Emma's eyes were instantly withdrawn; and she sat silently meditating, in a fixed attitude, for a few minutes. A few minutes were sufficient for making her acquainted with her own heart. A mind like her's, once opening to suspicion, made rapid progress. She touched - she admitted - she acknowledged the whole truth...It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!
Jane Austen, "Emma"
The day after Zack was killed, Tseng brought Aeris her eighty-eight letters and she, in a fit of fury at everything and everyone, set fire to them on a bonfire behind the church. She was angry with Zack for dying; with Tseng, for keeping the truth from her; with her mother, for having said some unforgiveable things about the boy who'd broken her heart; and with herself, for having doubted him. According to Tseng, he'd been coming to Midgar to see her. If he'd stayed away, he might still be alive.
"Did I need to know that?' she demanded.
"I'm sick of lying to you."
She jabbed her fire with a broom-handle, watching the hot ashes fly upwards.
He said, "My own position is not secure. I don't know how much longer I can protect you."
"Then don't bother." Throwing the broom-handle onto the flames, she stalked past him and headed for the vestry door without looking back. She knew he would follow.
The scent of her flowers assailed her the moment she stepped inside the church. Midgar's full of flowers, your wallet's full of money. Each nook and cranny of this sacred place held a different memory of Zack. The hole he'd made in the roof when he came crashing into her life - the pew they'd been sitting in the first time he kissed her - the patch of coloured light on the floor where he'd huddled, shoulders shaking, as he wept for Angeal - the rafter where, until last week, his white monster had perched - and over in the corner, the flower wagon he had made for her. Four years of rust had accumulated on its wheels. How proud he'd been of it! How she wished she'd shown more gratitude! He had been so eager to please her. When I come back, he'd said, I'll make a better one, I promise. I want to make all your wishes come true.
She would never see him again, never hear him laugh again, never kiss him or smell his warm skin or look into his eyes -
Without warning her knees gave way. She sank down on the edge of the flowerbed, rocking back and forth, curled in on herself, howling with grief - but it was for Zack she was crying: the waste of his potential, the extinction of his dreams. For herself, her heart had resigned itself to its loss a long time ago. While she wept, the voices of the Planet hissed relentlessly in her ears. The Planet wasn't interested in any mere human pain. It had too much pain of its own.
Tseng did not try comfort her. He never touched her; it was an unspoken rule of his. He simply waited, close at hand, until she had cried herself into a numb exhaustion and was lying on her side with her head pillowed on her arm, limp and light-headed, her eyes sore from weeping. Then he began to speak.
His department, he said, had recently fallen under suspicion of sympathising with anti-Shinra elements. They had been accused of not trying hard enough to track down Zack. The daughter of his predecessor, Commander Veld, had been revealed as the ringleader of a terrorist cell, and there was a warrant out for both her arrest and Veld's on charges of treason. The Old Man was becoming more and more erratic, more brutal; there was no telling where the axe might fall next. Somehow he knew, or had guessed, that his precious Ancient was the reason Hojo's escaped specimen had tried to return to Midgar, and this knowledge had shaken him to the core. All the Old Man's hopes for the future were pinned on his Cetra. Tseng feared that any day now the order might come to bring her in.
Tseng only called President Shinra "The Old Man" when his guard was down, which meant he was speaking from his heart. Everyone had a heart; this was an article of faith with her. She didn't know how much of Tseng's was left, but such as it was, she felt confident it belonged to her.
"I'll leave Midgar," she said.
"I couldn't let you do that. You wouldn't survive five minutes out there."
"You could come with me."
His eyes flickered. She wondered if he'd ever thought about it. "I can't leave my department."
"I thought your job was to protect me."
"My job involves a variety of duties. It's not always easy to reconcile them."
Sometimes he was so full of hot air. She rolled onto her other side, facing away from him, and reached out to brush her hand over the cool yellow petals of the nearest flower. The pollen stained her fingertips reddish-purple.
"Aeris," he said, "I've been thinking. There might be another way..."
.
Hidden in plain sight was, she believed, the technical term for what he was proposing: to disguise her as one of his subordinates and bring her to live in the Shinra building, in the department of Administrative Research.
"Me, a Turk?" She laughed incredulously. "Are you mad?"
"As long as you continue to live down here, we can't guarantee your safety. There are too few of us, and we have too many other duties. Danger could come for you when we're looking the other way. Up there, we'd be guarding you twenty-four seven."
Had he concocted this scheme as a way of keeping her by his side? He was devious enough for it. "And when the Old Man orders you to bring me in, what will you do then?"
"Lie."
"And if the Old Man realises you're lying?"
"That is a potential danger. But there is always danger. Aeris - " Tseng leant forward, elbows propped on knees, his fine manicured hands pressed together. "Surely you see by now that our fortunes are linked? The Old Man lets you have your freedom because he trusts me to keep an eye on you. If and when he stops trusting me, the first one to know about it will be you. And it won't be pleasant. Do you understand me?"
Every fibre of her being rebelled at the thought of setting foot in the Shinra Building. It would feel like a betrayal of everything she loved. "I can't. They killed my mother. They killed Zack."
"They would do worse than kill you. If the time comes when I can no longer protect you, it won't make any difference whether you are down here or up there. But one thing I can promise you, Aeris - if and when the worst comes to the worst, I will do whatever is necessary to make sure you don't fall into Hojo's hands."
As declarations of love went, she'd heard better. Zack had promised to build her a flower wagon and show her the sky. Tseng was promising to shoot her rather than let her become a test subject for Shinra's vivisectionists. She knew he would keep his word. It made her feel safe, strangely.
.
Why did she agree to his crazy plan? Because she wasn't stupid. She could see she was out of options. Because she didn't want to expose Elmyra to any more danger. Because she'd only stayed at the church so that Zack would know where to find her. Because he was dead, and she wanted to live.
Because she was twenty-two, not seventeen, and she was bored with her little world, bored of living at home and selling flowers, bored by the slums, ripe for a change. Cetra were born for adventure. She'd been stagnating - waiting - too long.
And anyway, in this mad world a crazy plan was the only kind that stood any chance of success.
.
Having obtained her consent, Tseng left to "sort some things out," but returned as promised later in the afternoon, carrying a suitcase and accompanied by a slim young Turk with coppery curls and golden eyes. "This is Cissnei," he said, setting the suitcase down in the nearest pew. "She'll be taking care of you."
Aeris recognised the name. Zack's friend - and more, perhaps?
"I'll see you back at the office," said Tseng. "One hour."
When he was gone, Cissnei opened the suitcase, took out a pair of scissors and cut off Aeris's beautiful hair, trimming it short like a boy's. The loss of all those heavy curls made her head feel weightless, as if it were floating above her shoulders. Cissnei swept up the cuttings and burnt them on the bonfire out back. Then she produced a bottle of hair-colour, dyed Aeris's crop a mousy brown, and helped her put in the matching contact lenses. But -
"You're still too pretty," Cissnei declared, folding her arms and standing back to look her over.
Aeris had been prepared to meet rivalry with rivalry, coldness with coldness, but Cissnei was so friendly and kind it was impossible not to warm to her. "Is that a bad thing?" she asked.
"It is if you want to pass unnoticed. Now, try this on."
The blue suit was surprisingly heavy; Tseng and others always moved in it with such ease. Cissnei said the weight came from the mythril thread that had been mixed with the wool for protection against materia. She rolled Aeris's old pink frock and raspberry denim jacket into a ball and threw them onto the bonfire. The sheepskin boots quickly followed. From now on Aeris would be wearing crepe-soled black Turk boots, silent as cat's feet. Giving a final tug to her tie, she tucked Zack's pink ribbon into one pocket and her mother's materia into another, and set off to walk with Cissnei to the train station. This was the first test. Nobody called out a greeting to her. People she had known for years looked the other way when she passed.
"All they see is the suit," Cissnei informed her, under her breath.
It was the same in the train, and on the walk through Sector Eight to the Shinra Building. The suit created some kind of psychological exclusion zone. In the company lobby the atmosphere was friendlier. One of the front desk receptionists said, "New recruit?" and Cissnei said, "On probation," and the receptionist called out, "Good luck, rookie!" just as the lift doors were closing. They rode in silence to the forty-seventh floor, where the first person they met, a Turk with a blond bob and no-nonsense face, told them that the Boss had just popped down to accounts but would be back soon. "I've got time to show you around, then," said Cissnei.
There was a lounge with panoramic windows and comfortable, slightly grubby sofas, and a TV set screwed to the wall. There were men's and women's washrooms, complete with showers. There was a locker bay, and a kitchen with a fridge containing nothing but beer, and a water-cooler, and some plastic pot plants. There was a big corner office that Cissnei called "The Pits", filled with computer work stations, metal desks, and filing cabinets; there was a stock cupboard, and a briefing room with a long, polished walnut conference table and black leather chairs, and an armoury, and a materia room where they had made up a little camp bed for her to sleep in - not permanently, Cissnei explained, but just until they figured out something better.
"And this," said Cissnei finally, "Is The Door. You don't go in there. Understood? Your key won't open it. If by chance you ever find it's been left open, shut it."
"Why, what's in there?"
"Oh, nothing. It's where the Old Man keeps all the bodies of his ex-wives." Cissnei flashed a smile to show she was joking.
Somewhere down the hall a phone was ringing. Aeris spotted it sitting on top of a desk close to the lifts: an ordinary, black bakelite, rotary telephone.
"Where's that Asher got to?" grumbled Cissnei. "He's supposed to be on the duty desk. I'll have to get that. Go see if the Boss is back yet. Down the corridor, go right, first door on the left."
As soon as Aeris turned the corner she saw that Tseng must have returned, for his door was ajar, spilling a wedge of yellow light across the marble floor and up the pale grey wall opposite. She paused when she heard voices. One was Tseng's, quiet and deep; the other, almost as familiar to her, was a nasal drawl that never failed to set her teeth on edge. Tip-toeing forward, she caught the tail-end of what Reno was saying:
"...be in denial, Boss."
"Are you questioning my motives?"
"Getting emotionally attached to the surveillance target is kind of an occupational hazard in our line of business."
Aeris felt her cheeks grow warm. Her heart fluttered.
"When have I ever denied her importance?" Tseng replied, sounding irritated. "Aeris Gainsborough is the last of her kind. She is a sacred trust - "
It was as if he'd dumped a bucket of ice water over her head. Sacred trust? Was that really how Tseng saw her? Like some kind of holy relic, left gathering dust in a church?
"The world's future may depend on that child," he went on.
"Child?" Reno snorted derisively. "Fucking hell, man, who are you trying to convince? Yourself?"
"In my eyes she'll always be a child." Tseng's tone made it clear that the point was not open for debate.
"It's okay, you can go in," said Cissnei, appearing behind her without warning in that silent way they all had. "When his door is shut we don't disturb him unless it's an emergency, but when his door is open you can just walk in."
The last thing Aeris wanted to do at that moment was show her face to Tseng. Her cheeks were still burning. She needed time to process what she'd overheard. Of all the many, many things she had imagined, at night and in her daydreams, it had never - not once - crossed her mind that Tseng might see her as a burden.
Cissnei took her by the elbow and steered her inside. "Ta-da! May I present our newest recruit?"
"Unrecognisable," said Tseng. He sounded pleased.
Right at this moment, having just seen herself through Tseng's eyes, unrecognisable was a pretty accurate description of how she felt.
Reno was leering at her, grinning that hungry stray dog grin of his. "You clean up nice, rookie. Real nice."
Up until now she'd had little to do with Reno. What she had seen of him, she hadn't liked. His tongue lolled in a way that made her unpleasantly conscious of her own body. His smile never reached his eyes. He didn't like her either: that much was obvious. She wondered why.
Cissnei handed Tseng a folded post-it note. "UrbDev just called. Asher's buggered off somewhere, so I answered it."
Tseng unfolded the note, read it, folded it up again and gave it to Reno, saying, "Go help Reeve with his problem." To Cissnei he said, "Take her to the armoury and find a weapon for her. Something lightweight and defensive. She can't be issued with a firearm until she knows how to use it. I'd like Rosalind to instruct her. Can you ask her to draw up a training schedule? And when Asher comes in, tell him I want to see him immediately."
.
That evening Cissnei took Aeris to The Goblins' Bar on Loveless Avenue - "Our regular," as she called it. The landlord kept a private snug upstairs reserved for the Turks's use. Some of the others had already arrived: Rude, Reno, a dark-haired slip of a girl called Aviva, and a rather pale and chastened Asher, who had only nipped down to the cafeteria for a bag of crisps and kept asking rhetorically, between chucking flights of darts at a dartboard, if getting the munchies was a capital offense now or something.
"Come drink a toast to the new recruit," Cissnei coaxed him.
The waif Aviva said to Aeris, "This is a tradition of ours."
"Wetting the baby's head," said Rude.
Reno stood up. "I'll get the next round in." He didn't stop to ask what anyone wanted. It seemed he just knew. For the real Turks he brought five pints of beer, while in front of Aeris he placed a white, frothy concoction adorned with candied cherries and rose petals and lashings of pink syrup, which she was apparently supposed to drink through a straw. With a completely straight face he told her it was called The Blushing Bride.
To be honest, it looked exactly the kind of thing she might have ordered for herself back in the days when she was dating Zack. She felt certain it would taste delicious. But if Aeris knew one thing from her life in the slums it was that you couldn't let people start taking liberties. If you gave them an inch, they'd steamroller you flat into the ground. So she shoved the mocktail back at him, lifted her chin, fixed him with her sternest eye, and demanded a beer of her own - and he looked her slowly up and down, as if he were re-thinking certain assumptions, and then he went off without another word and brought her a cold Zolom Triple X. She felt as if she'd won the first round. The only thing was, now she had to drink it.
"What weapon did you choose?" Rude asked her.
"A Guard Stick - "
"A staff?" Reno sputtered into his beer. "What are you, a friggin' wizard?"
Cissnei slapped the back of his head. "Shut up, fuckwit."
"Hey, a staff, that's cool," said Asher. "Nobody else has a staff. What made you choose a staff?"
"Nobody else has a staff because staffs are fucking lame," said Reno, grabbing Cissnei by the wrist and squeezing hard. She retaliated with a punch to his shoulder, and soon they were jabbing and poking at each other like a couple of squabbling siblings. To Aeris it looked like they were enjoying themselves. Reno twisted Cissnei's arm; she laughed and kicked his shin, and his knee jerk up and rattled the table, spilling everyone's drinks.
"Cut it out," said Rude, flicking a beer mat at them.
"So what's her code-name?" asked Reno, eliciting little yips from Cissnei as he pinched her under the table.
"Her?" said Aeris. "I'm right here. And what do you mean, a code name?"
"We all have code-names based on our weapons," said Aviva. "I'm Knives. Cissnei's Shuriken."
Asher stood and gave an elegant bow. "Nunchuks, at your service."
"Can we call her Staffy?" said Reno. "No, wait, I know - Sticky."
"And this is Fuckwit," said Cissnei, tickling him under the armpit.
"Named for my weapon, like the lady said - oh, ow, Ciss, stop - "
"Then there's Rodders, and Two-Guns - " Aviva, aka Knives, ticked the names off on her fingers - "And Shotgun, and Gun who you met earlier, and Knuckles and Fists. And Legend, he is one. And Rude - "
"Didn't make a good impression at his interview," Asher cut in, laughing.
" 'Baldy' was taken - "
"He's so gobby, always interrupting people -"
Their rapid fire banter was impossible to follow: she couldn't tell when they were joking and when they were serious. "Why do you have code names?" she asked.
"Because it's fun," said Asher.
"So they're just nicknames?"
"Not always." Rude had been quietly drinking his beer, but when he spoke, everyone hushed. "You need a new name. We can't use the old one."
Cissnei asked, "Did Tseng give you an alias?" Aeris shook her head.
"I told you what we should call her," said Reno. "Sticky suits her."
"No, I know!" cried Asher. "I've got it. You use materia, don't you? We could call you 'Firaga'. What do you think?"
"Firaga..." Aeris rolled the word on her tongue, tasting it. A hot, fierce name. The highest level of a destructive elemental attack. Dragons breathed Firaga. She smiled at Asher. "I think it'll do very nicely, thanks."
.
That night as she lay on her narrow, sagging camp bed in the windowless materia room, her head spinning from the unaccustomed alcohol, her belly a little gassy with beer, Aeris allowed herself a moment in which to acknowledge the enormity of what she had done. All her life she had sworn she would rather die than set foot inside the Shinra Building. And now here she was, not only in Shinra but of it: an employee; a Turk! Only a fake Turk, of course, an imposter in a blue suit, a fugitive hidden in plain sight - but nobody outside this floor knew she was a fraud. To the rest of the world she was Agent Firaga of the dreaded Department of Administrative Research.
And for how long? Tseng had said she would need to stay hidden until the Old Man died, but that might be years. Was this going to be her life from now on?
If she stayed a Turk long enough, would she eventually start believing her disguise was real? Could the others ever come to think of her as one of them? Could Tseng?
No. She would always be a child to him. A little angel; a sacred trust. At least Zack had treated her as a woman...
With a sob, Aeris turned over and buried her face in the pillow. She didn't want the Turk on the duty desk to hear her cry.
