Harken

19 Sophia

With her arms wrapped around my middle and mine around her shoulders, Callista carried me across the city until I couldn’t smell the smoke or hear the sirens anymore. Thad appeared beside us, guarding the air as we went, his claws out and ready to defend.

Even after we’d landed she still wouldn’t let me go—or maybe it was me who wouldn’t? I was in a daze. I wavered between being awake and falling into sleep-like shock, where I would just stare silently, my body trembling, my hands clutching each other to keep them still.

Thad and Callista never left our sacred circle on the mountain, the same edge of the cliff where I’d first awakened with scales and claws. Neither of them spoke. Their mere presence brought me a tiny comfort.

I wasn’t a crier, and yet I’d already cried more that day than I had in my entire life before it. I’d always thought that weeping over dead people merely stretched the period of pain out longer when it should have ended when they did. It wasn’t like tears would bring anything back.

Still, I wept. I just couldn’t stop myself.

A time came when I could not cry anymore. When the tears dried, I told Thad and Callista everything that had happened. When quiet finally set, so did the sun, and we pressed close as the chilly night swept over the hills. Thad gathered enough courage to leave and get food and flashlights, Callista standing over me like a guard. Even when he returned, we continued to sit in the silence and listen as the voice of the city rose up over the cliff.

“Why are we out here instead of at the house?” I asked. The bed would have been far better than the rocks.

“It isn’t safe anymore,” Callista replied. I dusted off my hands.

“Nowhere is safe anymore,” I spat. She walked away from me to ignore the sourness in my voice. Thad came between us.

“Callista is right,” he told me. “We need to move. We can’t stay in Los Angeles.”

His voice dropped. He didn’t want to say what was coming next, but he knew he had to.

“Right now, I guarantee you they’re headed to Lodi,” he said, avoiding my eyes. “The least we can do is use that as a head start…to get away.”

“Once they have it, we can’t be here,” Callista said with insistence. “We have to leave. And we need a plan, Michael. A real one.”

I drew in a quick breath, feeling my muscles tense. I knew what they were thinking: Michael had run off and nearly got himself killed again. Ruining everything, as usual. I straightened my shoulders.

“Here’s a plan for you,” I hissed, picking at rocks on the ground. “Let’s go right in the middle of the city, and stand on top of one of the buildings, and shout the truth to everyone. Let’s make the Guardians send someone to shoot us down, and kill that person.”

I piled the pebbles into my hand in angry motions. “Then they’ll send another, and we’ll kill him too. Then we’ll track each and every Guardian down. And we’ll keep killing until every one of them is dead, or we are.”

Callista shook her head disdainfully.

“What is wrong with you?” she said with dismay. “Do you have any idea what you did earlier? Do you have any idea that every time you put yourself in danger, you put Thad and I in the same spot? We didn’t even have a choice.”

“Being out there is better than sitting here waiting for them,” I said.

“And if you go out, they will hunt you down!” Thad shouted suddenly from the other side, in an irate tone that I’d never heard him use before. I pushed myself up to my feet, throwing the rocks to the ground in fury.

“Then why the hell did he let me go?” I yelled back. “He had me and he could have killed me in a second.”

“Because he wants to come back and kill you with the Blade instead!” Thad’s voice roared into the trees above us. “He knows you’re giving up. You’ve gone weak.”

My jaw tightened, hands now fists to hold the claws in.

“Now you have nothing left,” he said. “That’s what they’ve wanted all along. To break you, just like they broke us. They want you reckless so they can calculate everything you do, until you’re theirs. Callista’s right—we need a new plan.”

“I don’t have a plan,” I said.

“Well you need to come up with one!” Thad waved an angry hand at me.

“Why?” I returned sharply.

Thad let a quick breath out but I refused to relent. He turned away, walking off as if he wasn’t going to stoop so low as to reply to me.

“Because you’re the one who got us into this mess,” he muttered over his shoulder.

He could have shot my knee with a bullet and it might have hurt less. All of a sudden, hot tears of rage brimmed in the corners of my eyes, and before I could stop myself, I was dashing toward Thad with my fists out.

He reacted faster, hearing me and spinning around. I hadn’t realized that my claws were out too, and our silver edges clashed together like swords. But he was far better than me, far more prepared, and in one swift motion his blades wrenched in a circle, catching against my scales and flipping me over onto my back.

“Stop!” Callista shouted, though the short-lived battle was already over. Thad breathed heavily, standing away from me at the ready. I coughed and rolled over, the impact having shaken my urge to attack, but not my rage.

Callista held out her hand, but I hit it away, getting to my feet on my own. I turned from both of them and started to run for the edge, and before anyone could stop me, I was in the air again. I heard Callista calling after me but I ignored her voice, and flew all the faster.

Being solitary was almost painful. As soon as there were no voices of the others, the sounds in my head bubbled up with memories of my mother’s screams, Wyck’s ghastly voice, and the laughs coming through the screen.

Had I really meant what I’d told Callista and Thad? I was such a mess that I couldn’t trust my thoughts anymore. I had never believed in capital punishment before. Who is a judge to say that someone doesn’t deserve to live? Life isn’t something that is given on loan by a government, a privilege they can recall if someone doesn’t follow their rules.

Sometimes, though, I would watch the news about death row prisoners and study the Glimpses in their eyes. Most would have a dazed, empty space inside, like they’d already died and were simply waiting for the formalities to wrap up. But the serial killers and the psychopaths were different. Their faces might be calm but inside their eyes was still a terrifying, uncontrollable urge to kill, like kleptomaniacs addicted to stealing lives.

When I put the pieces together, I saw the Guardians as genocidal psychopaths. How many disasters had been by their hand? How many more would they kill, if someone didn’t kill them first? Was that to be my grim responsibility—to kill the killers?

Who wept when Hitler died? Murder is good sometimes.

I wrestled with these heavy thoughts as I flew, until exhaustion sank in and I was forced to the ground with an ache of thirst. I walked the sidewalks of an unfamiliar part of the city. None of the people near me gave any hindrance or even a glance my way. I was like a ghost.

That association fit me far too well. I felt as empty as a ghost inside. Without my mother and sister, I had nothing to go back to. I had no hope, no reason to fight. There would never be a normal again. Everything I’d once known was now turned to ashes.

I wandered in this aimless state as the night darkened further and the sidewalks began to empty. My surroundings became lonely and decrepit, slovenly-kept shacks and buildings growing like fungus against the sides of the road. When I spotted an open door radiating light ahead, I turned to go in.

It was a messy bar that I was too young to enter, neon beer advertisements glowing on the walls and animal heads studying me with blank gazes. Even at that hour, the bar was nearly deserted, only two men talking in a corner booth with their voices masked by low rock music and the television. The bartender behind the counter turned to me.

“Can’t come in here, kid,” he said, eyeing me as he cleaned the inside of a glass with a towel. He had long dreadlocks and a black tattoo on the right side of his face like a half-skull. The inside smelled of old sweat and cheap alcohol.

“Do you have water?” I asked in a soft voice, because it was all I could muster. He glared at me.

“You’re too young to be here, man,” he said. “There’s an In-N-Out down the road.”

“I just watched my family die,” I replied. “Can I just have some water?”

The bartender didn’t have an answer. In my life’s study of eyes, I’d discovered that sometimes, even people who didn’t have my power could read the gaze of another person. This was simply part of being human—the ability to see fear in enemies, or pain in a friend, or affection in a lover. The bartender must have read such intense pain in my own eyes that he was forced to concede, and he filled the cup for me without any more objections.

I swallowed all he gave me, coughing smoke up. He poured more, then went to the other side of the building to clean a table.

The television was on, so I watched as it played rerun shots of a football game. The fat reporter spit his “S’s” and “P’s” so much that I expected the camera lens to get covered in saliva. Why did I hold so tightly to these tiny details now?

Unexpectedly, the report changed, and before my startled eyes, my own face appeared on the screen. I nearly choked.

The anchor turned to the camera with my photo hovering at his side: my school portrait, zoomed in so closely that it was pixilated and made me look far more sinister. The subtext beneath my photo read: TEENAGE TERRORIST MICHAEL ASHER MURDERS OWN FAMILY, DISAPPEARS.

My mouth hung open in shock but I immediately had the sense to shut it, to turn around in the stool so my back was to the booth of men and the bartender. There was another television across the room playing the same thing: TVs all around, so that any of the patrons could just look up and match my face to the one on the screen. My heart beat faster, but I didn’t move, fearful that anything would bring attention to myself.

It was hard to hear the anchor without straining, so I leaned in as best I could.

“…Asher displayed sociopathic tendencies as early as six years old…” the reporter said, emphasizing all the right words with a professional—but obviously uncaring—tone.

“…but like all psychopaths, he managed to stay carefully under the radar so that all the signs went ignored,” she continued. “Brushes with police. Car crashes. Even cyberspace hacker friends. And a hobby that Michael called his “Wall of Death”.”

Here, my picture finally disappeared, only to be replaced by an even larger photograph of my old bedroom. Taken at a horribly crooked angle, the photo provided by the police department displayed my wall of eyes, all of the pictures now ruined by dust and ash and crinkled edges that gave them a degenerated look.

Of course they’d skip over the Joy and Love walls. Of course they’d go straight to the Sadness and Anger, panning across the terrified eyes of the anonymous people like I’d trapped them in cages and tortured them to get my pictures. Nobody would explain how I got the photos. Nobody would tell them to turn around and look at the glowing faces on the other side of the room. That wouldn’t have made for a good Wall of Death, now would it?

Go ahead, squeeze as much out of this story as you can. I clenched my fists.

But the reporter hadn’t even gotten to the best part yet—the part that’d gotten me labeled a terrorist. Next, they shifted to shaky video footage of a crashed jet on the beach, smoke dominating the sky as the flames roared through the remaining fuel. My photo hovered on screen beside the plane that Callista had crashed: I was accused of hiding bombs on board and destroying the jet via remote control.

I couldn’t believe what I was watching. It was so obvious…so fabricated. The anchors just continued on with their reports as if there wasn’t even an inch of doubt, throwing in the casual accused and alleged to stay barely in the bounds of honest journalism.

And Arleta—they loved their sinister and gory tales. They would eat all of this up. Everyone would watch the updates every day, talk about it at school and their jobs until my reputation reached local-celebrity levels. They’d all say they knew it all along, that they were right to have never trusted me, that they were lucky to have not been my friend.

I wanted to curse at the news that they were getting it all wrong, that all of this was a lie about me. But suddenly I knew what was happening.

They control every inch of the world… I remembered Father Lonnie so clearly, his whisper tinged with fear. This was the Guardians’ doing! They were feeding these stories to the media to ruin me even more, to give me nowhere to run.

My chin sank into my palm weakly as the report continued, showing interviews with kids I’d bumped into once or twice—suddenly, former best friends or ex-girlfriends. That part almost made me explode with laughter. Then it switched to the reporter walking down a sidewalk with my school in the background.

“Parents have to wonder that if a boy of seventeen can murder his own family and burn their house down—how close was he to your own children? Are they safe while he runs free?”

“I have a message for Mr. Asher.” Footage played of a short and rotund man in a police uniform, standing behind a stack of microphones. He looked nervous, lacking the public speaking skills to even look up from his pre-written statement on the podium. “No matter what it takes, we will find you. We will draw you out from where you are hiding, and bring justice to your family.”

I’d seen better-written threats in chalk at my sister’s schoolyard. There was a shuffle of stock music, ushering in an animated bumper that sent them into another segment. My face disappeared.

I sank back into the chair, looking across the counter at nothing. In one sweep, the Guardians had taken from me anyone in my old town who might have come to my support.

My throat had gone dry again. I heard footsteps in the doorway behind me but was too distracted to turn until someone slid into the chair next to me. I turned my head sharply. It was Thad.

“Did you follow me?” I hissed. I would have jumped from him if I wasn’t sure it’d cause a scene. He was by himself.

“You can’t be alone,” Thad replied simply. “You know that.”

I let my breath out. Having a bodyguard stalking me was not something that I found appealing. Likely it was because they’d already seen that if they took their eyes off me then I’d go off and nearly get myself killed. I cursed under my breath.

The bartender clinked a glass of water down in front of Thad and left again. He began to sip slowly, eyes staring blankly ahead at the television.

We sat like that for a while, neither speaking. Thad put his glass down.

“What are you thinking about doing?” he said, almost painfully. I wished I could have dodged his question but he was looking straight at me.

“Thad,” I replied, “my family is dead. My house is burned down. Everything is gone. Do you understand what that means?”

“That you’re blinded with anger,” he suggested. “That you’ll do anything to get your hands on Wyck for what he did. Even if it’s suicide for you and us.”

The words slipped out and he immediately knew how cruel it sounded. I cringed and turned away, drinking more to hide my face.

“I’m sorry,” he relented. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

Talking about it was not making me feel any better, and every time I let my mind wander back it was overcome by images of the burning house. I couldn’t escape it, like a brand seared in to the back of my subconscious, always popping up no matter how hard I tried to block it out.

Thad picked the glass up, drank the rest down, and then stood.

“Come on,” he beckoned. “I want to show you something.”

“No,” I said. “Just go.”

“Please,” he said. It took me unawares. He nodded toward the door.

I gave in. It wasn’t like I had somewhere else to go. I put some cash on the counter and Thad lead me outside. He went down the neighboring lane and into the shadows, where we jumped into flight and headed away from the Valley.

At first I was afraid that he was bringing me back to Callista, and I just didn’t have the heart to hear another scolding from her. But to my relief he turned away from the hills and in the direction of a different part of town. His motions told me that he knew exactly where he wanted to go, so I followed with little regard to the places beneath us.

We passed Beverly Hills, our short-term home. Surprisingly, only a small distance from the beautiful neighborhood, the buildings below us changed into messy structures again. You could easily tell where the rich people had stopped building their rich people homes, because that’s exactly where the roads began to fall into disrepair, and the trash began to be piled higher in the alleys, and the dogs appeared to run free from one lot to the next. Everything stank of rot.

Thad found the rooftop he was looking for—long and flat above an auto garage. This building was not much taller than the bar we’d left, surrounded by others in similar concrete construction. Wind rustled black tarps and broken crates that polluted the roof. I could hear multiple pounding subwoofers below, warring each other to dominate the beat.

Thad hopped onto the wall with his back against the bricks of the corner pillar and his shoes on the concrete edge in front of him. I wasn’t surprised by the lack of concern on his face for the edge, even as the sounds of the cars in the nighttime traffic rumbled below us.

I walked to the edge and peered over, using it as a distraction for my aimless gaze, trying not to look at Thad. Multicolored lights laced the street below us like an array of cheap carnival games. Buildings blocked most of the view but the little I could see was magnificent enough. Los Angeles signs sparkled like purple and green gems, reflecting into the faces of the people and the cars going about their frivolous and self-indulgent tasks. On the surface, everything glittered in LA. Even when I stole a glance at Thad, I could see the city continuing on the other way—ever sparkling, ever alive.

There were high towers in the distance, pinnacles of construction with so many offices and businesses housed within that the radiance of the windows were like tiny cubes of light. But those were far from us. In contrast, the buildings on the streets below were littered with pawn shops made of wind-worn bricks, nightclubs with flashing lights and provocative window signs. Patrons wandered in and out, getting into cars and swerving onto the road, three drunken girls leaving in a limousine. Their clothes sparkled vibrantly and their fake laughs rose to the sky. They were counterfeit diamonds: beautiful outside, repulsive within.

“I bet this would make for a lot of good pictures,” Thad said.

Pictures. I hadn’t snapped a picture in what felt like decades. All of my stuff was destroyed now. But that couldn’t stifle the urge that managed to crawl from under the ashes in my heart. Taking pictures always makes you feel better, Michael.

It just wouldn’t feel the same now, though. My Great Work was gone. A part of me had died with it.

“I already have loads,” I replied emptily.

“You could take more,” Thad said.

“Where would I put them?”

“Well I don’t know,” he said, eyebrows furrowing. “Look, I’m trying to make you feel better but you’re really trashing it all.”

I almost reared up in anger again but chose to glare over the edge instead. After all, I was the one who’d just lost everything. Who was he to tell me that I shouldn’t feel this bad?

A girl in a black dress caught my attention, stumbling between her friends drunkenly and shouting indecipherable nonsense into the night. She and her posse were migrating from one nightclub to another next door, obviously not satisfied by their levels of intoxication yet. Ugh. That type of shallow pointlessness was exactly what I loathed in the normal people who surrounded me at school. Another reason I never fit in with them.

“It’s weird how those people have no idea,” Thad said.

He’d followed my gaze down. Confusion was etched on his face. He studied the people further, almost in the grief of jealousy—the way a lepidopterist might study a butterfly and yearn to be as beautiful.

“I mean,” he went on, “how can we be up here flying around and they’re just down on the ground living their lives? Why were we picked? Why are we sacrificing all this when they don’t even seem to care?”

I didn’t respond. What had been such a fine canvas was now a melancholy portrait of the city below. He was right. Why was this our duty? We were only seventeen.

Thad shook his head, gaze following the people as they disappeared. He looked more worn than before, the façade to keep Callista and I in some semblance of order now removed. He wasn’t even studying the people anymore—he just stared down into nothing.

“I loved people too, before this,” he said abruptly. “So I know how it feels to lose everything, Michael.”

He didn’t look at me as he said it. My hands froze against the flat top of the wall. He cleared his throat.

“I don’t know if she’s alive or dead,” he continued. “They just took her.”

He shielded his face from me by looking at the street, probably not wanting me to read the anguish in his eyes. At first he hesitated, then his fingers slid away and pulled out the shiny skeleton pocket watch. He clicked the watch open out of habit and glanced at the time, before he snapped it closed again and hid it in the fold of his hands.

“Her?” I pressed. He nodded slowly.

“Yeah,” was all I could get out of him at first. There were volumes of stories behind that single word just itching to be free. Thad was doing his best to keep the covers closed. In the end though, he sighed.

“It’s a funny story how we met actually,” he said. “See, my uncle is kind of a bum. He lives in this old singlewide trailer in Washington and drinks most of the day, so I’m the one who has to run out and get jobs if I want food to eat that’s not like…microwave macaroni. Or sardines. I got to be a waiter, so I’d take all the money I made and put some of it to pay for my truck, and some of it for gas, and the rest I’d either save or buy food at the Walmart.”

He couldn’t manage a grin, but his lips turned slightly upward at the memory. “I liked the frozen stuff because it could sit in the freezer all month and I wouldn’t need to waste time going to the store every week. So I’d pile things into my basket and go check out. That’s where I met Sophia.”

Thad said her name sweetly, like the way a composer might speak of his most enthralling sonata. He shifted one of his legs on the ledge.

“She was the checkout girl,” he went on. “I was piling all my frozen pizzas and frozen noodles and frozen lasagna on the belt. She looked at me weird and said something like, ‘Should I be worried that you’re feeding an Italian army at your house?’ I laughed like a crazy person.”

He finally smiled at that part, though he had to lift a hand to wipe away a tear.

“So that was our thing,” he said. “Every month I’d go in to the store, buy a bunch of frozen food, and she’d make fun of it. If I bought frozen enchiladas or burritos, I was hiding the Mexican army. If I got rice she said the Asians were coming. I started doing it on purpose, and then I started going back more than once a week because it started to get funny.”

Thad shrugged. “But then they started to cut some of the checkout jobs. Sophia lost hers. So the last time I was there, she told me that she had to start working at another grocery store way down the road. She didn’t think she’d see me anymore.”

He crossed his arms. “I didn’t think so either. And I felt silly to be sad about it. But the next week, when I went to go get food, you know what I did? I drove all the way across the whole town to go shop at her new store and check out in her line again. It was like a habit. I couldn’t help myself.”

“I told her it’d be much less of a drive if we met somewhere in the middle. So the next day we did, and that was the first date.”

His voice had gone warm with the recollection. With some hesitation, he lifted the skeleton watch between us.

“On the first date, we got bored but neither of us wanted to go home,” he said. “So to get out of the rain we went in to this old shop. Sophia had this grand idea for us to pick cheap things out for each other and then use them as surprises at the end of the day. I was nervous so I got her something boring, some pin-thing for her hair. But I think she already knew me well. She got me this watch. It was crazy and I loved it, because you know me—always checking the time, and this just made it more fun.”

He brushed his fingers through the sides of his hair tensely.

“That was six months ago,” he said. “We’ve seen each other every day after that except three…”

His voice trailed away. “Well, now that count’s off, since they took her.”

He didn’t want to go in to this part of the story; his desperation to stay afloat had turned into an anxious flailing. But he had to go on.

“It was 4:56 PM on March 15th,” he said. “We were walking in one of the parks near the trailer. I’d just checked my watch and told her how all the numbers were consecutive. Then all of a sudden, there was this—” he stopped, then shook his head. “I don’t need to go into it. But I was knocked out, and when I woke up, I was in the white room.”

Each word was a heavy block of stone he had to heave out of himself.

“Maybe it was a different white room from yours,” he said. “Maybe there are a dozen white rooms all over the place. I don’t know. But they had Sophia there too, and I just barely remember seeing them drag her out the door screaming for me before I was dozing off again with a needle in my arm.”

His jaw clenched. “I haven’t seen her since.”

He never wept. Somehow, in all the time that he’d been a prisoner, Thad had managed to build such a mental fortress that not even recalling the girl he loved was enough to break through. It could have been his resolve to find her, the uneasy platform on which he stood to keep telling himself that she was alive, when both of us knew she probably wasn’t. The Guardians didn’t have any reason to keep her.

It left us in a heavy gloom. I breathed slowly, trying not to let the torment carry me away.

He finally lifted himself up so that his gaze could meet my eyes—his were bloodshot and filled with haunting memories. The city reflecting in them looked like a desolate wasteland.

“I lost Sophia for you,” he said bluntly. “No…not for you. Because of you. So did Callista with her family. You are important enough for all this, and I know that, but I don’t think you can see how many people have sacrificed to give you a chance at finishing what you started when you were Daniel. You’re that significant, Michael.”

He nodded at me. “Who you are now is always more important than who you were before. And if you can’t bring yourself to do it because it’s right, then do it for the ones who care about you.”

In so few words, Thad had summed up the invisible foe that I had been fighting: myself. Because now, I wasn’t just myself. I wasn’t just Michael Asher who could go taking clients and driving nice cars and sneaking out and back in at night. Father Lonnie had been speared on a church. Callista’s family had been murdered. Anon still risked himself just to help me. How many others did I not even know about who were, at that very moment, praying secretly that I would somehow survive? Everyone that Callista, Thad, and I loved had already placed his or her lives as collateral for my victory. The debt was now mine to bear.

All along, I’d known what I needed to do, and yet I’d tried to deny it. If I let the Guardians continue, I knew how this would end—I’d already predicted it in another life. I had to take the Guardians’ power. I had to cure their poison.

Thad held my gaze for a few seconds and then looked back to the street. The nameless people had vanished, music still pumping through the walls but the streets momentarily emptied. I replayed the dreams like movies in the back of my head, retracing every step from end to beginning. Thad and Callista had run to save me in the second life, even jumping in front of me to block the bullet. And in the first, they had hurried with me up the winding stairs, knowing full well that there was no escape, that the moment we dashed out into the night we would be caught and killed. They’d done it for me.

“Underground,” I gasped suddenly.

Thad looked up at me. “What?”

All at once, something from the dream that had been pushed to the back of my subconscious leapt into the forefront. It was so obvious that it was nearly blinding.

How could I have missed that? Such a tiny detail…

“What did you say?” Thad demanded, rising up as he looked at my stricken face.

“M-my dream,” I managed to force out. “The first one, from my first life when I hid the Blade. There were stairs. You and Callista and me were running up stairs from a basement.”

Thad comprehended what this meant at the same time I did.

“The Blade is under the restaurant!” he realized.