Memento Mori

3.6 - THE EIGHT

OF THE UNDERCITY'S infamous kings and queens, only six now remain to fill the seats of eight. I watch through a false wall of bookshelves as they filter in one by one from the promenade, finding their places around a stretched ellipsoid of a gold-and-marble table. Each seat is separated a full meter from its neighbors. Three along each side of the table, one at the head, one at the foot beneath a transparent stained-glass frieze of the Section's first Champion locked in vicious combat against a serpentine leviathan. The rest of the conference room is insulated by understated décor. All the fake gold and jazzy brass of the street-level gambling halls are for people accustomed to overcity luxuries. Behind closed doors, Venter style- simple, brutal, shaped like concrete- takes over.

Even the room itself isn't anything to speak of, size-wise. Fake plastic books lining the walls fifteen feet high, arched ceilings, marble pillars in between, ornamental torches for light. Behind the shelves, rooms like mine, where lieutenants linger on couches smoking lighters and glaring sullenly at their peers. Cutthroat, hazy silence. Low ceilings, carpet floors, insulated walls. One door back to the promenade, another looping around a small hall to the conference room and a tiny service stairwell. Everything clean, a little too clean; the kind of clean that makes you wonder what had to be cleaned up before you arrived, then decide you probably don't want to know the answer.

The colors around me are yellows, pastel pinks and blues, slate greys, black stripes, and a smattering of silver. Missing are the young lieutenants of Dax's gang, purple and black. And Sarah only had me.

Despite my size, I'm at home amidst these bonebreakers. Half their age, leaning against the false wall, a gunslinger with attitude who stands shoulder to shoulder with a Psi and a Biohancer who introduced herself by kicking out one of Nero's underlings to make space on the best chair in the room. Now Lain's sitting on the arm with a borrowed lighter in her fingers. The seat filled by one of the Anvil's duelists, a weathered shield-wielder with rebar-brown skin. Lain catches me staring too long, blows a whisper of smoke at me.

I look back to the conference room.

As Ulysses finally reenters and the heavy doors swing shut behind him, the tension on the other side of the wall immediately skyrockets. Concentrated lethality suffuses the air to the saturation point, so palpable you can almost feel it on your fingertips. Years have passed since the last time the Eight gathered together. That they do so tonight could only happen because they're joined by two empty seats.

I don't need to remind myself that these people aren't friends. They aren't allies. They're gangsters. Fighters, politicians, and if they have to be, killers. The scruples and morality of the surface don't apply when you're born with a boot already pressed to your throat. Up there, killing is the highest sin, anathema to a people who glorify combat. In the Vents, it's a brutal necessity. Something every person in that room has proven before to sit where they do now.

Through the wall and ten feet in front of the bookshelf I stand behind, Nero sits one seat down from the empty fore of the table, dressed for war. Black combat gear, acidproof rainwear with the hood down, the cowl of his serpentine Mecha head entirely exposed. Severe, his gaze tracks every step Ulysses takes to the center seat on the opposite side. At his left hand, floral Yelena patiently files her cuticles, eyes flirting across the table. The technician Kun Kharsa sits to her left, and rounding out the base of the ellipse, the aging doctor Wishbone finishes shrugging out of an extensively layered full-body cloak; cream colored.

Ulysses and the Anvil, martial master and long-graduated student, take two of the seats on the opposite side of the table. Those at the head and its right hand remain empty, creating a lopsided arc, head missing. The point isn't lost.

Those on my side of the room brought backup. Behind Nero, Volt leans casually against the opposite side of the same bookshelf I'm watching through, fingers patiently clasped at his belt. Two of Yelena's elementals flank her on small wooden stools, and Kun Kharsa brought a hulking Guardian of his own. Fearsome spirit-mask over his face, dark muscle lurking through the open center of a plain white haori, a six-foot sweeping blade strapped to his back. I can tell at a glance he's a hired talent like Volt, only brought on as an extreme security measure. There's few fighters in the Vents who could be considered elite warriors, and most of them are either dead or already on Dynasty's payroll.