by Natalie Reid
When he finished speaking, she was the one that found she couldn’t speak.
Griffin gulped at her silence, and rubbed at the back of his neck. “Well, thank you for helping me,” he said, tweaking the blanket that was still in his hands.
She reached a hand out and touched the corner of his elbow. “I hope you find your friend.”
He stared down at her hand. “Me too.”
With one last lingering glance, she told him goodbye, and walked out his door. When she had gone, Griffin didn’t feel as broken hearted as he had before. Old wounds in his heart were not reopened. The fear of what could be happening to Harper outweighed everything else.
He rushed to the counter to retrieve the make-shift set of keys he had fitted to the bike, planning to hit the streets and become a spy or a criminal or whatever else it was that his friend needed him to be.
* * *
Tom found Harper in the study, fallen asleep over her computer screen. He tried to move quietly to grab a map he had been meaning to read, but the girl jerked in consciousness, the lines of the keyboard imprinted into her forehead.
“Heard you snuck out last night,” he commented, taking a seat at the table.
She looked around the room with a groggy stare. Her hands, which were forever clad in fingerless gloves, rose to her face and pressed into her forehead as if willing the last remnants of slumber to leave her in peace.
“You mean you heard my cousin yelling at me,” Harper corrected. She leaned back in her chair and let out a loud, tired sigh.
“Where’d you go?” he asked.
She lifted her feet up on her chair and hugged her legs to her chest. “Nowhere,” she mumbled. “Just to see a friend.”
Tom picked at the edge of the map in front of him, causing it to curl like an ocean wave. “This the same friend that helped you fix up the bike?”
She scowled down at her knees.
“It’s not just a bike, is it?” he asked.
“Course it’s just a bike. What else would it be?” she snapped sullenly.
Tom turned back to the map, hunching over it. “Fine. Forget I said anything.”
For a minute he traced his lines over the streets of the map. West end to East, Business to Agricultural. As he studied the streets, he spread the map out wider so that it covered nearly half the table. Harper eyed him curiously from where she sat. Her feet came off her chair and she stood up to sit on the edge of the table so that she could look down at the map as well. Her shadow cast a cloud over the paper, and Tom stopped what he was doing to look up at her.
“I used to live right there,” she stated, pointing down to a space on the map. “I hated it,” she admitted with a shake of her head.
Tom peered closer at the neighborhood she had pointed to. It lied just north of the east end. “Why’s that?” he asked.
Harper pressed her palms together, black fabric meeting black, and stuck them in between her knees like someone might stuff a book back on a shelf. “You may find this hard to believe, but I didn’t exactly hit it off with the girls in my neighborhood. They couldn’t stand me. Said I was boyish and messy. They were right, but still…” She shook her head. “It wasn’t right.”
She scratched at the back of her short hair and then quickly returned her tightly pressed palms to her knees. “I used to wear my dad’s jacket every day. I guess that’s something else they didn’t like. It was a great brown, tattered monster of a thing. The bottom reached all the way to my knees, and the sleeves were like five inches to big. My arms would be flopping around inside.”
Tom shifted in his seat to better face her. “So why’d you wear it?”
She shrugged. “It smelt like him. Made me feel like he was close by. He had to work these horrible hours, so I was always asleep by the time he got back home. I really only got to see him on the weekends.”
Downstairs, the floors creaked. Denneck was in the kitchen making breakfast. They could hear the tick of the gas as the stove was turned on.
“I dunno.” She hunched her shoulders tightly to her neck. “Maybe things would have been different if he had been around more. Maybe they wouldn’t have taunted me so much.”
Tom sat up straighter. “Taunted you how?”
“First it was just little things. Teasing, name-calling. Then as they grew older, they seemed to grow meaner. One time they started pelting me with rocks. Only managed to hit me once before a Task Force agent drove by on his bike. He didn’t say anything to them, probably wouldn’t have told them to stop if he had seen, but all the same, the bike made the girls afraid. Then one night, a few weeks later, the girls cornered me on my way home. They grabbed my dad’s jacket from my shoulders and started to rip it with a pocket knife that one of the girls had brought, took turns shoving me to the ground while they were at it.
Across the street I could see that a Task Force agent had parked his bike in front of an apartment complex. He wasn’t around, but the lights on the bike were still on, like it could start up at any second. And I thought, if I could just make it to that bike, then I would be safe. Just reach the bike, that’s all I had to do. Then the girls would leave me alone. So I lunged for what was left of my dad’s jacket and tried to make a run for it, but one of the girls tripped me up. I ended up falling to the floor. But the worst part was that the pocket knife had gotten caught up in the folds of the jacket. My palm rammed right into it. The material of the jacket kept me from slicing my hand in half, but still…”
Harper laid her hand flat on her leg and slowly lifted the glove off her palm. There was a large white scar reaching from the top of her palm to just above her wrist. Tom winced when he saw it. He tried to stand up to get a better look, but Harper quickly covered it up again.
“I don’t like to be reminded of it,” she mumbled.
“That’s why you always wear gloves?” he guessed.
The stairs creaked as Denneck climbed up, a slow, rhythmic meter like the ticking of a clock.
“Does your friend know this story?” Tom asked.
She hopped off the table. “He doesn’t need to know.”
A knock sounded at the door. Denneck poked his head in, announcing, “Guys, breakfast.”
Harper nodded and made for the exit.
Tom stopped her before she could go, saying, “Well I think he should.”
* * *
Commander Vin looked out the fifth floor window of Task Force headquarters. From below, Sergeant Ritter was briskly walking up the steps, stuffing something into his pocket. Vin turned away from the window and stepped over to Ritter’s desk. A small vial of blue flowers sat on top. It had been there for so many years, yet Vin had never asked why he had them. He had allowed his right-hand man to keep his secrets. Only now he was feeling as if there shouldn’t be any between them.
Vin leaned back on Ritter’s desk, using it as a chair, and waited for him to make his way over. When Ritter exited the elevator and saw his boss at his desk, he gave him a nod of acknowledgement, and dutifully walked over.
“You need something?” he asked.
“Not exactly,” Vin said, studying Ritter’s face carefully as he spoke. “Just something that came up in my head and wouldn’t leave me alone.”
“Yeah?” Ritter prodded. He reached over on his desk and moved the vial of blue flowers a little farther away from where Vin was sitting.
“That soldier from the military you said took a swing at you; what did you mean when you said you took care of him?”
Ritter grinned mischievously. “What did you think I meant?”
His Commander shook his head. “No, I’m asking you. What exactly did you do?”
Ritter eyed him suspiciously before replying, “I gave him a good beating. Made sure he wouldn’t take a swing at one of us ever again.”
“So you didn’t kill him?”
“Ruffle feathers, don’t break bones, remember? You told me that.”
“I remember,” Vin replied gravely.
Whe
n he didn’t say anything else, Ritter stuffed his hands in his pockets, asking, “Was there anything else?”
“One more question actually.” He shifted on the desk so he could stare him in the eye. “Does the name Aileron mean anything to you?”
Ritter shrugged nonchalantly and shook his head. “No. Should it?”
Vin stood up from the desk. “No, it’s nothing really.” Then he picked up the vial of blue flowers and held them up to the light, saying, “I always wondered why you had these.”
“They’re nothing… really,” Ritter replied, mimicking his boss.
Vin placed them back down on the desk with a solid thud. “Well I’ll let you get to your work then. Making any more progress with our friends underground?”
“I’m working on it sir.”
“I hope the last of these renegade attacks are behind us,” he said, a look of warning in his eyes.
“Our agents are being equipped with new weapons tomorrow. That should make it near impossible for them to be jumped.”
“Near impossible,” Vin repeated. “I should hope they would be good enough to match the skills of anyone…Chance even.”
Ritter cleared his throat and nodded his head. “Well, if she’s unlucky enough to get behind one, she won’t have a chance.”
Vin clapped him on his shoulder rather forcefully, saying, “I’m counting on it.” Then he tapped the Task Force insignia that was stitched on Ritter’s shirt, almost as if he was patting it for good luck, before stalking off and leaving him alone.
Ritter slumped into the chair at his desk, careful not to crush the object in his pocket, and stared at his boss as he wove his way across the room. When he finally retreated past the doors that led to his office, Ritter got up from his seat and quickly headed for the exit.
Once outside, he found his bike and quickly hit the streets. Normally Ritter didn’t use his bike all that often. He was the one Task Force agent that could stomach leaving it behind. The reason was simple. Ritter didn’t like people knowing he was an agent, and the bike was the easiest was to get spotted. This time, however, he cared a little less about secrecy, and a little more about urgency.
When he reached the Expedition Depot, he rode his bike to the side and parked it in the shadows. Then he walked up to the statue of the bird and dug his hand inside his pocket. When he took it out, there was a small vial of Harebells, just long enough to enclose two small baby blue flowers. Reaching into the bird’s beak, he pulled out the roll of paper. In the space on the bottom, he wrote: Give these to her. Then, on the next line he added: Carry a gun the next time you go out. If you die, so does your friend.
He placed the Harebells inside the paper, rolled it up gently, and tucked it back inside the bird.
He got back on his bike and was going to ride it onto the street, when his tablet rang. He muttered a curse and reached his hand into his pocket to pull it out. The number told him that Sergeant Lance was calling him.
“What is it?” he demanded.
“Where are you right now?” Lance asked, as if innocently inquiring after his health.
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”
“We received a home distress call on the north side. On—”
Ritter cut him off, saying, “Send someone else. I’m on the opposite side of town.”
He was about to hang up when Lance asked, “Are you sure? I saw you heading out on your bike in that direction.”
“Am I sure I’m on the opposite side of town?!” he asked incredulously. “You don’t think I can tell where I am! If I were you, Lance, I’d tread lightly in what you say next.”
Before the younger sergeant could respond, Ritter hung up and zoomed away on his bike. In his anger, he had grown careless and did not see the two blue circles of a hover bike as it hid in the dark alley across the street.
Chapter 15
A New Kind of Weapon
Jessie sat hunched over on her bed, staring at the small vial of blue flowers in her hands. When she had rolled them out from inside the bird, she had stared at them in confusion. The image that she had of Ritter would not sit still in her head. She knew she hated him. She knew that. But when Nel had said she hated him, she had heard something else hidden behind the words. A secret longing for a hidden field of flowers, a wish to go back to a time when she still believed a place like that could exist, still believed that her father was a good man that kept promises. Then she had read Ritter’s warning about carrying a gun, and things became even more complicated.
She sighed and got up from the bed, placing the flowers on the wooden table in her room. There were only two days left until she had to bring Nel up top. She was beginning to feel that her time in the Resistance was a waste. Her reconnaissance missions with Kurt were next to useless when she knew that The Thirty were probably not in the city. Of course, she couldn’t tell them that without risking exposure. And, if she did steal Nel away from them, they would find out she was a traitor, and then she would never help them save those thirty people.
After going to the kitchen and grabbing some water, she left the house. She walked quietly through the streets, trying to force herself to gulp her water slowly. The purple spirals on the ceiling made her feel dizzy, so she closed her eyes as she walked. She had memorized the streets of Bunker City so well that she didn’t need her eyes to tell her where she was going. However, when she turned down one street, her arm bumped into someone.
Her eyes flew open at the sudden contact, and she saw Jason standing there. He was looking at her with an amused smile on his face, much like when he had met her in the tunnels when she had first decided to join them.
“Do you always walk with your eyes closed?” he asked.
“I’m trying to remember what night looks like.”
She continued walking, and Jason turned around to follow her down the street.
“I can understand,” he said sympathetically. “The constant light takes some getting used to. I would dim them in the night if it wasn’t so important that we be able to see if anyone ever tried breaking in.”
She shook her head. “You don’t have to explain yourself.”
He tilted his head and squinted up at the lights on the cave ceiling. “It must be quite different from living up on an airbase.”
She laughed softly. “You have no idea.”
“Will you tell me about it?” he asked.
“That’s like trying to tell water about air,” she commented with a shake of her head.
“Well, will you try telling Nel about it sometime?” He said the words quietly, as if they were a secret.
She looked up and studied his face, wondering if he knew anything about why she was really there.
“She talks to me about you,” he explained. “Whenever I go to visit her. She says she likes how you explain things.”
Jessie stared at the road ahead of her and did not respond.
“Does she remind you of him?” Jason asked. “The Potentian you said was killed.”
“If you want the truth, everything reminds me of him.”
She stuck her hand in her pocket and could feel the sure lines of the folded paper with Ben’s finch inside. Nearly every chance she got, she took out that drawing, hoping for some ounce of comfort to help ease the pain.
The two walked forward in silence. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine Ben’s finch in the forest. She wondered if it was still alive, what it had seen since she had let it go, if it had found Nel’s field of blue flowers.
A dangerous idea occurred to Jessie, and because of her short time left, she decided to throw caution to the wind.
“Can you tell me why it is that Nel says she hates her father?” she asked.
Jason stuttered in his steps, but forced himself to walk on as if there was nothing particularly important about her question.
“Nel’s father was not a good man,” he explained. “He killed people without thinking twice; he cared little for humans in general.
But, when she still lived up top, she didn’t know that. She adored her father. She cried for weeks and weeks when we brought her down here. She’d scream out for her father in the night, even hold conversations with him, pretending he was there. When we finally told her the truth about him, she wouldn’t believe us. It took her a long time to accept it. When she did, it was a complete reversal. Before, he had been the only man she loved. Now he’s the only man she hates.”
“That must be sad,” she whispered, looking down to the bottle of water in her hand and tilting it so the liquid slowly ran to the top like a meandering stream.
“I don’t think of it that way,” he defended. “At the time, it was tough to go through, but we saved that girl from what would have been a horrible life filled with lies.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “But it still must be hard for her down here.”
“Life’s hard for everyone.”
She laughed bitterly. “That’s a gentle way to put it.”
Suddenly Jason stopped and reached out for her arm. “Then be just as blunt with me. You’re not happy down here, are you?”
Her eyes fell from his.
“I know that look on your face,” he told her. “You look as tormented as I did when my father died.”
“Then you know that it isn’t being down here that’s making me unhappy.”
“I’m afraid placing you with Kurt was not the best move we could have made.” He shook his head in apology. “I wasn’t thinking of you as a person when we first met. I should have realized the emotional state you would be in.”
“I can handle Kurt,” she told him, making her face as blank as a statue.
“Alex told me what happened up top. How you seemed effected by his way of doing things. I can tell him not to take you up there next time,” he offered. “Kurt may be older than me, but I’m still in charge.”