chapter eighteen

“How long has it been?”

“Forever. At least. Just under 30 years.”

He tried to keep his face blank. “You still remember what you saw?”

“See-” she said. Clearly. But the word registered to him as impassive. He felt his jaw tighten but had no idea what in that one word had triggered his defenses. He tried to shrug it off. And failed.

“What do you mean , see?” He asked evenly, almost glaring at her. The round wire-rimmed glasses he wore to shield his eyes in the sun quietly streaked themselves with darkness as if he were staring into it, not some chick he’d been put up to digging deeper into on behalf of someone else that he liked less and less after sitting in the company of who or what they apparently were into.

She was not ambivalent to the hostile arrogance housed in the feckless pissant feigning interest before her, prodding her for intel he wasn’t yet wired to even understand. She was an Aware. In every sense of the word.

“Still going on. Time is bullshit. Never stops.”

“What never stops?” He pressed.

She sighed. The ashen color of his aura made the lenses he wore over his dead eyes opaque, as chalky as the worldview he peered out into her from.

The brightest bits of him were visually on par with the uneven mortar that’d been perpetually frozen as it had seeped out of the bricked in wall behind him to Awares like her.

He glared at the noncommital sound as if the light she defiantly refused to hide was the abomination people like him had been raised to think ones like her were, to make peace with the stuntedness they’d required of one another collectively. 

“All of it. None of it. Nothing. Ever. Stops. Nothing but… just …swerve. It is. It never stops,” she paused. “Humans lie to themselves with every breath, publicly pretend they think that it does-”

He snorted softly and tossed his glasses down on the table in frustration. “You’re talking in riddles-” he sighed, exasperated.

“There is not one syllable I have just uttered that was riddled with anything but blunt truth-” she muttered.

She knew he was there to gauge her and she knew on behalf of whom. He didn’t get that she was there to size up said ‘whom’ by peering into the silent atrocities humming out of the soul of who ‘Whom’ had sent with every put-upon, beleaguered breath.

“So you’re trying to tell me you meant exactly what you just fucking said.”he snapped, unintentionally aggravated.

“I am not trying to tell you anything, guy.”

“That’s fucking obvious-” he muttered.

He pinched the bridge of his nose and stared off into space bewildered, hoping his eyes would dance across something in the courtyard of the cafe as he steadied himself, anything that would make talking with her not feel like Hell on Earth since he’d taken it upon himself to do so. 

Nothing saved him. Nothing could tear his eyes away from what he blamed her for him seeing. He knew that trying to antagonize one of these fucking Awares was even more dangerous than dealing with hopped up Latents after they’d crossed and come back, cut off.

He loathed them all. They were the shit on a Sunday best-dressed shoe of society that ruined everything for adaptable folks like him, according to people like him. Adaptives, willing to do whatever to maintain the status quo except question it. Awares like her? They could go along to get along, just didn’t. And were hated for it.

Them and their fucking truth, something faint echoed around his clouded by judgment mind.

He was forcing his eyes to hook into her superciliously so as not to see everything else keyed to what she had been talking about prior to this tension that began unlocking doors he’d never even bothered to notice around himself.

“ So… you came back?” he condescendingly pressed as he picked up his glasses and slid them back on.

“Yeah.” she muttered. 

He tilted his head as the angle to win a war he was sure he was in -just by wasting time across the table from her- came to him, then tried to cloak it with put upon, captious composure.

“…Have you tried it again?” he chuckled disrespectfully. He laid on a cloyingly sweet smile like the backhandedness would land anywhere near her coming from him.

She raised a brow and let the enigmatic, sardonic smile that did not reach her cheeks pulse out of her eyes instead and poke him in his. He hissed and turned away sharply.

“Tried no. Done? Yeah.”

His eyes bulged out . She actually admitted it? They know that’s punishable by – echoed around his head skittishly.

He turned back towards her, laid bare. “And you’ve seen the… same-place?” he asked tentatively.

“No. You come back wherever you are. & places where you… turn on instinct, where you hadn’t before…due to whatever you’ve truly learned, back, at it again …it rings out when-”

“What rings out?” he interjected. Crows lazily cawed from the pine trees on the far side of the wall that hemmed the courtyard in, waiting for rats to flee the ships restaurants with in-out sections like this always were to them.

She absently waved her hand around her. “ It. When you get through what once felled you, or…failed you… whatever, tomato-tomato- It’s like making it through a… circle of-”

He looked up at the crisp, sane, known to be evermore sky that suddenly seemed secured by nothing more than a fraying string up above him, one primed to come crashing down around the cakewalk he’d perceived interacting with this One for them would be.

He’d known she’d hate to eat outside, theoretically. They all did, supposedly. It was one of the reasons he’d picked this place, at this time, knowing it’d be packed and they’d be relegated to Outside. Thought the sensitivities the one who’d sent him in had once spoken on would make her more vulnerable too. Susceptible. Easier to pop.

The exact opposite had become the case. It was him who squirmed in front of his good old-fashioned apple pie and ornate hazelnut latte. He’d slumped like the ridiculous amount of whipped cream atop his drink as it had grown cold. She’d sat like a lipid pool of darkly shimmering light that reflected out into the admittedly pristine space just like the surface of the gen mai cha she’d gotten for herself before he’d arrived.

The pauses in their conversation had been perfectly punctuated by the black server with the shock of blond hair sliding in and out of their lines of sight, replenishing her concrete colored cup whose exterior was streaked with what looked like clouds drawn with a finger-full of soot, from an iron pot coated with what looked like scarification across the skin of natives who no longer existed due to folks just like him.

The precision with which she spoke terrified him and made him wish for the vapid chattering of hollow, boozed up girls out to lunch with frenemies to feel better about whatever was wrong within their own lives they were otherwise refusing to face, decidedly indoors instead.

He caught a light breeze and sat there cold, clean as a whistling, achy bone, every aspect of him all but skinned before her. Only then did it dawn on him with horror.

He was not spying on her.

He was a sacrifice offered up to whatever the light was that beamed out of her, that he looked sickly in, even to himself. 

The pause in conversation as he was pounced on by his comprehension of the true state of affairs was jarring enough to summon the server back over to the bricked in alcove the two of them had been seated in front of by her request when the woman had migrated to the outer area prior to his arrival.

” Is everything good? …you guys okay?” the server sung out softly as she poured a glistening, metallic stream of liquid into the darkly clouded, pristinely shaped cup the woman always asked for when she thresholded there, unbeknownst to the pile of a person she’d ruthlessly disintegrated across from her.

He looked up out of what now churned in his head at the woman seated across from him. For the first time since this gauntlet he had brought upon himself had begun for him her gaze cut through the photochromic lenses perched on the tip of his rat-fink by default of genetics face and, devouring everything spilling from his eyes against his will, she actually smiled. Crows cawed overhead.

“HE…” she chuckled as she sized him up, “I mean We…we’re fine.” she assured her.

The server looked at him with enough concern to snap him out of the freewill he was obviously in for her to fully register as being present. She paused just long enough for the platinum tipped curls at the shaped point of her faux hawk to undulate awkwardly in the atmosphere long enough for what was left of the newly unleveled pre-Latent to latch onto it and be pulled to and discarded on the shore as she ambled away. 

Shoulders hunched, his eyes clawed back to the woman who’d been written off as his mark that he was now psychologically sprawled like clean meat before. He couldn’t look away from her, unsure if he was milk or a meal, a pittance tossed into a prayer fountain or some sort of grand, defacto indulgence, presented to her to wipe out some transgression he couldn’t yet comprehend. 

“Am I…” he stammered, “Am I-I…in Heaven or Hell?” he whispered woodenly, “According to all of this,” he added as the scant remains of the last life he’d had looked to latch onto anything to survive, even the godawful truth.

“Only you know the answer to that.” she stated with full authority.
He momentarily clawed at his own head, smacked himself in the face to snap out of what he’d unwittingly snapped into, then effectively gave up and gave himself over to it. Sprung.

“…What about you?” he whispered, spooked.

“Depends on the-”

“..day?” he interrrupted skittishly, thinking he had finally gotten it.

“Thought.” she said absently. “Or emotion. Depends on which makes it to the frontline fully formed, first.”

“What about-what we came here to speak- met here to talk about- where are the kids?”

“In the fields?” she clarified his query, just in case. Knowing the wobble on him was more real than anything he’d experienced up until that point, and utterly refusing to shove him down paths he hadn’t arrogantly asked for one way, or another.

He hesitated, then nodded. “ Are they Dead, or Alive?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you fn- For “ He threw his hands up at what was left of the sky that had just mercilessly cracked open his head.

“Nevermind them right now,” she growled, impatient with all of this back and forth out of nowhere. “Why are you… here, now?” she asked as the last thing tethering him to his so-called life snapped and he blacked out.