“Cold night, isn’t it?”
Down below, the clamour of life in the Two bustled ever onwards. Aerodynes and sector control drones drifted in unwritten lines above the sprawl, the endless, soot-smudged tangle of the slums underneath. The chill hung heavy in the air, dripping from the massive superstructures above in thick, palpable waves.
Wrapped in a plain leather jacket, she shivered a little, the slender lines of her form largely bare beneath the dusk-tinged tights that clung desperately to gooseflecked skin. The bodice slung about her torso in provocative lines did little else to ease the cold, the garment clearly designed to accentuate - not insulate.
Pulling a length of long, silvery hair over her shoulder and between her fingers, she sighed.
The strap of her rifle dug into her shoulder. The grey, lifeless metal of her sidearm dragged the left side of her jacket down into a lopsided droop.
With glassy eyes, she stared over the Sty.
“You could’ve dressed more…”
His voice paused, hesitant. Hoarse, a little wet, from a mixture of cigarettes and presumably heavy drinking.
She glanced over her shoulder with a flat look. His gaze flicked upward.
Few would fault the man for where his gaze chose to lay. As white as a ghost, the sunless pallor of her skin shimmered with an almost haunting iridescence, the twinned bounties of genetics and fortune combined in her slender being to fill all of her five foot, three inches of rise with a nearly otherworldly presence.
Great, billowing lengths of silvery hair spilled about her shoulders and back, sprawling onwards unto the small of her form, and not an inch further. Little segments of errant debris - bits of discarded wrappers, the odd ringpull tab - made themselves known now and then, the faintest hint of earthly tethers to an otherwise ethereal, impossibly beautiful creature.
That is, if it were not for the assault rifle hanging by her chest, and the odd, lattice patterning in the pall of her milky, wide-eyed gaze.
Fortune had long released her from its midst, however. Their liaison was proof of that - a chance meeting atop a blacktop roof in the middle of the district’s worst slums. Three 5.56 magazines poked out of a floppy cup of fabric bereft of any meaningful mass left to fill it, the implements of her trade never far from her heart. Scarcely ever settled on the near, her gaze danced to the far-away in methodical, programmed flicks.
He coughed awkwardly, and stroked his stubbled chin with a thumb, alighting his eyes to her waiting look.
“Somebody needs to die, Rina.”
With the swivelling crunch and clip-clop of her heeled walk, she paced towards him, striding close - painfully close - into his personal space. And like an animal attempting to decipher speech above its ken, she canted her head, a wing of argent strands occluding one eye completely.
Misting about her pale lips, the air quivered as she spoke, a terrible, childlike lilt of naive curiosity:
“How much?”