Knight Page 2

  Taz just stared at her, and Liari could feel the pity in xer stare. On the pad, a newscaster droned on about current events, filling the silence.

  “—into the deaths of prominent council members L’Horish’nu uk’Reyvin and Vire Ultik is ongoing. Police suspect the serial killer known as Knight to be behind the deaths, though no direct link has of yet been established.”

  Liari’s ears pricked. “What are you watching?”

  “Evening news. They think Knight’s back on the prowl.” Taz handed the pad to her. Liari paused the video and scrolled through the story feed, drinking it in.

  Liari smiled despite herself. “Knight's the only one doing any good on this planet. I hope they're back.”

  Taz made a face. “I think there are ways to get your point across without violently murdering those who oppose you.”

  Liari waved xer off. “Knight’s not Lhiyrra. They are just going after the people responsible for putting Lhiyrra in power. The people they kill deserve to die.”

  Taz huffed. “Whatever you say, Liari. I say it’s sick.”

  The sour feeling returned to Liari’s stomach. She stood abruptly, tossing the pad onto Taz’s lap. The equina made a face.

  "I know you're angry, but don't take it out on me."

  "Maybe I'm angry at you, too."

  "What? Because I said killing people is wrong?"

  "They aren't just people, Taz," Liari said. "They're the ones who put us in this mess. We shouldn't be down here, just scrounging to get by, and we wouldn't be if it weren't for people like Vire and Hori. They've got more blood on their hands than Knight." The avian made to storm out of the room but cursed loudly when her leg connected with the wall. She glanced down at her knee. The blow had dislodged three of her patellar scales. Blood welled from the pits where they’d been torn off. Taz went from irritated to concerned in an instant.

  “Are you okay?” xe jumped off the couch and trotted to the kitchen, where the first aid kit was kept.

  “Don’t worry about it, Taz,” Liari grumbled. She placed her hand over the small wound; Luminance seeped from her fingertips deep into the injured tissues. They knit together before her eyes. When she looked up, she saw Taz staring at her disapprovingly. Xe also hated it when she healed herself.

  “What?”

  “You know what happens when members of the public use Luminance.”

  “I’d just change my identity again. Nothing we haven’t done before.” Liari straightened and stretched her healed leg. The scales would take time to regrow, but the bleeding had stopped and left not a scar behind.

  “You know it’s not that simple. The Hegemony doesn’t—”

  “I know!” Liari shouted suddenly. The day had gotten to her. All the anger and helplessness tumbled out of her at once, and she stood across from Taz, panting hard. “I know what they do to people like me, Taz! I know a thousand times over. And I can’t do anything about it. No one but Knight is doing anything.”

  Taz sighed. “Liari…”

  “No,” Liari snarled, brushing away the angry tears that pricked the corners of her eyes. “I don’t want to hear it.” She strode out of the kitchen and disappeared into her room, reappearing with a stuffed black duffel bag.

  “Where are you going?” xe asked. Liari crossed the common room to the flat’s front door.

  “I just need to clear my head. I’ll be back later.” The door creaked when she flung it open.

  “Didn’t you just hear the news? Knight’s out there. It’s dangerous when the sun goes down.”

  “Knight’s got no fight with me. I’ll be fine, Taz.” Liari sighed. “I’ll be fine.” And she was gone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Arlei Maron was one of the biggest tycoons in Roirse. He was hailed as a self-made billionaire, clawing his way to the top using nothing but his own charisma and intelligence. In interviews the gold-scaled avian claimed to be the classic underdog story and regaled hopeful business moguls with advice on how to get them to where he was. It was all a lie, of course, as seven years ago he had been nothing but a thrice failed businessman. He’d played the markets and failed, leaving him bankrupt with nothing to his name but the hulking skeletons of high-rise buildings that would never be finished. A loser in and out—that is, until he met Lhiyrra.

  Lhiyrra, the self-proclaimed Heir to the Cradle, had needed supporters in his early days. Ivet was still popular among the masses. Xer stance on humans was controversial, but no one could argue that xe had turned around a society that had struggled under the threat of starless sickness for decades. It was xe who had posited the Light Up the Cradle initiative, in which immune lamps were installed in every major city across the Cradle. It was xe who had managed to still riots on the resource worlds between humans and the local populace, leading to a significant decrease in casualties. It was xe who had brought peace, however tentative, to the Cradle during the tumultuous later years of the human’s resettlement. Xe was not easily overthrown.

  Arlei had been one of the first Hegemonists, pledging his loyalty to Lhiyrra early on in exchange for aid in paying off his debts. It was a gamble. Had his impiety and treason been discovered, exile to one of the prison asteroids was incredibly likely. Death was almost certain. But it had been a gamble that paid off in the end. When the newest Heir, Edaui, was announced to be no better than a stub, Arlei and the rest of Lhiyrra’s loyalists were able to make their move. The coup was successful, Lhiyrra ascended the throne, and Arlei received the biggest payoff of his life.

  The skeletal high rises had been transformed into the most luxurious condos and office buildings in the sector, drawing in business despite the violent power grab. He wanted for nothing, and his tastes tended to run expensive…and young. Arlei had gone from a nobody drowning in debt to the second richest being on Valiant almost overnight. And not only that, but he also had the new Heir’s ear. The coup had benefited him very much indeed. But Arlei’s luck was just about to run out.

  Liari crouched on the metal supports criss-crossing beneath the walkways, her macroscopes trained on the pompous avian. He exited a luxury speeder fifty levels above the Lampless district, dressed in the finest ilhuei money could buy, surrounded by quivering yes-men and equally pompous politicians. Arlei said something that she couldn’t make out and the group erupted in laughter. Liari wondered just how funny Arlei’s actual comment had been.

  He was a prime target, one of Lhiyrra’s inner circle. A perfect example of the kind of selfish, immoral scum the so-called Heir kept as company. Arlei would not be easy to get to, but if Liari successfully pulled off the hit, it would hurt the levian Heir more than her past targets. And after the day she’d had, she needed a victory. Arlei was worth the risk.

  She watched him through the macros until he vanished inside one of his high rises, and then she slipped off her perch and descended carefully through the walkways. When you didn’t have wings in a city designed for flight, you learned other ways to get around. Taz had taught her how to climb at an early age, and she’d honed her skills over the past years. Necessity demanded it.

  Liari leapt from one support strut to the next, swinging off of lamp poles and scaling the canyon one level at a time. No one could see her move so stealthily through the underbelly of the city, and so no one paid her any mind. That was another bit of irony in all of this. Taz would be disgusted to hear xer teachings were being used for such a purpose.

  Eventually she reached the level of Arlei's penthouse, the last three floors of his most recently built tower. Up here, just a few dozen feet from the lip of the canyon, there were no support struts or lamps. She clung directly to the rock face, the rough scales on her hands and feet giving her traction. Liari wedged herself into one of the canyon's deeper crevasses and brought her macros to her eyes again. She had a direct line of sight into Arlei's home.

  The mogul's entourage had followed him. At present they were standing in his great room, sipping wine. There was more laughter, silent to Liari. The girl glanced at the
chrono on her wrist and noted the time: nearly midnight.

  This was how the feared Knight operated. She watched her victims for days, sometimes months, learning their every move. Her greatest strength was the ability to hide where few shadows existed. When the situation called for it, she climbed. But more often than not she simply trailed her intended victim, unnoticed. Stubs were worthless, and therefore invisible. No one was the wiser.

  By two in the morning, Arlei's friends had left and he’d retired to his quarters. Liari marked the time.

  Days passed in a similar fashion. Each day, by the time Liari rose, Taz had already left for work. This gave her plenty of time to prepare. She’d drag the dark duffel bag from underneath her mattress and set out, leaping across the struts that held the city together. The immune lamps cast minimal shadows on purpose, but she found the shadows all the same, clinging to them as water clings to glass.

  She followed Arlei, from his high rise to his meetings around the city, to his outings at night and back to his room. She made note of the little things—how he never flew anywhere himself, but instead chose to be driven by air speeder—a PneumoTek 611, one of the most expensive on the market. How the yes-men about him changed daily—never human, of course, but always a different group. She noted the security on his penthouse. It was covered in cameras and biometric scanners, but it was out of earshot of his neighbors and far from the city center.

  She returned home at night not long after Taz, who gave her long glances but never questioned her whereabouts. Liari would download her latest intel on her own personal pad, careful to keep its screen from Taz. They spoke little. Taz had walked on eggshells around her since her abrupt exit the day of her failed Academy interview, and Liari was too caught up in her task to care much for conversation. But on the sixth day, she broke her silence.

  “Do you know anything about the PneumoTek 611?” she asked. She sat at her desk, cluttered with assorted glassware and lab notes, in the flat’s common area. They couldn’t afford state-of-the-art equipment, and her lab setup was very haphazard. Between the ancient equipment and the improperly stored containers of volatile reagents, it violated a number of safety codes that Taz reminded her of constantly. Xe had learned to live with it. Xe, however, had not learned to live with silence—it did not wear well on xer. At present, Taz sat stiffly on the couch. Xe looked relieved when Liari finally spoke.

  “I know it’s expensive,” Taz offered. “And really fast. Why?”

  “No reason,” Liari said. Taz wasn’t convinced.

  “Looking into buying one?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Now Taz was interested. “What are you up to?”

  Liari wondered how much she could say without setting her friend off. “How exactly would one go about starting it without the right fingerscale prints?”

  “No,” Taz said, almost cutting Liari off. And then xe repeated, “No.”

  Liari made an irritated noise. “This is all hypothetical, Taz.”

  “Really? You aren’t planning grand theft speeder over there?”

  “You told me not to draw attention to myself. Hot-wiring a speeder and taking it for a joyride is exactly the opposite.”

  “Then why do you need to know?”

  "Just curious,” Liari lied. Taz gave her a look that said xe clearly wasn’t buying it. A pause stretched between them, each staring at the other. Perhaps it was that the silence was too much for the equina. Perhaps Taz simply didn’t want to push Liari away again. But finally, the equina sighed and relented.

  “Every speeder has a panel under the steering column. Behind this panel are wires leading from the ignition to the engine. If you strip the battery wire of its insulation, you can touch this to the exposed starter wire and start the engine. You can also shock yourself and die,” Taz said bluntly. Liari jotted the notes down on her pad.

  “How do I know which wire is the battery wire?”

  “It’s green. It’s always green,” Taz said. That was easy enough to remember. Taz leaned over, craning xer neck to see what was written on the pad. Liari hugged it close to her chest.

  “It's just what you've been saying, that's all,” she assured the equina. Taz’s mouth twisted wryly.

  “Sure it is,” xe said. It was a safe bet that the equina would be watching her very closely for the next few days. But it mattered little. She had what she wanted; she knew how to activate Arlei’s speeder.

  Planning her hit went smoother from there on out. While Taz slept that night, Liari crept into the common room. The lights were lit; in fact, they were never off. They had to keep the sickness at bay. She sat down at her workbench and slid a well-used lab notebook from one of the drawers beneath it, flipping to a dog-eared page that housed a familiar recipe from an old friend. The formula for an industrial-strength tranquilizer had no name, and only someone with a background like Liari’s knew what the finished compound would even do.

  She set to work, measuring this and stirring that, gently heating the mixture over an open flame as she stirred it. The deep gold liquid grew pale and translucent until no color remained. The last piece of the hit fell into place. Liari lifted the vial of tranquilizer to eye level, peering through the clear liquid at the distorted form of her apartment.

  It was time.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The very next night, when the sun set and the Lampless district was plunged into darkness, Liari became someone else. Names stuck to her about as well as a starship stuck to glue; that is, not at all. She didn’t have the luxury of keeping a name too long. She was always found out, forcing an identity change and a hasty move to a new location. Knight, however, was an enigma. A name was one of the few things Knight had, and Liari clung tightly to this side of her. She needed something constant in her life. Knight had been that constant since she could remember.

  Liari wasn’t sure when Knight first took shape. It was after she and Taz had returned to Valiant, she knew. Sometime after her twelfth birthday, when she’d come home and claimed the city’s infrastructure as her own, when she’d been desperate for something—anything—to change for the better. Lhiyrra and his supporters had gotten away with murder. It was time to end their reign, before they did any more damage.

  Liari dug into her duffel bag and pulled out a folded package of wire rods and silicon membranes. Dean Novai had been wrong in assuming Liari didn't have prosthetics. She just didn't wear them all the time. These were not, however, the most expensive money could buy, and though they looked realistic from a distance, up close the seam where her stubs met the shaft of the fake wings was quite visible. It mattered little. The only thing she had to fool were cameras.

  With her wings in place, Liari removed a jar filled with pale blue scale paint from the depths of the bag. Then, she carefully ran it across the scales on her arms and and legs and chest, completely obscuring their emerald green. She did the same to the mask across her eyes. Liari donned the fine ilhuei she’d bought for the Academy. It would serve a purpose after all, even if it wasn’t what she’d initially planned.

  Under the cover of night, Knight slipped away.

  She’d watched Arlei for a little over a month. It was a rushed time frame to complete a hit, but this had been an especially trying month for her. Liari needed a win. Arlei was scheduled to be at a publicity event that evening. A gala of some sort. What it was drawing in funds for, Liari had no idea. She cared little. She wouldn’t be there long.

  The event was winding down when she arrived. The immune lamps at the event were cranked up to their highest setting, bathing the upper levels of Roirse in brilliant white light. The Hegemony's elite mingled on the platforms outside the Temple district event center, laughing, talking about the latest events in their worthless, stolen lives. Liari hated them all. She worked her way through the crowd and tugged subconsciously at the wrap around her neck, unnoticed for the most part. She was just another well-dressed avian amongst the brass. No one seemed to see her wings were not real.

>   Liari found Arlei hanging at the fringes of the crowd with his usual entourage, possibly preparing to leave. She had arrived just in time.

  “Looking for some company, stranger?” Liari said, sidling up to Arlei. The gold-scaled avian looked her up and down, his eyes hesitating for a moment on the seam where her prosthetics attached. She knew exactly what he was thinking.

  Stubs were the unfortunate product of either three things: birth, accident, or criminal activity. The former two were automatically assumed to be the latter. And a pretty young stub at a gala, well. There was only one reason for her to be there.

  “You’re a little young, for my tastes. What are you, ten?”

  “I’m an adult if anyone asks,” Liari purred, touching Arlei’s arm. The avian’s companions hollered.

  “She’s old enough!” one of them said, sending up a round of laughter.

  “I’ll take her if you don’t!” another shouted.

  Arlei smiled, mouth tight. “Thanks, but I’m not interested.” His body told a different story. “I’ve got important business to attend to.” Liari stepped closer, running her hand up his arm.

  “Are you sure I can’t interest you in a little fun?” she looked from the man’s thin lips to his hungry gaze. He exhaled, and his eyes traveled longingly down her body.

  “Come now. All work and no play?” Liari tsked. “Where’s the fun in that?”