“Thank you.”
Her entire lifetime, gone in an instant. The goblin boy’s diminutive weapon stuck in her neck, blood squirting out as she slumped down and fell onto him, seemed a particularly apt metaphor in this moment.
Throughout all her time traveling the Crossroads, hopping from job to job to killer job, Fennec Shand had never taken note of — or, perhaps, just never chosen to face — how small she actually was in the grand design of the cosmos. She’d lived here her whole life, hearing grandiose stories of Arbiters, watching superpowered womp rats duke it out in the skies, and avoiding the most dire of trouble. Now, as the last breaths she would ever breathe escaped her lips, she wondered for the very first time if her life had been worth anything at all.
Gone in an instant. In the next instant, it suddenly began rushing back.
She sucked air into her lungs faster than ever before, bolting upright and pushing herself off the gurney beneath her. She staggered through the medbay, vision — and mind — totally confused. She tried to brace on a nearby silver tray carrying scalpels and other hospital-type implements, but it slid out from beneath her grip and she careened towards the floor, smacking into it with a thwap.
“Fuck,” she muttered, one hand quickly rushing to nurse the side of her skull she’d just bashed against the floor. She blinked several times, the recovery room coming into focus, and the most bittersweet realization of her life began to set in.
“I’m alive?!”
How the fuck was that even possible? She rolled over, pushing herself off the ground and slowly rising to her feet. The hand cradling her skull slowly slid down to her cheek. She simultaneously couldn’t believe she wasn’t dead and frantically ran a catalog in the mind of different ways she could… well, make sure. In the end, she decided to pinch herself.
Ow, she took a step back, pain clearly radiating through the receptors in her cheek. She took a few steps around the room until her gaze finally landed on a mirror. Truly, Shand had never stared at herself for quite so long as she did now, but there she was — hair unbraided and caught rather uncharacteristically undressed, but for certain, alive. She took a moment to take a look at the clothes on her body — a black sports bra and matching particularly high-waisted trunks. The trunks, for their part, had a big logo emblazoned on the fabric.
“She’s awake.”
Fennec turned on her heel, instinctively reaching to her waist for a blaster that wasn’t there. She watched as an unfamiliar man leaned in the doorway, his eyes lingering just a little bit too long on her muscular body.
“Names first,” she snarked, “then you look.”
The purple-suited man chuckled, raising an eyebrow. “You’re already quite familiar with me,” he smirked, “and I’m all too familiar with you.”
Fennec’s shoulders relaxed. She’d never seen Karl Jak in person before, but the more he talked, the more the voice that had blared over her ankle collar for four days straight became unmistakable. So the Abyss wasn’t a dream.
“The man himself in the flesh,” Fennec nodded.
“In a manner of speaking,” Karl shrugged. “May I come in?”
Fennec didn’t speak, but simply gestured and moved to sit back on the gurney. Jak flounced into the room, unbuttoning his purple blazer, hiking up his pant legs, and taking a seat on a nearby rolling stool. Fennec had to admit — he was rather impressive-looking, in a way that her similarly wealthy clients just usually weren’t. Normally, beneath the veneer of fine clothes and plastic surgery, the rich ones reeked of capitalist slime and oozed the type of villainy that belonged in children’s films. Certainly, there were parts of the galaxy that would label Jak a villain, but the bounty hunter found he didn’t slide easily into that box.
An entrepreneur, yes. Perhaps a sociopath. But one that seemed all too interested in the problems of this galaxy — and, if rumors were true, in solving them.
“Getting revived for the first time can be a shock,” Karl said as his ass sat firmly down on the squeaky stool seat. “I figured someone should be here to help you make a soft landing, and who better to send than myself to do the job?”
“I’m flattered,” Fennec scoffed, leaning forward. “Looks like I’m good as new.”
“Largely,” Jak nodded. “You should know about… some adjustments, though.”
Fennec’s brow furrowed. Adjustments?
“Ms. Shand,” Karl Jak said, seeming just a bit… well, Fennec would’ve said nervous, except that she couldn’t imagine someone like him feeling any anxiety at all under any circumstances. “Do you remember the last… twenty-four hours or so? Of your time out there, in the wilderness of Cevanti?”
Fennec blinked. Of course she remembered — there was her curt separation from Demetri, Anders, Caustic, and Lilith; her tangle with that beast of a thing over the briefcase; she’d gotten the two stones, and then she’d taken them to —
Oh fuck.
She stood up, rushing to the other side of the room and placing herself in front of the mirror again. She reached up, and pulled down on her eyelids, searching for any redness or crimson tint that wasn’t normally a part of her cornea.
“No need for alarm, Ms. Shand,” Karl stood, holding out a hand and trying to caution her. “We’ve managed to remove all of the unmade corruption from your body.”
Fennec let out a deep sigh of relief, stepping back and leaning against the gurney. She supposed it only made sense — Karl Jak had been knee deep in unmaking research really since it had started. Beyond sending them to the Wastes of Cevanti, teeming with the creatures — a decision Fennec was beginning to think might’ve been intentional on the part of the CEO — they’d had whole swaths of artificially created unmade fighting in last year’s competition, hadn’t they? She knew what she’d seen on TV. Those motherfuckers had been ugly.
And now, she’d gone through it herself. The unmaking had crept in every pore, and even now, knowing it was gone, she still felt a little bit… off. She felt ever so slightly sick, so she grasped her stomach, trying to breathe through the nausea. That… was when she felt it.
Just above her hips, something felt different. She traced the lines beneath the fabric of her Syntech-issue undergarments. They didn’t feel like her lines — the muscles and bones she’d had before Dante’s Abyss. She reached up to the edge of the fabric and tucked a finger beneath, preparing to pull it down, when Karl Jak spoke up once again from behind her.
“The unmaking, Ms. Shand,” he whispered, standing inches behind her, “is… formidable. Our scientists saved every bit of you we could, but some things had already been eaten away. Some things were beyond rescue.”
Fennec turned the fabric down, watching with horror as her skin slowly stopped and the machines began. Metallic structures, wires, and more contraptions filled a pretty large swath of her abdomen, all the way around. She couldn’t stop focusing on the difference between the parts that were still her and the parts that were… something else entirely. Metal, cold, shiny in a way that she’d never even tried to be. She could feel her chest tightening just looking at it, so she let the fabric of her undergarments unfold back into place.
Karl remained just behind her. “A souvenir.”
Fennec’s scowl grew deeper. As she stood here, the Crossroads’ most effervescent businessman hovering inches behind her, she remembered what the poison of the Unmaking had done to her. Remembered that… voice echoing in her head.
Remembered the job she’d been hired to do. Go to Inverxe, the ice moon of Ioun, a celestial body she’d never dared to even cross into the space of before.
The master codebreaker must’ve paid for this. He must’ve been the one to ensure her survival, because Shand knew that men like Karl Jak — men who delighted in watching people like her fight and die and burn each other to the ground — wouldn’t keep her alive out of charity. No, she’d been kept here, she’d survived, because someone felt she remained useful.
“I assume your people know where I’d like to be dropped off,” she stated simply, turning to Karl Jak. The two were almost nose to nose.
“The blood moon awaits, m’lady,” he smiled.
Fennec’s lips curled into a smirk. Time to get to work.
