Author's Note. This is the second part of a story is designed to examine what Sonic's fight against Robotnik would be like if it more closely resembled a conflict on Earth. Further details should be obtained by reading the story and by reading part one, Gardenia, and part two, Burning Beard. Thanks very much for your readership and any reviews you provide! The story is still being written, and your input can only help to make the story better.
Persona non Grata
a story of Mobius in four parts
Part One: Gardenia
(a rounded image of Sonic Hedgehog rolled into an impervious razor ball, face contorted in vicious joy, pistols in both hands, bordered by a snake desperately seeking to bite its own tail)
Part Two: Burning Beard
(Sally Acorn struggles to carry ball in heavy gloves; a purple stole knotted about her neck; she is turned away to face a bank of trivid cameras, lights casting her in silhouette, a single eye looking back over her shoulder; the image is bordered in a rectangular frame of ornate swords in their scabbards)
Part Three: Search and Destroy
(Tails Prower sits, naked, on a barren white floor, back to the viewer. Tufts of winterfur litter the floor about him and cling to his muscled shoulders, his back, his twin tails spread limply on the floor to either side of him. His arms are held tightly before himself, out of the viewer's sight, as if protecting something. His head is turned and slightly lowered; only one yellow eye stares at the viewer, wide and bright.)
(1) Hochteufel, Lachels, 31 Brumaire 3234. Subject Sonic Hedgehog receives an offer he can't refuse.
(2) Frake's Point, Ostian, 3 Firmaire 3234. Subjects Antoine D'Coolette and Thomas Posniak say a lot about a little.
(3) Frake's Point, Ostian, 20 Firmaire 3234. Subjects Sonic Hedgehog and Snively Kolensky have a discussion.
(4) Royal Court-in-Exile, Fortune Station, 2 Pluvoise 3235. Subject Sally Acorn rules others and herself.
(5) Nouvelle Lit Administrative District, 11 Prairial 3235. Subjects Sonic Hedgehog and Amanda Polgato rest and recuperate.
(6) Hochteufel, Lachels, 8 Messidor 3235. Subjects Joshua Dursine and Kima Griggs have an exciting weekend trip.
(7) Nouvelle Lit Administrative District, 19 Messidor 3235. Subjects Sonic Hedgehog and Amanda Polgato have an antenna-to-antenna.
(8) Royal Palace, Mobotropolis, 25 Fructidor 3235. Subjects Sally Acorn and Antoine D'Coolette dine and consort.
(9) Pocari Administrative District, 18 Vendemaire 3235. Subjects Sonic Hedgehog and Amanda Polgato visit an old workshop of Subject Charles Hedgehog.
(10) Mobotropolis, 3 Brumaire 3235. Subject May Rabbit traffics in beauty.
(11) Boulder City, 4 Brumaire 3235. Subjects Sonic Hedgehog and Amanda Polgato research and conduct experiments.
(12) Boulder City, 25 Nivose 3235. Subjects Molly Lotor and Myron Catalano work on projects of some importance.
(13) Boulder City, 13 Pluvoise 3236. Subjects Sonic Hedgehog, Amanda Polgato and Snively Kolensky rob a memory bank.
(14) Winstone, 15 Pluvoise 3236. Subjects Joshua and Kima Dursine have a party, Subjects Renee Donlevy, Thomas Posniak and Molly Lotor settle who is afraid.
(15) Carbon Flats, 16 Pluvoise 3235. Subject Sonic Hedgehog cares for a sick skunkbot, Subject Sally Acorn plans for contingencies, Subject Amanda Polgato sits too close to the television.
(16) Carbon Flats, 1 Ventose 3236. Subjects Sonic Hedgehog and Amanda Polgato share food.
(17) Dead River Administrative District, 5 Ventose 3236. Subject Amanda Polgato makes new friends, Subject Sonic Hedgehog gets a new job.
(18) Mobotropolis, 20 Germinal 3236. Subjects Sally Acorn and Snively Kolensky revisit old decisions, Subject Amanda Polgato waits.
(19) Terscala, 13 Messidor 3236. Subjects Renee Donlevy and Thomas Posniak experience major changes in employment status.
(20) Port Lyons, 4 Thermidor 3236. Subject Sonic Hedgehog discovers his heritage; Subjects Sally Acorn and Antoine D'Coolette make an unpleasant conquest.
(21) Terscala, 13 Ventose 3237. Subject Miles Prower has a big day.
(22) Mobotropolis, 30 Germinal 3237. Subjects Sally Acorn and May Rabbit have a heart to heart.
(23) Aleton, South Suburbs, 21 Prarial 3237. Subject Sonic Hedgehog has a very unpleasant reunion.
(24) Great Forest, 7 Thermidor 3237. Subjects Sonic Hedgehog and Sally Acorn consider their lives.
Part Four: Immigrant Song
(Copyright Act Admissions/Lanham Act Disclaimers. This piece infringes copyrights owned by Sega and DiC. It is not a product of Sega, DiC, or Archie Comics. All available rights are reserved.)
Hochteufel, Lachels, 31 Brumaire 3234
The Parlamantstheater was a magnificent wreck. A marble façade had been ripped away from raw brick by the war—der Grossen Krieg, rather; even in a nation born out of that conflict, Lachels, "der Krieg" was becoming ambiguous as a reference to the ongoing Mobian Civil War. Inside, the plaster was falling in at the balcony, making perfect acoustics for the sonic cruelty of the garbagepunk that had ruled Lachels' largest city of Hochteufel while the Overland Empire's rule over it disintegrated, shattered by its unsuccessful war with its neighbor Mobius to the south. Decay, rage, rebellion, rebirth. There had been a beauty in it, the stark simplicity.
Now, however.
Like anything cool, the Parliament Theater had attracted the money chasing teenage money. Expanding out of punk to industrial wouldn't betray its aesthetic, really, and once you were there drill & bass was right next door. And twenty years later the booking agent for soundboard soprano Mina Mongoose had decided the diva needed a little darker, more serious edge to her next album, so there were a series of fourteen year old girls with little streaks of rainbow dyed in their fur or henna tattoos on their bare human cheeks, waiting to get in to see Mina on a triple bill with True Faith and, sweet gods, DJ Vector. On this chilly day they were staring wide eyed at a leather-clad Jerk (as fans called themselves—some kind of obscure reference to the rate of change in an acceleration vector), a human with pallid skin and eyes so intense they contemned the face around them. He stood over the bloodied, prostrate form of the squirrel he had just laid out, pulsing rather than breathing, grinning down at the "SECURITY" logo on the squirrel's black t-shirt. "Like that motherfucker!" he shouted with an unnerving, automatic flatness, as though his own mind was not processing the words. "Like that!"
PCP tranquilized mobians. It tranquilized hundreds of them every day in the flat southtown slums, refugees in the from the churning lines that bludgeoned their country in two, grinding slowly, so slowly to the east, their fearsome Queen nudging Dr. Ivo Robotnik and his "Robian" dead-enders towards the desert. The refugees found it hard to get jobs; for the past few years new arrivals found it increasingly difficult to get public assistance, but PCP was always around. And then some human would complain about a mobian failing to pass around whatever the hell that stuff was they were smoking and discover a peculiar quirk of human brain chemistry. PCP tranquilized mobians, but it gave humans the power to put a fist through a wooden plank, shattering the bones, without feeling anything. It also gave them the inclination to do so.
The tweaking maniac would not have been able to obliterate bouncers, or have been aimed at slackjawed teenyboppers, without the involvement of twenty years of war and what passed for peace, two nations, two species, and dozens of cultures. This sort of thing happened a lot. The problem was complicated.
But the solution was simple. Another black t-shirt went inside, and he came back with a hedgehog.
His quills and fur were black as the curtain behind a stage, except for a pure white tuft above his sternum and a few streaks of lurid red in his headquills. He wore almost nothing but khaki boots, a constellation of three scars in his hairless belly, and ink. On his left shoulder, a serpent locked in furious struggle with a frothing repenomamus, enclosed with the words WINNER'S CIRCLE. On his right, the crest of Winged Victory, a golden circle with three white feathers extended from either side. On his face nothing, not even a scowl beneath his red eyes.
The human had turned by then and was proclaiming some alien gospel to a semicircle of nailbiting girls. The hedgehog walked up and punched him in the back of the head. The human flinched, face unchanging, and the hedgehog punched him again in the back of the head. The girls, the men, and a good number of bystanders stared in horror as the human rocked down to his hands and knees, making a sound. The hedgehog commenced to beat his fist on the human's skull like a carpenter working a stubborn nail. The human had been on the ground for about five seconds before the resurgent squirrel, holding his t-shirt to his bleeding snout, said, "That's enough."
The hog must have heard; he was only three meters away. His breathing now matched the motion of his fist; his lips pressed tight. The first drops of blood followed his glove into the evening air—
"Shadow!" The squirrel strode quickly across the emptied sidewalk and grabbed at the hog's shoulder. "Shadow, that's enough—"
The hedgehog turned sharply, fist still cocked and jackhammer-ready, something horrible in his eyes—
And his arms shivered as it left them. He dropped the human's collar and walked back into the theater. That was the week's rent.
Inside he turned away from the long atrium and slipped through a door painted into the black wall, still bearing the tattered flyers of disintegrated bands, the paper-thin archaeology of a generation of young lives lived fast. Behind was a flight of red stairs, very old, up to the little door and the room the owners let him sleep in. Clutter all over the rough wooden floor, tiny window over which he had hung the red bedsheet, the hot plate with its wire curled beside it, his bed—
"Hey Shads!"
He drew his arm back in front of his face, fingers curled like claws in their white gloves, eyes blazing over his black fur . . . and he sagged, tiredly. "What are you doing in my room, Amy?"
"Over –sixteen show tonight, Shads," Amy Roszkowiak chirped, twirling her maintenance keyring on a finger. Around the hand's wrist was wound one of the Theater's plastic alcohol-bands, pink as her fur and the quills pressed tightly to her scalp and back. She worked the bar downstairs—got paid in cash, as the fake ID proclaiming her majority was only good enough to buy, not sell. "Nobody wants to drink soda. So I thought you and me could go out."
The older hog's quills gave a soft, brushing hiss as he bent over and pulled a warm beer from the little plastic cooler. "Oh you did," he said flatly, leaning against the wall.
Amy grinned, bouncing her entire body on the squeaking mattress as she nodded. "Natuerlich."
"And what makes you think," he asked, thumb prying the cap off the bottle to bounce by his boottoes, "that I would like to go anywhere with a sweet . . . little . . . thing—" He paused to swig a mouthful of the weak brew. "Such as yourself?"
"Because," she cocked her head coyly, "you got a sweet tooth."
"You think so."
"I know your type," Amy taunted, crossing her ankles beneath her short cherry skirt. "Every night a dozen people on that dance floor wish they were as spooky as you. What was your last girlfriend like?"
He did not blink. "She was beautiful, smart. Wanted to make the world a better place. I beat her to death."
Amy's smile got a little broader. "What's your name?"
"Shadow Hedgeho—" His snout sank, eyes narrowing around his red irises. "Put those down."
"Hmm?" Amy was tossing and catching a little beige plastic piece in her fingers. She looked at it—the case for a pair of contact lenses—and delicately placed it on the windowsill, beside the empty box of a fur-dyeing kit. "Oh," she pouted, "don't look so angry. I already knew you weren't a vampire; I've seen you in the daylight."
"Get out of my room."
"You know how many ways there are for a hard guy to make money in this city? And you just hole up here while the tolkachi muscle eats steaks down on Wirtschaftstrasse. Must be because you're so irredeemably evil."
"Get out."
"You know what this room needs? A mirror! You could stand in front of it at midnight and ask yourself: who am I? The hedgehog? Or the monster?—"
She stopped, lips frozen, as the male brought his beer against the wall in an explosion of wet glass. The short remainder of the neck glistened where it emerged from his torn glove. "You have ten seconds to leave my room. Ten. Nine. Eight."
Amy Roszkowiak would, if ever permitted to speak with a psychologist, be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, mild dysthymia, and a tenacious attraction to dangerous men. But, although she might not know when she wasn't wanted, she knew when she really wasn't wanted. She tightened her gaze on the mess leaking down the streaked wallpaper and pushed herself delicately to her feet. Swinging her minute hips, she pulled on her loose, deep-red windbreaker and walked past him to the door. "Gee," she said. "Guess you did kill your ex."
"I lied," the hedgehog replied. "She survived. And she was a bitch."
He slammed the door behind her and the boiling crowd downstairs was muted, soft. He pulled the cooler over to his bed and lay there, breathing, thinking, and drinking. He had six beers in about an hour, but it didn't get him drunk; it got him sleepy. No amount of alcohol seemed to get him drunk, but sleepy is good, he thought, removing his lenses, then blinking his sleepy green eyes at the fading room. Sleep is very good.
Only once had a drug had its promised effect on him. Another guy who trained at Knuckles' Gym told him that if you smoked a lot of this mold, you wouldn't just get high; you would actually go to another place. That sounded good. The guy said that you'd meet people—space aliens, gods. That sounded good, too, he decided, and he bought some of it from the guy. He would meet Veronica, Vixen of Love, he decided. He would spit the filthiest words at her until tears streamed down her cheeks.
He'd held his second hit for about twenty seconds before he started crying, little spastic bursts of smoke from his nose turning his tears dry and chalk grey. Oh shit oh shit, do some more, he thought, and he put his lips to the bong and just breathed through it a while, with the lighter near the bowl burning or not, weeping into the cold little watery vase. He was sinking, the whole room around him was sinking from the second story down into the black depth of the earth, black and cold. He closed his eyes and the world spun, he pinched them and it became flat, and that frightened him. He opened them and he moaned, lost in some cold, stinging cave of cool metal and muted, dead light, walls at cruel angles, some hideous cage as big as the world. He wormed on the unfeeling floor, freezing, shivering, until he saw the tall form, standing there with him—
"Oh, fuck," he wept. "Fuck me. Fuck me." It was a god, but it wasn't Veronica to fill his spine with need and his head with blind rage. It wasn't one of his gods at all; it was one of theirs, one of the stupid gods belonging to these hairless monkeys. He had to live among them and breathe their scent and eat their weird, stinking food, and now he even had to worship their gods. It was the light-skinned guy with the glasses and the beard, their sorcerer-thief. Some ridiculously boring name for him, Gordon Freeman or something, like the god was just some guy living in a duplex down by the college. But his beard was trimmed rather than flowing, and he wasn't in his magician's robes: he looked like . . . the hedgehog shuddered, pressing his forehead to the frozen floor: he looked like fucking Amanda Polgato, the hungry botbitch, boxy armor over everything but his head.
"Fuck me." The hedgehog turned his tear-streaked face to the human: "I can't even get high without fucking up."
Freeman looked down, beady brown eyes withdrawn behind his magnifying lenses. He said nothing.
Time had lost its snap. This horrible, alien place with its cruel corners, its endless cold, this faint electrical hum that burned through his muscles every day. He was there forever. He was there for the rest of his life, beating his fists against the ground, breaking his bones, his screams lost in the endless expanse. He shouted, his throat raw, cursing the human's ugly race, spitting bloody phlegm on his boots. The human never responded, never even wrinkled his skin.
"Don't you talk?" the hedgehog screamed.
Freeman shook his head impassively. "Not normally," he said in a low baritone, heavy and hard. In the return of the endless hum after the human spoke the hedgehog heard a soft beep, a quiet, halting female voice with a gentle Corukas accent. It would have been reassuring if it weren't so obviously artificial. "Two—questions—remaining."
He wanted to be angry, but he couldn't. He couldn't feel anything but the horrible cold, the yawning emptiness. Somehow he dragged himself to his knees, his hands, looking up like some needy pet repen. "When?" he begged. "When will it get easier?"
"Never," Freeman said, resetting his glasses on his nose. "It's downhill all the way for you." Beep. "One—question—"
"Oh sweet Trixiana, I can't take it." But Trixiana wasn't here. Neither Winged Victory. His patron god was a filthy goddamned overlander. The heavens were empty. He was doomed. How much longer would he live? He was so strong, so pointlessly strong. He felt like he could live for hundreds of years. "I can't do it; I can't fucking do it; I can't." He mustered enough strength to roll himself onto his back, looked up at the human's upside-down face: "I can't do it. I won't make it. Please." Freeman didn't move. He had eternal, cruel patience. Freeman wouldn't save him. "I won't make it—"
It suddenly occurred to the hedgehog that he was right. He wouldn't make it. Someday he wouldn't amuse himself with his own ridiculous agony anymore, and then there would be nothing. He wouldn't wait hundreds of years. He wouldn't wait an hour. It might be difficult, but it would be hard to screw it up with a gun. "I won't make it," he said, suddenly quiet. "I won't make it, will I?"
The human blinked. Slowly, his mouth curled at the corners, curling down, twisting his face into a—
No, wait. It was upside down.
"You'll surprise yourself," he said. Beep.
And then the hedgehog was a shivering ball of quills in his sweat-soaked bed, crying until morning.
Negotiations to bring a temporary cease-fire in the brutal block-to-block fighting in east Mobotropolis are scheduled to begin Warday. The summit will take place in the tropical resort town of Frake's Point in the neutral nation of Ostian. Queen Sarah II publicly announced her ambassador to the talks today, revealing that "Robian" War Minister Thomas Posniak will meet with none other than her husband, King Antoine I. Both are highly regarded as political strategists and—
"Focus," Knuckles said in his twisted tropical accent, eyes narrowing as the hedgehog stopped working the heavy bag and started destroying it. "Klarer Geist, klarer Wille, klare Seele." The red-quilled echidna was an imposing figure; Ostian emigrant with a sharp snout, scarred hands, arms that clearly held enough power to kill a man. But his words had no effect. Without taking his eyes from the hedgehog he lifted a few fingers and motioned for the only other occupant of the gym, one of his younger humanstudents who wanted to see a guy who'd learned formal Ostian kickboxing, to move away. The kid'd remember the lesson well enough without catching a stray concussion. "Focus," he insisted. "See your opponent. Think of your goal—"
The hedgehog hissed, driving his right again into the growing dent in the canvas. "Fucking radio!"
A different voice. Female. Hard tone, but soft consonants. Something wrong with the mouth. —ough we speak to the enemy, the usurper, the murderer of our children, we do not forget his crimes. And we do not change his fate. For those who hurt us, Mobians will tolerate nothing less than justic—Click.
The high-schooler turned it off, but the black hedgehog was still hearing something. He ground his teeth, barked loud as he used his right, right, right, right, right—
The winch snapped and the bag landed heavily on the floor. The hedgehog leapt forward and stabbed his bootheel into the head of the bag. Into the eyes. He roared, stomping, coarse sand spilling onto the blue mat—
"That's enough!" Knuckles shouted, taking a step forward. The hedgehog drew back, raising his taped fists in front of his face—"SHADOW! LOCKERS! NOW!"
Knuckles gave him a couple minutes. He found the hedgehog hunched on one of the benches back there, arms crossed, head bowed, eyes closed. Curled into a little ball of red and black, like a frightened child. "That kid alright?" the hedgehog panted.
"Goette der Hoelles." The echidna sighed, exhaustedly. "Near to wetting himself. He's alright. You're not coming here anymore or I'll call the cops."
The little ball drew tighter. "You said learning fighting would calm me down—"
"I was wrong," Knuckles said, sitting down beside him. "It brings focus and peace for most people. It does for me. But you've got something terrible in you, Shadow. Angry. Crueler than hell." He shook his head: the echidna was not loquacious, but he'd given the hedgehog quiet chances to talk about his past, all declined. "And I known people like that too, but not anyone who wanted so bad to control it."
"What do I do?"
"I don't know. See a shrink. Go find your family, if you have one."
"It's ten in the morning. Where can I go at ten in the morning?"
Knuckles blinked, wondering if he'd heard the question right. But he knew the answer: "Somewhere else."
The bar was out of Wicked Jamie's Red Label, Amy herself was out of chocolate booze, and she'd already put in her appearance at Hochschule for the month. So when she got up in the morning she showered, brushed her teeth, said hi at her drunk mother sleeping on the couch, and picked up a couple of bags at the Kimzie Biergeschaft. The guy on the counter was new and made her pay him an extra five marks to use her fake ID. So she was a little pissed off when she unlocked the service door to the Parlamant, walked into the dark, scuffed black paint of the main stage, went behind the bar and found the hedgehog sprawled among a mulish mix of whiskey and gin empties.
"Verdammt, Shadow," she breathed, almost dropping the bags. She sniffed the air for the sour of vomit and for a horrible moment wondered if he was dead before the hedgehog moaned sleepily and turned, snapping a quill beneath his back. "Oh gods, Shadow, the owners are going to have you locked up if you do stuff like this." She pulled his sweaty arm over her shoulders and strained, trying to drag him to his feet—
The arm tugged back, and Amy was on top of him. Her cheek was pressed against his clammy face. "'m so lonely," he groaned, working his lips against her skin.
". . . you don't have to be."
It was afterwards, deep in the stink of his own bed, feeling her breath soft on the fur of his neck, that he realized it was all real. Not just the past hour; everything. It was all really happening, and it had happened to him for five years. Half a decade. It had seemed to him that he'd been living in his own mind, and maybe he had been. But he'd been living in this crappy, freezing mountain burg at the same time, too.
Holy crap, he thought. He wiggled a bit, feeling the way the mattress and the girl hugged him. It was all so real, this stuff, as inundated with his scent as anything a guy could have.
He started to take stock.
My name is Shadow Hedgehog. I'm a Mobian but I live in Hochteufel, Lachels. I used to be . . . a soldier, for Princess Sal . . . Queen Sarah II. But she banished me. Then I used to be a prizefighter but—
He stopped there for a minute, circling back. He didn't like his name. It was really pretty stupid. It'd be less embarrassing if he'd had to come up with it on the fly, but oh, he'd thought long and hard about that one, living on the streets in Winstone. He should have black fur and—
Fuck it. You can't go around changing your name whenever you feel like it. You make your bed.
Shadow snuggled closer into the cheap chemical sweetness that Amy tossed on her shoulderfur. My name is Shadow Hedgehog, I'm a Mobian citizen but I live in Hochteufel, Lachels, and I just slept with a sixteen year old girl named Amy Roszkowiak. He tried to see if the statutory rape bothered him and came to the preliminary conclusion that he didn't really have any strong feelings one way or another. Amy was crazy, of course, and kind of stupid, but there was a lot of that going around. She was also kind of cute. Kind of sweet.
You had the love of a Princess; now you're a murderer and a—
The beast in him gave up quickly. It was growing weaker, almost as tired as he always felt. Just a little tremor in his fingers, in the base of his spine, just above his tail. "Was gibts?" Amy sighed, blinking her eyes big in front of his.
"Nichts," Shadow yawned. What was the word for something that didn't matter?. . . . "Nichts ewig."
"Was denkst du daran?"
"Weiss nicht," he replied. He smiled wryly, closing his eyes. "Ich weiss ueberhaupt Nichts."
Amy giggled. "Think you mean 'gantz'. 'Gantz Nichts.' You're getting alright, though."
"Are there twokinds of Overlander?" he asked, propping himself on his elbow next to her. "I'm getting good enough to talk with most of 'em, but a few years ago when I was fighting they were always putting me up against these ugly-ass guys from these bars by the river—"
"Lakolska," Amy said. "Vorlandisch was just up in the mountains until the mountain people conquered everyone. Those guys at the docks call themselves—well, I don't remember the name. But they're all old families. You know the sound, wicz-witz-ewski-owski—"
"—owiak?"
"We came up from Mobius, way, way back; someone decided to change our handle. These guys are a different matter. They really hate the mountain people. Mobians too, but mostly the Vorburgers. Say that until everyone here speaks Lakolska again, they won't really be free."
Shadow grinned, slow and easy. "What a bunch of stiffs." He put his finger against her soft chin, traced it slowly down along her neck, towards the little valley. "Back down south there's twenty-five straight years of war, here they hurt themselves tripping over money, and they got a stick up their ass because they traded one language for another." He shuffled a little higher on his elbow as the thought really hit him, what a bunch of assholes he was living with, a whole country full of assholes: "Amy, how could a guy not know when he's got something that good?"
She just looked at him, a little smirk on her mouth. "Tell you what. I'm going to go pee. And when I come back, you're going to have a very good answer for me."
"Aw. Alright."
He lay back, brushing his quills back with his hands and folding them behind his head, as Amy stood. She threw her shoulders left and right, a lively little shimmy in her hips, running her fingers through her pink quills. "Where's the bathroom?"
"Downstairs."
She shot him a look of sharp, ludicrous disapproval over her shoulder as she pulled on her undercovers and her skirt. "Such a lifestyle!" she gasped, stuffing herself into her top.
When she turned the knob Shadow laughed. "Oh, I know the answer!" Then the door exploded.
Well, it didn't explode. There was an explosion, and the door shattered into chips and smoke, and Shadow was staring out at the smoke and the boots from under his bed, his pistol still sticky from the duct tape that had held it to the wire mesh of the frame. Amy was staring back at him. She had a cut on her neck, drooling deep red blood, and she was staring at him, pink quills pressing hard against the ground, too terrified to move. "INTERPOL!" someone shouted, and one of the black boots stepped in front of Amy. One green eye remained, and it swelled huge as she realized that she'd had him all right and all wrong. "Sie sind in Haft!"
There was a pause. More boots came in, blocking out Amy. "Fuck," someone said. "'snicht darin."
With aching slowness, Shadow got to his knees. His quills pressed one by one, slow and silently against the bedframe as he pressed his toes against the floorboards.
"This skank his girlfriend or something?"
"Scheise. She's got a pretty deep contusion on her—"
"Tear this place apart. Watch yourself; remember Grand Crossing."
As their legs moved he could see her just lying there on the floor. Her big green eyes. They weren't going to move paramedics in until he was dead or down . . . .
His toes tensed. "I'll come quietly if you take Amy t—"
"Das Bett! Schiess das—"
He went for two quick shots at a pair of left feet before he kicked. The bed sailed upright, the mattress ripped to shreds with the cops' long, uncontrolled bursts, then fell onto a pair of local-made submachineguns. Shadow somersaulted forward into a low crouch, pistol lifted next to his head, and realized he couldn't go any farther forward without actually pressing the soldiers onto Amy.
She was looking up at him, holding her life in with a gloved hand, her face a picture of pain and fear. She'd been wrong; he'd been right. He wasn't fit for a princess. He wasn't fit for anyone. The best thing he could do was disappear.
Déjà vu.
The windowglass cut into his forehead as he erupted into the freezing night. He dropped two stories and hit the ground running, breaking two of the toes on his right foot. One of the perimeter positions was quick enough not only to get off shots, but to get them off with a good lead, tearing a clean, screaming hole through his right arm. The hedgehog dropped his gun. He lost his footing in the fresh snow and skidded into the side of a prowler, bruising his femur, and he rolled with it, tumbling over the hood to land on his face. He scrambled and streaked away through a world of pain and snow and muted yellow light.
Fifteen minutes later a naked hedgehog broke into the back door of Knuckles' Gym and staggered into the locker room, bleeding, feet senseless, holding his freezing penis in both hands. He went to his own locker, praying that Knuckles hadn't cleaned it out. His padlock was still there. He rolled the dial and yanked, hissing at the pain in his arm, and it didn't open which was bullshit goddamn it because he'd put in the numbers right, he always put in the numbers right but it never opened, and he sat back on the little wooden bench that ran the length of the room. He wondered if he had left any clothes here at all, or whether the last thing he'd do for Knuckles would be robbing his other customers, and he started sobbing. They had to take care of Amy. They had to. They'd send up medics for the cops anyway and there was no reason for them not to take care of Amy. She wasn't an accomplice. She wouldn't even see him again.
A half-hour later he was lying on his back on the bench, his right arm throbbing on his chest, slowly making him lightheaded with its gentle flow. The cops would probably know to look for him here, eventually, if they knew who he was, and they apparently did. It was just a matter of sitting here for a few hours. It was boring, but there was nothing else to do. Another hour or two passed, gently drifting in and out of consciousness as the pain in his arm waxed and waned.
The hedgehog started wondering what it would be like if he died, before they got here. He considered writing a note, but he thought that everyone would get the basic idea from a splayed naked corpse. Maybe he ought to clean up. He wasn't sure if he could shower, but he broke his padlock to see if his shorts were in there.
They were there, under a white envelope.
Dearest Sonic –
We've met once, briefly, but I'm sure you'll remember the occasion if you think about it. I'm sorry to leave a message here, but I must confess it's hard to get in touch with a mobian such as yourself. Have you considered renting a PO Box?
Despite your ridiculous alias I doubt you want to downright avoid being found, seeing as it was easy enough to locate the sad clown with the empty head and thick muscles. Interpol found it more difficult, but I find it hard to blame them; they have so much on their minds. Whereas I have only one or two interests to fill my days.
I must confess that some might consider me almost obsessed.
I've been meaning to talk to you about a proposition that I suspect you'll find very interesting. Please come meet me; I'm staying at the Gasthaus Seemoewe, 13 Banhofplatz, Frake's Point, Ostian. I know you've been in the doldrums for a while, so I've taken the liberty of informing Interpol of your identity and whereabouts to see if that will get you off your lazy rodent ass.
Looking forward to speaking with you,
Snively Kolensky, Capt. Mobian Internal Security Office (Ret.)
P.S. The proposition concerns a legacy of your uncle Charles.
Ironlock Prison, Time Unknown
The food had given out at the beginning of the week, round about. The guards had stopped bringing even the dry oatmeal they'd poured into the prisoners' cupped palms, and everyone's belly was winched tight. The Captain, a quick, clever fox younger than most of his subordinates, barely even alive back in the good old days of the Great War, assured what was left of his SpecOps squad that this was a good sign. Robotnik wanted to feed his prisoners. He hadn't given up trying to convince Mobius that he was good for it, that the coup and the civil war had all been some terrible mistake on the part of everybody else. So, the Captian figured if the prisoners weren't being fed, that meant that Robotnik's army was collapsing. Somewhere in the world beyond the cinder blocks of their cell, Mobotropolis had been liberated. The Robians were pulling back to a last line of defense in the barren desert; Terscala and points farther east. That meant that the front would pass Ironlock, and they'd all be rescued. Their patience would finally pay off.
And about time, the Captain thought privately. Hadn't been easy. The mange was so bad among the prisoners that you could scratch yourself anywhere and you'd come away with a good tuft of fur. And for the Captain there'd been an additional privation. Specialist Helen had developed something for him, it was clear, and it shone at him in every look. But he kept telling himself that it was just one or two years in the cell, however long they'd been packed in there, breathing each other's stink. If they had each other that way he'd stop being a superior, the Captain, and his squad would fall apart; if discipline fell apart his troops would sicken and starve and die. He did his best not to think of her, spent most of his days with his arms hooked through the gaps in the bars, staring down the guards in their senseless ISO and MMA uniforms as they patrolled the hallway.
His lips drew tight at the sound of the door to the block opening. Non-feeding time. As usual every snout up and down the hall turned to watch as the guards—
They weren't guards. The one in charge was a pine marten. She stood tall, hair cut invisibly short into her brown headfur, regarding the starving prisoners in their little cages with acid blue eyes. She and two buff wolf underlings were levered into uniforms that weren't ISO, MMA, or anything the Captain had seen. Stark black with red epaulettes and trim, recently pressed, the only thing within view that wasn't cheap and disintegrating. And around the neck of the marten, weirdly, the links of some sort of tight metal necklace. Featureless, save for a little colorless brass emblem—the sideways figure eight, the infinite, the symbol of Mobius. The wolves carried submachineguns.
The marten stopped before the Captain's cell, smiled. She turned her eyes to the little hole at the shoulder of his camo jacket, where he'd torn away his namejust before going on the water plant mission—he'd had a bad feeling about the water plant mission. "Captain what?" the marten asked him in a clean alto.
He watched her eyes, keeping his mouth shut.
The marten snickered. "Obstinate fox." She lifted a finger by her head, circled it: "Turn around."
The Captain heard Helen give a defeated little groan, setting off a little shuffle of movement throughout the cell as everyone stared at their boots. Whatever, he thought, and turned. It had been a long shot, anyway, trying to hide his identity, when anyone who knew the first thing about the Queen's inner circle would know to look for—
"There you are, Miles!" the marten cried as she got a good look at Captain Prower's ID, sprouting from the base of his spine. She sounded almost playful. Creepy. Tails had disliked being confined since age four and he had grown to viciously hate it, but he almost appreciated the guards for their brusque callousness. In its way it was businesslike and straightforward; a little clear opposition was even useful, helped keep the squad together. Whereas if this marten had shown up on the first day after they were captured, he wouldn't have known what to expect.
Just that it would be very bad.
One of the wolves undid the door to the cell, sliding it aside. "Step forward," the marten said, waggling a claw.
Tails fixed his face, set his shoulders, walked past the bars and stood sloppily at ease in front of her, hearing the wolf slam the door home behind him. It broke his heart, but it was alright. His squad could take the last few days on their own. He'd miss them.
He missed a lot of other people, too. It would be like a knife in him, if he let it be. But he didn't. Freedom demanded it.
His squad mumbled encouragement, but they were crushed. They understood what was happening. Most prisoners could be lost. But one close to Her Majesty? You don't just give that away. You put it in your safe deposit box, Tails thought as the second wolf produced a heavy canvas straightjacket and ordered him to spread his arms. Careful with it. Don't want to break it. His squad tried to not watch as his arms were wrapped around his torso and the wolf buckled a muzzle over his snout, as though he were some dangerous mental patient. Tails cursed himself for not speaking when he had the chance: It's alright, this is a good sign. Biggs is in command. Helen was the only one still looking at him, tiny tufts of fur from the sides of the vixen's neck between the fingers of her balled fists. I'll be fine, Helen; Herm'll work something out. 'Herm' being grunt for 'Her Royal Majesty.' Don't worry about me.
The marten came up to Tails, pulled on him, testing the buckles of the jacket. "Good," she said. "I've known of you for a long, long time, Miles—parts of me have. You are a remarkable mobian, and a ferocious warrior. It's small wonder you came to the attention of one of us. I am glad I grabbed you first. I'm the Lady Renee, of Martens. And you will be my fox."
"Lady," the first wolf asked. "Do you want any others from this cell?"
The marten showed a flicker of annoyance at the interruption, but answered calmly. "Miles of Foxes is the only one from this block." The wolf saluted sharply in response, grabbed his submachinegun and sprayed bullets through the bars. Tails roared, the leather muzzle biting his face. He threw himself at the wolf, felt the marten's arms seize him roughly. "No."
Ironlock was dark from constant brownouts and Tails's eyes couldn't take the rapid white starbursts at the end of the gunmuzzle. Everything disintegrated into brief snatches, pulled apart like individual frames of a movie: fur pressed to a wall; a single empty eye dusted with gray brick; a pair, wide and still luminous; all mixed with the anticipatory roars and screams now erupting from every cell in the block—
The pine marten grabbed the front of Tails' straitjacket with her left hand and lifted him free of the floor. He felt the air on his fur through the holes in his worn boots, stared disbelievingly down the creature's sleeve at her annoyed frown. No mobian could—
Certainty hit Tails like a falling sky: it didn't matter that she wasn't covered with armor plate and weapons implants; she was a robot. The evil Doc had unboxed his soul-deprivation tank and was spending the last of his resources to roboticize what was undoubtedly a small sliver of his remaining captive population. He had a second to puzzle over what strategy could justify such a bizarre tactic, when one thought crowded out all the others: the robot was under orders to bring him back alive.
"You'll fight later, Miles," she said. "For now, you sleep."
She punched him, and he slept.
Kain Blackwood 2010
