Chapter Text
One.
Trash Beasts were a Cleaner's job. It didn’t go much further than that.
It was simple. There was a sighting, somewhere, called in to the Cleaner Headquarters, and the appropriate team was rallied up and sent out on a mission. Those with a vital instrument, those without. They tore down however many of them, with practised, trained ease. Then they returned to eat, rest, and do it all over again.
That’s what they did. Every, single, day.
When Rudo arrived, everything changed. Enjin had never met a child quite like him, much less with the capabilities he possessed. Watching him survive a fall so severe – an anomaly in itself – only to almost instantly reign his power as a Giver, fight monsters larger than he could comprehend at the time, survive whatever injures he’d sustained on the way; it was unlike anything else.
Rudo was a fighter. He’d made it known the moment he’d gotten right back up after his drop from the Sphere. Made it known the moment he fought back this mutation of beasts he didn’t understand, over and over again. Made it known the moment he bit off, chewed, swallowed the fingers of that trafficker, only to use the wrath from their threats as ammunition for him to expand into something bigger.
Rudo was, in fact, an anomaly. He was capable, brave, defiant, empathetic, often blinded by his own rage – but most of all, a child.
At the end of the day, that fact would render itself as known as his strength. He pushed, and pushed, and pushed, and fought back harder than the beatings he’d been given. He had a goal, and to everyone around him, everyone he met, battled, endured; there was absolutely nothing of existence that could get in the way of that goal.
But there would always come a time where the Ground, and the things in it, got too big - even for him.
This, was one of those times.
‘Alright!’ Enjin called, shifting Umbreaker back to his original form with an easy, mindful shake. ‘Let’s round up the troops, and head on home. We’re done here.’
No-Mans Land always offered a rather intriguing performance. Whether the Beast’s themselves tripled in size, were unfamiliar to them, or behaved out of the ordinary – it surged a competent Giver with an adrenaline that was incomparable. It was erratic, exhausting, a nuisance, and thrilling all at once.
Today hadn’t been of particular substance out of anyone’s control. They came as they were, large as they always were, bounced back as they always did; and Enjin’s team found the core, grinning all the while.
Zanka aggrandised the use of his Lovely Assistaff, as he always did, and demonstrated a rather hefty inclination to spur the game exactly how he wanted it to go, as he always did. Riyo and Rudo paired up, nothing out of the ordinary, then disappeared elsewhere during the final takedown.
Then disappeared elsewhere during the final takedown.
‘Phew,’ Zanka breathed, twisting around his Jinki as he fell into place next to Enjin. ‘Nothin’ like a good old –’
‘Where are Riyo and Rudo?’ Enjin cut him off, abandoning whatever thoughts he’d had towards their triumph. It wasn’t anything difficult, anyway – what mattered more, most of all, was the rest of his squad.
Everything had quietened down, the dust settling, the Trash Beasts at bay, a silence stewing amongst the victorious. Yet, no sign of the last two kids fighting alongside them.
‘They’re –’ Zanka flicked his head around as Enjin began to press his choker. ‘Riyo’s over there, see!’
Enjin paused his pre-empted question, deflating slightly at the sight of Riyo lashing her way down an uphill of overloaded trash. Then he felt his heartbeat quickening.
She was alone.
Riyo took no time to land in their space, pocketing her scissors with a frantic air about her. She leaned over to gasp as she rested her hands on her knees, shaking her head as though too aghast to speak. It wasn’t like her at all.
Then, finally: ‘I can’t find him,’ she spat, straightening. ‘I can’t find Rudo. He was – we were – shit, we had it covered. I tried calling him, but I haven’t gotten an answer. I took my eye off for two damn seconds to finish the job, and he literally disappeared –’
‘Slow down,’ Enjin ordered, calmly. Despite his forced composure, his heart had tripled its outrageous pace. He refused to allow his mind cloud with panic, and moved in closer to her. ‘What was he doing? Do you remember the exact spot you saw him last?’
Riyo nodded. She pointed to said spot, seemingly beyond the disgruntled pile of rubble she’d emerged from; still emitting remnants of Beast fumes.
Enjin’s entire body thundered loudly, his mind racing at an impeccable speed as he darted his gaze around frantically.
‘What did you see him doing?’ He asked, again. He knew he was beginning to sound frustrated, but he hadn’t the rationale to pay much attention to it. ‘He has to be here.’
‘He was doing what we always do!’ Riyo said, throwing out her arms. Her brows were drawn into a terrorised frown, and Enjin was sure, beneath her mask, her mouth looked the same. ‘He was using some skipping rope as his Jinki; turned it into a massive, fire-cord and just swung it around. He was doing good – it’s Rudo, for fucks sake –’
‘I don’t doubt he was holding his own,’ Enjin told her, though he had already started on his own search – it felt an ugly type of useless to remain stood in place. They followed without resistance. ‘But he can’t just not be here. He has to be somewhere.’
Neither had a comment in response, so Zanka and Riyo simply shadowed him with their own gazes dashing around as far as they could go.
This entire shithole was much too big for one person to adequately hunt for someone alone, regardless. Yet, two more pairs of eyes scattered around the perimeter Riyo had pointed out, still wasn’t enough.
‘Zanka, take the left, Riyo, you go right. I’ll move forward, and you call when you’ve either found him, or a clue – understand?’
Both nodded, aghast and alarmed, as though the situation had only announced its true severity in that moment. Enjin felt his stomach twisting all sorts of monstrosities as he pressed down on his choker.
Despite Riyo’s explanation, he had to try himself.
‘Rudo?’ He called, his boots squelching into the array of waste beneath him. The crunch of metal was almost as loud as the paranoia swarming his core. ‘Rudo, can you hear me?’
Nothing. Enjin felt the nausea growing as he continued his path, forcing a steadfast eye everywhere he crossed. Rudo could be half-dead, half the bones in his body shattered, bleeding out of his eyes – and he would still answer. He would still answer.
He kept trying, regardless. He called and called, shouted, roared into his collar. He felt himself growing frantic enough as to recognise his own voice spitting back up at him, the echo of his yells drumming thickly through his ears. It was useless; either Rudo was passed out somewhere, or he was dead.
Don’t think like that. That doesn’t help. Keep your eyes and ears focused on option one.
He kicked and dug his hands around the trash, through piles and piles of junk, feeling the wind knocked from him all the while. It didn’t matter how long it took. He wasn’t leaving this pisstake dumpsite without that kid.
Beyond him, through the gusts of cool breeze clanking against the coppers, he could grasp Zanka and Riyo searching just as vigorously. The panic seemed to have caught up to them – to all of them, really, because Riyo was right. Rudo was truly nowhere to be found.
‘What the hell?’ Enjin muttered, still thrashing around. ‘What the hell?’
He thrust his boots into the mounds of debris, frustration hiking his spine as he found his thoughts plummeting into a combination of self-depredation and pure, unyielding dread.
How could he have let this happen? How – his responsibility was to manage and ensure the safety of his team. That was, in fact, his sole purpose. And often, he felt he did a damn good job of it. Except for now. Not only had his eye slipped for too long – it wasn’t even a brutal injury they were facing. A core member of Team Akuta was literally fucking missing. How had he dropped enough focus to let such a disaster strike?
Then, boots hovered over what seemed to be the excess of their primary targets, he clamped down on something softer. Something that wasn’t made out of tin, iron, aluminium. Something that wasn’t quite as soft as a battered stuffed bear; as flat as tossed away garments. Something that was adorned with rings.
A glove.
Rudo’s glove.
His heart had reached, what he thought, the limit of its palpitations. Clearly not, as it succeeded in passing that threshold as he felt his throat close over, violently.
At that very moment, Zanka’s voice buzzed through his collar.
‘Enjin,’ he sputtered, a tight rasp in his tone. ‘We – we found Rudo’s choker.’
Enjin had to take a few, long, deep breaths before he could respond. He shrunk to his knees, gathering Rudo’s discarded glove as he darted around for the second one. It was buried beneath a muddle of what seemed to be ceramic jugs, but it was there all the same.
He found his own voice hoarse as he curled his head in to respond. ‘Yeah. I just found his gloves.’
The ride back to HQ was solemn.
Neither Riyo or Zanka took the passenger seat, which was interesting because occasionally, they fought for it. Particularly when it was just the four of them on a task, which only happened when sightings were deemed less-than-a-handful.
Fuck, how wrong they had been.
Instead, what was left of their youngest member was scattered across that seat.
Enjin drove with a furious hand on the wheel, tight-gripped and stoic as he bore holes through the window screen. He couldn’t see behind him, but he could feel the exchanged glances between the other two. He was enraged; they were petrified.
They’d come to the conclusion that it couldn’t have been a Trash Beast to have bested Rudo – not with such malicious manhandling. The disposal of his choker and gloves meant the act had been done by not a superficial monster; but a human being. A calculated, tactical, pre-prepared human being.
And they searched, and searched, and searched. Until Enjin, who’d been restlessly determined, called it a waste of time, and begrudgingly ordered them back to the car. Rudo just wasn’t there. And they were using their energy on a total dead-end.
It was sickening driving away without him.
‘What are we gonna say?’ Zanka piped up. Seemingly, the tense silence had grown unbearable for him. ‘How are we –’
‘I –’ Enjin replied, pointedly, ‘will tell the damn truth. That I fucked up, and the kid’s been taken by somebody.’
‘I screwed up, Enjin,’ Riyo murmured, after a strained moment of his anger dispersing around the vehicle. She had her hands wrought in her lap, distant from the usual, spread-out manner she obtained during those drives. ‘We were paired. I’m more experienced. I should’ve been watching out for him.’
‘Last you checked, he was doin’ fine,’ Enjin muttered. At truth, it was either all of them to blame, or nobody. ‘You don’t have eight eyes, Riyo.’
Before Riyo could make the remark, Zanka did. ‘Neither do you.’
Enjin simply clenched his jaw, and gripped the wheel tighter.
When they pulled up outside the suddenly daunting, oversized building, nobody moved.
Literally, nobody moved.
The tick of the exhaust system cooling down breached the – otherwise – deathly stillness that had overridden the passengers. Enjin kept his hands where they were, head bowed low over the wheel. Zanka scratched his cheek, gaze flickering between Riyo and the seething guy who felt he could tear the entire car to shreds had nobody been inside. Riyo herself kept starting up a drum of her leg, only to settle it immediately, and then repeat the process again.
Turned out, none of them knew what to do. Enjin didn’t expect any knowledge of his younger counterparts; the majority of his frustration lay in the fact that not only did he not know what to do, he was goddamn responsible for whatever condition Rudo could be in right now. He had one job. One goddamn job.
‘Damnit!’ He shouted, enraged, punching a fist against the wheel and startling everybody out of their silence. ‘Fuck, fuck, damnit!’
Again, not a word was uttered. A collective wince was shared, but this scenario was so beyond their realm of expertise, it was evident neither Riyo or Zanka had a clue what to say. How to behave. How to solve the stifled, poisonous air that had begun to suffocate all three of them.
‘We’ll find him,’ Zanka braved, then. He leaned forward to Enjin’s distressed, infuriated state. ‘It’s Rudo, Enjin. That kid is tough as hell. He’ll do just fine until we get him back.’
I should be telling them this. Enjin growled, then hissed through his teeth, giving the wheel another whack before he thumped himself back against his seat.
‘Yeah,’ he grumbled back, irritably. He took the keys out of the ignition and angrily tossed open the door. They couldn’t sit there and ruminate – hell, he couldn’t be the one to continue wasting fucking time. He snatched Rudo’s gloves and broken choker. ‘Let’s go.’
It didn’t have to be announced, what had happened. It was plain and simple the second they walked through the doors. Four of them had departed that morning, and three of them had returned. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that something had horribly, desperately, astonishingly gone wrong.
Enjin marched to the front desk, swallowing whatever rats that had begun to gnaw in his gut as he approached Semiu. He did know the process, he did know what actions to take, he did. He was just emotionally distressed from the shock, and he simply couldn’t react that way. Not when he expected better of everyone else.
‘You gotta tell me Corvus is here,’ was the first thing he said, slamming his occupied fist down on the glistening countertop. He caught Semiu’s expression darkening at what it held. ‘I need to speak with him. Now.’
‘Whoa, Enjin,’ Semiu squinted her stark eyes through her lenses, shifting in appreciation of his urgency. She glanced again to his palm. ‘What the hell happened?’
The nausea hadn’t even begun to settle before it made another uprise. Enjin exhaled angrily through his nose. ‘Rudo’s gone. Not the Trash Beasts – we don’t know if it was Raiders, or the Hell Guard, or who fuck knows what else –’
‘Enjin –’
‘But he disappeared right at the last second, and we need to go to the information broker, and to do that I need to talk to Corvus first –’
‘He’s in his office,’ Semiu cut him off, though not unkindly. Her face was riddled with questions, pestered with the plaguing distress that was swirling harshly in Enjin’s stomach. ‘Go.’
Turning to Zanka and Riyo behind him, he nodded his head for them to follow, and the three of them strode quickly, though perhaps a little anxiously, to the office of their boss.
Despite the pressure and harrowing demand of the situation, Enjin still respectfully knocked and waited as patiently as he could. Upon being beckoned inside, he collected himself and headed straight for Corvus’ embellished, orderly – but busy desk.
Without a word, he raised his fist in demonstration of Rudo’s gloves and choker, and tossed them onto the surface. He hadn’t realised how hard he’d been crushing the objects until he let them go. Absently, he stretched his fingers.
‘Kid got snatched up,’ he said, through a jaw perhaps tighter than it’d ever been. ‘Last minute thing. It’s my damn fault, but someone was planning this. We need to find him as soon as we can. I don’t know who took him, but he’s a damn Sphereite, so it could be anybody.’
Corvus, as composed and sage as he always presented, calmly shared the same reaction as Semiu did. Eyes between the gloves and choker, and Enjin’s pressed, irate face.
He nodded, pursing his mouth slightly. Even so, there was a twinge of panic in his gaze. A kind that only mounted during a happenstance that otherwise didn’t even occur as possibility. Because that was what the ordeal encompassed – something that would be assumed fucking impossible.
Then, much else like Corvus’ marshalled personality, he jumped immediately into a poised, reassuring action.
‘Alright,’ he murmured. ‘We’ll need to scour all the tracks of the Ground, and find out exactly who took him.’ Gently, he picked up one of Rudo’s gloves. ‘I’ll send my crows to flood every single district. They can watch the gates and border walls.’ He dropped said glove. ‘And make sure Rudo isn’t smuggled out of the city.’
He rose from his desk, placing his palms against it. Enjin knew Rudo was a valuable asset; for more reasons than what had been made known to him. Corvus would respond this way should any of them disappear out of sight – but still, with him, it was different.
‘I want you,’ Corvus gestured to Enjin, ‘to use your connections to find Kuro. You have enough networking going on in the streets. When you find his hideout, I will give him intel in exchange for Rudo’s whereabouts.’
He then gestured to Riyo and Zanka. ‘Neither of you make a move until Enjin finds him. As we know, Kuro and his methods are bizarre enough to put everybody at risk. We need one member to pose the question to reduce adding to the toll – though I can’t guarantee what the price itself will be.’
‘I’ll ask him myself,’ Enjin insisted, somehow feeling a slight wave of tranquillity now that things were moving into, what seemed, sufficient action. ‘I’ll find him, play his crazy games, and get the information.’
‘You won’t go alone,’ Corvus vetoed, pointedly. He seemed otherworldly in that moment, looming and powerful, yet slightly passive within the frustration he must have been feeling. ‘We will all attend, but if you wish to ask, then you ask. My crows will tag along as reinforcement; keep an eye on things.’
‘The guy is nuts,’ Riyo piped up, then. Both Enjin, Zanka, and Corvus turned to her. Midst Enjin’s strained focus, he’d almost forgotten the two behind him. ‘He’s literally crazy. Who knows what he’ll have us do in exchange for that kind of information. Especially with someone as desired as Rudo.’
Well, she wasn’t wrong. Either way, Enjin found himself scowling at the thought – he’d come across plenty of crazed mechanisms in the Ground. Kuro wasn’t going to be the batshit roadblock that prevented their finding of that kid.
‘What, you sayin’ you can’t take him on?’ Zanka offered, shooting her a quirked brow. ‘Doesn’t matter what he suggests. We’ll have it covered.’
‘I’m just saying,’ she mused, lifting a shoulder as she settled a hand on her hip. ‘We’d want to come prepared.’
‘And we will,’ said Corvus, straightening. He gave them a curt nod. ‘There’s no more time to waste. It’s still mid-afternoon. Grab what you need, and let’s get moving.’
As the three were ushered out the door, he called after them before they’d made their final departure.
‘None of you are to blame,’ he said, firmly. Enjin felt his neck jerk agitatedly at the remark. It felt like a washed-up lie sprayed in his face, the kind of lie one only spurted to make someone feel better, even when they didn’t deserve it. ‘Rudo is a remarkably capable talent. He’ll hold his own until we get there.’
And then the remainding Givers of Team Akuta left without a word.