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RT's Lost Year's Chronicles. Entry 2.

9/13/2019

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I'm home this time. Can't afford to be anywhere else. The red vacancy sign flickers in through the slot under the door. These mini-cabins are basically the size of four coffins stacked so there's a bed on the floor, a low table with stool, and small petri-vending machine with the lowest grade crap in the CN Ruled Galaxy priced as though it's single digit quality. I'm at the table with the bag of stuff I bought for my new life sitting next to my ankle. 
I take off my wrist console, flip the camera up and turn it around. I take a sip of the garbage D grade 98.6 that came in this morning, which is about fifteen minutes away from turning to rot, and press record. I stare into a camera and check to make sure it’s centered on my face before I start speaking. I turn it on and begin…
“It’s been a of couple weeks since I made the first one of these. I was hoping to have some good news before I made this next one, but don’t yet. I do have a plan though… It’s not an easy or legal plan, but this is Region Three and slavery is legal here so I’m not all that worried about breaking the law.
As I predicted, I am not able to enjoy going back into my local blood joint with a modicum of civility any longer. The credits are long gone. I have bills stacking up that I can’t even begin to think about paying. I don’t bother to open the emails or respond to the alerts. I just ignore them. Eventually, they’ll get more aggressive and try to come after me, but that costs money, and before they do that I’ll charge up just enough to get a new identity, hop a cheap flight to a faraway station in Dayth Quadrant 2 and be gone. I’m still not going back to Region 1 or 2. That would be suicide. They have my DNA on record, missing person, wanted, and at least half of the people who want me found would sell me out for free and the other half would sell me out for the hefty bounty on my head. So, it’s Region 3 or nothing, but Region 3 is damn big, 12 Quadrants in all. Region 3 begins, ten thousand LY’s from Earth’s solar system in all directions, Quadrant 12 is the slice that begins on the far side, away from the center of the galaxy. Quadrant 6 is the slice closest to the galaxy center, and the rest of the Quadrants fall in like an old-fashioned sun dial clock. I was taken in Quadrant 7, but have been living in 1 for the last few months trying to make a go of it without fighting in the cages, but I can’t stick around much longer here.
The trick is to not leave too soon and not leave too late. If you leave too soon, you’ll miss out on all the sharks trying to offer you high interest loans. I’ve been through this a few times. You make some money, then you run out of money, and then everybody comes running to offer you money, money you and they know you can’t pay back, but they make the bet that you will or that you’ll be stupid enough to one day invest in something that’s worth something so they can take it, sell it, and get theirs back plus interest. Except I don’t ever buy anything that’s worth anything, and even if I did I sure as **** wouldn’t put it in my own name. I mean, any of the names I’ve used that owe money, which is almost all of them. I try to keep one or two clean travel names, names that can take me from A to B or in this case Quadrant 1 to Quadrant 2 without leaving a trail back to the money I’m taking with me and the money I owe left behind.
Is it a scam? Sure. Is it honorable? Of course not, but… Am I hurting anyone? Not as much as the collectors when they come after low level recently freed slaves who take their offers and end up as slaves again. Not me. I’m not claiming to be helpful either. I’m not stealing from them and then giving it out to the poor. That would be a mission. That would draw attention. That would require being involved enough in people’s lives such as to leave an imprint, one that I can’t afford. And who am I kidding? I’m not that selfless either. Don’t be too hard me. It’s kind of tough to be selfless when the only thing you have in the world is a digital stack of false identifications that are coded to your DNA, fingerprints, and retinal scans. Some of my fakes require me to shoot myself up with a small DNA enhancement so I will then and only then match the DNA tag. Then, once I’m done with that ID I will have to add another enhancement to fit the next fake or try to have the addition spliced out, which is a lot harder. Those are my good fakes, the most expensive ones and the last resort fakes. The ones that I use if I’ve stayed in a place too long and I need to get out ASAP.
I’ve got about two weeks left on this station before I have to bolt. That’s enough time for me to apply for those loans, get them processed, and bail.”
            I pause the recording and take a breath. This is stupid of me. I know it. Admitting to all these crimes, but… but what? I can’t go back. I cannot go home and endanger everyone who was lucky enough to survive the Taltrix explosion. I won’t do it. It doesn’t matter how much I miss them, my brother and my mother, my friends, my family. None of that matters if they’re dead. If I go back and it all starts up again. It’s not worth it. To hell with my feelings. Better that they live and I’m lonely than go back and watch them taken from me knowing it was my fault… I turn the recorder back on and keep talking.
“I tried going after more bodyguard work, but nobody would have me. It was a stroke of insane luck for me to get the first job, but after that catastrophe I knew what would be waiting for me as soon as I walked into the others. Rare is the job that a woman hires a female to guard herself. Usually, if a woman is wealthy enough and smart enough to hire bodyguards she hires the biggest she can find, aka not a woman who is five foot three. Not me. I’m more for show, except I refuse to wear the bikini outfits of the other working bodyguard women. I don’t have anything against that, but you can’t fight in a tiny bikini. It offers no protection to your skin for laser burns or cuts. It’s stupid. Meanwhile…” I sigh and take another sip of the blood that’s about five minutes from rancid at this point.
“Meanwhile, it may not be a bad idea to see if I can’t get one of those bikini jobs of a different sort. You know I heard they get up to 50% access to their gift? 50%! You know what I could do with 50%? A lot. I could make someone forget they ever saw me, I could make a whole room full of people forget they ever saw me. Not highly gifted ones, but still. Most. But the bikini thing… Not really a bikini. More like a fishnet thong sort of thing. Pasties. Whatever. High heels. Whatever those girls wear up in the cages. They work regular shifts. They aren’t expected to fight, but they are expected to send out waves of se*ually charged energy out onto the dancefloor. The job is to create the vibe. The excite the audience, the spectators and the customers who are dancing. I know how to do it. I can do it. It’s not like I can’t.” I take the last bit of blood nearly choking on it. “God that stuff is foul. That’s what I get for buying the cheapest 98.6 on the market. I may as well have been drinking fracosa piss. Cancel it!” A shiver runs down my body as the last dregs of the blood fuel my senses.
“I studied it you know. Gifted art making, gifted dance. Of course I wasn’t in a bikini. And it’s something I like, dancing. Music. I miss the music. As a boxer I sometimes trained with music. The thing is… of all the two jobs I’ve had, slave fighter turned pro and bodyguard, the job was physical and intense and I liked that part of it. What I didn’t like was wiping the blood off my body, either mine or theirs, and despite my blasé tone I really didn’t… okay, I didn’t always enjoy ki*****. Sometimes it was deserved. Most of the time it wasn’t. Most of the time, it was just self-defense and me knowing the safest way to survive the fight was to kill my opponent. I didn’t have the luxury of mercy in the slave matches. In the pros I had more choices, but they came at a cost. Rematches. Life canceling rematches. And those were never fair fights. Never. I did though, because I was willing to end people. And that gets very tiresome on the soul eventually. Life in Region Three doesn’t mean what it does in Regions 1 and 2. Dayth culture is very casual about dying in fights. It’s natural for them, a natural way to go. They see it as better to die in the cage fight than to die of old age. Hell, two of the older fighters I went up against flat out begged me for euthanasia.
I don’t know if you really believe that, but when your body betrays you, breaks down past repair, and you have no money and no way to make money, you want out. You want to exit and if you’re cursed with people who depend on you, you want to give them something before you go. At least, taking on a fight with me, a few of them could leave their loved ones some credits. That’s if the fight organizers didn’t scam it. They scammed just about everything else.” I reach over and pull out a very skimpy red bikini, holding it up to the camera turning it this way and that.
“You thought I was kidding.” I put the straps of it over my battlesuit so the little red cups cover my breasts. It looks as ridiculous as tits on a Fracosa. “I know. Not my best look, but… I’ll pick up something better once I get to Quadrant 2. And I’m gonna get rid of the lavender.” I say, running a hand through my short pastel locks. “Blonde is the natural color of Dayths and even if my skin tone will always be a bit darker than theirs, I can keep away from UV and bleach it a little. That plus…” I slide a blonde wig out from the packaging and put it on over my head. The hair is not quite white blonde but has a touch of yellow in it. Its smooth waves fall to my shoulders covering my alien-like ears and markedly changing my appearance. I still have the Dayth spiral face tatts and my nose is still a wreck, but I can almost pass for attractive like this. Provided I wear some kind of face mask or something. “I know I’m not a looker exactly. I mean, without the chastity battletech suit on, my body underneath is honed. It’s… I’m in shape. I might have a bit more muscle than the usual dancer, but that will be to someone or some club’s taste I imagine, and once I stop training in the ring my body will change. It’s a good hideout gig.” I slip the wig off and ruffle my lavender tips around.
“Fifty percent access is a lot. I could get full gift access if I crossover into Region Two, but then I would have to register as a gifted citizen, and at my level… there aren’t many fake ID’s that can be made to cover me. Out here in Region 3, as a former slave, the authorities aren’t interested in digging deeper into my background. They already know I’m somebody from Region One or Two and they have no desire for that information to get out. It doesn’t serve them. So, my fakes work out here even though they shouldn’t. I just want to be at least some of who I was. I want to feel some of what I used to feel. Fifty percent is good! That sounds so barbaric to you in Regions One and Two, I can just imagine you hearing that and thinking how horrific it is, and it is, but with fifty percent I won’t need to wear this chastity battletech. I can go ahead and walk around naked and nobody will be able to lay a hand on me! I mean, they can try, but they’d be dead before the heat of their finger reached the cool of my skin. The reason dancers get so much access is because they can’t wear the chastity battletech and still do their jobs. And because of their jobs they need it. Solution, if they’re gifted, they get enough gift access to protect themselves from anyone. For me, even as a bodyguard I was only given 30%, but as a woman, my size, as a dancer… I would get 50% for sure and that’s more to me than just about anything.” I split off the red bikini top back over my head and set it down on the table.
“If I can do it, the dancing I mean, and I think I can. If I can do it well enough… make a name for myself as someone else, then I can probably get back into region two as a gifted artist, and I know what you’re thinking. I’m not trying to go back to Region 1. I’m not trying to go home. I just want to have some of who I was back. Not the part that got everyone killed. Not the part that’s cursed with a lunatic for a father. Not the part who is responsible for the destruction of Taltrix. None of that. I don’t want any of that! I just want a little bit more of my humanity. The option to get through a week without killing anybody. Doesn’t seem like too much to ask really. All things considered.
I’m hopeful that the next time I do one of these I’ll be long gone from Quadrant 1 and well into Quadrant 2 with a new identity, a new life, a new hustle. Still the same secrets of course.” I pick up the cup of blood and sniff it. I gag and set it back down. “And something better to drink.”
I press stop on the recording and put my console back on my wrist. 
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RT's Lost Years Chronicles. Entry 1.

8/22/2019

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I take a seat on a floating stood at the bar to place my order. Nobody sits at the bar for long in a private blood joint like this. Freshies drink at the bar. They can only pay for one. They down a short of whatever 98.6 came in on the cheap that day and bolt. Get-n-gone. For the rest of us, the mature drinkers, we like to at least pretend we have some control over our habit. We add ritual and take our time. We have it chilled, request our favorite types, go top shelf, even gifted. We are connoisseurs of blood. We pretend our gift makes it okay, that what we’re doing isn’t just a fancy form of cannibalism or drug use. We order at the bar and take our drink to a private booth where we won’t be bothered, so we can sip while we check the scrolls, jump into the cloud, play a VR, make a holochat, but most importantly finish our drink in peace and only then will we be on our way. Of course, I pay extra for that privilege, something I won’t be able to do after today. I haven’t always been a part of that upper crust, civilized, “we” and I’m about to not be again. I lost my job this morning, but I’ve got the credits now and one last high-end jolt before I immediately fall back into the abyss of poverty isn’t gonna make any difference to my financial situation in the long run.
After thirty quick ticks of my soon-to-be broke a** taking up a stool, the Dora saunters over with her oddly sexual gait. All Dayth robots are Dora’s or Doran’s, short for Dayth Organic Robot and then their number. This Dora’s full name is DOR537908132, but nobody uses that. She’s got all the movements down, the lift of the leg, the sway of the hip, the slight lean forward to expose cleavage, and the exact tilt of the head that implies she finds me interesting, but it’s not the movements that give her away. It’s the slight jerking halts between. Each time the foot falls and weight is transferred to her other leg, the machine inside her shows itself just a baldly as if one of her designers wrote their name in ink all over her pretty tattooed face.
These microscopic tells that make up the visual distance between organic and machine aren’t apparent to everyone, but they are to my Taltrix trained eyes. Some folks are repulsed by these tells. They shell out top credits to buy seamless Dora’s who are human enough to really make you forget the robot inside. Those Dora’s are usually high-end companions rather than bar wenches. I’m comforted by the robot inside. A Dora doesn’t ask any personal questions. A Dora is gonna treat me exactly the same as any other paying customer. It won’t matter to her that I’m a former slave. Legally, freed slaves are supposed to have the same rights as every other non-property owning free person, and that’s all her programming cares about. A human Dayth, native or transplant like me, would have a whole host of prejudices about that, none of which are fun to contend with. Most importantly, it won’t matter to a Dora that I’m gifted and on restricted use, that my real name is Redder Torch and I’m running from a past that if it catches up to me it would mean the deaths of everyone I love. A Dora doesn’t care about any of that and that’s a big part of why I’m here, that and the blood.
Dora leans over the bar to give me a close up view of her see through top. At least half of all native Dayth women, including most Dora’s wear see through tops. The rest of us are in thick battle chastity suits for protection. Mine happens to be second hand, but it stops a laser burn or a cheap blade from biting into my skin, and it can’t be forcibly removed by anyone else. I clear my throat as Dora puts a permanently soft hand down near my own calloused one. Her smooth long fingers are perfectly shaped. My paws still look like the boxing mitts they are, covered in ink swirling patches over each knuckle that I managed to break in the last three years, which is most of them. I catch a whiff of Dora’s not unpleasant pheromones and sigh. I’m not totally immune to her robotic-flesh charms. I haven’t been intimate with anyone in years. Not worth the effort. Too many lies I gotta tell, to them and myself in order to get off and lies take the fun outta of it for me. More lies just make me tired.
Dora reads the mixed signals of my body language but doesn’t back off, perhaps making the computation that I’m shy. I’m not, but she doesn’t know that. Dora smiles. “Hi Iris. The usual?”
I’m always pleased she remembers what I want her to remember about me, and nothing else. “Yes. Thank you, Dora.” I make the payment including a nice tip for her using my wrist console as she starts preparing my order. When she’s done she pushes the tray over to me. When I go to take it from her she smiles again and tilts her head, her face a mask of empathy, but she doesn’t ask me what happened today or if I want company, even if a part of me does. Dora just freezes with an unnatural stillness that makes me relax a little. I smile at her for that kindness before taking my tray over to a private booth where I can relax in relative safety to enjoy my one last hurrah.
Taking the first sip is always a little jarring. The taste is acquired. Within seconds of swallowing I feel my body reconnect itself in a kind of wholeness I haven’t felt in a while.
Suddenly, I’m not alone in the universe. I’m not even myself, Iris or Redder, or RT. I am a reality flower, a blooming of gravity and mass, an expression of life that happens to look like me and thinks like me. I am as I should be and nothing else. I am perfect. Of course, even as I feel these things with the blood flowing through me I know they are lies. It is artificial, this blood induced state. Even if I wasn’t on restricted use of my gift, if I was at one hundred percent, I wouldn’t feel like this, because shame stands in my way, mistakes, regrets, memories. But not here in the blood high, where a sip or two gives me the euphoria of believing I’m on the right path, even when I know I’m not. I sigh quietly as the first wave subsides leaving me hobbled again at three percent, cut off from not only the outer world but from the bulk of my higher brain functioning.
Before I take a second sip, I make the decision to do something stupid. I’m going to take a risk, because if I don’t I really don’t know where I’ll end up this time. I’m starting to lose a lot of myself and I don’t know what I might do once all of who I was is gone. Hopping up, I double check the lock on my booth to make sure nobody can get in, then sit back down to flip the face of my wrist console up twisting it around so the camera faces me. Making sure I can see my reflection, I set up the angle. Unfortunately, there is no angle that doesn’t show what the last few years have done to my face. My once-straight aquiline nose, now has a pronounced bump in the bridge with a sharp bit of bone straining the skin like a tent pole, and below that the rest of my nose angles to the left. My right eyebrow has a mangled scar through it from that same injury. It was on the day Taltrix blew up and I was taken prisoner in Region Three.
My now short hair, which I continually dye lavender, shows off my alien-looking ears that I hate. They stick out from my head at the small narrow tips that aren’t exactly pointed but give the appearance of such. It’s a stark contrast to the long dark chestnut curls that once crowned my head falling to my shoulders, which I always wore down to cover my ears completely. Then there are the swirling, black, Dayth tattoos over my cheek, nose, neck, and temple leftover from the medical patches administered to knit the skin back together when I wasn’t allowed any access to my gift to heal myself. I look at that stranger’s face and know her much better than the girl I once was. This face has been my disguise, but it’s pretty much permanent. I take a gulp of blood. This time, I let it calm my nerves. I lick the remainder from my lips, press record, and start speaking.
“Sol year 5523. Region Three. Station time, 18:26. Main Vein blood bar. Q1-DS-994, Quadrant 1 Dayth Station 994.” I press pause. This is harder than I expected. I take another sip and breathe a moment before this next part. I don’t know if I have the strength right now to tell it from the beginning of my time in Region Three. Everyone I once knew believes I’m dead, which is for the best. And yet here I am recording this, which could get out. It’s stupid… But I’m afraid of losing my grip completely, afraid that I’ll never be anything other than those lies. I hit record again, take another slug, and then I go on telling the truth.
“It’s been four years, almost five, since the Taltrix explosion. I’ve been on the run ever since. I don’t have any intentions of going home to Mars. I should probably be sorry about that, but I’m not. I can’t. Instead, I’m tempted to do that thing I try to do every so often where I stop drinking blood, stop taking stimulants, start eating my vitamins instead of shooting them into my veins.” I shake my head and take another sip. “I attempt this kind of cleanse every so often, because either I hit a low spot like getting fired again or something catches inside my mind, a snag in the fabric of my thoughts. A reminder that there might be another life than the one I’m living.” I look at the small carafe and toy with it a little in my hand. It’s cool, perfectly chilled. I refill my cup and take another sip. A part of me knows this record is just for me and another part of me, the lying part, that part tells me it’s for everyone I love, in case I die before I see them again.
“There was a time when I thought change was possible, when I thought revolution or upward mobility or that the good in humanity would one day outweigh the bad. I don’t have such naïve thoughts anymore… I think it’s possible to carve out small hidden moments of happiness inside a bubble where the rest of the world cannot touch them, but as soon as they are exposed to the light, they will dry, wither and burn, like crops on dead planet…You know, Earth isn’t the only dead planet caused by humans. In Regions One and Two we like to think it is. Oh, we outlawed habitat destruction, but that didn’t stop greedy profiteers from stripping all useful resources off any planet they came across in Region Three during the Golden Age of Space Travel. The CN’s forces were too small to police the planets farther out. It’s why all of Region Three is a wasteland. Nobody lives on-planet in Region Three.”
I turn my camera around to take in the view of my small booth and all its lack of charm. Four walls in a tightly enclosed space, a table made of some cheap metal, definitely not spider steel, and a bench with cushion so worn out it has little runs in the plastic fabric. “We live on ships or space stations. The joke in Region Three is that the air is third rate, the water is third rate, but the killing is first rate.” I take another sip at a joke that really isn’t that funny, but I’m trying to decide how honest I can be in this recording. I can’t start at the very beginning. I don’t have it in me right now. I’ll need more than a small carafe of blood to go back all the way to the day I was captured when I first entered Dayth territory. I decide to fast forward to the more recent stuff. It’s fresh in my mind anyway, and I’m itching to get it off my conscience, not that I have a strong moral compass anymore given all I’ve done to survive.
I sigh and go on. “Ever since I fought my way to freedom, I’ve been working as a bodyguard. It’s a typical gig for former slave fighters. Granted, I was one of the smallest bodyguards in the business. Nobody likes to hire small bodyguards. Half our job is to just look intimidating, and since I barely came up to the chest of most bodyguards I was only ever hired to protect female clients. It was a good gig for a minute, mostly because I was allowed ten percent access to my gift. The problem was…Some of the clients I was hired to protect were slaves or even if they weren’t slaves legally they were still owned by other people. I got fired for protecting one of said slaves from her owner, which got me blacklisted from the industry. I was fired for doing my job you might say, except that when the person paying you wants free reign to hurt the person you’re supposed to be protecting for them, your job changes. Instead of protecting them your job is you keep your mouth shut and just let it happen.
You stand in the hallway outside of the room and you listen to cries. You stand there and you don’t move. You don’t let anybody else in that room either. You stand there while you hear the sound of flesh being slammed against a wall. You stand there and pretend you’re not listening to the sound of someone pleading for help, to the sounds of crying. You stand there like some sick pervert who gets off on these sounds while the other person’s bodyguard who is doing the beatdown nods at you and licks his lips like he would do exactly to you what his boss is doing to the person his boss is paying me to protect. I stood there for about as long as I could, which turned out to be exactly thirty-seven minutes. That’s a long time. I wish I could tell you it was five minutes or two minutes, but things like that creep up on you. You’re just standing there looking at your console trying to ignore the **hole next to you, guarding the door. Trying to forget all the people you once knew and loved who are off living these extraordinary lives, or boring and happy lives, or dead. You try not to wonder what they’re up to even though you see it in the feeds, and even though late at night after you promise yourself you won’t look at the feeds and won’t look for them, you have one or two too many cups of blood and you look anyway. You let the pain of it stab you in the chest to punish yourself for the s***hole that you’ve let your life become. You swallow against the lump in your throat and notice that the argument in the room behind you is getting rowdy and not in a good way.
You come back to the present and tell yourself it’s not your fight. You tell yourself, this is a good gig, that you get some access to your gift legally and with it you can at least protect yourself. You tell yourself, if you can keep this job, if you can stick it out for a few months or a year even, you can get enough money to make a new start in Region Two, far away from the cesspool of human degradation that is Region Three and far enough away from anyone you know. But then you hear another crash in the room behind you and the guy next to you lets out a laugh that sounds like a sneer and something inside you snaps.
I should tell you, at that time I was allowed ten percent access to my gift. I am allowed exactly three percent now, legally. I can hack the blocking tech when I need to, but it sets off alarms to do that and my slave status kicks back in, and then I’d have to fight in the cages again to get out. So I don’t hack it unless I need to, but as a bodyguard, legally I had ten percent access of my full capacity for speed and strength, as well as ten percent telepathy, psychokinesis, mind penetration, and psionic attack.
Ten percent doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough for me. Like I said, I get three now, which is why I’m… here… Anyway… So… I snapped and I killed the guard who was standing next to me. He was gifted too, not as strongly as me, so he was allowed thirty percent access. His mental blocking was reasonably strong, but he didn’t have my training. I set off a chain reaction of electrical, mental, malfunctions that caused a shutdown of his frontal lobe. After that, he dropped to the floor gurgling and I slid my short sword under his chin, through his soft pallet, and up all the way into the skull cavity to kill him and disguise the psionic portion of the attack.” I instantly regret saying that to the recording. I consider rewinding to cut it out, but I take a sip of blood and clear my throat and go on instead.
“That was probably pretty graphic for you. Sorry about that. I forget… people haven’t had my… experiences… anyway… Then I went inside the room and... I’ll spare you the details. The woman, who I was supposed to be guarding was… on the floor… barely conscious. Like me, she was legally free, a former slave, technically, by that I mean he had signed her paperwork to release her from his ownership, but then immediately employed her as his consort, which didn’t seem like much of a change. He only did any of it because she’d gotten pregnant… By the look of her laying on the floor… the details I’m omitting…  I would say she probably wasn’t pregnant anymore.
My boss was oblivious to my presence. He was sitting in a recliner wearing VR Goggles and jerking ***. I’m assuming whatever he had in mind for them to do didn’t turn out the way he planned, but he still needed to finish the job. I picked up the woman and I took her out of room while he climaxed onto his stomach.
Later, after I dropped her off at a medical suite with all the credits I could spare and a contact for a woman I know who makes fake ID’s, I promptly went out and got blood drunk, at this very establishment as a matter of fact. Then got into a fight, which I lost badly, so I could walk into work this morning and claim I tried to intervene when the attackers came for us. They almost believed me.” My carafe is almost empty. I pour the last of it into the cup and admire the thickness of the liquid, even when it’s chilled. I take a tiny sip before continuing.
“I can’t tell you how many times I wish someone had snapped for me when I was a slave, or when I was a student, or just low on the totem pole. That someone had just lost it, not cared about their job, not cared about money, not cared about anything and came to my rescue, but… I’ve come to realize most people aren’t like that. That’s not how it works.
            I mean, you already know I lost my job over that. Even though they couldn’t prove it, didn’t matter. Either way, I was a useless bodyguard as they saw it. So now I’m down to three percent gift, searching the wanted ads… Nothing pays enough live on. Nothing for ungifted labor anyway. So I’m considering what to do next. Do I..? What? Stop running and go home to my insane father who swore to hurt me and all those I love if I ever showed my face again? They’re better off without me. I’m a bad luck charm… I should get going.”
I press stop and save the file. Log it as Lost Years, entry one. I slowly sip the remainder of blood, trying to savor it. It’ll be a while before I have a taste of anything this good. After slipping out of the booth I call out a thank you to Dora and add, “If you don’t see me for a while, I’m either too broke to come in or… I’m doing something else. Something fun. I think it’s time I had a little fun...But if you do see me again, do me a favor yeah? Don’t ask where I’ve been or what I’ve been up to. If I’m back here you already know the answer.”
Dora smiles and gives me a nod that says she’ll do exactly that. I give her a little salute and take my leave.
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