A longer chapter that opens with a quick flashback and then we cut back to the present. Here we go folks, as I promised, the Troupe chapter.


GO WILD

Chapter Four: Ghost x Eyes


I help Huan into bed one leg at a time. First his good leg and then his stunted right leg and pigeon-toed foot. His twisted kneecap looks like a knot of dough and for this reason Huan prefers longer pants but it's an unusually warm night in EG.

His shorts don't hide the deformity and Huan watches my eyes. He hates it when I bring more attention to it or obviously check.

In the midst of tucking him in, pulling the covers to his ribs, and positioning his chair by his bedside, I snipe a furtive glance.

The doctor hadn't cared about scars when they cut him open and the unnatural folds in the skin show new tan lines and swelling from carrying weight.

"How were your legs today?" I ask this question at the end of the day and it's a customary one between us.

There's a gleam in his roasted malt eyes, our mother's eyes, the color of our father's favorite oatmeal porter. (Amari and I sneaked one once and it definitely did not taste like oatmeal, going down or coming back up.)

He wiggles his feet, elation pumping through him. "Don't be mad."

Wallahae, what did he do now? "What is it?"

He kicks his mangled leg triumphantly, tugging the blanket tucked from the cover of his made bed. "I was able to run in the gardens today."

I frown. That explains the swelling in his knee. "You told me a fib. You told me you were going to use your chair if I left you alone." I make my tone as even as possible and still, it upsets him.

His skin is rouge from his afternoon in the sun and his cheeks still redden.

"I wasn't planning to, but I thought I'd give it a try. The second it started hurting I stopped, I swear."

He swears as if that will alleviate my worries.

He shouldn't walk yet. He shouldn't stand yet. He shouldn't place any weight on his knee. Heck, he shouldn't bend his knee… "You don't need to be running yet," I say.

The bright cheer disappears from his eyes and I hate myself for making him feel bad for telling me.

"I know—I know," he says as a preemptive strike against my inevitable speech. "I…I just hate being in that stupid chair all the time."

I know you do.

He crosses his arms, twisting away from me. I know he is my baby brother, I never forget that fact, but in moments like this, it coldly dawns on me that he is only seven years old. Only five years separate us and it feels like a decade.

"I trust you that you will stop if it starts hurting," I say, relenting some. "Just don't let Amari see you."

I'm throwing Amari under the bus but she'd mangle my legs if she knew Huan had gone for a run when I was supposed to be supervising him. It had been on my watch his knee was blasted apart from shrapnel in the first place.

Huan sighs, squeezing the hem of his blanket. "She worries too much."

"She doesn't want you to get hurt again. Nor do I so don't make me regret letting you go out by yourself." I cup his chin for emphasis; the boy doesn't like to listen sometimes. I don't blame him though. My sister and I are broken records.

Chin still cupped he counters, "You and Amari climbed the apartment building, jumped from the top of Jin's shop and had jellyfish battles on the beach."

I want to sink into the floor, wishing for the gazillionth time I had never told him about our escapades. Mother, may she rest in peace, would scold us every day. So over protective, I thought. Climbing that ten story building, it's not a big deal mother, we were being careful.

Just because we did it back in the day, it doesn't make it a bright idea for him to try. Why couldn't he understand that the mere thought of him being hurt angered me more than anything in the world—Wallahae, I sound just like my mother.

"Yes, I did those things and I spent a lot of months in body casts," I say. My bones have been broken so many times a doctor looking at an x-ray would think I had blitzed my skeleton in a blender and glued everything back together. Yet injuries from childhood stupidity, while immensely painful, are inherently innocent and incomparable to the sin of child's leg destroyed by unexploded ordinances.

Huan pouts and I decide to change the subject.

"How are your lessons?" I ask.

"We're doing military history. I'm learning all about contemporary war methods." Huan sats up from his sudden rush of excitement. I'll never get him to sleep now.

"—he was showing me the military gear and how it's built!" Huan had pulled out a notebook beside his lamp near his bed and flipped through the pages, pointing at rough drawings. "Look at this! Designed for three-dimensional movement. You use these to hook to a space then you reel yourself in like you're flying!"

I glance over the drawings, mildly intrigued but I received the same lessons when I was his age.

His chipper tone suddenly sours. "Do you think they'd let me join the military?"

My blood freezes, ice cold. It is an especially humid night in EG and I actually shiver at the thought. I don't meet eyes with him. I pretend to be fixing his bed corner and puffing the seat in his wheel chair.

"Safra?" He asks and I use the softest tone I can manage with profound anger clouding my mind. I wring his seat cushion like it's a dishtowel.

"I don't think that's a good idea."

"Why not?"

The desire to join the military is so utterly beyond me I can't think of an argument more compelling than, "Why would you even want to, Huan?"

"You think I can't do it. Because of my leg, isn't it?"

Because of the military, you barely have a leg. My lips tremble but with self-censorship honed after twelve years of practice, I hold it in.

As much as I'd love a hard-handed approach, Huan is too sensitive and too stubborn (he got that from me and Amari). Of all my traits I wish I could instill in him, I wish I could feed him my wrath for the military for what they did to him.

It's my fault he doesn't listen to me. I confuse him. I'm not a parent. I'm supposed to be an older sister, the middle sister, the one who is more lenient. I barely respected my mother's authority and rules, I sure as hell wouldn't obey my older sister, so why in the world would Huan listen to me?

Besides, I can't measure how much I should take this dream of his seriously. When I was seven, if asked, I'd probably say I wanted to become a mermaid.

Still, I'm forever trying to encourage Huan that he can do anything he wants, regardless of his leg injury.

"No, I didn't say that. Not because of your leg. Because there's nothing to worry about. East Gorteau has a standing army of over 3 million and there hasn't been any opposition since Ming Il-Sung's inauguration."

"So?"

"So, what you would even be doing? Changing the flag when it rains? Patrol the palace grounds in the heat in a stuffy uniform? Doesn't that sound boring?"

The lamp on his desk flickered. A few desperate fade ins before the light gives up entirely. That puts an end to the conversation. I've never been more thankful for a blackout.

"Oh, the power. There it goes," says Huan. I am right next to him yet I grab his hand.

"Give it a second," I say in total darkness.

Before I can worry about jinxing it, the light powers on, even brighter than before, with a conviction. As it always did.

"Weird isn't it? A few floors down, when Park's family loses electricity it stays out yet ours always comes on."

I read a question hidden in his words. Not only Park's family. The entire building, block, town. Our one apartment betrayed the absolute darkness, like a firefly glowing against a dark curtain.

The same question I got once a day: why does your apartment always have electricity?

At first, when I was younger, the question jabbed but was light-hearted. Why are you buggers so lucky? What a weird coincidence? If your father is an electrician, send him our way, they'd say with a suggestive wink. As the famine worsened and when most people had at most an hour of power per day, the questions became laced with more and more jealous suspicion.

"Probably something in the wiring when this building was constructed," I tell Huan, the words rolling off my tongue because I've uttered that half-baked theory a million times.

"But when they came they found nothing," says Huan. The State, he means. They came three times and gutted the apartment looking for a generator, special wiring, magical machine, elves. Who knows. But they found nothing out of the ordinary. Yet our power came on when most of the country hung in darkness.

When I was Huan's age, I was curious too. As you get older, you learn to not ask dangerous questions. It was a blessing because we'd let the older abijis in the building bake their foods with our power at the cost of them giving us a cut of the baked product.

Our strange power source helped keep us fed during the arduous famine.

"Let's just be happy we have power," I say. "Now I'm going to shut off your lamp so you can sleep." I hold my finger over the switch. "Do you need anything before I go?"

He shakes his head but is interrupted with a long yawn. He may have gone running without my permission but at least it tired him out.

I peck him on the top of his black tresses and switch off the light. His hair also the color of our mother's, the color I wish I had snatched from her. Instead, I got the brassy copper, like a weathered penny, from our father. He'd always coo about Amari's features. "Amari, your dark hair, dark eyes, you're so cute."

To me, he'd say, "Safra, your eyes were supposed to be green, I could tell, but they have no color in them. You have gloomy, gloomy ghost eyes."


The pulsing from my injured hand is what drags me to the surface. I am not in Fazier's living room. The light that dapples on the stone floor is a mosaic of colors through a pane of stained glass. The echoic, high-ceiling ambiance of a house of worship, like the Council's Headquarters, but there's no way I'm there.

The smell of the garbage is far too muted. The stale air is perfume to my nose. I can smell the tobacco that lingers in my hair from Blondie's well-aimed puffs. Am I even in Meteor City anymore? The thought of not being in Meteor City fills me with more relief than I care to share.

How long has it been? The buzzing in my ears from the explosion is gone, muscle soreness from Blondie's torment and the whiplash in my neck have settled in, my mouth is very dry and my stomach sucks itself in from a few missed meals. It's been half a day at least.

The light from the window pane is soft and the shadows are long, which means it's morning. It could be the morning of the second day, but I reckon it has only been eighteen hours. I stretch, counting. Ten toes. While groggy and achy, my legs flex. Muscle tear like the day after a hard workout, but no atrophy. Muscle atrophy can set in within mere days of disuse, ask me how I know that.

I rub my hands together. Ten fingers. Something padded and fingerless covered my hands as if I rubbed knitted quilts together. Are these…oven mitts? I flex my thumb, touch the fingerless tips. I feel like some sort of weird crab.

I tap my back pocket. My square wrench is gone. I tap my waist. The piece of cardboard I use to map the mines is gone. I tap my neck with my mittens but don't feel the scrape of a thin chain. They took that too.

Again, I confirm it is the morning because the light gets stronger and the shadows shrink in the chamber. Soon the light touches the highest corner and I can see the gothic stone walls. Sculpted into the stone are men in billowing robes. Murals of divine beings and humans among the divine awash in a beacon from the high heavens.

I remember Ang Kaa, the most opulent of the jungle temples near my city. A mark of the Gortese golden age when my ancestors realized they descended from demigods. Nothing could ever be as beautiful and menacing as the Ang Kaa. When journalists spoke of East Gorteau as the 'Divine spark that lit the fiery gates of hell' they are speaking of Ang Kaa. The most spectacular temple in the world, the door to Heaven, forever befouled as Hell on Earth where one million Gortese were imprisoned, tortured and killed when Ming Il-Sung seized power.

To purify our country he tainted the most sacred site in all of Gorteau.

I lie in the shadows, captured, and thirsty in a house of worship with foreign gods I barely recognize from school studies. There aren't any smears of black blood on the walls, nor the permanent stench of death by torture, nor the distant echo of screams you weren't sure if you really heard or not. A holy place of worship, at first I feel at ease but then uncertain.

My blood could simply be the first the splatter like ink on its smooth walls.

The creak of a spring, twist of a knob and light pours in. Multiple figures I can't distinguish crowd the door frame but one figure moves in. They don't shut the door all the way, barring those outside but creaking the door just enough for light.

"Do not be afraid," says an approaching velvety voice. A tall slender woman.

I see the razor cut ends of her ash-brown hair, but her face is cast in shadows. Her palm graces along my mittens to my elbow.

What time is it, no what day is it, I want to ask.

"You must be wondering how long we've kept you here," she says. "It's the early morning. We placed you here after you fell unconscious. My companion hit you a little too hard in the head."

Blondie. I picture him chopping my neck so clearly. Somehow I guess the overzealous brunt force wasn't a hapless accident. Or at least maybe it was an accident that I survived.

"Is there anything you need?"

Are these merciful captors? I want food, water, a full bottle of aspirin—

Something encroaches, from my elbow. Faint, barely there but there, the gentle crawling legs of a spider. Gouts of purple aura smoke over my face and manipulate my mind, flipping pages of a book. With energy I don't have, I will my mind to close. I literally picture shutting a book and catching her finger between the spines.

The aura pushes with impressive force, but my mental wall doesn't yield.

She releases my elbow and the crawling sensation disappears.

"You're a nen user," she says in tranquil monotone.

I thought the others saw? Or did that grape of information not make it down the grapevine? Or they didn't see clearly in the fuss. "You are too," I say. Blondie and Collar. "They are too. Who are you people?"

Her fingers close around my throat, long nails digging into my skin. I catch her wrist with both hands, failing to remember until that I have oven mitts for hands. Instead of shutting the book, I yell in my mind, all I need to do is overpower these mittens

She all but throws me aside, appreciating the danger sooner than I ever expected. Did she read my ability from my mind or she could tell from the nature of my aura? I cough for air, rubbing my scratched throat.

I still don't catch her face when she silently turns her heel, walks out and shuts the door behind her. Leaving me in disquieting darkness again. At least for a little while longer I can enjoy the color glass and the shapes as it plays on the cathedral hollows.

Not too long later the door is kicked open and its hinges give.

I've only met the bastard twice now and I already know it's Blondie coming to fetch me by his gruff exhale and the rhythm of his footsteps. I know he can be very quiet, but instead he stomps. Like my younger brother when he was a toddler stomping a tantrum.

Blondie doesn't even spare me the dignity of walking on my feet. He grabs me by both arms and carts me over like a piece of furniture. No worse than that. I feel like a kitten, limp and helpless, carried by the scruff of its neck. I smell high tar cigarettes on him, the same spicy scent that triggered my senses near the market. It awakened my adrenaline then and it's doing it again now.

In the dimly lit hall, a slew of steps but they're so smooth the sound skates with Blondie's stomps. Light from a foggy window and within arm's reach, Collar stews next to Blondie and watches me like a hawk on crack.

I say nothing. Somehow in the midst of my lounging in a dark chamber, I had transgressed them again.

While I thought they were taking me outside (to a firing squad or something) we move into the grand cathedral.

Collar doesn't make a sound, but Blondie's footsteps echo high and far away. The ceiling is so high I can't make out the abstract patterns, only a blur. But my eyes are adjusted to the dim chamber and I see the others in the cathedral long before the chill of their shadows loom over me.

Even the walls have ears and they share with me what they've heard. The Phantom Troupe has called this decrepit church home since their creation. They are the malaise creeping between the walls and how a house of worship can feel so far away from God.

I gaze up and count seven long shadows. Troupe meant crew so these seven must be the troupe. At first nondescript silhouettes became a gallery of seven distinct characters.

A woman similar to my height with tied cotton candy hair, but sweet, fluffy and sugar-spun are the last words I'd associate with her by first glance. Now I've never experienced winter cold before but the arctic blue of her eyes evokes the beauty and burden of ice. Glacial blues sustain a gaze on me, reading me from my unbrushed hair to the dusty trim of my tunic. She wears gloves like me, but hers are fingerless. What did she need to protect her hands from? Then I see the needles. They stick out of the pin cushion on her hand like spines of a porcupine.

Next to her, slouches a man clad in a kimono much too heavy for the sweltering weather outside. The purple kimono drapes over him, shapeless and forgiving on his slender frame. At my entrance, he gathers his long silky hair into a topknot on the crown of his head. His kimono is solidly colored, plain compared to gauzy silk dye and lavish robes painted with flowers, but it works on him. He looks dignified and poised, even with the scruff of facial hair, as if he had nothing to prove. While I'm admiring his kimono, I caught the line of his droopy eyes. The sword held straight in his left hand-chik!-a warning nudge at the sheath guard from his thumb.

In the opposite corner sits a woman in a flattering, well-tailored miniskirt with loong supple legs I immediately envy. She sits to the side, her razor hair cut and aquiline nose in perfect profile. She must be the one who tried to interrogate me with her ability. I try not to notice the six-shooter that she is conspicuously cleaning with a handkerchief. In addition to being able to tear someone's head open like pages ripped from a book, with that pistol I bet she could pepper me like the over-spiced cinnamon lattes that are all the rage in WG.

Next to her is another blondie. I could see his wintergreen eyes, or maybe they're bluer than that, not wintergreen, but juniper. Whatever, I can go on for ages about his eyes. I can see them the clearest because they take up the majority of his baby face. He's muscular like snake-face blondie but the curiosity beaming in his smile makes him seem less threatening. He carries a phone with demon wings, the same kind the antennae jabbed in the man's neck. Maybe in this case, less threatening first impressions are wrong...

I have to crane my neck to see all of the next man. He stands double my height, and with his upright grizzled hair, his great mass actually skews my depth perception in the high ceiling cathedral. None of them look scrawny, but he's a Beef-Mountain, probably raised on super steroids. Animal pelts and thick patches of hair cover his muscular body. His hands could swallow my head and could probably rip a tank in half. His expression is the most distinct, mouth closed but wide with glints of wicked mischief in his eyes.

Next is a willowy man, with long thin limbs like a giraffe and hair colored ashy, like volcanic soot. A ring pierced in his bottom lip. His skin has a gray waxy sheen to it, like a vinyl doll. A long gray fringe hangs over his eyes, masking him. Dressed in a velvet coat so perfectly stone colored, he could blend seamlessly into the cathedral shadows if he wrapped his hair in stocking. I get the need for stylish aesthetic, but looking at him alone conjures memories of dizzy heatstroke.

Last but sure as hell not least is a hulkish man who appeared literally spliced and stitched together who stared at me calmly, impressionless. Overlong, pierced earlobes dangle around his chest and at first glance I thought was a fleshy- colored scarf hanging from his neck. Thick stitches and an unnerving disjointedness in his limbs visible in how he sat. He is huge, like beef-mountain, but I can't decide who is king in that regard. I think I used beef mountain too early...

Needles, katanas, extra muscle and even guns. Heh. What do ya know? Turns out I wasn't wrong about the firing squad.

Blondie drops me right into the unforgiving beam of sun and I hate him for it.

"Ready."

Slam.

A sound I have heard hundreds of times before yet I don't immediately recognize in the unnerving in the echoic cathedral. What I now realize was the shutting of a crisp book cover. I look above leggy and baby face and see a man who must have been invisible ten seconds prior. Seriously, how did I not sense him?

Blondie had used the word 'danchou', which I don't understand. Is it his name? Nine members turn and yield to him. The meaning dawns on me. Danchou means boss.

He wears an imperial purple coat that bares his moonlight white chest. Without a doubt, the whitest pearly skin I've ever seen and after spending a few weeks in West Gorteau where girls bleached their skin that's saying something.

Animal fur on his hood and cuffs, again, what is with the winter aesthetic wardrobe in the desert? The fur billows on his collar, mimicking the brilliance of a white lion's mane. A trail of yellow buttons on the trim, probably one for each of his exposed, chiseled abs that I see perfectly… Sleek back hair but not in an overly greasy style like some men in WG. Impeccable and not a strand out of place. He hunches his shoulders, slouching forward, with a book on his knee, a remarkably humble way of sitting for a boss.

Orb earrings made of jade beckon my eyes to his face that despite the unfortunate circumstance I find quite handsome. A tattoo on his forehead, I can't make out the intricate specifics but I recognize the cross shape from the murals in this house of worship. This man, Danchou, belongs here. Belongs to this house of worship, to this curious city.

Finally, I meet his large round eyes and I'm charmed to find that his are the same empty color as mine. The boss of the infamous Phantom Troupe has ghost eyes too.


It's holiday so I can update earlier than usual and I was so excited to write this chapter. I left it off there because there is a ton of description in this chapter. I hope not too much. But what do you think of my rendition of the Troupe so far? I loved getting to talk about their character details through Safra's eyes, especially Danchou who is one of my favorite troupe members. The guy with the ash hair is Omokage if you remember from Phantom Rouge, but I'm going to take some liberties with his character and flesh him out a little. And now you have seen glimpses of Safra's two abilities that I promise are not random that will receive more explanation in the coming chapters. Lastly, did anyone notice the AoT reference?

THANK YOUS to Wavywavy and inconspicuouslurker for reviewing the last one! Hope this new chapter is to your liking! To others who are following along I'd love to know what you all thought.