Memento Mori

4.7 - ONE LAST RUN

A RAT'S NEST of warrior hawks watch my every step as I enter the Rock Bottom side-by-side with Krey. The interior of the club is no more excited than the outside. Low ceilings, open floorplan, a thin corridor of free space between the room-length bar on the right and the lounge pits on the left. Dim neon, a pulsating music-synced hue beneath every piece of furniture, the NeoPop radio rattling my stomach. There's more gangsters sprawled across the seats than I expected. Kun Kharsa's technicians, Wishbone's medics, the Anvil's brawlers, Nero's nano savants, and the remnant's of Dax's boys make a mosh pit of rebels. Different stripes, they're all a part of the same clan now: the survivors.

The Eight's lieutenants- those who survived the Lighthouse- linger at the bar, separated from the rest of the mooks. Younger generation, they're more familiar and less bitter than their dead mentors. Loose friends with each other, street friends; the kind of friend you only count on when you've got something they want. Hard to find better in the Vents.

"Lotta faces here," I murmur, following Krey towards the bar. The 6-Teba hangs low along my leg, drawing as much attention as his Malice does.

"I pulled them together after the Lighthouse. Every fighter here is loyal to the Vents. No one's going to sell out to Dynasty."

"That's what everyone says, before they have a knife to their throat."

But the tension in the room doesn't exactly contradict him. The amalgamated survivors don't look like fish in a barrel- they're arming for war. Patching wounds, prepping their classes, huddled over maps of the Vents handmade from years of street scouting. Not a face I can see is over thirty. It's a young, angry crowd. Disillusioned and dangerous, animals backed into the corner, staring their extinction in the eye and refusing to back down quietly.

Back of the club, manager's spacious office, the electronic heartbeat dulls to a heartbeat pulse as the door slides shut behind us. Krey taps his JOY on a wall-mounted pad, closing the street-facing shutters and lighting up an oldTech lamp atop a wide fauxwood desk situated in the middle of the room. Spread before the high-back leather chair on the far side, a solitaire game halfway finished, empty glass of brandy. Impaled on the other half, a bejeweled hand missing the rest of its body. Krey slips around the desk and crashes into the chair, slouching deep, paying no mind to the severed hand.

Lain bends over to examine the hand. "How much did the owner offer you to let him crawl back to Dynasty?"

"More than they ever paid him," he replies. His dark eyes flick to the bloody knife sunk in the meat of the palm. "He would've squealed if I let him go."

"I'm not disagreeing. But shit, you'd think if anywhere would be off their payroll, the Rock Bottom would be near the top of the list. It's a go-to club for the gangs."

"Their fingers are spread throughout the entirety of the Vents," Matthias says, taking the chance to wash his face in the adjoining washroom. "It's easy to forget that this is just one of the syndicate's many branches. They exist outside this city. Outside the entire Section. The Executor who visits here, I imagine the Vents is only one of her projects. Their resources far outmatched any of the Eight from the very beginning. It's how they were able to hire people like the Armiger."

Krey cracks his knuckles and sits back up in the chair. Doing a good job of concealing it, but he's just as haggard as I am on the inside. Days of horror interspersed with near misses at every turn, constantly on the run, sleep measured in single digits; it's all adding up. Not to mention no one in this room has checked their JOY for fear of confirming what ungodly hour of the morning it is.

Krey pours a little more brandy from a glass decanter, splashes in an eyebrow-raising amount of clear, bubbling caf, and downs it in a quick gulp. The tumbler vibrates as he sets it back down on the desk. "Time to start filling the blanks, Em. What's your idea?"