(Disclaimers in the prologue)
A man and a woman stood before the window in a brightly coloured café. Their view consisted not of a road, nor a car-park, nor any earth-bound location, but of bright pin-prick stars and dark, empty vacuum; the infinity of space.
They were surrounded by this void, with no means of leaving the small pocket which sustained them. They had been lured, trapped and finally imprisoned. The last, mocking words of their enemy had chilled them to the bone:
"This place is nowhere. And it's forever."
The woman's name was Sapphire. She found she was unable to contemplate the stars for long and turned away from the window. She pulled a chair to the nearby table and sat down, concentrating on the small chess pieces which littered the cloth. She knew she had to focus on some task. Despair was so close.
Sensing motion, she raised her head to watch her companion, Steel, move away from the taunting vista of nothingness. As she did, she blinked with confusion. For a moment it had seemed as though they both still stood there, shoulder to shoulder. Something was wrong, something didn't fit, but it lasted only for an instant. Steel had moved over to the doorway and was examining the forcefield which kept the vacuum at bay.
Where had the image come from?
Her confusion lasted for long, uncertain moments before she realised that she could sense nothing further which was odd and decided that the illusion had been brought about by the stress of the trap. She needed a distraction.
Sapphire started to analyse the chess pieces. They were all tiny, designed to go with the small travel set. She held each figure between the tips of her fingers and used the flat of her other hand to try to make sense of them. Yet she could read nothing, and that in itself was very strange. At the very least she should have received the date of manufacture, the nature and age of the components, the identity of the last handler.
She looked over to her partner, wanting to make him aware of this peculiarity. Steel was tracing the forcefield with the palms of his hands. Sapphire waited patiently for him to finish his task; time was not exactly at a premium, here.
When he left the field alone and turned back into the room, Sapphire was disturbed to see that Steel's eyes contained a wildness. Not just anger; she had seen and been the recipient of his anger on many occasions. No, what Sapphire saw in Steel's eyes was a fury which verged on madness.
"Steel?" she questioned, deliberately making her voice as calm as possible. To try to soothe him would be pointless. She understood his moods far too well and knew exactly what would placate him and what would only infuriate him further, so she tried to distract him from his rage. "Steel, there's something very odd about these chess pieces."
Steel let none of his anger slip as he walked slowly toward Sapphire. She shifted uncomfortably but had never had any reason to fear her partner, so she took no defensive stance. Steel's paranoia was supposedly common knowledge among all the agents, but Sapphire herself had never seen any evidence that it existed. She had only ever been confronted with his cynicism, and those times when he had suspected the worst, he had usually been proved correct.
He had never once intentionally hurt her. Even during their most animated disagreements, the ones which became fully fledged arguments, he had never shown the slightest inclination to assert his superior strength and do her physical harm. After all, she and Steel were more than partners. They were closer than friends, closer than lovers, and though neither of them had ever discussed the strength of the connection between them, Sapphire was convinced that Steel understood its binding quality.
Therefore Sapphire had no reason to fear the agent now stepping over to her with such hostility in his eyes.
She was obviously right in her assessment, because Steel drew a chair from the table and sat opposite her, steepling his fingers beneath his nose and studying her through narrowed eyes. His expression was still filled with anger, but it was surely directed at those who had imprisoned them.
"Well?" he finally growled.
Sapphire almost sighed with relief. For a minute she had been worried that the Steel who shared her prison had been tampered with by the Transients, perhaps like the woman at the service station. Hearing his voice, so familiar to her, the worries faded. This was Steel. He was the same agent he had always been; gruff, surly, and browbeating yet also honourable, brilliant and utterly trustworthy.
She tried a smile, the twinkling one which usually let him know that he could huff and puff to his heart's content and she would still be there when he was done, ready to try something new, to find the solution. He always calmed down on seeing that smile. Sometimes it even made him smile, too; the slightly embarrassed, self-deprecating smile which told her that he realised he had been found out and apologised for the huffing and puffing. The one which said, What would I do without you?
Unfortunately, the circumstances right now were such that he was unable to return the smile. Sapphire gave up and offered her discovery, wary that Steel liked few things less than being made to repeat himself. She held up a chess piece for Steel's inspection.
"I've tried to read them. Analyse them."
"And?"
"And I can't."
"What do you mean, you can't? You must be getting something from them!"
Steel had not raised his voice, but as he spoke, Sapphire sensed a dangerous rage boiling within. She tried to read his emotions but found that the rage blocked everything else. How was she to break this mood? She needed her partner fully functioning, to help her to find the way out of this cage. Right now, she was having trouble even meeting his eyes ...
Sapphire swallowed her concerns. She had nothing to fear from Steel. They were closer than lovers. They were connected.
"That's what I'm telling you," she returned, cooly. "Not one scrap of information is encoded in these pieces."
"That's ridiculous," Steel spat. Sapphire watched a frown play over his forehead and shivered as he cast a brief suspicious look to one side, as though he had caught sight of some invisible enemy. He picked up one of the pieces, rubbed it between his hands and then handed it back. "There. If nothing else, you should be able to tell that I've been holding it recently." Something else seemed to distract him, and this time he jerked his head around for a fleeting instant.
Sapphire felt a block of ice begin to consume her body. Steel was sitting across the table from her yet he seemed to be a million miles away, and drifting further all the time. How was she to bring him back? She couldn't face this prison alone! She snatched up the piece, expecting Steel to be right and to read his signature on the figure. When it registered nothing with her, she let it fall out of her hands. "Still nothing," she whispered.
Steel shook his head slowly, and then more vigorously. "No," he said firmly. He bit at his lip and looked down at the table, snatching up the bottle of sauce. "What about this?"
Sapphire took the brandished bottle gingerly from his hands. 'I have nothing to fear from Steel,' she silently reminded herself. She analysed the container and replaced it. "Nothing," she insisted.
Steel stood up so suddenly that his chair fell backwards. He pointed at a napkin and she swept it obediently, shaking her head as the result was the same.
"No!" Steel exclaimed. He turned away from her and staggered around in a circle for a few steps, his fingers kneading his forehead viciously.
Sapphire wondered why her lack of success in reading the items was such a problem to him. After all, the woman had told them they were 'nowhere', so couldn't it be that the items in their prison were actually 'nothing'? Or maybe they had taken away her talent for analysis, sometime after leaving the service station. There were explanations, but her partner seemed convinced that the discovery indicated some greater threat.
He returned to the table and swept it clear in a cacophony of falling objects. Startled, Sapphire pulled back. Steel lowered his face menacingly to her own and ordered her to read the wooden table top.
"Nothing," she finally admitted, now flinching from Steel's fury. He batted the table to one side in response, easily tearing the metal brackets which bolted it in place.
Something was wrong, something was changing - no! No, something had changed! For a suspended moment Sapphire was once again treated to an illusion of herself and her partner in the same room. Steel threw the table to one side, but she smiled at him, laughing at his frustration and he was smiling with her now, that beautiful 'What would I do without you?' smile, her partner, her friend ...
It was gone.
Steel remained, though without the smile. He had discarded the table and produced a thin, silvery pen which he waved threateningly close to her eyes.
"This," he insisted softly, the lack of volume suddenly terrifying.
She took the pen from him and analysed it, knowing that she should gain a great deal of information from it because it was no part of the trap. It had come from the confines of Steel's own jacket.
She read nothing.
Sapphire's lips trembled as she gently returned the pen. She could barely meet her partner's eyes as she shook her head.
I have nothing to fear from him. He has never hurt me. He and I are connected.
"LIES!" Steel roared and flung the pen across the room. He grasped the back of Sapphire's seat, twisting it to face him. In a classic demonstration of physical dominance he stood over her, blocking any movement by the position of his arms. "I could have thought it of almost anyone," he continued, speaking so quickly as to nearly lose his coherence. "Almost anybody except you!"
Sapphire couldn't have moved, even if Steel had allowed it. In a handful of minutes, her partner had been transformed from the man she knew and trusted into this raving maniac. Something inside him had snapped and it was beyond her repair. The cold gnawing at her body increased as she was faced with all of Steel's furious strength.
Survival instincts were aroused and she attempted to paralyse him. Normally she should have been able to do so easily, as her mental powers were greater than his, but he was completely unaffected.
He was still talking, repeating her name over and over, like a mantra. She noticed that tears had begun to fall down his cheeks.
The tears caught at something inside her. Despite the danger Steel now represented to her, she couldn't bear to see him so distressed. Without any real volition, she edged an arm between herself and her partner and slowly moved it to his face, finally making contact with his skin and softly brushing the tears away.
"Steel?" she asked, pouring everything she had ever felt for her companion into her tone.
"Oh, Sapphire," he gasped, opening his eyes and looking into hers. For a few precious moments Steel seemed to return to his senses, because he nuzzled his cheek into her hand, then twisted to kiss the inside of her palm.
Sapphire wondered about trying to talk, but was too afraid that the words she might choose would agitate him again. Instead, she lifted her other hand to Steel's face and brushed stray hairs back into place.
Then the precious moments were over.
Her wrists were suddenly caught in a vice-like grip. Steel still wept, but the anger had returned to his expression.
"It was mine," he whispered. "Even if nothing in this room was readable, you should have got something from that pen."
"I know it was yours!" Sapphire gasped. His grip on her wrists was painful.
"Be quiet! No more lies!"
Given no option to explain herself, Sapphire was finally consumed completely by the cold. Her shoulders slumped in resignation, though she began to weep softly.
"You see," continued Steel, "I know how you've been lying to me. You aren't going to help me find a way out of this trap because you don't even belong in it! When will they be back for you? Or can you leave at any moment? Just fade out, as though you were porting back to the Hub?"
Sapphire wanted to shake her head in denial, but all she could do was gasp a sob.
"You want to leave me here. Alone. You have never cared about our partnership, our duties, our success - it's always been leading up to this, hasn't it?" Steel turned his head to his shoulder and managed half-successfully to wipe some of his tears on to the fabric of his jacket. "Well, off you go, then. Go back to the Transients. Or Silver. Or whoever it is you want to be with instead of me."
Sapphire could no longer look at him, and closed her eyes in denial. The sudden loss of Steel's angry expression gave her some small strength. "Steel, please don't do this," she began.
"I loved you!" he thundered, and she squeezed her eyes shut even more tightly. When the echoes died away she looked tentatively at Steel. He slowly moved his face closer to hers, angling it, as though he were moving in to share the kiss that had always been imminent but never quite arrived between them. He stopped before his lips met hers, just barely, and she felt his breath on her skin.
"I loved you," he repeated, more quietly, and unclenched his hands from Sapphire's wrists, sliding them up her arms and over her shoulders. She knew what he intended and made no attempt to arrest his movement. If her partnership with Steel was lost on the winds of this madness then she had nothing left to fight for.
"My heart ... is broken," he whispered, his voice that of a lover, though his eyes still blazed with rage and loss. Steel's hands finally circled her neck, and she felt him begin to squeeze.
In the few seconds she had before the world faded to blackness, Sapphire studied her killer's face almost objectively. This was Steel. He looked the same as always. Unable to speak, her last act as one of the living was to send a message of her own love and forgiveness through the link she still shared with her partner and friend.
~~~~~~~
Continued in Chapter 7
Back to Transients, by Zircon
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