by Gareth Otton
Despite the crushing disappointment of finally meeting her mother’s family, that sad little girl in control of Stella giggled at the thought of the skinny, stick insect Tad punching blindly at nothing, but never giving up.
It was only a short giggle and didn’t come close to lifting her spirits, but to the little girl who had known nothing but pain for so long while shut away behind a wall in Stella’s mind, it was the first glimmer of light in a world of darkness. Realising that Tad meant every word, for the first time that little girl didn’t have to be brave anymore, because finally she had a shoulder to cry on.
Stella tried to respond, but no words came out. A painful lump was forming in her throat and her whole body trembled. At first she didn’t know what was wrong with her as it had been so long since such a malady had seized her, but suddenly realisation dawned. It was all too much. Her stress at work, the death of those men, Tad’s injuries, and worst of all, a wound decades in the making being torn open anew. She hadn’t done this since she was the age of that little girl in her head, that same little girl who was in charge one last time.
Try though she might to keep the tears inside, they fell regardless. Mortified at showing such weakness in front of Tad, she fought him when he tried to wrap his arms about her, but even that was only halfhearted. After weeks… months… maybe even years of fighting, Stella finally gave in. She didn’t just let Tad pull her close, she clung to him like he were the driftwood keeping her from drowning.
Through her, that little girl let a lifetime of tears flow as Stella sobbed into Tad’s chest, trusting that his embrace could protect her until the little girl was cried out.
23
Thursday, 14th July 2016
20:45
The last time Mitena was here she was suffering from a head wound, but she recognised it regardless. Though well maintained, it was the smallest house on the street, and it was in a nice neighbourhood. Mitena should know. Until yesterday she’d lived two streets over all her life.
She angrily pushed the thought aside. She’d shed enough tears for the family house she’d never see again. Now was a time for focus. She ducked behind the bushes of a neighbouring home and waited for the man she followed to climb out of his car. With her tattoos, it was far too easy to hunt this man. Unlike dreamwalkers, there was nothing special about him. All she needed to do was drive at a distance as she followed him from his meeting, then touch her speed dreamcatcher to get here ahead of him.
Now she waited until FBI special agent Sean Astur unlocked his front door before springing her trap. She tapped her speed dreamcatcher and waited for the world to slow before she ran up behind the unsuspecting agent and shoved him inside.
There was no one home, so no one heard him cry out. To her sped up senses the sound was long and low, and she had more than enough time to relieve him of his gun and close the door before he landed on the tiled floor.
By the time Astur looked around with frightened eyes, he found the barrel of his own pistol pointed at his face.
He froze.
“Get up,” Mitena said. When he didn’t move straight away, she kicked him and shouted for him to get up again.
“Mitena, what is—”
“Shut up. I don’t want to hear anything from you,” she snarled. “Just get up and go to your kitchen.”
This time he listened. Too slowly for her liking, he climbed to his feet, all the while watching her and looking around for a way out. However, for all that Kuruk was the one who had done the killing recently, she had learnt a lot since she started their crusade. Astur wasn’t going anywhere.
She marched him into the kitchen and sat him on one of the dining chairs.
“Put your hands behind your back,” she said.
“What? Mitena, I don’t know what’s got in your—”
“Hands behind your back. I won’t ask again. Next time you make me wait, you’re getting a bullet.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” Astur said, trying for brave but his voice shaking a little.
Mitena didn’t even think. She’d been through too much to let this man get the upper hand. The gun made a clap sound, louder than she was expecting but not nearly so booming. It was immediately followed by the startled scream of agent Astur as he reached for the hole in his right leg just above the knee. Blood gushed from the wound, but it wasn’t fast enough that she needed to worry about him dying on her.
“You shot me,” he gasped between panicked breaths.
“Hands behind your back,” she said one final time. “Make me wait again you lose your other leg.”
Shaking in agony, Astur didn’t hesitate this time.
Pulling handcuffs from the back pocket of her jeans, Mitena moved behind him and threaded the cuffs through the slats in the back of the chair and secured his wrists.
“Please, Mitena. Why are you doing this? I’ve only ever wanted to help you and Kur—”
“I followed you tonight,” Mitena interrupted, lowering the gun now she had him secure, but still not relaxing. “I know where you went.”
Astur’s eyes widened as he processed that information, then he tried to hide his reaction. She knew the next thing she heard from him would be a lie.
“You followed me to my support group? That’s what this is about... Wait! Wait!”
He yelled as the gun came back up, this time pointed at his other leg from much closer.
“Don’t lie to me. I’m not in the mood for that. And don’t play for time. I just want straight answers and this will go a lot smoother for you. Where were you really?”
She pressed that gun into his knee, pushing hard enough to make him squeal in panic.
“It was a Movement meeting,” he said.
“The Anti Dreamwalker Movement?” Mitena asked, already knowing the answer but wanting to hear it from him.
“Yes. For God's sake, yes. Just take this gun away. Please. I’m telling the truth.”
“Why were you there?”
“I…”
She pounced on his hesitation, the gun pressing back against his knee.
“Wait! No, don’t. I lead the local meetings. That’s why I was there. I led them.”
For once he was telling her something she didn’t know. She thought he just went to partake in the meetings, but if he actually led them…
She suddenly had a cold feeling in her gut and was sure she would learn something tonight that she didn’t want to hear. After the nightmare of the last few months, she suspected what that might be and she thought she was ready to hear it. It was time for the truth.
“So you hate them all, the dreamwalkers,” Mitena said. “That's what you do, right? You meet up and you talk about how much you hate every single one of them and want the world to go back to how it was before the Merging.”
“Of course we hate them,” he snapped, anger and pain mixing to make him shout. “Think of all the people they’ve killed, the evil they’ve done. Man was not supposed to have that kind of power.”
Mitena ignored most of what he said, but concentrated on his tone. She should have seen this earlier. What kind of FBI agent would contract out the killing of dreamwalker criminals to two kids from the neighbourhood? How had she been so stupid not to realise this earlier? But she’d been so caught up in helping Kuruk…
She shook her head to clear that thought. She had to stop thinking that way. Saying she had done all this to help Kuruk was just an excuse. She was done doing that, it was time to take responsibility.
Her grandmother’s home, the home she grew up in, exploding yesterday had finally woken Mitena from the dream state she kept herself in these last few months. For the first time she could see just how messed up she had let her life get and how she and Kuruk had become worse than the monsters they hunted. Five men died in that explosion, and Kuruk killed at least that number outside the house beforehand. Worse, she suspected he knew they were coming. There was only one way he could know that.
“You warned Kuruk of the raid,” s
he said, not phrasing it as a question. “You knew they were coming and worked with my brother to lay a trap.”
“I… No, of course not. I warned him they were coming, but—”
His words cut off abruptly as the gun raised again.
“I told you not to lie to me. Kuruk never had access to explosives. He wouldn’t even know where to get them. So here’s what I think happened. You found out they were coming, worked with Kuruk to booby trap my grandmother’s house, then blew it up. The only thing I don’t understand is why. Those weren’t dreamwalkers who died in that house. The dreamwalkers were outside. Kuruk killed innocent people doing their jobs, your people. Why?”
Astur gulped audibly and was trying to think of an answer that would put him in the best light, but she wasn’t waiting for that. She suspected someone had already called in the gunshot and that police responding to that at an FBI agent’s house would get them here in record time. She didn’t have the luxury of waiting for him to talk.
She pressed the gun against his knee one last time, and this time she left it there.
“Last chance. You hesitate again, I pull the trigger. You lie to me, I pull the trigger. You look at me funny, I pull the trigger. You get that.”
He nodded quickly, beads of sweat dripping off his pain ridden face as his head moved up and down.
“Why did you want Kuruk to kill your men?”
“It… It looks like the dreamwalker’s fault,” Astur admitted. “If it wasn’t for them coming here, the raid wouldn’t have happened. It shows the world that the Merging effect everyone, not just people in the Borderlands.”
It was Mitena’s turn to freeze as she thought that over.
How have I been so stupid?
All this time she thought she’d been doing the right thing, taking out monsters before they could hurt people, and instead she had been a pawn in someone else’s plan. Astur had made Kuruk and Mitena the most wanted people in America, maybe the world, all for his twisted cause.
“You played us,” she whispered. “When Kuruk finds out about this—”
“Kuruk knew,” Astur interrupted, his pained expression momentarily twisting into a cruel smile. “This was his plan. He came to me, not the other way around.”
“I don’t believe it,” Mitena said.
Astur, despite his pain, actually laughed.
“You’re under the mistaken impression that I’m in charge of what’s happening here, but that hasn’t been true for a long time. Your brother’s the one who planned that ambush yesterday.”
“You’re lying,” Mitena said, but Astur continued regardless.
“He’s also the one who came to me begging for more names. He said his work wasn’t done, not until there’s not a single dreamwalker left to make a victim of anyone else.”
This was it, the reason Mitena was here.
She knew the explosion hadn’t been an accident, and she thought that if that had been planned without her knowing, then what else had she missed? In the back of her mind she knew what that meant, but there’s knowing something as a hypothetical and hearing it from the horse’s mouth.
“The list,” Mitena whispered. “The extra names. How many were innocents? How many did you just add onto the list just because you didn’t want to disappoint my brother?”
Again, Astur laughed. “You don’t get it—”
Mitena cut him off, pressing the gun harder against this knee and staring directly in his eye until he spoke the answer to the question she’d asked.
“Three.”
Mitena felt sick. Three innocent lives she had helped end just because she didn’t question what Kuruk was doing and where the names came from. Three people who’d done nothing wrong were dead because she started this crusade and not thought it through.
“You made me kill three innocent people,” she whispered, feeling the very real desire to squeeze that trigger and keep squeezing until the gun was empty. However, Astur’s laughter gave her pause, piquing her curiosity enough to make her ask, “What are you laughing at?”
“You… You think you only killed three… ha ha. You idiot.”
“What are you talking about?” she snapped, lifting the gun from his knee and pressing it against his head, all the while doing her best to control the shaking in her limbs. Some part of her suspected what he would say, but needed to hear it.
“Not three innocents. Three criminals. That’s all there ever were. You think we have whole databases on Dreamwalkers at the FBI, enough that when one goes bad it suddenly triggers an alert so we can feed it to you? Grow up. Those names were added to the list as soon as we suspected they were dreamwalkers.”
“You’re lying,” Mitena said. Then louder and with more force she added, “You’re lying!”
She pressed the gun so hard against his head that he rocked backward. But his fear was gone as shock had set in. He just kept laughing and teasing her.
“You really are an idiot, Mitena. But you’ve done good work. You and your brother both have done more for our cause than—”
“Shut up,” Mitena hissed as a new sound came to her awareness.
“Done more than any chapter of the Children of ADaM. Thanks to you, the world is starting to know that even removed from the Borderlands, you’re still not safe from these freaks. Our numbers in the movement have only grown since—”
“I said shut up,” Mitena hissed again. Blissfully he went silent this time, though only for a second. In that second he too heard the wailing of sirens in the distance, and the sound set him off laughing once more.
“So stupid,” he cackled, the last words she could understand. From that point, there was only laughter and gibberish.
Mitena stepped away from the madman and almost slipped as she stepped in the pool of blood that had collected beneath the raving lunatic. Looking down, she found more blood than she expected and wondered if maybe she had hit him somewhere more serious than she thought. It explained his laughter. The man was losing blood fast and becoming delirious.
She looked at the gun in her fingers and the man sitting in that chair. Suddenly faces flashed before her eyes, all people she’d help kill. So much death. Because of this man, her soul was forever tainted.
She raised the gun, pointing it at his head and seriously considered pulling the trigger. It would just be one more life, and at least this time he would deserve what was coming to him. After what he’d made them do, what he’d turned her brother into, what...
The gun lowered as her thought trailed away. She needed to think about this, stop rushing into things like she had been for the last few months. At the moment she only had his word about what he’d done, about what Kuruk had become. Who knows what he might say to save himself?
Besides, she’d killed enough people.
Gently she lay the gun down on the kitchen counter and took another step away.
The sirens were growing louder now and as she looked up she saw flashing blue and red lights washing in through the windows. With one last look at the laughing agent who wasn’t so lively anymore, instead laughing like a drunk at the tail end of a three-day bender, she decided enough was enough.
Thinking of where she and Kuruk had been hiding since yesterday, she activated the dreamcatcher on her shoulder and vanished from the kitchen.
Kuruk jumped as Mitena popped into existence in the small apartment they rented under an associate’s name. Said associate was provided by Kuruk and that should have been clue enough that he’d changed from the man she knew. Who would he know from his old life who would rent an apartment on their behalf? He had good friends, but that good. No, this was another example of how Mitena had been willingly overlooking what was happening right in front of her.
“Where the hell have you been?” Kuruk asked as he settled back onto the poorly made kitchen chair that groaned under his weight. “I’ve been worried sick.”
“Of course you have,” Mitena said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Before s
he could answer, he added, “Is that blood?”
He pointed to a spot on Mitena’s combat trousers, a dark patch on the tough khaki material. There wasn’t much, and Mitena realised she must have brushed against Astur’s bullet wound.
“It’s not mine,” she said.
“I can see that. Whose is it? What happened?”
It was impossible to ignore his concern and for a second he sounded like the old him, caring only about her wellbeing. Ever since their parents died, he’d been her self-appointed protector. However, she couldn’t let this cloud her judgement again.
“It’s Astur’s. We had a little chat.”
Kuruk’s eyes widened as he absorbed that, then after nearly a full second he exploded out of the chair, nearly overturning the kitchen table. Paper and stationary went flying, but Kuruk ignored it as he towered over his sister.
“You did what?” he demanded.
As always, Mitena was aware of their massive size difference, but she wasn’t afraid. As far gone as Kuruk was, the one thing would never change was that he couldn’t hurt her.
“We had a chat. There are some things you’ve been hiding, Ruk.”
“Jesus Christ. Is he dead? What have you done, Ten?”
“No,” she snapped, the words coming from between clenched teeth. “What have you done?” Without even thinking, she tapped her dreamcatcher for strength. It was a similar design to Kuruk’s but considerably smaller. However, it provided her the strength she needed to overwhelm a startled Kuruk.
She shoved him in the chest, sending him back to the kitchen chair hard enough that it rocked, groaned and almost gave way. One of the legs shifted as a fastening came loose, but it held, barely.
