Crimson (8 page)

My indulgence in this moment is short-lived. We turn a corner on the path. Not far in front of us is an iron wrought fence, black and rust, held in place by solid brick pylons. It looks unclimbable, especially with two soldiers waiting for us on the other side. They’re ready for us. What appeared to be an effective escape route is instead a rather well-laid trap.

The soldiers chasing us slow their pace to a walk; the trap is sprung and we have nowhere to go. Nem’s final words seem more a lot more prophetic now. I guess we have only just started. We turn to face our pursuers.

As we reached the fence, I failed notice that Nem settled herself onto my shoulder. I’m not sure how one misses the addition of such a large bird upon one’s shoulder, but her ability to arrive in silence scares me as much as the soldiers surrounding us. And although I can feel her there, she’s entirely weightless. It’s an unusual sensation.

“I hope you are not so naïve to consider yourself trapped. Or do I have to do everything myself?” She lets out an audible sigh. Perhaps I’m missing something, but naïvety seems like the least of my problems right now. They have both directions covered.

Then things get crazy. Nem launches herself with a single stroke of her wings. She morphs as she moves through the air, landing a dark human entity, the second I’ve seen in the last two days. She’s different, definitely shorter than that first one, shorter than me, and with her more solid outline and long flowing hair, I’m sure she’s not the entity met before. But how can one truly tell the difference between shades of black?

With such inhuman speed, she seems almost to flicker out of existence between two giant strides towards the closest soldier. Her hand reaches out and appears to grab him by the throat but to my surprise passes through him. As it leaves his body her hand drags energy, in human form, her fingers wrapped around its throat.

She pauses just a moment, shoulder to shoulder with him. The energy she holds dissipates quickly. He falls, dead.

She turns, deliberately, facing the next soldier. I blink. She stands behind him, her right arm draped over his shoulder and across his chest; a wicked embrace. Her eyes glow brighter. Shock spreads across his face as her black hand erupts through his chest. There’s something disturbing about her posture that makes her appear to be smiling. He falls backwards, right through her incorporeal body. She did that far too easily.

“Get the girl out of here!” yells one of the men behind the fence.

I turn around to see the remaining soldiers grab hold of the girl, the same strange one there the day I was captured. Of all things, how curious it is that she is here. Perhaps she’s the one they’re using to track me? They move quickly, reacting to the deaths of the other soldiers and drag her into an awaiting van before Nem can get to them. It seems even Nem has her limits. The door on the van slams shut as it goes screeching off.

“Damn, oh well,” Nem says nonchalantly.

“Having fun down there, Sister?” a voice calls from high in the trees above us. To my surprise, another entity, distinctly feminine in silhouette and as completely black and featureless as Nem, sits on a branch above us. Her legs swing freely, playfully, like she doesn’t have to worry about falling from of the tree. From here it looks like she’s having fun. Or maybe she’s just delighted by the killing. Should I be more disturbed? I find myself unmoved, as if this is just a standard part of my life now.

“Why hello up there, Machie, how is my older sister?” Nem calls out.

“You know I hate it when you call me that,” she replies, her inflection implying bemusement rather than real annoyance. “And I’m going to need to leave.” She looks into the distance. “I can’t leave her for too long, she’s still strong, but nothing lasts forever.”

She pushes herself off the branch, morphing into a crow as she falls. With a flap of wings she’s gone.

“Stay safe big sister,” Nem says with the softest of whispers.

She faces me, takes one quick step and jumps morphing back into her crow form to land upon my shoulder. “You know, you look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she says into my ear.

“You turned into a human,” I say, still trying to comprehend everything that just happened.

She tilts her head at me, suggesting my statement seems unusual. “It happens. Just don’t ask me to become a cow,” she humours.

After a short pause, her voice turns inquisitive, asking, “You’ve seen someone like us before, haven’t you? I can see it on your face.”

I nod. “She was just like you and yet I could tell you are different. But it’s not exactly easy to tell. It wasn’t you then, was it?”

“No, it wasn’t me,” Nem says. “When did you see her?”

“She helped me escape from the Templars.”

Nem snorts. “Hah! And here I was thinking you managed that by yourself. It wasn’t me,” she says. “And I don’t know who it was. Now you’ve gone and made me curious. I was sure you didn’t get any help and it’s not like me to miss the presence of another. And that is very curious indeed.”

“What the fuck just happened?” Cara asks, interrupting.

“Were you not paying attention dear?” Nem replies. “Death just happened. Now they know where you are, which means you need to be somewhere else, very quickly.”

“Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here then,” I say, stepping up to the fence to size it up. “Hey hold up. When you chose to lead us down this path, how the hell did you expect us to get over this fence?” I ask.

The cast iron fence is a lot higher than I noticed before and from my current point of view it doesn’t seem particularly climbable. The top is topped with pointed bars and it is far too tall to vault while the brick support posts seem also too tall to provide an alternative place to climb over. Cara responds to my question by reaching up and grabbing the brick lip near the top of one of the brick support posts, lifting a foot onto the iron cross-beam and gracefully launching herself over in one sweeping motion. She makes it look easy.

“Right,” I say in awe.

My efforts are far less graceful. After scraping my forearm painfully on the bricks I stretch my leg up onto the top of fence. Without these gloves this would have been far more painful. As I try to vault over I catch my foot on one of the points on the top. Instead of Cara’s graceful motion I tumble head first over the top and landing hard on my back.

I spend the next moments recovering from having the wind knocked out of me. I struggle to get my breath. And I can tell I’m going to have a nice lump on the back of my head. Cara just stands there and laughs at me. I really don’t see the humour in it. As if to rub it in, Nem joins in with her laughter, perched on the top of fence.

“Gee thanks,” I say, standing myself up. “You could have at least helped me up.”

Cara, ignoring my glare, responds with another outburst of laughter, struggling to keep herself upright.

 “Come on, come on, you’ve got to move on. They’ll be back here shortly with more reinforcements,” Nem says.

“Do you know how to get from here to where you said your sister is?” I ask Cara.

“Sure,” Cara says, “though I’m not sure an impossibly black bird with glowing red eyes is inconspicuous enough for where we’re going. Nem, you’re going to need to avoid being seen if we’re going to walk amongst the public.”

“I can keep an eye on you from above,” Nem says. With a flap of wings she launches off my shoulder.

You know, having a crow, especially a talking one that claims to be an honest to goodness harbinger of death, circle above us is rather off-putting. It’s fair to say that I’d dodged Death’s scythe a little too often these past few days. How much longer before the omen becomes my own?

It’s been a long day already and yet, I know it’s only just begun. The most important thing at the moment though? I’m so hungry.

“Do you think you might know somewhere with some food around here?” I ask.

“Sure, there should be something around here,” Cara responds. “Think you’ll be ok here for a moment? I think it’s better if I go get food by myself and bring it back.”

This doesn’t sound like the best of ideas to me.

“You sure?” I ask. “You will be back?”

She smiles convincingly at me. “Yes, of course I will, but in the short time I’ve known you, you have this habit of making a scene whenever you’re in public. It’s probably best we avoid any more scenes for a while.”

The truth is worth a laugh. “Ok.”

I sit down on some stairs at the entrance of a building and watch her walk off. I hope she’s coming back.

Cara returns, handing me a paper-wrapped bread roll. The chicken and salad roll it contains looks delicious. Now that the adrenaline has worn off though, the food is depressingly tasteless. Not tasteless enough to leave the tomato in, though. It has to go. It’s been forever since I had real chicken; it’s impossible to find in the outer suburbs. Unless it’s stolen, which I’m fairly confident it was, the last time I ate it.

We walk through the city, eating our respective lunches quietly.

“How far away are you taking me?” I ask, between bites.

“It should be about an hour’s walk from here, if we do it quickly,” she says.

Will we even last an hour before they catch up to us? Should we be worried they’ll work out where we’re going? This morning they seemed to be getting quicker at finding us. The thought just depresses me further.

Cara picks up on my mood, and, breaking the silence, asks, “You worried?”

“Yeah,” I respond. The curt response is not the friendliest of answers. She’s not to blame.

“What if they work out where we’re heading?” I ask.

“We’ll just need to keep moving and avoid obvious landmarks so that they don’t. Hopefully, that will be enough to cover our tracks.”

“And even if your sister can find my sister, how do we get her out?” I ask.

She shakes her head at me, concerned. “I have no idea. We just have to work that out when the time comes.”

“Do you really believe that?”

She stares into the distance. “Yesterday I believed I was absolutely safe with the resistance. Not sure I can believe anything anymore.” She sighs. “I’m sorry I don’t have a better answer for you.” She takes my hand and softly squeezes. “I guess we will just have to work something out.”

She doesn’t let go.

The rest of the city is passed in silence. The city itself is dull, more than expected; we’re in the inner circle of the city, but under the surface it is just as dirty and dreary as the outer suburbs I’m used to. On the surface everything appears better, the buildings, the people, the food. But underneath it’s no different. With so few people on the streets, it appears just as abandoned. What do these people do all day?

We go out of our way to avoid passing too closely to the few people with whom we cross paths. Too far out of the way I think. I wonder if it makes us stand out more. Frankly though, no-one seems interested in us. Is it undue paranoia? Perhaps.

“How do you know if this place will be open when we get there?” I ask, to break the silence.

She laughs at that. “Of course it will be,” she says. “This is the kind of place that never closes.”

We fall silent again. I’ve never been good at small talk, but as we walk through this dull place I struggle to start even the most basic of conversations with Cara. What is there to talk about?
Hi, how are you? Sorry about your dead friends. Weather is pretty good isn’t it? How do you feel about holding hands with a violent psychic killer?

Here I am, staring at the most beautiful woman I’ve met, somebody who instantly befriended me despite everything I am, somebody who’s been dragged through hell because of who I am, and I can’t manage a simple conversation with her. Why?

She seems to pick up on me staring at her, though her choice of topic is perhaps the one thing I didn’t want to think about.

“Tell me about your friend Aine. What was she like? Were you two…?” She leaves the question open.

Were we what?
Oh
. She couldn’t have picked a worse way to break the tension.

Panic spreads across Cara’s face. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

I shake my head with a sympathetic smile. “No, it’s ok. And no, we weren’t. I’ve never really had anybody like that in my life. Where we’re from, there wasn’t exactly a plethora of people with which to develop relationships. Certainly nobody who seemed interested in sullen old me. No, she was… I don’t know.” Fifteen years and I struggle to think of a single word to describe her. “Strong willed.  She was a kine; you know what they’re like. But she was sweet in her own way, a good friend, my only one really. I mean, we didn’t have anybody else growing up; it was just the two of us against the world. We never really found any purpose. We didn’t have anybody else. She was younger than me, though I don’t remember us ever not being friends. We explored the outer limits; the derelict buildings and abandoned parks. Most of the time it was me listening, while she did all the talking. She wasn’t much of a philosopher, but she always had something to talk about.” I laugh at that thought. “She was a lot more focused on what was going on around her. I think now that I should have paid more attention to what she had to say. I certainly could have taken a leaf out of her book more often than I did.

“Then that day they just came and shot her. Bang, all over. As if she was nothing. She meant something to me, so why take me? Why take me and not her? I don’t feel special.”

Why was I ok with talking about this? I keep thinking about that day, replaying the motions of the cops. Or were they soldiers? I can’t remember.

What I need is to change the subject. “Tell me about your sister. Were you close?” I ask.

Oh well done me, that’s a
perfect
change of subject. As if you couldn’t make this situation more awkward you had to drop that question. And judging by her facial expression, she’s thinking the same. She snaps out of it though and nods her head at me.

“Yeah, we were close once. We’re twins,” she says, unexpectedly. “When we were younger were inseparable. You know, matching clothes, finishing each other’s sentences, all that kind of stuff. Then we both ended up on the wrong side of town, I guess. Without any family but each other we didn’t really have any direction.

“We were about sixteen when we found out that our talents were highly desirable in the less than legal psychic community, particularly in the employ of thieves. We got involved with one particular group that raided the houses of people known to be important to the government and other well-to-do members of the city. She’d use her remote viewing to locate valuables in buildings and draw maps for the heists, while I acted as a preternatural look-out during the heists. But before long we weren’t just helping them plan robberies anymore, we were in there, participating. I guess at the time the thrill of it sucked us in, but I don’t know now. We were young. You understand.

“But the group was falling apart from the start; infighting lead to schism and people started to peel away, start their own groups and plan their own jobs. Caitlin wanted us to stretch out on our own as well. But I think even then I knew that that life couldn’t last forever. Feuds had become personal, violent at times. I wanted out. After that, we just drifted apart. The resistance came to me looking to use my skills. I tried to get her to join me but I think now she’s too far in to get out.”

The pain of those events is displayed on Cara’s face. Why help me chase a sister who I’ve never met, at a great risk to herself, when she could be working on her relationship with her own sister?

The conversation drifts off, thankfully, to more mundane subjects, mostly revolving around how neither of us is used to this much exercise in a day. The city itself passes by uneventfully. You know, it seems like once upon a time it may have been beautiful; as beautiful as any city, I suppose. The further we travel from the inner city and towards the outer skirts the more obvious the impact of the war. Each city block takes me closer to a more familiar world. The sun paints fire through the sky and with the scars of war illuminated all around me it’s hard not to feel like I’m once again walking into hell.