Half an hour and a few failed interactions later, Cassian and Sylvester had managed to convince a triad of other Shadowers to join them on their stock transportation expedition. All she had to do now was make up a decent excuse for why they were doing something so logically flawed.
The three Shadowers heaved the heaviest boxes up a set of stairs which lead out into one of Central Novus’ long-abandoned tube stations. Cassian had assigned herself and Sylvester the smaller, lighter boxes. She knew full well that she wouldn’t be able to rid of Sylvester with the powers he had, but if he was to find himself in a spot of bother it wouldn’t go amiss.
“Okay team,” she began, trying her hardest to sound enthusiastic, “we never used to transport stock like this, but the Shadow District’s sort of like a labyrinth these days, and time is money.”
“Wait, are we being paid for this?” Asked one of the Shadowers, a tattooed woman in a cropped red T-shirt.
Cassian thought for a moment, “Yeah, sure. Fifty novi to each of you for the favour. Sylvester here is just happy with a pile of books.”
He chuckled shyly, “They were just in such good condition.”
They reached the main entrance of the tube station, approaching the barred gate that had been installed as a precaution. Cassian began fiddling with a huge cluster of labelled keys, “Bit of a bookworm then, I presume?”
“Oh, most certainly,” he beamed, “Sometimes I’d spend full days in the library.”
“The librarian must’ve loved you,” another Shadower chimed in, a blonde, rather dapper looking woman in a long coat.
“Oh no the library was in our home,” he waved his hand dismissively.
Cassian scoffed, finally finding the correct key, “Pfft, home library? Knew you were a rich kid.”
Sylvester blushed green and shrank anxiously, “Ah, well-uh… it’s a tad complicated..”
“Alright then,” Cassian taunted, unlocking the gate and filtering the Shadowers out onto the street, “Be all mysterious Mr Lean Green Magic Machine.”
Sylvester rolled his eyes and passed her sheepishly, “So what’s the plan?”
“The plan…” Cassian began, stepping outside and slamming the gate shut behind them all, “Is to get these boxes to the culinary sector of the Shadow District. It’s a bastard to get to, hence why we’re up here instead. All we have to do is cross a coupl’a roads and shimmy through an alleyway or two.”
The Shadowers nodded in acknowledgement.
“And be quiet right? Purples react to disorder and noise, so we've just gotta be like one of them,” the Shadower in the red t-shirt said.
“Precisely,” Cassian clicked her fingers in agreement, box balanced precariously in her prosthetic arm, “No trippin’, shoutin’, droppin’ boxes yada yada yada. Think we can do that?”
“I should hope so,” Sylvester murmured, “I don’t particularly fancy a repeat of last night.”
Cassian couldn’t help but feel a little bad for the Siyseurlian, of all the people she could’ve ran into first, it had to be the kindest, most anxious of Ali’s friends. Why couldn’t it have been that Felix bloke?
“A'ight, you lot pootle along then, Sylvester and I will take the back,” she instructed.
One Shadower, the third one clad in a hooded army coat that fell to her knees, wrinkled her brow.
“Pootle along..?” She clearly hadn’t met Cassian and her peculiar lexicon before.
“That’s what I said, yeah,” she waved her hands at the Shadowers dismissively, “Go on, shift your bums.”
The group began carefully traversing the Novian upper streets. It'd admittedly been a while since Cassian had been on the city’s surface during the day, the aura was strangely utopian. The sun’s orange rays broke through the cloudless sky, bathing the city in warm light which mingled with the subtle purple shimmer that came off of the light strips in the pavement and turned the streets violet at night. Much of Novus’ architecture was boring and squarish, almost clinical. Combating this there was a clear insistence on incorporating natural features such as wall plants, waterfalls, trees and flowerbeds to offset the industrial feeling.
Halfway through the walk Cassian plucked up the courage to quietly talk with her green friend, “So… you’re complicated? Is that just a Siyseurlian euphemism for stinkin’-fuckin’-rich or am I mistaken?”
Sylvester seemed a little defeated, “I was wealthy. Exceedingly so. But I fled Siyseursiel around five years ago. I didn’t take any funds with me.”
“Huh…” Cassian chewed on her lip in thought, “But why? Sounds daft.”
“Yes. Being a ghastly blot of ink on an otherwise immaculate family record will make you do daft things,” he hugged the box closer to his chest.
“I’m assuming the rest of your family… aren’t green?” She figured now was likely the best time to ask.
The mention of it almost seemed to cheer him up, he chuckled softly, “Actually, my sister is too. But no, we weren’t born green. And it’s entirely my fault.”
“Did you eat too much broccoli?” She leaned towards him teasingly.
Sylvester stifled another giggle, “Heavens no, it was an alchemical accident. We were teenagers at the time, we wanted green eyes, see? We’d always loved them. Our resident alchemist gave us a spell to achieve this but… I recited it wrong.”
“Well… you did get green eyes,” Cassian shrugged, trying to make light of the situation for him.
“Yes, and green everything else.”
Cassian’s eyes made an attempt to jump out of her skull, “Everything else?”
Sylvester tutted and gave her a disapproving sideways glance, “Now now, we’ve only just met.”
She grinned to herself, partially glad the two of them were getting along so well, it would certainly make her job easier in some aspects. There was only one drawback to this operation that concerned her, and that was the searing pain she continued to feel in her knee.
This entire walk she’d tried hard to feign normality, forcing her feet to move routinely, enduring the sting that came with every movement of her left leg. She wasn’t sure she could do it anymore, but that was alright, because it gave her a reason to mess everything up.
Giving into the weakness in her joints, she let her leg crumple under the strain and went tumbling to the ground, letting go of the box in her arms and watching as it flew across the street, directly hitting a Purple in the back. She hit the ground with a thud and something somewhere in her body went crack; she wasn't entirely sure what.
“OW!” She squawked, gripping the ground with her now-bloodied fingers. Sylvester and Shadowers spun to her attention.
“Cassian!” He called out, snapping a hand to his mouth upon realising his volume. He peered around him and quickly realised that the surrounding Purples were already approaching the group.
The Shadowers slowly backed into one another and exchanged fearful glances.
The woman in the red t-shirt threw her box in the air, “FUCK THIS, I’M OUT!”
She bolted down the street away from the commotion, drawing a horde of Purples along with her. The other two followed closely after her, leaving Sylvester and Cassian alone in the middle of the road. The eldrin reached over and helped the Deputy up.
“We should go,” she huffed as she stood up, still taken out by the fall.
“No,” Sylvester shook his head, “My days of standing idly by are over.”
Cassian wasn’t entirely sure she knew what he meant, “Sorry?”
He pulled up the sleeve of his coat to reveal a wristwatch with a glowing green clock face, be swiped his fingers across it and the same shifting sand that Cassian was familiar with began to shimmer in his hand, this time coloured green. She watched as a pointed staff, almost as tall as him appeared in his hand.
“He made you one too?” She gasped.
Sylvester smirked, his physicality beginning to phase away, “Isn’t it wonderful?”
He disappeared in a flurry of glitches. Cassian cautiously clicked the ring on her finger, bringing out her gun.
“You still there Sylvester?” She called into the air, firing her gun at a Purple who was getting slightly too close for comfort.
Sylvester’s head and shoulders appeared out of nowhere next to her, “Why I wouldn’t just leave you, dear!”
She jumped and squealed, “Please don’t do that again!"
Sylvester chuckled mischievously and disappeared once more, this time reappearing next to a cluster of Purples and swishing his staff at them, casting out a cone of glitching light that instantaneously drained them of all colour and youth and sent them to the floor.
“Bit mean, isn't it?” Cassian watched his attacks with concern as she spun around, stunning another overenthusiastic assailant.
“They’ll go back to the way they were, worry not,” he assured, doing the same again to another man. This time he gargled and shrieked as his form collapsed in upon itself. Cassian grimaced, it was borderline gruesome, honestly.
“Nah mate, you’ve got a mean streak,” she insisted, smacking another person across the face with her handgun, “but then again, who am I to talk?”
Sylvester turned back to her, a hint of urgency in his tone, “You do realise I’m buying you a head start getting away from all this?”
Cassian blinked perplexedly, she hadn’t expected for him to put himself first, but it wasn’t dissimilar to his selfless acts the night before, “You sure?”
“Certain! Now go! Godspeed!” He called.
Reluctantly, she ran away from him and the commotion, several Purples following eagerly behind her. Part of her hoped he’d be able to make it back okay, she almost felt guilty leaving him in the fray alone. Her father’s words echoed in her mind: maybe she had gone soft?
Darting down the street she shot wildly at the oncoming Purples as she sprinted.
She rounded a corner into a familiar alleyway, one with a short wall halfway down that created a dead end. Her knee screamed at her as she ran, a sharp pain striking up her thigh as she lifted her legs and jumped up onto a wheelie bin propped against the wall. Ignoring the agony she reached up and caught the top of the wall with her prosthetic arm, hauling her body up over it.
As her feet scrambled to push her further up, she heard a voice cry out from the bottom of the alleyway “CASS! WAIT FOR ME!”
She turned back slowly to see the blonde, long-coated Shadower from earlier had somehow ended up running the same way, another crowd of Purples chasing her. There was no way she’d be able to scale the wall the same way Cassian had done; she’d run into her doom.
“QUICK! PUT A HAND OUT!” The Shadower called.
And Cassian did.
She put her prosthetic hand out, gun at the ready, and pulled the trigger.
A bolt of light shot out and hit the Shadower in the chest, sending her flying backwards into the crowd of Purples.
Now sat at the top of the wall, Cassian watched as the Shadower came to, hanging in the arms of four different Purples, who gripped her coat so tight they looked as though they’d rip it to shreds. The Shadower fought against them but it was no use. Four versus one was never going to be a fair fight.
“No no no, Cassian, please!” The Shadower wailed, dragging her feet against the gravel as the Purples dragged her away, “Don’t do this!”
That was it, she’d be dragged to a Xytosystem Store and would likely be a Purple within the hour, along with the other two who Cassian presumed would fall at the final hurdle; she did, after all, have the only set of keys to most of the Shadow District’s entrances.
Cassian’s eyes glazed over as she watched the scene play out, she murmured beneath her breath as if possessed by her thoughts, “Nobody’s got your back.”
In a frenzy the Shadower cried out, “YOU’RE CRAZY CASSIAN! WE TRUSTED YOU!” And her final holler hit the markswoman harder than it probably should’ve, “YOU’RE A TRAITOR!”
She gazed down at the ground below and saw how several Purples still grappled at the wall, trying to get up so they could grab her too, she mumbled again, “Nobody to lose…”
Preparing herself for the pain of it, she slipped off the wall and dropped down to the ground on the other side into a new, Purple-free back alley. She snarled and shoved her sleeve into her mouth and soften the cry as the burning static sensation shot all the way up and down her leg, it seemed the damage was only getting worse.
“Fuckin’ hell,” she cursed, wiping a stray tear from her cheek. In the corner of her eye she could see the familiar green light again.
“Oh thank goodness,” Sylvester sighed as he appeared, sinking down to his knees to match her height. He put a hand beneath her chin and lifted her face, “you made it.”
Cassian nodded quietly, her knee still burning. She noticed how the green veins had returned to his face, this time it seemed as though the darkness had spread into the whites of his eyes. He appeared almost demonic, it was hard to look at him for too long.
“Did any of the others?” He asked cautiously, his voice weak and breathless.
Cassian shook her head and feigned a sad sigh, “Didn’t see anyone.”
Sylvester took a long deep breath through his nose, which quickly turned into a guttural cough, he turned away from her and continued hacking.
“Sylvester, are you… alright?” She crawled towards him. A splat of dark green blood landed on the ground in front of him. He took a deep breath and sat back up straight, running his hands through his long black hair.
“Not especially,” he said, wiping the blood from his lip, “but let’s worry about that when we get inside, yes?”
He slowly stood, wobbling once he reached his feet and extended an arm to Cassian, who hauled herself up unsteadily. Arms over one another’s shoulders they dragged themselves to the nearby Shadow District door, Sylvester asking motherly questions about Cassian’s weak knee the entire way there—it was only ten or so metres away.
“What a failure,” he moaned, watching as she tinkered with her set of keys to get the door open. He was wrong though. To Cassian, it was anything but a failure. “Don’t feel you have to let me have those books, it’d be a bit tasteless.”
“Oh no, seriously take ‘em,” she insisted, “You saved my life. Again.”
The two of them began slowly descending the stairs, Cassian’s leg almost falling apart with every step, Sylvester got to the point of practically holding her up.
“Sorry about all this, mate,” she said, “Been pretty useless lately.”
“Not to worry,” he replied reassuringly, “I’m just glad I could be helpful to you.”
And helpful he had been, but not in the way he’d probably intended.
Cassian grinned cunningly under the cover of her fringe.
This really had been a great success.
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