by helenrena
Since by a stroke of luck we’d ended up in a bookstore rather than, say, a clothing department, we had plenty of printed materials to learn things from. Fox had somehow divined this most amazing skill of reading, then painstakingly taught it to the rest of us. The only problem was that while books had told us a prodigious amount of stuff, from word definitions to how one could survive a zombie apocalypse, there was nothing on how to make it through a normal day in a normal city. How would a bus stop look? How would you get a taxi? How would you use a phone? And it wasn’t like we could just ask any of these things after we escaped, because what if the person we stopped worked for Horgreth or some other gift-trafficking lord?
Next, I had meant to talk about our clothes. The gods handed us whatever rags they chanced upon as long as these things remotely fit us. Our current outfits weren’t the worst we’d had so far, but still, who knew how appropriate they would be to rush out of a mall and into the wide world full of normally dressed people? The only gear I didn’t doubt was Demi’s. Just yesterday Bones had brought her a pair of light blue jeans and a black, long-sleeved T-shirt that said, “I Heart New York.” I had seen people dressed like that in the magazines, and besides, these clothes seemed plain enough not to invite gawking.
Less lucky, Fox had gotten a shabby, tight black suit and a weird white T-shirt with no sleeves, but only a pair of narrow bands over his shoulders. An iffy combination. But still, if Fox turned his collar up, his white shirt was almost invisible, and Fox looked almost like guys in Business Gift mags. And that’s where our luck ended because my dress, white and long, with torn ruffles and a plunging neckline, was a wedding gown, and the only time a teenage girl with vampire-pale skin, thigh-long hair, and cardboard soles might slip by unnoticed while dressed like me was probably Halloween. Which had happened two months ago.
And yet it was Sinna’s attire that I figured would do us in. Out of cruel perversity, the gods had supplied him with a loose suit of seizure-inducing periwinkle. With a pattern printed all over it. No, the color, I believed, was okay. After all, people couldn’t wear sensible colors day in and day out. But the pictures—I don’t even know how to put it—they were surreally, grotesquely bad. It was a nightmare captured on cotton. Imagine a herd of bloated, dandruff-ridden sheep. As one, they were all squinting at you, their matchstick legs splayed under them as if these beasts couldn’t hold their own weight, and their mouths, evil and crooked, emitting strings of gigantic Zs. What these letters signified I had no idea, but altogether this suit was far too sensational for someone on the run.
So our clothes and our ignorance of the world—I slid a pawn across the chessboard—that made two reasons to stay put.
The third reason was Fox. He didn’t look human, or at least not normal-human. If his talent, time, wasn’t tattooed on him, I’d have sworn he were a color, because where it came to time, he couldn’t twist it, not even a second forward or backward, but his colors were amazing. His hair, eyebrows, and irises were the hue of dark red tulips. I could just picture him playing with his colors when he was little and then forgetting to change them back. Or choosing not to. Still, whether a time or color, Fox would stand out, which, added to Sin’s and my clothes, would make people remember our motley crew, and then the gods would have a picnic of finding us.
I knocked a king off the chessboard with my pawn, trying to recall my fourth point. Oh yes, money. We had none because the gods for some reason never carried even a dime.
And my fifth reason? I couldn’t remember it, and it was the most convincing of them all. It drove me nuts, but presently, I came up with yet another reason: Sinna’s smell. The poor soul reeked of rubbing alcohol. Yesterday, very late in the evening, the gods had taken him to a doctor. Given us no explanation, naturally. After an hour or so, Sin had returned, told us the doctor had drawn a blood sample from his arm, and made us all but drunk with his alcohol stench. Then, since it had been pretty late, he’d simply gone to sleep, and now, even if he took a shower and washed his clothes, there was no time for them to dry.
We were so not going to pass for normal people out there.
I got to my feet. “Listen.”
Demi looked up, and we both saw her reflection in the steel door—she was rolling her eyes. “Ev, we’ve been here for fifteen years,” she said. “We heard all your friggin’ reasons before. Do you suggest we rot here?”
“Ev.” Fox stood up and put his arm over my shoulders. “I know you’re unhappy with my decision to try to escape this hellhole. You—and Sinna—would much rather we mastered our talents and then showed Horgreth and the gods how wrong they were to mess with us.”
“Exactly,” I began, but Fox didn’t let me finish.
“There are just two problems with that, Ev. One small and one big. So the small one is this: have you ever considered that there might have been a mistake and we might not be gifted in what our tattoos say at all? Because we’re fifteen—in fact, fifteen and three quarters in my case—and we haven’t had even a glimmer of any of our alleged talents.”
“Wait.” Sinna jumped to his feet, then quickly glanced at Demi and pressed his hand to his mouth. “No, nothing. Sorry about that,” he murmured through his fingers.
He must have wanted to tell Fox and Demi about the nightmare he’d made for me. Why’d he stopped? Maybe I should tell them…or maybe I should wait. Right now Demi just might kill me if she learned Sinna and I had shared more than a kiss.
Fox returned to his spiel, “So, as I said earlier, the dream people might have gotten our gifts wrong, and if we don’t perform real soon, Horgreth will have us killed and fed to those rottweilers. That’s the small problem.”
I suddenly recalled the ice I had tasted that morning. Yes, I’d felt the hard, cold chips on my tongue, and I’d known the people around me were frightened, which could only mean that I had sensed their emotions and that the butterfly woman had been right: I was becoming a heart!
Fox plowed on, “Now, the big problem I explained to you many times before, but it bears repeating because that’s how kids learn. Ever-Jezebel, all the hearts who have ever lived have turned evil. Catherine the Great, Queen Victoria, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin. They butchered millions. And you can only do something like this if you don’t have to feel rotten about it afterward. I guess they simply channeled happiness into themselves after the deed and went right ahead with their day. And I’m sure they didn’t start out that way, they weren’t born horrid monsters, but if you can play with your feelings—create them, erase them, channel them—then how long will it be before you start cutting ethical corners, hmm?”
I stood silent. There had been decent hearts—must have been—even if we’d never heard about them.
Fox sighed. “And I know my own moral standards are awfully low because, given an opportunity, I would not hold back from ripping any gift trafficker into bits the size of our keyhole. Nor would I stop you from channeling pain into them. Save for one catch. If you channel torture, it’ll be all agony in your nerves. No love for me at all. Then, of course, you’ll kill the pain and you’ll love me again, but with time—and I can only imagine how dreadfully short that time will be—you’ll feel that your love for me is just another feeling, nothing special, and why even go back to it if your feelings are your juggling pins? And then, with no goodness in you and no love, you’ll abandon me, and I—” His voice broke, and he pulled me into a crushing hug. “I will die without you.”
Terrified, I hugged him back.
“So, you see that I’m right, don’t you?” he said.
Yes, I saw it; his words were logical; it all made sense. I nodded into his chest, and he kissed the top of my head. “Good girl. I love you.”
“Well, that settles it.” Demi stomped in her new cardboard soles, testing them. “We’re escaping tonight. And we are going to make it.”
***
Thank you for reading!
Into the Blind is available for purchase on Amazon.com.
About the
Author
Helen Rena loves reading and writing novels. And short stories. And flash fiction. She has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, and a vast collection of books and green bottles. She is still not sure why green bottles. She lives in Southern Oregon with her husband and two children. Please visit her at helenrena.com.