Cloak and Daggers

by Katerina Martinez

  “Wait, but I want your help. I… I don’t know what this is, but I feel like I’m supposed to know you, like I’m…”

  I didn’t know how to say what I felt, found myself wondering if I had the capacity to say what I felt. I’d never had to put into words the tremendous sense of longing I had started to feel in the pit of my stomach, the sadness, the sense of being incomplete. I wasn’t sure if the feelings were my own, or if this orb were imprinting its feelings on me, but they were there, and I couldn’t escape them, like a nightmare when you’re running down the corridor and it seems to stretch, and stretch, and the thing behind you keeps gaining, and gaining.

  “I need your help,” I said, “I need you to help me understand.”

  Since time began we have been helping your kind understand, the voice said, we are the watchers from the Tempest, keepers of the Precipice, Guardians of magic.

  “Guardians…” I said, “I know that word. Why do I know that word?”

  We gave you the gift of knowledge, we protected your souls, but you lied to us, and now you cage us, you use us—

  “No, I don’t—”

  You are not worthy of the gift of magic. You swim in the Tempest but do not understand or respect it—

  “But, I’m not—”

  Help us. Free us. Free us, Maxine Cartwright. It is your duty.

  The light around the orb shifted, and within its eye, I thought I saw a shape begin to manifest; an almost humanoid shape, with arms, a face, a body. More orbs of light swam into view, each of them falling in line beside the first, each of them looking at me, watching me, their nuclei changing and shifting to reveal… what? Their true forms… they’re showing me their true forms, and they’re terrifying, and beautiful to look at, but I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid because they’ve been calling to me.

  For days I had been prone to experiencing the beginnings of claustrophobia, panicking when I thought the walls were closing in on me, feeling my throat tighten and close to the size of a pinhole. This had never been something I had suffered throughout my lifetime, but standing here in front of this orb with a shadowy figure at its center staring at me, it all made sense.

  They were reaching out to me, and I was feeling what they were feeling. I had been feeling the tightness of this inner-space they were being kept in, I had been feeling the panic, the desire to get out, the desire, sometimes, to fly, and return to a place where I felt safe, or to a person I felt safe with…

  Jamie flashed into my mind, and the image was so powerful it sent me reeling, spinning, and falling to the floor. I tried to sit up, expecting to touch the mist I had been standing in, but touching the cold, metal floor instead. The mist was gone, the Guardians were gone, but the longing, the sadness, it was all still there, lodged inside of my heart like a splinter, or a bullet.

  “Woah,” Stanley said, his voice now not sounding distant or muted at all. “Are you okay?”

  He helped me get to my feet, but I didn’t want him touching me so I backed away in a hurry. Had that taken place in my mind?

  Stanley put his hands up. “You almost passed out,” he said, “I just wanted to help.”

  I stared at him, then at the luminous dome, and then at the clamps holding it in place. There were computers and consoles around the room, and more cables and wires than I could count. Help us, the Guardian had said. It wanted me to get them out, but I didn’t know where to start. Was I supposed to throw magic around the room until something broke? Was I supposed to cut into cables until the power flowing to the dome ceased? Was there a button I could press—like an off switch?

  I doubted any one of those things would work, at least not quickly, and with Stanley around and security guards watching this feed, I would have guaranteed at least three casualties during my attempt, and I didn’t want blood on my—Isabella’s—hands. I was already a fugitive, and a terrorist; she wasn’t, and one day she would have to go back to her life.

  “Do you need me to get you some water?” Stanley asked.

  Jamie, I thought, I need Jamie. “No,” I said, “Can we just get out of here?”

  “Yeah, sure. Where do you want to go? My place?”

  I nodded. “Fine, let’s go back to your place.”

  “Perfect,” he said, stepping lightly around cables, “Let’s go, then.”

  “Hey, wait,” I said when he reached the door.

  He turned around. “Yeah?” he asked.

  I looked at the dome, then back at him. “You really have no idea what’s in there?”

  He shrugged. “Should I?”

  I shook my head. “I guess you’d know better than I would.”

  “Maybe… now, back to my place?”

  I walked out of the room, though I didn’t want to. I wanted to help the Guardians, only I didn’t know how I could have done it from here, right now. I hoped Jamie had been able to gather some information that would be of use, like a kill switch, or a ritual, or anything we could use to break the dome and free the entities trapped within.

  Longing and sadness sat heavy on my shoulders, but it wasn’t only sadness I felt for the Guardians. It became obvious to me why Stanley had no idea what the dome was about or what was in it. He was chipped. His magic, his senses, were all dulled. He didn’t know there were Guardians—Guardians of magic, creatures of legend—trapped only a few yards away from the place where he worked because he hadn’t been taught about them, and he clearly couldn’t sense them, which meant they probably couldn’t reach him.

  But they had reached out to me, and I had heard them, and I was going to get them out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I kept my eyes peeled for Jamie on the way out of the facility, but I couldn’t spot him. Maybe he was hiding, or maybe he had left the building before I got topside. I hoped for the latter. The idea that he might still be in the building wasn’t a good one. I needed to see him, and talk to him, and tell him what I had just seen and gone through. This was big. Planetary, big. Biblical.

  Luckily, the narrative that we were getting out of the facility to go back to Stanley’s place was encouragement enough for him to not dawdle in the control room talking to his buddies. I couldn’t remember how long it had taken for us to leave, my brain felt like it had been thrown into a washing machine and left to spin for three hours.

  Too much, too fast, too soon.

  I regained my ability to think around the time when I slammed the door to Stanley’s car shut. It was as if the sound itself had pulled me out of my dream and sent me reeling into my own body. Suddenly, I was completely aware of where I was. The lights in that big switchboard I called my mind were starting to switch on one by one, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. We were on the move, rolling along the streets of New Seattle… and Stanley’s hand was on my thigh.

  I stared at his hand as if it belonged to a leper, horrified that he had decided to touch me, then looked across the car at him. When he saw me looking, he turned his head and grinned as he slowly pushed his hand further up my thigh and deeper into the middle.

  One could have forgiven what had happened at his place of work; so they brought girls over there to have sex sometimes, whatever. The girls knew what they were getting into, at least I hoped they did. Did that make Stanley a bad person? No, not really. Was putting is hand on my thigh a creep move? Totally. Was he going to get his nose broken for it?

  That all hinged on his next move.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “What?” he asked, slowly inching his hand around my thigh and further into the center.

  My eyebrows arched up. “Get your hand off me,” I said.

  “C’mon, don’t you like it?”

  I grabbed his wrist lightning-quick, took hold of his two forefingers, and pulled them back so hard it made him squeal. “What do you think?” I asked.

  “No!” he yelled. The car swerved as he struggled to take hold of it with only one hand while also trying to manage the pain. “No, you don’t like it!�
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  “So, are you going to try that again?”

  “No! I swear, I won’t.”

  I released his fingers. I hadn’t broken them, but they’d feel sore for a while at least. “Stop the car.”

  “What? I need to get you home.”

  “I’ll walk. Stop the car.”

  “No way, I can’t leave you alone out here—we’re too far from the center of town.”

  I lowered my head. “Do you want me to break them this time?”

  Stanley pulled his hurt hand away, thought about it, and then slowed the car down. When it came to a halt, I was quick to undo the seatbelt and step outside. Stanley stayed for a while, waiting to see if I would change my mind, but I didn’t. I started to walk in one direction, and he drove off in the other without saying a word. Was he a good guy? A good guy may have tried to apologize for making me feel uncomfortable, but then again, I had used him to get a look at the facility powering the Angel Dome, hadn’t I?

  It suddenly hit me. In all the confusion, and the excitement, and the whirlwind of emotions I had been experiencing, I had almost forgotten what that facility was, and what those Guardians being trapped in that dome meant. They weren’t just prisoners, they were slaves. Somehow, the Faction had built a machine capable of capturing these ephemeral creatures and using their power to erect a magic shield around New Seattle.

  And they’d kept the shield up for hundreds of years, if the stories were to be believed.

  I suddenly felt even worse for these entities. My heart wrenched, tears stung my eyes for the second time tonight, and I felt like doubling over as if the thought had given me physical pain, but I held firm and kept walking. No need for anyone to see what I was going through, no want for anyone to ask me questions about whether I was okay, or if I needed help.

  A car then pulled up alongside me, and for a moment I thought it was Stanley looking to try again, or maybe actually apologize, but it wasn’t Stanley; it was Jamie. I couldn’t have gotten into that car fast enough. Jamie took one look at me, realized what was going on, and tried to reach for my shoulder with his hand. The moment his fingers touched me, I reached for his hand, took it, and held it to my face as I cried like I hadn’t ever cried before.

  He didn’t speak, he simply let me recover and compose myself. By the time I looked up, his disguise had fallen, and he was Jamie again, staring me from behind concerned, but comforting green eyes, made dark green in the dimness of his car. He tilted his head to the side and smoothed my hand with his thumb, then brushed his other hand against my cheek, tucking my hair behind my ear. I hadn’t noticed until I caught myself in the windshield’s reflection, but I looked like me again.

  “Max,” he finally said, breaking the delicate silence, “What happened?”

  I shook my head slowly and stared at my own reflection while the Guardian’s voice replayed in my head, accusing me of things I hadn’t done, of pain I hadn’t caused. What I had just experienced hadn’t been like a dream, though it had been dreamlike. I still remembered every word I had said, every word they had said. I remembered my own hurt, their hurt, their rage, but also their desire to be freed. That, above all else, was what had caught my heart in a vice-grip.

  “Have you ever…” I started to say, but the words refused to come. I could do little else but stare at my own reflection in the car windshield, searching my own eyes for something that wasn’t there.

  “Have I ever what?” Jamie asked, after a pause. “Max, talk to me. What happened to you?”

  His words shook my mind out of the trance long enough to enable me to look at him, and doing so gave me even more control over my emotions, my thoughts. I took a deep breath. “I know what’s powering the Angel Dome. I’ve seen them with my own eyes. I’ve spoken to them.”

  “Spoken… to what?”

  “Guardians.”

  “You spoke to… Guardians?”

  “I didn’t just speak to them; I was with them, inside of this machine, this thing that is keeping them trapped and using their energy somehow.”

  “But that’s, how is that even possible?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know, Jamie, I have no idea. But that’s what I saw, that’s what happened to me. You believe me, don’t you?”

  Jamie fell silent, but he nodded. “I do. This is… insane… but I believe you.”

  “I didn’t know what to do… fuck, I’m still shaking. What do I do—”

  “First you need to—”

  “What do I do? They want to get out, they’re prisoners. Slaves. They have been for hundreds of years—”

  “Max, just try to—”

  “They reached out to me, for days they’ve been reaching out to me. I don’t know why, maybe it’s—”

  “Max!”

  I had been talking not over him, but past him, as if he hadn’t been present and speaking himself, but the way he rose his voice just then made me stop and listen. My head felt like it was swimming, my hands were shaking, fingers trembling. I curled one hand into a first to try and stop the shakes from coming. It helped, but only slightly.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said. He was staring at me, one of his hands I still held tightly, the other he had placed on my shoulder as if to keep me from floating away. “We’ll figure this out, okay Max? We always do.”

  “This is bigger than anything we’ve ever done, Jamie. Bigger than you, me, than all of us.”

  “I know… the first thing we have to do is get out of the city. We don’t want to get caught out here, not while we’re… like this.”

  A deep, heavy pause filled the car, one in which Jamie and I simply looked at each other, eyes locked. I tried to see him, to see into his eyes, but all I saw were the lights, the Guardians. His eyes were the dome, and the orbs were floating within them, dancing, flitting this way and that, radiating light from behind his eyes, and in that moment, I envied him, because at least in this strange half-fantasy, the Guardians were with him, in him, and they weren’t in me.

  “Have you ever suddenly realized you were... incomplete?” I asked.

  “Incomplete? What do you mean?”

  “Something’s missing. I didn’t know until I walked into that room, but something’s missing from my life, this vital, necessary thing. I can’t shake that feeling. I’m kinda glad I’m feeling it for the both of us. I wouldn’t want you to have to go through this too. I feel like a wreck.”

  I laughed, and a tear spilled down my cheek. Jamie was quick to brush it off my face with by placing his hand against my cheek and using his thumb to wipe the tear away, only he continued to move his thumb back and forth when the tear was gone. I swallowed as a familiar, yet unfamiliar warmth began to fill my stomach. I remembered feeling like this when Jamie and I were in the hall earlier in the day, but we had been interrupted, and nothing had happened.

  But there was nobody to interrupt us now, and when the warmth in my stomach surged upwards, I couldn’t contain myself. Knowing full well how complicated everything might get following the decision I had just made, I reached for his face anyway, cupped his jaw, and kissed him, breathing deep against the kiss. Jamie brushed his hand across my cheek and into my hair, holding the back of my head as our lips met and danced.

  The kiss broke, and I pulled away, but Jamie chased me and took from my lips again, igniting a fire inside of me, one that hadn’t been lit in more years than I cared to admit. When, naturally, the moment passed, I found myself buried into Jamie’s shoulder, breathing in the scent of his neck and allowing myself a second to rest, to recover. Not from the kiss, but from everything else that had happened today.

  It was as if this had been a sobering moment, a chance to breathe and reassess the situation, and as much as it had probably just complicated everything about our lives, I didn’t have a single regret. I could only hope, as I sat there, twisted in the car, with Jamie’s arms wrapped around me, that he also held no regrets.

  I pulled back and let
myself sit more comfortably into my seat, not sure whether to look at him or look away. My heart was thumping, my hands still shaking, only now they were shaking for a different reason, a better reason, and ultimately a good one, I hoped, as I carefully glanced over across the cab.

  Jamie was staring out into the road. The first signs of rain had started to fall on the windshield. A car hissed past, its lights growing, then disappearing. My heart started to tighten as the silent seconds passed, but then Jamie… smiled, and that smiled turned into an almost chuckle. He turned to look at me, still smiling, mossy green eyes sparkling despite the dimness.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Nothing… I’ve just… wanted to do that for a long time.”

  He started the car and we pulled out and into the street. I let myself sink into the seat, holding onto my back-flipping stomach and trying to contain the smile. That moment had, at least for now, put me back together, had shaken me back into the moment, and this was where I needed to be. I needed to figure out a plan, a plan on how to get the Order of Prometheus out of New Seattle, while at the same time freeing the Guardians in a way that wouldn’t doom the inhabitants of the city.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “I have a plan,” I said to the crowd gathered around me.

  Jamie, Abel, Spider and Charles, had assembled in Charles’ office at my request in the middle of the night, as soon as Jamie and I had returned form the city. Neither Jamie nor I had said much on the ride back to the underground facility, but we hadn’t had to, not after that kiss. Something had passed between us then, and the silence that had followed seemed almost necessary, but also comfortable, and serene.

  The calm before the inevitable storm.

  “Couldn’t it have waited until morning?” Abel asked.

  “No, it couldn’t have. Jamie and I have… found something.”

  “Found something?” Charles asked, “In the middle of the night?”