Chapter 13: The Price of a Favor
The static from the dead line bled into the hum of Level 48, a flat, soulless noise that filled Zack’s head. He kept his forehead pressed against the cold metal of the comm booth, the oily smell of burnt plastic clogging his throat.The deal was done. The words he’d spoken into that cracked handset now felt like a physical toxin coursing through his veins.Malachi’s voice cut through the fug. “Well?”
Zack pushed back from the booth, the world outside the smeared glass resolving into the grimy, rain-slicked walkway. A few hurried figures in hooded ponchos shuffled past, heads down.He turned. Malachi stood against a wet pipe bundle, his face carved from shadow and neon reflection.“He’ll do it,” Zack said. His own voice sounded distant, numb.“Pull the file.Create a new one. Reassignment to a Prime Adjutant Security Detail within ten days.”
Malachi’s eyes sharpened. He knew there was more.Nothing came free, especially not this.“His price?”
Zack swallowed. The taste of the protein bar from the discarded pouch was bitter in the back of his mouth. “A data chip. I’m to take it in with me, deliver it to a contact during my first week on-station.”
“What’s on it?”
“I didn’t ask.” At Malachi’s incredulous stare, Zack’s temper frayed.“What does it matter? Sabotage schematics.Blackmail files.Assassination coordinates.It’s the toll. We don’t get to question the cargo.” He pushed past Malachi, needing to move, to outpace the creeping sense of contamination. The air here was thick with vaporized grease and the perpetual damp of the lower manufactory levels. “He’s routing travel docs and a uniform voucher to a dead-drop locker on Level 41. We have to get there.”
They moved, two more anonymous shadows in the gloom. The walk was silent but for the patter of oily condensation dripping from overhead cables and the distant, rhythmic thump of a press forge. The tension between them was a taut wire.Zack’s mind chewed on the reality: he would wear the grey again. The uniform that had been torn from him by furious, righteous hands in a filthy warehouse.He would salute. He would follow orders.He would become a ghost of the man he’d tried to kill.
Malachi, keeping pace beside him, finally spoke, his tone low and brittle. “And after you deliver this chip?What then?You’re just another adjutant up in their paradise. How does that find my daughter?”
“Access,” Zack shot back, the word cracking like a whip. “You think we can just wander into Sector Prime?This gets me through the door. It gets me into systems, into registers, into the social logs of the high-urban zones. I find her location, I get it to you, and then we figure out extraction.That’s the job now. One step at a fucking time.”
The elevator down to 41 was a shuddering cage of rusted grating, offering vertiginous views of the cavernous industrial void between levels. They didn’t speak.The vibration of the descent traveled up through Zack’s boots into his skull.
The dead-drop locker was in a subterranean transit hub, a vaulted space where the air tasted of oxidized metal and stale breath.The locker was keyed to a numeric code Harren had given. Zack input it, his fingers cold.The door popped open with a hollow click.
Inside, folded neatly, was a lieutenant’s uniform of the Iron Ascendancy Army. Slate-grey, impeccably pressed.The rank pins were already affixed to the collar. Beside it lay a sealed packet of documents and a small, non-descript black credit chit.No data chip yet. That would come later.Zack reached in and lifted the uniform jacket. The weight of the fabric was familiar, a dread familiarity that pulled at his muscles. He could smell the faint, astringent scent of military-grade cleanser on it.
Malachi looked at the bundle, his face a stone mask of revulsion. “You’re really going to put that on.”
It wasn’t a question.“Yes,” Zack said. He closed the locker, tucking the packet and credit chit inside his scavenger’s coat.He kept the uniform jacket folded over his arm. It felt like carrying a corpse.“There’s a sanctioned transient barracks near the mid-level ascension spire. We’ll go there.I need to clean up. I can’t look like I’ve been living in the gutter.”
The transient barracks were a step above the smuggling dens and pipe-nests of the lower forty, but only a step. It was a block of single-room capsules stacked like drawers in a morgue, paid for by the hour. Zack used the new credit chit to rent one for a twelve-hour cycle. The room was a blind cell of white plastiform, three meters by three, with a grated drain in the center of the floor, a suction-jet shower head in the ceiling, and a narrow shelf that served as a bed. The door sealed with a magnetic hiss, locking out the world.
For a long minute, they just stood in the sterile, humming space.The only light was a pale blue glowstrip around the ceiling’s edge. The uniform jacket lay on the shelf like an accusation.Zack moved first. He stripped off his worn, dirty scavenger’s clothes, letting them fall to the floor in a heap. He stood naked under the blue light, scars from the warehouse beating still visible—dark bruises faded to yellowish stains, scrapes healed into pink welts. Older, silvered scars from service mapped his lean torso and arms.He was all hard angles and coiled tension.He activated the shower. A fierce, needle-spray of tepid water blasted down. He stepped into it, head bowed, letting it sluice the grime of the lower levels from his skin. He scrubbed at his face, his short hair, trying to scour away the feeling of the comm booth, of Harren’s transactional sneer in his voice.
When he stepped out, water sheeting from him, Malachi was still standing by the sealed door, watching him.There was a different quality to his stare now. Not calculation, not anger.Something more hungry, more hollow.
“You’re really going through with it,” Malachi said again, softer this time.
Zack grabbed a thin towel from a dispenser, roughly drying himself. “We’re past debating it.”
“I know.” Malachi pushed off from the wall. He took a step forward, his eyes tracing the lines of Zack’s body in the dim light.“I just need… to see it. To see you before you put that fucking skin back on.”
The air in the small room shifted, thickened. Zack stopped drying himself, the towel hanging limp in his hand.He met Malachi’s gaze. The raw, unvarnished need there was like a physical touch. It mirrored something deep in his own gut—a desperate, clawing hunger for connection, for sensation that wasn’t pain or dread or the cold grip of duty. A need to feel alive, and human, before he had to become a ghost again.Malachi closed the distance.He didn’t ask. His calloused hands came up, not to push, but to settle on Zack’s bare shoulders.The touch was electric. Zack flinched, a lifetime of reserve screaming in him, but he didn’t pull away. He stood still, water dripping from his hair onto the floor between them.
“You don’t have to—” Zack started, his voice rough.
“Shut up,” Malachi murmured, his own voice thick. “Just… shut up.”
His hands slid down Zack’s arms, feeling the hard muscle, the scars. One hand came up, cupped Zack’s jaw, the thumb brushing over the stubble on his cheek.His eyes were dark pools, full of a terrible understanding. He leaned in, and his lips met Zack’s.It wasn’t gentle. It was a collision of desperation, salt and heat and the shared taste of a bitter world. Zack groaned into it, his own resistance shattering. His hands came up to fist in Malachi’s worn shirt, pulling him closer.The kiss was deep, dirty, all tongues and teeth and shared breath. It was an affirmation of being alive, here, now, in this awful little room.
Malachi broke the kiss, breathing harshly. He tugged at his own clothes, shedding his layers with impatient haste until he was just as bare. He was thinner, gaunter, a map of a harder life written on his skin.He pushed Zack back towards the narrow shelf-bed.
Zack went, his legs hitting the edge. He sat, and Malachi was on him, straddling his lap, their erections pressing together in a hot, insistent friction. The feel of another man’s cock against his own sent a jolt of pure, undiluted lust through Zack. He hissed, his head falling back.Malachi’s mouth was on his neck, biting, sucking. His hands were everywhere—gripping Zack’s ass, scraping nails down his back, threading into his wet hair. “Fuck,” Malachi breathed against his skin.“Fucking soldier. Going to fucking sell your soul.”
“Already sold it,” Zack gritted out, his hands gripping Malachi’s bony hips. He rocked up, grinding their cocks together, the slick pre-cum smearing between them.“Not yet,” Malachi growled. He reached between them, his fist closing around both their shafts, squeezing.The sensation was brutally good. Zack thrust into that tight, rough grip, a groan tearing from his throat.He was achingly hard, the blood pounding in his cock.
“Condom,” Zack gasped, the one rational thought in a sea of need.
Malachi leaned over, fumbling in his discarded pants pocket.He pulled out a wrinkled foil packet. Tore it with his teeth. He sheathed Zack’s cock with a brutal efficiency, his own hand slicking saliva over the latex before he positioned himself above it. He didn’t wait, didn’t ask.He looked Zack straight in the eyes, a challenge and a plea, and sank down.
The tight, burning heat was exquisite. Zack cried out, his hands flying to Malachi’s thighs, fingers digging in. Malachi took him deep, his head falling back, a strangled sound escaping his lips.He was so tight, so fucking hot inside. He began to move, riding Zack with a fierce, punishing rhythm.“Harder,” Malachi panted. “Don’t you fucking hold back.”
Zack obeyed.He snapped his hips up, driving deeper. The shelf creaked under their weight. The sounds of skin slapping, of ragged breaths, of low curses filled the sterile room. Zack fucked up into that tight, clutching heat, each thrust a rebellion against the uniform waiting on the shelf, against Harren, against the whole rotting Ascendancy. Malachi rode him like a man exorcising a demon, his own cock bouncing, leaking onto Zack’s stomach.Zack reached between them, wrapping his hand around Malachi’s length. It was hard, veined, wet at the tip. He jerked him in time with his thrusts, a rough, fast pace. Malachi’s breath hitched, his movements becoming frantic, less controlled.“I’m close,” Malachi warned, his voice a broken scrape.
“Come,” Zack commanded, his own climax coiling, burning at the base of his spine. He pistoned his hips upward, grinding deep. “Come on my cock.”
With a raw, shattered shout, Malachi came. His body clenched like a vise around Zack, his cock pulsing in Zack’s hand, stripes of hot cum painting Zack’s chest and stomach. The intense squeeze, the sight of him lost in it, was enough.Zack’s control snapped. He buried himself to the hilt and exploded, vision whiting out, a deep, guttural roar ripped from his chest as he emptied himself into the condom inside Malachi’s body.
The world crashed back in waves: the hum of the room’s systems, the smell of sex and sweat, the shaky trembling of Malachi’s thighs where he still sat impaled. They were both breathing like they’d run for miles.
Slowly, carefully, Malachi lifted himself off, collapsing onto the narrow shelf beside Zack. They lay there, shoulder to shoulder, staring at the blue-lit ceiling, their bodies cooling.After a long silence, Malachi spoke, his voice utterly drained. “The chip.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll be watched. The moment you step into that uniform, you’re in their machine again.”
“I know.”
Malachi turned his head on the plastiform. “If you get caught with it… delivering it…”
“I know what happens,” Zack finished flatly.Disgrace was the least of it. They’d rip him apart, piece by piece, for information.“So we don’t get caught,” Malachi said. It was a statement of shared purpose. The sex had been a transaction, too, in its way—a sealing of a new, darker pact. They were bound now, not just by a debt from a warehouse, but by this: by the uniform on the shelf, by the chip yet to come, by the daughter lost in the gilded sky.Zack sat up. He looked at the grey jacket.Then he reached for it.
“We move at first shift-change,” he said, his voice once more that of the Lieutenant. The man from the shower, from the desperate, clutching sex, was receding, locked away.“You’ll need a cover. Maintenance contractor assigned to the ascension spire refurbishment. I’ll requisition the passes with the new chit.”
Malachi watched him dress, piece by piece, the transformation both terrible and complete. When Zack stood, fastening the final collar clasp, he was Lieutenant Rallok again.The scars were hidden. The weariness in his eyes had been refined into a cold, focused light.
The only evidence of the man beneath was the faint smell of sex on the air, and the milky streaks drying on Malachi’s stomach.
“Let’s go,” Zack said, his tone leaving no room for the past hour, for the vulnerability. “We have a spire to climb.”
The barracks door sighed shut behind them, sealing away the scent of their sweat and spent bodies. The corridor outside was a harsh tube of yellow light and echoing footsteps, a return to the real world’s abrasive grammar.Zack walked with a straightened spine, the uniform’s stiff weave a foreign cage against his skin. Malachi fell in beside him, a half-step behind, a contractor to a lieutenant.They didn’t speak. The silence was a third presence, charged and brittle.
The mid-level concourse was a river of grey-clad workers flowing toward the cavernous maw of the ascension spire. The air thrummed with a deeper frequency here, the vibration of immense elevators moving through their shafts like bullets in a barrel.Zack’s new credit chit got them through the first personnel gate without a glance. The guard, dull-eyed from a twelve-hour shift, just waved the uniform through.
“The contractor is with me,” Zack stated, his voice devoid of inflection. “Spire refurbishment, sub-level reinforcement.” He didn’t wait for approval.Malachi followed, a shadow in workman’s dun.
They navigated a service corridor, the noise of the concourse fading into a mechanical groan. Pipes clenched the low ceiling, dripping rust-colored condensation.Here, away from the flow, Zack stopped. He turned, the blue in his eyes hard as chipped flint in the bad light.
“Listen,” he said, his voice dropping below the drip and hum.“The chip.When it comes. Getting it in is one thing.”
Malachi watched him, saying nothing.
“Delivering it,” Zack continued, the words cold and precise.“That’s the point of maximum exposure. If something goes wrong at that moment, if it’s a trap, if they’re waiting…”
“Then we’re both fucked,” Malachi finished flatly.
“No.” Zack’s hand shot out, gripping Malachi’s arm just above the elbow.The pressure was intense, urgent.“You run. You leave me behind. You promise me.”
Malachi tried to pull away, but Zack’s grip was unbreakable. “Don’t be a martyr, you stupid fuck.”
“It’s not martyrdom.” Zack leaned closer, his breath hot.“It’s tactics. If they take me, I’m one man.I can stall. I can feed them a story about Harren.But if they take us both, it ends.Right there. Elena stays lost.” He released the grip, his hand dropping.“Promise me you’ll run. You get clear, you find another way up. You keep looking.”
Malachi stared at him, a muscle working in his jaw. The memory of the warehouse—Zack bleeding out on the concrete, telling him to pull the trigger—flashed between them.This was different.This was worse.
“This is risky,” Malachi whispered, the word inadequate for the precipice they stood on.
“I know,” Zack said, his voice finally showing a crack, a sliver of the man from the shower. “But if she’s alive, we find her.It’s worth it. Say it.”
The corridor seemed to press in, the dripping pipes marking time they didn’t have. Malachi looked at the determined, haunted face of the man who had become his only compass. He gave a single, sharp nod.“I run.”
“Say the words.”
“If it goes wrong, I run. I leave you.” Malachi spat the agreement out like poison.
Zack held his gaze for a second longer, then turned back toward the deeper hum of the spire. “Good.”
They approached a final checkpoint, a fortified booth where the service corridor met the primary ascension hall. A different quality of guard stood here—sharper, better armored, with a scanner that glowed a soft, predatory blue.Zack squared his shoulders, the lie solidifying in his gut.
“Lieutenant Rallok,” he announced, preempting the guard’s question. “Reporting for Prime Adjutant reassignment processing. This is my designated civvie liaison for spire asset evaluation.”
The guard, a woman with a face like etched stone, looked from Zack’s uniform to Malachi’s ragged stoop. Her eyes narrowed.The scanner wand in her hand lifted, its light bathing Zack’s chest. It pinged, accepting the new identity embedded in the uniform’s micro-weave. She shifted the light to Malachi.“Contractor credential,” she demanded, her voice monotone.
Malachi’s hand was steady as he produced the forged work pass Zack’s chit had requisitioned.He held it out.The guard scanned it.The light blinked, lingered. The hum of the spire’s core seemed to swell in the sudden silence.Then, a green ping. “Proceed.”
They stepped through into the vastness of the ascension hall. It was like entering a cathedral built for machinery. The central shaft yawned, a vertical chasm where mag-lev elevators, sleek as knives, shot upward on columns of shimmering force. The sound was a monumental whine, felt in the teeth. Across the expanse, a row of personnel lifts, their doors gleaming steel, waited.Zack didn’t hesitate. He strode toward the nearest lift, Malachi a pace behind, both of them dwarfed by the scale. His mind wasn’t on the uniform, or the chip, or the promise just extracted. It was on the first, impossible step.They boarded a lift marked for Sub-Level 5 – Foundational Maintenance. The doors closed, muffling the great noise to a deep throb. The compartment began to sink, not rise, moving down into the spire’s roots.
Malachi leaned against the wall, watching the level indicators flicker downward. “We’re going deeper.”
“The refurbishment story needs ground truth,” Zack said quietly, his eyes on the descending numbers. “And Harren’s contact won’t find us in the bright, clean upper decks.”
The lift slowed, then settled with a soft hydraulic sigh.The doors opened on a world of gloom and structural bone. Massive concrete pillars, studded with corroded reinforcement rods, stretched away into darkness. The air was cooler here, smelling of damp concrete and ozone.They stepped out onto a grated platform. Somewhere in the shadows, water dripped in a slow, syncopated rhythm. This was the underside of the dream, the foundations of the soaring spire above.A place of shadows and forgotten joints.
A figure detached itself from the gloom near a pillar, resolving into a man in a technician’s coverall. He had a narrow, pinched face and eyes that didn’t reflect the dim safety lights. He didn’t speak.He simply held out a closed fist.Zack walked toward him, every sense screaming. He stopped an arm’s length away.The man’s hand opened. In his palm lay a small, matte-black data chip, no larger than a fingernail.
Without a word, Zack took it.The metal was cool. He slipped it into the interior pocket of his uniform jacket, the one just over his heart. The man gave a curt nod, then melted back into the darkness between the pillars, gone as if he’d never been.Zack turned back toward the lift. Malachi was watching the empty space where the contact had vanished, his face unreadable. The chip was a cold, specific weight against Zack’s chest. The point of no return was now literally next to his skin.“Now,” Zack said, his voice echoing slightly in the vast, dark space. “We go up.”
The lift doors opened again, swallowing them whole. This time, Zack pressed the button for the High-Transit Hub, fifty levels above. The machinery engaged, pulling them upward.The descent into the dark was over.
The ascent, into the gilded light of their enemy, had begun.