The Weight of Old Chains
That day, on the way home from the mission, I passed out in the car, bleeding tears and a nosebleed. It came on so suddenly there was no time to react. When I woke up again, I was staring at a familiar ceiling. I was lying in the exact same building, on the exact same bed, in the exact same condition as before I’d left.
I felt a pain like my entire body was being torn apart and turned my head. Eileen was looking at me with a mischievous grin spread across her face.
“The shot I gave you before dragging you off the bed was basically a stimulant,” she said.
When Eileen had injected something into my neck, I’d felt my whole body heat up like it was on fire. I’d suspected something was off, but the situation had been so chaotic at the time that I’d forgotten about it. That careless mistake had come back to bite me like this.
“It doesn’t actually heal the wounds. It just makes them feel like they’re gone for a while. Once the drug wears off, everything comes rushing back and you collapse again.”
“I could’ve died.”
“You didn’t, so it’s all good. Besides, Hounds aren’t the kind of bastards who die that easily.”
It seemed Eileen thought that the single fact of me being a Hound was enough reason to treat me roughly. In the past that might have been true, but not with this body. My physical abilities were exactly what they looked like, so one wrong move and I could break down completely.
Anyway, Eileen kept chattering away in high spirits for a while longer before announcing she had work to do and vanishing. I was left alone in the now-quiet room, lying dazed on the bed.
Come to think of it, the withdrawal symptoms aren’t that bad right now.
Lying blankly in a silent room was practically the worst situation for me, yet my body showed no reaction. Normally I would have been trembling uncontrollably, desperate to move, but now I was lying perfectly still. It wasn’t because I lacked the strength. Even when my body wasn’t functioning normally, the withdrawal had always gnawed at my mind. Whether I could move or not, this body had constantly demanded adrenaline. It was bound by a compulsive sense of duty that refused to tolerate my existence without it.
Because without it, I’d die.
I stared at the ceiling for a moment, wondering why this body that had once been like that was now so quiet. It didn’t take long to find the answer.
It’s satisfied enough.
It was similar to when I worked with Darius. Back then, throwing myself into chaos on a regular basis had made the drug dependency disappear, letting me live an ordinary daily life. It was a good thing. A good thing, and yet at the same time it made me realize just how badly broken my mind was. I’d known it for a long time, but it seemed becoming a normal, well-adjusted member of society was still a distant dream.
I sighed and closed my eyes. I had only just managed to take my first steps away from the place I had lived my entire life, yet my soul was still chained there. The gap between my head and my body seemed to be the root of what was eating away at my heart.
In this day and age, people like me are probably the minority.
Everyone lived hard lives. There were plenty of soldiers whose souls were still trapped on the battlefield, and just as many people who turned to drugs to look away from reality. So I comforted myself that I wasn’t the strange one.
The place Eileen used as her base was a low-rise building in the lower levels on the outskirts of the city. With only three floors in total, it was so unassuming that you might not even notice it from a distance. But that also meant it was free from unnecessary noise, a location where she could avoid most annoyances.
I moved my residence to Eileen’s hideout. Compared to my own home in the mid-levels of the city, which was almost completely silent, her place was at least somewhat noisy. Unless I’d just come back from a big job, excessive quiet only gnawed at my mind. Silence was the perfect condition for human worries to multiply.
Anyway, after moving my residence to Eileen’s hideout, I started occasionally running into people who seemed to be her companions. One of them was a man about a head taller than Eileen. What stood out most was that his entire right arm was an implant. It looked like he’d replaced a part lost during the war. Other memorable details were his clouded, blind left eye and the constant smell of cigarettes that clung to him. Whenever I passed by him, the scent of tobacco was always there. It wasn’t the sharp, grassy smell typical of narcotics.
When I asked Eileen, she told me his name was Jackdaws Ram. The fact that he had a surname meant he wasn’t corporate-born. He avoided me quite blatantly, and since I had never spoken to him, I had no idea why. Even when I asked Eileen, she only gave cryptic answers, which made it even harder to understand.
If he held a grudge against corporations, he wouldn’t be working with Eileen, who had once been a corporate soldier. And if my appearance made him uncomfortable, his behavior was surprisingly considerate toward me. It felt less like he was avoiding me as a person and more like he was avoiding something beyond me.
So even though we lived in the same space, we had spent our time there without ever exchanging a single proper word. Until one day.
“If you’re that anxious, why don’t you just check for yourself? The method is simple.”
“But it could be dangerous. How can I be sure…”
“It’s better than hovering around with no end in sight.”
I was on the stairs leading from the third floor to the second when I heard voices talking below. It was a man’s voice, heavy with exhaustion.
Jackdaws.
It sounded similar to the occasional coughs I’d heard from him before. This was the first time I’d heard his voice so clearly. Then again, I had only been here for a week, so that was only natural.
I briefly considered waiting on the stairs to listen longer, but instead I simply continued down. In the living area on the second floor, the two of them were deep in conversation. Maybe because my presence was so faint, they didn’t notice me even after I reached the bottom. I stood silently near the stairs, watching them. Only after a long while did Eileen finally spot me.
“If you were awake, you should’ve said something.”
“I’m not a child.”
“Says the person who passes out at ten every night. Anyway, you came at just the right time.”
Jackdaws Ram. The man Eileen usually called JL. Our eyes met. The strange atmosphere in his gaze was still there. This time he didn’t look away, holding my stare for a long moment. That was when I finally understood what that strange look meant.
It was the eyes of distrust. The look someone gave when they couldn’t trust the other person, yet felt guilty for that very lack of trust. People with eyes like that usually ended up doing unpredictable things. That was why I also preferred to keep my distance.
Eileen stepped between us, grabbed both our shoulders, and pulled us close together.
“This time, you two go together. We can’t keep living like this without even getting to know each other.”
“Are you serious? You think just bumping into each other will fix it?”
“A ram butting against a fence. When two sides have nowhere to retreat and are forced to face each other, it’s the perfect way to shed old skins.”
JL looked at me with an expression that clearly said he wasn’t happy about this. It was a look I had seen countless times, so I simply stared back at him without a word. After glancing back and forth between me and Eileen for a while, he finally pulled a cigarette from his pocket. He lit it with the implant at the tip of his finger and spoke.
“Fine. I’ll give it one try, I guess.”
His tone was heavy with reluctance. I followed him without complaint.
The entire drive to our destination, neither of us spoke. We didn’t feel the need to talk to each other, and we both seemed determined to just finish the job and go home. It was clear Eileen had pushed us into this against our will; neither of us was trying to get closer on our own. On top of that, JL’s distrust of me played a big part. Since I knew he was deliberately avoiding me, I had no intention of approaching him either.
The car carrying JL and me left the lower levels of the city and headed even further out. We moved from an area surrounded by towering buildings like prison walls into a place where the air was thick and dark. A massive central sewer—something no one had planned for—flowed stickily through the enormous canyon between the roads. Just the dark air visible through the window was enough to guess how polluted it was. There were no proper purification facilities here. It was a sediment zone where people buried by the rapidly changing society and driven to the outskirts gathered. In other words, a slum.
Most of the buildings here were hollow tin-can structures. There were no precision facilities like electrical systems; they were simply giant buildings in appearance only. Maintenance was out of the question, so finding a building without mold was actually harder. This was the ragged edge of a living city that had expanded indiscriminately in every direction. The overwhelming emptiness made me feel powerless just looking at it.
The number of alleys too narrow for even a single car to pass through began to increase. Wandering around here alone would definitely end badly.
Anyway, the reason we had come here was to recover corporate materials that had been stolen in bulk by a gang. The client was a corporation again. There was nothing particularly special about the job.
Some time later, the car finally stopped deep inside the slum, in a place where a lone streetlamp cast an orange glow that barely illuminated the alley. Without a word, we stepped out of the car into the heavy, poisonous air.