Gilded Destiny

by Nola Sarina

Runaway Trainwreck

  Calli

  I ran from place to place. I made money how I could, no matter what that meant I had to do. Dizzy was my only priority, and I worked long, grotesque nights to afford the childcare I found in each town. I was a nomad, a gypsy, travelling and hiding from something so dark no one dared to ask why I came with no history. All they saw was a broken woman with a baby in her arms, and they didn’t bother to pry.

  Every night, the shadows felt too cold, and I only managed a month in each place before fear of being caught by them overtook my will to stay, to provide security for Dizzy… so I left.

  She grew beautifully and called me Mama when she started to speak. I didn’t correct her. She didn’t need to know the truth: that her Mama was dead because of me. And Dizzy was the only one I allowed to see my tattoos, and she learned all the names of the colors by lying with me in the mornings - after I relieved whatever babysitter I employed - pointing to the flowers, naming them. College-aged girls were good sitters, I quickly learned, and they looked after Dizzy for cheap wherever I went… so I worked, and I was her Mama.

  I only let her go outside if the sun was bright and shining.

  I stared at myself in the mirror one night before hitting the town and the corners I worked. Stress and age drew my face taut, accentuating my scar and sharpening the angles of my bony figure. Dizzy was healthy, neither too plump nor thin, but I was wasting away.

  One night, a John I entertained three times a week in the town of Spokane, Washington, where I’d lived for five weeks, took a phone call as I put my clothes back on. He was a decent John, a generous payer and not on the violent side, compared to some of my other regulars. He chattered in Japanese, and I tried to ignore the gun inside his coat as he swung it over his shoulders. And then, mixed into the language I didn’t understand, I heard the word.

  “Vespers.”

  I grabbed him hard and jerked him to face me, and he startled and pulled out of my grasp… but as he stared at the terror in my eyes, he dismissed the caller on his phone and put it away. He sat me down on the bed and asked me what I knew.

  I told him I wouldn’t answer him unless he gave me a promise to help find my daughter a safe place to live… because the Vespers were coming for me.

  The offer perked excitement in his chocolate eyes, and he agreed. For whatever reason – the overwhelm of lurking at night while carrying the weight of such secrets or the craze of being alone for so long, or perhaps by some fucked up plan of the bitches of fate, I told him everything.

  Everything. Right down to the night when Levi left Dizzy alive and dismissed me to run, until we should meet again.

  The John listened closely, and then he made another phone call. He wouldn’t tell me much about his organization… just that they had skilled warriors seeking the Vespers for reasons he couldn’t disclose. He said he had a place that was safe from them… completely safe. A boarding school of sorts, with a focus on martial arts and business education.

  They were called the Shinobi, and they had been the sworn enemy of the Vespers for hundreds of years. Their safe place was a guarantee, because they knew what to watch for in darkness.

  But I knew no place with me in it would be safe from the Vespers.

  I asked him to take me to the place before I decided, and he agreed. The following night, he took me to a little house with four old women inside, all Japanese and all very sweet. They made me drink tea and called me too skinny, which was seriously true. He said Dizzy would live there until she was old enough to enter the formal martial arts school, but they’d be cautious not to introduce her before she could defend herself, since they didn’t have many girls.

  I woke Dizzy up with a smile the next morning, and she chattered on to me about the colors of an imaginary type of insect that was like a caterpillar with wings. I asked if she meant a butterfly, and she said no… this insect was a caterpillar that didn’t have to die before it learned to fly.

  The mind of a five-year-old child astounded me.

  When I kissed her goodbye and handed her off to Kado, the John that proved to be the only friend I had in the world, she cried and clung to me, and I hated myself for leaving her.

  But the shadows were growing colder every night, and I knew I was living on borrowed time.

  “You’ll be Desiree now,” I whispered into her soft, red hair. “Not Dizzy, anymore, because you’re a big girl.”

  Her screams tore me in half as Kado took her away.

  And then I started running, but no matter how fast you run, you can’t escape nightfall. The shadows were thick, icy, and liquid black along the train tracks when I was too exhausted to run any further. The train’s headlight blinded me as I faced my fate.

  I sure hope Levi remembers that he said he’d make it quick for me… and keeps his promise.