Anna In The Garden

22

22

Ken used her chopsticks to mix up the noodles, the sauce and the chicken with an absent mind. She and Kontessa had fallen into silence once the adrenalin rush died down. Sitting on the back rest of a chair, feet on the cushioned seat, she shovelled noodles into her mouth. Every so often, Ken leaned over, looking out of the window to keep her eye on anyone that lingered too long near the hidden fire escape. Fake rain pattered against the glass.

Keeping the illusion going took next to no effort at all. That pleased her. What worried her was that every time she fired up the cloak, it burned like hell in her head. While eating, she had tracked through the cloak's code, optimising in areas where she could. Whoever wrote the code was a genius, but sloppy. Given enough time, Ken could reduce the code down to a much more lean state, instead of the bloated mammoth of lines currently running through her mind and implant.

She watched as Kontessa ate her noodles with her legs bent, feet pressing up against her backside, slate leaning against her thighs. Her sister really did find this entire thing fascinating, despite where they were staying. She still continued reading through the data, trying her best to find this media that Ken had become obsessed about.

"Listen, about that guy, back in Allure's." Wiping her lips with the back of her hand, she spiked the chopsticks upright in the noodle box. "When you've lived here long enough, you get to recognise the signs. He would've ..."

"Don't worry about it." Looking up from her slate, Tessa gave Ken the tightest of smiles. Ken didn't buy it for a second, shaking her head as Tessa dropped her eyes back to the slate. "Besides, who doesn't want a fifteen year old murderer for a sister."

"What do you want me to say? That that was the first person I've killed? Yeah, nah. There's been lots. So many." She slid down from the back rest and landed on the seat of the chair, leaning in to Tessa. "Do you want me to say I won't do it again? Yeah, nah. That I'm sorry about it? That I regret it? Yeah, nah. He would've ripped us both in two for that slate and your bag. He didn't even know if it was worth anything. People down here take stuff and don't give a shit if someone else is holding it. This isn't Loki Sector, so you best get that passive aggressive shit out of your system, pretty damn pronto, or you can take a transport tube home, right now."

Kontessa fixed Ken with a wide-eyed, glare. Pursed lips held words back that Ken knew Tessa wanted to say. Lights from various advertising hoardings flashed into the room, wrapping them both in psychedelic bubbles of colour. Ken met Tessa's glare and returned it with a steady gaze of her own.

She didn't want Tessa to leave, at all, but she couldn't have her sister second guessing her all the time. She hadn't lied. Killing people, here in Goodfellow Sector, came as easy as breathing. Normal troopers, that is, not Trace: Sinister troopers, didn't care about people turning up dead, so long as life around the dead body wasn't disrupted too much. Ken had had her moments, lots of them. Caring about the lives she had taken stopped sometime after the third pair of pawing hands and fetid breath upon her face.

After a while, Tessa blinked several times, flicking her eyes back to her slate. Ken kind of understood her and kind of didn't. After escaping Allure's, Tessa had seemed fine. Mostly fine. Fine-ish. But, as soon as they began to relax in the apartment above Terra's noodle bar, it had given Kontessa time to reflect and what she reflected upon the most was Ken's knife digging into that mouth-breather's groin.

"I've been wondering." Throwing some media to Ken's implant, Tessa pointed at new bios for them both that she had written while eating. "This cloak. Is it moveable? Changeable? I mean, does it have to be a wall? An incredibly detailed and lifelike wall. Or, can it be something else? Say, faces? Is it location specific? Or user specific? You set it up so that anyone with an implant sees the wall, not what its hiding, but you can be, say, the other side of the district?"