Page 32 of The Quiet
“What are you saying?” she pushed, urging her tired body in pursuit.
“Nothing, forget I said anything,” Kay retreated as they started following after Jackson, his shoulders visibly tight as he pushed through the foliage ahead.
Luckily, Kay seemed to notice the subtle differences in her ensuing silence, glancing back several times when she didn’t keep questioning him. Eventually, he mused aloud about other things. He mused aloud about the world, and showed her a drawing as if nervously trying to engage her again. Ella passively nodded at his remarks as she fought nausea until at last they reached a small clearing a short ways from a freshwater river. The ROSE walked off to clean in the river, as Ella and Kay both stayed at the campsite nearby.
“I’m sorry about what I said,” Kay apologized as he rifled through his bags for a change of clothes.
“What were you implying?” she asked coolly, leaning against a nearby tree.
“I just don’t understand how you’re comfortable being around someone so dangerous. You even said he’d try to drug us with Amnesia. Those memories did something to you. You aren’t thinking right,” Kay continued, but kept his eyes on his bag, refusing to look at her. “You looked like you were hypnotized. I’ve never seen you drift off in front of someone like that.”
“Because I picked up a cigarette? I picked it up. He took it. That’s it,” she shot back. “I have plenty of reasons for not being myself, Kay.”
Kay didn’t respond and she knew it wasn’t for lack of a better word. That was never the case. Kay was a quick study of most things, so quick sometimes that he sounded paranoid or hysterical until everyone else finally caught up to the more obvious signs of what he’d noticed days before.
Her teammate and his lover, Jade, had accused him of being a Listener on several occasions. As a powerful Listener herself, she’d meant such things in jest, but Kay’s powerful sense of observation did sometimes seem uncanny.
He was still wrong every now and again. Ella reminded herself of that before turning and leaning against a nearby tree with an overlook of The Quiet beyond the campsite. She wanted to sit and fall asleep, but didn’t want to encourage any questions from Kay about her health. He was already looking for reasons to doubt what they were doing.
Her head rested against the bark, relieved she was facing away so that she could close her eyes. “The ROSE live and die for their mission. It’s only dangerous if you get in the way.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. That kind of black and white thinking just can’t be reasoned with. Come to think of it, Ella, you’re in danger of it too these days,” he said, “and you’re talking about them like you know them when just yesterday you barely knew who they were. I think you absorbed something from his memories.”
Ella sighed, already regretting telling Kay about her experiences with Jackson’s curse. She’d considered that possibility, but hadn’t wanted to think about it. It was too unusual, too foreign a concept to her, and she didn’t have time to think about the implications.
Kay would spend all night thinking about just that, throwing her questions and challenges she’d have no words to reject. The worst part is that every concern would be well thought out, and she would eventually have to admit that she didn’t care about the concerns. If the last few hours had taught her anything, it wasthat logic was nowhere close to driving her actions. Kay would catch on and then almost certainly try to take the reins from there.
“I’m sorry I’ve been so stubborn,” she said, hoping the apology would deter him from his earlier theory about Jackson’s memories. Even though she wanted it to be genuine, the apology felt empty coming out.
“I mean, you saw his memories. You saw real images from the war that shaped our world. Experiencing the war first hand like that, the uprising of humans against the Strike,” his tone began to change from horror to fascination and then horror again. “I can’t imagine what it must have felt like to see history like that. There’s no way you’ve come out unchanged.”
“I just need to sleep. I need a break and tomorrow I’m sure I’ll feel more like myself.” She tried to placate his nervousness, and baited the ardent intellectualism she sensed coming alive in him as she added, “It was really fascinating seeing some of the battles. I can tell you more about the details tomorrow. It was like having a front row seat to history.”
She didn’t feel that way at all, but knew implanting those words in Kay’s head might spur him to act a bit more irrationally too.
The words worked better and faster than she ever imagined they would.
Hearing something rustling behind her, she turned her head to see Kay inspecting the ROSE utility belt thrown over a branch. Kay took the heaviest item from the belt, a skull-like lighter. He clicked it back as the flint hissed, the fanged skeleton opening its mouth to the flame. His eyes filled with childlike wonder asif for the first time he saw it as a historical artifact. The fearless intellectual in him blazed to the forefront, leaving all qualms behind.
“Of course,” she said, trying to sound less deliberate than she felt. “Now, I bet you’re jealous you’re not the one who saw the memories.”
“I’m not saying it’s not concerning,” he said, but his actions betrayed the anxieties he’d voiced only seconds ago. He still watched the flame burning in front of him as if it were magic.
“It’s a cherry knife,” Jackson said, walking back from the river. Kay was frozen in place, but now holding onto the lighter as if he were determined to take it back to the Imperia as a museum piece. Ella half expected him to run off into the woods with it.
Jackson didn’t seem to mind, throwing his soaking clothes over other branches as he elaborated, wearing soldier’s fatigues that he’d stolen from camp. The tan shirt exposed his tattooed forearm arm and the infamous ledger of names marked across it. “You lock a porous blade into the hilt and light it once it soaks up the oil. Fire is one of the only things that does enough irreversible damage that it’s hard for Strike to repair the tissue,” he removed a packaged meal bar from the bottom of Ella’s bag. “When it burns long enough, the blade turns cherry red.”
He took a bite of the bar, still hunched over the bag as he inspected what else was inside. Chewing and packing it into the bag, he sat back and they all seemed to inspect each other in silence. She could almost feel Kay’s mind churning as if he’d just found a treasure trove of valuable insights, the only thing capable of overriding his moral qualms about interacting with the ROSE at all.
As if averse to his own interest, Kay shifted restlessly and returned the lighter to its place before grabbing his change of clothes. He looked over at Ella and she nodded back to say she was fine, before he walked off to wash out of his salted and sandy fatigue.
“You’re doing this to track down one person who killed your team. It’s stupid,” Jackson said to both of them, causing Kay to stop dead. He must have heard them discussing it as they trailed behind.
“You couldn’t possibly understand what our reasons are,” Kay took the bait, and Ella looked forward, relieved that she didn’t have to answer any questions. Her throat, arm, and fingers all throbbed, pulsing through her body as if communicating to each other in code, one responding to the other, over and over.
“Try me,” the ROSE said and Ella listened as the very different characters engaged in a conversation behind her.
“It was our team. People we loved,” Kay said.
