Silence (12 page)

The reason that his and
Dorothi’s secret safehouse was
secret
was because it was located in
the sewers. Not the drainage sewers, mind, the sewers at the end of
your everyday toilets and trashers. These were the sewers that were
home to everything with the ability to rot. The area was
uninhabitable… unless you had the key to the single vacuum-sealed
apartment down here.

Sheikoh had inherited his safehouse
from a dirty homeless recluse that he’d stayed with for a couple of
months just before he’d met his ‘parents’. His face twisted at the
thought of the Namars, and a shudder of putrid air slithered into
an unguarded nostril. The disgusting air seemed to catch in
Sheikoh’s throat and he retched so hard that he fell onto his
knees. He pushed himself up, taking carefully tiny breaths through
his mouth.

The strange hermit had taken to the
infant Sheikoh, for some reason. Neither of them talked well so
they spend most of their time in a somewhat wary silence. Giz
tolerated the company of nobody other than Sheikoh. The hairy bum
would pounce and bite down hard on people that so much as tried to
talk to him.

In the few months Sheikoh had spent
with Giz, he’d learned a lot about slinking around and hiding in
plain sight. Giz had a way of teaching the younger Sheikoh with
only his eyes and gestures. Sheikoh’d learned to steal, to defend
himself, and how to survive the streets all from the unassuming
Giz.

Then one day the smelly, dirty man
disappeared off the face of the city and Sheikoh had been more hurt
than he knew how to put into words.

He had spent the next month in his and
Giz’s house in the sewer, waiting for the man to come back. Giz had
made or found a shelter in the gut wrenching stench of the
irredeemably disgusting section of sewer where the entire city
plumbing invariably led to. Giz never came back, so Sheikoh took
over his house.

Whoever had built it had done a good
job hooking it up with the propensity to withstand the toxic stench
hanging in the air like a corpse from a tree branch. Its heavy
aluminate casing held the inside room in a vacuum-sealed chamber.
Fresh air constantly circulated in through ceiling vents. It was
long and circular like a swollen worm and set solidly on the ledge
of the sewer, placed with great care so that not even the tiniest
piece of its base was overlooking the thick-flowing slime lurching
along its concrete pathways.

The walk to the doorway always seemed
to take forever. Finally Sheikoh made it. The different metals
welded together to make the safehouse’s exterior wore a coat of
rust. The two chamber doors on either side looked like that of a
vault.

Looking at it, one could see that the
building was obviously the handmade work of an individual rather
than a company. Sheikoh had always wondered if Giz had made this
place himself. But it was much more likely he had just discovered
it. Looking back, Sheikoh wasn’t completely sure that Giz had been
totally mentally competent. Or maybe he had been until the sewer’s
toxic fumes had damaged his brain.

Sheikoh shivered, as he fumbled with
the door’s center wheel. Then he swung it open and stepped inside.
It closed behind him with a heavy thud. Sheikoh flipped a switch.
Lights flickered on, along with a deep rumbling noise hummed
overhead.

Sheikoh waited, bored, while the air
cleared. There was nothing to do or even to look at. He wondered
why he’d never put a poster up in here or something. The hum of
machinery finally modulated to a purr, and he was blissfully free
from sewer’s smell. He sprayed himself with a can of air freshener
and then silently opened the second metal door. It glided away from
him on smoothly oiled hinges to reveal the long, slightly
claustrophobic room.

Sheikoh saw Dorothi at once. She was
reading a thick book with her ear buds in and her back to him. She
wore a long, pink pajama shirt that was almost a dress on her
petite body. Next to her was that circuit board thing she’d told
Sheikoh she was messing with half hidden under piles of wire
clippings.

“
Hey, Do-do! How’ve you
been, kit?” Sheikoh called loudly, waving at Dorothi. She jumped up
in surprise, pulling her music out of her ears, and smiled
hugely.

“
Sheek!” Dorothi exclaimed.
“I thought you said you were gonna be gone the night at least! What
happened? What’s going on this time?”

“
Well, my
contact was a guy who might want to kill me a little, and then we
were ambushed by guys with some freaking
technologic
guns… Also tomorrow I’m
meeting a Celestial,” Sheikoh listed to a wide eyed Dorothi,
ticking each item off his fingers. He intentionally neglected to
mention his meeting with the Arch Centaurai. He didn’t want
to
overly
worry
her.

“
That’s
my brother all right… always
so
good with people,” Dorothi
murmured in response, rolling her eyes. Sheikoh smiled
back.

“
I got you something to
eat,” Sheikoh offered.

He pulled out the two sandwiches he
had jacked from the lunchboxes of a couple of construction workers
and tossed one over to Dorothi. Before taking a bite, Sheikoh
looked under the bread and frowned.

“
Ugh!” Sheikoh complained.
His face fell despondently. “Mayo…”

He ripped a piece off the
corner of the sandwich and put it gingerly in his hungry mouth.
 His shoulders shuddered involuntarily and it was all he could
do not to throw up.
Even for mayonnaise it
was nasty. It tasted like sewer. Dorothi took a bite of her own and
 grimaced.  Then she put it to the side and stared at
Sheikoh with concern. He offered her his sandwich with an innocent
smile. Dorothi shook her head looking queasy, and Sheikoh glanced
around, searching for something else to eat.

“
What can I say..? People
love me… so… Anything else eat by any chance?” Sheikoh asked with a
distracted smile, shifting through the boxes of cleaning agents and
repair parts that were stacked up in the makeshift
pantry.

Dorothi tossed him a bag of half-eaten
chips. Sheikoh caught it and reached a claw shaped hand inside,
ravenously. Dorothi laughed softly, as Sheikoh stuffed a giant
handful into his mouth. He raised his eyes in bliss.

“
Are you okay, Sheek?” she
asked him, her anxious eyes combing his body for any sign of
injury.

Sheikoh waved away her concern as he
tried and failed to swallow the massive mouthful of soggy chips
he’d shoved into his face. Under Dorothi’s obvious scrutiny,
Sheikoh made his eyes wide and jumped up and down like kangaroo
that had gotten a foot stuck inside of a jellyfish. A reluctant
giggle escaped out of the girl’s puckered mouth. Sheikoh attempted
to swallow the chips again and this time he succeeded. He sighed
with relief.

“
No really Sheek, are you
okay?” Dorothi asked again, seeing that he had finally
swallowed.

“
Honestly, it was touch and
go for a minute there. I thought I was a goner,” Sheikoh admitted
earnestly. “But then I managed to swallow the chips.”

Dorothi hid a giggle and punched him
in the arm. “No, really?”

Sheikoh poured a smaller bit of
crushed chips into his mouth noncommittally. Then he stretched his
arms back and arched his feet, to try to feel any discomfort beyond
the familiar ache of sore muscles. He flexed his right hand and
remembered with a jolt that he’d broken his right index finger. He
held his hand out to look at the finger that was hanging limp,
noting with chagrin that he’d also ripped a few holes of skin in
the immediate vicinity of his hand and wrist. A normal finger
wouldn’t have let him forget that he’d broken it. Sheikoh cursed
under his breath.

Flashes of blacksteel peaked out at
the two from beneath the tattered synthetic skin that stretched
over all of Sheikoh’s ‘augmented’ sections. Dorothy looked at the
dark metal, transfixed. Her face was pale. Dorothi was horrified by
the sight of Sheikoh’s damaged body parts and he knew it. He looked
away from her, his cheeks tinted with embarrassment, and Dorothi
turned to sift intently through her backpack.

Sheikoh knew that she didn’t want to
have to look at the metal peeking out of Sheikoh’s hand, and he bit
his lip with remorse. The two or three times that he’d removed the
synthetic skin that covered the right half of his body in front of
Dorothi, he woken to Dorothi, screaming his name into the night for
a week. Dorothi had never said anything about it and Sheikoh was
too ashamed to broach the topic, so it was one of the few unspoken
conversations between the two of them.

He didn’t suffer any illusions about
his cyborgic parts; he knew that the blacksteel limbs, partially
mummified with eerie, flickering synaptic wires and hung with
pus-like motors looked horrible. They looked like they’d been born
in a nightmare. If it wasn’t for the Synthskin that perpetually hid
their monstrous appearance, Sheikoh wouldn’t even go outside.
 He sighed.

Why couldn’t he ever remember to stash
some of his spares in the safe house? Sheikoh didn’t want to have
to ask Dorothi to help him work on the insectoid machinery that
made him into a maligned freak, but had to. Sheikoh didn’t have the
dexterity to build another finger with one already out of play.
Creating fingers was a much more delicate process than attaching
them. The synaptic wiring had to be measured exactly and wound with
perfect precision, in order to connect all of the hundreds of
miniscule digits and motors perfectly.

The process would take hours, and even
though he didn’t have to walk Dorothi through every step. (She was
already a better mechanic then him) It would be much easier to pick
up a finger from his house, but after the day that he’d had,
Sheikoh wasn’t leaving the safehouse without backup unless he was
sure that all of his fingers worked fine. He didn’t want to run
into the Centaurai again. The thought of Vest sent a chill down his
spine.

Sheikoh opened his mouth and shaped it
to form his request, but something strange happened. Instead of a
question he’d intended a tiny, strangled sound came from his
throat. Sheikoh didn’t want to ask Dorothi to help him. He didn’t
want to force the girl to touch the most loathsome, disgusting
parts of himself. He didn’t want to be the reason that Dorothi woke
up screaming in the dead of night.

There just wasn’t much choice in the
matter. Sheikoh looked at the young girl, rifling through her
overnight bag. He steeled himself and opened his mouth again, but
as he did so Dorothi turned towards him. She was wearing a
triumphant expression and holding something in her small hands.
Dorothi had brought his plastic blue case, the one that held a
bunch of his cyborgic spare parts. Sheikoh felt a smile of relief
trace his lips.

“
I thought you might need
this, Sheek,” Dorothi explained with a tight smile. Her voice was
both proud and nervous, like she thought that Sheikoh was about to
rip off his skin right in front of her. Sheikoh had no intention of
doing that.

Face lifting in smile, Sheikoh took
the bag from Dorothi and pawed around inside of it with his damaged
hand. He sifted through the multitudes of fingers and knee caps,
rolls of Synthskin, tangled synaptic wire and muscle motors from
the size of a pea to a baseball. He could just pop on another
premade finger on within fifteen minutes. Then he groaned,
realizing what he was missing.

“
My tools…” he murmured
under his breath.

Sheikoh had left them in his room the
last time he had replaced the lining between joints that wore away
after about five months. He cursed under his breath and then
glanced over at Dorothi.

“
What?” She asked him, her
voice edged with the slightest hint of secret fear.

“
Uh… By chance could I
borrow your screwdriver? I’ll give it back after, I promise.
Without a scratch,” The corners of his mouth lilted with a small,
apologetic smile. Sheikoh knew how much Emili’s old tools meant to
her little sister.

“
Okay, okay.” Dorothi
acquiesced, a little reluctantly.

She handed Sheikoh the shiny
screwdriver by its slightly worn black leather grip. It looked
brand new. Until one noticed the tool’s scratched and pitted end.
Sheikoh wasn’t fooled by the screwdriver’s immaculate appearance.
He knew the truth. All of Emili’s old tools had been overworked for
years. They had been dull and blanketed with scratches and scars.
The only reason they were shiny and new looking now was because
Dorothi would set aside a few hours a week to painstakingly polish,
sharpen and care for some of the few mementoes she had of her late
older sister, Emili. Dorothi was careful to keep all of Emili’s old
tools lovingly maintained.

Sheikoh carefully picked it up with
his good hand and thanked Dorothi warmly. He knew exactly how much
effort the child put into preserving her sister’s old possessions.
As Sheikoh walked outside, he detoured over towards Dorothi and
kissed her on the top of the head. In doing so, he slipped by
Dorothi’s bag and flipped a case of silversteel polish and a few of
Emili’s other tools out into his black sleeve. Dorothi didn’t
notice a thing.

“
I’ll be out for a while,
Dodo-bird,” Sheikoh called over his shoulder. He didn’t especially
want to see Dorothi’s anxiety clear with relief.