The Arcana

by Matt Hiebert

  IV.

  I wander back to my room to take a nap and watch some television, but all I do is lie on my bed and cycle through the channels. Nothing catches my interest. Soon the news will start covering the battle. I don’t want to see that.

  After a while, a knock comes at the entrance and the door opens without my prompting. This has never happened before.

  It is Justice. Her arms are crossed and I can tell she’s shy about disturbing me.

  “Can I come in?” she asks.

  “Of course!” I am ill-at-ease with her presence yet another part of me is glad she’s here.

  “I’m sorry to bug you, but I’m bored,” she says.

  “No problem. Yeah, it gets boring when you’re just waiting around. You never really get used to it.”

  I have trouble remembering the earlier days, when everything was new and strange, but I do remember the anxiety of waiting for a summoning: Standing around inside a seashell before being thrown into mortal combat. Never knowing when it will come. One second you’re watching an old movie, the next, demons are trying to tear you to pieces. You learn to prefer the boredom pretty quickly.

  “Tell me about when you first started,” she says innocently, not knowing that she just sent a knife of pain through my solar plexus. She already brings back memories I’ve suffocated for years. Now she asks me to relive them.

  Perhaps it is the look on my face or the several seconds of silence that tell her she’s crossed a line.

  “I’m sorry. If you don’t want to talk about it….”

  “No. It’s all right,” I decide to say. I have never talked about my family or that day to anyone, even the government counselors and psychiatrists that work in the Enclave. “Well, I had a wife…And a daughter about your age….”

  For an hour I spill my guts to this little girl. I talk about the murder of my family, I talk about learning to use my power, I talk about all the people who have come and gone over the years, all the places they were from, all the mistakes they made during the battles. People and places I had forgotten reappear in my memory whole and vivid. I can’t believe how much I have kept buried.

  Twice I start to cry and she puts her hand on my shoulder to comfort me, which for some reason makes me laugh through the tears, perhaps out of embarrassment.

  “I’m sorry about everything,” she says when my monologue winds to an end. “I wish all of that hadn’t happened to you.”

  I smile at her. She means it. I suddenly feel guilty about all the things I have said to her. I feel like it was selfish of me to burden the kid with such horrors, especially when she has problems of her own and doesn’t seem to know it.

  “No,” I say. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have dumped all that on you. I don’t usually do that kind of thing.”

  “It’s all right. I’m glad you did. I wanted to know.”

  I just stare at her. Her long brown hair is straight, parted down the middle. Her face is heart-shaped and her eyes are gray. Justice doesn’t display any outward physical change, but like other members of the Arcana, she is bound to an object. The child will never again be separated from her sword.

  A noise like a sigh or a painful laugh escapes my lungs. This is not right. She should not be here. Her parents are out there somewhere, torn to pieces. Grieving.

  A child. Please, God.

  Some kind of commotion seeps through the walls. People running, shouting. The door parts for us and we go see what’s happening.

  Medical personnel sprint toward the great room and we see the Chariot floating to the ground. The disk wobbles and lands hard on the stone-like floor. The woman who is the Chariot collapses. She is wounded but I can’t see how badly.

  There is only one other person on the disk of light. The Moon is hurt and sits at the back of the disk, conscious but stunned. Three deep parallel gashes on the side of her face drip red down her neck.

  A viscous puddle of blood spreads from beneath the Chariot’s body. When the disk of light disappears, her limp form drops to the floor of the Enclave with a dull thud. Medics rush to her with all kinds of equipment. When they roll her over I can tell she’s already dead.

  Justice runs over before I can stop her. She looks down upon the staring eyes of the woman who had been the Chariot, the woman she just ate dinner with. Her hands shoot to her face and she spins around, reflexively trying to unsee what she has seen. Her eyes are wide and round.

  Before I know it, I am holding her. She pushes her face into my chest and begins to sob.

  “I’m sorry,” I say as if all of this were my fault. Her cries are muffled against my chest.

  “Get her out of here,” Stokes says quietly behind me. I drape my arm around the child’s shoulders and turn her away from the scene. I want to give her false words of comfort like: “It will be all right” but the lie is not within me.

  We are halfway down the corridor when the ceiling opens and the new Chariot arrives. A man this time. Latin American. The battle is not over.

  I feel the summoning rise within me. Without control, without any decision on my part, I turn and leave the child to take my place upon the disk.

  I am horrified when I realize she is right behind me.

  She, too, has been summoned.