Poison Dance

by Katie Frendreis

Nagoya could be a beautiful city if you visited the right parts, stayed out of trouble. But ever since the Thirion gangs took over and flooded the streets and air-roads with syphium, the city had started to pulse with danger. Around every corner lurked the threat of sharp knives and sharper needles, drugs and enhanced Roo-thugs smiling in the neon flash and silicate sheen of a city on the brink.

            So it was as Detective Kaito parked his aerocar on the loading dock above the building that housed the Yujo’s Legs, a nightclub he only considered entering because of his current case. As he secured the patrol car and ducked his head against the sticky, vaguely poisonous-smelling rain, Kaito recalled the scene from earlier that night—a body laid out on the floor, exsanguinated from a vicious gash across its neck, blood soaked into the plush pile of the carpet in the dead man’s penthouse. Just in front of the dead man, a shattered window letting rain and neon haze sparkle across the apartment’s contents.

            Five needles, glinting in the city’s glow, protruded from the dead man’s chest.

            Thunder crackled overhead as Kaito reached the indoor stairs that led into the Yujo’s Legs. The stairs would take him down a back way into the club, nearer to the kitchens and offices rather than the bustling, guest entrance on the street-level. Kaito pressed his way inside, breathing with relief as the door swung shut behind him and he could get a good lungful of the processed air within. Anything was better than the noxious air of Nagoya, especially to Kaito’s genetically heightened senses.

            A figure emerged from the shadows of the stairwell and loomed over Kaito.

            “Who th’ f’re you?”

            Kaito’s badge was in his hand and up in the figure’s face, other hand reaching towards his side arm, before he answered. “Detective Kenji Kaito, Nagoya Homicide. I’m not Vice.” At that reassurance, the other man relaxed and flipped on a previously unseen lamp. Green light flickered momentarily, then burst to life, illuminating the grotesquely elongated features and inhuman muscles of Kaito’s questioner. A Roo-thug, Kaito cringed. Of course.

            The Roo-thug’s protruding maxillary twisted into an animal approximation of a smirk. “An’ what’re you here for, Mister Cop?” Years of genetic manipulation and heavy surgeries had given the man—and others like him—features and strength reminiscent of the Australian Outback’s largest marsupial. As ridiculous as it must have sounded decades ago when gene handling and animal/human hybridization was still a mostly undiscovered science, all manner of Spliced Humans now existed, and Roo-thugs were high on the list of the most physically dangerous. 

            Detective Kaito—whose olfactory and auditory systems had been augmented with African elephant DNA—settled into a relaxed position his inner thoughts did not mirror. “Just looking to talk to your boss. Is Galazy Hita on the premises?”

            Grinning at his perceived intimidation, the Roo-thug crossed his arms over the ropy muscles of his chest. “Mr. Hita’ll be free in a min’.  Follow.”

            The darkness twisted around the stairs, broken only by the greenish glow of the lantern, and Kaito’s boots clanged against the metal grating as he followed the thug down towards the nightclub. Music and the heady scents of sweat and alcohol pulsed louder and stronger as they descended, Kaito’s sensitive nose picking out not only liquors but several different alternative substances, with varying degrees of legality. He shook his head to alleviate the pressure building behind his eyes. While stronger senses were useful in his line of work, they could also cause problems, like the migraines he’d suffered stoically for what felt like ages. He could only imagine the weird reactions a body must have when faced with more heavy tampering like that of the Roo-thugs that pervaded the growing Nagoya underbelly.

After a number of levels, the thug directed Kaito through a rear part of the club’s kitchen area and down a side corridor that ran along the back of the main dance-floor. Glimpses of writhing bodies and flashes of lights filtered through several semi-opaque windows, more overpowering to Kaito’s hypersensitivity than he cared to admit. On the opposite side of the corridor were a number of private rooms, and the detective guessed a Vice official might find some pretty interesting things behind those closed doors.

            “In ‘ere,” said the thug. Kaito followed his gesture through an ornate door frame and entered the club boss’s office.

            Seated behind one of the most ostentatious desks Kaito had seen was Galazy Hita. The man’s jet black hair was slicked flat against his skull, and a narrow nose angled harshly between his small eyes. A woman perched on the edge of the desk facing the man, and she lifted an eyebrow at the detective’s entrance. Kaito inclined his head to Hita, offering the club boss more respect than he’d shown the Roo-thug. Hita nodded tersely, and the thug at Kaito’s side slipped soundlessly from the room, the woman doing the same a heartbeat later.

            “I’ve had plenty of coppers in here,” Hita’s voice slid from his lips like liquid, “but not usually a polite homicide detective. Tell me, why’ve you come?”

            Kaito took a seat only when Hita gestured to the one across from his desk. “It’s your business partner, Mr. Hita. Daisuke Arbojin was found dead tonight in his penthouse.”

            Hita pressed back into his synth-leather chair but his face remained impassive. “Murdered, I presume?”  Before Kaito could reply, Hita smiled. “Of course, in our line of work, murder is a most common cause of death.” A smirk touched his handsome features. “I would be more surprised if you told me Daisuke had died peacefully in bed at a decent age.” 

            “Did your business partner have any enemies?” Kaito palmed his recording tablet, ready to jot down any insights Hita might provide.

            “Ah, well that’s where you’ve got your work cut out for you.” Hita shrugged. “Daisuke Arbojin wasn’t the friendliest of men. When conducting business here in Nagoya and with the lunar colonies, Arbo-Hita Corp has made a name for itself because we both know—knew—what we wanted and were ruthless in getting it.” 

Kaito cut in. “Five needles were found piercing Mr. Arbojin’s chest.”

Hita rose from his chair abruptly, startling Detective Kaito. “Here, let me show you around the club.” He grinned. “It will help you understand my partner.”

            Kaito agreed to follow Hita out of the office, but he kept his attention sharp. With the sensory overload of a nightclub, it would be easy to become distracted. But after years of handling his own genetic manipulation, Kaito trusted himself enough to trail Hita down the back corridor.

            The first room they came to was filled with low couches, painted red in the dim light. Slender-limbed dancers swayed among those laid out on the seats. Hita stopped Kaito from passing too far into the room. “One of our private delicacies,” he explained.

Kaito looked more closely. Many of the club guests had removed some or all of their clothing. They writhed on the couches, in an orgy of pleasure but not sex. Here, the silvery glint of a needle protruded from a man’s thigh. There, two needles pierced a woman’s breasts. Kaito gasped, a fluttery nausea churning in his stomach. Disgust, yes, but a smidgen of interest laced with disquiet. 

            “Our popular offering,” Hita’s voice brushed against his neck. “The dance of poison.”

            Music, that had remained a low rumble until that point, rose to a crescendo and the lights flashed. A curtain opened to reveal a woman on a small stage. It was the woman Kaito had seen in Hita’s office when he entered. Her feet were as bare as the rest of her, and she moved languorously about the small space, her fingers drifting across many bottles and canteens displayed around her. The glassy eyes of the people on the couches trained to her, captivated. As the music pumped louder, the dancing woman opened a small vial, releasing a puff of green smoke, then threw back the liquid inside like a shot of whiskey.

            “One of our best,” said Hita. 

            Kaito blinked. He’d heard rumors of such performances, but to see one in person, in the flesh, was earth-shattering. “And she . . .” he struggled to speak. “She ingests the poisons?”

            “They all do. You saw those needles. Each one, dipped in the finest, purest poisons Japan has to offer the world.” Seeing that Kaito looked concerned, the club boss led him away from the performance. “Detective, you see what drugs like syphium have done to our island, haven’t you? You were here during the drug wars?”

            The detective nodded, though he was unable to shake the image of the poison dancer. “Yes, Mr. Hita.  I’m a veteran of both Syphium Wars. I saw the terrible price men and women paid for that drug.”

            Hita smiled expansively. “Then you know how hard it is for people to find contentment in this world.  You see them every day, strung out and addicted. They’re just going to find another fix from somewhere—no matter what the government decides or bans. Arbojin and I opened this club for those people, ones with discerning tastes who were ready to take the next steps in feeding their minds and bodies. It’s not just about drugs, detectives. It’s about a different way of looking at the world.”

            “But . . . poison?” Kaito shuddered. “Syphium was dangerous enough. Poisons’ jobs are to kill people.”

            “That’s why we administer only the smallest amounts and in a controlled fashion.” Hita smiled, and he looked nothing more like a doctor trying to convince a child the shot was for his own good. “Monitoring ingestion keeps them safe. They’re going to do it anyway, detective. This way, we keep the novelty alive but control the usage.”

            Kaito blinked but had little to say in reply. Rumors of such poison parties ran rampant through the department every few months, but there’d never been any confirmation. “And no one has died on your premises?” he asked, not quite trusting Hita to answer.

            “Have your officers ever been called here before?”

            That wasn’t strictly an answer, but Kaito let it slide for the time being. “And how does this explain your partner’s death?”

            Hita’s expression turned dark. “You must believe me, detective, I do not partake in my own offerings here. But Daisuke—he found the temptation irresistible. Every night, he watched the poison dance, and he luxuriated in the press of the poison-tinged needle. I suspect those needles you found on his body will contain traces of such poison.” 

            “While that may be true,” cut in Kaito, “Mr. Arbojin’s throat was slit.”

            Galazy Hita stared at his hands for a moment before answering. “Well,” he said at last, “I will always honor and miss him.”

***

After returning to his aerocar, Detective Kaito sank into the driver’s seat and removed his police-issued data-scroll from his breast pocket. He unrolled the scroll and keyed in a few notes from his illuminating time in the Yujo’s Legs. Galazy Hita had explained the needles found at the crime scene and cast certain doubts about Daisuke Arbojin’s more illicit pastimes. But how to find a killer in a city so large? A man like Arbojin would have thousands of contacts in Nagoya alone, and someone could have killed him and returned to some far-flung place like the Lunar Colony or even Mars by now.

            But there was something about the crime scene that still rankled Kaito, so he set his autopilot back to the dead man’s penthouse. As he glided between the rain-washed skyscrapers, he thumbed through the information he’d scrawled earlier on his data-scroll: fragments of Arbojin’s schedule prior to his death, a handful of names of known associates, locations of his offices for the shipping companies as well as his liaison on the moon. None of it seemed to point anywhere helpful.

            That was why the crime scene was suddenly so important. 

            When he arrived, the crime scene technicians had finally cleared the space and removed the body, so Kaito was alone with his thoughts. Glass crunched under his military boots as he stood just to the side of where Arbojin’s corpse had laid. The shattered window across from the body’s location was taped shut with a sheet of plastic, but the wind still howled from beyond the broken portal. Much of Arbojin’s furniture had apparently been made of glass, so it was hard to tell what glass came from various tables and stands or from the shattered window.

            Kaito stood by the window for several minutes in silence. Closing his eyes, he breathed in the thick air of Nagoya from beyond the window. He breathed in the thickly perfumed apartments of Daisuke Arbojin, now dead and freezing on a slab at the morgue. He breathed in the iron stink of blood that had soaked into the carpet, as well as the other fluids Arbojin had released upon his death. And he breathed in . . .

            Poison.

            There was a click of the door, and Kaito sprang forwards to catch whoever was sneaking inside. His hands closed around slender forearms, and he dragged the intruder into the dim light of the living room. The figure struggled until the neon light from outside the windows fell across both their faces.

            “Detective?” The small intruder ceased fighting back and stared up at Kaito.

            Kaito blinked. In his arms was the woman from the club, wearing not the slinky dress from Hita’s office or the sparkling nothing of the poison dance. Instead, she was wrapped in a thick coat and scarf. Her long, black hair snaked from a high ponytail and hung down her back.

            “Please,” said the woman, “I’m not here to hurt you. I—I didn’t even know you were here.”

            Something about her made Kaito trust her, and he released his grip on her arms. She stepped back and peered around the room with clever, flashing eyes.

            “This is where he—”

            Kaito nodded. “Yes.” He pointed to the floor. “We found him here.”

            The woman closed her eyes and sighed. “I should have known this would happen.”

            “What do you mean, Miss . . . ?”

            “I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. “My name is Akari. I worked for Arbo-Hita—which I guess you know. They recruited me for their club after they saw what I could do with poisons. I worked with Mr. Hita and Mr. Arbojin for many years.” She walked over and leaned against a synth-wood bartop. Kaito stared pointedly at her, noticing the barely visible wrinkles at the edges of her eyes and lips. The poison dancer was older than he had first guessed, nearer to forty than twenty, though still agile and capable.

            “What was the nature of your relationship with Mr. Arbojin, Miss Akari?”

            Akari’s cheeks flushed. “For a short time, I thought there was something between us. I thought he loved me. We had a . . . But all he ever wanted was syphium, or some other drug or poison. In the last few years, he was obsessed. Mr. Hita was being kind when he called him his business partner. That may be how they started, but Daisuke hasn’t done any real work for Arbo-Hita in ages. And he hasn’t helped me or”—she choked—“in so long.”

            “Miss Akari,” said Kaito, his voice as calm and even as he could make it, “who do you think killed Daisuke Arbojin?”

            She turned away, but not before Kaito saw the tears flash in Akari’s eyes.

“Akari, I’m going to ask you to stay here. And I’m going to call some other officers to take you home. I have to go and check something.”

            The woman nodded. She gripped the edges of the bar with white knuckles. Maybe it would help ground her, maybe it wouldn’t, but Kaito left the apartment with grim finality.

            The elevator ride down to the base of the building took several minutes, all of which served to jangle Kaito’s nerves. Such a tall high rise offered many levels of parking for aerocars and hovercrafts up and down the height of the building, and the bottom of the building was nearly deserted when Kaito stepped off the elevator. Darkness settled like a weight down at the building’s base, and the detective thanked his heightened senses once again.

            Outside the apartment complex, Kaito paused to get his bearings. The broken window in Arbojin’s penthouse had faced north, which was around the right corner of the massive building. Kaito’s boots squelched in tepid rain puddles. For a moment, he gazed up at the concrete cornerstone and up, up, up past the straight angles of the glass and steel and into the silvering clouds above.

            Nagoya could be a beautiful city.

            If you visited the right parts.

            Stayed out of trouble.

            He found his second corpse of the evening sprawled on the pavement. The blood under her fragile form had partly washed away in the ever-present rain. Even now, the stinging droplets hissed against Kaito’s shoulders, baptizing him and the body in its foul spray.

            Kaito had seen so many corpses in his work as a detective, and so many more during his soldiering in the Syphium Wars. But the bodies of children always struck the heart differently.

            The body had belonged to a young girl, probably in her early teens, face just starting to hint at the same dark beauty as the poison dancer upstairs. Terror had frozen her face in horrible rictus, and her broken arms were spread wide in a spurious copy of crucifixion. Kaito approached breathlessly. He leaned down and stared into the girl’s face, her clouded eyes, her gaping mouth.

            The fingers of her right hand still clenched around the hilt of a knife, lovely, deadly, and decorative—probably from Arbojin’s collection. Kaito knew without investigating that this was the weapon that had killed Daisuke Arbojin.

            Her left hand clutched something too, and Kaito bent down to uncrinkle her fingers from their contents. Her rigored hands released a tight scroll up to the detective, and he brought it up, shielding it with his body from the rain.

            With careful hands, Detective Kaito unrolled the scroll. Formal Kanji filled the page, but Kaito could tell what the document contained; it was a birth certificate.

            The mother listed was—as Kaito had feared—Akari Mila.

            Just below that was the father. Kaito sighed. 

            The father of the dead girl was Daisuke Arbojin.