“Then it’s just one of many terrible things you’ve done to survive.” He couldn’t tell if her voice held contempt or pity, and didn’t want to read her and find out. Making eye contact would mean looking at Shendra again, and he squirmed at the thought of it.
“I didn’t start out hoping to be terrible,” Flynn replied. “I learned young that I excelled as a liar. I hadn’t been a runaway for three days when someone took a shot at me for stealing food. It was easier to convince them I was collecting on behalf of a forgotten debt.” He felt another pair of eyes judging him from the shadows. “Eating for more than a day meant doing far worse, and I learned early on not to feel anything at all.”
“Until you became as you are,” Zella concluded. “An inconvenient change of heart, too late to mean a thing.”
Flynn was exhausted and gave no response. She had no solace to give him, no sympathy for his sins. She didn’t condemn him either, but simply nodded, thanked him for his time, and left. Restless, drifting in and out of thinnest sleep, Flynn sat alone with the phantom eyes watching from the shadows.
CHAPTER SIX: A Broken Home
After a night of unsteady sleep, dawn finally crept in. Flynn had drifted in and out, met with memories of people he once knew and, at times, it was difficult to tell if he was dreaming or awake. When he climbed from the chair, his limbs stiff and sore from the previous day, the morning sun had only begun to color the sky with brilliant streaks of orange. He walked to the window overlooking the courtyard and surveyed the grounds in the morning light, humbled by neglect and wear.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he finally confessed. “All Airia gave us was Einré Maraius’s name, but I wouldn’t know her if she approached me in a crowd.” He hadn’t finished the brandy, but his head pulsed with a hangover anyway. “There are just too many possibilities.”
“And yet you’re talking to me about it,” a voice behind him inquired. “Why?”
Flynn turned and leaned on the window, rubbing his tired eyes. Death reposed in the chair he’d been using, her legs crossed over the armrest. Her black catsuit sheened as Flynn moved from the window and the morning sun passed across it. When they first met, she’d introduced herself as Scytha.
“All I know is what you know, Flynn,” she continued. “The name ‘Einré’ means no more to me than to you or anyone else.”
“I know, I know,” he replied. “I just need a sounding board. I … I have so many questions. Maybe I’m just not asking the right ones.”
Scytha sighed, and crossed to the windowsill to sit on the sun-bleached cushions; were she real, she’d have brushed Flynn along the way. “Consider this, then: Airia meant for you to be able to find this Einré, this needle in a haystack. She would have logically set you on the right path, at least.”
“Without knowing her intent, it’s more likely we came this far randomly. By chance. That all she could do was get us to safety, and all we’ve done is seek the path of least resistance.” He fought to concentrate, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Airia’s been captured. We lost Mack and Leria … but it happened right near a conduit to another world. Maybe she fed Renivar’s people information, forced us down the rabbit hole?”
Scytha shrugged. “Maybe.”
Flynn waited for her to say something more, but she merely hugged her arms under her breasts and smiled at him coyly.
“You know, that’s not very helpful.”
“You don’t know me well enough to be very helpful,” she told him as she rose once more to her feet. “But there are things you have the capacity to … imagine…” Her voice grew breathy as she approached him, and her hand grasped the zipper of her catsuit and guided it down slowly. Flynn was briefly transfixed, before forcing his eyes shut to regain his bearings. Scytha was back on the bench, as though she had never moved. “Your thoughts are straying,” she warned. She kicked back, looking out the window. “I can go wherever you want with this. I just don’t get why you’re trying to read into the thoughts and motivations of a goddess.”
“Former goddess,” Flynn corrected. He paused, considered it. “Airia’s not thinking like a goddess, but like someone who used to be one. She wants to make things right. She also wants revenge.” The implications troubled him.
“So why not imagine her up, at least?” Scytha asked. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to go straight to the source?”
“I know her even less than I know you.”
“Your priorities are all wrong, you know.”
It was a new voice, and it startled Flynn as he turned to the door. The last time he’d actually heard her was months ago on Earth, where she’d drowned, whispering, in blood. Rebecca Saul. Scytha vanished in Flynn’s peripheral vision, and he tried to reorient his subconscious mind to call her back.
“I wasn’t looking for you,” he told Rebecca.
“I know. But your mind comes back to me a lot.”
Flynn lost the will to dismiss her at those words. She brought her hand to her neck, sliding her fingers across where he’d slashed her. Flynn felt a familiar shame and the temptation to apologize. I didn’t mean to, he would tell her. It was an accident. I panicked. I didn’t mean to.
“I’m not going to waste the apology,” he said out loud.
“You’d want to save it for the real thing, I’m sure,” she replied with an amused smile. “How it must have hurt, though … to re-encounter someone who had loved me and left, just to have things turn out this way.”
“I never loved you. I just … I made you love me to get inside your head. To twist your way of thinking. I put a lot of time in for you, Rebecca.”
“I was special to you.”
“You … you were that, at least,” he conceded.
“You taught me the truth. You taught me that people like us are aberrations. It’s not because of what we are, but only because of what we aren’t: normal.” She gave a heartfelt smile. “So, Flynn. What are you doing here?”
She was blocking the door, but no one would come to see him anyway. The majority of his companions had no casual interest in speaking with him, or had been alienated by his recent actions. Mack would have come in to say ‘hi,’ he realized. It would have been a relief to banish Rebecca now, but she was too firmly entrenched in his thoughts and waited patiently for his answer.
“You’ve seen the people of this world,” she said. “You’re normal again. At least, enough to pass. Enough that you’d need few lies to get by. But your comrades? They’re not like you; they can’t understand what this place means or what it is you need.”
“I have what I need,” Flynn replied. “A mission. A job. A chance to make things right—”
She interrupted in a forlorn whisper. “You’re so lost. You need normalcy. We all do. You put a weapon in my hand and helped me find stability after a life on the run, after trying to care for everyone except myself. We all need normalcy. It’s what gets us through the day.”
For all the love his friends had for him at that moment, Flynn was genuinely tempted to turn his back on them and walk out. It would have been easier, to trust them to find their way without him. Zella can open the ways, he considered. They wouldn’t be stranded. If they were still sleeping, it might be the best time to go. There was no denying he could have a life here, and many of his friends might even understand. Rebecca watched expectantly, her blue eyes as vibrant as he remembered. She pushed a few strands of her long black hair behind her ear.
“You can’t stay with people like these,” she told him. “They don’t hate what you’ve done, they hate that you can do it. People can’t stand seeing others excel. It destroys the balance, makes them jealous. The superior need to be kept apart from the common people for the good of the common people. Your words.”
“My words,” Flynn echoed, having come to the source of the problem. He returned to the chair that had been his impromptu bed, keeping
eyes on Rebecca while he knelt down to pick up the bottle of brandy. Everything she was saying was just her interpretation of things he’d taught her. The girl she was had died long before he’d cut her throat, and what had survived was some vile chimera borne from the two of them. The longer he studied her, the more he saw his former self in her. What rattled him most was how comfortable she’d become with it. “I want you gone.”
Flynn uncorked the brandy and turned his back on her, walking to the window overlooking the courtyard to dump it. It was his father’s vice, and the relaxation it brought came with lowered defenses. He didn’t need ghosts of the past whispering his shame.
His hand stopped on the latch, the remnants of the bottle swishing as he halted. He corked it once more, tossing it aside on the nearby bed, to touch the window pane as intrigue wrapped his face. A soldier was sitting on the lip of the fountain; she was smoking a cigarette.
* * *
She stared wistfully into the woods. Her posture hadn’t changed from when Flynn had seen her through the window; she rested her elbow on a crossed leg, her cigarette hanging lazily near her lips. Flynn came around from the side of the manor, having used the back entrance so as not to draw attention. He stopped at a corner and watched her, studied her. She sat comfortably, sighed softly, all as though she’d been here before.
Flynn should have turned away there—it was likely her arrival was a fleeting venture and, were his company quiet, she would never know anyone was there. Yet he approached her, softly at first, compelled by something nameless. After a night spent with familiar and unwelcome faces, what he realized he needed just then was the company of a stranger.
She hadn’t yet noticed him.
As he neared the fountain, he could see her more clearly. Her hair and tail were both reddish brown, but with patches as dark as black and light as orange streaked through. From under her uniform coat, a cutlass hung sheathed on her left side. She abruptly drew her hand back and Flynn halted; she’d merely placed it in her pocket. He cautiously moved to her side so as not to sneak up completely on her. “Excuse me—”
The girl choked. She scrambled up, but it wasn’t to run. She stumbled forward, turning as she dropped her cigarette so that her hand could shoot for her sword. “What the—who—?!” She was coughing violently, and Flynn realized she’d been inhaling just as he’d tried to get her attention.
“Easy,” he said, raising his hands to show he was unarmed. “I was just passing through. I didn’t expect to find anyone out here.”
As she coughed and choked, nodding rapidly in response, her sword arm relaxed. He waited until she could stand upright, her eyes wet and red with pain. She started to speak, but coughed one last time before scolding him. “Shouldn’t sneak up on a body like that! Scared the bloody daylights out of me!”
Keeping a wary eye on Flynn, she crouched and searched until she found the cigarette she’d dropped. He kept his distance, noting the twin pistols holstered on her right side, one above the other, just under her arm.
“I wasn’t trying to frighten you,” he replied. “I just … I didn’t expect to see anyone out here.”
“Should be sayin’ the same thing, mate.” She put the cigarette back in her mouth without a second thought, taking a drag and trying to stifle the wet cough that followed. She nodded at the manor, pointing with the cigarette. “House has been abandoned for years. What puts you out here?”
A lie came as naturally as the old days. Yet for the first time, Flynn looked his subject in the eyes and recognized something of himself in her; whatever tale he spun, she would pass judgment only on who he was, not what. He could be normal, unremarkable, and that brought with it infinite possibilities.
“I’ve traveled here from a distant land,” he told her. “Came from the west. You probably know my kind—on the run from all the violence in the countryside. Tried to take a shortcut to Selif but found this place instead.”
Even such a hollow truth shook on his lips. In this soldier he saw temptation, the means to fall and become the man he was once more. It was then he knew that while he could prosper in a place like this, it was for that reason alone that he could never allow himself to stay.
“Long as you’re not moving in. Family in that house met a bloody end. Locals won’t go near it now. Hard feelings. Too much guilt.”
“You’re here,” he pointed out.
“Guilt’s not mine,” she replied, looking up at the somber manor. “Place has been derelict since I was small. Knew the family that lived here, once.” A loneliness cracked in her voice as she went on. “My quiet place, now. Enough damage done, left well enough alone. I … ’ve got a lot in common with this house.”
“Is that so?”
The soldier shook off her melancholy and forced a smile. She tossed her cigarette in the fountain and turned to Flynn. “How ’bout you, mate? Who’re you, what’s your name?”
Flynn was taken aback by the abrupt turn in her mood. “Ah—”
“Name’s Alicea,” she said. “Shea, for short. Shea Bagwell, Private.”
“Flynn Carolina,” he countered, without missing a beat.
“Carolina…?” she murmured, intrigued. Though it wasn’t truly his name, it wasn’t entirely a lie either. Shea reached out and shook his hand cordially. “Pleasure, Flynn. Pity I can’t linger.”
“Duty calls?”
It was better that she left now. Shea was the first heart-to-heart he’d had since coming to this world, and thus far he’d resisted the lure. Better to return inside, gather his friends, and begin planning their next step. He sensed ways from this world, distant and faint, and wished they were certain and close.
“Shame to break company after just meeting,” Shea replied, evidently bothered. With a nod of her head, she gestured at the forest path, and asked, “Fancy a stroll?”
It would have only taken one word to decline, but whatever his intentions, a different one slipped through his lips. “Alright,” he said, and followed her through the gate and down the winding path.
* * *
Chari found Poe shirtless, leaning against the wall by the cracked and broken windows of the entrance. He watched outside with cold contempt, and though she possessed little urge to speak with him, Chari couldn’t help but wonder just the same. The curtain flicked with the wind, and she felt the need to comment.
“You are aware that nothing is out there?”
“There was a soldier,” Poe replied. “I hurried down, heard voices outside. Flynn is leading her astray.”
Poe’s sword hung at his bare lower back, and she realized he must have gotten dressed in a hurry. There was a time when one look at Poe’s sculpted body would have been reason enough to lead him to her bedroom by the belt. She was sorry to know him so well that it quashed any yearning she felt, but so long as he didn’t notice, she saw no harm in savoring the view. Her studies eventually brought her to his steely eyes, tired and red.
“Have you been sleeping?”
He shook his head. “I don’t sleep much. A few hours at a time, then patrol. We’ve had no pursuers up till now.”
Poe’s response concerned her. “Guardian … there is no one here. We are safe.”
“Our attackers survived the encounter. They may have some means to follow us that we do not—” Poe managed to suppress a yawn, then continued. “The soldier. She may have been a coincidence, but after the schoolgirl … I fear Flynn has learned nothing.”
“In what manner would you have dealt with her?” She dreaded the answer.
“A swift death, her remnants left to the forest. Another casualty of war to any who might find her. Or a warning to whomever may have sent her.”
“Such a deed you feel is necessary?” she asked with disgust. After their exit from Breth, she was in no hurry to kill again.
“Understand,” he said with some reluctance, “murder is not
my first solution, just the one I feel to be safest. We have already been devastated once for letting a stranger too close.”
Chari had no reply. The house smelled stale; though they had a kitchen, none had yet taken to preparing breakfast. It was a duty Mack usually handled, something they had all taken for granted. She had meant to prepare a meal for him in kind; now she might never get the opportunity. She shared none of this with Poe, who watched on for the slightest sign of movement outside. He trembled a little from the cold wind creeping through the glass, and were he any sort of friend, she’d have kindly offered to take his place. But she needed only to brush the scar he’d carved into her leg to remember he was not.
“You should rest…” Her advice was half-hearted.
“I need not your concern,” he replied tersely.
“My concern is of no relevance,” she said firmly. “But your health remains of inescapable import. If you are to succeed a goddess, you must journey to where her power is kept, and to do so you must be rested and fit. The health of our party is my domain, and I do not wish to be troubled with yours.”
Poe considered her words before looking back in defeat. She hated to say anything that might encourage his lust for power, for that desire superseded any sense of duty and camaraderie he might possess. As he left, Chari remained by the entrance, grateful they were momentarily lost. Knowing that Einré Maraius almost certainly waited on TseTsu, she welcomed every diversion that might delay her eventual homecoming.
* * *
As the autumn winds dusted the pine needles from their path and rustled Flynn’s hair, he casually struck it back. Walking with Shea felt so natural that this simple act unnerved him; he needed to remember that he was a changed man, something inhuman. But with Shea by his side, her features mirroring his, though softer and natural, there was nothing about himself he had to hide, and he hadn’t quite pegged why this bothered him.
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