“Dez…” began Raisa, approaching tenuously. “They can’t have gotten far.”
“What?” he looked up in total confusion.
“She’s right,” Victor chimed in, stepping towards Desmond and kneeling beside him. “They looked like a local gang. They shouldn’t be hard to find. If we just go back to base, get some backup…”
“We’ll have it back before you know it,” Raisa finished, trying for an encouraging smile and largely succeeding. Desmond could only stare back at the two, once again failing to comprehend. He’d all but given up. Why hadn’t they?
Then it finally occurred to him. No matter how many things around him he’d managed to break, no matter how much potential he’d squandered, these two had stuck with him. They’d stayed up late with him at university, helped him cobble together his latest soon-to-be failure, joined up with the Dark Lightning just because he had. They’d believed in him, and stood by him, even when the far, far more intelligent thing to do would have been to leave him to fend for himself.
And what had he ever done in return? He’d always put himself first. Every single time.
Well, no more.
“You sure?” Desmond asked. “If you guys don’t want to do this… well, we’ve been through hell today. We can walk if you want.”
“Whoa, Vic, you sure you healed him all the way?” Raisa asked, prompting a wide-eyed, rapid nod from Victor. “What kind of talk is that? We’re so close. We almost got killed by a train! Why throw in the towel now?”
“I think we can do it. Plus,” added Victor sheepishly, “they took my rubber duck. I’d like to get it back.”
Despite everything that had brought him to this point, Desmond had to let out a laugh at that. He may have lost all else that he’d ever valued or won in the megalomaniac maze of missteps that his life had turned out to be, but he hadn’t lost these two. He wasn’t going to lose them. And for as long as they were willing to follow him, he decided he had to strive to be worthy of that. He might not have always been that, especially not lately, but now was as good a time as any to start.
“Fine, then,” Desmond declared, getting to his feet and pointing to Victor. “But only for your duck.”
“Only for the duck,” Victor agreed, rolling up his sleeves.
“I’ll call into base, tell them we need reinforcements to find… the duck,” added Raisa, beginning to tap away at her Matrix.
But before she finished, Desmond waved her off. “You know what? Forget reinforcements. We can do this ourselves.”
When the two looked over at him, mildly puzzled, Desmond continued, “Hey, it’s our job, anyways, right? We started it. Just the three of us. Let’s finish it.” He paused. “That is, if you really want to.”
Raisa and Victor glanced at one another, looked back at Desmond, and nodded in perfect sync.
“Then let’s do this,” called Desmond, cracking his bruised knuckles, and charging off down the sidewalk. Victor and Raisa followed suit, the former in an awkward jog, the latter in an elegant sprint.
Though he really should have learned not to celebrate too early by now, Desmond still smiled. So maybe he only had two friends in the whole world. So what? That was more than enough. He’d taken them for granted so long, but for perhaps the first time, he really, truly felt — despite all available evidence — that with them by his side, they could still do anything.
They rounded the street corner, and Victor called out, thinking he’d spotted someone in an alleyway on the other side of the road. So then they ran across the middle of the street… directly into the headlights of an approaching police car.
Turns out that, as soon as they were out of the SkyLine, that AI, Jemma, had immediately got back in touch with the authorities, warning them that the three saboteurs had changed course to Beorn Station. So the cops had come on over, swept the area, and lo and behold, all three, pretty much exactly matching their given descriptions (minus one prominent coat, which did give the startled rookie at the wheel a half-second of pause), literally walked right into their hands. All three were immediately arrested.
Needless to say, any semblance of respect or reputation the three had within the Dark Lightning evaporated the minute they called from the local jail and told them, yes, they’d gotten the Enigma List, but no, they didn’t have it with them, they were kind of in jail for “accidentally” taking over a train, so they please send out a search party to look for six punks in hoodies around the SkyLine station? There was no immediate reply, which felt just about right.
Desmond, Raisa, and Victor spent the night in adjacent cells in the Sector jail. It was reasonably comfortable, to be sure, but it could have been a five star hotel and it still would have stung.
“You know, we’ve had some lows before,” Victor stated, arms folded behind his head as he stared up at the ceiling, “but if this isn’t rock bottom, I think we’re going to need a geology degree to figure out what is.”
Raisa chuckled. “So we’re totally out of the Dark Lightning, aren’t we?”
“I think that was settled the moment that cop spilled his coffee over himself and shouted, ‘Hey! You there! Aren’t you supposed to have a really nice coat? It’d be criminal not to!’” Desmond interjected, doing a poor imitation of the officer who’d arrested them all. “‘Let me see some identification!’”
Victor and Raisa snickered along, the former stating, “I don’t remember him saying that. I must have missed it.”
“He never said that,” Raisa corrected.
“I never did!” refuted the young officer from across the station, making his way towards the three. He smoothed back his mop of blond hair, tapped a couple things on his Matrix, and continued, “Thank you for making it so easy on us, though. That was pretty dumb of you all.”
“Yeah, don’t mention it,” Desmond answered, turning away from the cop and facing the wall.
“I do have one question, though,” said the officer, his voice dropping low. “Totally off the record. I won’t tell anyone. I probably shouldn’t even be asking, and you don’t have to answer me if you don’t want to, but… why’d you divert to Beorn Station at the last second?”
“What?” responded Desmond, unmoving.
“Did you think you could outrun us that way? Was that it? I mean, surely, you had to know we’d catch you, right? Or did the pressure get to you?” reasoned the officer, irrationally enthusiastic. And he knew it, too — seeing the strange looks he was getting from Raisa and Victor, he added, “Sorry. This is my first real big case. I’m just curious, that’s all.”
“What are you even talking about?” Desmond asked, standing up and stepping right up to his bars to face the officer. “It was life or death. That train was going to kill us all, man.”
The cop stared blankly back. “What are you talking about?”
“The other SkyLine, the one headed right at us. Didn’t you see? Aren’t you cops supposed to, like, know everything?”
“Um, Desmond…” Victor chimed in from the other end. “I didn’t want to mention it before, but…”
“What, Vic? What now?” Desmond asked, more than a hint of laughter already creeping into his voice. “What more could possibly go wrong?”
“I don’t think we were ever going to hit that train.”
Desmond suddenly recalled seeing the other SkyLine pass by as they’d made the turn, thinking it seemed sort of weird, sort of off. He’d thought, obviously, it was because he had switched the train over and avoided it. But now that he examined his mental image closer, was it possible that Victor was right? Had they been running right into each other at all — or just parallel?
“Did you honestly not realize?” asked the rookie, failing to suppress a smile. “You know that there’s a track in each direction, right?”
Desmond began to bang his head against the wall, as Raisa stepped up to the front of her cell and glared at him as best she could. “Hold on. Do you mean to say that we went through all that… that stress, threatening that AI, fearing for our lives, because you couldn’t read a map?”
“Hey, you couldn’t, either!” Desmond retorted.
“I didn’t see the map, genius! You just said, hey, we’re going to die if we don’t make that turn! How am I supposed to argue with that?”
“OK, but surely you must have noticed the second track in front of us?”
“I’m sorry, I was busy keeping those conductors from beating us up!”
“Well, I was busy trying to save our lives!”
“Which you wouldn’t have to do, if you could just read a map!”
“Look, Victor didn’t notice anything off, either,” Desmond pointed out. “So really, it’s all of our faults.”
“You know what, I guess so. Hey, Vic, what were you so busy doing that you didn’t notice the literal second line of track next to us?”
“I don’t remember,” admitted Victor, prompting the other two to attempt to stare him down through a wall or two. “What? It’s been a long day.”
“You all are a barrel of laughs,” said the rookie, barely stifling full-bellied laughter. He’d had a few doubts about going into this line of work. But now? He hoped every day would be like this. If the crooks and criminals of the Thyriaverse were all this incompetent, well, he’d clean up the whole world in no time!
“As much as I’d like to stick around for your comedy hour, though,” he continued, “I’ve got to meet up with the rest of the squad. They want to celebrate my first arrest, and I’m late enough as it is.”
“Have fun!” Victor stated, totally unprompted.
“Thanks?” the rookie answered, raising an eyebrow. “Anyways, one of my colleagues will be by soon to watch over you for the night. Good night, you three.”
The three would-be criminals watched him leave, and, as soon as he was out of the door, they all sat back down on their cell cots.
“You know,” Desmond pointed out, “no one’s watching right now. We could try to escape.”
“They probably have security cameras somewhere,” Victor reminded. “They might even be able to hear us right now.”
(In fact, this was true; the rookie that had just left was watching the security feed from its 17 different angles as he headed down the street, making everyone who passed him by wonder who was that man, and what was that new TV show he was watching that was apparently so funny? But neither Desmond nor Raisa nor Victor knew that — they were in jail.)
“Oh, yeah. I forgot about those,” said Desmond, sighing.
“Desmond, I think you might be an idiot,” Raisa observed, as if it had just occurred to her for the first time, which it had.
“I think we might all be idiots,” Desmond responded. “But you know what they say. Better stupid together than smart apart.”
“Is that really a thing people say?” Victor asked.
“I have no clue,” admitted Desmond, faceplanting into the thin pillow on his cot. “I just don’t know what to do right now.”
But he had Victor and Raisa, and there was nothing more he really needed. So the three of them had stayed up, talking about what they might do now that they were suddenly free to pursue new career opportunities. Victor mentioned that he might like to use his engineering degree for actual, legitimate engineering instead of making criminal technology, and that perhaps the two of them could tag along and stick together. No one came up with a better idea, even after nearly an hour of floating ideas such as opening up a candy shop or attempting to take over the TACs on Luna, so they decided they’d go for that.
But they could only get there once they cleared their legal troubles, which were considerable, to say the least. Facing down one charge each of grand theft SkyLine, one charge each of fleeing the scene, five hundred and sixty-three charges of reckless endangerment (one for each passenger on the train), and, for Desmond specifically, one charge of attempted assault against an AI, the three pooled their resources and managed to hire a lawyer known as “No-Conviction Cody,” who was famous on the streets for… well, it was in his name.
As anyone might be, Desmond, Victor, and Raisa were all fairly nervous leading up to their day in court, especially since they hadn’t actually ever managed to speak to their attorney before. But as soon as the jury had taken their seats and No-Conviction Cody opened his mouth, they relaxed at once.
For before their very eyes, their lawyer spun an argumentative masterwork, commanding the jury’s attention absolutely and never letting it go. Every word he spoke was poetry, every syllable perfectly weighed, every pause impeccably timed. Piece by piece, moment by moment, No-Conviction Cody built up a picture of the three’s understandable panic and noble-hearted attempts at saving the train. But he was also careful to mention their unfortunate lives, their failed ventures, all of it. It all led to his grandly simple conclusion — his clients were simply too stupid to be held responsible.
Despite the best efforts of the prosecution, and the testimony of one deceptively polite AI, as soon as No-Conviction Cody called the three up to the stand and got them talking, the trial was all but over. The prosecutors offered to settle the very next day.
However, there was one small catch. There was one charge they wouldn’t drop, so irrefutable was the evidence of the three’s culpability. As it turned out, jaywalking was a minor offense in the Sector, but an offense nonetheless. The three hijackers’ testimony might sway a jury on the events in the SkyLine, but there was no doubt, and no justification, for them illegally crossing the road immediately before their arrest.
No-Conviction Cody argued the point endlessly, but the prosecution would not budge, and threatened to withdraw the deal if he didn’t give in. His clients urged him to let it go, if only so they didn’t have to show up to court the next day. So, reluctantly, he took the deal, and Desmond, Raisa, and Victor were each officially convicted of criminal jaywalking. For this offense, they were each assessed a fine of Ӑ500, and were then released summarily, thus ending their great, bizarre ordeal.
In fact, it was their lawyer who had paid the greater price — as a result of the judgement, No-Conviction Cody had to change his name to One-Conviction Cody, which cratered his reputation on the streets. But as the three walked out of the Skylurian court house into a bright, sunny day, the thought didn’t cross their minds at all.
“So, what now?” Raisa asked, as they began down the street.
“Well, we should probably show up to work, tell them we’re ready to start,” Victor reminded. “Might be bad if we don’t do that.”
“Ha. Good idea,” said Desmond, observing quietly that somehow Victor had ended up the responsible one in the group. Now that was perhaps strangest of all. “Then again, with our luck, we’ll probably be fired before the end of the month.”
“Don’t say that!” Raisa punched him in the shoulder. This, despite the fact that she’d been thinking exactly the same thing.
“Look, I don’t know how much explosive material we’re going to be working with, but just in case, we should probably keep me far, far away from all of it.”
“I’ll let the boss know,” noted Victor helpfully. “Hopefully this goes well, though. I think it will.”
“Really?” asked Desmond skeptically.
“Yeah. I mean, at some point things have to get better, right?”
“I guess you’re right.”
They’d walked together in silence for a while, until Desmond finally asked, “Hey, you guys know if the Dark Lightning ever chased down those guys that mugged us and got the Enigma List back?”
“I don’t think so. If they did, well, I figure they might have let us back in,” supposed Victor. “Or at least returned our calls.”
“Yeah. Still, it’s in the past. What does it really matter?” asked Raisa, shrugging.
Well, what it really mattered was this: the six thugs that had stolen the Enigma List from Desmond hadn’t been seen alive ever again. The next morning, their bodies were found slumped over in an alleyway not far from where they’d cornered the train hijackers, heavily beaten and inexplicably burned. It seemed they’d put up a fight, but not a very good one.
The drive containing the List was nowhere to be found. If it had been taken by any of the major criminal organizations, none of them were admitting to it. If it had been retrieved by a citizen, no one was saying anything. It was almost as if the street gang had fallen victim to one of the fables and myths allegedly described within the Enigma List, and that was far more true than anyone would ever realize.
Slowly a new legend had been born — that of the cursed Enigma List, where disaster and death followed anyone who stole it, who was unworthy of its secrets, who was impure of heart, whatever it might have been. It was pretty clear it wasn’t totally true, but it didn’t have to be. It just had to scare off people from trying to take it again, and that’s exactly what it did.
So, in a sense, Desmond Kjeza, Victor Rougell, and Raisa Minasen had failed so terribly on so many levels, they’d actually succeeded at something for once. Instead of being charred corpses, they instead could take one another, arm-in-arm, and head towards what was likely to be the latest of failures, but could be the beginning of a new, happier life.
All things considered, well, that wasn’t so bad.
