Rinnie rarely looked up; not because Noir City had an ugly view of the sky, but because she took it as bad omens. She could define it as an impulse that forced her to look up. That afternoon Rinnie wondered if it would rain; she put her hands in her jacket pockets, and inhaled as if trying to fill her lungs from the insane atmosphere of the city. Smell of decay.
Although the sun hadn't completely set, she had to strain her eyes to be sure she didn't take the wrong shortcut; the city was so monochromatic that spotting the bright colors of Mike's snack shop was the only proof that his corneas didn't need a replacement yet.
That stingy Ezra would be happy to inject some kind of new pharmaceutical drug into her eyes in order to charge you a little more. It would be your kidney and lungs in exchange for good vision.
"Hey Mike!" he greeted the mustachioed man on the other side of the counter "Can I have a double cheese burger?"
"Sure" he smiled contemptuously as he licked his teeth "What service will you give me in return?"
"The service of cutting your landfill in two" she smiled innocently back as she lunged over the counter and grabbed him by the shirt.
It's okay. Okay" he got up when she left "Someday you won't have so much confidence and I'll be the only place you can go"
"I'd rather die" she didn't let her smiling expression change "Oh! I think that would not be a bad plan "
"Bitch ..." Mike whispered as he took one last look at Rinnie's body.
Mike was an old acquaintance from a few years ago. He considered it a bit disgusting, but the only one who gave him discounts when it came to exchanging items. In exchange for a hamburger and some painkillers she could bear him waving his belly as the lust showed in his eyes.
"I won't take much, just the essentials" she told him with some seriousness "Two big bottles of painkillers and two double cheese burgers"
"It will be fifty-seven halos" Mike replied after calculating something in a notebook.
"Fifty seven?!"
"These are hard times. Merchandise is expensive these days." He shrugged.
"Rather they try to enrich themselves with the lament of others" she murmured loud enough for Mike to understand. "It makes me sick".
"Take it or leave it." Mike held out his big, greasy hand, ignoring her. She dropped the fifty-seven little sparkly blue hoops. "I don't know why you complain. You have… that. " Mike didn't know what words to use to describe Rinnie.
She was certainly a peculiar young woman, as peculiar as she could detest herself to be; And it is that she did not wear a wakizashi on her hip just to defend herself. The survival business in Noir City had transcended the typical trample the weakest to live, now you only had to kill angels for about a week to eat something from the outside.
Angels ...
Outside ... What did Rinnie know about the world? Actually, nothing; she only had idyllic images of what Ezra told her during painful reviews, or what the movies showed - which she also had to pay for with halos -. Noir City was an island in the middle of Oceania, very close to Indonesia.
The typical food of the city was a crude imitation of what was already created with artificial ingredients. At least Rinnie hated the taste of double cheese Camburguers.
"I hate that" she replied "Take this, and give me its dollar value"
She gave him sixty-five halos and received two thousand dollars.
She took the plastic bags with the name of the store and went down the street in search of the route 210 bus; It was the only way to arrive in time for review would. He could feel her restless flesh and the burning of toxins coursing through her system, even though this wasn't actually happening; and is that Rinnie was very strict with her medicines. The fact that something would go wrong if he didn't get them on time terrified him.
The sound of a crash or a small explosion brought her out of her reverie; That sort of thing wasn't common, but it wasn't something that would set off her alarms and make her run right away. It wasn't her problem, and that was one thing the people of Noir City were very clear about.
It wasn't until, already spotting the bus station, a person rushed past her that her senses were triggered and her body froze. It was an uncomfortable shock, and she felt her cells unravel. It was such a strange and terrible reaction that he could barely see the angel running in his direction.
The alarms sounded throughout the city warning citizens to take refuge in the underground tunnels against attacks from Extreme Angels.
It was a huge mass in the shape of a Rubik's cube that turned its pieces to move, destroying everything in its path. The buildings shook and the asphalt was furrowed leaving a trail of chaos. Rinnie didn't bother to get out of the way, rather she just slowly drew her wakizashi and left it stretched upright in front of the angel. This was stopped abruptly by a kind of expansive force. Rinnie's eyes sparkled with a golden color to match her hair, which now simulated a life of its own, waving in the air and defying gravity from the wind wave that created the collision.
She let the air out on a sigh and pointing at it with the blade of his weapon he ran to get closer and cut a deep cut in the dark flesh of the angel. The cube began to spin its ranks frantically, throwing Rinnie from side to side; However, far from screaming in pain at being buried in the walls of the buildings, she had an angry expression on his face.
"You ... damn angel" he yelled angrily "Why aren't you strong enough to kill me?"
She got up on the rubble thinking that the owners would have more of a headache when they saw the building in that state. She gripped the wakizashi tightly and with an impulse between the angel and the sad gray buildings, she fell on the monster, severing one of its joints. She made sure not to have contact with the liquid that came out of the angel's wound; her eyes twinkled in such a way that they illuminated her entire excited face.
"Don't mistreat my body like that if you won't finish the job"
It lunged at another of its joints, and when it touched the ground it was responsible for dividing it horizontally.
"Ezra charge me more expensive for what you've done"
A spin of the cube made her fly against a building, however, she used this as a propellant to reach the center of the cube.
"Do you know how much I pay for those damn shots?"
She focused her energy on the tip of his weapon and blew it up next to the angel. Her body was abused and she was forced to spit out her blood so as not to end up drowning in it. She scooped up the two halos that were between the angel's flesh and put them in her pocket without worrying about dirtying her jacket.
"You are a bastard without a conscience. What will you know about money? " she reflected looking at the remains "Yes. You did know, at least when you were human "
The angels were nothing heavenly or beautiful as the books outside illustrated; they were human, with flesh and heart, with brain. They were people infected with the deadliest plague that had ever touched the earth: the angel plague. Rinnie wasn't sure why that name; perhaps because it came out of nowhere infecting everyone as if it were a punishment for decaying humanity. I only knew that it was currently the most contagious disease out there.
There were daily reports that it was transmitted by contact with secretions, by blood, by ingestion or by breathing it.
The disease caused a period of about three days of suffering and agony. As if the individual was aware of the worst way the virus invaded his system; After this, it mutated into a horrible form called Angel, creatures that could vary their mutation and even grow by devouring people and other smaller angels -the latter caused them to harbor more halos inside them-. The virus in question that invaded the body was called Ann.
All of this reminded Rinnie enormously of her favorite movie. She stopped for a moment to think.
"When did they say they would air the last Evangelion movie?"
Lately there was a series of commercials repeated every hour about the new animated film about mecha and monsters. They broadcast them on almost all the outside channels -which he had also bought by halos-, and Ezra used to disconnect the cable from the television because he said that it would fry her brain from so much drooling over the "Eva".
She heard several collisions in the distance and a severe headache warned her that something was wrong, so she only ran in the direction of the noise to find a girl perhaps three years younger than her. She was on the ground, scared, her hair tousled, white and shiny; and the deep red eyes that seemed to want to hide deep in the earth. Rinnie detailed each faction of the girl because something told her it was the cause of her recent discomfort.
The girl noticed her too and it was as if something suddenly connected them so deeply that Rinnie felt naked.
A group of five angels gathered around him; Rinnie gripped the hilt of her wakizashi with great care. She looked at each of the angels without making any sudden movements, and then returned her gaze to the girl. She looked terrified. She tried to get closer before the angels darted; now they were only trying to devour each other, for they were little larger than a human and of the most various and grotesque forms.
The girl opened her eyes from shock and her pupils contracted, then a huge wave of light spread between them. The girl looked like something out of a virgin's stamp, and all the angels present there vanished like dust. Rinnie froze, her insides burning and her eyes big and bright.
When the light subsided the young woman fainted, bleeding from her nose and ears. Her white hair was now stained.
Rinnie regained mobility at the moment in which subjects dressed as members of the military force carried the person in front of her. She made no attempt to follow them, even more so that her senses returned to normal. Her wakizashi was cracked and broken at the tip.
"Oh! Damn!" she said to himself when she saw the state of her weapon and covered her mouth immediately.
She remembered the times Ezra scolded her for cursing.
"Oh! Come on, I'm twenty years old, old enough to talk however I want. "
She decided.
She got off the bus when it got dark, she was in a familiar area so she did not force herself to walk carefully, but dragged his legs in the hope of getting home soon. She did not play as he always did, she only entered the back room that faced the back street where the office was.
"Ezra" he yelled "Ezra, damn"
"Hey wait" he said back "I'm in the middle of something extremely important"
Rinnie dropped into one of the plastic chairs Ezra had in the hall. Soon he arrived; a clandestine doctor whose license was withdrawn more years ago than Rinnie could imagine. Reason? He never wanted to tell her. His hair was wild and black, and his gloved hands, robe, and glasses were spattered with blood.
"It seems that you come back in one piece," he reviewed with the view "Another day of little profit"
"You haven't left anyone open on the stretcher, have you?" she asked alarmed.
"Huh? Oh yeah! Right, thanks for reminding me" he said with a laugh, returning to the room. "This will only take a moment."
Rinnie heard the sound of a sharp object against wood and felt guilty for letting Ezra still do her job.
"That's it" she returned cleaning her hands "One of the clients paid me with a duck. Can you believe it? A real duck. I have prepared it for dinner ".
"That's fine"
Ezra checked her lungs and her eyes; he then took a sample of her blood and reacted it with a liquid Rinnie was unaware of.
"Have you changed the routine?"
"Why the question?"
"Your blood concentration of Ann is lower than normal"
"How is that possible?" she asked "Lower? Does the treatment work?"
"I doubt it. It must have been something else "she thought for a while "What did you do today?"
"Nothing special" preferred not to talk about the girl with that peculiar power that affected her in such a way.
"I think you don't need the antibodies today," Ezra sighed.
"Do it, I'm not going to risk it" he dictated "I'll pay you double"
By that he meant paying a thousand dollars for a routine injection of demon antibodies; a variation of the organism caused by a mutation drug adverse to the Angel plague called Demon. Many people had undergone this painful smuggling treatment to avoid contracting the plague, and while it did repel the Ann component, it caused demon-like deformations. One way or another it was better to look demonic and remain the same person than to deform and lose consciousness to be a pitiful and dangerous organism.
Ezra had subjected Rinnie to this antibody treatment ever since he discovered that her system was infected with the Ann component; however, Rinnie never told him why she was contaminated in this way. The treatment ensured that her human condition would remain dominant while maintaining a balance of toxins.
It was really painful.
She went to his room in the adjoining room connected to the consultation by a door; the front was of a laundry and behind it was Rinnie's house. She lay down on the bed looking at the posters of Asuka Langley and Ayanami Rei, and she wondered if this young woman might be the clue she needed to quit those drugs. She wondered if it would be too intrusive to kidnap her.