#hosed

“Welcome to Motors out Back,” Kira said in her best customer service tones, mentally cursing her manager for cracking down on that particular part of service. Why couldn’t she just talk like a normal person? “What can I do for you?”

Auburn stepped forward, sliding off their sunglasses and nodded firmly. “You are Kira Cole?”

“Yes,” Kira replied, reaching over to readjust her metal arm. “What do you need? Has someone stolen my identity again?”

“Oh, no. Not at all,” Blackie replied firmly. Kira decided that their voice sounded masculine enough to tentatively give him pronouns. “We work for the WRI.”

The workers rights institution. Kira wondered if there was something about her employer they were hoping she’d spill about. “I think everything here is fine,” she said with s shrug. “I get all of my breaks and there aren’t any cameras in the bathroom.”

“We are aware of the quality of your workplace, ma’am. We-”

“Don’t call me ma’am,” Kira replied, annoyed by how long it was taking to get to the point. “Look, what do you want?”

“Have you heard of the Mort Project with WRI? It’s a new program in place by the leader of our world to help weed out bad employers. We have been looking for people to go undercover for us for a couple of weeks at certain locations to catch employers who are actively disobeying the law. The pay is good, of course. Eighty credits per hour, entrance to the Flying Vehicles convention, and hydrocore classes and certifications.”

Kira’s eyebrows nearly flew off her face in surprise and excitement. That amount of money was insane, never mind the hydrocore classes! She thought she would have to work for another three years before she would have enough money to get hydrocore certified. Just having that certification to your name jumped you up in the tech world and you had a lot more freedom to make bigger machines and granted you more access to materials.

“You should have started with that,” Kira said in friendlier tone, tossing aside the towel. “Will I need to quit my job here?”

“You can. Or we can just let your employer know that we are borrowing you and compensate them,” Blackie replied. “We will reach out to them and let you know when and where you’re needed.”

Kira nodded. “Sounds like a plan.” It also gave her time to research all of this and make sure this was a real and legit offer because it really did sound too good to be true.

Blackie nodded as Gold stepped forward and offered her a professional looking card. “If you have any questions, please let us know.”

“Will do,” Kira said, taking the card and slipping it into the compartment in her upper arm.

……………………………………………

Kira was given her first assignment very quickly. She had done all of her research and asked all of her questions and was certain that this was all legit. She found out they had been looking for people like her specifically to make sure disabilities were being compensated appropriately. She found that funny considering her arm was so state of the art she actually had an advantage over most people. But, whatever floated their goats, she supposed.

She had been flown out to an entirely other continent and planted in a workshop that produced fan parts for large ships. She wasn’t going to be working to make the fan parts, of course. That was extremely below her qualifications. She was to act as maintenance and improvements, an actually interesting job. She went around to the machines in the mornings, worked out if anything needed maintaining, and if she had extra time, she would make improvements to the machines to increase productivity and quality of parts.

The first couple of days were actually a lot of fun, working to improve the machines she came across, enjoying the cable management work, and getting to know the place as she was shown around by a smiling manager.

It was only in the second week that she started to see through the cracks. The workers trudged into work, already looking miserable and sharing looks but not really talking to one another. On their breaks, no one sat together or went to lunch together. She saw people chatting on their phones, clearly happy to be social, but not to one another. When she made a comment or joke or tried to connect to others, there was a skittish look in their eyes. She also quickly realized that most of people who here there were too poor to leave and those that weren’t so desperate left just as quickly as they got there.

Something was definitely up, and Kira was determined to find out what. After all, the quicker you figured it out, the bigger the bonus.

Kira sidled over to one of the more open looking guys, checking the metrics as he fed the metal tubing into the machine. “Good day so far?”

That skittish look was back, but not as strongly in this guy. “Uh, yeah, pretty much.”

“I’m Kira.”

“David.”

“Nice to meet you,” she said in chipper tones before she went back to studying the machine. It was down in speed for some reason. Something she’d have to look into when David went on his break and there was downtime.

“You’re new here, right?” David asked, startling Kira. In her whole time here, she had never had anyone beside the managers try to start a conversation with her. She latched onto it quickly.

“I am, yeah. Still on my trial period and everything.”

“What do you think of it?”

“Well…. It’s weirdly quiet? Not the machines, of course, but most workplaces I’ve been in have a lot more chatter, you know? At least in the break rooms.”

The man nodded, a strange look darkening his face. “That’s how it should be,” he muttered. “Tell you what. In the last 10 minutes of your next break, meet me in the storage room by the bathrooms. There are some things you should probably know.”

“Oh, alright. Will do, then.”

He nodded firmly, peeking over his shoulder before he went back to his work, head down and eyes forward.

Kira shook her head a little and moved on to the next machine to check its metrics.

………………………………

Kira meandered toward the bathrooms, eager to know what exactly was waiting in the storage room. This could be a very bad idea, of course, but Kira knew very well how to defend herself, and she had a small camera in her metal arm recording just in case David was going to try anything with her.

She pushed open the door to see David and two other workers talking quietly. They looked up and waved Kira in.

She stepped in and gently closed the door, looking between the three of them.

“This is Garro and this is Pattie,” David said. “This is Kira. She’s new here.”

“You have one chance to walk back out that door,” Pattie warned Kira. “We’re playing with fire in here.”

“Then I’ll just put on my welding gloves,” she said, grabbing another bucket and turning it over to sit with them. “What’s going on here?”

“You’ve probably guessed that not everything is sunshine and rainbows over here,” Garro said darkly. “We’re about to let you in on how bad it is.”

Pattie nodded. “This company is terrified of unions. If you know their history, you’d know why. They were almost wiped out from lawsuit after lawsuit. When they hire on people, they make sure only the most desperate actually stay, and, while not in the company rule book, have basically banned any talk of wages, hours, or anything that might get them in trouble and might cause a union to form.”

“Why hasn’t anyone reported them?” Kira asked, twitching the fingers on her metal arm to send a live recording out to her sponsors.

“Oh, people have tried. This company is all about surveillance. As soon as they see someone trying to start something, they move in. We don’t really know what happens. Some people never turn up again. Others come back to work, beaten and bruised and spewing some BS story about debts they didn’t pay only to commit suicide a month later,” Garro replied with a growl. “The only reason we’re safe to talk in here is David’s bug re-setter.”

David nodded. “It sends a prerecorded bit of quiet to the receivers through the bugs planted on and around us. It even tells the company we’re all in the bathroom right now. We can only talk for a short while, but it works well enough.”

Kira nodded. “That is really interesting, actually.” She just hoped the bug re-setter wasn’t messing with her own recording. “I have something to confess too, then. I’m actually here because the government has a feeling that there is something wrong going on here. We’ll get this place busted pretty quickly here.”

Each of the three didn’t seem that reassured. “Miss, I know that you want to help, but we do need this place. We need the money for our families.”

“And you’ll get it. Trust me, the lawsuit payouts are going to be insane. And I’ll make sure that everyone here gets taken care of properly.”

“I guess….. Those payouts would look pretty spectacular, considering how much back pay we’re all missing,” Pattie said thoughtfully.

Kira nodded. “Exactly. We’ll be fine. I’m going to head back out now. Don’t want them thinking I’m stealing time in the bathroom.”

The other three laughed and Kira grinned before quietly and carefully leaving the storage closet.

………………………………………………..

Kira was busy behind an extruder machine when she heard someone call her name. He stretched her head up to look over the machine as she held parts together, annoyed at the interruption. “Yeah?”

There were two bulky looking managers standing there, looking very very stern. “We need you to come with us for a meeting.”

“Yeah? Give me 10 minutes to get put back together so there isn’t too much downtime-”

“Now.”

Kira stared at them before she shook her head, carefully putting parts down. “Suit yourself,” she told them as she came around the machine. “But if this machine starts leaking or whatever, it’s not on me.”

“We understand,” the bulkier of the two replied.

The other one grabbed Kira by her metal arm and she shook him off. “Don’t touch me.”

“I wasn’t touching you. I was touching the metal-”

“Yeah, the metal of my arm,” she replied. “What’s going on here?”

“We’re just going to have a meeting,” Bulky replied.

Kira glowered at him, but found herself trapped between the two of them. She flicked her fingers to start another recording to be sent to the WRI as they led her to an office that was already pretty crowded with people.

She tried not to show any emotion on her face as she realized David, Garro, and Pattie were also sandwiched between managers and security. They all looked quite pale and Kira very quickly flicked her fingers to activate her distress signal. She had no idea what would really happen here, but she knew it wasn’t going to be any fun.

She was pushed into place by the bulkier manager and just in time as a woman dressed in a business suit entered the room.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” she said with a smile that Kira recognized from the paperwork Gold had given her before coming here. This was Jerry Yearling, one of the high up enforcement lawyers in the company. Kira pressed her distress button once more for good measure, rubbing her arm so the camera on her wrist would get a good view of the woman.

“You might be wondering why your here,” she purred. “It has come to my attention that the four of you have been doing something rather illegal on our premises. Building a machine to interfere with our security systems is, of course, a matter we take very seriously. If you will just tell me who built it, you will go free.”

None of them moved, though Kira felt some tension in the air. The other three had no idea if she would take a hit for them, and she didn’t have any way to tell them that she was fully on their side. She had been told what she could be getting into, that there was a good chance that she could get hurt, and she was suddenly wishing she had taken that more seriously.

“Really? I know one of you made it,” Yearling said, taking a step closer, watching for any flinches from any of them. “The rest of you would take that punishment too? Or maybe you all worked together on it. Well, except for you, Ms. Cole. I know this has been going on longer than you’ve been here. Just tell me who made it, dear, and you can go on your merry way seeing as they’re dragging you into all of this.”

There was an out. Kira could just leave and let David deal with this until her sponsors got there. She could, and no one would really blame her.

But the part of her raised by her old father pushed that thought aside. She remembered his stories about the prisoner camps he was held in during the war of the dark world. The war that spelled the end of his home planet. He told her that she should never allow herself to be turned against her peers.

“That’s how they get ya,” he told her, pointing a wrench at her. “That is. It’s all of you against them, and never let them convince you otherwise, you hear me?”

Kira nodded firmly inwardly, standing still and allowed a contempt filled smirk take her mouth. One her father would be proud of.

Yearling’s lip curled in disgust and huffed. “I suppose I have some methods I’ve wanted to use for discipline for some time. Bind them and separate them. Be sure to take her arm.”

Kira watched her turn and leave as the others were bound and someone grabbed her arm and shoulder, trying to separate them.

She watched, amused as they tried to remove it until they started to get frustrated enough that she was worried they were going to try and destroy it. At that point, she pressed the release and moved her fingers in the pattern needed to unlock the catch. With a simple jerk, she popped it off and offered it to the man who had been trying to take it. “Take care of that, won’t you? It’s expensive and I have very very aggressive insurance on it,” she said with a little smile. Say what you wanted about insurance brokers, she was glad they were so violent, especially when it came to things that were considered a part of your body.

The man, to his credit, took it very gently before someone else grabbed her other arm and led her to an empty office where she was sat on a chair and bound to it, her arm and ankles tried to the chair before the left.

Kira waited in silence, the hum of machinery still audible even this far from the factory floor. She was reconsidering the price of her being here. And you know what? Eighty credits per hour were still very worth it.

The door clicked and Yearling entered a severely disappointed look on her face. “Well, I did give you a chance.”

“That you did,” Kira said a little lazily despite the way her heart rate went up when she saw the case the woman was carrying. What was in it? What was she in for? She never imagined she would ever be in physical danger, at least not this intimately, like her father had been, but here she was.

Yearling walked past Kira, grabbing the back of her chair and dragging her over to the wash off shower in the corner where people could come clean chemicals off of their skin.

“Are you familiar with the tortures they used to use on the old world?”

“I am,” Kira replied, quickly connecting the dots.

“Oh, really. Then you are familiar with something called waterboarding?”

“I am.”

“I see. A history fanatic then?”

“Only because my father lived so much of that history.”

Yearling hummed, grabbing Kira’s short hair and dragging her head back as she leaned the chair against the wall. She went back to her case, opening it to reveal a variety of tools, many of which were sharp and bladed, before picking out a piece of cloth.

She grabbed Kira’s hair again and jerked her head back again, holding the cloth in the other hand. “You do understand why I’m doing this, don’t you?”

“Because you’re one sick son of a gun,” Kira replied.

Yearling clicked her tongue. “No. This is self defense, you see. I know who sent you.”

Kira went cold as Yearling continued, “Oh, yes. The WRI sent you, didn’t they. I know all about them. They’ve been trying to knock me off the census for a while now. Quite annoying, really, how much of a hand the leader of our world has in our lives. The great Scientist King! Master of Magic and Physics. He thinks he can make this world perfect, when in fact, he’s just making the viruses smarter.” Yearling cackled.

She slapped the cloth over Kira’s face, grabbing the shower head and turning it on.

Kira jerked against the chair, held steady by Yearling as water poured across her face, tasting of iron and ill made pipes as it got up her nose and filled her mouth. She spat and gagged, but the cloth wouldn’t let enough out as more poured in.

Her lungs spasmed painfully as she fought for air, choking on the burning pain of water going down the wrong pipe. She needed to breath! She had never felt this sort of desperation before. Was this what it was like for her father when he just barely survived being suffocated in those prison camps? She couldn’t die!

She was going to die.

The cloth was lifted up and the water pulled away and Kira instinctively gasped, only to cough and choke on the water still in her mouth and nose. He coughed until her stomach hurt and she was gagging painfully, trying to keep her breakfast down, though she was losing the fight.

The cloth went back down over her face and Kira tried to hold her breath despite the escape attempts being made by her diaphragm.

She coughed, more water burning through her sinuses and leaking down her throat as she fought to breathe, and then the cloth was removed and she could cough unimpeded.

She retched, water coming up before she was back to coughing. Yearling leaned in close to Kira’s ear. “Are you having fun yet?”

Kira drew in another breath, preparing to spit on the woman, but was rocked by a slap that sent her and the chair to the floor. She threw her head back in pain as she landed on her arm, hair dripping old water into her eyes.

Pain throbbed through her arm and cheek as Yearling turned the shower head on and sprayed Kira down with cold water.

Kira gasped and shivered, a small squeak for help escaping before she managed to lock it down again.

“What was that?” Yearling asked, amused.

Kira just glowered up at her, turning her head quickly when Yearling tried to spray her face.

Yearling set the shower head down, still on, and grabbed a flat plate of metal from nearby, covering the drain. “I’ll be back soon. Behave yourself.”

She sauntered to the door and opened it, not glancing back even once as she left.

Kira put her head down, closing her eyes and breathing deeply, coughing thoroughly to clear her lungs.

By the time the door opened again, water was lapping at her cheek. She lifted her head to see a familiar black haired agent who quickly holstered his gun and rushed in, water splashing around his boot as he came to a stop by her.

“Are you alright?”

“Not as fine as you look,” she said, exhausted.

He hummed softly, reaching under her to get the chair off her arm.

“I get paid more for this, right?”

“I’m sure we can work something out for you.”

The Adventurers Masterlist