3
The filling station is a little on the overwhelming side.
It’s small, but striped with glaring lights on the ceiling, the kind that ache my eyes and brew a headache behind them, the radio speaker crackles almost as loudly as the high volume itself, and the aisles are stocked full of too many choices.
I focus, not on the hum of the half-dozen refrigerators lining the wall, but on the shelves.
I take my time to pick through everything while Serena disappears into the bathroom, and I fill a basket with crisps, chocolates, juices, energy drinks, packets of cheese and crackers and breakfast bars and then, I find an entire section of coffee machines and hot food in glass casings.
But then, my mouth puckers at the sight of the remaining selection of hot food.
Fried chicken strips that look sort of grey under the glaring fluorescent light, two whitish pieces of pizza that I’m sure aren’t meant to be white at all, a few small buckets of limp soggy fries, and a pretzel that’s dented and torn along the side, like it’s been banged around and dropped a few times, so there is no way in any world, Videralli or krum, that I’m touching that.
There might not be anything open at the airport.
Usually when it’s so early, the restaurants and cafés are shuttered.
So I snub the hot food but start sifting through the equally as disappointing sandwiches in the open fridge.
After too many suspicious looking chicken and cheese options, I decide we are too late in the filling station for any decent food, and, from the basket on top of the coffee machine, I grab a couple of packaged pastries that are probably stale, and a banana—the only one that, after picking through the lot, isn’t bruised.
I stop at the magazines and get one of each kind.
Flights are super boring in the krum world. And claustrophobic. The more I have to distract me, the better.
I dump the whole basket worth of items onto the counter. The banana jumps on impact, and bounces over the edge, and down onto the floor at the server’s feet. A chocolate bar is quick to topple after it.
The server behind the counter spares me a withering look before he picks up the fallen item. As he starts scanning them, Serena returns.
She asks, “Did you get that juice I like?” The one she decided is her new favourite at the second airport in our travels. Gatorade.
I tried it. It’s disgusting.
“I got the blue one.”
Her gratitude is a mere nod, then we wait in silence as the server takes his time scanning and bagging.
It’s a minute that stretches on for ages, each tick of the clock behind the counter louder than the last, until finally, Serena pays.
I start packing everything into my empty backpack.
Serena asks, “Can you call us a taxi, please?”
He does, and we go to wait for it outside.
Serena leads me around the building to the bins out back.
Here, hidden by smelly plastic, she changes our illusions. And we change our clothes.
The taxi pulls up out front, and we race for it before the server can notice that we’re suddenly two different people now.
And in the backseat, the ride to the airport is filled with packing and repacking our bags, sorting through the junk, and mainly, Serena illusioning the cash. By the time she’s done with the money, the paper notes are just a stack of books.
Easier to get through airport security with books than it is to get through with cash—or jewels.
Serena’s print has saved our asses so many times now. Without it, we wouldn’t have made it very far at all, not even past the first airport.
I’m sick of them.
Airports.
I can’t wait for this part to be over, and we’re settled on a beach somewhere, sand between our toes and cocktails in our hands.
But I can’t fast forward through the monotony of airports so early in the morning. At least the main café is open, really more of a cafeteria vibe that reminds me of the mess hall at Bluestone, and I’m glad for it, because I fill up on breakfast as we wait for the next flight out—
To Pristina. Serbia.
I’ve never been. Not like this is really a visit.
We’re only there for two hours before we jump onto another crammed flight and go to Istanbul, where Serena alters our illusions to fit in, then to Baghdad, then Doha, then all the way to Dallas, Texas.
Finally, we stop flying around the world.
I’m nauseas with travel by the time we’re leaving the airport and stepping out into hot, thick air.
It’s horrible.
Serena pauses at a bin and sicks up everything she ate on the last flight.
Once she’s gotten it all up, we wait in the long taxi queue, then we’re off. The idea was to get far away—out of the city, and beyond that.
The idea wasn’t to find a motel on the outskirts to take a breather in.
But that is what we do.
Sick, nauseas, exhausted—we sleep.
And sleep.
Serena wakes up only to be sick, then she’s straight back to bed, and for the next twenty-four hours at least, we are dead to the world.
When we wake, we shower, change clothes, tend to new illusions, then when we leave, this time we aren’t going to the airport.
We walk to the car lot just up the road.
Dressed in matching tracksuits—Serena’s a royal blue, mine just black—we wander the car lot wearing the illusions of men. Appearances that Serena stole from a couple of guys on the last flight.
But her lassitude limit is really hitting her now.
Too much nausea, too much effort, and her nose trickles with a slight trail of blood that she wipes away.
We’re running out of time.
A few times now, we have stopped to give her a break—like just outside of Geneva, and here, in Texas. But it’s not enough.
Serena needs real rest, which she can only have once we reach the shield witch.
All I know is that the shield witch is in Mexico.
Serena didn’t share more than that. And I’m certain she only told me that we need to go to Mexico in case the lassitude limit wipes her out completely, unconscious, and I’m forced to take charge—that way, at least I know the direction I have to take.
Problem with that backup plan of hers, is that I can’t drive. So it will be taxis all the way to Mexico, and a lot of aimless wandering.
I keep things as easy for her as I can—because neither one of us can risk her exhausting.
I don’t even argue against the car she picks out.
Not the worst one on the lot, but not the best, either.
I say nothing about the stench of stale cigarettes inside. Nothing as I consider the scratches along the silver paint, the dent on the boot, and the other on the hood.
I skim the tag.
It says ‘hatchback’.
I don’t know what that is, I just know that the car I’m looking at is very small. Cramped. The seats inside aren’t leather, aren’t clean, and the steering wheel material is peeling.
Serena waves over an attendant.
“How do you know how to drive?” I ask.
Serena’s lashes are almost halfway down her eyes, like she’s drunk out of her mind and about to pass out right here on the hot concrete ground. Only, it’s a man in a royal blue tracksuit who wipes his sweaty brow opposite me.
“Abuelo Salvador,” she tells me, and spares me an exhausted, sickly look. “He was a collector. I practiced on vintage cars around the estate when I was a child.”
“I didn’t know that about you.”
There’s an edge of accusation in my tone—but maybe that’s the fatigue and the heat, and how slowly that car salesman is moving towards us across the lot.
“He never let me take them off the grounds,” she adds, wiping the back of her hand over her brow. “But he did let me drive the Alfa Romeo around town.”
I scoff. “He let you drive the Alfa Romeo?”
“The SUV,” she tells me with a pointed look. “Not one of his prized cars.”
I run a look over the silver ‘hatchback’, whatever that means. “This might be a little different.”
Serena agrees with a faint, unenthused hum.
And still, we buy the car. For just a few hundred US dollars, too.
That’s how much my manicures cost. No pedicures, just the hands.
And I don’t get French tips, like some of the older Videralli women do.
I only ever choose a satiny pink, or a light gloss, or a faint blush, and that one time, coral—but that didn’t look too nice with my complexion, so I never got it again.
But it is strange to look at this dented car and see the price of a manicure, like I thought I understood money—but I don’t, not at all.
I’ve pranced through the shops of London, waved and tapped my black card, like it was nothing. Like it meant nothing.
The bill went to Father.
Even if I went over my allowance, he never told me to stop spending.
Looking back on it, I guess I got in fake trouble. Father telling me off for frivolous spending was just an act, part of his role, and mine was to keep waving around the black card.
Because I know what it’s like now to be in real trouble with Father.
It’s terrifying enough that I’m choosing to get into this stale-smelling car and sit on the stained passenger seat, with Serena Vasile of all people settling into the driver’s seat.
All for what?
Just so I didn’t face Father’s wrath.
No, I had other reasons.
Good reasons to run.
I’m just having trouble remembering them in the harder moments of this journey.
It’ll get better. Easier. At least when we reach the shield witch.
That’s what I tell myself as I flip the grated apertures at the front of the car.
“What are these?” I ask, whacking it up and down, up and down. “Are they supposed to do something?”
“Vents,” Serena says, breathy, like she’s fighting of another bout of nausea. “For cool or hot air.”
“Oh, turn it on.” I tap the sliding buttons around it.
Serena reaches out and, without taking her eyes off the road, turns it on—and air whooshes out of the vent.
But the air isn’t cool.
“I don’t think it works,” she says, and the patience in her voice is sounding a lot like over-stretched violin strings ready to snap. “Leave it. Get the phone out of my bag. Text the number that we’re on our way. Just say that, ‘on our way’, nothing more.”
I reach over to the backseat. “What number?”
“It’s the only number in the contact list.”
I bring the whole bag onto my lap.