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[ #### ARCHIVE LOG ] File ID: SOLACE-38 Date: 2724-07-16 File Status: ARCHIVED –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anita finds her vest in a crumpled bundle on the bathroom counter. It still holds the vaguely round shape she hastily balled it into before tossing it there. Damp and wrinkled, pulling it back over her head feels like she took it out of the dryer too soon. It even smells nice still, clinging to her with perfumed sweat and still warm from her body’s heat. The white fabric is stained with lipstick marks on the shoulder strap, the trail winding up Anita’s neck until it reaches her jaw—purple hickies already blooming beneath the smudged red pigment.
They had been making eyes at one another all night. At least, Anita had noticed her pretty much as soon as she arrived. She couldn’t tell if the other woman had noticed her at the same time and decided to play it cool, or if it was just a fortunate parting of the crowd that made her catch Anita looking. After that point it wasn’t long before the bolder woman approached Anita and they got talking at the bar.
Anita had watched her—watched her as she left the bathroom moments ago, and then kept watching the door long after it closed behind her. She stares at it for what feels like a long time before she finally gathers the will to make herself presentable again, to return to her friends. But her heart is still pounding, her lips still tingling with the aftershock of their kiss— ‘kiss’ being far too timid a word for what had just happened. Not that her brain is offering any better alternatives; it's too preoccupied replaying every second of the past five minutes (had it even been that long?), struggling to recall whether they’d even exchanged names in the blur of it all. She’s not drunk—those two drinks at the bar were her first of the night—and from the woman’s clear gaze, Anita could tell she hadn’t been out long either.
Psyching herself up to return to the bar, Anita braces her palms against the bathroom counter. Real marble. It’s a classy place—no toilet stalls. Each bathroom is its own private room, complete with a counter and a chaise in the corner that, surprisingly, hadn’t seen any use during their tryst. Looking back now, a detail comes to mind: the way the woman had led her here—direct, unhesitating—and the way she had locked the door behind them without even glancing at the mechanism… She knew where they would end up. She already knew exactly what kind of privacy these lavish bathrooms afforded, and how perfectly they could put them to use. For Anita, this was her first time at the establishment. And to think—she'd almost decided not to come.
Anita finally lifts her gaze to properly regard herself in the bathroom mirror. Before she acknowledges herself in the reflection, she allows herself a flashback of a few minutes prior. Over her own shoulder in the mirror she sees herself with the woman. Herself, pushed against the glossy dark brick tiles without preamble nor complaint. Her vest is pushed up and over her head by the brunette, then in a fumble of hands, bundled and tossed away by herself. She watches the skin of her stomach be explored and scratched by soft hands and manicured nails, feeling the electricity of it again now as she recalls it, another zap of sensation arcing over her abdomen, settling between her thighs. She barely registered when her jeans were unbuttoned and unzipped at the time, but her slightly clearer mind does her the courtesy of playing it back now. She recalls, with a flash of a smirk from her reflection now, that she has this tremendous vivid visual recollection of herself being fucked by a beautiful latina stranger in a fancy bathroom, because she caught glimpses of it as it was happening in the mirror over said latina’s shoulder.
Anita almost laughs. It’s not like twenty-eight is ‘old’, but she still feels like a teenager sneaking into a janitor’s closet to make out like she used to with Andy. There was no denying her partner then, or now. Perhaps she has a thing for latina’s? Or maybe it's women who know what they want, and who happen to want her.
Anita’s mind allows her another flashback of the bar before her red-lipped companion led her here. ‘ When I see something I want, I’ll have it when I want ,’ she said, her accent wrapping thickly around the words like the sugar syrup in their fancy cocktails, her sweet breath hitting Anita’s ear and making the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Her words left the first of many lipstick marks when her lips brushed against Anita’s cheek, but Anita wipes them away now with a moistened, fancy, monogrammed hand towel from the counter.
‘When I see something I want, I’ll have it when I want.’ That simple, bold response still echoed in Anita’s mind as she remembered her own surprised suggestion of a nightcap. Not just because she had work later—she’d long since put ‘Anita the party girl’ to bed, with a little encouragement (or intervention) from the Batemans. Even at the height of her wildest nights, she’d never invited anyone back to her place. This woman was probably three or four years younger; Anita wondered if she’d caught her in her own ‘party girl’ era, and hoped the younger woman wasn’t quite as reckless as Anita once was. But looking into those eyes just minutes ago—hazel, almost a deep amber-gold in the low lamp light—Anita knew that whatever happened would happen on the younger woman’s terms. She had been tipsy, loose, yes, but there was a calculation behind her eyes, too. It was as reassuring as it was thrilling. Usually, it would be the other way around—but Anita didn’t mind one bit. She only wished it had lasted longer.
The way it ended was abrupt.
The woman pulled back suddenly, her gaze locking on Anita’s but fixed somewhere beyond her. Anita saw no radio, no earpiece, nothing obvious—but she knew the look. That sudden, vacant stillness when someone was receiving information no one else could hear. Not hesitation, no thought occurring. It was the look of someone catching a signal only they were tuned in for—processing, weighing, deciding in real time. On this woman it was extremely subtle, she was hiding it well, and it likely would have gone unnoticed for anyone else.
And then the moment was gone. Her hair—once a precise up-do—now fell loose in red-ombre waves, tugged out of place by their brief collision. She pushed off Anita, who stayed breathless against the wall, and gathered it back into a bun with an efficiency that spoke of practice. Then her hand found Anita’s chin, a thick silver bracelet sliding down her forearm as her thumb traced the last of her own lipstick from Anita’s mouth. She lingered longer than she had to, studying the smudge like she was admiring her handiwork. A quiet “hm” sealed the gesture—pleased, faintly amused. With a final quirk of her brow, she turned on her heels and swept out, leaving Anita with nothing but the echo of her touch and the awareness that something had shifted.
The smell of her perfume lingers in the warm air with Anita. A warm but musky scent with some sweetness in there somewhere. She can smell it on herself, too, and she likes it. Anita’s own makeup has survived their encounter, but she never wore much to begin with. Her foundation had staying power, and her casual attempt at a smokey eye remains mostly intact, enough that she won't bother trying to fix it before heading back out. There would be no hiding what she had been up to from the others anyway, especially from Ajay.
Once the bathroom door swung open and she was back outside, Anita feels a flush of embarrassment at how quickly her eyes scanned the crowd for any trace of… whatever you call the stranger you just hooked up with in a fancy club bathroom. There was no sign of her, and none of the people ahead showed any evidence of having crossed paths with such a stunning creature. Anita was certain they’d all be wearing the same dumbfounded expression she had if they’d been left breathless in her wake too.
Even with at least two walls separating her from the main bar, the music was loud enough that the sudden shift in volume hit Anita like a sobering shock to the senses. Coupled with the low ambient lighting, it felt as if she’d stepped back into a world where what had just happened would not have happened, and was already starting to blur at the edges. Despite her still-sensitive lips, the pleasant ache between her legs, and the slight wobble in her quads as she walked, a subtle emptiness tugged at her chest. She focuses on the thrum of the music—the electronic synth pulling her back into the club’s atmosphere. Her group had been many drinks ahead of her by the time she arrived—and she had to work the nightshift later—but with the two drinks in her system and the recent lightheadedness fading, Anita can almost convince herself to have fun. Almost.
*
Later, Anita is waiting with her bike at the first checkpoint outside of the warehouse that is her current job, in line to be scanned through security. The first layer of it, anyway. Aside from the drones and the sensors, her job is to be the last layer, the final line of defence for whatever it is that her faceless rich employer is storing here. She didn’t know what she was guarding when she took the job, and she doesn’t want to know now. Sometimes it concerns her, then she tries not to think about it. It’s 2am, she could be partying with her friends, maybe keeping an eye out for her fancy bathroom stranger. Instead she’s here, ready to don her dumb ‘guard’ uniform, armor and all. Bored, but not potentially dying every night, and that was the point.
‘Why you gotta do that anyway,’ Ajay said earlier as Anita was saying her goodbyes. ‘This where the real money is, can ya not look around ya?’
Ajay, oddly, was the most outspoken of her Legend friends, loudly and often expressing her confusion when it comes to Anita’s logic. Ajay partakes in the games, doing what she needs to do in order to give back to the Frontier Corps, so she wonders why Anita can’t do the same for herself.
When the Syndicate first revived and rebranded the Apex Games, only six of them originally cut the muster for the first season and became ‘Legends’. But after her intervention, rightly enacted by the Bateman sisters, Anita had taken a step back from competing and was trying her hand at a more honest way of earning a buck. It was at Jackson’s influence, he was the one who got her this job in the first place, but Anita isn’t sure that he was fully aware of what was going on at the warehouse when he suggested it to her.
She scrolls through the log of her coms with Jackie while she waits under the residual glow of a nearby security spotlight. She finds their text thread, scrolling back to the texts they exchanged when he got her the gig.
[I got you this job nita, play nice]
[Yes sir]
she had responded, punctuated with a salute emoji.
Anita scrolls way back to when she first told her brother she was joining the Apex Games. It was not long after he had fully recovered from the attack on the Hestia II, when she had almost lost him through a hole blown in the ship. The ordeal made her feel that they needed to get back to Gridiron and find the remnants of their family, the sooner the better. She reads through their texts, not for the first time in the years since.
[I gotta do this jackie]
[Why risk it after everything we survived this far?]
[I wanna see mom and dad again while we got some life left, so i have to]
[why not in the next? maybe that wouldn't be so bad. maybe they already grieved]
[you don't mean that]
She still remembers watching the three dots repeating over and over, his hesitation or anger or whatever made him decide not to elaborate.
[It's a blood sport anita. it's gonna be on the damn tv. you're a soldier.]
[then i'll be extra good at it]
[you know what i mean. there'll be other ways]
[not with this kind of payout. i'm sorry.]
Anita knows what Jackson sees when he thinks of the Apex Games: the Thunderdome. The IMC’s arena, where soldiers were supposed to ‘blow off steam’ but often ended up maiming each other for sport. Where matches slid from sparring into gladiatorial bloodletting. Where civilians were allowed to join in and too often left in body bags. The place that revealed the worst in soldiers who were supposed to be the IMC’s best. Its ‘heroes’.
Jackson hated it then, he thought it immoral. He dislikes the Games now for the same reason, perhaps rightly so, unswayed by the filters and dampeners in place to protect the stars. But Anita was dead set on it when she joined, and she’s dead set on her course of action now. Because she can’t shake—even after all these years— the memory of her brother’s hand slipping in hers, his weight dragging her down where she should have held strong, the sheer terror when she almost lost him to a fall she couldn’t stop. The fear still grips her sometimes in the quiet hours, when she’s trying to sleep. Cold steel hands stabbing into her chest, squeezing until she can’t breathe.
How could she do the same thing to him, willingly, night after night? The two remaining siblings were all they had left out here.
“Williams!” The gate guard calls her name, snapping her out of it. Her spine prickles with the reflex to stand to attention, but she forces it down. She isn’t a soldier, not anymore.
*
Anita’s IMC training was the main reason she got this job. Her past as a Legend almost cost her the position—celebrity wasn’t exactly a recommendation here—but Jackson vouched for her with his friend from Harris Valley, and that opened the door. She met that guy once and doesn't like him. Truth be told, she doesn’t like most of the guards. She’s fairly certain the warehouse is a front for something shady, but not enough to walk away. Not yet.
Jackson thinks it’s his influence that keeps her here and she’s happy to let him believe it. That is easier than admitting it’s her own streak of self-righteousness. Exposing some criminal operation isn’t going to make her brother feel better about her supposedly more ‘honorable’ employment anyway, even if it would earn her a long-awaited told you so . And the pay—while nowhere near what a Legend pulled—is decent enough for a blue-collar girl.
Four checkpoints later, geared up and weapons cleared, Anita starts her route through the warehouse floor. She hopes her patrol partner is up ahead, not hanging back waiting for her as usual. Cameron. Nineteen. Too young for this line of work, in her opinion, though technically old enough to wear the uniform if not the sidearm. He’s told her often how he watched her matches as a teenager, back before the Games ballooned into the corporate spectacle they are now. He says he’s got a set of Bangalore cards tucked away, rare collectors items now that she’s off the roster. He keeps asking her to sign them; she keeps dodging him. The idea of him making more on her name than she currently is doesn’t sit well with her. Irrational, maybe. But still.
“Radio check,” the Supervisory Sergeant’s voice comes through, clipped and precise in her earpiece. Supervisory Sergeant. Every time she is reminded of the title, Anita wants to roll her eyes. Most of the staff are ex-militia, so the rank system is probably meant to give them something familiar, keep them invested. To her, it feels like playing pretend soldier. But she guesses a little structure is better than none.
“Williams,” she answers once the others check in alphabetically.
Cameron is among them, just before her with ‘Walker’, and when she rounds the next corner she spots him. For once, he isn’t loitering.
The warehouse stretches around them: rows upon rows of towering shelves, climbing higher than a dropship’s bay doors. The frames are latticed, stacked with deliberate gaps, designed so patrols keep line of sight across multiple aisles. Cool-white overheads cast the place in a sterile glow, too bright to leave shadows, while motion sensors blink faintly at every junction. A low, constant hum hangs in the air—ventilation, automated lifts up to elevated catwalks, server banks somewhere deep in the facility. It’s clean, orderly. The kind of precision that money buys. But beneath it all, Anita can’t shake the sense that the shine is there to hide something dangerous.
At the heart of the warehouse sits the vault. Her patrol skirts the innermost ring—close enough to respond, never close enough to cross the invisible tripfield that encircles the chamber. Step too far into that unseen perimeter and the alarms would scream, drones would swarm; she’s witnessed the controlled carnage only once during a test fire. Anita and Cameron aren’t here to guard the vault itself. They’re the last line, the human failsafe meant to clean up what the machines somehow miss.
She’s only ever caught the vault open once, too, during a shift-change inspection. The memory needles her every time she makes the circuit. Suspended inside had been a sphere of dull metal, blackened and scarred, its surface fractured with thin seams that leaked pale-blue light. It didn’t move, but it didn’t feel still either—like it was waiting. Looking at it too long had set the back of her neck prickling, as if she were standing too close to a live wire. She remembered staring too long, drawn in despite herself—until one of the higher-ups barked at her to keep her eyes forward and her feet moving.
That was the centerpiece, but it wasn’t the only thing inside. She recalls racks and pedestals ringing the chamber, each fitted with closed cases. If they had labels, she couldn’t make them out from her angle. Then the vault door had sealed again, swallowing everything back into silence.
Anita hadn’t asked questions. She didn’t want the answers. But she knew one thing: all this security wasn’t for the warehouse floor. It was for whatever they kept in there.
Cameron’s voice comes through her earpiece, easy and clear, rambling once again about some rare Bangalore card he swears is worth a fortune because of the metallic elements to the print. Anita half-listens, nodding at the right moments even though he can’t see, but something tugs at the edge of her senses as she passes a junction into the next aisle on her route. The trace of a new scent—musky, unmistakable—drifts through the cold warehouse air. It’s gone almost as soon as she catches it, so quickly that she thinks she is just about to have another flashback from the bathroom. It wouldn’t be the first time she has thought of the woman from the bathroom since she clocked in, but the scent doesn’t belong here. It’s not grease, not dust, not metal.
The comms chatter keeps rolling in the background, the other guards checking their assigned corners and exits, their routine patter filling the air, and filling her mind. She’s grateful for the distraction, and even for Cameron's when he prattles on, oblivious to her paranoia.
“Hey, Williams, you ever notice how the racks in row twelve lean? Like, one good sneeze and the whole lot comes down.”
“Nothing in here ever moves,” Anita mutters, hoping the roll of her eyes is conveyed in her tone. “They’re braced up to the ceiling.”
“Uh-huh. Bet you ten AC they’re not.”
“Do you ever look up? Not taking that.”
He chuckles, low and easy. Normal. Almost enough to dull the edge of her nerves back down to their usual standby-state.
Then, oblivious to her suspicions, he shifts to another tangent: “And those crates in row fifteen? Next time you pass, look at those —”
There’s a pause, like he was going to finish his sentence but can’t remember what his point was going to be, it happens.
“Yeah? What about them?” She attempts to prompt him.
She waits as she slows her pace. Two beats. Three beats. Too long. The pause could be natural. He’s dramatic like that, always waiting for her reaction before finishing a thought. Anita rolls her eyes, adjusts her grip on her holstered sidearm and keeps walking.
She waits for another beat. Nothing.
“Cameron?”
Still nothing. Not static. Not distortion. Just… absence.
She waits on the open channel for one of the other teams to check in. Maybe Cameron ran in to one of them and they’re talking in person. It happens, it’s not strictly allowed but it happens on nightshift. It breaks the monotony. She looks up, and the ceiling sensors blink their steady green. No alarms. No drones deploying. No system countermeasures spinning up.
“Williams. Check in,” she orders over the com. She isn’t in charge, but she’s high enough up that the sharp staccato of her order should have someone scrambling to respond.
Anita’s jaw tightens. Her hand has found its way to her sidearm, and her grip there tightens too. Up ahead, the scuff of boots on a slightly dusty floor. Then nothing.
Someone is inside her perimeter, and they’re already ahead of her.