GHOSTS

“Those too. Take them off,” the broad-shouldered warden barked. Enora leaned down and slid off both of her shoes, not breaking her furious stare with the woman’s jade-glowing implants. Proudly, Enora held the two cream-colored heels out from the tips of her fingers and mocked the warden with a smirk as she let them fall to the floor just out of the woman’s reach. The warden grunted angrily and snatched them up from the carpet. She rose with a hard straight lip, but Enora could see the anger behind it. With a whirl, the onyx-clad woman was rapping at the hotel room door. Enora spit at her feet, exaggerating every motion of it. Her warden stood at the door unfazed. It was barely open when she disappeared into the hall again. Part of her wanted to lash out at the door, to slam her fist against the plasteel and scream, but Enora restrained herself.

She sat down on the bare mattress and took in deep breaths to relax her nerves. The room was nearly emptied now that they had confiscated her shoes with their long heels. After she buried the fork they brought with her breakfast in the previous warden’s neck, they cleaned out the room of anything which wasn’t nailed down, save the bed. Now, she had to ask for everything. Her heavily armored guards brought her food and toiletries when she asked for them, but they would stand in the corner and watch her every move. With little halos where their eyes should be.

She ate rice with her hands while they watched her. She showered while they stood in the doorway. Their liquid black shapes hovered over her while she slept. The new warden would be back any moment and she would not leave until Enora needed to use the bathroom, or eat again. With nothing but the flickering, low-powered slipdress she had been wearing for days, she saw no more options in front of her.

Despite days of her screaming and defiance, the oyabun had refused to speak with her again. The last she saw of him was in the kitchen of this hotel. He stopped and spoke with a chef and his men, the Tower and a barrel-chested bald man, escorted her by force to the freight elevator. Forty-five stories up, they threw her into this penthouse and sealed the door.

Enora thought stabbing the guard would anger the old man into showing his face, but he never came. Only the armored woman appeared in his place.

With a calmer heartbeat, she walked to the windows. Outside, Uptown crawled and seethed, a delta of flickering lights flowing out like the roots of a tree in all directions. A satin black curtain was drawn over all of it and even way up here, the din and commotion of it all seemed to surround her. Through the thick floor-to-ceiling windows, the traffic and the nightlife’s heartbeat pounded. Enora wondered if Deck was somewhere below, scrambling to track her down, as exasperated as he sounded on the phone, or if Silas really had paid these Yakuza thugs protection money to keep her locked up like this. Her hand fell against the thick glass, and she stood there a moment, silently.

“Missus Carrow,” a solemn voice behind her said softly.

Enora turned around slowly, trying to cloak her surprise. Before her stood a shapely woman, clad head-to-heel in the same heavy plate armor as the rest of her captors, only in resplendent white, rather than the deep black of the others. Unlike the guards, this woman wore an odd helmet, which covered her eyes. It contoured widely over her skull and the nose angled, creating a visor over most of her face, not unlike a bird of prey’s sharp, hooked beak. As Enora wondered how the woman saw through the opaque visor, a mechanical seam shot up the middle of it in a straight line, spitting out a thin mist. The contiguous piece shifted into large halves which slid over the woman’s ears, revealing a soft pale face beneath.

The woman rubbed her eyes with a gloved white hand and blinked a few times. Her face was gaunt and stretched over hard cheekbones, her mouth, a faint shadow. She stepped toward Enora with the sway of a catwalk model, but there was something sinister in her black eyes.

“You have spilled blood in my house,” the woman said calmly as she approached. The soft tapping of gloved fingertips against the short sword at her hip punctuated each word she spoke as they crawled slowly to the grip. “This poses quite a problem,” the woman growled.

“Just let me speak to the oyabun, and we’ll sort this out,” Enora replied, repeating herself from earlier.

The woman in white stalked closer to her, slightly unseating the blade from its sheath with the tip of her thumb. Her almost sable face craned in nearer to Enora’s and she shrunk against the glass to escape the woman’s hot breath against her cheeks.

“I am the onna-oyabun and I am the only voice you will hear,” the woman said menacingly. “These men possess only the voices I have given them, and only the ears which I allow.” Her glowing, pearlescent eyes twitched as her hard glare darted back and forth over Enora’s face. All at once, the woman spun around, her hands held stately behind her, and asked, “Now, tell me why my son has stitches in his throat, when his hands — my hands — have brought no harm to you?”

Enora pressed away from the glass and straightened her sputtering dress. “You may call this a favor, or hospitality, but this is captivity, plain and obvious. And I am no longer of the belief that this isolation is for my benefit,” she said, coolly, trying to match the onna-oyabun’s intensity. “My husband would not keep me locked away like this.”

The woman in white quickly turned, bringing her blade a breath away from Enora’s neck before Enora even heard the metal hum through the air between them. Enora trembled but tried to keep herself still. The onna-oyabun stood firmly like a statue with the blade held out like an accusing finger.

“You are right, Missus Carrow. Your husband is not keeping you here,” the woman snarled. She inched forward and Enora nervously stepped backward, feeling the cold glass press against her fingers.

“W-who did, then?” Enora managed through a nervous stutter. The thin, mirrored blade glimmered with the milky reflection of the towers beyond the window, and Enora followed the glinting tip with her eyes as it came to rest against her skin. It felt like a hair pressing upon her throat.

She glimpsed a sketch of a smile in the woman in white’s lips as she almost whispered his name. “Roland,” the onna-oyabun said, sheathing her blade in the blink of an eye. “But, I am beginning to see his grave error in doing so.”

Air burst from Enora’s lungs as a brick-like fist smashed into her stomach. She gasped for air, which felt like swallowing fire, and her knees buckled. Collapsing to the floor, she doubled over and coughed violently, trying to catch her breath. The woman in the shimmering ivory armor stood over and chuckled to herself.

“Weak,” she muttered, just before a screeching, deafening, high-pitched pulse pierced through air. Enora’s hands shot over her ringing ears and she felt a scream flee her lungs when the air exploded into heavy wind all around her. From the corner of her frightened eye, Enora glimpsed a flurry of sharded glass rush away from the window and rain down onto the street below, glittering like snow in the midday light.

The pulsing stopped, and the onna-oyabun lowered her outstretched arm to her side. She lowered her gaze to Enora and the big, chunky visor slammed closed over her eyes. “This was a foolish agreement. Good bye, Missus Carrow,” she said, in an icy tone.

“No! Wait — ” Enora cried out as she tried to scramble upward. The woman in white’s sharply angled heel bit into Enora’s shoulder with an incomparable force. Enora tumbled backward her arms thrashing wildly to grasp at something. Her hand smacked hard into the onna-oyabun’s ankle and Enora tightened her grip as she pitched over the edge, tumbling through the spinning city.

The woman in white’s wailing scream was drowned out by the howling wind rushing past Enora’s ears. They spun wildly over one another and the onna-oyabun clawed at the air, trying to reach Enora. With a violent thud Enora felt resonate in her teeth and her skull, they crashed into a balcony floors below the penthouse in a crumpled heap.

Again, Enora’s ears rang with a piercing high-pitched squeal and she tried to stand, disoriented and dizzy. Pushing herself up from the tangle of limbs they had become on the concrete landing, a sharp, stabbing pain ripped through her shoulder when she put weight on her right arm. It gave out from beneath her and she collapsed on top of the woman in white’s body, crying out in agony. Shifting onto just her left arm, she saw the limp limb dangling at her right side, bloodied and unresponsive, pain bursting through it like a crackling blaze.

As Enora wobbled upright, the onna-oyabun stirred back to consciousness with a labored groan, coughing up a ribbon of sticky, scarlet blood which splattered across her now gouged and cracked white armor. The woman’s thick visor sputtered and split apart but only the right side jerked back away from her face. Her arms were spasming, belching out smoke and sparks as the woman tried futilely to move them. She shivered and struggled, but all of her limbs seemed to be unresponsive. Helplessly, the onna-oyabun stared at Enora with one quivering white eye, as more and more blood slowly crept from the cracks in her armor.

“Fool…ish,” the woman coughed out, blood filling her mouth.

Enora backed herself against the glass door, her insides still twisting against the fiery pain. “Fuck. You,” she managed between heaving, desperate breaths.

The woman’s lonely, frightened eye fell to the blade affixed to her hip and shot back to Enora with a solemn word.

“Hon-or.”

Enora nodded through the pain and fell to her bruised knees. With her good left arm, she gripped onto the short sword tightly and drew it from its sheath. It glinted radiantly in the bright sun. The onna-oyabun weakly tilted her head back to reveal her bare neck, inviting Enora’s mercy.

“Do. It,” were the last words the woman in the white armor spoke before Enora pierced her throat with the razor sharp blade all the way to the thin hilt. The onna-oyabun seized quickly still, and then fell limp all at once. Enora collapsed away from the dead woman, and struggled to catch her exasperated breath.

Her dead arm throbbed with a heavy, radial sensation. She could not tell if it was truly broken or if she had only dislocated it, but Enora knew she was not going to do much about it on her own. She knew she had to get out of the building and quickly. Struggling against sharp pains in every breath, she drew the short, flat sword from the woman in white’s neck and weakly pried open the sliding glass balcony door.

Inside, the suite was pristine and ivory white not unlike the penthouse where she had been held. A trail of black dirt and fresh blood followed her into the unoccupied room. She thought for a moment about cleaning herself off, but decided it made no difference and would only cost her precious time. Limping her way to the door, she carefully tucked the sharp sword under her good arm and clicked open the lock.

The hallway was eerily quiet, and as empty as the room. Across from her, the room was numbered 4107, and her door was emblazoned with the metal numbers 4104. Four floors. God.

A glowing elevator sign blinked at the end of the hall to her right. Thinking the difference between running and waiting meant dying on her feet or dying on her knees, Enora made a break for it.

Wincing against the hard thuds her heels sent throughout her body, she ungracefully galloped down the hallway, holding the sword down at her side. Even after taking the onna-oyabun’s life, she did not know if she could take another, let alone swing the blade if it came down to that. The dry burn of adrenaline filled her mouth and the hot pulse of energy surged through her veins as she rounded the corner to the elevator banks.

Frantically, she bounded for the buttons and smacked against the call panels until all of them glowed. As the whir and wind of the all four elevators crawling up filled her ears, Enora pinned herself against the wall to ensure she could see the other doors when they opened up, sword at the ready. The taste of copper laid heavy on her tongue and the almost fruity aroma of dried blood filled her nose. Her breath quickened and her heart pounded in anticipation.

Anxiously, her grip on the blade fidgeted and she tried to steady her hand after seeing how terribly it trembled. The rushing air of the rise elevator cars wooshed by and all four banks lit up and chimed, as the doors clunked and slid open. A swarm of hulking, muscular men in obsidian sleeksuits with shock rifles and stunsticks poured from the elevators and surrounded her before she could even move. Their weapons whined and arced to life around her in a brilliant aquamarine glow

The bloody blade clattered to the floor with a dull report and Enora’s legs gave out. She slid against the wall to the floor, with bitter tears at her eyes, furious, afraid, and bereft of hope all in the same breath. A sharp, defeated scream tore from her lungs and Enora collapsed into dead weight, drained of all the fight she had mustered in her attempted escape. One of the men approached her cautiously, kicking away the dead woman’s sword. He reached out a thick hand and tightly curled it beneath her armpit. His stunstick cracked and popped before her face, making her turn away. Two more men approached and took hold of her. When one snatched her up by the limp arm, she wailed out in pain before she was met with the shooting needles and painful seizures of their stunsticks.

Her teeth felt like they might explode and all of her nerves coiled and spasmed, then all at once, she was dizzyingly weak again, breathless and exhausted. All of this was somehow worse than her fall.

She floated between the men, her legs swaying inches above the floor as they crowded onto one of the elevators. Unable to lift her head, she watched the blood trickle down her pale, bare legs in a snaking trail from some unseen wound as she hovered there in what seemed like freefall.

Enora felt herself fading, slipping as a halo of darkness slowly descended upon her sight.

In hazy, indistinct waves, she felt the men drag her from the hotel and load her into a car. The monotonous rhythm of the ride made her drift in and out until she felt them stop and pull her back out again. Her useless arm still pulsed with sharp, stabbing pains but Enora was too weak to even register the pain as they carried her by the haunches.

Slowly, a dusty and bare concrete floor blinked into view beneath her swaying feet. The warmth of morning sunlight kissed her skin and a light and cool breeze gently reminded her of her open wounds. The scent of salt and sea filled her nose just a moment before they slipped beneath a wide, dark shadow.

Heavy footsteps thumped toward her and a familiar voice snarled just out of her field of view.

“What have you done to her, you worthless cunts?” it said.

The crackling charge of her captors’ stunsticks whirring to life stung her ears and the hot electric glow of their surface burned her eyes shut.

A clangor of metal slapping against metal echoed through the space around her and the men’s grips both tightened reflexively. The sharp spike of pain against her arm and ribcage forced an animal yelp from her lungs.

She struggled to lift her head and the voice across from her boomed once more.

“Lay her down gently and no one has to die!”

The stunsticks’ sputtering died away and she floated down to the cold dusty floor as though she were weightless. Shadows of the men who carried her slowly crept from view and Enora rolled to her side, taking pressure off her limp arm.

A hulking brown figure bounded into few as metal flopped against the floor. Dust stung her face and Silas’ blurred face hovered above. His large hands softly cradled her face and she smiled weakly, tears pooling at her cheeks.

“My love,” she managed in a whisper.

Their faces met and he kissed her deeply. The welcome sensation burned against her lips and the hot taste of blood filled her mouth once again.

Silas pulled away from her and ran his cool, steely fingers across her cheeks to wipe away her tears.

“My love,” he said, his lips quivering. As blackness crept over her again, she saw only one of his eyes shifting back and forth over her and nothing but emptiness and more emptiness beside it.