Eminent Silence

by Tristan Carey

  I tried again, got the same response. A third time, then a fourth. Still the same message, over and over. The number you have reached has been disconnected…

  Did Mom move out? Did she get a new place? Is that what some people did, after they lose a child? I didn't even know if she knew I was missing or not. What if she thought I was dead? I knew the statistics on kidnapping — survival rate for children dropped 90% after the first 48 hours gone missing. Well, six months was a hell of a lot longer than 48 hours… But even then, would Mom just give up like that? It just didn't feel right.

  It didn't occur to me to try Peter until ten minutes later, and I got a second wind of hope. If anyone would pick up the phone, it'd be him.

  I tried his cell phone, first. It was prepaid, and there was a chance Peter got a new one by now, but I prayed he kept the same number. The Parkers didn't keep a landline simply because it was cheaper to buy your own minutes on portable phones.

  I got his voice-mail, and waited through his stupid-long message: 'Hey, this is Peter! Or Maverick, Maverick's cool. You probably have the wrong number, because I don't have any friends. Ha-ha, yeah...well, anyways, uh, if this is May or Ben, I swear I won't be late, and if it's Hedy, I promise I didn't kill anyone. And if it's Goose, well, I got your back. You know what to do!'

  I smiled to myself, resting my chin in my hand as I listened to his familiar chirping voice. Peter had changed his voice-mail as soon as he came up with new nicknames for us. Hearing 'Goose' made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, made me feel better after crying. Maybe things were still all right. He even called me by my nickname, which I'd completely forgotten my nickname, which I'd completely forgotten about.

  Then the beep came.

  The tone became a little scratchy as it started record, and I was just about to exclaim 'I'm still alive!' when I heard it.

  Clik-clik-clik.

  It was only for a split-second. But my ears still picked up on it, distinct from the otherwise normal white noise of the phone. My voice caught in my throat, nothing coming out.

  'Hello?' Peter's voice. Curious, bright, exactly as I remembered him. So loud, so clear, like he was right next to me.

  Like I was home again.

  But that clicking. I breathed into the receiver, my heart skipping a beat. My eyes searched the room, hoping that wasn't what I thought it was. It couldn't be.

  Could it?

  The silence lasted for five long seconds.

  'Hello?' Peter asked again, and my heart crumbled as my will to answer faded. 'Is anyone there? Who is this?'

  It's me. Peter, it's me. Mia. Find me. Save me. Please. I want to go home.

  No.

  I couldn't do it. With shaking hands, I carefully set the phone down, back in its cradle.

  I sat back in the seat, my breath leaving my chest in a whoosh. Peter's voice, his words, still echoed in my head. My throat was locked with tears. I still couldn't quite believe it. I didn't want to. It had to be paranoia.

  But in the back of mind, I knew it wasn't.

  Peter's phone was bugged.My chin jerked up to look at her, and I got a little dizzy. I had been sitting in that chair, staring at the phone, for so long my butt was numb. Faint bird singing could be heard through the broken windows, a soft breeze coming through and rustling the leaves across the floor of the office. It was so utterly quiet I forgot that I wasn't really alone.

  To be fair, I was still pretty distracted by the whole disconnected line and bugged phone deal; of which I still didn't have a reasonable explanation for either. What the hell did Peter do that earned him that kind of attention? What happened at home that meant I couldn't call either my cousin or my mom?

  I didn't know. And halfway across the world, there was nothing I could do.

  This frustration, this helplessness was only the cherry on top of this Nightmare Sundae.

  Wanda's head peered in through the door, her green eyes flicking up and down and taking me in. 'Are...are you okay?'

  I didn't answer for a long moment. Realizing that a phone — which only this morning I would've hinged my entire life on — had now proven to be a dead end, I pushed the chair back and got up. 'I'm fine. Do you have food?'

  It was weird how my mind just went straight to that without any second thoughts. I didn't think to explain to Wanda what just happened; I didn't think she'd understand, wasn't sure I wanted to tell her anyways. I still didn't know if I could trust her and her brother or not.

  'Yes!' Wanda smiled, apparently pleased by my question, how easy it was to answer (as opposed to before, about the Crucible and the Chairman). She gestured for me to follow. 'Come! Pietro brought much to eat.'

  I smiled weakly at her, not as enthused. I didn't really trust Wanda's judgment on what she considered 'much to eat', if one took in their current lifestyle into account. But as it turned out, Wanda wasn't kidding; I came back into the theater room to find Pietro by the stage and what looked to be two shopping carts of food piled around him, and more in his arms. He was already chewing through a bag of potato chips like logs through a wood chipper.

  I could only stare as Wanda just walked right up and plucked an apple, bright red and fresh, from the pile and took a bite from it. I looked between them, their second hand clothes, and asked, 'Whoa. Did you buy all of that?'

  The twins blinked at me, then looked at each other and burst out laughing. I could feel my cheeks grow hot; were they laughing at me? 'What? What's so funny?'

  'You think we buy all this?' Pietro gestured with his finger, circling at the food.

  'And with what money?' Wanda finished with a snicker, covering her mouth.

  At first, I didn't understand what they were saying. When it finally hit me, I shook my head, and grabbed a box of cereal, holding it up. 'Wait, you stole this? You stole all this food? Guys, that's illegal!'

  I felt stupid for saying it, and the fact that the twins were still smiling a little, looking at me as though I was overreacting. Wanda just shrugged her shoulders, snorting, 'So?'

  'So? What if you got caught? You'd get in so much trouble!'

  But Pietro just tossed his head, smirking. 'Pfft, I do not get caught. Besides, it is not as if we have money. We have no jobs. Did you forget we just escaped prison?'

  'I-I just —' they had a point, of course. 'It's not right. And it's dangerous! You even said so yourself, there are men out there looking for us. Getting caught stealing is only going to make it easier for them.'

  'Well, if you have better solution,' Pietro said, raising an eyebrow. 'Then please share.'

  'Never mind, then,' I muttered, dropping the cereal box and scowling, turning my gaze away from them. What the hell could I say to that? I knew the problem went deeper than my own feelings, I just knew it, but I wasn't sure how to explain it, much less in a way that these two would understand. It was, I guess, a harsh wake-up call that these two weren't like me. They didn't think like me, they didn't care about the same things I did, and apparently what I still cared about was stupid now.

  Frustrated, I just turned on my heel and walked back towards the staircase.

  'Wait, where are you going?' Wanda called after me. 'I thought you were hungry!'

  'Yeah, well,' I just flapped an arm in dismissal, not turning back to look at them as I disappeared up the steps. 'I lost my appetite.'

  I didn't go back into the office. Instead, I wandered around, finding myself lot in thought again. The theater was a lot bigger than I first thought, and it didn't take me long to get lost. Which was fine, I suppose. I didn't really want to be found at that moment.

  I ended up in what appeared to be a practice room of sorts, for ballet maybe. There were banisters sticking out of the floor as well as the walls, which were lined with mirrors. Said mirrors were now broken and cracked, so my reflection was left jagged, distorted, and twisted out of shape. Not that I could recognize it as anything else now.

  The furniture in here seemed to have been brough
t in from somewhere else; there were a row of seats from the theatre hall that had been unceremoniously dumped in a corner. Footlockers were lined up along one wall, two broken into and the others looking rusted over. Along one wall were curtains; upon closer inspection, I realized that there were windows behind it, surprisingly unbroken. But the overcast white sky hurt my eyes compared to the soft darkness of the room; I stepped back and closed the curtains again. Instead, I flopped on the floor, beside a bench that wrapped around a column in the room.

  I sighed, dropping my head into my hands. I hated the feeling of my hair flicking by my face, unweighted by its new, short length. I tried brushing it back, but it was too short to stay tucked behind my ear for long. It was, really, a minor frustration, but on top of everything else, it just made me feel worse.

  I couldn't decide if I was really angry at the twins or not. I barely knew them, so it felt wrong to be so quick in passing judgment. And yet it felt like they knew exactly what they were doing. The way they acted, the look on Wanda's face, Pietro's laugh, combined with the weird idea of them knowing me on top of it all, when I knew nothing about them...it left me feeling off-kilter.

  I felt like I was wrong for saying something, but I couldn't stop the righteousness I still felt over the matter. What the heck was I supposed to do?

  And that's not to mention I was still hungry.

  Still, I couldn't make myself get up and go back to them. It'd be like admitting I was wrong, that I needed their help as much as I didn't want to.

  These thoughts swirled around in my head, and I got so lost in my reverie that I jumped when I heard the door open behind me. I glanced over my shoulder, looking up in surprise as Pietro slipped inside, his head bowed slightly in embarrassment. 'Sorry, did not mean to scare you. Wanda said I could find you up here.'

  I could only nod dumbly before turning back to study my hands. It wouldn't be until later would I consider how strange it was what Pietro said. How did Wanda know where I was? Had she followed me?

  I said nothing as Pietro slowly ambled over, coming to a stop a few feet away. There was some tension in the air as neither of us spoke; I sure as hell had nothing to say, and I didn't know why he came to find me. I still wasn't sure if I should really be calling the Maximoff twins my friends or not.

  With a small huff, Pietro bent down into a crouch, so we were almost eye-level, although he stood just outside my peripheral vision, so I had to turn my head to look at him. It was then I noticed something in his hand, bright red against the gray and blue of his clothes. An apple.

  'I thought you might still be hungry,' Pietro admitted with a sheepish smile, when he saw me staring at the apple. He held it out to me, but I tucked my hands under my arms, looking away again. Maybe I was just refusing out of spite, but I didn't want it after the argument.

  Pietro exhaled through his nose, his hand dropping away with the apple. He tossed his head, perhaps annoyed by my attitude. But there was a different tone in his voice when he spoke again a moment later.

  'We did not mean to laugh at you,' Pietro said softly, rolling the apple beneath his hand against the floor. I glanced at him; Pietro wasn't looking at me, now frowning at his ash-covered sneakers. 'Sometimes I forget that you have lived differently than us, before the Crucible. I suppose life in America is much nicer than it ever was here.'

  I pulled my knees up, wrapping my arms around them as I pressed my chin against my shoulder, watching Pietro but only out of the corner of my eye. 'You're from here? From Sokovia? That...couldn't have been easy.'

  From what I learned in my modern history class, Sokovia wasn't exactly the nicest place to live ever since World War Two. To say it fell under hard times during the Third Reich would be a gross understatement; its subsequent liberation would then be followed by years of economic depression and political turmoil; a famine in 1956 left the entire country crippled and left it open for the USSR to take over. There was some minor improvements after that, if you consider a second takeover by a foreign country a good thing; but Communism brought jobs and food for a little, before the Korean War and the Suez Crisis kind of threw things out of whack again.

  'It was...not perfect,' Pietro admitted with a shrug, again with that self-deprecating smile that held more pain than humor. 'But at least we had each other, and our parents. We always had food. We did not live in fear. Much has changed since we were little, you do not even realize.'

  'You must have been young when it happened,' I muttered. It was kind of up-and-down again for Sokovia while the Cold War reigned, with the little European country getting the worst of it. Things didn't look up for Sokovia until as late as the 1990's, when the USSR was disbanded, bringing about an end to Communism and a rise to democracy and capitalism in Sokovia that was so desperately needed. It was good for about ten years, as Sokovia finally gained political and economic strength — when, on the eve of the 21st millennium, until Russia invaded once again. The New Year's Revolution. This happened in concurrence with the Yugoslav Wars, particularly the Croatian War of Independence.

  'Five or six, I cannot remember,' Pietro said, making a face as he tried to recall. 'You learn fast when things changed. You learn, or you die. That, I guess, has not changed one bit.'

  The New Year's Revolution sparked a small uproar on the global scale — the president at the time, Alexei Krovopuskov, had declared Sokovia to be ancient territory from way back in the medieval days, and was apparently trying to reclaim its heritage or however they spun it for the propaganda reels. America and the UN provided aid to Sokovia with weapons from Stark Industries, which had already been ahead of its time back then; Russia backed off and, as far as anyone was concerned, Sokovia had been at peace ever since.

  Least to say, Sokovia had been the punching bag of world history.

  'That is why we steal,' Pietro said, meeting my gaze, his expression entirely serious, if not a little forlorn. 'We came from the Crucible, and know little. What else can we do but survive?'

  I nodded slowly, having to pry my eyes away from him, too embarrassed with myself. I was like a fish out of water, and nothing made sense. I knew it was wrong to steal; that wasn't any different then or now. We had so little money, if any at all. What could I do? Get a job? I had no intention of staying here long enough for that to happen. And being hunted on top of it all? That doesn't reconcile easily with staying behind the law.

  'You still don't think it is okay,' Pietro guessed accurately, perhaps judging the look on my face. He raised his his chin, a line forming between his brow. 'Would you not steal, even if it meant you would have to sleep with empty stomach?'

  'I…' I started, then closed my mouth when I couldn't come up with an answer. Then, before I could think of anything else, my stomach growled. I placed a hand over my abdomen, flushing red while Pietro smirked.

  'Well, if it eases your conscience,' Pietro said with a small chuckle, before his features smooth again. He flicked his hand, and the apple rolled over, coming to a stop by my foot. 'You are not the one stealing.'

  Then with a huff, he planted hands on his knees and stood up, moving out of sight behind me. Picking up the apple, I studied its surface as I listened to his footsteps scrap against the floor, softly fading out before the door closed. I still wasn't happy with it; if I ate this apple, wouldn't I be profiting off a crime? Would that make me complicit?

  Did it even matter anymore?

  My stomach growled again and it was then I finally gave in and bit into the apple. The skin broke beneath my teeth, the pulp tart and juicy on my tongue. I couldn't resist any longer after that, and the apple was gone in less than a minute. All thoughts of it being stolen were dashed from my mind when my stomach took over. My hunger didn't care if it was stolen or not, the apple tasted exactly the same as any other, regularly bought apple.

  When all I held was the core in my hand, I felt shame in the pit of my stomach. Bitterness bubbled up from where the sweetness had initially been. But I swallowed it down;
the apple was mine, I ate it, and it was too late to be having seconds thoughts now.

  Standing up, apple core in hand, I went back to the curtains, pushing one aside and opening the window behind it. My broken reflection followed me where I went in this room, mimicking my movements like it had any right to pretend to be me. I couldn't make myself look at it for very long without starting to feel a wave of panic and pressure in my chest. I supposed I could always go into another room, but I was afraid of running into the twins again, and I wasn't ready for that just yet.

  Below, the street was empty as usual. I took in a breath of fresh air, feeling a little better. Looking out made me feel a little less trapped in the small room. Lonely scraps of paper blew in the wind, spiraling across the Tarmac in small tornados. I could see more of the city from up here, saw how the low buildings stretched on for what seemed like a mile or more. Mountains framed the horizon, trapping the Novi Grad in a small valley. It would've felt like paradise, I suppose, a haven safely hidden from the rest of the world. If only it wasn't so gray and lifeless, I might've actually felt safe here.