by Lou Paduano
“Greg,” Ruiz called to him. “What the…?”
“I’ll be across the street,” Loren answered, still moving for the door. He bumped into two of the patrons entering, backed out of their way, then held the door open to give instructions to his awestruck friend. “Call Pratchett. Tell him I need a map.”
The door closed behind Loren. Ruiz sat stunned, watching his dinner companion race across the street toward the alley. Loren never wavered, never looked back, ducking into the alley and out of sight. Ruiz did not move. He did not say a word, unable to think of one to say over what had just occurred. He simply stared at the full plate in front of him then back to the alleyway.
Sandy returned. He instinctively placed his hand over his beverage, not wanting a refill. When he looked, he realized what she actually wanted. The smiling young woman placed their check on the table, all of her teeth glittering as she spoke.
“Can I get you a box for that?”
Ruiz’s eyes fell to his plate, full of fries and the cooling slab of beef on a bun. The mouth to the alley was still empty with no sign of Loren coming back and the server was still standing beside his table waiting for a response. Only one came to mind.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
The C line was late. Rush hour traffic out of downtown Portents had come and gone with the haze of the afternoon sun. Few remained in the city, those who worked awkward hours or were held up at the office for last-minute requests from bosses who cared little for the hands on the clock. They were the remnants, scurrying to get home, away from the black tower that loomed over the city and cast a great shadow when the moon rose. Those who sat waiting impatiently at the station occupied their time with their handheld devices. Some cursed signal losses. Some cursed the person on the other end of the line from their call. All were oblivious to their neighbors, including the lone woman standing near the yellow line at the edge of the platform. Tears were gone but her eyes were reddened from the sadness that crept over her every inch. Soriya Greystone had seen better days.
Guilt and despair were no longer words to Soriya, but the only emotions left to her. Mentor was dead. Vlad was dead. Urg was dead. The killer remained on the loose, threatening her city, though why she still felt that connection she had no idea. The city had abandoned her, betrayed her for an old soul willing to murder to achieve his ends. What was the point of trying to protect it when it was too busy protecting him over her? She felt alone, truly alone for the first time since the young man with the thin gray eyes first sat down next to her in the tiny garden outside the orphanage. Loren had tried his best, she had no doubt. He wanted to talk, to help her out of the spiral she found herself caught in, but she refused. She pushed him away. She pushed the Eckharts away. No one chased after her. No one followed. She was alone, half by choice and half by circumstance. It was deserved either way.
She waited for the line to pass. Once the train was gone, she could return to the Bypass. The case lay ahead, unwilling to diminish in her thoughts despite the myriad distractions of the day. She needed time to grieve, to feel the loss that threatened to crash down on her at any moment. But the case remained. The clues spread before her like pieces of a puzzle, the signs remnants of lost languages, the trophies tools used for the final task, but what that was eluded her still. Everything eluded her. From the ambivalence rooted in each face she saw at the station to the leads left at each murder scene. She was no detective. She felt no connection. It was all slipping away and she was letting it. She needed Mentor. She needed to hear the words of her old friend and father while he tucked her into her bed as a child or chided her while taking down Anteros. She simply wanted to hear his voice, call to her through the darkness that seemed to surround her every move.
The photo rested in her hands. She wasn’t sure why she had taken it from Mentor’s wife and daughter. They had done nothing to deserve petty theft from her, especially after allowing her the use of their shower and a fresh set of clothes. Still, the look Mentor gave, standing before the university where he once held the title of professor, gave her a kind of comfort she could not live without. It was in the way his eyes welcomed her when she looked at them. The rose-tinted cheeks before he carried the scar than ran along to his left ear. Before the burden of the Greystone. It was in the warmth of his stance, proud and determined, as he had always been. He was everything she wasn’t, though she tried so hard to prove otherwise.
Eighteen years. They had been through so much, seen so many things. He showed her the wonders of the city and the nightmares that hid in the darkness of Portents. So many memories threatened to overcome her, waiting in the shadows of the platform.
In the small domicile of the Bypass chamber, five-year-old Soriya stood in awe before the mountainous bookshelves littered with texts. The girl’s auburn eyes were large, soaking in each spine and the letters they bore, though most of the words were beyond her. Mentor sat at the far end of the room, the proud parent. He found her this way daily, staring in silence at the world that surrounded them. Usually it was the Bypass where she kept her distance but never averted her gaze. More and more, it was the books. She recently discovered reading, something the orphanage attempted but kept a tight leash on rather than let the children decide what they might enjoy learning. Mentor made no boundaries; he simply waited patiently for his ward to make the first move.
One evening in the coolness of an autumn night, when the chamber turned frigid against the coming winter, she asked, “These are all yours?”
He let out a small chuckle at the question. She had been with him for weeks and seen no one else in the chamber, so the answer was obvious. Still, she asked and the question brought joy to his lips. Soriya saw thin lines running from his eyes toward his temples, but the smile made him younger by years. She wondered why the question was so entertaining, what it stirred in his memory, but she stood silent, waiting for his answer.
“They are,” he answered. Making his way to the bookshelves, he slowly retrieved a text from one of the top shelves and held it out to her. “Now they are also yours. Experience. Wisdom. Faith. All within these books.”
The cover was soft, its corners bent and torn from use. The title was in large letters, with small words that she knew but did not understand how they worked together. It read The Rights of Man. She clutched it tightly, afraid to let it fall in front of the man who had given it to her. She wanted it to be perfect. She quietly flipped through it, never reading it or skimming it, just taking in the moment of the gift. He knelt in front of her.
“Use these books, Soriya.” His voice was soft, his hand firm on her shoulder. “Listen to them, for they will not lead you astray.”
She nodded slowly, cautious about the book in her hands and the man before her.
“What is it, little one?” he asked at her quiet stare.
“Do you have any about dragons?”
His smile made her laugh.
A cry cut through the air of the platform. Soriya lost the sight of Mentor’s smile, longing for it to return, but the cry won out. It was high and shrill from the far end of the long station underneath Evans Avenue.
No one moved. No one made any gesture at all. One young man slipped his hand into his pocket and retrieved a set of headphones, which he promptly inserted in his ears to drone out the echoes of the single scream. It was not their concern. Soriya knew that better than most. She saw the way the people of the city turned their heads at the sight of crime, both human and otherwise. She saw it in their faces, the knowing act of their obliviousness.
Soriya acted alone. No matter the pain that shook her tired frame, no matter the guilt from her losses, action was all she had left. She started in a slow walk, slipping the photo of her fallen family into her pocket. The walk turned into a trot and then into a full run, down the platform when a second scream rang out. It sounded like a bell ringing, a bell she had not heard in a long time.
Mentor set up a classroom
in the corner of the Bypass chamber. Soriya asked about public school a few times in those early years. The classroom was Mentor’s solution to the question. He even set up a bell that rang when class began, usually with an eager young nine-year-old sitting at attention. There were no other desks set up besides her own. Mentor stood in front of the wall of the cavernous room, using colored chalk to illustrate his teachings on the wall. Books surrounded Soriya, none containing the dragons of her five-year-old dreams but those that held deeper meaning for the job she was eventually meant to inherit from the man who had adopted her. From the Torah to the King James Bible, from The Origin of the Species to The Great Gatsby, everything was discussed with Mentor; everything was analyzed in a larger scope without the threat of curriculums and standardized testing to gauge her knowledge base. It made the learning fun, making it that much easier to excel at retaining the information discussed.
“I don’t get it,” she said, stopping Mentor’s discussion. The quiet innocence of her youth was already fading behind the morbid curiosity of a teenager, almost as quickly as the brown of Mentor’s hair faded to white. “If God created free will, then why smack down the tower before—”
“Faith,” Mentor interjected. They had gone back and forth on the topic of Babel for hours. His voice bordered on irritated, but the thin smirk of contentment that kept her warm and safe in the confines of the Bypass chamber still shone brightly. “Faith is more than understanding something or someone. It is about belief. It is the ultimate tool. The ultimate weapon. One sect’s belief is another’s restriction. We need to know them all.”
“I would have rebuilt it,” Soriya answered defiantly, flipping the page in the book.
Mentor knelt beside her, turning the page back. “So would I.”
Soriya circled around the winding stairs that led to the streets and the waning hours of daylight. Mentor’s smile was caught in her vision and she almost raced past the voice that called to her at the far end of the platform.
A young woman, no older than her, was held tight at the forearm by a man twice her size. He sported a wide build, with short legs. His arms, uncovered by clothes or jacket, showed off his proud musculature. Tattoos lined his biceps with images of blood, tears, and broken women. His worldview was as much on display as his body. The man tore at her clothes, keeping her wrist bent back to keep her from running off.
Soriya did nothing but watch. This was the city she protected. These were the people she kept safe from the things they refused to believe, the shadows that circled them in their nightmares. Mentor was dead but the man with the tattooed muscles kept breathing. She wanted to walk away. She wanted to forget she heard the cry of the woman. She wanted to be alone, to let the city fall away when Mentor’s killer finally had his way with it. Wants were all she had left, but none of them ever mattered. Need won out more often than not and her need to pummel the brute before her was vital to her survival after the events of the last few days. Saving the girl was an added bonus to be sure, but blood on her knuckles gave her life the only meaning she ever knew.
Finally, the decision was made for her. The woman’s pleading eyes called to her and the man saw the look, and followed her gaze to Soriya. Her fists were clenched tighter than her jaw, her thumbnail digging into her ring finger. At first, he made no motion toward her, simply continuing to tear at the woman’s blouse. Her free hand clawed at him, but he swatted it away. His eyes flitted back to Soriya, who continued to stand there watching.
“Nothing to see here, lady,” he said through gritted teeth. They were chipped and yellow. “Unless you want what she does.”
“Help,” the girl cried out. In her eyes, Soriya saw the eyes of a child where there should have been the fire of a woman fending off an attack. In her heart, she saw herself without Mentor. Thinking of him brought it all back. She felt the stone on her hip and the ribbons wrapped down her left arm. She thought of a hundred scenarios, a thousand attacks, all ending the same way—with blood.
“You don’t need any help from what I can see,” the man taunted. The blouse pulled away under his tearing. The woman’s bra did its job to cover her but the view from above appealed greatly to the brute. His eyes were focused completely on the woman, on his prize, and not on the observer.
A hand reached out and grabbed his wrist. He spun his head, saw the flames burning in Soriya’s eyes, then heard the snap of his wrist breaking in a single motion.
His screams carried her back to a quieter time.
In Mentor’s small domicile, Soriya watched the aging man jotting notes on the large map tacked to the back wall of the room. A thin black circle surrounded the note, but she failed to make out what it said from the other side of the room. Mentor remained secretive about some of the work he did, leaving the twelve-year-old teen to imagine what occurred when he stepped out for the night. She did not mind the secrets, or the solitude that came with his absence, only the loneliness that tended to remain when he was around. She did her best to engage her wayward sponsor with questions and comments, hoping to draw him into conversation. Most ended with a muted grunt, while he dug through texts littered with images of creatures she only read about but knew he had seen roaming the streets of Portents.
On the table in the center of the room was a stone of grey. Mentor’s own. She always kept her own at her side in a small woven pouch she worked on when she was eight, which looped snugly on her belt. Its presence was always felt, a constant reminder of the work she would one day fulfill. Slowly, she removed the Greystone from its casing and placed it next to its twin. The air thickened around the two objects as if they were drawn to each other. Wonder sparked her eyes, small flickers of light dancing between them from opposite ends of the table.
“What are they? I mean, really? Can you tell me?” she asked, lost in the lights.
Mentor placed a small tack into the map, then turned to her. He lifted his stone and tucked it in his pocket, ending the dance. “Balance. Balance moves through us into the world. The Bypass is one half. The Greystone is the other. Balance is the key.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Have faith, little one. As I do in you,” Mentor smiled, rubbing his chin. “In time, the stone will be the one to tell you. If you will listen.”
“I’m ready to listen,” she begged, the high-pitched squeal of a teenager coming through more and more, despite that she tried to curb it.
“Not yet. Not until you learn,” Mentor replied, moving for the large cavern. She followed close behind after grabbing her Greystone and slipping it back into the pouch on her right hip.
“More books?” she asked, dismally. He smiled at the tone, understanding it completely. He continued to walk until he reached the stairs leading to the tunnels above.
“More than that.” Her eyes were wary at first. She had wanted to visit the city on many occasions but they were rare, only used when Mentor required her presence or knew he was going to be gone for long periods and needed a second pair of eyes to watch over her. Those were the times the Courtyard became her home, though she felt ill at ease with being surrounded by the wonders of her childhood imagination, especially without the comfort of the man who had become the only family she knew. Mentor stepped to the side of the entranceway, his hands ushering her onward to the stairs, welcoming her to the next step. When she looked to him, skeptically, he nodded. “The world lies before you, little one. Take it.”
Her laughter carried her up the stairs to the city above.
The man with the tattooed muscles screamed. His wrist wobbled on the single bone that still supported it. Soriya squeezed it tighter. His screams echoed louder than his victim’s but no one came. The C line arrived, drowning out much of the noise generated by the thuggish brute, not that Soriya cared. Her mind was decades away, her eyes empty to the world in front of her. Instinct and training were all that remained of her senses.
The woman, her own wrist free from the attack, gathered her torn blouse and covered her chest from vi
ew. She picked up her purse and her scattered belongings, looking for a way out. She wanted to leave, but Soriya blocked her freedom, forcing the young woman into the corner of the platform, cowering in the shadows. Had Soriya been in the moment, she would have opened up the way for her to run. In the back of her mind, she knew that was what she had intended to do. Save the girl, teach the man a lesson in pain, and go home. A simple night, one that she was fond of taking advantage of during her time in the city. This was different. There was no simple plan beyond the pain she wanted the man to feel. Her pain.
The man flailed, his free arm trying to connect with her. She danced around it, maintaining her grip on the wrist. She pinched his bloodied wrist tighter, causing more screams. Then as quickly as it began, it stopped. The man’s wrist slipped free. He was down on one knee when the pain suddenly ended. He curled the hand tight against his chest, cradling it. Her shadow loomed over him. His right fist, unbroken, balled up tight. He turned, winding up to strike.
“You crazy…” he started, struggling to face Soriya. Only, she wasn’t waiting for the rest. Her fist crashed down on his cheek when he turned, her dead eyes lost to the moment.
It was a moment she knew she wanted but did not understand why until it occurred. One of the rites of passage Mentor spoke about when she was a child, explaining that they were what defined their lives. She laughed, thinking a single moment was just that—an instant, never to have the impact he believed.
She was wrong.
Sitting on the cushioned bench, she suddenly understood everything Mentor had said to her over the years. It surrounded her world, changed it and twisted it so that it was perfect in every conceivable way. That was how Soriya felt about her first ice cream sundae.
The decision was a difficult one but the sundae was the right choice. It had everything in it. Peanuts, hot fudge, caramel sauce covering large scoops of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry ice cream. Mentor ordered a small custard, plain vanilla. Just the way he liked it. Simple. She couldn’t settle for simple. Not for her first. Not when she wasn’t sure it would be her last.
