A Division of Souls - A Novel of the Mendaihu Universe
Page 11
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Caren finally reentered her apartment almost thirteen hours after she had last exited it. It was just past two in the afternoon, certainly not the first time she wandered home after a long shift with the sun shining high overhead. Such was the job of the ARU. She dropped her work duffel bag on the living room floor and groaned, every overtired muscle screaming for rest. And yet like damned clockwork, she couldn’t stop her brain from heading off in twenty different directions at once. Every time…every damned time she and Poe were roped into a particularly intense case. Her muscles ached, her eyes stung, and her brain was stuck in overdrive. It was going to take hours for her to fall asleep.
But she was home again, and that meant more to her than anything else. She closed her apartment door, locked it, and leaned heavily against it, exhaling deeply. She scanned the small front room, searching for an anchor to quiet this chaos in her head. This constant, unending buzz in her brain, more intense than ever, that would not go away without a fight. It never did. But she was home…it always calmed her, one way or another. She enjoyed the familiarity of her surroundings, yet she now felt alienated from her own belongings. They were like a lucid dream…distant, forgotten, yet she knew them to be hers.
And right now, she was too tired to fight it. She wouldn’t find peace here. Not yet.
She escaped the front room to her own cave, her bedroom. It was still pathetically, distressingly out of order, just as she’d left it. Madeleine, her elderly next door neighbor and an old family friend, had taken care of their apartment when needed, but the woman would always leave Caren's bedroom for her to clean up. She rarely had the time to do so, but his was actually a good thing, because this mess added to the familiarity she needed. This was the one room out of the billions of rooms in the Sprawl that was truly hers and hers alone.
Denni had taped a note on her bedroom door to say she was over at Madeleine’s and would let her sleep in. Caren felt a knot in her stomach…she felt guilty that she had missed tucking her in for the night. That she'd missed seeing her off to school. Seeing her coming home. Of all the things she hated about this job, this was the worst. If this case was as big as she feared, there was a good chance she wouldn’t be seeing her for days at a time. She stopped herself from getting angry, however…now was not the time. She was home and on familiar ground, and she desperately needed to sleep. Exhaling one last time, she got herself ready for bed. She’d have time enough for all that misplaced anger later.
Stepping back out of the bedroom moments later, she began her own post-work ritual with a series of long deep breaths and muscle stretches. She had freed herself from the uniform and pulled on a pair of overworn sweatpants, a stretched out and faded black tee shirt, and her hair draped loosely over her shoulders. Every hindrance, anything that held her back, had been willed away and disposed of. Her body and soul were free.
“…hra khera, hra mehra…” she whispered in the Anjshé tongue, breathing slowly and fully. “…hra khera, hra mehra…” To be here, to be at peace. She repeated the mantra slowly with every breath, in her ritual to relax. It took her several minutes before she felt the beginnings of an inner calm, when her muscles no longer twitched and her brain had stopped racing. She would ignore hints of anger and distraction, instead focusing on that calm she so briefly held moments before. It was a tough ritual, one of the hardest she had to perform on herself, but she would not give up.
That was her problem…her brain was always in overdrive. Always thinking, always plotting out scenarios in her mind. It made her the strong investigator that she was, but at the price of inner peace. This constant and directionless energy would plague her at the end of every shift. Her dreams were vivid, on the rare instances she had them, and her sleep was often short and restless. Some nights it would take her an hour to even attempt the first stages of sleep, and she’d often wake up multiple times throughout the night. Tonight would be no different, but she’d already accepted that.
Hra khera…hra mehra…
This was the only way she could reach her inner calm. The civilian Caren fought to surface, but Special Agent Johnson wouldn’t let her out so easily. She stood center in the room, legs akimbo and her hands gently reaching out to opposite walls, and closed her eyes. She visualized the stress and fatigue in her body and gathered it together, within her soul. The excess energy swelled within this space, and with a deep breath and a push, it began draining through her and out her limbs, pouring out of her hands and feet, away from her like rainwater.
Hra khera…hra mehra…
To be here.
To be at peace.
Denni.
Calm.
Finally, the tension inside her body began to melt away. Blood circulating evenly throughout her body now, energy balancing itself within her spirit. Every part of her being wound down, slowing down to a crawl, until everything within equaled all that was without. She pushed out a final deep breath, completed the ritual, and opened her eyes. Meekly, the civilian climbed out of her shell and assumed Caren’s person, felt it safe to be there, and let the last of the tense energy disappear.
She brought her hands slowly together, fingers entwined, her index fingers resting on her lips as she nodded. Smiling, she opened an eye and glanced at a framed picture hanging on the wall in front of her. Aram and Celine Johnson watched over her, handsome and regal in their Mendaihu uniforms, smiling back at her. This was the same picture she saw in her lumisha dea, the one over the mantel at her parents’ old house, but whenever she saw the real thing, it comforted her. She whispered a silent prayer to them, thinking of them fondly, and brought her hands back down. They had taught her that meditative technique when she was young, and it had never failed her. Satisfied, she turned to her living room sound system, and tapped a preset. Ancient Celtic rhythms filled the room with a soft, safe ambience.
She fell into the cocoon of the couch, and closed her eyes.
Safe…
The spinning in her head wound down to a stable balance. “…hra khera, hra mehra…” she whispered again. She closed her eyes, taking in slow rhythmic breaths, and before she sought to thank her parents again, she was asleep.