Editing Bound Fate (Warhammer High) (section)

===Didn't Make It Through the Night - Tuesday, Septembris 20===
----


Furia flopped onto her bed, computer chair still spinning crazily with the momentum imparted by Doug's jacket. Her hand dug around the covers, under the mattress, beneath the pillow.

"Fuck." The word was muffled by the thin pillow. ''No more goddamn smokes.'' Furia had hoped to patch things up with Hana, though she'd never say it.

It didn't go well.

She heard something, a light rustling outside, barely more than the wind through the trees. Her blood picked up, her father's legacy flooding adrenaline through Furia at the slightest provocation once more. When a gentle tap came at the window, she could only smile and wave a hand lazily through the air. Doug stepped in neatly and shut the window behind him.

"I take it your father isn't home?" He sat down on the bed next to her, and Furia rolled over.

"Nope, said he was going out to get a new grill. The last one burnt his grox ribs and didn't make it through the night." She grunted slightly as her own pained ribs, still throbbing from the fight, made their presence known.

Doug pulled on her hip, and the bed shook slightly as Furia rolled onto her stomach once more.

"Oh, my. I take it the fight with Hana went well?"

"Eh, could've be-ah!" Furia jumped as his hands parted the union of shirt and skirt. Fingers brushed her discolored skin gently. "Could've been better."

She sighed into the pillow, relaxing as Doug's hands, feeling like large spiders, played out a warm, gentle massage over the bruises. After fifteen minutes Furia was all but asleep, the stress of the day forgotten. She didn't stir again until his hands slipped under the skirt, pulled it down just slightly and started massaging again. Furia sat up suddenly, pulling him into a passionate kiss, all need for lho or fighting forgotten, subsumed.

"Ehrhehm-Furia." Doug managed to reluctantly pull away, face already flushed. "I'm afraid I don't have much time here, for now. I have more work to do, but I will be back later. If you're still up for it?"

She thought about it for a minute, then suddenly remembered what she'd been trying to forget. "Yeah, yeah. I actually have something to do too. Almost forgot."

"Excellent, then I shall see you in a few hours, my dear Furia." Doug kissed her again, as gentle and lingering as the earlier massage, and left through the window, stopping only to take his leather jacket.

Furia laid back down on the bed, smiling as she tucked her button-up shirt back into the skirt.

"Fucker."



Far below, A-D Thar's chin worked back and forth, a slow near-grinding of his teeth as he thumbed through page after page of deaths. He'd been at it for nearly twelve straight hours, only pausing to use the restroom and grab a bottle of water. There were a lot of unknown-cause deaths, plenty of overdoses and no shortage of unexplained murders. Idiam stopped as he came across a recent unexplained homicide, recognizing the name on the file, his partner. It had been redacted as well. ''I'll have to wait for the new Commander to open the file.''

He set that thought aside for now and continued, hands bulling through the paper, sorting: unknown, overdose, unknown, unknown, unexplained murder, overdose, miscellaneous. Over and over Idiam pulled, analyzed, sorted and stacked, his bloodshot eyes steadily growing more saturated. After another half-hour he'd finished. The overdose pile was snatched up, and set down roughly at the other end of the table. The dull thud echoed noisily through the room, disturbing the established balance of silence and whispering paper.

The old display crackled to life, dim and thick with imperfections in the holograph. Idiam began to input data, slower and even more a chore than the sorting. He read the data, input, read again, and double-checked before moving on to the next. The time seemed to wear again, and Thar felt himself begin to slip into the fugue state once more, his body finally accepting that the chore would happen despite its protests.

“I believe you may have the wrong idea, Detective.”

Idiam jumped, almost knocking the enormous slab of paper to the ground. He turned slowly, hand at his pistol. The voice sounded familiar, and it wasn't until he saw the tall, thin kid in the black coat that Thar relaxed. If only a little. ''How did he get in here?''

“I'm afraid most of your compatriots aren't as observant as you are, Detective Thar.” Doug strode crisply forward, hard heels making no sound against rockcrete. Idiam blinked at the apparent reading of his thoughts.

“What do you mean?” Idiam turned back to the slowly appearing map of deaths, of overdoses. “There's a pattern to these overdoses, I just have to find it.”

“Indeed, I can think of no reason a street dealer would give a child an overdose of slide. Uncut, much less. You think he intended to kill the child?”

“Yes.” Idiam returned to the task, given fresh energy by the shock of Doug's sudden appearance.

“I... spoke with the dealer, Winhus. I believe you met his cohort, Agissa. He's no serial killer, and he's not the type to give out uncut slide. I suspect he wasn't aware it was uncut. His dealer knew nothing about it either, only that he was to pass that particular package to Winhus, with instructions that it be sold to a child.”

Idiam suddenly remembered where else he'd heard that voice. ''That domestic disturbance call.''

“Congratulations are in order, I hear you quite cleared out that cube. They must have given you a Distinctia for that.”

Thar nodded again. “Broke over thirty slide rings in #113 alone.”

Doug looked over the other piles for another three minutes, then suddenly nodded.

“Tell me, how many overdoses does Hive Tetra have in a year?” He looked pointedly at the massive stack, then back at Idiam. “How many do you think are from uncut slide?”

“I'll find the pattern, if it takes me all night.” 

“I admire your work effort, Detective Thar, but there is simply too much noise to pick out a pattern. Is this normal?” He gestured at another stack, the smallest, but still comprising hundreds of unsolved cases.

“The unknowns?”

Doug picked through it, quickly separating several sheets out of the pile and arranging them into a neat stack.

“Yes, I assume that spontaneously bursting into flame is quite rare, even among lower hive inhabitants.” He lifted a single sheet from the fresh stack and held it straight for Thar to see, then quickly began to file through the rest, picking out more and more spontaneous combustion cases, until over two-thirds of the stack was sorted into a new pile.

He began to look through these with alarming speed, throat barely moving as he subvocalized each detail, committing it to memory. “Observe.” He stepped neatly over to the display, then tabbed over to a fresh map, activating the tactile marker interface. Doug's spidery fingers danced over the surface, pinching and drawing to align each three-dimensional position in turn. “Ah, there we are. Far too many spontaneous combustions to be coincidental.” The deaths happened in clusters, always cycling through different hab blocks. One such cluster was centered around school #113. Another swam lower in the hive, somewhere near the underhive.

“How did you get access to the other blocks' crime records?”

Doug smiled and said nothing, then paused, a look of recognition coming over his features. “Now, that's interesting.”

Idiam finally stepped over. “What?”

“There was a rather large group of scavvies operating there a few days ago, breaking in to the slide trade as it were.”

“What does spontaneous combustion have to do with scavvies?”

“Nothing, Detective Thar. But if we overlay the #113 slide rings you broke up with the spontaneous combustions...” They both began to add now, and Idiam didn't even bother asking how the boy knew where the rings were. Finally they were done, and the clusters of fiery death overlapped almost perfectly with the slide rings. A stray agglomeration sat near the underhive border area, and Doug drew a line here. “Scavvies who had recently broken into the slide trade were here.”

Idiam looked it over for a long minute, but couldn't find any way to justify the overlap as a coincidence. “But... what does slide have to do with spontaneous combustions?”

Doug turned his head, eyes glinting in the low light.  “A most excellent question, Detective.”





''No one ever accused Furia of creativity. Still, there's a, uh, homespun elegance to her words.'' These thoughts swam through Coby Trelan's head a half hour later on the darkening surface as he received yet another blistering invective.

"WHERE THE ''FUCK'' IS MY ''FUCKING'' JACKET YOU ''FUCKING'' MOTHER''FUCKER''?!"

Coby cringed, dark curls quivering and bobbing as if they were trying to free themselves from the boy and flee the presence of this raging monster.

"I-I left it over at Victoria's." The words were small, too small, his lips pinched and narrowed.

"WHY THE ''FUCK'' WAS ''MY'' JACKET OVER AT ''FUCK''TORIA'S?!" Furia clenched her hand around the grapefruit-sized granite stone, picked to be thrown through his window. It cracked and flaked under her grip.

"Uhhhhh." Impossibly, Coby shrank more, his whole body seeming to retreat into itself. His voice grew quieter, smaller somehow. The only exceptions were his eyes, now like great moons orbiting a doomed planet. "She... she liked me wearing it saturday when... uh... we..."

"''FFFFFF''UUUUU-"

A great crack! burst over the posh neighborhood. Down the street a man fell, crying out with hands over his head as he looked for the origin of the gunshot. A window broke, a flower pot was knocked over, an expense gravcar's alarm went off. Coby cried as well, as a spray of gray and black dust and pebbles scattered over him, the stone having shattered under Furia's apoplectic rage before she could be bothered to throw it. Coby cringed there for some time, weeping, only roused by the smell of his own waste when it reached his nostrils. He risked a glance, a look, and saw nothing. Still, some small part of him was disappointed that he didn't get to watch her walk away. Coby always liked the way Furia's angry stomp tossed her skirt ''just'' high enough to see.



Furia slaughtered her way down the sidewalk, for if slaughtering air and dust, concrete, sunlight and good cheer was possible anywhere, by anyone, it was Furia Angron on this day, at this time. The soles of her boots flopped, her stomping having long since blown out all arch support and most of the structure. Her hair stirred crazily, as if an updraft of pure rage was flowing from her eyes, nose and mouth, streaming back over her head and carrying it aloft.

No less than three lho-sticks were in her mouth at any given time for the half-hour following her talk with Coby. She had run out a block back, but a man opening a fresh box had seen her eyes and found truth, a brush with death so terrifying he'd given up the habit altogether. The box was almost empty now and, as the storm clouds gathered behind Furia, more and more people hurried inside. Logically it was to avoid the rain, but somewhere deep down, at the core of their very being, they knew something far more terrible than any natural disaster was coming with the setting sun. 

Victoria's house wasn't far from Coby's, or Furia's for that matter, but the trip seemed to take an eternity. Perhaps it was the scraping, the flaky mouthfeel of her grinding teeth; perhaps it was the pounding of blood in her ears, as if the moon had dropped two thousand kilometers and the oceans swelled, leapt from their rude cage and crashed down on the world in a mad, futile bid for freedom from the tyranny of tide and time. Whatever the reason, the trip seemed to stretch, slower and slower, time freezing over as Furia walked the last block. The burnt, smoldering remains of lho-filters were seized by her teeth and ground mercilessly, more thoroughly than any pestle could hope to dare and under pressure no mortar could have the audacity to bear. The last trace bits of nicat bled into her mouth, the scream of a dozen inanimate objects almost audible, so palpable was their agony.

Furia walked through the gate uncaring, heedless if it was locked, or even a gate at all and not a tasteful barred window to the splendors of Fulgrim's wondrous personal gardens. She simply continued and the inert matter gave way, with no thought as to how, why or if it was even logically possible. There was one thing and one thing only of which Furia was absolutely sure in this moment, as she spit the fist-sized of wad of fluff and agony into a patch of gentle, timid Ayndle Hook Arctic Heather, chosen by Fulgrim for its subtle and delicate looks, an inherent contradiction to its renowned hardiness.

She was sure that, no matter what happened, she could not be angrier than she was at this moment. When she looked up into the second floor of the Fulgrim Villa and saw Victoria, Furia remained exactly as angry as she had been a minute ago. When Victoria dropped her robe, lips moving playfully, eyes batting and flashing with unimaginable promise, Furia maintained the precise level of fury she had shouldered ten minutes ago.

As the physical weight of her unmasterable rage bore down, she saw Victoria's latest boytoy step into the window frame. He was tall, with light brown, wavy hair. His facial expression could be described as irritatingly mild and unreadably neutral. He spoke in visibly formal and complex sentences, each word enunciated thoroughly and pronounced meticulously, each syllable inconceivably precise and definite. 
Furia had to physically stop herself from pulling an eye out of her head.

So stupendous was her disbelief she thought it more likely, more physically possible, that she would find a small, Doug-shaped stain on one or both of her eyes, capering and waggling as the globes moved in their orbits, making Victoria's latest conquest appear to be him. But Furia didn't, because she was already in a particularly self-loathing mood. The overwhelming self-reproach allowed her to see the world as it truly was.

So, when Doug stepped forward and traced a long, slender finger tenderly along Victoria's perfectly sculpted jaw, Furia could at least take solace in the fact that she was right. She wasn't more furious than ever, no longer a frothing cauldron of wrath. She watched Doug push Victoria gently down onto the bed. She saw his long black coat stir gently behind him, as it had only two hours ago out her window. 

The world blurred and distended, but it wasn't reality coming apart, it was her.

There were... tears. 

Furia wasn't angry. 

She just wasn't. 

She wasn't.