by Jinn, Bo
“How come?”
“Not sure. I heard, through the grapevine, that they bit off more than they could chew with their last contract – some peacekeeping operation in Niger… Peacekeeping,” she snorted.
It was strange to hear of goings-on in the war world again after what seemed like so long.
“You were not with them?” he asked.
“No.”
He peered up at her as he continued to feign eating.
“When was your last assignment…”
“How about we change the subject?” Celyn replied sharply.
He bit his tongue, but her evasiveness revealed much. It had been more than seven months. Had she not procured an assignment since Nova Crimea?
“Well, I would ask what’s new with you,” she said. “Considering you haven’t stepped out of the house in a long damn time, I’m guessing there’s not much to tell.”
He stopped suddenly and was momentarily silent.
“Actually, there is something,” he said.
A pair of glowering eyes peered up.
“It better not be another favour…”
“No,” he replied quickly
There was silence. He settled his fork on the table and delayed, debating with himself the best way to say what he wanted to say.
“Do you remember,” he began slowly, “what I had told you the first time you came here? About what happened in Kamchatka?”
“You OD’d on neurals.”
“…Yes,” he said. “Something else happened. Something I did not tell you, probably because it had not weighed on me so much at the time. But now…”
Celyn looked up, the fork grazed her teeth as it came out and she inclined.
“Alright,” she said. “What is it?”
“I had this… dream,” he begun awkwardly. “At least, I thought it was a dream.”
“What was it?” she asked.
There was a nervous pause.
“I am sure it was a memory.”
Celyn looked back at him, poking the bits of food on the insides of her cheeks, apparently unmoved.
“I do not know of what or where or when,” he continued, “but I am sure that it was before they cleaned me.”
“That’s impossible.”
“That is what I thought,” he said. “But, I know it was not a dream.”
Celyn sighed and picked up her fork again.
“You had half a cylinder of neurals in your system,” she said. “It was probably a hallucination.”
It was the dismissive reply he expected, for it was the one he had given himself in the beginning. And yet…
“I know I have heard the name before,” he muttered.
Celyn looked back up with renewed interest.
“What name?” she asked.
He paused again. Confronted with someone else’s questions, and thus compelled to relate things out loud, the whole thing suddenly seemed absurd.
“Vincent,” he answered.
“…Vincent,” Celyn repeated with a slow, perplexed nod.
“Look,” he started, “when the Commission clean you, they…”
“What are you doing?” she interrupted, shaking her head at him with a squint.
There was silence between them again. He did not know what she meant by the question. After a while, Celyn straightened up with a sigh.
“Alright,” she said, starting anew. “Suppose it really was a memory, which it probably wasn’t; why do you care? What difference does it make?”
“I need to know.”
“No you don’t,” she said, her eyes suddenly severe.
“I have to know the truth.”
“The truth…” Celyn shook her head at the tabletop and started to snicker. “Alright, I’ll tell you something you already know,” she stated, categorically. “Look, I don’t know what you saw and I don’t care. But if you keep going down this road and you’re not long for this world. That’s as true as anything you’ll ever know.”
He sensed a darker experience between the lines of her words.
“What am I supposed to do?” he said.
“Never underestimate the survival value of smoke and mirrors,” Celyn answered. “You don’t know what any of it means. Make that your excuse if you have to, but let it go. If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for her.”
Naomi was a short distance behind, in the living area, pretending to draw but really observing what was going on between them. Celyn was right, of course. She was more important than anything else. But, still, that fingernail grinding at his soul would not allay.
He nodded vaguely, not so much to concede as to terminate the discussion.
Silence befell them again. After a while, his lips curled into a coarse smile.
“She adores you, you know,” he said.
Celyn looked up again.
“What?”
“Naomi … She is very fond of you.”
Celyn peered over her shoulder and Naomi quickly turned away, pretending to draw.
“You don’t say…”
“A few days ago she asked me to make her hair like yours.”
Celyn raised her eyebrows at him and took a second look at the girl, noting her recent haircut.
“Please tell me you didn’t try…”
“I had to cut it off.”
She snorted a suppressed laugh, then gave in and started to chuckle. It was the first time he heard her laugh. It was the first time they laughed together. He eased into the strangeness of the interaction. After a while, the laughter died down and there was quiet again. This time, Celyn was the one who broke the silence: “So, what does she do all day, anyway?”
“Art mostly,” he said. “She loves to draw.”
“What does she draw?”
“Animals mostly.”
“Animals, huh?”
“Always animals.”
“Good place to start.”
He paused and looked up.
“You draw?” he asked
“I can,” she replied, matter-of-factly. “Is that a problem?”
“Not exactly essential for martial proficiency.”
“Neither is cooking, but it wouldn’t hurt if you worked on it a little”
His brow knotted in response. He never thought he would feel as affronted as he did in having his ability to care for the girl called into question. The conversation rested once again.
“You can’t keep her locked in here forever,” said Celyn.
He said nothing, and this time the silence went uninterrupted. After a while he looked up. Naomi caught his attention over Celyn’ shoulder. She appeared to be mouthing something to him – something that he could not quite discern from the small, vague lips. But from the way she was drawing her fingers around her neck and down to her chest, he construed her message. He reached into his pocket with a diffident sigh.
“I … have something for you,” he said, hesitantly.
Celyn looked up and saw the golden locket hanging by the silver chain in his fist. Her eyes refocused from the locket to his eyes.
“She gave it to me,” he said. “I want to give it to you.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“…Why?”
“To thank you,” he replied. “For taking care of us.”
The gold locket swayed from side to side, and after what seemed an age, her hand slowly extended forward, as though she were reaching for a flame. She held the locket and examined it, running her fingers along the chain.
“How do you…”
“Ah… here,” he said, rising from his seat.
He gently took the necklace, let the chain hang in his fingers and felt for the clasp. He unhooked it and the chain separated.
She tensely drew the hair from over the back of her neck and he leaned forward, brought his arms around her. A quiver of warmth rippled through when his rough hands brushed against the supple skin on the arch of her shoulder. For an instant, he lapsed back into that Russian wilderness conjured
in his dreams, and that same yearning seized him right until the moment the clasp clicked and his hands glided over her collar. The gold pendant hung right over the cleft of her breasts.
He followed the line of her chest up to the two glowing eyes, and the black holes in the gemstone eyes dilated when their gazes met, sparking a vigour which started to blaze, but was doused instantly…
“Celyn.”
A twittering voice stole upon them. Naomi was standing at Celyn’s side, her large eyes turned up in the same pleading manner as before.
“Will you draw with me?”
She held up a lion drawing in one hand and a handful of crayons in the other.
Celyn seemed to look to him for approval – or disapproval. It was not clear what she wanted at that point, caught between two opposing forces heaving on her like the shackles on a rack. Whatever it was her vaguely despairing eyes sought from him, Saul tendered it with a silent nod.
She stood up from her seat and he watched her led her by the fingers in a kind of hypnosis. There was a strange wisdom to the girl, something implacable about her beyond their understanding, but the glimmers of which he could now plainly perceive, as he watched her wiles operate like a subtle magic, engrossing Celyn, ironing out the hard lines in her countenance, mellowing the callousness of her voice to honey, and The Narcissus-at-the-pool eyes, as she gazed upon the girl, made it seem as if she could waste away before her.
For the succeeding hour or so, he kept to his seat at the kitchen table and occupied himself with a book and a glass of blended malt, which he intermittently topped up. The text was old and in Russian. A single line caught his eye on the bottom of the middle page, one which he kept coming back to over and over: “One can fall in love and still hate.” He mouthed the line to himself over and over, shooting glances over the book. The darkness was layered thick upon the night sky. A UMC report muttered something about “new uprisings in the twilight of Russian Winter.”
Russian Winter…
He recalled the phrase from a while ago and glanced over the pages to the big screen, but his attention almost immediately shifted to Naomi, who was closely imitating every stroke of Celyn’s pastel against the drawing paper, turning up a bright smile whenever her mildest approval was forthcoming. Not a word was said between them.
After a while, he looked up at the wall. The chronometer showed 2340. He drank the last dribble of whisky and stared once more at the ominous line at the bottom of the page before he dog-eared the leaf, closed the book and stood up from his seat.
The big screen turned off. Celyn stood up on the floor.
“Just a little longer, please,” Naomi croaked with fatigue.
“You should sleep now,” he said. “You do not sound well.”
Naomi rubbed her tired eyes and yawned, coming to her feet, wobbly with fatigue. She looked up.
“Thanks for staying with us.” she said.
Celyn smiled vaguely.
Then, quite suddenly, as was her way, Naomi came toward her.
As soon as the little arms wrapped around her, Celyn hardened up, then melted away again when the embrace was released. The smile instantly vanished from her and there was a flash in the jade-colored eyes which did not escape his attention. It happened in the inkling of an eye.
“I will come soon,” he said, his eyes fixed sideways on Celyn.
Naomi made her way down the corridor. He waited a few moments after he heard the bedroom door open … then close.
“I suppose I should thank you too,” he said, turning to Celyn.
She was still and speechless and her chest was rising and falling.
“Are you… alright?”
“What…?” she voiced with a start.
“Are you alright?” he asked a second time.
“Yes,” she nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine.” The moist film on her crown gleamed in the light. There was a tremble in her breath.
He approached her with caution.
“You know you can stay…”
“No,” she answered sharply. “No. I should go.”
She put her coat around her and made straightaway for the front door, taking the empty haversack on her way out.
“Good night,”, he said.
But the door had already shut.
Naomi was in a deep sleep, his arm draped over her and the small hands held on to him. He lay awake. The gentle rise and fall of her breath usually moved him to sleep, so that he never slept until she did and he always slept when she did. But it had been hours since she had fallen asleep and his mind was still racing.
Vincent… His lips moved to the name, but no sound issued.
Vincent…
The night sky was star-filled and the great, nocturnal orb was a sparkle blazing white in the blanks of his eyes, sparking something deep within the folds of thought.
Vincent...
His pupils dilated.
…Caine!
The thought sent a surge through him.
“Vincent Caine,” he contained the sudden flame whisper.
At once, he slipped his arm loose from Naomi’s grip, careful not to wake her, rising from the bed and pulling the cover back over her.
He stepped out of the room and his pace quickened down the corridor.
“Vincent … Vincent.” Obsessive mumbles.
The light came on over the shelf behind the glass-enclosed flame where the books he’d accumulated were set in jagged stacks and rows. He looked down the spines of each book and ran his finger down the row until he found “UNITED MARTIAL COVENANT: THE BIRTH OF NEW WORLD ORDER.”
The book slipped out of its row and the other books toppled into the space. He opened it and began feverishly flipping through the pages. After page 50, he started skimming through the text.
I know you are here…
Every so often, he would stop on a page, when flashes of familiar words caught his eye, then he’d turn the leaf over again. Finally, he stopped on page 213, where the top of the page read:
“Chapter 12: A World Divided”
He ran two fingers over the front of the page as he read, mumbling:
“…Internal division … early years … UMC…”
His finger stopped in the middle of a sentence.
“…Vincent Caine Incident.”
That was it. That was the name.
He carried on reading but nothing of any immediate relevance followed. Then, his eyes narrowed over the small number ‘4’ right beside the reference. He flicked through to the end of the chapter and the found the number on the endnotes. The note at the foot of the page read:
4. 02/03/53 – Vincent Caine – Multiple Homicides – Assassination – Sen. John Clarke Jones…
All that followed were a series of cross-references to books and cases he had never heard of, and strings of letters he could not begin to decipher.
“Triple homicide … Senator John Clarke Jones…”
Nothing.
Could his obsession have been so misguided? All that because of a meaningless half-inch of small print? Then, the natural assumption followed: It really had been a dream – a conjuring trick of the subconscious. The name must have somehow transposed from memory and the rest was pure imagination.
The more he read the name over and over, the more logical it all seemed. And yet the more logical it seemed, the more his intuition rejected it. There was something more … something he was missing…
The doorbell rang.
He jerked round like a startled lion and he stood still until the echoes faded through the hall, at which point he thought he must have imagined it. He looked across toward the kitchen, where he could just make out the numbers “0345” on the chronometer.
About a minute later, the bell chimed again.
The book slowly closed. The gleaming edge of a blade, lying on the shelf, caught his eye. He put down the book, taking one last look up the corridor to the bedroom, where Naomi was lying asleep and safe.
He turned off the ligh
ts and began his slow, soundless creep down the long path, through the hall toward the front door. It was unlikely a drunken straggler would wander to the top floor of a residential tower on the edges of the inner city. His fist was firm around the blade grip…
When he stopped at the door, the bell rang again.
The small display on the side of the door lit up at the touch of a button. His sinews unwound. The blade slipped into his sleeve, hidden.
The door opened.
The city lights spilled in through the windows of the outer corridor lighting a silhouette. It was Celyn.
“… Why are you here?” he asked
There was a long and guarded silence. His blood was still simmering.
“I… don’t know,” said Celyn. Her response was slow and trembling. There was disquiet written all over her: her hands caressed her sides, almost neurotically, and her eyes darted in any direction except his. “I’ve been … just … walking around the city.”
“Since you left?”
Her nod was as a shiver. There was silence.
“What happened?” he asked, warily, his blood was still simmering, hand still on the blade.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I got … lost.”
He took a slow, hard look. She did not appear as though she was high on ambrosia or anything else. Then a realisation steadily dawned on him through the silence of the dark. She was lost and she had come. She had come to him.
He stepped back and held open the door. After a long delay, Celyn stepped over the verge and the door noiselessly swung shut.
He filled a glass with scotch, and then took a seat across from her, with the blue flame swaying beside them. He drank and the warm fluid seared his throat. He looked up.
Celyn sat rigidly, hands on her knees as though she were prepared to spring up at any moment. Her eyes were gaping and sullen, still anxiously flitting about without direction. The frail light shone sallow over her and the sweat broke over her crown. Her fingers trembled.
“Why have you come?” he asked a second time.
For a while, she did not seem able to speak or move.
She raised a lone hand and he followed the lone hand cautiously as it slipped into her coat. When her hand emerged, it wielded the ubiquitous black canister and she set it down on the table between them.
He looked from her to the canister and back twice before picking it up. By the weight, he could tell immediately that it was full and slowly tuned his eyed back up at her again.