REQUIEM - Low Life

1. The Storm Before the Calm

OCTOBER 2125

She could hear the rain, but she couldn't see it. The glass tinged at her touch and revealed a bit of the outside world before quickly reverting to its display. Raindrops and neon lights turned back to calm, abstract blobs floating in a black void. "Hey," Virgil whispered behind her. He was quiet and sneaky, so much so that that wasn't the first time he snuck up on Yasmin.

"Hey," she whispered back. "Don't give me a heart attack." She held his arms as he wrapped them around her before letting go. "I don't feel like I'm in Atlas when I'm in here."

"I want us to feel safe." Virgil waved his hand over the glass and Yasmin could see, behind the rain and lights, the smoke, and the darkness outside. "Nothing about that is safe."

"It still raised us. It's home," said Yasmin.

Virgil nodded in agreement. "We should stay in today. Lay low." He started walking away from her. "We did it."

She chuckled. "We did." She heard a sound coming from the front door of the flat and started walking towards it. "Virgil..." A sharp explosion blew her against the window and the door was gone.

Virgil counted four men entering the room through the smoke and he leapt at one. He was half naked and unprepared, but he couldn't afford to react any later. He caught the first housebreaker and tackled him into the wall before bashing his head twice. The second man tried to grab him, but Virgil slipped out and put him in a headlock before dragging him into the kitchen. Once he had knocked him out, he came out of the kitchen with a knife and tossed it perfectly at the third man as he was reaching for his gun, piercing his shoulder. He jumped on top of him and twisted the knife until his victim yielded. That was three down, and one to go. He looked up to see a familiar face.

The others had worn black, combat masks over their faces, but Hiro's face was there, clear as day for Virgil to see. He was holding a gun to Yasmin's head, after she'd just recollected herself. "Stop fighting, Virgil. You know what you did. You know how it goes. You didn't think you'd get away with it, did you?"

"She doesn't have anything to do with this," said Virgil as he stood up slowly. He knew how impulsive Hiro was and how easy it would be for him to just pull the trigger on Yasmin. He looked at her. "Close your eyes," he said. As soon as she did, there was a flash of blinding light followed by a darkness just as blinding emitted from the walls. He knocked Hiro down and pulled Yasmin into another room. "You need to get out of here, there's more of them coming. They're on the roof, take my car and stay low, under the altitude limit, okay?"

"Virgil, I'm not leaving you," said Yasmin.

"You have to." Virgil handed her an emergency pack from the side of the wall and showed her to a secret passage to get downstairs. "You know where the money is. Spend it wisely."

Virgil walked back into the main room when Yasmin was gone and was greeted by the butt of the gun to the side of the head. Hiro looked down on him after he knocked him down and pressed the skin behind his ear. "We got him."

-

The light in the room sputtered and blinked as Hiro woke Virgil. "Hey, we're here," he whispered. They were in an abandoned police station downtown and outside the rundown interrogation room, two men stood and spoke.

"That's the kid who stole from us?" one of them asked.

"Yeah," the other replied. "The money wasn't in his apartment, though. We're probably gonna have to rough him up a bit to find out where he stashed it."

"Baron," Benjamin Bentley said to his younger brother, "it's not about the money. You should know this now. It's about principle. You don't steal from the Bentleys. Don't rough him up. Kill him." He tugged on the sleeves of his suit jacket before walking away.