12. What’s the First Rule?
Chapter twelve
What’s the First Rule?
Kira
“ W hat the fuck is the first rule of Paradigm?” Blink said the moment he slammed into the passenger seat of the car. Our meeting spot was at a dead-end road, near a farm that had been abandoned for some years. No one came out here. No one but the likes of us.
I didn’t answer, feeling the heat of the same despair I’d felt when they threatened to take away my boy.
“She said I was a nanny,” I said.
Could I have laid off the sarcasm? Yes. But she had lectured me about how to take care of my son, then called me the nanny. Then she called the police over a clearly sarcastic joke.
“And?” Blink said, his serpentine eyes completely unsympathetic. “You could have lost him!”
He turned in his seat, his thick, gloved finger pointing to my boy in the middle seat.
“You could have been arrested and separated from him,” he said, his voice clipped and livid.
He pulled off his gloves and I saw his unmarked fingers. The fingerprints he had burned off of his own hands a long time ago.
“You’re not like me,” he said, holding up his hand. “You have fingerprints and each one would lead back to Kira fucking Kekoa, and not Anna Jones! And then where would you be? Eoghan has alerts for your name in every precinct in the Northeast. You could have lost him. Is that what you want?”
“Of course, it isn’t!” I yelled, but he didn’t back down.
“Well, that’s where you’re heading if you don’t start being more careful, Kira.”
He slipped his hands back into his gloves, his demonstration over, apparently.
“What’s rule one?” he asked again, and I bit my tongue, clenching my teeth.
I refused to participate in this farce. We both knew the first rule and he didn’t need me to say it to play into his little… demonstration.
He looked at me, his creepy eyes unblinking as he waited. I waited in turn, the two of us stubbornly staring at each other as the silence grew between us.
The damn staring contest would have gone on for hours, were it not for the sudden, and loud, snoring that came from the back seat. Cillian was slumped, his head pressed against the side of his headrest, a little green snot bubble forming below his nostril, whistling and snorting with every breath.
“Is he alright?” Blink asked, his brow furrowed in concern. “Is he supposed to sleep like that?”
“Yes, of course he is. Two year olds sleep a lot.” It was really ridiculous that Blink knew so little about children.
“But his head… it’s like it’s about to roll off his shoulders.”
“Yes, Blink,” I said with a roll of my eyes. “Their heads tend to stay attached to their body. Just be careful if you see a green ribbon around their neck. You don’t want to pull that off.”
Blink looked at me again, his eyes unblinking. It was off-putting, and I wondered how he was able to keep them lubricated. He must go through eye drops like crazy.
“Is that some kind of art reference?” he asked, his nose scrunched in irritation.
“No, Blink,” I said, with a long, aggrieved sigh. “Not everything is about art—”
“It is with you,” he grumbled.
“— and in this case, it’s a literary reference. A story popularized by Washington Irving. Ever heard of him?”
“For fuck’s sake,” he said with a roll of his eyes. “I’ve studied literature in four different languages and English was not one of them.”
“Well, that’s your fault.”
“Well, that’s your fault,” he mocked, his face so serious that it made me burst out laughing.
He didn’t quite laugh, but he did smile.
“How’s the search for my replacement?” I asked, bitterness creeping in again.
My only friend couldn't help but betray me. That was the sad truth of it. We had a job to do, after all, and I couldn’t do mine.
“The search for your augmentation,” he said, his jaw clenched, “Is going…” He let out a long sigh. “It’s going. That’s all I can say about it.”
“That well, huh?”
I had realized who he would need to reach out to - who he had to curry favor with to replace the income I was losing the company. I almost felt bad for him. Almost.
“She still hates me,” he said, without needing to elaborate more.
“I hate you too,” I said.
“Well, that doesn’t matter as much to me,” he said with a smile he tried to hide.
Ever the stoic Lithuanian, even a smile was too much emotion for him.
“Please, Picasso,” he said quietly. “I need to know you hear me. I need to know you’re listening.”
He tipped his chin up and rested his overburdened head against the headrest.
“I worry about you, Kira,” he said, using my name to emphasize his point. That he saw me as a person. That he saw me. “Please, I cannot be distracted right now with fear and guilt that I have brought this mayhem on to you.”
My brows furrowed, as I looked at him - really looked at him.
Blink’s curse was his talent for observation. He could read a room, he could read people, he could see the details that painted a picture that most of us would miss. A talent I had admired. He had made a study of microexpressions, and could get just as much information from a conversation from what wasn’t said, as the words exchanged.
I tried to use those skills that he’d taught me now.
His eyes were heavy. There were dark circles under that weren’t normally there. His entire face looked like it was dragged downward. Had he been sleeping?
“I cannot tolerate your misery on my conscience.”
Was that what made him act this way?
To my complete surprise, he reached over the center console and took my hand in his. When he turned his face towards me, I was struck with the raw emotion there.
“I don’t have a lot of friends, darling,” he said. His deep voice felt hollow, as though every word fatigued him. “And I don’t even know if the feeling of friendship is mutual. But I am closer to you than I am to anyone except…”
He cut himself off, shaking his head.
“Please, do me this kindness and just tell me what rule number one is.”
With a confession like that, how could I refuse him?
“Rule number one is…” I let out a sigh, knowing that I had violated this rule since the moment I had been weakened by love. “Be as ordinary as possible.”
To never stick out, to never grab someone’s eye. To never be the main character, but instead take on a supporting role. The world was run by the people who stood behind the thrones, in the shadow of greater men.
It went against human nature to never center ourselves in any interaction, to always think of ourselves as facilitators, rather than members, of anything.
That was why Eoghan’s attention had been so intoxicating. The human longing to be important to someone was an allure I had not been able to resist.
“Be careful,” I finally said, because only one thing had ever defeated Blink. Only one thing could make him seem so miserable. “She’s not worth this agony.”
“Neither is Eoghan.” The two of us looked at each other - two friends, in the same fucking predicament of loving someone who was our poison and drug. “Take care of yourself, Picasso. Take care of the brat, too.”
Without a word, he opened his door and left the car.