Chapter Eight:

A Tiny Encounter

Joan

Eleven and Twelve had been acting oddly. It was almost like they'd gotten… friendlier. I started to watch them constantly, marking their movements. It seemed strange, but… I knew how they moved already. My eyes could see that path they were taking.

The Senator called me into his office a day after I had something to drink with Twelve in the mess. He grinned and showed me a book, or, more accurately, a tome.

"What's this?" I asked.

He pointed excitedly to the cover. "This is the key, Thirteen. This is how I will become President, and, eventually, the ruler of the world!"

There was something about that last line that almost made me laugh, but I didn't even crack a smile. I felt something witty come to my mind, but I shoved it down, unsure of how the Senator would react to such a comment.

I studied the tome. "It looks… Egyptian. Very old, and, from what I see, recently uncovered."

"Your eyes do not deceive you, Thirteen." The Senator opened the book. "This is, in fact, Egyptian. It's hieroglyphs entail a grand legend; one that goes in our favour."

"How so?" I asked.

Running a hand down one of the ancient pages, the Senator smiled. "You know of the Egyptian Gods, Thirteen? It seems they weren't Gods at all, but Conduits. The Egyptian people worshipped them, and they donned the masks that they are famous for to this day. Anubis, the jackal; Horus, the hawk… This book explains to me the powers they wielded."

"Are you sure it isn't made up?"

"My dear girl… This book was written by their hand, in Ancient times. Long before the Roman Empire. They detailed that they were each immortal, adding onto their powers, and that the Humans that were disloyal to their rule sealed them away. That part was added at the end, as the Conduit Gods could not write it. With those Gods on my side…" The Senator grinned, his eyes, for a moment, becoming wild. "They will be indebted to me for helping them escape, and I shall have more of your kind on my side!"

I felt like rolling my eyes. "So, in order to get the Presidency of the United States, you want to go to Egypt?"

"We leave immediately," the Senator announced. "We're bringing Two, Three, Five, Eleven, Twelve, and the prisoners along with us."

I nodded. "Understood. I'll let them know."

Lance

"Egypt?" I exclaimed in surprise. "What the hell?"

"That's what we heard," Alec told me as he leaned against the bars, facing away from us. "We're leaving at first light tomorrow. Better get your sun-tan lotion."

I was about to snap at him when the doors opened. I went back to Kayce and held her close, my frown apparent on my face.

"Well, if it ain't Thirteen?" Alec said. "Fancy meetin' you here. I heard that you come here often, and I was hopin' to catch you."

"The Senator wants you," Joan said in a totally uninterested voice. "Don't keep him waiting, Eleven."

"I wanted to talk first." Alec shuffled for a minute. "See, I was wondering if you could clue me in on what you and the Senator talk about all the time. You keep a lot of secrets, Thirteen."

"It's none of your business."

Alec shrugged and crossed his arms. "Y'know, don't you think it's strange? We're hunting Conduits, and yet, each one of us is a Conduit. I think we're being used, Thirteen."

I heard a thud and looked over my shoulder. Alec was pressed up against the wall, Joan's hand right beside his face and slightly melting the wall… somehow.

"Keep your comments to yourself, Eleven," she said quietly. "Or I'll ensure that you will only see light, until your retinas burn and destroy your eyesight, and you will always be in your precious world of darkness."

She left then, barely glancing at anything other than the door. Alec looked at the wall beside him and wiped a bit of sweat from his forehead.

"Am I ever glad that she wasn't evil in the first place," he said to me. "Then her 'alter-ego' would've been the last thing we worried about."

Joan

A few hours after my run-in with Eleven, I was sitting on a gigantic plane with the Senator, already in the air and heading to Egypt. I had walked by the spot where Eleven and I had had our exchange of words and wondered briefly why the wall had melted. That didn't seem to matter though; for some reason, I was excited, but it wasn't showing. The thought of being in a warm desert seemed to lift my spirits.

When we landed, I was studying the sand and the people with an interest that I hadn't believed existed. The prisoners were subtly escorted to an awaiting train that would take us to Giza, where we would meet the man that the Senator had hired to translate to book further.

The train ride made me feel sick, but I kept it inside like most of my feelings. I ended up wandering the train in the end, unable to sit for a moment longer. I followed my feet all the way to the car in the back, where two of our guards were laughing and hitting something.

"Freak! Let's see you squirm!" one of the guards yelled.

"N-No!" a young child's voice screamed. "Mommy! Daddy! Help!"

My hand moved on its own as I drew the nodachi on my back. I rested the blade on one of their shoulders.

"Step away," I ordered firmly. "Step away or die."

The guards raised their hands and took a few tentative steps back. "Just havin' some fun, is all," one of them muttered.

"Screw off," I spat.

The guards ran out of the car. I slid the nodachi back into the sheath on my back and looked at the kid. It was the one that I'd seen a few days ago; the one that looked strangely like me. She was crying and hiding her eyes in fear.

I ignored it and picked her up, my arms moving into a comfortable position that felt natural.

"I wanna go home…" she whispered.

My hand automatically started to pat her head, but I had nothing to say. I was unsure of what I could say to such a small child.

I brought her back to the prisoners' car and left her near the sleeping man with black hair and soul patch. She quickly wrapped her arms around him and started to cry. The man stirred, but by then I was already gone. It wasn't until a few days later, once we'd gotten to Giza and were translating the rest of the book, that I went back into the prisoner's car.

"You're spending an awful lot of time here," I told Twelve.

He shrugged. "There's no law against it. And I've seen you come here a few times as well, Thirteen."

I stared him down for a while before he left, because he didn't like me or he was just bored, I didn't know. When I looked back at the cells, the man with black hair and a soul patch on his lip was leaning against the bars closest to me, smiling.

"Well, aren't you just a ray of sunshine?" he said.

I barely moved a muscle. "What do you want, prisoner?"

"Just to look." He tilted his head a tiny bit. Strangely, I almost expected him to. "You still have no idea who I am, do you?"

I curiously moved closer to the bars. "What do you mean?"

He smiled. "Don't worry about it; you'll know soon enough."

I backed away from the bars and left, deciding to ignore the man. He's just trying to play with your head, I told myself. Just trying to get you to fail… Fail what? What could I possibly fail?