LETHAL TOUCH: BREAKING THE PRIME CEO

THE GLOW IN THE GREY

The sky rained regret.

Heavy, viscous and salty.

Adia pulled the collar of her oilskin coat up past her nose. The leather hissed. A droplet of concentrated Grief struck her shoulder, heavy as a ball bearing. It slid down the sleeve, leaving a trail of dark, sticky residue. She didn’t wipe it off. Touching it meant feeling it and she had enough feeling to drown the whole damn sector.

She moved fast. Boots on wet cobblestone.

SPLASH, SPLASH, SPLASH.

The District was drowning. Sector 4. The Sinks. Gravity worked harder here. The air pressure was a hand pressing down on the skull, grinding the teeth together.

The Grief Storm had been raging for three days. A High Yield Extraction uptown, the news feeds said. The Elite were shedding their sorrow so they could enjoy the gala season.

Their trash was Adia’s weather.

She ducked into an alleyway. Narrow. Stinking of unwashed bodies. The walls sweated grey slime.

A shadow detached itself from a doorway.

"You’re late!" it hissed. A woman. Edala. Her skin was the color of old newspaper.

"Weather’s heavy." Adia whispered. Her voice was low, a vibrato hum that seemed to push the cold air away. "Keep your voice down! The mist has ears."

"You have it?" Edala‘s hands shook from the withdrawal. The tremor of a soul running on fumes. "I can’t… I can’t see him anymore, Adia. I try to close my eyes and picture his face, but it’s just… It’s just grey noise."

Adia stepped closer, checking the alley mouth. Empty. Just the relentless stinging rain hammering the trash cans.

"The item!" Adia said.

Edala fumbled in her pockets, pulling out a ribbon. Blue satin, frayed at the edges, cheap synthetic material.

But to Edala, it was a holy relic, belongs to a son who died six months ago. A son she was forgetting because she’d sold her Grief to pay for his funeral.

Now she had nothing, no pain, no love, just the void.

"Give it here!"

Adia took the ribbon.

Even through her gloves, she felt the vacuum of the object. It was cold and lifeless. A dead thing.

"Glove!" Edala begged. "Take off the glove. Please! Just a second. Let me see the light!"

"Risky!" Adia said. But she was already doing it.

She peeled back the leather of her right glove.

The alley changed.

Her skin was bioluminescent. A soft, pulsing gold ran through her veins, visible beneath the dermis.

It was a raw unrefined warmth. The air around her hand instantly grew ten degrees hotter. The rain droplets vaporizing before they could touch her skin.

She was a reactor. A walking, breathing sun in a world of ice.

Adia concentrated. She needed to bleed. So, she closed her eyes and found the emotion of her own mother’s hand. The texture of it, the smell of baked bread and safety. The feeling of being held.

She pushed that feeling down her arm, into her fingertips and squeezed the blue ribbon.

The fabric gasped. Literally, the fibers expanded, soaking up the golden runoff from Adia’s skin.

The blue satin began to glow, a faint, rhythmic thrumming of amber light bleeding into the thread.

Edala whimpered. The sound was hungry.

"Easy!" Adia snapped. She pulled her hand and snapped the glove back into place. The light vanished, hidden behind the leather. But the ribbon… the ribbon remained warm. It hummed with a synthetic heartbeat.

"Take it!"

Edala snatched the ribbon, pressing it to her cheek.

The grey in Edala‘s eyes cracked. Her pupils dilated. A flush of pink rushed into her cheeks. Tears welled up, fresh and hot.

"Erick..." Edala sobbed, crumpling against the wet brick wall, clutching the ribbon. "Oh god, Erick. I can see him. I... I can feel his hair."

She looked up at Adia, her face twisted in a beautiful, agonizing mask of sorrow. "It hurts. God, it hurts. Thank you."

"Five minutes!" Adia said, her voice tight, breathless. Discharging emotion was exhausting, like sprinting a mile. "It’ll fade in five. Don't waste it!"

"Here." Edala tried to shove a ration bar into Adia’s pocket. "Food. Take it!"

"Keep it! Eat! You’ll need the energy for the crying."

Adia turned and walked away. The raw gratitude radiating off Edala was too loud. It tugged at Adia’s own sensors, threatening to pull her into a feedback loop.

She hit the main street.

[HEART RATE: 110]

[ADRENALINE: HIGH]

She adjusted her coat. The glow under her clothes was brighter now. That was the problem with usage. It agitated the supply. Using her power woke the beast up. Her skin felt tight, buzzing with the static of a thousand unspent laughs and a million unscrubbed terrors.

The rain fell harder. A Grief Micro-Burst. The streetlights flickered and died, the filaments unable to burn in the heavy atmosphere.

Adia kept her head down. She had to get back to the basement. To the lead-lined box she called a room.

She passed a beggar. A man with no legs, sitting on a hover-sled that had no battery. He was a Hollow. Eyes entirely white, mouth hanging open. He was begging for sensation, written on a sign around his neck,

WILL BLEED FOR ANGER.

He wanted someone to hit him, just to feel the spike of the pain.

Adia gave him a wide berth. If she touched him, even by accident, the transfer would kill him. Her voltage was too high, like a lightning, and he was just a 12-volt battery, he’d explode for sure.

Keep moving! Don't look! Don't feel!

A low hum vibrated the water in the puddles.

HUMM, HUMM, HUMM.

Adia froze.

Above her, a Mint Patrol Drone.

She didn't look up. Looking up was an act of defiance. Defiance was an emotion, and would trigger the sensors.

She went limp, forcing her mind to think of math. Simple arithmetic. Two plus two is four. Four plus four is eight. She visualized a brick wall, grey, boring, empty.

The drone hovered. A black teardrop shape against the weeping sky. Its searchlight swept the street, like a Resonance Scanner, looking for Heat. For the thermal signature of Joy, or the jagged frequency of Rage.

The blue beam passed over the Hollow beggar.

It passed over the puddle.

It shot Adia.

Two plus two is four. I am a stone. I am a puddle. I am nothing.

Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage. Her skin burned. The glow wanted out, to scream at the drone, to flare up like a flare in the night, building the pressure inside her skull.

Don’t slip. Please, hold the seal.

The scanner lingered. It felt like ants crawling under her scalp, whirring, its internal gyros calculating. It sensed... something. A variance. An anomaly in the background radiation.

Adia bit her tongue hard. The sharp sting of pain helped ground her, masking the emotional radiation. Pain was common and cheap.

The hum faded. The drone moved on, drifting down the street toward the screams coming from a bar fight three blocks away. Rage was easier to harvest.

Adia exhaled, a cloud of white steam.

She started running, cut through the Leftover Zone, an abandoned construction site where the unfinished skeletons of luxury condos stood like rusted ribs.

The Elite had run out of Ambition Silk halfway through the project, so the buildings just sat there, half-dreamed and forgotten.

She reached her building, a tenement block that leaned precariously to the left. The front door was gone, replaced by a sheet of corrugated plastic.

She slipped inside.

...