Taffer Notes: And we continue with Book 2, in which you can expect the following:
* Lots of slice and life.
* Training montages.
* A Guardian not wanting.
* A Ghost very much wanting.
* And a little bit of romance and murder mystery.
Beta read and edited with the help of the wonderful Maverick-Werewolf.
Content Warning: Suicidal Ideation
The Last City isn't home. Her Light is wrong. But her Ghost insists she gives him time. Time to make her see she's meant for this. And while Nicole struggles to accept her second chance at life, the Vanguard has struggles of its own: Murders. Guardians and their Ghosts have turned up dead within the walls, their Light ripped from them and their bodies no more than empty husks.
Book 2:
Rubik's Cube
Part 1
Overcome the Blow
Chapter 1 Cold Feet
Light pours into the kitchen. It lances through a gap between the flower-specked curtains, bright and warm and filled with dancing flecks of gold. A merry display of something careless. Lively.
Yet, at the end, the gold is nothing but dust pretending at worth.
The beams of light touch the kitchen table, but none of it touches her. She sits at the end of the table, withdrawn from the light and ringed in shade.
She cries.
Cries. And cries. Can't remember when she started. And she dreads she'll never stop.
In front of her lies a sheet of paper. Words sit on it. Most beg for forgiveness. None make a lot of sense. The pen she's been writing them with lies on the floor, thrown in a fit of disgust.
Click-click-click come the soft touches of dog claws on the floor. They bring bone-deep guilt. For a moment, she's glad she's thrown the pen away. A wet nose wedges itself up between her knees under the table. A tail swats slowly against another chair.
She wails and sinks her hands into his fur.
"I'm sorry," she says with words that barely find a voice. "I'm sorry. I'm okay. I'm okay."
She repeats the mantra until her phone rings, singing a familiar tune of a wayward son supposed to carry on. Good on him. She'd really rather not. The phone buzzes on the table.
Rattle-rattle-rattle
Gets louder. And louder. And louder. Until, in a blink, the familiar tune dies, turns to a memory of yesterday. Instead, she's filled with notes sung from the beaks of birds that come twisted out of cruel metal.
In her hands, the dog turns to dust.
Nicole falls.
She falls until the black wolf rises from the dark. Its eyes are fires. Green fires. They burn the darkness and they burn her and when its jaws open, it swallows her whole.
His Guardian woke up screaming.
Ghost came to with a start. He lifted off the shelf he'd been resting on and twirled once, scanning for threats. He found nothing, of course. Nothing but a trace of confused Void Light which dissipated even as he tried to get a better read.
And then he— THUNK —smacked into the shelf above.
All of that, the getting jolted awake and hitting his shell so hard it rattled, hadn't taken longer than half a second. Which meant nobody had seen it. Right? No one. At all. Rustling his shell back in order, he rolled out from between the shelves and took a proper look around.
The apartment was empty. Naturally. Well, safe for him and his Guardian. And whatever ghosts (remember, small g) she'd dreamt up at the tail end of her one hour and twenty-three-minute nap. She sat bolt upright in the bed, the sheets bunched up in her lap. With one hand she grabbed her chest. With the other she squeezed the life out of her pillow, staying like that long enough for him to slowly float towards her.
A mistake, as it turned out.
She froze the moment she noticed him, a miserable noise building in her chest that made his core want to crumble. And then she flung the covers aside, dashed through the room, and vanished into the bathroom to — ah — dry-heave. Yeah. Dry-heave. She didn't have anything in her worth throwing up any more.
Ghost drooped.
Dear Traveler, he narrated, sullen from core to fin tip, and drifted over to the fridge. What's your return policy on defective Ghosts?
A flick of a transmat beam and he had the food stuffed in his buffer.
My people protocols aren't working.
One more and it materialised neatly on the table, right on time for his Guardian to duck under the bathroom curtain, her arms up and hands busy tying her hair. It turned into a lopsided tail that stuck out to one side. There, her hair dangled as morosely as he felt.
Ghost gave an encouraging sideways roll. But he tried. "Dinner?"
Her mouth twisted. She swallowed. Though eventually then she nodded and sat at the table, facing the blackout curtains. As if she expected them to part and eat her. Or maybe— maybe she wanted to see the City?
It was really pretty at night. She'd like it. Everyone did.
"What time is it?"
"Seven-fifteen," he said and zipped over to the curtains. He wedged himself up against the top, right under the rail, and shoved forward to push one half open. In spilled the Traveler's light, pale and gentle. Along with it came pretty hues of pink from the setting sun getting the clouds all flushed, and below it winked the colourful lights of the City itself. Whole rivers of them moved between the buildings, a steady flow of traffic that never truly slept.
The Last City was a heart that beat relentlessly.
"I didn't sleep a lot, did I," she half asked, half stated, while her eyes were set on the Traveler. In one hand she held two chopsticks. A bunch of cold noodles dangled from them, equally could soup dripping back into the takeaway bowl. Of course they'd had chopsticks back before the Golden Age. He'd known that.
Totally.
"No." Ghost shimmied himself closer to her. "Did you have a nightmare?"
A nod.
"Anything, ah, specific?"
"My dog died," she said flatly. "Turned to dust."
By the Light, if he had a foot it'd be so far up his mouth. A mouth he had to grow first, too.
She slurped down some noodles though. Progress. Right?
"Then I got eaten by a black wolf the size of a moon."
He froze up. "Psht. You don't still think—"
"I don't know what I think," she shot at him.
Ghost sorted his shell with a few faint clicks and glanced away.
"Don't— don't make me think," she added after a while. "I don't want to think."
Much as she'd have liked not to think, it was really all Nicole could do while she ate the rest of the cold ramen in silence. It tasted alright, at least. And she could keep it down, even if that had been a little touch and go at first.
The rice she put back into the fridge.
Didn't take long after that and she found herself pacing. Around her, the flat's plain walls crept in on her. Inch by inch. Much like the noose that fastened around her throat and pulled ever tighter.
She looked at the door. Then at the window, with that bleached ball hanging out there to remind her how real all of this was. Not like Ghost gave her a chance at forgetting, not with how he was always… there.
Never not.
A constant presence, his electronic clicks and whirrs filled the place up. And that didn't help with how small it'd already become. Heat welled at the base of her clenching throat. Frustration. Anger. Boiling like awful soup made of rotten leftovers. She clenched her fists and was a second from snapping, when he rolled right in front of her, the red tape catching her eye.
She exhaled. Flexed her fingers. The heat died. Slowly.
"Do you want to go out?" he asked.
Nicole started on the spot.
"Out?"
"Mhm," he intoned with a convincing hum. "Stretch your legs some. See the City. Shop! Do you like shopping?"
"I— I don't much care for it."
Right as she'd said it, Ghost sunk half an inch.
"But isn't it a little late for that anyway?"
"Pfah. The City never sleeps."
She ran her hands down her sides. Along the borrowed shirt that John had said he'd want back. Shop? She could use clothes. It'd be nice to have something of her own. Something that fit. And new shoes. But that left the question of—
"What am I going to pay with though?"
Ghost leaned himself a little to the side. Thinking. Counting?
"You've got enough to get started with. All we need is to swing by a vault terminal to pick up some glimmer."
"Glimmer. Right. That. Silly me. How'd I forget that."
She swiped the keycard up where she'd left it on the kitchen table, stuffed it into her trousers, and went out the door.
The hallway still smelled of roses. It came with an idea of something wild, but yet decidedly soft. Brought a memory, clear as day, of a shaded, narrow path following an old fence.
"Ah— Guardian?"
Except she'd walk Thor there and not a floating, opinionated voice-box.
"You— ah— Guardian, you forgot something." He swung around her head, his eye swinging back and forth from her to the door.
Huffing, Nicole ignored him and kept walking. No. No, she would absolutely not put those minky shoes back on. Socks would have to do, even if her feet were already getting cold.
Except where was she going again? She stopped at the ancient-looking winding staircase. Reasonable sleepers as they were, the wild roses had turned their blooms into pink snooze pods, though that didn't keep them from sticking out against the backdrop of green.
"Down?" She asked.
"Down," he said and zipped on ahead.
Two elevator rides later, Nicole was dreadfully lost. And fighting a losing battle against a particular case of sensory overload. The last elevator had spat them out near a plaza. A plaza that hung down the sloping side of the massive wall ringing the city in. It reminded her of a shelf. One fairly far down, what with how the bleached wall rose up high and high and higher over her. But still far enough up that she decided not to walk to the edge. Ever.
The tops of tall buildings rose to meet it. Two were even tall enough to rise over it and those two had bridges leading right on over to the plaza-shelf.
And it was all very… noisy.
Gathered under the Traveler's glow and the flash of neon light signs lining the plaza, were all manners of people. And not quite people. There were even a few trees with neatly cropped patches of grass around them, paper lanterns dangling from their branches.
It was busy. Full of life. Buzzing, vivid nightlife.
There was the obligatory music roaming out from some wide open doors, all equally alien to her and all equally vying for her attention. People came and went — or just stood there, hanging out in small groups.
Nicole hugged her elbows close and followed Ghost to a corner.
The walls all around here were either white plaster or the same mosaic she'd seen everywhere else. Full of colour and with patterns on them that didn't quite fit any culture she could remember. Or maybe it fit too many at once. Bit like the music. All mashed together from things that were meant to be familiar, but at the end weren't.
In the corner Ghost led her to stood a row of narrow terminals. He buzzed in front of one, a burst of light connecting with its screen, and while he did whatever it was he did, Nicole's eyes wandered.
She stood there, and from her gut unravelled a halfway ordinary sensation.
A sort of gentle nudge of the unfamiliar. The weightless, inconsequential strangeness she'd felt every time she'd left an airport at too-late-o'clock. Groggy, but not quite tired, with the air maybe too humid. Or too dry. Too hot. Or too cold. The bottom line was that it was different. That the cars were probably bigger. Shinier. And the people followed a different fashion trend than what Scotland was currently obsessed with.
It was that same out-of-place that came with sitting in a cab while a city rolled by that wasn't quite what you'd seen before, scents spilling through the cracked window that weren't quite what you were used to, and the radio playing music that wasn't quite what you'd expect.
Because travel far enough, even the grass under your feet ends up different. And right now she thought she stood on that strange grass, disconnected from her life. If she closed her eyes and pretended, she might even have been able to imagine herself in a resort by a beach, tucked away on the balcony of her room while an eternal party happened somewhere nearby.
"Guardian?"
Nicole swallowed and spooled her thoughts back in. When she looked over her shoulder, Ghost floated over a pile of blue, glimmering cubes on the surface of the terminal.
"Handful of glimmer for your thoughts?"
She frowned and moseyed over, coming to a halt with her hands awkwardly hovering over the pile.
"I just had the weirdest feeling," she admitted, "like I flew out for a vacation somewhere strange."
"Vacation?" Click, his shell went. Whirr-whirr. "Ah— it's fine to put the Glimmer in a pocket. It's not heavy."
Nodding more to herself than him, she carefully scooped it all up and stuffed it into her borrowed trouser pockets. In her hands, the glimmer felt warm. Bit like holding statically charged feathers, rather than the glowing dice she'd expected from how it'd rolled on the counter when John had paid for the food.
"Yeah. Vacation." She patted her trousers down. Tried to flatten the glimmer bulge. "Booked a plane to somewhere… else. Somewhere totally out there. Not… missed the entire apocalypse by means of the shoddiest time travel method ever." She threw him a look. "Dying, by the way. That's dying. Shite way to time travel."
He regarded her with a slow shutter — or blink — of his eye.
"What? Please don't tell me time travel is a thing."
"It— ah— the Vex can sort of do it? Travel through time? I don't know how it works. Honestly, I don't know if anyone does at this point, but—"
"Stop." Nicole pinched the bridge of her nose. "What about please don't tell me did you not hear you daft, floaty bawbag?"
He pulled back, his shell puffed out, and rotated his fins quick enough to turn the red tape into a blurred line. "I thought you were being sarcastic."
"Was not," she muttered, and sorted herself back together to face the plaza.
Dear Traveler,
I made my Guardian mad. Again. I also don't know what a bawbag is, but I get the feeling I don't want to find out.
Did he blame her though? No. Of course he didn't. He'd listened but he hadn't listened. Which, as it turned out, made this particular Speck of Light into a bawbag and earned him a shoulder so cold, he was now more convinced than ever that she favoured the icy touch of Void Light.
Even if she'd almost set him on fire once. And had burnt her coat.
She didn't say another word for the longest time after that, either. But she followed him. Padded after him with her elbows hugged close to her and her steps tentative. Her eyes wandered though. So much, he was worried she'd not see where she was going. In fact, she absolutely didn't and he had to chirp at her more than once and get right up into her face to stop her from either walking into a railing, a lamp post, or into another Guardian. Like right now.
"That's a Hunter," Ghost told her when she stared. "Hard to miss. See the cape? It's a Hunter tradition that's made it all the way into their civvies. A lot of them will wear one no matter where."
This Hunter in particular, a human, was in the middle of showing off. With a snap of his finger, he summoned a burning dagger, right into his hand — and then flipped it up into the night sky where it trailed embers and flames and quite a few stares. Including his Guardian's, who tracked the brightly burning dagger with wide eyes. When the dagger came back down it landed on the Hunter's outstretched finger, where it balanced for a second before dissipating.
The Hunter's friends hooted. One clapped him on the shoulder. Another offered him a shot-glass filled with something vile (or so Ghost guessed), which the Hunter promptly downed before taking a bow with a flourish so over the top it made his cape snap like a whip.
Then he repeated the trick.
Ghost rolled his eye. This was going to end with someone getting burnt. Horribly. But that was going to be a different Ghost's problem. Not his. He had a Guardian with the spatial awareness of a water bottle to worry about.
Except for when she was throwing bricks at him.
"Anyway," he said. "Clothes. Shoes. You need shoes. There are a few shops across the north bridge."
At the mention of a bridge, her steps faltered. He could practically feel the spike of fear glancing off him. From there it turned into a subtle, nervous jitter that followed them all the way across the bridge.
The bridge was windy. Chilly. Enough to make her shiver all the way across. Overhead, lanterns swayed gently, their lights moving in large, lazy circles. She hated that. Hated it so much she held her breath behind clenched teeth, half expecting the bridge to simply turn over and dump her into the dark.
It didn't though.
It held.
On the other side, things didn't look much different. The architecture remained undecided if it wanted to be blocky and industrial, or rather be rich with colour and full of intricate curves — but it was all a lot tighter. Narrow. And full of small, cramped shops. None of which had ever grown any doors, she noticed.
Like no one had to worry about thieves.
They were all wide open at the front, their stuff on display all the way out into the path where you were supposed to walk and it made her think more of a market than anything.
The building itself was more of a tube, really. Hollow in the middle with a hole up top. Nicole, naturally, did not approach the railing. Not even to sate a moment of curiosity asking just how far up or down this market went and if she'd discovered the tallest vertical mall ever.
No, she hung by the shops and wandered. Aimlessly, mostly, not really paying much attention to what was being sold. Sometimes Ghost would stop and look inside one, then throw her a look like he wanted her to stop with him, but she kept walking.
Clothes. Scarfs. Rugs. Furniture. Pretty glass and intricately wrought iron thingie-ma-things. Nonsense. Some sense. Food (her stomach clenched). Flowers.
She stopped at that one, caught in the cloud of sweet and earthy scents. While she stood there and stared, Ghost's electronic clicks and whirrs slunk closer. Eventually, he inched all the way around her shoulder and peered into the shop alongside her.
At the back of it, past so many plants fighting for shelf space, a woman looked up, her fingers stuck in a pot of dark earth. Blue fingers. Connecting to a blue wrist. And blue arms, with wispy, glinting clouds flowing under their skin like rivers. An Awoken.
Nicole clenched her jaw and kept walking.
Ghost caught up quickly.
She didn't stop wandering until the cold against the soles of her feet finally began to hurt in earnest. And even then she stood dumbly at the entrance of the first suitable shop for a while, like walking in there was going to be harder than anything she'd had to do so far.
Except instead of running from Fallen, she'd be battling jackets and trousers and shirts — while skirts and dresses dug her grave. She made a face. This was stupid.
She was being stupid. Making an arse out of herself, really. She looked a right mess standing there in a shirt way too large and tents for trousers and no bloody shoes. So why wasn't she just going in?
When some cheerfully coloured dresses at the back parted for a grey haired woman, the cloth hangers softly clinking on their rails, Nicole almost bolted. She even turned around and made to walk, but Ghost got in the way. He swung in front of her, his shell pushed out. When she moved half a step, he scooted closer.
He squinted.
Nicole huffed, threw her hands halfway up, and relented.
The insides of the shop smelled like lavender. Not mothball intense lavender, but a walk along a lavender dotted path kind of… lavender.
"How can I help you, Guardian?" the grey haired lady said and came right up to her carrying a smile.
Guardian. Nicole's lips dragged down. She side-eyed Ghost. He was a dead giveaway, wasn't he? What with how he hovered around her like she'd grown a small moon.
Not that the woman needed her to answer. Her eyes flicked up and down, measuring Nicole from the tips of her dirty socks all the way up to her shoulders. Nicole, in turn, stood a teensy bit straighter. And felt exponentially worse.
Ah-ha, the woman intoned, knowingly, and gestured her to follow. "How about we get started with a pair of shoes?"
Walking back was halfway more comfortable, even if her new shoes pinched a tad around the ankles. They were still shoes. The jacket helped too, adding a bit of weight to her shoulders and keeping the chill out. And that was a start.
But a start for what, really? Start at having something that wasn't borrowed? Start at normalcy?
What normalcy?
Nicole chewed on her bottom lip while she dragged her feet across the bridge, hard at work ignoring thoughts about long drops to sudden stops. Rather, she tried to focus on the weight of the bags in her hands, hefting them up a little. Two pairs of trousers. Lots of knickers. More socks. Bunch of shirts. She'd spent almost all the glimmer Ghost had gotten for her and that'd been nearly as embarrassing as walking in there in the first place.
"You okay?"
Nicole's teeth dug a little deeper and she looked up. Ghost hung real close, eyeing her.
"No," she said without hesitation. "And this was mortifying."
His shell twisted left, then right. "You did great."
"I did great? Shopping? I couldn't even count the glimmer, Ghost. At least with coinage and different currencies you got numbers stamped on and the worst that can happen is not knowing what way the exchange rate swings. How do you learn to count cubes?"
"Well— ah—" he started, swinging his eye over her shoulder and then back at her. "That's what you have me for. I count them for you until you've figured it out."
"What if I don't?"
"You will," he said. "We will. It'll work out, I promise." And then his eye flicked away again, right over her shoulder and back to the bridge she'd just walked off of. He shimmied backwards, his trajectory a little wobbly, and Nicole finally gave in to look back too.
Four Ghosts floated under the lantern light of the bridge. They moved in a tight group as they inched along — and for a moment they reminded Nicole of a group of whispering children.
Ghost— her Ghost —cleared his theoretical throat.
"Ignore them," he said and swung forward, scooting ahead. "That's what I've been doing."
"Yeah? How's that working out?"
"Poorly," he admitted. "Want to go home?"
Nicole flinched. Home. That. That thing she'd lost.
But she nodded anyway. Even if that, too, worked out somewhat poorly.