Page 41 of The Quiet
He still held the ends of her fingers, and she put the pieces together. It was almost endearing now that she realized, but she and Kay were his new team. As temporary as it was, he was delaying getting rid of it, delaying the dive into true loneliness.
“You’re a bit of a dreamer in secret, aren’t you?” he asked.
“What are you talking about?” she replied, struck by the assessment.
“Kay admires that you’re tough and brave because you’d do things he’d never think of doing. He thinks this mission is you being tough and brave all over again, doesn’t he? I’d do, and have done these things before, so I see a different side of it. Tough and brave is a means to an end, but you’re chasing down a dream. Tell me this–even if you find him, what are you expecting to happen in that head of yours? What’s the dream? It was all just some big misunderstanding?” he asked.
Ella withdrew her hand, looking at his eyes now. “You’re looking for someone who vanished over a hundred years ago.”
“Apparently, I vanished a hundred years ago too. I’m not looking for him. I’m looking for information. I don’t want to find Peter. No one actually wants to find him.” Jackson reasoned, still sitting in front of her. She noticed for the first time that the darkness of his eyes had faint glints of chocolate brown.
“And when you get your information? Confirmation that he’s dead?” she asked.
“Sure, I’ll just off myself. No point in sticking around,” he said so naturally, it felt truthful.
Ella gawked as he removed another cigarette and walked back up to the rocks to smoke. “You will have worked all your life to preserve human life, and here you’re planning to kill yourself?” She asked as she leaned after him.
“My teams are all dead, the ROSE are all dead, everything I knew is gone. If your society is full of bleeding idealists like Kay, I’m better off jumping off the cliff right now.”
“Bleeding idealists? People that care?” she asked, voice raised as she still stared incredulously.
“People that are easy to manipulate because all they want to do is therightthing,” Jackson shot back, “which ironically is very different than the necessary thing about fifty percent of the time. Let me guess—your academy teaches all about principle and progress but you’ve got poor people piled up on the streets in the bad sides of town? Still hold public executions? Idealism is just a balm for the ego. People don’t actually act on it most of the time anyway.”
“That’s every society,” Ella shot back, unsure if she believed her own words but feeling compelled to disagree with him.
“Then I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t want to be a part of society.” He said without hesitation.
“The ROSE died so that society could exist,” she reasoned, every exchanged line in the argument causing her to sit up straighter.
He shrugged, “We were dreamers too, Ella. We died for the dream. No one ever wants to see reality. You don’t actually want to find Crow. I don’t actually want to live the peaceful life I fought for. It’s the search you love. It’s the fighting I love. That’s life. Chasing. Tension.”
“Sounds like a nightmare,” Ella breathed, leaning back against the stone and he laughed, exhaling the smoke into the air before looking back at her with a full grin as if she’d told a joke.
It wasn’t until she saw the genuine lightness of his smile that she realized she had. That was the joke, after all, and he’d been laughing about it perhaps for years.
“You don’t have to take it so seriously,” he said, and at that moment, she felt some burden on her chest lift. It wasn’t just a joke, but an inside-joke, one that felt somehow wrong and scandalous and yet she realized in that moment she’d been waiting to hear it for a while, to laugh with someone about it.
The lightness was interrupted by the intrusive thought that even just a moment ago he’d mentioned killing himself in that same spirit and her smile faded. He seemed to notice and they sat there both with vacant expressions, watching each other.
“You don’t have to take it so seriously,” she repeated the words on a breath, just spoken from a man who’d helped bring down an empire.
Ella wondered why she suddenly felt so close to him and if that should alarm her. She leaned her head back against the rocks and closed her eyes, relieved when Kay at last walked from around the structure.
“Very empty,” Kay said, “and dusty. Not exactly what I would have expected from the spirit of Life. How’s your arm?”
“Fine,” Ella whispered with her eyes closed.
Pencil still in hand, he eased to the edge of the cleft, and started scribbling away as he inspected the landscape. Ella looked curiously from where he’d come and decided it might be worthwhile to explore while Kay did his sketches and Jacksoncontinued to parse out the possibility of a settlement in the north.
Kay was right in his summary, and Ella didn’t know if he’d expected an apparition from Life itself, but she found herself content enough to explore the vast tower and large atrium in its center.
She found the silence rather peaceful and laid down with the cool marble at her back. It was a refreshing replacement to the sun on her neck and it was a relief to give her legs a rest. As she closed her eyes, she let her mind wander restlessly from Crow, to her team, to Jackson and Kay in a blur of confusing hopes and fears.
Her thoughts drifted into a dreamlike haze, Ella feeling the ground soften and grow warm beneath her, melting the pain out of her body. Eyes still closed, and almost asleep, she marveled at the painlessness in her arm and stretched it out.
Her body felt strong again and perfectly healthy, Ella arching her back against what felt like a bed beneath her before settling into it without question.
The moment felt fragile but immersive, as if opening her eyes would make it all disappear and so absorbed in the relief of it all she wished for a moment that she could stay there forever.
