“I’m Eamon,” he says, releasing his grip on her arm and running his hand down her sleeve.
“Anaiya.”
Eamon blinks.
“Seth’s Anaiya?”
Anaiya feels her face harden and Eamon cocks his head in interest.
“So, not Seth’s Anaiya,” he says slowly, rubbing his knuckles under his chin. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
Anaiya neither confirms nor denies. “It was you, wasn’t it?” she asks instead. “You went down during the run-in with the Peacekeepers the other night?”
“I heard I wasn’t the only one,” he says, smiling. There is a playfulness to that smile, a recklessness.
“Couldn’t let you have all the fun, now could I?”
His laugh is husky, a rustling of corduroy against bare skin. “I guess not,” he says. “Are you here with Cress?”
Anaiya nods, looking over to the table, where new arrivals have gathered.
“I’ll come with you.”
* * *
ANAIYA WATCHES Eamon closely as he bends his head closer to Cress, sending her into another fit of giggling. The izakaya is now full to capacity; voices, conversations and music rise and fall around them. Anaiya’s third parameth has kicked in and she reclines in the worn polyester armchair, calm and focussed.
For the most part, Eamon is a clear screen, a simple narrative. Over the last hour he has engaged easily with the other Elementals at the table; flirting, laughing, joking and debating. In so many ways, he reminds her of Rehhd – his dark anger and rebelliousness hidden beneath a bright layer of magnetism and levity.
“What about you, Anaiya?” Cress asks, turning away from Eamon with flushed cheeks.
Anaiya frowns, recalling fragments of the conversation she had half-heartedly been listening to. “Hmm?”
“What is your alternate competency?” Cress repeats.
They are speculating. As Anaiya knows, from both of her alignments, competencies are inevitable – uncovered rather than chosen. It is a sentimental game, a relapse into the idle musing of childhood when competencies were unknown and there seemed a world of possibilities, a thousand paths that one’s life could take. Rather than scorn their sentimentality, Anaiya understands it.
She smiles wryly. “Border Watcher.”
The Elementals around her break into laughter at the irony and wait for her real answer. So, she chooses the Air competency that, in her mind, is closest to Peacekeeping. The one she was confident the Water Technicians would have assigned her.
“Dancer.”
Cress’s face lights up and she claps her hands in delight. Anaiya grins despite herself. But then she catches Eamon’s steady gaze and her smile falters.
“I would have been a Trinketeur,” the diminutive Elemental beside Eamon announces. The laughter builds again, the others entertained at the thought of Scythe, the night’s orator, being a low-level creator of market knick-knacks.
“I would have made gaudy yellow baubles and synthfly sculptures as big as a fist,” she continues, revelling in the attention.
The light-hearted banter swells around her, but Anaiya and Eamon are both oblivious to it. She meets his gaze evenly, despite the quickening tempo of her heart and the light sheen of sweat on her palms.
What has he noticed?
The paranoia itches along her skin.
It’s just the parameth. It’s just the parameth.
She forces herself to breathe normally and holds his gaze until he raises an eyebrow, and she realises immediately that she is displaying very atypical Air behaviour. She drops her head quickly, but it is too late. Moments later, the scrape of the seat next to her against the polished concrete floor announces his arrival.
He sits casually next to her, legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles, his left arm propped up on the cold metal of the chair, cradling his head. His fingers disappear into his hair, his head cocked towards her as he regards her, eyes shrouded in the dim light of the izakaya. “You have that look, Anaiya,” he murmurs.
She looks away from him. “What look?”
In her peripheral vision, she sees him shrug non-commitally, his flippancy betrayed by the rigidity of his frame and steadiness of his gaze. “Of rage…” His voice is soft and viscous, grabbing at the air around her and decelerating time. “Hunger.”
She turns her head slowly to face him again. He is smiling, his angled face turned into something dangerous. He leans in to her and her head bows to meet him. He is close, now, his lips at her ear, his soft breaths amplified and hypnotic. “The thing that drives you to take on a Peacekeeper in a dark street,” he murmurs. “That rebellion that makes us the same.”
The forbidden word is whispered, rippling from his lips to her core. She shivers. At the sensation, at the intimacy, at the word and its consequences. He is opening himself up to her, revealing himself, giving her an in, an entry into the Resistance.
She turns her head slowly, his lips grazing her ear and cheek as she does. She doesn’t pull back, keeping the distance between them minimal. This close she can see anticipation and hunger in his eyes. He trails a finger down her cheek and smiles. “We’re the same, Anaiya.”
Anaiya opens her mouth to respond, but the words die on her lips as the izakaya’s soundtrack is abruptly silenced. The secondary sounds of the Rabid Dog’s patrons hush in response and everyone looks to the figure lit by a soft, golden spotlight. Anaiya and Eamon reluctantly pull away from each other and turn to the corner of the izakaya where the beam of light has singled out a lone Elemental.
The first orator begins with a tremulous note. It shifts and shatters against the walls of the izakaya before gaining strength and stabilising.
“I walked along the edge of my Syn,
and looked down.
The reflection was mine, but it was not me,
and I drowned…”
The words, and the haunting, hollowness of the voice, arrest Anaiya. With the parameth softening the otherwise sharp transition, she forgets about her fixation with Eamon and drifts in the words of the orator, and their rhythm. Time loses its form as a reference, and minutes pass as both brief moments and long, epic journeys.
And so it goes. Other orators stand to bathe in the spotlight, their words spilling over the attentive audience. It has music, and a hidden, evocative beauty that rises and swells with the emotions of the crowd, pulling at Anaiya and dragging her away. She does not resist, does not analyse or assess. She closes her eyes to the izakaya and simply experiences it.
* * *
“…AND I WILL WAIT.”
The orator’s voice, this time the deep and husky tone of an older male Elemental, comes to a dramatic conclusion. The words are dredged up from his lungs and pulled from his mouth, his face twisting with an unseen torment. As they are released into the crowd, his shoulders slump and his head bows. He falls into his seat heavily and silently.
Movement flashes behind him, immediately noticeable against the stillness of the room. Two figures stand close together, their heads bowed in deep conversation. The one on the left nods his head and the two break apart, Anaiya recognising the taller one as Seth.
As if sensing her attention, he turns to her. Their eyes collide and a heavy stone lodges in her stomach. A smile plays on his lips, but it disintegrates before fully engaging, his eyes now focussed on the Elemental beside her. She waits for him to walk over, but he remains where he is. Moments pass like this, with him shifting his gaze from Anaiya to Eamon. Finally he looks away, glancing around the room and occasionally leaning in to speak to the unfamiliar Elemental.
The rock in her stomach falls heavier. She looks away. Beside her, Eamon reclines in his chair, arms folded across his chest and eyes unmoving. Anaiya doesn’t need to follow them to know their target. So, instead, she watches Eamon. A contradiction of emotions plays across his body: he’s openly calm, but his eyes glitter. His right foot taps rapidly against his left; his legs are rigid despite their languid stretch.
The tension she heard in Seth’s voice the night of their encounter with Jenna has obviously developed into something more tangible. Coupled with the conflict between Seth and Kaide, she wonders how involved Seth is with the Resistance, whether he is on the fringe and drifting outwards. The rock lightens.
She lifts her head to seek Seth out again, but the spotlight blinds her; she shields her eyes and turns away. Less than a metre away, Scythe stands up, blocking the harsh light and Anaiya’s view of Seth. Frustrated, she leans towards Eamon in the hopes of improving her view.
“I am a person, not an Elemental.”
The words, spoken in Scythe’s familiar high-pitched, lilting melody, register a few seconds later in Anaiya’s mind, their reception delayed as her neocortex struggles to make sense of them. Her body snaps back to its original place in the armchair and her gaze fixes, unwavering, on the orator.
“A citizen without a government,
a scorched and barren land.”
She glances down at her wristplate, desperate to bring up the recording function, but knowing that Eamon, if not other Elementals, will see the movement and question it.
“My voice will be mine again,
and I will coat my tongue with the ashes of fallen Fire.
I will bleed in colour,
and paint my blood on Otpor’s walls.”
If not for the parameth still coating her mind, Anaiya knows that she would be visibly reacting, openly betraying the shock that sours in her mouth. As it is, her fingers grip tighter on the chair’s armrests and her legs ache with the strain of not shifting, not standing, not striding through the golden glow to Scythe and…
She bites the inside of her cheek, increasing pressure until her tongue is pricked with the taste of iron.
Later, she will struggle to remember the exact words, the precise inflections, with only the intensity of her emotions and the first stanza searing into her memories. For now, in the haze of her revulsion, she looks past Scythe and over the faces of those in the crowd. She takes in the expressions of intrigue, adoration and amusement that shape them.
Scythe shifts her balance, stepping back to lean against the table as she continues her monologue. The movement affords Anaiya a clear view of Seth. As always, he stands apart from the crowd, despite the bodies pressing against him. There is none of the room’s rapture in him. Just a deep stillness. He doesn’t murmur, doesn’t move – a small frown the only outwards sign that he is present and attentive.
Scythe is coming to the conclusion of her oration, her voice dropping in decibels, morphing into a harsh whisper. As the words die, Seth glances towards Anaiya. She waits for his face to change, his stance to shift, but he merely turns and disappears through the crowd.
Her gaze sweeps the room for his path and seconds later she sees him exit the izakaya, just as Scythe drops into a flourish and settles back into her chair at the table.
* * *
TWO INNOCUOUS MONOLOGUES LATER, the table where Anaiya sits is enveloped in the noise of rapid chatter set against the backdrop of a mellow song track. Mostly the conversation centres on praising Scythe for her brilliance, her rawness, her insight. Anaiya feels sick. But then parts of the conversation break apart and when she hears Cress mention Rehhd’s name, she turns subtly towards the smaller group.
“Rehhd would have been proud of you tonight.”
Scythe smiles broadly.
“Where is Rehhd?” Anaiya asks Eamon, who has taken to perching on one of her armrests.
His right arm dangles in the space between them, his fingers pulling absently at the fraying strands of torn upholstery.
“Rehhd’s working on another project,” he says, dragging at a particularly long thread and idly wrapping it around his index finger. “I doubt we’ll see her.”
“A solo project?” Anaiya asks, frowning.
“Not exactly,” he replies, snapping the thread and discarding it from his finger. “More like a group project she’s spending some alone time on.”
Anaiya wants to ask more questions, but she displays restraint, careful not to rouse Eamon’s suspicion. “What about your projects?” she asks instead. “What are you working on?”
She keeps her voice light. Playful.
Eamon smiles down at her. “I’ve got a few Graphics projects going,” he says, swiping across his wristplate.
He leans closer to her, his left arm wrapping across his body to place the wristplate in Anaiya’s line of sight. His chest presses against her left shoulder and his nose brushes lightly against her cheek. She can feel his breath on her face, but she ignores it, focussing on the images taking up and flashing across the screen panel of his cuff.
The images are monochromatic and abstract. Clean lines and flat colouring speak of a simple technique, but the designs themselves are intricate and complex.
The next image that flashes up on the screen is familiar. A perfectly detailed skull adorned with extinct butterflies and delicate flowers sits in quarter profile, the hollow eyes gazing lifelessly over Anaiya’s right shoulder. It’s sketched entirely in black; dark shadows pull at the gaunt cheekbones and the petal folds of twisted blooms.
“I’ve seen this one before,” she says, turning to look up at Eamon.
He pulls his arm back and switches off the screen with a double tap.
“Seth bought it off me a year ago,” he says. “He had it inked on his forearm an hour later.”
“How did you two meet?” she asks, remembering Seth’s version but wanting to hear the story from Eamon’s perspective.
“We met the night he bought the ink design off me,” he starts, shifting on the armchair and leaning his body closer to Anaiya’s. Together, they stare out over the izakaya crowd. At groups of Air Elemental talking and laughing, at lovers embracing in dark corners and under soft, golden lights, at Cress dancing with Scythe, spinning her around in leisurely circles and caressing her face.
“Rehhd and I had met the year before. We had been working on a project together and it had all been pretty intense. We both moved in different circles – she was more eclectic in her selection of friends; I tended to stick with the Graphics crew. But we kept in contact and occasionally collaborated on other joint projects. I had seen her out and about – but you know Rehhd, she moves between groups like a synthfly between corpses – so I never really met her other friends until a year ago.”
His voice is deep and husky, combining with the paramethylate to become hypnotic. Anaiya settles further into the armchair, letting the words tumble around her skull, her fuzzy brain catching on one word: Rehhd.
“We were at Veritas, an izakaya not far from here,” he continues. “Cress was performing that night, so I was just hanging around. Rehhd arrived with two males I had sometimes seen her with. She came over to the bar and they followed. Kaide was the talkative one, but Seth was the more interesting.”
Eamon pauses. “He had this intensity back then,” he says. “A fire…”
The word snatches Anaiya out of her trance.
“I always thought it would develop into something bigger. Like I was standing before this prodigy whose genius would just continue to grow until it blocked out the sun…” He laughs hoarsely – a cold and broken sound. “I worshipped him back then,” he says, hooking his right leg over Anaiya’s, tangling her up in him. “I would have followed him anywhere into anything…And for a long time, I did.”
“What happened?” she asks softly, staring at the way their legs are intertwined in the foreground of her vision.
The sound system pauses as one track shifts into another, providing an almost silence that allows her to hear his next words, even though they are whispered.
“He stopped being the god I thought he was. And I outgrew him.”
The next track swells in the stale air of the izakaya. The melody is dark and heavy, interspersed with a bright, quick tinkling. It falls into a repetitive beat, then skips, diverges on a different beat, then skips again and returns.
“You just walked away?” she asks after a while, hooking her right leg over his to form a tighter weave.
“No one just walks away from Seth,” he replies, smiling down at her as he hooks his left ankle over the weave to complete it. “Or Rehhd, for that matter.”
“It’s strange,” she says. “Them being friends. They seem so different.”
“They are in a lot of ways. But they’re the same in the ways that count.”
Anaiya is about to ask what are these ways, the ones that count, when he speaks again.
“And with both of them being so close to Kaide, it was inevitable that they would end up being thrown together.”
As if at the mention of his name, the tall and broad figure appears at the edges of the izakaya’s shadows. Unlike Seth, he does not pause at the border between light and dark, his even stride bringing him across the small distance to their table. He stops at Cress’s chair, reaching down to tickle at the exposed skin under her ear and sending her into a fit of laughter. He smiles at the sound, but his gaze rests on Anaiya and Eamon and their interlinked limbs.
For a moment, Anaiya feels a sharp desire to pull them free. It passes and, instead, she returns his gaze. Nonetheless, her legs spring back when Eamon disentangles himself and stands up.
“Drink?”
Anaiya looks up at him, her assent poised on her lips. But Eamon is looking at Kaide. And Kaide is looking at her.
“Tequila,” he says.
Anaiya ignores the taunt and watches as Eamon retreats from her on his way to the bar. Kaide pulls up a stool next to her.
“So, you found Eamon?”
His voice is light and casual, but Anaiya isn’t entirely convinced this conversation is one without motive.
“He found me.”
“Oh?”
“I like drinking. He likes drinking. The bar is the place to procure said drinks. Ipso facto, we met at the bar.”
Kaide laughs softly. The sound hits Anaiya as genuine and she relaxes.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, turning to face him. “You missed the main part.”
Resistance: Divided Elements (Book 1) Page 19