“This is what I mean!” Devin cried out as her hoverbike ripped out further ahead. “You clam up and clench the whole time we’re at the Skyport, then you go wild out here!” Deidra turned back over her shoulder to answer, which mortified her friend. All he could see was the hill quickly cresting. But Deidra had taken this jump every day since they docked here. She knew the height and distance in her bones.
“The moors never hit you, or called me property!” Deidra shouted through the mist. Three… two… she counted down in her mind. Her face snapped forward. Deidra drove both heels back into the throttle. Her hoverbike turbines surged. Every exposed piston pumped with an audible click. Gears spun triple time inside its engine. The mist thickened until the hill vanished beneath her.
/> It folded away all at once. Deidra burst from the clay cloud, over a two-hundred-foot wide canyon. Its black depths called her, but she wouldn’t answer. Deidra let her head back, shoulders relaxed despite every instinct to tense up. She let the wind caress her the way human arms never had. Devin would take the bridge below, and he’d miss it all. The crisp gusts. The folding, furling clouds of lunar dust. The vacant fields and peaks of stone sprawled out below. Another mile away, visible from only so high, was a single building. It’s neon lights were a lone beacon in the endless gray. Sure, Devin would find it just fine with the tracker built into his hoverbike, but he wouldn’t see this. The Forge glowed like a torch for shackled and wayward souls alike.
Deidra grinned, pulled up on her guide-bars, and enjoyed the rest of her ride down.
“Ah-ah-ah! What is this, your first night? Boots off before you step in!” Clarabelle screeched at the crack of the door. Devin froze with his foot up to step in. He retreated, half-deflated in a sigh. Deidra laughed her way past him in her “atmosocks”. The only thing left, after an acid-bath! Their most recent, ridiculous, ad in the Olympia broadcasting boasted. She beat her friend inside by seconds but had to wait for him to switch off her collar.
“It’s our sixteenth, actually,” Devin corrected while he wrestled with his second boot, just outside the door. He plopped it down on the magnetic mat outside the door. “Which is what makes it so easy to forget, after a long day.”
“Forget simple things like that, and you don’t stand a chance,” said Clarabelle. Deidra tilted her head to her. Behind the high, rich wooden bar, Clarabelle scowled at Devin. Her hair pulled back in a flawless ponytail, her dark but kind eyes burned into him through stress lines on her cheeks and forehead. Her cruel-to-be-kind balance seemed more on the cruel end today; Deidra wondered why for all of four seconds. Then Clarabelle flipped the switch beneath the bar to remotely slam the door. It locked automatically. “Get in already, would you? We’ve got tables that need anchoring and soup that needs spicing.”
“Yes ma’am,” Deidra and Devin said at once. Both reached up for the solid gold collars around their throats. The click of a button dispelled the invisible atmospheric field they projected around the wearers. Unlike others who wore variants of the device around Greymoor, Deidra and Devin weren’t able to remove their collars, even when unneeded. The Gold Standard rarely let their dogs off-leash, after all.
“The anchors are on the left side of the bar,” said Clarabelle. She didn’t look up from the hot-plate she was configuring. Deidra moved to retrieve them without a word and went to the rows and columns of empty tables.
The transformation the Forge would undergo in a few days would astound anyone who hadn’t seen it as many times as Deidra had. For now, it served as the dormitory for Gold Standard servants and employees while they prepared feasts and recruited spectators and crews. It was a mausoleum for the grim revelry of Olympia Golds passed. Desolate. Quiet. This was owed to its remote, undisclosed location in the moors. Only those who slept there were privileged with the information to find it. When the terraforming was done, the Forge would make its nigh incredible journey from Greymoor to Ares. There, Deidra and Devin would be ousted from residence, to make room for thousands of spectators. The place would explode with drinks, screens full of combat statistics, betting, and inevitably violence over it all. Deidra treasured these last few days with Devin and old Clarabelle. The quiet before an inescapable storm. She’d heard whispers the barkeep had been in service of Koslav Gold almost as long as Deidra had been alive.
“You got something better to do?” Devin laughed while his friend struggled with one of the anchors. When she refocused, Deidra easily snapped the steel ring around the table’s central pillar. She twisted it into place on the floor. A grenade detonation wouldn’t pop it free of the floor now.
“Besides waste time talking to you? Plenty,” Deidra smirked. Devin moved to the next row of tables. He snapped anchors on in record time.
“Just look what Clarabelle’s turned us into,” Devin chuckled quietly.
“We’re still alive, aren’t we?” Deidra countered.
“Sure,” Devin said, strangely somber. Deidra glanced up at him, just in time for him to look away. Behind her, Clarabelle chewed her lip, too quick for the girl to catch. Deidra smelled something sour, though, something besides the unspiced pots in the back of the Forge.
“The stuff in the back’s starting to stink the joint up,” Clarabelle said suddenly. She curled a fist against the programming panel of her hotplate, which had little to do with her actual frustration. “Why don’t you go take care of that? Both of you. We’ve got plenty of time to anchor the rest of the tables.”
Deidra nodded for fear of the fury that’d come with refusal. Clarabelle was, after all, a paid employee of The Gold Standard, natural superior to two servants. Though she’d never invoked rank, it was an unspoken understanding between them. More than that, it was testament to Deidra and Devin’s gratitude. They could never repay her for the extra scraps Clarabelle slid them under the table. For the blankets she misplaced over them, when they should have been reserved as backups for paying guests. Deidra did, however, hesitate by the kitchen door when the old girl stayed put at the bar.
“You’re… not coming?” Deidra dared to say. It would be the first time she and Devin were left in charge of anything in the kitchen, without constant breath down the backs of their uniforms.
“What I do is none of your concern,” said Clarabelle. She went on tinkering with her hot plate. “You two know the recipe as well as I do. Maybe better. Go on.”
“Ye-ye-yes ma’am,” Deidra nodded and disappeared along with Devin.
“Don’t forget the ta-”
“The tarragon, got it!” Devin finished for her. They were ready. Clarabelle waited until the door swung shut behind them to hang her head. She had to let it out. She had to whimper, just once.
Deidra and Devin huddled close over rising steam from a pot as wide as the two of them combined. The last of the orange spice they’d sprinkled in dissolved in their stirring spiral. Deidra took a long whiff. Devin opted for a spoonful of their work. Both let out a simultaneous mmm. Everything was taken care of for the day at last. At last, Devin had nothing left to hide behind. He’d been studying his friend all day, to see how she’d take what he was about to say. He knew it wasn’t the perfect time, but then there never was one.
“We’re entering the Olympia,” said Devin. Deidra squinted at him. She’d sensed something between him and Clarabelle, hung in the air. She hadn’t expected it’d be a bold-faced lie.
“Who’s we?” Deidra snorted. Devin took another deep breath and leaned back over the kitchen counter. Her smile said she didn’t believe him for a second. Holographic disks of flameless heat shimmered behind him without threat of burning his coattails, even on contact.
“Me, Jeff, Jack, Olivia, Tygon…” Devin watched Deidra’s eyes darken with each name of another servant she knew. They had come through the door to the Forge for the night with tickets and applications any minute now. She wondered if they had as much foresight about this announcement as she did. “You?”
“Tell me, do all of them know they’re friends with a psychopath?” Deidra prodded. She devolved into real laughter, then downright hysteria as Devin’s eyes fell towards the floor. “What did you, just sign everyone up? Make up a ship name? Hope for the best?” Deidra chortled and coughed. Her throat caught when she saw how downtrodden her friend had become. The wrinkles across his forehead were anything but humorous. Deidra calmed herself long enough to say, “Did you? Oh my God, Devin, did you-”
“We came up with the idea together. They all agreed. You’re… the only one I didn’t talk to yet,” he admitted.
“This is ridiculous,” Deidra chuckled, though every ounce of humor had pulsed out of her heart in a hard thump.
“Deidra, just listen to me-”