by T. Rudacille
***
Even though it was highly unlikely that they had any devices in the room that could record and transmit our conversation, we spoke in hushed whispers, all the while using our enhanced hearing to pick up the sounds of footsteps in the hallway whenever there were any outside the barred door. We would hear someone walking by, and we would start speaking at a normal volume about something mundane, or I would start fake-sobbing (which would sometimes turn into real sobbing) and together, we would watch the shadows of the person’s (or people’s) feet to make sure that they did not stop in front of our door. The first time we performed this act, Dr. Miletus gestured for me to continue not-totally-fake sobbing even after their feet had passed our door; she was accounting for the length of the hallway and the sounds of my sobs being audible even at the end. If I had stopped right after or even soon after they had passed us, they would have gotten suspicious. It was not guaranteed that they would have even noticed, but Dr. Miletus was thinking through all the possibilities, even the most unlikely or ridiculous.
“It will have to be Caspar.” She said to me quietly as we sat on the bed, our eyes fixed on the door. “For want of a better word, he is quite infatuated with you.”
“That seems like a pretty good word.”
Well, I could think of worse ones. She could have said ‘fascinated,’ and then I would have thought that he viewed me as some sort of science experiment, or a strange creature in the zoo. She could have said ‘in love,’ and I would have cringed, because Nick was gone, and I loved him, and besides, given Caspar’s change of allegiance, I would never view him with anything other than complete loathing for the rest of my immortal life. I should have viewed him with such ire after what he had done to Dr. Miletus, and after he had led me down that dark path on which I almost lost any opportunity I had to achieve my dream of becoming a doctor. I had told Brynna that I would never write him off, because he couldn’t help what he was, but I was writing him off now. Maybe it was foolish, my earlier sympathy for him. Maybe it was stupid of me to take so long to write him off. But I had pitied him. He could not help it that he was born Dionysian, and had to hurt people and force them into hard bargains in order to survive. It wasn’t his fault that his father had disowned him based on what he was. But if I thought about his strained relationship with Adam, I would see that he had reason for his change of allegiance. His father had sent him away the second it became apparent that he would be a Dionysian. He had shipped him off to war, and he had hoped that Caspar would die. His own father had hoped he would die so that he, the King of Pangaea, would not have this dark stain on his family ledger. It was so sad to think about, and I wondered if the reason why Brynna had sympathized very slightly with him was because she had been written off the same way, and just as unfairly. I wondered if I sympathized with him because I had seen how my father’s exiling of Brynna from our family had affected her, and how once I had lost my father, too, how despite all common sense, it made me sad to know that we would never have anything close to the somewhat alright relationship we had once had, when we were still on Earth.
I had a bad habit of sympathizing with people who deserved no sympathy.
“It is not an accurate word, because it is deeper than an infatuation, Violet.” Dr. Miletus told me, “I can feel it in his heart, and if you allow yourself, you will feel it, too. Hopefully, what he feels for you will make him drop his guard, and he will share with you all we need to know.”
“Yes.”
There was an elephant in the room, to say the least. She did not want to address it, but she knew that she had to, because it was lodged firmly in her chest, causing her great discomfort. She was afraid to broach the subject, because she was afraid of offending me, because what if I had not thought of it? What if I was not even thinking along those lines? But she had a daughter my age, and she could not imagine her daughter being asked to do what she thought that I would have to do, and she looked at me maternally, however slightly, because I reminded her of her daughter, and she would never want me to have to sleep with him in order to gain his help.
“I am not going to do it. I can’t even fathom doing that, Dr. Miletus.” I said.
“Good.” She replied, and she did not seem shocked that I had read her thoughts, though I had not read her thoughts in the way that Brynna could read thoughts. I had just seen the discomfort in her heart and made an educated guess as to what was causing her to feel that way.
“I would not want you to do that, even if it meant we would gain the information we need in order to escape with our loved ones in tow. I am not willing to ask that of you, even if it would guarantee that I would see my wife and daughter again.”
“I’m so sorry about your husband, Dr. Miletus.”
She was silent, and out of respect, I did not look at her. Her eyes had remained set in stone, and her voice had remained level when she had told me. The only signs of her internal pain were that her voice was quieter than usual, and when I looked into her heart, I could see the pillars burning, walls crumbling, and all standing structures falling in on themselves. Her husband had been killed in front of their house as she tried to shuffle her daughter and very pregnant wife out of the back. There had been guards around the back of the house who caught them, and she and her husband had tried to kill them all as her wife and daughter hid back in the house, but as quick as we are, and as skilled as we fight, we are no match for a frightened sixteen-year-old Old Spirit, formerly of Earth, with a machine gun, firing wildly as his adult fighting companions are slaughtered around him by two of his “enemies.” Her husband had pushed her out of the way, behind their wood supply, and then dove over her, but he had been riddled by bullets and was dead before she could even look to see how many times he had been shot.
“The worst part of it is that I pity the young boy who killed him. I feel such sympathy for the child who murdered my husband of two hundred years.” She had laughed softly at that, absolutely bitterly. “It is unfair to both him and to me, that he was forced to rob this world of the great love of my life. Well, one of two of my great loves.”
“That’s all I keep thinking with Nick, too. The world has been robbed of him. It’s so unfair. Can I tell you something that nobody knows?”
“If you feel comfortable doing so, then yes.”
“Brynna killed Rene.”
I waited a moment, but her heart showed no shock, and she did not say anything. For a moment, I wondered if she was passing judgment on Brynna, but then, she smiled very slightly.
“I figured as much. I did not know why she would do it, but I could see the secret of it burrowed deeply in her heart.”
“He was obsessed with me, so she killed him. That’s what Brynna does. But Nick met her there, totally by accident. He was going there to kill him for me, because he said it was his job. And later, he told me that he was not a hero. He could never be a hero. He just wasn’t brave. It made me cry to hear him say that, and it made him cry, too. Because he was brave, Dr. Miletus. He just couldn’t kill. He was so good that he couldn’t go to a man’s house in the middle of the night and kill him, even if it was for me. I knew that, and I loved that about him. But he always said, ‘When I die, I am going to go out in a blaze of glory.’ He said he would leave this world with gusto and drama and chivalry and epic bravery. And he died on an operating table, screaming, and crying, enraged, and sad, and scared. It’s not your fault. I’m not saying it’s your fault. But it’s so unfair that he is gone, and that he died like that. He deserved so much better. He deserved his heroic, glorious death. It all would have come full-circle for him that way, and it didn’t happen. He just died.”
“It should have been like it would be in stories.”
“Exactly.”
“It should have been a beautiful death. God, Millen talked of it so often. And he did die heroically. He died shielding me, and protecting his daughter and wife and unborn baby. I suppose he would not have wanted to die any other way. But Nick died heroical
ly in his own way, Violet. He was fleeing with you, your friends, and your sister.”
“But he failed. We failed. And now Penny is out there all alone, or worse, she is gone. It might just be me now. And you still have your wife and your daughter, but you’re totally in charge now.”
“Yes. It is up to only me now to protect my family, a position into which I never wanted to be put, because I had grown to rely on him so much, and to love him so much, over these past two hundred years, and there are days where only he could calm my wife down, or where he could talk sense into Illa, and now that is up to me. I can do it, but by the One God, I know there will be days when I miss him so much…” Her voice shuddered very slightly, and without looking at her still, I grasped her hand, which she squeezed back gently. “Right now, I can hold my grief away, because we have this task before us to escape from this cell, to rescue our loved ones, and to escape from here. But so long as we survive, there will come quiet moments, and in those quiet moments, I will ache for him. I fear feeling pain, Violet. I fear it because it makes me weak. It makes me dysfunctional, inefficient. It robs me of everything that makes me who I am. And as much as I pity that boy who took him from me, I hate him. I hate an innocent child who more than likely had no choice. I hate them all indiscriminately for what they have done, for what they have taken from me, from you, from your sister, from every person I have ever known in my hundreds of years. I hate that they inflict this pain on us. I hate that they take away from us what we love most in this world.”
“And that they feel nothing when they do.”
“Exactly.” She replied, “I might not be your sister, Violet, so I cannot say this for sure, but I have a prediction for what the future might hold. Over the years, we will face a choice to take away from them as they have taken from us, or to show them mercy. We will face this choice time and again, and each time, we will choose the same. By the end of this, we will be as dark as they are.”
“Yes.” I agreed, because she was absolutely right. “But do you know why we’ll be different, Dr. Miletus?”
“No.” She replied, “Tell me.”
“Because we will have a reason to take from them. A valid reason. They take from us because we are different, because we don’t believe what they believe, and because they are afraid of us. When the time comes, we will take from them because they took from us. It will be justified.”
“Perhaps. But here is the one line of reasoning for which neither you and I nor they account: The One God we both claim to follow is a merciful God. Even if they follow the Old Ways, in the Old Ways, he did show mercy, and said that we should show mercy. I do believe in the One God. The One God of the New Ways. But I will never show them mercy, Violet. I make a promise here and now on my soul that I will never show them mercy, and if that will buy me a lifetime in the Eternal Darkness, then so be it.”
I finally looked over at her, and my hand that had let go of hers moments earlier held out to her, palm up. She looked at me, and I could see that throughout our discussion of all that had happened and all that we both thought would be, she had been crying. It had not shown in her voice, but there were tears streaming down her cheeks. I was thankful that I had not looked at her, that I had given her the privacy she had needed to cry simply by keeping my head facing forward.
“So be it.” I repeated.
She placed her hand, palm down, on top of mine, and squeezed.
