“Interesting,” Yang Rong drawls. “What are you insinuating?”

“I am bribing you,” he responds. “Do you care for monetary compensation?”

A light chuckle. “Not quite.”

“Then, my next proposal. Much of the current weaponry manufactured by the Nexus is unsustainable and remains ineffective against higher level anomalies. A specialized unit such as yours, using cheap ammo to infiltrate tundra territory – I don’t have to stress how suicidal it is. Instead of guinea pig testing, there are… better-tested prototypes available outside of the common rifle.” Noah bites his lower lip – his fangs have retracted, thankfully, for now at least. “If I were to disclose the blueprints to their making, would it be an incentive to let me go?”

Yang Rong sounds interested. “You mean to say you have connections?”

“I mean to say I have ways of bargaining.”

“I won’t say your offer isn’t enticing.” Yang Rong is still holding onto his forearm, not allowing him to move away. In this position, Noah has both knees on the sides of Yang Rong’s left thigh, hovering over the man so he has a higher vantage point despite being several inches shorter. “But where will you go?”

“I will go back.”

“Go back where?” The colonel asks, tilting his head higher so his black bangs wouldn’t obscure his vision. He takes Noah’s arm and slides his fingers on the heavy gauze, watches as the younger man flinches imperceptibly, and then with a pensive expression, strokes the scars around it as well. Some are faint yet telling, and others are still pink and swelled. His skin is tens of incisions, old and new. “Noah, do you remember?”

He stills. It’s not easy to forget and he wishes he has selective memory, or better yet, convenient amnesia so he can rid himself of everything tragic. He remembers in snippets – say, an extinguished fireplace, a broken wheelchair, then the living room toppled under and the turmoil of it all. He has a sudden urge to vomit when he recalls several mutilated corpses and they were all children – limbs skewered, impaled in half.

“I don’t want to remember,” he whispers. He’s too frazzled to deal with all this else the aftermath will plague him with more regret and guilt.

“You are painstakingly soft-hearted. You hadn’t known the children for long, yet you remain so attached.” Yang Rong leans in and soothes his voice to match, “’Noah-gege,’ you should be more like that little boy. He lost his family and he hadn’t blinked an eye.”

“Where is…” Noah avoids eye contact. He focuses on the empty spot between their bodies and the dog tag peeking from the colonel’s shirt. “Where is Ming Tang?”

“Sleeping a few rooms over,” Yang Rong says. “The boy is preternaturally intelligent. Have you taught him?”

“He has always been gifted.”

“He strikes me as a particularly remorseless child,” the man says.

“Not ‘particularly.’ The city’s abandoned children have grown up in death. The conditions have made it so that even six-year-olds are versed in basic survival skills and weaponry. Naivety is not a common trait you find out here, Colonel.”

“Neither is sentimentality,” Yang Rong replies with a light smile. “Noah, how old are you?”

Noah wonders the implications behind that question. With a slight frown, he answers, “…Twenty-one years.”

“Where are you from?”

“Does it matter?”

Yang Rong unexpectedly wraps an arm around his bare waist. The direct contact makes him jolt in surprise. Instinctively, he tries to escape, but then a second later, a warm hand is kneading his tender back. He thinks it may be comfort that Yang Rong’s trying to go for. The man senses his stiffness, and he leans in to whisper, “Be good. Your eyes haven’t turned back. How about we have a nice chat to calm you down, hmm?”

He still looks frazzled and out of it – flushed cheeks, swollen lips, damp hair. A long shower would be preferable, but he feels some vulnerability in being seen like this. His appearance is unfamiliar, distasteful even to himself.

“…Oh,” he murmurs, before adding, hesitantly, “I… There is something in the backpack. It could help. Hypothetically.”

“Hypothetically?” Yang Rong carries two conversations at once. He starts with the more common questions then eases into personal territory. Interrogative, as per usual. “Noah, how long has it been since you’ve been infected?”

Noah only chooses to answer the first. “Mn. Hypothetically, it’s a benzodiazepine that should have passed animal trials. I won’t know the effectiveness until I test it.”

“You snuck into a cryobank to procure drugs. How daring.” As Yang Rong talks, he snakes one hand down the curve of his back and another up the side of his neck. The colonel lightly scratches behind Noah’s ears. It’s teasing, like he’s playing with a small animal, and the pure satisfaction on the man’s face is a little disturbing. “Are you sure you’re not a dealer from the slums, little kitten? We do get those once in a while.”

“I said I’m not a cat,” Noah replies darkly.

“Really?” His face glints of mischief. “I think you act as cute as one when I touch you here. Is my technique that amazing?”

“…”

“Don’t be shy. Your Rong-ge is good at—"

Noah resolutely knees him hard in the stomach and watches as the other man doubles over from the impact. While Yang Rong groans in the background, Noah himself is a little taken aback from how unnecessarily ripped the man is – cement instead of skin, rock-hard muscles that injure him in collateral.

“Do you eat metal?” he hisses, holding onto his knee to mitigate the pain.

“…How do you still have this much strength?” Yang Rong says with a sweatdrop on his face. “If you aimed any lower, there would be a great loss to humanity.”

Noah ignores him and gets up from his position, finally feeling the heat starting to subside. He shakily brushes his bangs out of his eyes, grimacing slightly from how damp and unpleasant it is to the touch. He grabs the nearest towel – the one draped on the edge of the bed – and just about rushes out the door.

“Noah,” the colonel calls out to him before he can leave. Noah turns back questioningly and looks even more confused as Yang Rong beckons him to come back over. “Come here.”

Noah raises a hand to rub at his sore eyes. “They’re still not…?”

Yang Rong, sitting on the edge of the bed, chuckles as he reaches over to him. His hand dips lower and lower, past Noah’s navel, down the pelvic line, and stops on his crotch. An agonizing second later, Yang Rong slowly zips up his pants back up. The man flashes him a smirk.

“The view isn’t bad at all, but we do have an underaged child with us now, don’t we?”

---

[50.7128 N, 76.1020 W]

A woman sits cross-legged by the counter, dyed in faded shades of amber and warm white. The oil lamp, scented, is propped neatly to the side. The environment is atmospheric and noiseless minus the small crackles of candlewick. The alcove is dark and dim, but she’s running shop here.

Around her are animals hanging on metal skewers, strange creatures stretched out and lined in a seemingly arbitrary order, pieces of meat cleaned and sliced for display. The beautiful woman of the butcher shop hums a soft melody as she ties up her hair into a ponytail. Her posture is prim and proper as is her attire – elegant blouse, woolen skirt, black tights and black heeled boots. Attached to her two garter belts are a small pistol, several knives and a mini comms device. Her blazer is handsomely draped across her shoulders. No creases nor folds.

A light jangle comes from the door. The person outside is struggling to push through, heaving and gasping with each step. Half a minute later and finally, a slovenly-dressed middle-aged man heads inside, dragging along a bloodied pig.

The woman gives him a pleasantly surprised look, her green-gray eyes crinkling up as she studies the catch. She props her chin up with one hand and greets him amicably, “Oh my! Bonsoir! I haven’t seen you before. It’s always interesting to see new faces.”

The man has trouble communicating. The wrinkles on his face are more pronounced when distressed, and he’s trying his hardest to convey to her in English what it is that he’s here for. Most of his teeth are gone from decay. He gestures toward the pig and stumbles over his words, his accent thick and heavy.

“P-Pig, I s-sell you.” He rubs his thumb and index together, signing ‘money,’ and then holds up two fingers. “Two…twenty. OK?”

The brunette strokes her chin and drones, “My good gentleman, the animal you’ve brought is not infected. It’s a rare catch worth ten times as much.”

“T-Ten?” He falters. “Ten not good. More m-money… five?”

With a small sigh, she gets up from her seat and walks over to him. Confident, poised – the young woman holds a presence that would capture gazes from a mile away. Her heels clack with each step and then she extends a hand to reach behind her back.

Immediately, the elder stiffens and pales with fright – a trained reaction – and he hastily waves out both hands, frantically ceding the bargain.

“Ten… I-I do ten, OK?”

A misunderstanding. Low literacy is common in the slums. This man hadn’t much of an English education before the radiation hit.

She’s confused for a second and then, when the realization settles in, she starts to chuckle lightly. She pulls out a wad of cash and places it gently on his palm. He holds it in shock, not quite registering what just happened. A thousand in hard cash – this much is extremely difficult to come by in the slums.

She smiles at him. “Consider it a special price for new customers, alright?”

The man hastily bows once, twice, thrice… before he’s shooed away. He closes the door politely after himself, and the brunette gets to work lugging the pig down the alcove and throwing it atop a wooden table. The setup of the chamber, despite being a little eerie to the regular passerby, is relatively neat. For a butcher, the area has little blood splatters on the floors or walls. It’s also very sanitary, what with the stacks of rubbing alcohol, ten plus disposable stations, excessive gloves, masks and goggles.

If the lighting were more fluorescent, this place would be more similar to a lab.

The hanging bells chime again, interrupting her just as she was about to perform a discectomy. She looks up, expecting the man to have double-backed. The people she sees on the other end, however, surprises her even more.

She takes off her gloves and walks over to greet them.

A group of military officers, all of them wearing the same dreary uniform, walk in with their snowclad boots. The rifles equipped on their gear don’t faze the woman one bit – she is used to dealing with army men, judging from the lackadaisical way she’s brushing back her hair, not faltering in her steps. She smiles, all teeth and pretty, the expression best suited for customer service.

“Wow,” she whistles upon seeing one of the men – dark irises, darker raven-black hair, stature tall and firm. He has a silver insignia on his chest. Four stars. “I do have the pleasure of meeting you here, General Xie. What brings you to this shabby place? I’m Allaire, one of the… hmm, shopkeepers would be an appropriate title.”

The man doesn’t seem interested in small talk. He places a large black bag on the table and tells her simply, “Everything you’ve procured.”

Allaire raises a clean brow. “Expectedly… the military’s intelligence network works fast. As it happens, we’ve only recently gotten ahold of some more peculiar species – have you ever heard of the prairie pigeon?”

“The last sightings of one were more than five decades ago.”

“We picked one up the other day – well, the tainted version of one, at least.” She beckons them over to the other side of the cove. “Come on in and have a look.”

Past the main reception is an open area with even dimmer copper-toned lights. In the large, one-hundred-meter section, tens of live creatures are confined in cages, all of them more than five feet apart, screeching and squeaking a hard-to-hear cacophony. Some soldiers stand cautiously by the entrance, guns armed, fully alert while the others are carrying the cages out the cave.

“Chéri!” Allaire raises her voice to call someone over. “Hyun, would you come help our esteemed guests load their inventory?”

A muffled affirmation comes from the near distance, some place hidden upstairs. While Allaire waits, she cordially shows off the anomalies they’d captured – a poisonous sea snake, a twin-headed lynx, a merge between parrot and crow – and then proceeds to entertain with lore.

“The radiation’s been hitting this area harder in the past year. The anomalies show very heterogenous traits – you might find them interesting when you dissect them a little,” she says with a wink. “Most of these you won’t find in other areas, or so I assume. Whether or not these will help in the Nexus’ research is beyond us.”

The general nods.

“Then… General Xie, a question if I may ask?” Allaire smiles at him.

“If it is appropriate.”

“How is the Nexus’ progress on human-anomaly hybrids?”

“The Nordak cryobank felled one week ago and along with it, an unrecoverable number of embryos,” the man replies. “The progress is nigh.”

Allaire blinks slowly. “Even the vault? I was certain there would be measures to prevent such a catastrophic downfall. Perhaps a screening process – the Nordak cryobank surely has automated screening systems?”

“Automated systems are in place unless there are signs of manual deactivation.” He shoots her a hard look. “The details are none of your concern.”

She laughs lightly. “So cold.”

A young man comes downstairs in the middle of the conversation. He’s dressed not as sleekly as Allaire, but still considerably classier than the average person of the slums. His chestnut-brown hair, slicked back, coordinates well with his clean dress shirt and pants. What stands out the most, however, is the black eyepatch on his left eye.

He raises an eyebrow upon seeing the so-called “guests” and murmurs something to Allaire in Korean. She chuckles and replies in his mother tongue as well, casting a secretive glance at the general of the army, who’s still pensively studying the captured creatures.

“Hyun, help them do some heavy-lifting.” She playfully slaps him on the back.

He sighs but does as she asks, going over to help transport the cages outside. Hyun is tall and quite muscular, able to lift a hundred kilograms without breaking a sweat. When working, he has on a stern expression and he doesn’t socialize with any of the soldiers around at all. In comparison to Allaire, he’s unfriendly and much more unapproachable.

He puts the last cage down by the entrance door. Without a word, he turns around and walks back the way he came from upstairs.

“Wait.”

The general suddenly calls out to him, holding the attention of everyone in the alcove.

Cold, dark eyes drill into Hyun, scrutinizing him as if going through every strand of his hair and every single pore on his face before stopping on the eyepatch. General Xie’s tone of voice is often hair-raising, intentionally or not, and it carries complete command and force. He holds the aura of the most elite alphas and it is such that he’s a person of incredibly high rank. Top-tier combat ability, incredible awareness – and not to mention he’d aged very well also, his handsome features still prominent in his fifties.

“What’s happened to your eye?”

Hyun says simply, “It is an old injury, not a recent infection if you have any misgivings.”

“The blood on your hand?”

There really is a speck of blood – a tiny dot by his knuckles, extremely easy to miss. Hyun takes a disinterested look at it and replies deadpan, “I run a butcher. I must’ve gotten it on myself. There are no external wounds – you can check.”

General Xie stares for a couple more seconds before nodding and walking away.

It’s not until the door closes completely, the wind chimes coming to a still, that the tension fades.

Hyun abruptly breaks character and slams his forehead onto the nearest wall. He braces his arms against the granite and wails out, loudly, “Holy crap! He’s so scary… Allaire…! Why did you ask me to help!!”

Allaire laughs sweetly and pats him consolingly on the back. She leans close to his ears and whispers affection in French, making him even more flustered and skittish. They’re quite the interesting duo. Outwardly, they’re both tall and pleasing to the eye, dapper and smart, but inwardly, while one is confident and queenlike, the other is a quivering ball of anxiety.

“It’s the first time you’ve seen that Xie fellow. What do you think?” Allaire says sweetly. “Does he live up to the rumors?”

“You called me down here so I can meet…” Hyun trails off and sighs dejectedly. “I can see why he’s so hated.”

“That aside, mon ours, why do you have blood on you?” Allaire takes ahold of his hand and gingerly smears the droplet. “You should be more careful.”

“I was feeding… It has been a while so… I didn’t notice.” He recalls the conversation with the general and his face pales again. “I wasn’t expecting—I mean, what kind of devil can see something this small? It’s literally needle-sized! Is he Satan himself?!”

“You should know how much experience he has,” Allaire tells him. “Haven’t you read the logs? He’s a first generation. General Xie has been in the force for more than three decades, the longest of any soldier ever alive. He’d survived multiple purges, soloed countless code red outbreaks, and he was the officiate of the Border Massacre.”

“I’ve seen the logs,” he mutters. “Studied his profile too.”

Allaire smiles at him. “And the resemblance?”

“Not one bit alike.”