>>5746936Troubled dreams of dark water, drowning in infinite blackness.
Carmelita wakes up in a sweat, breathing heavily. It didn't end that way, she tells herself. There's air to breathe. She's alive.
Not that her current situation makes her feel great about it.
Her current home, if you can call it that, is the inside of a converted shipping container. Barely enough space to stand up or move around. She has a medical cot for a bed, a bucket, and some dollar store pajamas substituting for a hospital gown. That's it. Oh, and the handcuffs.
She's heard about places like this before. Part street doc, part private prison. You sent people here if you fucked them up and wanted them to get better, but not get away.
Still better than washing up as a floater. She'd seen them before, when patrolling the docks. Drowning victims whose bloated bodies had filled with gas, buoying them to the surface. Floaters.
She would have been one of them ...
The lock turns in the heavy reinforced door of the shipping container. Time for breakfast.
There's a small communal area where prisoners/patients are allowed to eat if they behave themselves. Luis is digging in to his morning ration of eggs, biscuit, and coffee. He waves her over. "Another day in paradise."
Unexpectedly, a third party joined their table, a person of imposing height and stature. Carmelita tensed as she looked up, ready to defend herself, but this person seemed to have words in mind.
"I imagine none of us expected to find ourselves here," says the Dragon.
Carmelita scowls as she jabs a blunt fork at her eggs. "I heard you've been enjoying the hospitalty here for a while."
Luis says, "Might be safer in here than out there these days. Not many of us left."
The three fell silent. They had all heard about the ship explosion. None of them knew whether Spider was alive, or what the future of the Syndicate was.
"The way things are going," Carmelita says. "Those crazy bastards might actually clean up the rest of us. Half the reason Spider put together the entire Syndicate was to overpower them, stop them from fucking things up. Didn't do us much good."
"Who can say?" the Dragon says. "Maybe they'll even do what we thought was impossible."
Luis protests. "The whole point of the agreement was we couldn't win, right? How can a bunch of weirdos do what half the city's gangs working together couldn't do?"
"If anyone can," the Dragon says. "It's them."
Carmelita had never felt good about accepting Spider's bargain. Later, when she found out the truth of things, she liked it even less. But she had accepted the brutal necessity of it all. Now the Freedom Square gang was going to ruin the whole thing ... and Carmelita wasn't sure she wanted them to fail.
The Dragon turned to look at one of the shipping containers. Its occupant hadn't come out since she arrived.
"I think it depends on her," the Dragon says. "Will she recover? And if so, can she become who she needs to be? Time will tell."
