Chapter Four Monika #5
No, it’s clear who this male is. Who he’s always been.
I just didn’t see it. I saw the version reflected in the posters on my childhood bedroom walls.
I saw Taranis, the brand. But this thing here?
This is who he really is. This is what his soul looks like.
Who he is beneath this beautiful veneer of humanesque skin.
I wonder whether his alien face is just as handsome or if it more accurately reflects his inner ugliness.
Whatever the case, I won’t be surprised if he eventually reverts, whatever his face looks like.
It was too much to hope that the world could have a hero like the one he’s presented himself to be.
Someone wholly good, so beautiful on the inside that his outside could only reflect it.
I feel a little . . . dumb for having been so severely duped, but in my surprise not surprised at all.
After all, Taranis is only proving the old adage that if anything seems too good to be true, it is.
Because even perfect veneers can have rotten cores.
“All right.”
He gives me a lingering look over his shoulder, eyes narrowing as if I’ve grumbled an insult at his back he didn’t quite hear. He finally grunts. “Don’t forget about your NDA. You tell anyone I let those SDD guys die, and I will kill you and make it look like an accident.”
“I believe you.”
He turns to face me fully then, his gaze so narrowed I’d think his eyes were shut if I couldn’t see the bright-purple light blazing out of them.
The orange lights on the wall flicker purple too.
He opens his mouth to speak, then shuts it, then shakes his head as if shaking off a thought before he repeats, “You can find your own way out.”
“I will.”
“I’m not going to help you.”
“I know.”
He sneers at me, his upper lip curling away from his teeth. Then he turns from me and shoots up into the sky in a blur, disappearing through one of the broken windows.
I just watch him go, a strange weight leaving me as I realize I no longer find myself obsessed with him like a seventh grader scribbling the name of their crush in the margins of a notebook.
I also didn’t stutter when he talked to me.
It’s like, in the span of an afternoon, he became anyone and no one simultaneously.
Cameras all packed, I shake my head and sigh as I head to the service door, alone.
I use the blood-covered keys to quickly make my way down the eerie service corridor, making sure to lock the doors behind me.
I slip back into the garage, skin damp with sweat and cold, manage not to get killed by a flying bottle aimed at the Humvee, crawl into the driver’s seat, and—with the help of the internet—figure out how to make the giant car start.
Since I don’t have the number for anybody at the SDD, I call my PR contact for Taranis at the COE to let them know about the dead guys in the tunnel and chat over editing.
Several of the photos have gone online SOOC—straight out of the camera—and I’ve granted permissions to the photo editors on-site to use the others as they see fit.
Tomorrow I’ll do my own edits and see whether I might want to use any for my gallery’s upcoming exhibit—not that I’m optimistic he’d ever grant me any such permission.
The COE team asks if they can send a medical team to check on me, which I decline, but with the promise that I’ll come in to the office for a debrief and a medical check tomorrow.
I jerk up on the parking brake as I finally reach my flat. I park the Humvee in an illegal zone, hoping it gets towed, and make my way through the glass doors of my apartment building.
Taylor sees me and sits up straight, pushing their bangs out of their face and squinting through their thick-rimmed glasses. “Your date went well, I take it?” they say, their facial expression unchanging.
I bark out a strangled laugh that sounds about as bedraggled as I feel. “You could say that.”
My hands have started to get the shakes.
My shoulders and back sear. My mind is still moving easily, zipping through the events of the evening, putting them into boxes, trying to decide which photos to edit, whether any are worth putting up on my gallery wall, what to do with the fact that I’ll have to ask Taranis permission to use some.
Are we still going to the Jinju Festival together?
Will my dress be tailored in time? What stage heart attack will my mom have when she sees photographs of me wearing it?
Will Ambassador Min-hyuk be cool if I show up with Taranis on my arm without warning?
If I warn her and he bails—which I have no doubt he most certainly will, given what I know now about his character—will she freak out even more?
Will she tell my mom that I’m a liar? If she does that, Mom will likely fly to America first thing, convinced the American culture is having a terrible effect on me, and drag me to Berlin by the earlobe.
“Seriously, though . . . you okay?” Taylor does something unprecedented then: They stand up and come around the desk. I’ve never seen Taylor get up for anything.
I stand in front of the elevator without pushing the button and cross my arms over my bulletproof vest, my bag’s strap feeling like it weighs an additional thirty pounds. “Yeah. I was on assignment. It was . . . intense.”
“That blood?” they say, pointing at my arms.
I nod.
“Fuck.”
“You said it.”
“Then I’ll say it again. Fuck.”
Smiling, I exhale and nod once more, meaning it this time.
I push the button heading up, and Taylor comes over to me, with their sleek nails painted neon purple, and reaches out like they’ll put their hand on my shoulder.
I laugh outright at the grimace that takes over their face, and shake my head. “Please, spare us both.”
They exhale, deflating like a balloon. “Thank god.”
I get into the elevator, feeling a little better even if my hands are shaking just as much. “Thanks, Taylor.”
They wrinkle their nose. “I’d tell you to stay out of trouble, but . . .” The elevator doors close between us.
Up in my flat, my whole body burns as I sink into my textured bright-yellow couch.
I turn the TV on—I’m not even sure what I’m watching.
A reality dating show? Maybe? My mind can’t focus.
It keeps spinning and spiraling out. I realize that I still have blood on my hands and on my clothes, and go to take the hottest shower of my life.
As I remove my Kevlar vest, my backup camera falls out. I’d completely forgotten about it.
So clean I’ve got steam wafting from my skin and hair, I return to my couch, backup camera cleaned of blood as best as I was able.
I take a moment to go through my camera bag and pull out the tripod-mounted camera too.
Then I take a deep, steeling breath before I start to filter through the recordings.
As predicted, the tripod-mounted camera caught nothing interesting except for a grueling before-and-after comparison of Taranis going down the tunnel and then reemerging from it, looking like he’d been attacked by a giant cheese grater.
I don’t look that bad, but my before-and-after isn’t great either.
The smaller camera that fell from the ledge during the rat attack didn’t catch much, either . . . visually. But . . . I turn up the volume. Then turn it up louder.
My heart pounding anew and my shaking hands steadying in a way that spells trouble, I plug the camera into my computer and isolate the sounds of the screaming men, the flurrying of bat wings, and the scurrying of the rats until voices become apparent.
I hit record on my computer and let my jaw slowly unhinge as I listen again and again and a tenth time.
“The fuck are you doing ambushing me?” says a voice that is unmistakably Taranis’s and unmistakably angry.
“The Marduk knows you’re holding out on him.”
“We have a deal—”
“And you’re a little liar.”
When Bia’s melodic voice chimes in from slightly closer, I recognize the other voice as the Meinad’s. “And a thief.”
“The Marduk knows you already have it, and if you don’t deliver it when and where he told you to meet him, our next meeting won’t be so pleasant.” The giggling makes me shiver, even where I’m sitting on my comfy couch in my warm apartment building.
The sounds on my camera fade out after that, and in the picture, I see Taranis whoosh by overhead without once looking down to even check to see if either of the men on the ground who’d come here with him—to protect him—were still breathing.
As I sit back, heart hammering with realizations, two things become abundantly clear to me:
Vanessa was right. I should never have taken this contract.
And Taranis is, indeed, a bad person.
In fact, I’d go so far as to call him a villain.