Empress of Rags and Riches- Shilo/Graverobber- PG (will go up)- Chapter 4
The door to the tomb clicked shut with a gusty creak, and Graverobber hummed to himself as he went to work. He figured that since he was already there, he might as well be productive. After some clandestine snooping, he was pleased to find another entrance to that jackpot of a mass grave. He'd had a fine old time among the dead, harvesting a good fifty or sixty vees before climbing back out. He stunk of decay and had more than a few unidentifiable smears of this or that. Body dandruff, he called it, but it was more of a slime, an ooze. Human bodies made their own postmortem mucus. As always, though, it was worth it. And there were countless more bodies to pick from. The mass grave could easily keep him in Z for months.
The vague purpling of the eastern sky told him that dawn was nearing. This was his cue to clear off. He left the daylight to the more contributing members of society when he could. He considered himself a gentleman of the streets, and his kingdom was one best walked in darkness.
Before heading out, he looked up at the girl's house. There were no lights on. There was no sign that the girl was inside. She was probably just sleeping, but it was like the house had swallowed her up. Graverobber knew damn good and well what she'd undergone at the opera. The whole city knew. She hadn't said a word about it, though, so neither had he. But he did wonder what she would do now.
~*~
The ground beneath Shilo wasn't comfortable. Why wasn't she in bed? Did she miss a pill? She couldn't take listening to her father lecture her. Maybe if she was lucky, he hadn't gotten back yet. He didn't have to know that she skipped a pill and had another accident. He wouldn't know that she'd messed up again. Her head throbbed for a couple of silent minutes before the pain subsided, a familiar sensation to her. Still, Shilo felt weak, like her limbs were made of rubber, and her skin was clammy. It would pass soon, as it always did.
She waited for the pain in her head to dissipate completely before she tried opening her eyes. When she opened them, she saw the ceiling of her mother's tomb, not her own claustrophobic bedroom. There was the slightest moment longer of confusion before the fog cleared completely. Shilo settled back into reality, the reality of the Genetic Opera and the revelations about her father... and her father's death. She held her breath against the pain that came crashing down, threatening to overwhelm her, the sudden pricking of tears at the corners of her eyes.
It took her a minute, but she was able to press the feelings back. She needed to get inside. It wouldn't do to stay in the tomb forever, and she needed a shower. Shilo tried to keep a hastily formulated list of things that needed to be done present in her mind. She needed to move to the next step on the list. First order of business- to find the mask that she thought she remembered leaving just inside the door.
There- she had it. She spied it in the corner, next to a spent can of teargas, a remnant of Rotti's tricks. With somewhat shaky legs, she stood and picked it up. Next item on the list-- find and light the torch. She flipped the release for the hidden door and felt around for the torch. Ah, there it was. Shilo lit it with the lighter that was kept in its little nook next to the torch rack.
Slipping the uncomfortable mask on, she headed up through the tunnel into her father's home.
~*~
In the early mornings, when his days were done, he lay in whatever passed for a bed with the sun creeping up and illuminating the rented room of the week through a filthy window. This was the time for his mind to wander, before sleep claimed him. He got a lot sorted out in his head during these quiet morning hours.
It had been two days since the night of the opera, and the public eye was already moving beyond the girl and on to the future of GeneCo. Tabloids and gossip were the way news traveled in the streets and Graverobber could get his hands on plenty of both. Not Today's Face, not the Sanitarium Weekly, not even the Metro Gazette could dig up much more on the Wallace girl than what had been announced at the opera; all sketchy facts at best. Her father was a real piece or work, that much was clear. Nathan Wallace had been a Repo man who had murdered his wife and infected his daughter with a fake but debilitating disease created by doping her blood. The tabloids painted her father as a monster. Graverobber's opinion wasn't much different on that score. The few details did shed a little bit of light on how he'd met her, at least. The poor kid.
She had stumbled upon him as he was going about his work, and he'd felt bad enough leaving her to the GeneCops. It was obvious, from the first moment he'd laid eyes on her in the graveyard, that she didn't know shit from chocolate about anything outside of her own comfort zone. He'd taken an amused pleasure in educating her to the finer points of the underworld beyond, and after making sure that his own skin was safe, he'd had feelings of genuine regret for letting such an untested girl become a casualty. When he'd seen her alive and unharmed at Sanitarium Square, Graverobber moved to apologize. By taking her home, he tried, in his own way, to make up for abandoning her in the graveyard. This made them even, he had figured at the time. He'd done her a bad turn and followed it with a good one, and returned her to that silent, lifeless house sound and whole, with eyes maybe a little more open. A wider perspective never hurt anybody.
He didn't argue with himself as to his reasons for his interest in the kid, but he did look at them carefully. There was no internal moral struggle. He didn't want to be her knight in shining armor. He'd saved her skinny ass twice as it was. The girl had been thrown to the wolves, and he didn't particularly want to see her torn apart by the pack, but what beyond that? What did he hope to get out of all of this?
When Graverobber was honest with himself, as he tended to be in those early morning hours, he realized that he was simply curious. He wanted to pry into the girl, figure her out, find out what had been kept hidden away. Besides, from what little bit he had gathered, it seemed that he might be the only person in the world she knew at all. She was beautiful, she was vulnerable, she was young, and he wanted to know more. She seemed to trust him and was probably a wreck from hell.
It probably wouldn't hurt to pay the kid a visit. He needed to do another harvesting run anyway. That mass grave was still ripe for the taking. Graverobber may have considered himself a gentleman of the streets, but he was still a graverobber. He decided to follow his curiosity and see what developed. He had no idea what his intentions were, but that rarely stopped him. The approach had normally served him well enough in the past. It made things interesting, in his opinion. This girl, this Shilo Wallace, made him very curious indeed, and Graverobber was a little like a cat sometimes. He followed whatever caught his fancy until he grew bored with it.
Maybe this could shape up to be fun.