Space Ace Kimberly: Defying Borf by Jade Gretz

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Space Ace Kimberly: Defying Borf ANIMATION

Orpheus Circuit

They called the derelict a salvage bazaar, but Kimberley knew names were how people lied to themselves. The platform had been a gaslit promise two decades prior — a ring of shops and arcades strung along an old orbital tether — and now it hung in the dark like a tooth pulled from the sky. Neon veins still pulsed through its ribs, and the vendors of luxury and vice had braided their wares into galleries of shadow. Borf’s emblem, a clenched gauntlet in black chrome, glinted in three separate shutters. That was the orchestra Kimberley had come to conduct.

She wore a suit that shimmered with honeyed iridescence, not because she fancied it but because light could betray a woman who preferred the dark. Undercover, her voice could be a razor or a velvet rope, and she had practiced both in half a dozen languages. Tonight she would be both: a smuggled starlet, a whisper, a blade tucked into satin.

The informant was late. The platform smelled of ozone and cinnamon, of solder and sugar — the scent of the lives people tried to sweeten into meaning. Kimberley eased herself into a booth at the "Lullaby Arcade." The machines blinked like skulls playing peekaboo. In the mirror behind the cabinet, her reflection rehearsed smiles that never happened.

"You're early," said a man with a collar of polished bone. He wore a vendor's badge that read MARZ in brass, and where his eyes should have been there were two thin slits of glass which reflected only her lips. He might have been Borf-affiliated, might have been a thief, might have been a man who liked to be called Marz. Kimberley liked distinguishable traits. They made people easier to read.

"I like to make good impressions," she answered, and let the words stretch like a cat.

He slid into the booth with the languid grace of someone who'd been paid to be charming before he learned to be cruel. "You don't look like anyone from the outer rings. Which means either you're lost, or you've got money."

"I can be both," she said. "Name's Kimberley. I sing, collect curios, and have a soft spot for hazardous liaisons."

Marz laughed in a sound that clicked like a typewriter. "We all do," he said. "What brings a starlet to the Orpheus Circuit? Borf pays well for beautiful trouble."

There it was: the name she sought, spoken like an invocation. Kimberley folded her hands to hide the tremor she refused to feel. "I like high-risk investments."

He considered her as if tasting for counterfeit sugar. "Borf's operations run deeper than smuggling and simulated sanctuaries," Marz said. "There are chambers below the tether. Labs. Whisper-halls where they stitch junk into gods and gods into weapons. People go to Borf for what they can't get anywhere else — commodities of personhood."

"Personhood?" Kimberley repeated, letting the word linger. In the hush around them, urchin children fed coins into a machine that spat out holographic dreams for a fraction of a morning’s wage.

"Borrowed faces, rewritten memories, talent that wakes when you plug into their circuits," Marz said. "The kind of trade that doesn't clap for the word 'ethics.'"

"Sounds theatrical," Kimberley murmured. "But I like theater." The seduction in her voice wasn't purely flirtation; it was a map. She wanted Marz to think of her as an audience, not a threat.

He leaned forward. "What would it take for you to be introduced?" he asked.

She smiled with one corner of her mouth. "A favor rendered at the right altitude."

Marz's glass eyes reflected the arcade's blinking hearts. "You'd get an introduction to the Lower Array. You'd see Borf's labs. But be warned: once you know, you don't un-know. Some people call it work. Some people call it wrong. Borf calls it necessary."

Kimberley left the booth with a handshake that felt like a contract. She had work, yes — delicate work that required a knife-edge of appetite. She tasted the platform's air: electric and stale, as if time itself had been smoked. The Orpheus Circuit hummed with the lull of machinery and the furtive chatter of the criminally bored.

The entrance to Borf's enclave was a vault disguised as a theater ticket window. Kimberley bought the cheapest seat, because poverty could be a costume as well. The clerk — a woman with chrome fingertips and a laugh like a broken tuning fork — stamped her with a pattern of zeros and stars and slid her into a corridor that smelled of iron and laven
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