Cohost writing prompt: @spy-thief-assassin-who — Bounty Hunter who likes letting you negotiate your way out of it
Shiloh piles to a stop halfway across the room, boots skittering on the tiled floor, nearly dropping her empty pistol in the dark. In the gaping back doorway of the abandoned building, a pair of eyes shimmer with the dull low-light rainbow discs of manufactured retinas. Too low, wrongly spaced; not an augmented human. Not even a homunculoid, someone synthetic she can reason with, try to hack, or even surrender to.
Heaving for breath, and trying now to do it quietly, she stares at the doorway, slowly resolving the neatly sitting silhouette of a multirole synthetic co-unit. A hyenoid.
"Fuuuuuuuuck," she breathes, not even for the animoid itself. It'll sit there and guard the doorway all night, perfectly patient, if it doesn't get orders to more actively go for her. No; she knows who-all out here has a hyenoid.
Somewhere in the front of the building, a boot crunches fearlessly over ceramic shards.
"Hey," Shiloh says, coming out strangled and pitched wrong. "Hey! Don't come closer, I've got a shotgun!" and it's technically true, she does have a shotgun. Strapped to her back, even. If she'd expected a search-and-apprehend ticket to land with her name on it — like, ever — she might have diverted some cash from frivolities like 'eating' into actually having shells for it.
Out front somewhere, Megger laughs like a waterfall. "You gonna shoot me, Shiloh?" she calls back, voice muffled from rooms away and echoing off their empty walls.
"I don't wanna shoot you!"
"I bet you don't," Megger says, quieter, taunting. Her feet crunch over rubble some more, then stop crunching. Maybe she's stopped moving. Maybe she hasn't.
Shiloh briefly considers trying the window. The hyenoid turns its head to watch her, yawns. She reconsiders.
"I think we have a stalemate here, Megger!" she yells towards the door.
"Do we?" Megger calls back. Definitely closer. She sounds relaxed. Confident.
"If you wanted to take me in dead, your animoid woulda bitten my legs off by now!"
"Oh, well I guess, then," Megger says. "Guess we're stood off by your willingness and ability to shoot me."
"That's fuckin' right!"
"Guess we're stuck."
"Fuckin' right!"
"Shit, guess I'm not taking you in alive, then," Megger says.
"Fuck fuck fuck," Shiloh chants to herself, "Wait!"
There's a long pause, in which the hyenoid yawns again, noisily, teeth gleaming in what little light there is.
"Are we negotiating, Shiloh," Megger says, taunting, amused. Predatory.
"Fuck," Shiloh mutters, squeezing her eyes shut. Thinks about that time they'd picked up a ticket together, because Shiloh needed to get a foot in the door and Megger needed a dumb warm body to hold a gun on one more escape route than she and the hyenoid could cover by themselves. How the target had made a break in Shiloh's direction, spraying rounds, and she'd chased him three blocks and tackled him to the ground because they got more for him without bullets in. And then she'd tried to talk Megger up to a bigger cut of the money, since she'd done more work than they'd agreed on.
"How about," Megger had said thoughtfully, "I punch you in the face for talking back. But I let you enjoy yourself on my strap, for working hard."
"That's not how negotiating works—" and Megger had punched her in the face, picked her up off the floor by the ponytail, bent her over Megger's motorbike, and, well.
Shiloh did her best not to do tickets with Megger again.
"My starting offer is: I have a ticket to take you in," Megger says.
"I'll shoot you!" Shiloh quietly starts to search her pockets. C'mon. C'mon, one last lousy overlooked round. A forgotten lucky bullet. Anything.
"I think you might be out, Shiloh," Megger says. "What else you got?"
"You already fuckin' know I can't buy you off," Shiloh says bitterly.
"No cash," Megger agrees. "Weak negotiating position, Shiloh."
She sounds like she's enjoying herself immensely.
"What." Shiloh clears her choked throat. "What's your opening offer not to turn me in for the ticket?"
Megger laughs. "Have you come round to my way of negotiating, Shiloh?" she says, low and cheery and very close outside the room.