A Normal Night

“Alright, you can go in.”
The tall bouncer waved her by, and Amber flashed an eager smile. Not because she thought it was something the club girl she was dressed as—short, sleeveless black dress with mesh over her limbs to mask the numerous scars—would do, but because the faked student ID he handed back had passed his inspection.
That’d been the whole point of coming out. If her fieldcraft had degraded so far she couldn’t get into some hole-in-the-wall, what would be the point of all those childhood years being beaten into a government commando? She needed some way to stay in practice while she hid on the margins of the known universe. And as a treat for passing, she’d do something she’d always wanted to try.
Inside, humid warmth and a pulsing beat supplanted the cool, fickle breezes of Fell Justice’s night on Amber’s skin. The dim lights and black curtains of an intermediary lounge drew her attention to her other senses. She inhaled a strange cocktail of dry ice vapor, sweat, and… oranges? No, orange liquor. Her heightened Spartan senses registered it like a bludgeon, trying to mask the rest.
She felt as much as heard the pulse of a bass beat growing louder as she neared the far end of the room. She pulled open a door by its odd semi-circle handle and was suddenly assaulted by the unmuted stomp of its rhythm.
Strobe lights flashed over the heads and shoulders of a tight-packed crowd like lightning on a stormy sea. The room’s ceiling was high, lost in shadow above a maze of black girders, leaving space above the ravers for hologram emitters to play. Impossible shapes cast in neon red and mint-green danced through hazes pouring from what looked like broken industrial pipes. Amber shouldered her way in to wonder with the rest of them.
The bass thrumming of a blam! song subjugated the crowd to every beat as it flung itself to the far walls, shaking Amber to her bones as it sought to escape the dance floor’s cage. The synthesized melody wandered one direction only long enough to suggest a pattern to the human mind before punking their silly assumptions with an inversion or the breathtaking gasp of a missed beat. It was chaos—and Amber loved it.
All Amber’s life before running away from the UNSC had been orderly. Neat rows, run the jungle gym in line, beat the timer. Remove the screws in this sequence, disassemble this component to clean, then invert the process to reassemble. Over and over again. Combat may’ve been no neat, clean chess match, but the downtime between missions was so rigorously boring. She’d seen recordings of dance clubs in her downtime, once even through a pirated security feed as they operated nearby. But no recording viewed on a tiny screen could come close to experiencing it with all her senses. She was eighteen—though she’d had to add a few years on the fake ID given how Spartan augmentations messed with her body—and in a club, like some normal person.
She reached a break in the crowd where enough room had cleared for the most daring to exhibit themselves. A woman in military surplus fatigues, torn and stitched in wild patterns with thread that glowed like neon, dipped and spun, thrusting her arms with the aggression of a martial artist into poses as elegant as a ballerina. Amber marveled how her long hair—green on the side it wasn’t shaved—held its shape as she contorted through the routine.
She watched the dancer intently, memorizing each stance and movement, and tried to imagine the effort each would take. As soon as she caught the pattern, Amber imitated the pose, and realized the people closest to her were giving her space. Encouraged, she followed through with the next, and the next, met with the approving whoops of the crowd.
The dancer took notice and matched her, a feral smile lurking beneath hard eyes. She sped up, and Amber followed, strutting over the dance floor’s glowing checkerboard. The smile vanished as they continued, and Amber realized this woman had taken offense somehow. Hurt by the confusing rejection, Amber kept pace until an opening came.
As the song halted, Amber threw in a flourish by launching into a kick which crossed into the other dancer’s intuited personal space—one only a Spartan’s speed could manage. The other woman flinched before her own finale, and as the music subsided their neighbors cheered for her.
The dancer only shrugged, then turned and walked off as the next song, something slower, came on. She disappeared a moment later as the crowd milled, people repositioning as some took breaks and others stepped up. Someone offered her a cup as the victor, then left her to sway by herself.
The liquor within stung, but the orange taste of it soothed her throat, and Amber drank deeply. She wished Morgan could’ve been here. She was having fun, and wanted someone to know, to share it with them. Morgan had always been so uptight. She needed to let her guard down once in a while, be open to experiences. Sometimes, in colonial wilds on some survey patrol, they’d speculate what it humanity’s best of the best might be like. To live a normal life. If it felt anything like this, she would’ve loved it.
But that couldn’t happen now, could it? Bitter grief soured the liquor on her tongue, so she tipped the cup back and washed its last drop down without tasting it. Alcohol was supposed to help with these things, right?
She pushed to the sidelines and asked for a refill, which someone was kind enough to pay for, then wandered back out. Before she’d even found her way close to the center again, she started to feel a fuzziness. Her vision distended a bit. Was it supposed to work this fast? Maybe her metabolism was having a reaction to it—or maybe wanting to forget just invited her mind to play along.
Amber swayed as the crowd whirled around her, and she started laughing without end, lost for why. She nearly stumbled as she finished the second cup, but her arm caught one put in her way. She tried to thank him, but she wasn’t sure the words came out right. The jacket’s black sleeves were well-tailored.
Finding standing up more difficult than leaning, she kept a hold to steady herself and let the arm lead her. Was this what it was to dance with someone? She lamented not being able to experience it more clearly.
Cold air started to rest on her arms and calves through the mesh. Something about that struck Amber as wrong. If it was cold, they had to be outside, but she hadn’t wanted to leave. She wanted to go back inside, to the music, and the people.
She let go of the arm, but it wrapped around her waist. She tried to pull away, but fingers circled around her wrist, tighter than she wanted. Even through the haze, training took over.
She turned until the arm gripping her right wrist crossed her body, then brought up her unrestricted left and pushed—hard enough the offending elbow reversed its bend with a crack. Not finished, Amber spun the other way, feeding momentum to her suddenly-free right.
Her open hand connected with the solar plexus she’d expected, rather than seen, would be in place. Drove through it, in fact. She felt ribs break beneath her palm. The body was flung away from her, and its sudden absence put her off balance as soon as the attack was executed. She crashed to the ground, head striking pavement hard enough to daze her.
When the pain at last subsided enough she didn’t need to freeze to hide from it, her head had cleared enough to realize she was outside after all. The night sky above was obstructed by a network of massive satellites and causeways branching from the stems of orbital elevators—the Sublime Grace network. Amber was so far below, with rainwater sticking grit to her dress and bare limbs.
Something had been in her drink. It’d overwhelmed even her metabolism, but the her genetically-enhanced liver seemed to be catching up now. And whoever had put it there—was probably the same person who’d led her from the club.
Adrenaline didn’t seem to carry the drug as well as blood, and a stressed Gamma produced a lot of it. Enough, it seemed, to shake off her daze and roll to her feet, fists ready to beat down anyone who might be coming to collect her. Amber took in the alley—several blocks from the club, by now—and scanned the shadows around her, so far from the nearest street light.
No figure came at her. No hands reached for her arms again, nothing to give her the fight she wanted. Then she spied a figure against the wall, in the deep shadow of a fire escape.
He was slumped at the bottom of the wall, legs splayed out and back upright, and still. His black jacket was crumpled like the deflated refuse bags left out along the street. Rainwater made a red blot in the center of the shirt beneath run.
Amber looked down at her hand, surprised. Blood, half-cured, washed between the ridges of her fingerprints and gathered around her cuticles.
A torrent of thoughts tried to wash through her lingering haze. Had she really struck that hard? Was this even the person who’d drugged her, or just some sap helping her home? Was he—
A sickening spasm twisted her core, doubling her over to retch on the pavement. The orange smell of her bile was awful. She wiped her mouth on the back of her wrist and spat the street-grit her lips picked up with the last of the sick.
Amber couldn’t tell if the man was really dead. Her training covered a dozen ways to tell even at a distance, but synapses were firing so wildly she couldn’t remember any of them. She had no frame of reference for what’d just happened, no idea how to respond. Her mind raced in circles, only coming up with one thought: she didn’t belong here.
A normal life had dangers of its own, none of which she understood. She belonged where her augments and training gave her the greatest edge, and that was in a fight. No more trying to imitate and feel her way through uncertainty.
She left the body where it lay, alive or dead, and set out back for the apartment she’d rented. Someone would find him and call an ambulance, or a morgue. It was Fell Justice, after all.
Category:Short stories