was a vibrant red like freshly spilled blood, though black spilled around it like ink. After practising it almost obsessively while I was alone, I finally managed to get it at least partially physical.

Binding was… an interesting technique. I still couldn’t even use it for half of what the manuscript used it for. If nothing else, it was seriously improving my control over psions. Before I got the manuscript, I didn’t even know psions existed, let alone how to manipulate them.

I stretched my fingers, and made the dark red string longer. More and more psions were fed into it, making the slightly ethereal thread thicker and thicker. With my other hand, I carefully plucked at it.

Pling!

A sound similar to a harp rang softly through the air. If being a double-agent in Harbor didn’t work out, I potentially had a promising future as a harpist in a circus or something. Black Diamond would probably take me in. At the very least, Bruce would get me a job doing menial labor or something.

I pulled the string, and stretched it out further and further until the read thread snapped. The moment that it happened, a dull ache throbbed in my head. As far as I could tell, psions were a literal manifestation of my psyche. Naturally, that meant psionic constructs were linked to my mind. Every time a thread broke, it caused a slight headache in the back of my head. Maybe if I was stronger… funny, I never thought I of all people would be wishing to be a stronger Psyker.

I sighed, and stopped messing with my psions. My eyes naturally dropped to Vigil sitting on my desk. I reached forward and bopped him on the nose. “When are you going to wake up, little guy?”

He didn’t answer. Ever since I gave him everything he needed to repair himself, the clanker had been totally silent. Logically, he was just preoccupied with upgrading. I knew that… and yet everytime he ignored me, it made my heart throb.

I dropped my head into my arms, and looked past the silver strands of my hair toward the plushie. His lifeless, dull red eyes met mine. Was Vigil even real? It was a thought that’d taken root last night. I was desperate out in the Mire for any type of comfort. Was he something I just conjured up to keep myself sane?

Vigil was always doing or talking about incomprehensible stuff… and it wouldn’t be the first time I hallucinated something into existence. In the past, just because I got an inhibitor didn’t mean the hallucinations left. There was one time my psyche was so beaten down that I’d hallucinated my mother was back alive and taking care of us for weeks. Was he actually just a fragment of my broken mind trying to keep itself together?

No… no, he was real. I stretched a hand forward, and toyed with his soft ears. He had to be. ‘Sides, I didn’t know how to hack things, and cams had definitely been wiped in my presence. Unless that was the Biosystems at work, and I’d just attached a personality to them that didn’t really exist? 

I wish he would just say something. It’d been four days since he spoke to me. My ears twitched upright, and I grumbled softly to the whispers that were starting back up, “shut up.”

A heavy sigh escaped me, and I checked the time. My meeting with Vesper was coming up soon. I wasn’t looking forward to that. Until then… I had 42 Vitae saved up. Maybe I could go for a little gamble for good luck?

| Blind Acquisitions - 1x Lost and Found

Rolling… |

| Thanks for playing! |

Heh, right… that didn’t exactly bode well. One of my ears perked up like Vigil might say something about my poor use of Vitae. He never did. When are you going to wake up and say something, buddy?

— — —

The place Vesper marked for our meetup was a bar near the eastern wall. It was quite a far ride out to it, especially since I didn’t have my faithful companion scrubbing cameras clear of me. Instead of Redline, I took the tram, and then the bus, and then walked several blocks on foot to get to the place. Most of the walking was underground through the storm sewers to hide my tracks.

I climbed up the last wrung of a rusted ladder, and slid a manhole cover back into place. With my trail totally hidden, I pressed up against the wall of a filthy alley and checked on my destination. I was close to the wall—like within a couple blocks of being able to reach out and touch it if it weren’t for the PDF circuit running along the inside of Silverport’s wall. 

As could probably be expected of a place so close to the wall, everything was incredibly run down. It was like the buildings and people around here had been left to rot. Most people didn’t want to be near the walls considering this would be the first place to be hit should a Mire Tide breach the place. Not to mention the chances of encountering an invading calamity sharply spiked on the fringes of the city. 

The streets were almost totally abandoned. A few rusted out frames of cars lay where they’d been ditched decades ago. Everything of value had long been stripped by scavengers over the years.

Down the street, smoke leaked out of a shattered window. The smoke trailed out through a small gap in a dense network of vines that covered the side of the building. From the scent… some kind of drug lab, maybe? Or drug den? I made a mental note to call it into the PK once my meeting here was done.

”What do you think, Vigil?” I asked the plushie safely tucked inside of my Barghest Armor. “Why’s a paladin hanging out in a place like this?”

I pushed off the wall and crossed the abandoned street to the bar. The doors were boarded up, though the boards had been ripped off their spots recently. I pushed open the door, and slid in.

”So you showed after all, old chap.” Vesper sat at the bar with a glass pressed against his forehead. Shadows obscured the top half of his face, and the bottom half was hidden by a bright red scarf. “Didn’t think you would.”

“You caught my attention.” The modulator built into my armor mechanized my voice into something unrecognizable. “Wether you keep it is another matter.”

”Mhmm.” Vesper waved a hand to the seat just next to him. “Can I get you a drink? It’s from my own personal stash.”

”Pass…” I slid onto the stool just next to him. I had half a mind to get right into business. Instead, I asked a question that’d been weighing on me. “How’d you know I’d be there that night? With the Reaprat.”

“Who do you think let the boy out of his gilded cage to begin with?” His eyes slid from the dusty back of the bar to me. The man sipped at his drink, and then set it down on the table with a soft clink. “He’s safe, by the way. Should be well on his way to Thunderbird City.”

”I know.” I’d been keeping tabs on him with Seek intermittently. The further he was from Silverport, though, the more draining it was to track him. 

“Ah, your eloquence knows no bounds.” He lifted the glass in my direction lightly. “Been keeping tabs on me, too?”

”Your deduction skills match my eloquence.” ‘Course I’d been keeping track of him. His scarf was the perfect item to track with Seek. For the most part, he stayed in the east districts.

“Now that the pleasantries are out of the way, shall we start?” He traced a finger around the lip of the glass. “I need you to find the stolen items from the reliquary.”

”Do you have pictures?” I crossed my arms in front of my chest.

”Naturally. The full file too, should you need it.” He weaved a hand, and a shadow spilled out onto the bar. Where it passed, it left an unmarked manila file. “You won’t betray my trust, I hope?”

”I owe you one at the very least.” Though I wasn’t so sure about that anymore. If he was really the one that let Dustin free… Why didn’t he stay next to him the whole time? He helped when the Reaprat actually showed, but still…

“I do believe we’ll work quite well together, Barghest.” Vesper patted the top of the file. “The cathedral isn’t one to forget our friends. We might even help slip the hold from Hades? You don’t seem the kind of man to be mixed up with them.”

”You don’t know me,” I snapped at him. My tail instantly curled low around my leg. Thankfully, the man couldn’t see it. “This is a working relationship, nothing more.”

”Ah, of course, old chap. I merely meant to say—well, never mind that.” Vesper adjusted his scarf around his lower face. “You shall be compensated handsomely for your assistance.”

”I better be.” I didn’t actually care all that much about the compensation. There were a few reasons I wanted to help outside of him helping me in the past. The main one was to get whatever was stolen off the street. The cathedral might just be after religious relics, but somehow I doubted that. There was a much higher chance someone stole a bunch of anomalies from them instead. Anomalies that could and would endanger civilian lives. 

”Our first object of interest is a simple lantern.” He slid the file to me. “A gang called Revenant has it now. Should be a simple enough retrieval. We could go now, or—“

”Saturday night.” I cut him off, though still memorized the shape of the ornate lantern so I could track it later. Tonight and tomorrow weren’t good times. With the first practicals of the freshman cohorts coming, I didn’t have the mental space to hunt this stuff down.

”Ah, no rush, old chap.” He waved his hand and deposited a burner phone on the counter. “Here… to contact me when you’re ready. Don’t keep me waiting too long, though.”

”I’ll let you know when I have it.” I pulled the battery out of the phone so he couldn’t track it, and stuffed it into my pocket. I slid off of the stool.

”Take the file, too.” He nodded to me and picked his glass once more. He held it up in the darkness of the bar. His eyes stayed locked on the ice cube slowly melting within. It reminded me of a lazy predator slowly watching everything fall into place. 

I watched him for a moment before slipping out of the bar with the file in hand. Vesper was… weird. He was the kind of weird that made me a little nervous to work with him. Still, I could do one job to see and go from there. I owed him, anyway. Before then, I had practicals tomorrow I really wasn’t looking forward to.