Silence (13 page)

Sheikoh held the bag under one arm and
pushed the door open with the other. Sheikoh waited expectantly for
Dorothi’s goodbye for a moment before he turned his head to the
quiet, young girl. She was silently playing with a pink Swifthooves
toy without any enthusiasm.

‘
Did I upset her… or maybe…
Is she disgusted with my… with me?’ Sheikoh wondered. The thought
pierced right through him; he felt like a shard of ice had lodged
in his chest.

“
You… want me to pick
anything up?” Sheikoh asked with a trace of trepidation.

He wished he knew some way to talk to
the unusually quiet Dorothi, to tell her that he loved like a
sister some days and a daughter others and that she meant more to
him than anyone else in the world.

Anyone left.

What?!

Anyone left?!

Sheikoh suddenly wanted to punch
himself in the gut. The thought was as awful as it was untrue. The
way he loved Emili and the way he loved Dorothi were two entirely
different things. His love for the beautiful, blonde Emili was like
a fire in his chest, second in strength only to his overpowering
urge to protect Dorothi.

Sheikoh saw Emili’s sky-blue eyes
every time he looked into Dorothi’s. Only, out of everyone in
Octasia, the color didn’t feel stolen. It was just a part Dorothi.
Emili was his moon, sparkling in the night. Distant, mysterious,
and perfectly beautiful. And Dorothi was the opposite, Sheikoh’s
sun. If he ever lost her, he couldn’t go on living.

Dorothi shook her head slowly without
looking up from her toy. Sheikoh shook himself, trying to disperse
the feeling that the 11-year-old would have been better off without
him. Sheikoh tried to shrug the unclean feeling off of himself as
he pushed open the door that led out to the sewer and steeled
himself against the inevitable, disgusting malodor of the sewer.
Sheikoh took a deep breath, his last taste of clean air for a
while, and made to step out.

“
Sheek?” Dorothi said
suddenly.

Sheikoh turned around to look at her
with concern. Dorothi was standing up now hugging herself and
looking down at her feet. Her curly brown bangs fell over her
frowning face. Sheikoh noticed that Dorothi was shaking gently and
biting her lip.

“
Before you do anything
risky, you… you have to promise me that you won’t… die...” Dorothi
whispered without looking up. “Like Emili…”

Sheikoh’s heart melted. He bent his
head and let his black hair cover his eyes. His throat felt
tight.

Dorothi didn’t need someone like him.
He was a liar, a thief and a killer. He was bad for her. And
someday, she was going to regret caring for him.  

No
.

Sheikoh stopped the thought. Whatever
he was, he was all Dorothi had. He had to be the guardian she
needed. The fact that he wasn’t worthy of the job meant that he had
no excuse for screwing her up. He just had to do things as best he
could.

Sheikoh rearranged his face into a
cocky smile.

“
Hey! Whatchyu sayin,
Ladybug? You messing with me?” Sheikoh demanded
teasingly.

Dorothi lifted her chin and met his
eyes hopefully. The moment burned with unrequited hope and
life.

“
You’re the only person in
the world who knows about my secret armor,” Sheikoh told her
confidently, rapping his chest with a dull thump that made a
different, peculiar note than a normal chest. He shook his hair out
of his eyes and winked. “You know better than anyone how hard I am
to hurt. I promise you that I’m not going anywhere, anytime soon.
So you, little miss, are not allowed to worry.”

Sheikoh walked to the door and then
stopped. He turned around.

“
Also, you better have the
remote fixed when I pick you up tomorrow.” Sheikoh raised an air
fist bump to Dorothi who responded, wearing a small smile of
fragile hope.

Sheikoh strode through the door to the sewer. He knew he was
about to seriously wish he’d been able to repair himself in the
safehouse. As always, the smell hit his face like a ton of bricks.
He walked past lumpy, floating masses of unidentifiable refuse,
stepped over rats and lizards that watched him with gleaming,
speculative eyes. His breath came in soft gags, gasped solely from
his mouth.

The disgusting, sludgy liquid in the
canal lurched alongside him. Sheikoh kept his head determinedly
forward, never letting his neck twist from forward vigil. It was
hard enough to bear the disgusting smell without looking at stuff
that hit him straight in his gag reflex. He pretended it was a
river instead of a steaming pool of chemical-pounded crap. A
dead, rotting mutant of a river.

When Sheikoh finally reached a spot
that he’d convinced himself smelled relatively less horrible than
the rest of noxious tunnels, he stopped. The air in his lungs felt
slimy and unwholesome. He let it shudder out of his
mouth.

“
I’m just getting way too
used to smelling pieces of shit,” he laughed and consequently
choked.

Sheikoh started stripping
off his clothes as fast as possible, tossing them against a
concrete wall behind him. A misaligned torso and a pair of oddly
animal legs slowly came into view. Covered in clothes Sheikoh
didn’t look any different from anyone else, but now his abnormal
proportions were immediately apparent. Even with synthetic skin
stretched over his prosthetics.

The left side of Sheikoh’s pale chest
and stomach was only noteworthy for their exemplary physique. His
left pectoral muscle was hard and corded, boasting veins, and his
abdominal muscles rippled down his stomach like stepping stones. He
made sure to maintain the hard muscles that had saved his life more
than a few times.

His right side, however, was
different. His frame was perceptibly less curved from his armpit to
hip, and a slightly misaligned pectoral ascetic bulged from his
chest. Other than that, the right half of his chest was unnaturally
flat. A bumpy pathway ran down from his right shoulder to his
stomach and went around his waist like a belt. His groin boasted
nothing other than a patch of Synthskin smooth as a
mannequin’s.

From Sheikoh’s right shoulder to the
center of his right thigh, the seamless synth-skin was slashed
through with a silver zipper, so he wouldn’t have to replace the
moderately expensive Synthskin every time that he had to make some
repair on his blacksteel skeleton. Sheikoh ran a finger from the
top of the silver seam all the way down to the dead center of his
right thigh. The skin covering his right side loosened and sagged,
expanding until the hole that the zipper had revealed gaped like a
dark cave. The dull blacksteel of his automaton limbs peaked out
from inside a blanket of false skin.

Sheikoh’s blacksteel limbs stepped
through the zipper hole. He wrapped the synthetic skin attached to
the edges of his real skin around himself like a toga. He could
tear it off easily and painlessly, but he didn’t want to have to
reattach another layer when he’d finished. That would take almost
an hour. ‘And it smells like crap in here,’ Sheikoh giggled to
himself.

Then he focused on the task at hand.
The sewer really did smell awful. He just wanted to get this over
with. Sheikoh draped the sheet of skin over his shoulders like a
macabre cloak so that it was out of his way.

In the dim light streaming overhead,
Sheikoh took a long look at the metal garbled along his right side.
His arm and legs were segmented, skeletally-thin limbs of metal
wrapped in countless, tapeworm-esque wires that weaved through the
frame discordantly. The right half of his chest was divided into
nine, plaited sections that lent him flexibility while cradling his
reengineered organs.

Worse, blobs of yellow-white, pus-like
fluid sacs surrounded each of the motors. When he was wearing
Synthskin, the blobs gave muscle-like form to his limbs, but when
stepped out of his skin (Literally), they hung loose and sagging
like slugs or leaches that had attached to black bones. Sheikoh
looked like a half-rotted corpse that a university was dissecting.
His broodingly handsome features perversely made him look even more
demonic. Sheikoh sighed out the putrid air, and let his body fall
against the wall that was as far away as the stinking, concrete
bound river of filth as humanly possible.

“
Or as cyborgicably
possible? I’m not really a human, am I?” He wondered aloud, as he
deftly unscrewed the unbroken wire attachments with practiced
ease.

Strands of synaptic wire that had held
his index finger onto his hand curled outwards upon coming undone.
He left the last wire and the broken one screwed into the
blacksteel. Luckily, the broken wire was still good; All Sheikoh
had to do was reconnect the break. Synapses frayed and snapped all
the time, it wasn’t a huge deal.

When a wire completely
degraded though, that
was
a huge deal. Feet of the coils that wound through
him had to be completely replaced. In the meantime, anything
relying on the connection shut down. That wasn’t good, because some
of those wires lead to his irredeemably damaged organs. If the
wrong wire degraded, Sheikoh was dead. Overdriving was so dangerous
because it was extraordinarily hard on the synaptic
wires.

Sheikoh always kept a simple synapse
repair kit handy. He dug a roll of paper tape and a lighter out of
his faithful black jacket and taped the broken wires up adroitly,
making sure the lines were connecting.

That in itself was a solution, but it
was both impermanent and unreliable. Two words that Sheikoh never
wanted to use to describe his trigger finger. He felt dizzy,
imagining his trigger finger falling limp in the heat of battle.
His stomach lurched uncomfortably. He could almost feel the bolt of
plasma burning pain and death into his blood.

He shook the thought out of his head
and lit held the flickering lighter under the tape until it had
caught.

“
One…
Two…
Three
,” Sheikoh counted under his breath, staring at the
candle-sized fire. He blew it out. Then he kept blowing. After
about a minute he could touch the reattached connection that had
been molten only moments ago. The tape had blackened into a tough
coat of ash. Sometimes his little trick didn’t work, but it had
this time. He could feel the tingle.

Sheikoh smiled his satisfaction and
unscrewed the last two wires, before tossing the useless finger
into the sewer sludge ahead.

He dug around in the blue bag until he
pulled out a finger that felt passable. His cyborg parts were all
homemade, so some of them were of much better quality than others.
He clicked it into a hand joint and quickly wound and then screwed
the already tangled wires into their individual indents with
practiced efficiency. A minute sting that told him his nervous
system had connected to the finger.

He admired the fingers of his finished
hand for a moment, looking absurdly like a zombie inspecting its
manicure. Then he wiggled his fingers till they blurred with speed,
and a satisfied smile lit up his face. The smell of the disgusting
tunnel he sat in was all but forgotten. He picked a few skin flakes
out of his metal joints and flicked them away. He did a quick
once-over before deciding that he didn’t need to do any more work
on his prosthetics.

Sheikoh lifted himself up and slipped
back into his Synthskin. He zipped it up with his repaired finger.
The folds slowly shrunk over his metal limbs, wrapping him in a
comfortable hug. He threw all his clothes on, except for his
battered, midnight-black jacket. Sheikoh crumpled that into a ball
and tossed it against the wall of the sewer and then let his body
drop against the makeshift cushion. He sat back for a moment,
searching his deep pockets for the tub of chromium
polish.

As he cleaned her old tools, Sheikoh
thought about Emili. She had been the mechanic who’d saved
Sheikoh’s life all those years ago. She’d allowed him into hers and
Dorothi’s little family when he’d had nowhere else to go. Her face
had shined like the sun from where he had lain, perched on the
precipice of death; he’d promised that he’d never forget everything
Emili had done for him. Even after all these years, Sheikoh’s chest
still gaped with a hollow ache at his and Dorothi’s loss.
    

Even after all of the years, the pain
was still unbearable. It sent Sheikoh’s mind scrambling for some
other, more comforting line of thought. He landed upon the only era
of innocence in his hard life. That ancient addiction filled his
body, the delusion that he fit somewhere inside of the grand scheme
of things. Like a puzzle piece sliding into an ever changing
landscape, Sheikoh .

Sheikoh had been so young when the
parents had abandoned him on the side of the street. The only
knowledge they had left him with was his name. He never would've
survived those early years without the timely intervention of his
‘parents’, Daneil and Anima Namar, who had given him a respite from
the cruel streets. That had been after Giz had vanished.

Nonetheless, their memory was stained
with icy contempt.

He had been about 4 when they found
him. After his strange tutelage under Giz, Sheikoh had wandered the
cold streets, hopeless and alone, living among every harsh truth
Interium didn’t want to face. The poor, the jails, the graveyards,
the deformed, the criminals, and even, in some cases, the
terminally ill were all locked within hellish, chain-link walls.
Sheikoh had survived on trash and handouts, constantly on the
lookout for danger, in the forms of fellow abandoned souls and
starving Purmynxs’. He had been too young to feel pity for the
creatures in his same position. Desperation had driven him from
corner to bloodstained corner.