Jack Scratch
Jack is not tall, but he uses what he has. Today he’s wearing his crap-kicking steel toes covered in stitched tire treads, scaled aluminum chaps that jingle when he walks, and an open sin-leather vest (the kind they grow in vats, not the plastic syn-leather garbage the tribes wear when they go thrashing in 16). He always wears open vests, transparent shirts, or low tank tops. Jack Scratch never lets anyone forget what the scratch stands for. Four parallel black scars sweep across his lean chest from the left shoulder to the right hollow of his waist. They are broad and jagged. They’re often mistaken for gaudy tattoos. Shumai knows better.
When he enters the apartment, he finds her already at the door with her hand on the knob. There’s a bag in her hand, the same crummy valise she had when he first brought her to Tier level, a month ago. She has that green slicker on that he always hated, and he finds himself wanting to shred it off her shoulders with his bare hands. She’s shaking. He can handle this.
“…hell are you doing?” He asks brusquely, and then kicks the door wide open. Jack watches with satisfaction as she backs into his apartment, towards the overstuffed couch with the fat brown cushions.
Shumai pulls her white floating lock out her eyes, and it only irritates him more (he paid a lot for that g-m!) “I’m leaving you,” she says, her voice flat. She doesn’t move for the door.
“No. Sit down.” He turns around to close the door, not even watching her, but still satisfied when he hears the sound those baby-butt smooth couch cushions crinkle. “What’s gotten into you? You want me to drop you off back in midlevel, and go back to that job making pissholes for midkids?”
“I don’t know what you do, and where you work, but when I came up here a month ago I got an anonymous call from the Tier Community Development Committee. I guess that means TierSec. They told me if I even decided to leave you, I would have an apartment in Upper, paid through the end of the year. I’ll do just fine without you.”
Jack turns around and sees her sitting on the couch, her knees together, the floating lock drifting over her cropped black hair like an aimless cloud. He spits in the flower vase on the windowsill and mutters “Frigging agency interfering with my life.” He walks over to her and puts one foot on the coffee table, feeling the satisfying crack as the wood splinters under his boot. “A month ago you said this was what you wanted. If you can’t make up your mind, I’ll make it for you.”
“When I first met you, I thought you were really something. I don’t know what it was about you,” she says, absentmindedly rubbing the thin black scratches on the inside of her left wrist, “but I could tell it was something… something exciting. Like you could change the whole Heart if you felt like it, just with your laugh. Now…” The young woman looks down at his foot, and her knuckles whiten as her fists clench. “Trust me, Jack, or whoever you really are, you don’t want me here tonight when you go to sleep.”
Jack snarls and kicks off the table; it bangs painfully into her shin. He slams the door back open. “Fine! Leave! Get the hell out here. See if I care! You were trash when I found you, and you’ll still be trash tonight when your ass lands in that Upper shack!” He keeps yelling until she is out the door, saying similar things and worse, and then pushes the door closed so hard that it buckled in the frame.
Alone in his room, he looks around at the decorative prints on the walls, the floor to ceiling holovid projector, the couch and divan. He breaths an inarticulate snarl and swipes his hand across the couch cushions. Silver flashes and his fingers elongate; pale and fibrous stuffing explodes into the air. Another slash and the coffee table shatters in half, another and the prints fly in shreds to the floor. A scant dozen minutes later and the rooms is in shambles, the walls laid bare to the support beams, A-V equipment smoldering in a heap.
Jack Scratch flicks on his comm. “Hello? Jack. I need a new apartment. Furnished. Three hours. Park view. None of your damn business.”
