BROKEN RAIL CHARACTER INTRODUCTIONS - min-seo byeon ( the revenant )
At this angle, Irene can just barely make out the color and the sheen of the blade pressed against her throat. It is simple metal but wickedly thin and sharp. The Raildog symbol stares back at her, the symbol carved into the metal and painted over with black so that it stands out, flat and matte against silver. The body behind her shifts. “Min,” she says slowly, her heart sitting in her throat, wet and aching. There are two options. One is that she is talking to Min-seo Byeon, ex-Raildog who joined for just two years before everything fell apart, and the other is that she’s talking to Min’s murderer. Both are convenient for very different reasons. “I thought you were dead. All the reports said you were missing and we found all your stuff on that shithole planet --”
The knife moves just slightly away from her sweat-stained skin, barely a half a centimeter of distance.
Fingers press against the small of her back. Tapping. Irene holds her breath, trying to feel. Spelling, slow and tentative, long and short taps alternating in a familiar pattern. Irene. Then again, faster: Irene, more insistent. Min’s throat had been ruined on some job on Idero II, a planet improperly terraformed. The air there was half-toxic in some places and outright deadly in the rest, and a faulty oxygen line led to disaster - for a while, anyway. Then she adapted, like she always did.
“Yeah.” She closes her eyes against the dark. “What happened?”
Shot.
“Sure. Alright. We got that from all the bullet casings. Where?”
Head.
“That isn’t funny.”
A finger jabs her hard in the base of the spine, almost pushing her forward into the blade of the knife. Then the pressure eases and the tapping resumes, more centered at the middle of her back now. Like a joke, sort of, which is quintessentially Min. Not joking.
“Well, can you get the goddamned knife away from me? And tell me why you’re lurking around in a shed?”
The knife pulls back and Irene turns, slow, the drag of her soles kicking up loose dirt. Min-seo slides the blade back into its sheath along her thigh. She is dressed all in black, like she’s about to attend a funeral. And maybe that’s the point, knowing Min. She thinks about what she wars every time.
“Hell. Guess you can survive anything, can’t you?”
Asshole, Min signs, the motions half-obscured in the dark. Still, though, she smiles, her grin a little bit like a snarl. Missed you.
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