The city lights slowly drifted past overhead, a calming and mesmerising sight, but Keira felt like she was living in the aftermath of an explosion or a traffic crash; the immediate danger had passed with a narrow miss, but it left behind a blasted wake of shock, numbness and emptiness. Two tall Freedom Guards flanked her as they silently escorted her through the illuminated neighbourhoods of New Haven. Each held her by the upper arm with a gloved hand, directing her forwards at their own regular, martial pace. It made her feel like a prisoner, detained, untrusted and undignified. But she wasn't going to run anymore; she felt more drained than ever, almost completely out of energy, and she wouldn't be able to stay awake for much longer. Even Tess on her shoulder felt heavier than usual. If the guards were to let her go, she felt she would probably drop, unable to support herself under the weight of all that had happened on this day.
At least she could think a little more clearly now that her strained emotions no longer ruled her. Her mind was back in the shadowed streets of the old stadium district where the chase had come to its dramatic conclusion, but it had brought her no appeasement, no lifting sense of closure. In fact, she felt even worse than before, and it was by her own doing. She understood now the foolishness and futility of her reckless actions, running off into the danger of the darkness without any pause for evaluation. It was so senseless of her, so unlike her normal, rational, logical self, and she was ashamed. Why had she tried to play the hero when there was so little she could have done? This wasn't like the night of the fire that destroyed The Naughty Ottsel, when her impulsive actions had actually served some purpose. Tonight she had saved no one, achieved nothing, and she still had not found the answers or retribution that she sought. What good had she been? None at all. In fact she had been more of a hindrance than a help, an unnecessary burden. How could she have ever hoped to make any difference?
And Azyma still had not been found. That was the cruellest blow of all.
The pain in her heart continued to throb with every beat, with the knowledge that Azyma was still out there somewhere, lost, alone and frightened, probably hurt, maybe even dying. The voice she had heard on the communicator still haunted her, swirling around in her mind like a stubborn ghost and unable to be banished. She still wished there was something else that she could do or could have done, but now even she was beginning to get sick of that feeling that had plagued her all day. She didn't have the energy left to keep fighting anymore, and she just allowed the soldiers to steer her along, her eyes fluttering on the verge of consciousness.
Up on her shoulder, Tess adjusted herself but said nothing, unable to break the awkward silence that followed them around as the soldiers marched along either side of them still. So instead, she used the time to reflect on the situation as well. She was still searching for her own explanation for all of this. She knew Azyma better than anyone, and she had been trying to put the pieces together ever since the night when she had first been attacked in the streets of the slums. Who had done this to her? Were they the same one responsible for trying to kill her in The Naughty Ottsel fire? What about that ambush by the lake in the forest only last night? Where had they taken her? Was one of them the mysterious suspect who Sig had shot from the top of the city wall? All of these things had to be linked, there was no doubt of it, but the mental thread in her mind that connected them was faint and intangible, out of reach, lacking substance without the vital core. If only she had a little more information, she felt certain that she could figure this out, but right now her patience and her focus were wearing thin, too shattered by the emotional last twenty four hours, every one of which had been saturated with pressure, pain and stress.
Plip.
Distraction came in the form of a light droplet of rain meeting her forehead. Looking up, she could see the dark clouds now looming over the city, even against New Haven's bright, permanent lights. She had seen them far away on the horizon earlier in the day, creeping closer, but now they had converged right overhead, bringing with them the baleful omen of a storm. It would strike soon, and already she felt the heaviness growing in the air around her. It was a miserable end to such a difficult day, one last measure of violence.
As they turned the last corner, Keira's eyes flickered up in recognition. This was her street. She still wasn't ready for what was to come, for what her father would say to her about what she had done. The feeling grew worse as the front door came closer, until finally standing before it, the escorting guards let her go and broke their silence.
"We have brought you back to your home. Now please stay here this time, and leave the work to us."
These words made Keira feel even more ashamed of her behaviour, for there was desperation and frustration in their voices. She wanted to apologise for causing them such unnecessary disruption, but she could not bring herself to respond before the guards turned away, and she knew she had missed her chance.
"Thank you," Tess called out to them in reply, trying to appear polite, but the guards did not even pause, and disappeared beyond the street lights without another word.
Keira stared at the front door, not ready to enter. Tess knew what lay ahead for her as well, and she was sure it would not be pretty.
"You feeling alright, Keira?" Tess asked.
Keira responded with a single, semi-silent grunt. "I'm fine," she lied, her voice small and unconvincing.
Tess saw right through it but did not argue. There was no point. Keira had been through far too much already today, and she couldn't take any more. So instead, just for good measure, Tess placed a gentle, comforting hand on her friend's head. Keira gave no reaction to it.
"Just take it steady, OK?"
Keira swallowed and nodded.
"Do you want me to stay with you?" Tess then asked.
Keira shrugged her other shoulder unhelpfully. Tess did not want to push it too much, so she resigned herself back to silence, and remained in her place. Once she saw how things were inside, then she would either choose to leave or stay, depending on what seemed the most appropriate.
Larger raindrops were starting to fall around them, spot-marking the pavement. Keira took a deep breath, reached for the handle, pushed open the front door and stepped into her home. Her father's voice emanated from the kitchen, and Keira timidly shuffled her way down the hallway and turned, finding him standing by the table exactly where she had last seen him, communicator in hand and relaying his final orders to the troops. He looked up immediately when his daughter appeared in the room, pale and afraid, and rounded off his speech before switching the communicator off and placing it down on the table top.
There were a few moments of heavy silence. He looked just as tired as she felt, and the mood in his eyes was plainly visible through his amplifying spectacles; they were still alert but wearied, and they held Keira for a moment. Then Tess saw them fall upon her. He gave her a brief but knowing nod, and she understood exactly what it meant.
Please leave us.
Her choice was made for her. She nodded back, placed her hand supportively upon Keira's head one more time, then dropped from her shoulder and left the room. Samos waited until the sounds of her scurrying up the stairs faded out, before speaking. They were alone together now, father and daughter.
"Keira..." he began, but Keira interrupted him, bursting into a messy, hastily assembled apology.
"Daddy, I'm sorry I disobeyed you. I just couldn't... I just wanted to..."
Samos raised a pacifying hand and Keira fell silent at once. He could see the shimmering emotions in her eyes, and he knew that his daughter could not take any more psychological punishment today. What she needed now more than ever was peaceful and delicate understanding.
"It's alright, Keira," he said gently. "I know how difficult this has been for you, and how close you have become to Azyma. Sometimes our emotions do get the better of us, and sometimes we are unable to help it."
This came as an unexpected surprise to Keira, who had braced herself for a severe reprimanding. The anger she remembered in her father when she'd run from the house earlier had completely disappeared.
"I forgive you, Keira," he continued. "But you must understand how very fortunate it is that you were not hurt out there, or worse. I do not want to see you ever doing something like that again. Do you understand?"
The words sank in, and though Keira still felt very ashamed, her cheeks hot and her eyelids heavy, she nodded. This at least accorded with what she had expected to hear.
Her father nodded back, apparently satisfied, but then he began speaking again, purposefully. "Good. But now, Keira, before I let you take some much-needed rest… there is something else that I think you ought to know. It's about Azyma."
Keira's heart leapt in her chest so violently that she shuddered and took in a sharp breath, new alertness suddenly materialised from nowhere. What news did he have? Had they found Azyma while she was being brought back home? Was she alive? Or…?
Samos began to pace up and down the room as he spoke, his log shoes dragging hollowly on the floor. "As you might already be aware, Keira, in my younger years I was in charge of the Underground movement against the Baron's rule. We were always on the lookout for committed and trustworthy fighters, but we also harboured those who could not fight, provided safety and protection for those who had suffered under the Baron's iron-clad tyranny, and who had nowhere else to go."
Keira listened but was confused, her mind so slow and cloudy with the spreading hand of exhaustion that she couldn't quite understand why he was telling her this, or what it had to do with Azyma.
Samos paused at the edge of the room, facing the wall. "Azyma was one of those unfortunate victims."
The questions that Keira was about to ask froze up in her throat. Now she understood. Of course, Azyma had been in the Underground. She had met Tess there. She'd told her that on the first day they'd met. How could she have forgotten?
"I remember the day when she arrived at the hideout, alone and vulnerable," Samos went on, one hand upon the far counter and his eyes closed in memory. "We interviewed her carefully, always suspicious of the Baron's spies who frequently attempted to infiltrate our group, but it became increasingly clear to us that she was not one of the Baron's agents. She revealed what had brought her to us; her family had been apprehended by the Baron's guards in one of their needless raids in the slums, and taken to the Fortress prison. In those days, Keira, once you went into that Fortress, you never came out again. Azyma had no one left to help her, no one else to turn to, so she followed the rumours of a resistance movement, and somehow — and to this day I am still not sure how she did it — she escaped the clutches of the Krimzon Guard and found her way to our Underground hideout."
With wide eyes, Keira once again looked over at Azyma's picture left on a table nearby, now feeling much closer to the people depicted in it. She still didn't know why her father chose now of all times to reveal this to her, but she didn't care. She was as silent and as still as a statue, absorbing his words with a craving thirst.
"As you can imagine, it was a difficult time for her," continued Samos, now turning back and pacing the other way. "She was so young when she came to us, barely more than a child still. Life as a rebel was not meant for a soul such as hers, and she struggled to adjust, but she did it all in the hope that she would one day be able to find her family and be with them again, and that was what gave her the strength to keep up the fight. She grew especially close with Tess, and I did what I could to help her too. Once the Baron was overthrown, I had people search through all of the Fortress records we could get hold of for any evidence of what had become of her family." He stopped behind the kitchen table, and looked balefully at his daughter.
"And...?" asked Keira, feeling the weight of emotion pressing down on her again.
Samos closed his eyes and shook his head slowly, pained. "Nothing. The Baron either did not keep very detailed files on his prisoners, or he destroyed them all once he had no further use of them, eradicating all traces that they had ever existed. What happened to them, we may never know for sure. Azyma has been trying to cope by herself ever since, but Tess and I have always looked out for her."
Keira was deeply saddened to hear such a story, affecting her much more strongly in her fragile, sleep-deprived state. She never knew that Azyma's past life had been so dramatic, even for a member of the Underground, and in the brief time they had known each other, she had never spoken of it to her so much as once. What was more, Keira realised now that both her father and Tess had known about this the whole time, and it made her irrationally feel a little annoyed that they had never let her in on this vital secret. But she was too exhausted to argue or demand why.
"I hoped I would never have to tell you this," said Samos, "But in light of the uncertain present situation, and seeing as fate brought you and Azyma together, I now think that you deserve to know. That is all I can say on this matter, but if you desire to learn more, then I am sure that Tess will be willing and better able to explain more than I."
It took a moment for the words to sink in, silence in the house once again, but then Keira accepted. She wasn't sure if she fully understood everything, or how much of it she would even remember, but it had to do, for she was losing her ability to stay awake. Her external awareness of the world retreated for a second, her head drooped on her shoulders, but she caught herself just in time and stayed on her feet. Her father was in front of her now, and with a slow wave of his hand, he gave her a precautionary dose of green eco, which healed her scratched shoulder and warmed her a little, making her feel slightly more at peace with herself, but all the more ready to accept sleep's encroaching hand.
"Get some sleep now, Keira," Samos advised, touching his hand caringly to his daughter's. "We have all had a long, long day."
Keira nodded automatically without saying a word, her eyelids growing all the more heavy. Then her feet unconsciously carried her out of the room, up the stairs in a slow, mountainous trudge, and finally into her bedroom where Tess waited, lying on her small bed on the floor. She looked up as Keira entered with a distant and longing look in her half-closed eyes, and she didn't know what to make of her expression.
"You alright?" she asked tentatively. "What did he say?"
But Keira said nothing and flopped down onto her own mattress, finally surrendering to the accumulated fatigue. She did not have the heart nor the energy to repeat anything.
With a heavy heart, Tess accepted her decision not to talk. "I understand," she said quietly, and began curling up into a more comfortable position. But then Keira mumbled something into her pillow, something that Tess could not decipher. She raised her head again. "Sorry?"
With a great effort, Keira rolled her head sideways so that her face was free of the pillow, and spoke in a half-whisper with her eyes closed. "Why didn't you tell me about Azyma? About what happened to her family?"
It took a few moments before Tess realised what Keira meant, and at last she understood what Samos must have told her. It made her shudder, for if he had chosen to reveal what she thought he had, then things must be looking pretty bad for her. The rain still pattered against the window, growing heavier and heavier, and Tess felt frightened by the thought that Azyma could still be out there somewhere, alone and unprotected against such cruel elements. But she shook off the dread and the guilt and sombrely gave her explanation.
"It was Azyma's own decision, Keira. She just wanted to get on with her own life, and put her sorrows behind her... start again. She never wanted you to know either, Keira. I'm sorry."
Keira said nothing. Tess waited a few moments, expecting more questions, but then she realised by the sounds of her soft, slow breathing that Keira had fallen asleep. Not knowing if she had heard all or any of what she had just said, Tess lowered her head back down and curled up on herself quietly, waiting for sleep to take her too.
While a disquieted stillness settled inside the house, outside the rains continued to pour down in thick curtains that swept across the streets. Night's course wore on, and the storm only increased its ferocity. Soon the wind was howling between the buildings, the sky over the city was alive with lightning, and the streets ran with rivers of rain.
At a deep, unknown hour in the violent heart of the night, Keira was jolted awake by an intense flash of the weather. Incoherent images from the darkest depths of sleep, the disorganised residues of the day, rapidly retreated back into the recesses of her mind, but she was left with vague impressions of running away from something, or towards something, she wasn't sure. She couldn't understand it.
She pushed herself up in her bed, the light summer blankets clinging uncomfortably to her skin with sweat. The sound of rain still hammered loudly on the window beside her bed, and the frame creaked in the strong winds. Still half-asleep and drowsy, she did not know the time nor even if she was dreaming or awake, but she felt the unexplainable urge that she had to get somewhere. Without thinking, without fully understanding what she was doing or why she was doing it, she untangled herself from her blankets and wandered zombie-like across the room. She fumbled with the door for several moments, her hands swiping up and down until they found the handle, and then she finally managed to pull it open and shuffle out into the hallway.
The house was dark and ominous, and in her disorientation, Keira only dimly recognised where she was, but she could not tell whether this was her own house or Azyma's. Eyes half-open and one hand on the wall to guide her, she stepped clumsily down the stairs and thence staggered slowly into the front room. Here she stopped in the centre. She had forgotten where she was or what she had come here to do. Shadows of half-formed thoughts flittered through her awareness, vague shapes and unidentifiable colours, shifting and swirling nebulously all around her like underwater clouds. They completely transfixed her, enveloped her, and held her captive in the centre of the room.
Suddenly, another flash of lightning lit up the walls, breaking the spell and revealing the location of Azyma's family portrait for a split-second. The ghostly after-image hovered right before her in plain sight, the faces melting and morphing, but it imprinted itself upon on her consciousness with a deafening importance. A fragment of her lucid mind momentarily surfaced, breaking its head through the hypnotic smog just long enough to form a lasting memory, before it sank back down again.
"What if...?" she whispered to herself, barely above a level that even she could hear.
Another crash of lightning, but Keira thought she heard something else too. Her head rolled loosely on her shoulders, and she looked behind herself at the front door. In a living-dream hallucination, it burst open quickly but without a sound, and there stood the outline of a black figure, still as a statue and dripping wet from the rain. The only features it had were two eyes, two haunted white eyes staring blankly and emotionlessly ahead, but Keira knew at once that it was Azyma. There was no one else it could possibly be. They both stared at the other, making no reaction at all. The shape of Azyma lingered for a moment on the threshold, then seemed to move towards her, but then she was gone, and the door was closed once again.
Things were getting hazier now, and Keira felt the familiar clutch of sleep trying to reclaim her. As if in slow motion, her knees bent and she slumped forwards on the spot, coming to a soft landing on the rug. And there she lay, drowning in deep sleep until morning.