Romney Balvance and the Katarin Stone

by J Jordan

  “Is that a tank? They have a tank?”

  “It’s an antiair battery,” said Tykeso.

  “Silencio.”

  “Isn’t that overkill?”

  “No. How else would they deal with aerial entry?”

  “But all of this for a shrine?”

  “Yes,” said Victoria, “all of this to keep our heritage from the people.”

  “Silencio.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Tykeso. “We don’t speak Andaran.”

  “Please stop talking,” said another soldier.

  Tykeso’s mouth became a thin line. They were approaching a cramped hallway toward the back of the hangar. They moved down single file. Before Romney knew it, he was shoved sideways into a cell, and a heavy metal door closed behind him. He peered out through the small view port to see a soldier lock the door with a loud thud and then turn away.

  “Boys in one cell, girls in another.”

  Romney looked to the opposite wall, which was roughly three arm lengths away. Tykeso was huddled against it, his eyes focused on the door. The space was tight, but Tykeso looked accustomed to it. Tykeso dragged his arms over the walls, until they were over his head. Then he folded his hands behind his head. Romney had enough room to lift his arms out to his sides, though he didn’t try. And yet, Tykeso looked more comfortable.

  “Is this your first time in a cell?”

  “Why? Is it obvious?”

  Romney stared out the view port. There were no guards posted on the left or the right. And no one patrolling the hallway. He pounded on the door with his good hand, but the sound was muffled even for him

  “You have to occupy your mind. Conversation is the best way to pass time. It stimulates the brain, keeps your thoughts away from the passing time, and it can feed your soul.”

  Romney crossed his arms. Suddenly he could feel the air around him, pressing against his chest. The walls seemed much closer than before. Like the shrinking space in a vice.

  “The trick is to keep your mind off of two things at once,” said Tykeso. “The first is to stop thinking about the cell around you. The second is stop thinking about time.”

  Tykeso closed his eyes and took a deep breath. And then another. And another. Romney followed along on the third breath.

  “Better?”

  Romney took another deep breath and exhaled.

  “No,” he said, “I can feel them closing in on me. Like, I know they aren’t moving. But I can feel them moving. And it’s really hard to breathe right now. And I didn’t want this to happen. It was so fast, and I just played along, and now I’m a prisoner in a foreign country and my friends are prisoners too, and this is all my fault.”

  Romney had the sudden urge to kick the door. He turned and flung his heel into the solid metal, ready to break through. The thud was just above a whisper. And now his entire leg was aching.

  “Hey,” said Tykeso, “have you ever played the comrades game?”

  Romney wheeled around to glare at Tykeso, ready to scream. How could he be so calm right now? They were in a military prison and the walls were closing in. They were going to die here.

  But something about Tykeso’s demeanor was soothing. His voice was calm, casual, friendly. Romney nodded. Suddenly his outburst seemed childish.

  “Maybe you call it something else,” Tykeso continued. “It’s like truth or dare. But you only pick truth. We would use it before battle to learn about each other. You should never fight beside a stranger.”

  Romney nodded slowly. He dropped to the ground, his aching leg outstretched.

  “I start the game, since it was my idea. That’s the first rule.”

  Tykeso sat for what seemed a long time, rubbing his hands together in his lap. His face, usually fixed with a stony expression, was statuesque in his contemplation. He opened his mouth, took a deep breath, and spoke slowly.

  “I have hurt a lot of people.”

  Romney noticed the solemn look on his face. There was no ounce of pride in the statement.

  “The second rule is on you,” he said. “You tell me a truth. And then I tell you one again and then you tell me one. The game ends when someone asks a question. It shows you respect the person, because you want to know more of him.”

  “And what if I don’t have anything to say?”

  “Then you don’t want to be comrades.”

  Romney tried hiding his worry with a thin smile. He didn’t have any truths worth telling. He plumbed the depths of his psyche for something that could maybe approach Tykeso’s own tragic confession, but all he could think of was his apartment. And how he had wanted to yell at Tykeso for reading his magazines.

  “I’ve lived in my apartment building for six years.”

  Tykeso watched him. At first, it seemed like nothing more than a casual glance, but there was more scrutiny in it than Romney liked. Tykeso was watching his eyes. The glance broke before he could speak. Tykeso was looking down at his hands again. When he spoke, it was one word at a time.

  “I was married once.”

  Tykeso brushed his palms together and then looked to Romney. He was waiting for the next response.

  “What happened?”

  Tykeso’s stony face warmed.

  “You can ask, but I don’t have to answer.”

  Romney nodded, somewhat relieved. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to know. He was just glad the game was over. But Tykeso was still rubbing his hands together and watching the concrete floor. He looked deep into the cracks, looking for an answer. When he spoke again, he whispered.

  “Her name was Kiva. We were young.”

  The game had started again. Romney watched the elf. The stone was beginning to crack around his eyes. His mouth shifted between grimaces. This was obviously something difficult for Tykeso to share. There were knots forming in Romney’s stomach, but he knew what to do. The memory stood the same way it always did, in the way of everything else.

  “I had a fiancé. Haley. She left me for a supermodel.”

  Tykeso looked stung by this, but Romney’s smirk softened the blow.

  “Seriously. You can’t make that stuff up. He was in one of those commercials for soap. They met at a nightclub in North Lanvale. Can you believe that? She told her friends it was love at first sight.”

  His voice quavered at the last part. Romney looked into the network of cracks in the concrete floor, took in a deep breath, and tried to clear the knot in his throat.

  This fact can be verified. Haley Burroughs married a man named Aeron Wrathborne in the summer of 2015. He was a part-time courier for an eco-friendly, nonprofit delivery company, auditioning for local art house cinema projects in his spare time. His many previous occupations included part-time runway model, full-time internet cat video commentator, and one-time soap commercial star. The brand was Highland Spruce. It smelled like groves and trees mixed in a vat and applied to cardboard. One could still find Wrathborne’s commercial online, if one were so inclined. And to really drive the nail in, Aeron and Haley Wrathborne continue to live happily ever after to this day.

  Romney noticed he was chewing on his own lip. So he stopped, cleared his throat once more, and looked to Tykeso. His smirk was unconvincing.

  “That puts me up by three, comrade. You have some catching up to do.”

  Tykeso grinned back. The effect was somewhat off-putting. He wagged a long finger at Romney.

  “It only counts once.”

  And then the warmth faded. Tykeso reached once more into the concrete for a truth. He found one, hesitated, and then spoke.

  “I lied to Cora.”

  “About what?”

  Tykeso didn’t answer. Or maybe he was trying to find the best way. Romney looked into his own patch of floor. Perhaps the last one was too much. He reached for another truth close by.

  “I have a degree in finance.”

  “I don’t have any degrees,” said Tykeso. “I told Cora that I had a master’s in military history. I just read a lot about the su
bject. But she believed me.”

  “So, that’s the lie?”

  “One of them.”

  “I still think about her sometimes.”

  Romney cleared his throat. He couldn’t believe he had said it. It just came out. But now something in him had unraveled and the only way to keep it from hurting was to keep talking.

  “Not all the time. Every now and then.”

  Romney trailed off. Tykeso was watching him.

  “When it’s quiet,” he said, finishing Romney’s thought. “When there’s nothing left to keep you busy.”

  “Always right before you’re about to fall asleep,” said Romney. “Just a sudden boom.”

  He demonstrated this with his hands. Tykeso nodded.

  “Or when the rain sounds like her fingers. Tapping on your window.”

  “You find an old watch in your closet. I could have sworn I threw it out.”

  “But you hid it instead,” said Tykeso.

  Memories are a funny thing. You never know the true splendor of a moment until you’ve remembered it. Romney could see the pink wristband in his hand. And its little cat face, with whiskers for hands. He could see the watch around Haley’s wrist. He could see her wrist, her arm, her shoulder, her smile, warm in places.

  He told Haley he would get her a better watch when he had more money. Any day now, those dusty gargoyles at Smith and Hulgrad would finally promote him to advisor. Her watch would be rose gold with a skeleton face, and mithril gears that sparked blue when they caught the sun. That was when she kissed him, right on the cheek. She said that silly little watch was the greatest thing she had ever received. She loved cats. He should have seen it coming a mile away, he told himself, but her smile and her kiss, the warmth.

  The trouble with memories is that you can get lost in them. And they are often tied to emotions. Romney cleared his throat and wiped his eyes.

  “They need to ventilate this place.”

  Romney looked to Tykeso, then followed his stare up to the lone vent in the ceiling. It had stopped humming.

  “Everything will be fine.”

  A loud pop interrupted the moment. Romney pressed his ear against the metal door and heard the faint commotion outside. There was another loud pop, followed by a rapid succession of more. A muffled scream rose over the quiet struggle. Tykeso’s face had petrified into grim determination once more.

  “What was that?”

  Tykeso’s eyes narrowed at the sound. The popping gained in volume and frequency. Whatever it was, it was getting closer with every passing second.

  “I think the building’s on fire,” said Romney.

  “Not fire. Those sounds are pronounced.”

  But Romney didn’t hear this. He noticed a group of soldiers passing by the window. He turned and pounded at the door, forgetting the dull ache in his knuckles. He slapped at the glass, but he knew they were already too far down the hallway to hear him.

  It was getting really hot in that tiny cell. How long would they have until it reached them?

  “We’re going to die in here,” said Romney. “We’ll be burned alive and no one will come to save us. They won’t recognize our charred remains. I’ll be killed in an Andaran prison and no one will know it was me. They won’t even know I was missing in the first place.”

  Tykeso was quick to act. He rose from the wall, grabbed Romney by the collar, and throttled him. The force stirred something in Romney. The haze of panic fell away.

  “Romney, listen to me,” he growled. “Stop it. The building is not on fire.”

  Romney nodded slowly at the towering elf, but said nothing. Apparently, his worried expression said he was still not convinced.

  “Those popping sounds outside are not a fire. They are gunshots.”

  Another group of soldiers passed the little window. This time they were headed in the other direction. A straggler stopped by the window, raised his gun, and made several loud pops at something down the hall. The pops were returned, bringing the soldier down and out of view. A figure darted past the door, too quickly for Romney to gather any precise details. There was another succession of loud pops. Then there was a sound best described as a “thook” and then a loud “baboosh” that shook the walls of the cell. The lights in the hallway were extinguished in one swoop. Then the single fluorescent bulb in the cell flickered out.

  “What’s going on out there?”

  “No way to tell,” said Romney. “Maybe Victoria called in reinforcements.”

  “Those were controlled bursts,” said Tykeso. “Plus that last sound was heavy ordinance. I don’t think our Partisan friends have that kind of equipment. Or skill.”

  Tykeso broke off before he could say anything else. The cell door creaked open. A dark shape slipped inside and softly closed it behind him. The cell had just enough room now for the three of them to occupy the space very close together. From the proximity, Romney could make out the standard-issue fatigues worn by the soldiers found throughout the base. This soldier kept his back to them, his face pressed into the small window, eyes darting from one side of the dark space beyond. Romney tried to keep his distance, while also giving Cora ample personal space. The balance was difficult to maintain.

  “What’s going on out there?”

  “¿Qué pasa?“ Tykeso translated, “¿Por qué disparan?”

  The soldier wheeled around. Even in the dark, Romney could make out the fear in his eyes. They were filled with tortured visions still burned in. He rasped something that Romney couldn’t understand, despite being close enough to feel his breath. Romney tried his own hand at Andaran.

  “¿Qué?”

  “Drega mala,” he hissed back. “La diabla ha llegado.”

  “What is he saying?”

  “He said ‘bad’ and then another word I don’t know,” he said slowly, still parsing out the sentence. “But then he said the devil is here.”

  “So, he’s crazy?”

  “Yes,” said Tykeso, and then decisively, “but he didn’t lock the door behind him. You should punch him in the back of the head, so we can escape.”

  Romney tried easing toward the door, all the while smiling at the soldier pressed against it like a shade of green and pale wallpaper.

  “No, no, la diabla,” said the soldier as Romney closed in. “No lo deje. La drega mala.”

  “He doesn’t want us to go out. He keeps saying ‘drega.’ I’ve never heard that word before. I’ll tell you what. Let’s trade places.”

  “Can you please try talking to him first?”

  Tykeso cleared his throat and politely greeted the soldier in Andaran, using the formal conjugation to ask him how he was doing. The soldier didn’t respond. He kept his eyes on Romney, his arms outstretched.

  “¿Señor?”

  There was another “thook,” much clearer than the first, and it shook the entire cell with its “baboosh.” This sent the soldier into a frenzy. Romney could feel Tykeso bracing for something. Without warning, Tykeso leapt over Romney’s head and aimed for the soldier’s throat.

  “¡Sacarnos ahora!”

  “No, no, no, no, no.”

  “¡Te mataré! ¡Sacarnos!”

  “La drega mala.”

  The cell door slid open and the soldier tumbled out, onto Cora Queldin. She shoved him away. The soldier scrambled to his feet and looked down the now-darkened hallway, past Victoria Costa with her newly acquired handgun with flashlight attachment, to the dark shape approaching in the distance. He screeched, turned, and bolted into the darkness, away from whatever was approaching. There was another pop and a brief flash in the dark, a distant screech and a faint thud. Cora wheeled around, glaring at the approaching shadow.

  “Watch your fire!”

  “I wasn’t gonna hit you,” said a familiar voice in the darkness. “So, is he in there?”

  Tykeso slid past Romney into the hallway. After checking on Tykeso, Victoria swiveled the flashlight onto Romney. He squinted in the light.

  “I’m
all right,” said Romney.

  There was a squeal from the darkness and the sound of combat boots on concrete. A figure swung into the doorway and aimed an even brighter light into Romney’s eyes. He had to shield his eyes from this one.

  “Romney,” squealed the familiar voice.

  Romney knew what he would see in the right light. He would likely see scruffy, black hair, an upturned nose, a devilish grin, and two green eyes glazed in mayhem.

  The eyes would probably say something like, “Welcome to my world, little man.”

  “Lorna. Good to see you.”

  “I heard you needed a jail break.”

  Victoria turned her flashlight to Tykeso, who was relieving a prone soldier of his weapon. Cora grimaced at the act.

  “That’s the game, kid,” said Lorna, taking a serious tone. “Exfil is this way. We need to keep moving.”

  “Exfil?”

  “Exfiltration,” explained Tykeso. “Our escape plan.”

  “Which is?”

  “Shoot everything,” said Lorna. He could almost make the shape of her grin in the dark. “Come on. This way.”

  They moved down the dark corridor, following the two beams of flashlights. As they moved farther in, they could make out the emergency lights illuminating the hangar. They charged forward as a huddle, like Ontaran football players. Tykeso and Lornatook point with weapons drawn. In this new light, Romney could better see Lorna’s equipment.

  She wore a thick layer of bulletproof armor over her biker vest. Romney assumed it was military grade fiber. Tykeso would later explain that it was actually a material known as “rock hide,” which, to put it simply, was made of an incredibly strong element that stopped most bullets on the market, along with several still being invented at the time. Tykeso would marvel at it later on, and constantly ponder at how she gained access to such body armor. And that said nothing of the cost.

  Each of her weapons had a name. Lorna was currently shouldering Marie, her assault rifle, complete with foregrip, tactical flashlight, and holographic sight. Marie’s suppressor was tucked away in one of the many pockets on her armor, since the time for stealth had ended. Some would argue it never started in the first place.