Parasite (Completed)║🏳️‍🌈 LGBT+

8: Corruption

05:28, Fourthsol 15th M5, 2226

I don't have to scour the shade dens of Eris-1 for my thief. Two sols after the Goddess first brought us together, she sends Shiro back to me.

I haven't fed since my brief encounter with the homeless woman in the market alley three sols ago. Hunger is bending my mind but I can't feed safely with my body so wracked with paranoia. After a night beset with nightmares, my morning walk to work is a dizzying landscape filled with imaginary wardens and IndoChina Mining guards waiting to pulse my limbs to paste.

So desperate to get out of the open before a warden spots me, I miss the usual turning for my ritual walk past the Kida Biotech building. I find myself skirting around its huge perimeter, hoping to rejoin the road to the hospital later on. That's when I see him slinking out of an unobtrusive door on the back side of the huge Kida perimeter wall, and dropping into an adjacent alleyway.

Shiro.

His audacity has me stunned; he's managed to hack the door codes for the most secure building on Eris, evidently without having attracted the attention of any Kida Biotech guards. It doesn't take much to guess what Shiro is doing there; there's only one thing that he'd be stealing from Kida. Meatware code. Perhaps he's trying to fix himself.

I follow, obscuring myself behind hovs and walls. Shiro limps along; his ankle must be getting worse. He picks up speed at the end of the alleyway and hobbles across the road where vends and sim bars jostle for space with crumbling pods that must certainly be shade dens.

I expect him to disappear inside a building to find a shade dealer, but he hunkers down on a low wall that hems in a sim bar. A mist descends, not quite drizzle. A damp sheen settles on my skin and clothes as I creep closer, shielding myself behind a tall black hov.

Shiro clicks idly at a shade pen and then secretes it into a pocket, hardly bothering to be discreet in case of passers by. Under the dome's luminaires the shade-addled image I'd had of Shiro in the dim transporter cab needs a little revision. His clothes are that same mix of loud Edge colours and neutral tones popular on Earth. Pale and gaunt, with tattoos adorning bare forearms and piercing eyes that never stop moving, he looks more exhausted than two sols ago. 

That doesn't matter to my parasite heart; Shiro is every bit as magnificent as I remember.

A horrifying thought chills me as I crouch unseen behind the hov. Now that he's stolen directly from Megumi Kida herself, Shiro won't ever accept my bribe to visit the Kida labs with me; it's simply too risky for him now. The thought is followed immediately by a more distressing one: if whatever code Shiro has stolen from Kida enables him to fix the glitch in his meatware, he won't be immune to me anymore. I'd drain him like I do everyone else on Eris. I won't get to touch him again.

He sits statuesque on the wall, seemingly engrossed in his lens data. After a few moments he sighs, and looks my way. "How much is she paying you, Heems?"

My heart begins to tumble. How did he see me? I was hidden so well. I've spent my entire vampire life thinking that I'm stealthy and inconspicuous. I should have taken lessons from a professional criminal like Shiro.

I step out from behind the hov and inch forward, nestling near to Shiro on the wall. My skin tingles with the urge to be closer to him, but I daren't move. His eyes are unfocussed; some activity in his lenses is more interesting than I am.

"Nobody's paying me for anything. I just saw you coming out of the Kida building and—"

"I'm not open to deals. Stay away from me."