The city was overwhelmingly visual, vibrant even in its underlying decay. Sights pull eyes in every direction at the same time as they dull the senses. A spectacle as much as it’s a soul- distraction.

The deteriorating building facades are splashed with graffiti in begrudging attempts to hide the omnipresent trademarks of the private sector. On street poles, flyers for masquerading nightclubs are plastered right over torn orders calling for citizenry obedience.

The moon hides behind pollution-laden clouds, but nights have never been brighter. Glitzy neon signs flicker relentlessly, but they’re nowhere near as bright as the high rises over at the business district. The grinning faces of the corporate oligarchy greet the populace every hour of the day on the big screens to remind everyone who runs the city.

Back at eye level, faces in the nerve centre of the urban destitute are much more ambiguous, smiles hesitant and glances shifty.

Over the years, the market has expanded beyond its confines, stalls overflowing onto nearby streets. Everything else is the same, though. Vendors tout imported commodities and counterfeit goods from their kiosks. The smell of street food is so dizzying, one could taste the gutter oil-fried grub with just a passing whiff. Tarnished drones hover about, advertising call girl services in robotic voices.

The night market’s always been busiest at late hours, but it’s an overload of the senses, even for the desensitized regulars.

Sooyoung’s eyes are tired. Her entire body feels fatigued, but she hasn’t done anything. The note in her pocket, crumpling in her hand, is the only thing fueling her movements.

She expertly weaves through the patrons, careful to keep her hands to herself. Just a slight brushing against another and she might end up with a black eye again, courtesy of a metal fist.

She comes to a stop at the address scrawled on the dirty receipt. Through the open storefront, workers in bloodied white aprons, both human and automaton, bring down cleavers and haul rounds over their shoulders.

A feeling starts to pull her in the opposite direction, but Sooyoung decides to stuff the address back into her pocket.

Against her better judgement, she submits to the dampened ache in her chest and enters the shop, enticed by lingering memories of jet-black bangs framing a gentle face and thoughts of ‘I miss you’.

 

 

 

“The basement of a butcher shop, huh? You’re an organ trafficker now or what?”

Her quip falls on deaf ears.

Jinsoul’s workshop was a thing of wonder; a cluttered laboratory of regime-outlawed chemicals, meticulously crafted DIY ammunition, and rigged firearms.

Jinsoul herself was a thing of wonder; a chemist by education and a self-taught gunsmith by necessity, she was far more rugged than her delicate features let on. Even displeasured, she was pretty.

Sooyoung speaks up again, a mischievous glint in her eyes. “Did you call me because I’m your best shot?”

“No,” is the curt reply she gets, “you’re a last resort.”

“Well, at least I’m still on the list.” 

Jinsoul deflects Sooyoung's lazy smile with a hard stare. “Let me be clear. You’re only here because I had no other choice. And if you this up, my head’s getting sliced clean off my body.”

Sooyoung wonders, for a moment, if Jinsoul knows that she would throw herself under the guillotine at city square for her in a heartbeat. She was willing then and she's still just as willing now, if not more.

“Relax,” I would never let anything happen to you, “when have I ever missed?”

She can’t, not with the targeting scope they installed in her right eye.

Long time no see, Sooyoung wants to say, I hope you’ve been taking care of yourself.

But Jinsoul won’t even look her in the eye, so Sooyoung doesn’t dwell on her thoughts any longer.

“Who is it this time?” she asks instead, getting right into the nitty gritty. She wasn’t called here to reconnect.

Jinsoul pauses from transferring vials of clear liquid to slide a tablet towards Sooyoung. She smirks at the man on the screen, hair slicked back and a glint of red in his artificial eye.

“Councilman Wong’s slimy attorney? You lot are getting closer and closer to offing the executives.”

“You can’t kill him,” Jinsoul says.

“But that’s what I’m always asked to do.”

“Just take out his eye so it stops recording before you knock him out.”

Sooyoung rounds Jinsoul’s worktable, but keeps her distance, opting to watch the woman delicately fix up darts with hypodermic needles. Her gaze floats from Jinsoul’s nimble hands to her fixated expression. The line on her cheek used to glow like striking azurite whenever she was happy – a fluorescent cyan every time she laughed – but nowadays, the tattoo was perpetually a washed-out blue.

It takes everything in her to resist reaching over and tucking the loose strands of hair behind Jinsoul’s ear. Self-control and patience were Sooyoung’s greatest virtues, but right now, all she yearned for was to feel Jinsoul beneath her fingertips again.

“Don’t touch that,” Jinsoul suddenly warns, voice stern.  

Sooyoung retracts her hand immediately, not realising that they had been inching closer to the vials of solution on the table.

“What is this?”

“Your ammo.”

Sooyoung raises an eyebrow. These are not the lead bullets she was accustomed to.

“It’s a sedative,” Jinsoul curtly answers, “altaxetine and synthetic prepolac.”

Sooyoung may know jack about drug compounds, but she’s been force-fed commercial brand names all her life. One’s illegal, the other was recalled off shelves seven years ago after it was found out to contain nanotech that big pharma was using to track customer vitals.  

Together, they make for a notoriously elusive recreational drug. Void, as the junkies call it, after the vacant stares it induces.

Jinsoul, always astute (or maybe she’s still intimately attuned to Sooyoung’s idiosyncrasies), catches her skepticism. “And that’s why I’m secretly cooped up in the basement of a butcher shop.”

Sooyoung snickers. “Void kills.” Her parents are a testament to that.

“I’ve altered its composition to be non-lethal,” Jinsoul hums. Of course she did. Sooyoung has always believed Jinsoul was the brightest mind she knew.  

“You should just let me kill him. Councilman Wong gets away with letting people die of dehydration everyday ‘cuz of him,” Sooyoung grumbles.  

“Wicked as he is, he’s just doing what he’s being paid to do,” answers Jinsoul, sounding both reasonable and cold, “like everyone else under the payrolls of the heads of state. And you.”

Has she forgiven me?  Sooyoung desperately wonders. But in this day and age, optimism is nothing short of irrational. Will she ever?

“Glad you understand my line of work,” Sooyoung quips, even though Jinsoul despises her apathetic banter.

“It’s nothing honourable. All it takes is a good aim and being a greedy sleazebag.”

Sooyoung guffaws. “And yet you’re putting your life in my greedy sleazebag hands.”

“As if I had a choice,” Jinsoul mutters, unable to look at her, “it tortures me to have to put my trust in you…”

Sooyoung’s grin fades.

Jinsoul clears , as if to re-coat her words with steel. “Haseul just wants an interrogation. No more need to die. We don’t need to hurt any more people than we have to.”

When Jinsoul accidentally knocks over a couple of empty vials, Sooyoung instinctively helps gather them up. Their hands graze and Sooyoung freezes, but Jinsoul retracts just as quickly, not letting the contact linger any longer than a fraction of a second. Jinsoul finishes cleaning the mess by herself.

Sooyoung obscures her hurt with a listless laugh. “You can’t start a revolution by being a pacifist,” she muses, “why are you still trying to be one during these impossible times?”

Jinsoul has many, many admirable qualities that make her glow in Sooyoung’s jaded eyes. Even now, Sooyoung marvels.

“You're not one to understand what it’s like to try upholding morals, so don’t ask,” Jinsoul bluntly answers.

Whatever iron wall she was constructing, Jinsoul was determined to make it impassable. Sooyoung hates to pry where she’s unwanted, but it stings when it’s territory she was once so familiar with.

“Fine. Tranquilize the mucky lawyer and kidnap him. Aye-aye, captain.” All in a ty day’s work.  

“How much?”

You’re kicking me out already?

“Consider it on the house.”

Jinsoul ignores her. “How much?”

Sooyoung lets out a quiet sigh. “Twenty thousand.”

“You never charge that cheaply. How much?” she asks again.

For the first time since Sooyoung stepped foot in the workshop, Jinsoul looks at her. But her eyes are far from warm, chapped lips pulled into a slight grimace. Hard to believe Sooyoung once woke up to this face every morning.

Sooyoung smiles a little. “You’re the first client to barter for a higher price-”

“Stop trying to extend your time with me,” Jinsoul suddenly says, voice breaking, “I…I have work to do. You need to go.”

She shuts her eyes, as if looking at Sooyoung any longer physically pricked her. Her distant exterior fractures slightly.

Through the fissure, Sooyoung gazes. “Jinsoul...” 

She aches to embrace her, to touch her face and run her fingers through her hair, to kiss her knuckles, her forehead, her lips. To reach within. 

But she stays rooted to the spot because that’s what Jinsoul is telling her she wants. Sooyoung understands it from her closed fists, from the minute trembling of her shoulders, from the way her jaw tenses.

“Please, Sooyoung,” Jinsoul murmurs with finality.

The line on her cheek fades into a pale violet, but she turns her back before Sooyoung could dwell on the colour change, busying herself yet again on her worktable.

“50k,” she hears Jinsoul say, “you’ll find it in your account by tomorrow.”  

Sooyoung’s mouth opens and closes. Unheard words are a waste of breath. She heads for the stairs without so much as a goodbye, plunging back into the headache-inducing neon jungle of the world above.

She could only be glad the numbing bustle of the night market makes for a more effective anesthetic than anything Jinsoul could ever concoct.