Face-Slapping13 min read
Trash, Tobacco, and a Wolf with an Agenda
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I crawled out of a wasteland on the third day and tasted the sun like a threat.
"Are you alive?" a voice asked, and for a second I thought the world had decided to answer me back.
I blinked and the town looked like something stitched together from other people's lives—tall houses, odd round holes, nests with awnings. The air smelled less like rot and more like... waiting.
"I—" I fumbled for words. "I don't know where I am."
"You look like you crawled from the pit," the man at the door said. He was huge—Colton Bass—and he sniffed the air like someone measuring a spice.
"Did you sleep in a trash field?" he asked as if he were trying not to laugh.
"No. I fell," I admitted.
Colton opened the door wider. "Come in. Wash up. You smell like three days of bad decisions."
"I can do that," I said. I stepped into a bar that hid behind a humble facade, and the inside was warm and huge and full of things I couldn't name. The chairs swallowed me. The cups could have bathed a child.
"You a kid?" he kept teasing as he shoved a towel at me.
"I'm twenty-eight." The lie hit the air soft and useless; everyone here towered like stormclouds.
Colton didn't care. "Twenty-eight is still kid-sized where I'm from. Eat. Talk later."
I ate until my hands trembled.
"Try this," he said, handing me a small bottle. "My recipe. It'll put hair back on your chest." He winked.
"It tastes like milk and fire," I said.
"Good," Colton laughed. "Now, where did you come from? No one wakes up in the pit and walks out into town without a story."
"I—" I paused. "I think I'm from Earth. I was researching plants and then a hole swallowed me."
Colton guffawed but then grew quiet. He said, "You look too... straight. You don't smell of mixed blood. Be careful."
"Mixed blood?" The phrase was new and sharp.
"Here, gene tweaking turned people into beasts. Height got big. Strength came with a price. There's a gene-testing day every year. If you get lucky—go to middle zone, maybe high zone. If not, you stay and rot."
"Will they make me marry?" My voice was small.
"Maybe. Or sell you," Colton said. He poured me more food. "You want to work? You can wash dishes, help. But don't roam the black market."
"I want to stay. I don't want to die in the pit."
"You can sleep over. But keep your head down." He looked at me like a father giving one simple rule. "And if you want to breathe tomorrow, don't tell many people what you can do."
"What can I do?" I wondered.
"Girl, you read people like open books. You should be scared."
I was not yet sure whether to be scared of the way he said it or the way he watched me.
— — —
"Are you ready to lose?" Pavel Brennan asked, shoving a handful of chips toward me. He had the kind of grin people trusted when they wanted a bet to burn.
"I've never been to a fight before," I said.
"Then watch," Pavel insisted.
We walked into a backroom where people paid to watch beasts fight. The arena smelled of sweat and something metallic. The crowd was loud and hungry.
"That one wins," Pavel said, pointing.
I didn't want to say it aloud, but I watched the two men and listened to their bodies like a language. I saw a hunched tension that always burst in jumps. I saw a patient stillness in the older man's eyes, a waiting for a sliver of chance.
"You think the big one will win?" Pavel kept nudging.
"No," I said, and the word stepped out like a confession. "The bigger one fights from power, but he has the pattern of a bad jumper. He gives himself away when he gets cocky. The smaller one is patient—waits, then uses the other's momentum."
Pavel blinked. "How do you see that?"
"Years of watching animals," I said. "I learned to notice how the body tells the truth."
He laughed like a man pinching a storm. "That's going on the web."
"Don't," I warned.
Pavel only winked. "No promises."
— — —
"You're a dangerous advantage," Colton told me later, while handing me a towel. He spoke quietly.
"How so?"
"You can read people. You can find weakness not with knives but with knowledge. People who need to hide—that's a target. You're a target."
"Then protect me."
He sighed. "I'll protect you. But don't become bait."
"I won't."
— — —
I didn't mean to end up in the black market hospital, but curiosity is a bad thing to tame. Pavel's excitement pulled me down alleyways until we found cages and lights and people who needed kindness and had no one.
"You shouldn't be here," Colton told me that night when I told him.
"You should be careful," I insisted.
"I am." He smiled a crooked smile and poured whiskey.
"That wolf-boy that followed?" I said. "He saved me once."
Colton's face twitched. "Wolf boys are trouble."
"He seemed... desperate. He sniffed my neck."
"Never let anyone mark you," Colton said.
"Mark me?"
"If a beast marks something—it's hard to unmark."
— — —
"Nolan," the wolf said first when he stepped into the tavern one evening. His voice could make a man turn in his sleep.
"You're full of trouble," Colton told him.
"You were the girl from the pit," Nolan Crow said, and the name tightened the room. "Why do you hide?"
"I don't hide." I stood up straighter than I felt. "I just live."
"Your blood—" Nolan bent close to me as if listening to a song. "It is clean."
"What does that mean?" I asked, every hair on me suddenly awake.
"It means you are not a mix. Your blood is old. Very old." Nolan's eyes were gentle and terrifying.
"I came from Earth," I said. The words felt like stepping off a cliff. "I—"
"You're dangerous to people who trade in DNA," Nolan interrupted. "And precious to those who want to breed old lines."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying this: do not let anyone put you on a table."
His breath brushed my hair. He looked younger than he sounded, and his wolf-ears were soft and ridiculous and made him look suddenly like a boy.
"You saved me." He said it like it meant more than it should.
"You marked me once," I said, more to myself than him.
He studied my hand. "I only told you to run."
"Then why—" I started.
"Because I don't want you to disappear." Nolan's voice turned almost shy. "Because the smell of your blood makes me quiet."
I tried to hate him for the thing he admitted. I could not.
— — —
The pirates came the way thunderstorms do—without asking. They tore the town, shots cutting the sky into ragged breath. People ran. The elder women sobbed. Houses fell like old teeth.
"Stay hidden," Colton told me.
"No," I said. "I will help."
"You will not."
But the town did not listen. People fought. Colton crouched in ruins and kept his rifle level. Pavel cussed and fired and did surprisingly well. I fed the hurt. I wrapped gauze on a man whose leg had been shattered. A child clung to me like I was real ground.
"Get to the ship when the fleet comes," Colton shouted. "Don't look back."
We did not know the fleet had already been called.
Screams, ships, the smell of ozone. Explosions, then—sudden—silver shapes cutting through the cloud. They came like gods.
The ship that answered the call had a blade-quiet precision. Its insignia was impossible to miss. I stood on the hill and watched metal fall from the sky like a promise.
"They're here," Aldo Newton said, his voice a tree trunk. He was a man of the Empire and he didn't smile.
I met him later when we were swept aboard.
"Stay with my men," he told Colton. "No one leaves this deck without orders."
"What about—" Colton began.
"Orders," Aldo said.
— — —
We sailed toward the capital with a hospital of people who had seen too much.
On the ship I saw Nolan again. He was not guarding me. He was walking the corridors like someone who had found a new hunger.
"You could have been dead," he said when he found me.
"I almost was," I said. "Thank you."
He shrugged. "You wear very tempting blood."
"Stop saying that," I snapped.
He grinned. "It's true."
— — —
We arrived at the Imperial compound where Aldo Newton had a friend, and we were folded into lives that had rooms with curtains and beds that didn't complain.
"Stay here," Aldo told us. "I'll find a place for you."
He found a home and a man to vouch, and suddenly I was a guest at Aldo's household—under the protective wings of Jagger Carter, a nervous boy with a smitten face, and the careful blessing of Aldo's wife.
"You'll go to school," Aldo declared. "Get an education. Learn the world."
"School?" I asked.
"Yes. You owe the Empire your presence."
I went to classes after a lifetime of surviving. I learned vocabulary like it was a weapon and how to make the right small bow. I learned quickly that being small and human in an ocean of beasts felt like walking on glass.
"Watch out for Kadence," Meredith Arnold whispered the first week.
"Who?"
"Kadence Durham. She runs gossip like a blade. If she hates you, the whole school thinks she has reason."
"Why would she hate me?"
"Because she loves Jagger, or she thinks she does," Meredith said.
Kadence found me in the cafeteria like a hunt that had grown bored and then interesting.
"You can't stand beside him," she hissed. "You can't be that near him."
"I barely know him."
"Don't play the part," Kadence snapped. She had a smile like broken glass. "If you want to be seen, go be seen somewhere else."
"Fine," I said. "I will."
— — —
The adult party—Jagger's coming-of-age—carried the city like a tide.
"You will come," Aldo said.
"I don't know if I should," I admitted.
"You will," Aldo said. "We owe appearances to those who gave us a roof."
I wore a dress that didn't feel like my skin but like a borrowed prayer. The light caught on the fabric. I heard footsteps and whispers like a chorus.
"She looks like a painting," someone said.
"Who is she?" another asked.
"She's Colton's find," Kadence whispered across a table. "She ruined what I had."
"You cannot ruin what was never yours," I wanted to say, but I smoothed my dress and went forward.
"Why did you come?" Jagger asked shy as a bird.
"Because you invited me." I smiled.
He was relieved, like someone who had not believed in luck before.
Then they arrived—Vivienne Farrell and her brother, Santiago Butler. Vivienne looked small and sick in a silk that didn't hide what was under the skin. She saw me and the world held a breath.
"She saved me," Vivienne said later in private, her voice like bell-strings breaking. "Not you, not anyone—her."
Santiago's eyes were stone and curiosity mixed. "Who are you?"
"I'm Kaya." I said it like it was the only truth I owned.
Santiago looked at me for a long time, and the air felt like river water.
"You are one to watch," he said finally. "Come upstairs. My sister wants to thank you properly."
— — —
Upstairs in a quiet room Vivienne coughed and then laughed. She had a fragile glow that did not lie.
"If not for you that day—" she started.
"You were brave," I said.
She looked at me, embarrassed to breathe. "You recognized something about me."
"I think I recognized a pattern," I said. "Your blood clogs. You cough often. There is something like a tide underneath."
Santiago's face changed when I described it. He paced like a man who had been turned inside out and found a loose thread.
"Have you any idea what this means?" he asked.
"I think you've been told it's a disease your house cannot treat. But I believe it's genetic vascular clotting—a reaction to something introduced into your line years ago. It can be managed if we change some things. Some medicines can ease the tide."
Santiago looked at me like a man seeing a map to home. "You might have just given us hope."
"Maybe." I didn't say what woke in me at that moment: the fear that they would want me for more than gratitude.
— — —
The night the truth exploded began with a whisper and ended with a cathedral of noise.
Kadence Durham had been angry for weeks. Her list of perceived slights grew like a weed. She had the reach of parents with influence and a mean streak sharpened on privilege.
Someone had left a bowl of mud and rotten scraps at my desk. Someone had posted lies about me. Pajamas had been cut. Notes pinned to lockers called me names that flamed like cheap paper.
"Enough," I told Colton that night.
"I will handle it," he said. Colton's hands had steadied to an iron calm.
What I did not realize was that Santiago Butler did not just listen to me. He had a plan.
On the night of the banquet, the hall was full of nobles and armor and wine. People laughed and pretended to be a civilization.
Santiago stood and raised his glass.
"Tonight," he said, "we celebrate youth and change. But before the toasts, I must speak of truth."
There was a tiny pause. "We have had an ugly string of crimes in our city—assaults, bribery, a smear campaign. Some believed they were private. They were public."
He clapped once. Screens in the hall flickered alive.
On the screens rolled footage: a dark alley, a man who puffed his chest and who had once told me his uncle was a chief, the same man who had tried to own women with his hands. His face went white on the screen as he watched himself.
"Who sent this?" Kadence shouted.
"It was recovered from the black market surveillance," Santiago said. "And from other sources." He looked over the room and found Aldo, and Aldo nodded.
"He's not the only one," Santiago continued, voice sharpening. "We have evidence of illegal trade. We have payment ledgers. We have recorded conversations. Any of you who colluded to attack innocents or to trade people as property will be revealed."
A hush dropped. It was the kind of silence that slept on a wire.
Then Santiago began to call names.
"Kadence Durham—your father funded a shipment of 'comfort girls' and the matter was hidden."
Kadence's face lost color. "That's not—"
"Not true?" Santiago said. "We have bank transfers. We have testimony."
A young noble at the other end of the room went white. He tried to stand, to argue, to pull the thread off the robe of accusation, but out of his throat came a sound like a child.
"It is a mistake," Kadence said, savoring the word like it might be a shield. "You're mistaken. There's confusion. This is political theater."
"Then explain the footage of you paying for a man to assault a stranger, and then laughing about it," Santiago said, and the screen showed a candid camera of a man lighting a cigarette and counting coins. The man had been certain he could not be touched.
He wasn't the only one. Names fell like dominos.
Pavel whispered, "You've got to be kidding."
"No," Santiago said. "We are not kidding."
There was a murmur. Someone in the gallery clicked a phone and the feed was sent to a hundred thousand people in seconds. Phones flashed like little candles. People recorded. People shouted. People turned toward the accused with the hunger of a verdict already forming.
The accused man—he had once swaggered over me in a back alley and told me how untouchable he was—stood. He looked at the faces now filling with accusation and fury as if looking at shutters being slammed shut.
"This is slander!" he screamed at first. "I have an uncle in—"
"Silence," Santiago said.
"You're lying. You're liars!" the man said. His voice was high and thin now. The bravado had slipped off like an old coat.
"What will you do now?" someone in the crowd asked.
He tried to laugh, but it came out like a croak. "You cannot prove this!"
"We have witnesses," Colton answered from the crowd. "We have logbooks. We have the men who took the coin."
"You're just jealous," Kadence yelled, but the room no longer listened to her.
"I'm sorry," the man said suddenly. "I'm—I'm sorry."
The first stage of his pride had always been its fullness. On the screen, his face was still, then a strip of red crawled up his throat, his jaw clenched. He had turned from a man whose uncle made him unpunishable to a man with no anchor in the noise. He reached for his collar like someone searching for air.
"You're a coward," someone spat.
He laughed, then the laughter broke inside him. "No—it's not like that, I didn't—"
Santiago moved closer. He didn't touch the man; he simply let the man's words hang. "You took advantage of helpless women. You threatened families. You thought being born near a name protected you. That stops today."
He lifted his hand. "Security—remove him."
Two men in black stepped forward. The man tried to pull back. People began to whisper, and then phones rose. Someone recorded the moment he was made to kneel.
"Beg," a woman cried from the crowd. "Beg for what you've taken."
He was on the floor, knees scraping the marble. His shirt was shredded, and the splatter of red he had bled earlier was now only a memory. He reached out and grabbed for sympathy with a shaking hand.
"Please," he pleaded. "Please—my uncle—"
The crowd was not kinder than the law. "Kneel," they chanted, and the recording phones multiplied. "Confess."
He did not know the words to make it stop. His pride had to go first. He reached for the rim of the table to pull himself up and fell again.
"Forgive me," he screamed, but the scream sounded like a child asking for something it had no right to.
"That's it," someone near the front said. "Turn him over."
They paraded the ledgers, the files, the messages. People took pictures of his shaking hands. A dozen people recorded him on their devices as he slid into panic. He begged for grace. He begged for an easier ruin. He begged for his uncle's name to dissolve the torrent of shame.
But the crowd did not stop. They clapped when the tribunal read the charges aloud. They clapped when the recorded transactions were shown. They clapped when the cameras caught the faces of those who had been hurt and heard their testimonies.
"You're the kind of man who thinks the law is for someone else," a woman in the crowd said. "See how it feels to be open."
He collapsed into the floor and stuttered apologies until his voice was hoarse. His posture changed—arrogance crumbling into pleading—then to quiet, hollow begging. Someone took a picture of him kneeling. It spread across the net in minutes.
When the Empire's adjudicators took him away, they did it under the theater of the crowd. The scene was long enough to be remembered.
I watched it all, my heart banging.
"You did right," Santiago said to me later, only the two of us behind wide doors. "This society eats the weak. Sometimes we have to show the strong they can be eaten."
"You proved them wrong," I said.
"No," he said simply. "You proved them true."
— — —
After the public humiliation, the town breathed differently.
Kadence's influence was trimmed. The men who had thought themselves unpunishable found themselves in small cages of papers and charges.
As for me, nothing changed overnight. My blood still tasted like a map to some people. The wolves still smelled me.
Nolan and I kept our odd truce. He came by the hidden room he showed me under the desert cliffs and left little things: a book, a bandage, a small carved wolf. He said nothing more frightening than, "Stay."
We had small happinesses. The robot named "Molly"—a gift—spilled compliments like a toddler. I learned how to sleep without listening for strangers.
Vivienne's cough eased. Santiago found a doctor who changed the right mixes and made the flow of her blood gentler. She smiled at me once, and I felt like I had paid something forward.
Jagger came by sometimes and brought awkward gifts. He asked me out like a boy asking permission from his own beating heart. I told him I couldn't answer now, and he listened. He learned the shape of patience.
Colton never stopped being my rude harbor. He told me to be careful, then offered me a shotgun when we thought the pirates might come back.
And Nolan? He still smelled my skin in the dark sometimes and growled softly at anyone who leaned too close.
Once, late in the hideout with the soft lamps humming, he looked at me and said, "There will be those who want to brand you as a prize. There will be those who will tell you you are a future for their lines."
"I know."
"And you'll run."
"I might."
He reached out and put a hand against mine. "Then don't run alone."
I squeezed back.
— — —
Months later, at a small market, a child asked me if I was from old Earth because my skin didn't show the same patina as the rest.
"No," I said. "I'm from a place that taught me how to be small and survive."
The child smiled. "You look like a story."
"And you look like the beginning of one," I told him.
When the sun dropped behind the city and the robots hummed their night lullaby, Nolan walked with me on the rooftop.
"Do you ever want to go back?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, watching the light burn out. "But not until I know who I am here."
He nudged my shoulder. "Then be here. Teach them."
"Teach them what?"
"To look. To see a person, not a trophy."
"I'll try."
He offered his arm. "Then hold on."
I did.
And when the skyline dipped into dark, I listened—not for holes in the sky but for the soft, sure steps beside me.
The End
— Thank you for reading —