Chapter Twenty-Three
Yun
“You look way too tense,” the woman across the trailer from me said as she examined her long, artificially colored nails.
She reminded me of a bargain basement version of Mercy—poorly dyed blonde hair, clothes that were similar but not quite right, and sure didn’t fit her, and a false sense of arrogance that Mercy never had.
In short, I got the sense that this was a girl who had grown up watching Mercy on the news, and when she turned into a guide herself, she figured she’d base her entire look on the other woman.
“You don’t get nervous? You never know what’s happening in there.”
“They’re espers. You don’t have to worry about them. They know exactly what they’re doing.” She held her hand out, examining the gaudy red polish that covered each long nail. It made me wonder how she didn’t get them broken off constantly.
I could have responded, told her that espers are hardly gods, but I had a feeling she wouldn’t accept any of that.
In fact, it was easy to pin her exact type.
She saw everything as a fairytale, and she had a part to play in that.
If she was the princess, they had to be her knights in shining armor.
Anything else would break that fantasy for her, and she couldn’t allow that to happen.
The memory of the nightmare, of that thing reaching out for me, of all the things I’d done to escape both the memory, and the reality, came back to me.
Maybe I’m not as different as I want to think.
“How long have you been with them?” I went with a nice, easy line of conversation. The last thing I wanted was to sit here in silence for what could be hours.
The woman smiled brightly, telling me I’d picked the right topic of conversation.
“We’ve worked together for a little over a year.
” She seemed to have to do some math to work that out.
“There were so many other guides who wanted this spot, but I just knew I had to have it. Have you seen them on the magazines? They’re moving up so fast, and I knew I wanted in on the ground floor. ”
Her words caused an uneasiness in my stomach.
Did she see them as just a way to scramble to the top?
I guess I couldn’t blame her that much. The reality was that guides took most of our position from the squad that we worked with.
Sure, we had our own ranks, but we were only as good as the espers we served.
It was hard to get mad at her for trying to play the game society forced us into.
“I was surprised that Reject Squad got themselves a guide.” She didn’t say that like a question, and I didn’t get the sense that she really needed an answer.
“Why? Don’t most squads need a guide?”
“Well sure, ones who actually do things do. Usually, they just use rotating guides. Basically, whoever gets in trouble gets sent there as a punishment to take care of them. It happens like that with a lot of the lower squads. Of course, lower squads usually mean like, Rank C or so.”
She left the rest of it unsaid. At least from her lips. Her expression made it perfectly clear what she thought about all of this. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen that look, of course, and I’d probably had it myself before.
I couldn’t seem to right what I knew about them with what other people said. I just couldn’t see the men that I had known thus far turning their back and just not giving a damn about dying civilians.
At least, not all of them.
“What’s it like?” she asked with a soft voice, as though afraid of anyone overhearing us.
“What’s what like?”
“Well, you know, being with them? There’s plenty of stories about all of them.
I’m not sure there’s anyone that Ingram hasn’t been with.
Kenyon stays a little quieter, but there’s stories about him too.
Carter seems like he’s just an idiot, but sometimes I don’t know if that’s true.
And Shear? I know espers aren’t exactly human, but I’m not sure it’s ever been as true as it is with that one. ”
Every word out of her mouth annoyed me. I wasn’t even sure why. She wasn’t wrong, and I’d thought the same exact things about them too, hadn’t I?
Whether she had a point or not, however, she didn’t have the right to say it.
It was like hearing someone talk shit about your sibling.
It didn’t matter if you had thrown a flat-screen TV at them a week ago, no one else got to talk shit about them.
These men might be terrible, and they were probably stupid, but at least for right now, they were mine.
And as tempted as I might have been to say that, I press my lips together instead. There was no good reason for me to go and out myself like that.
Thankfully, before I had to come up with something to say back, an alarm signaled inside the trailer.
The portal had started to disintegrate. Whether that meant that they’d cleared it, or time simply had run out, I didn’t know. It had the other guide and me out of our chairs and out of the trailer in a heartbeat.
The trailers sat about a hundred yards from the portal, and two combat espers stood watch between those spots. They served as guards in case any monsters slipped through the lines that the squads had created inside. They remained as guards even as the other guide and I approached the portal.
Something I didn’t expect hit me.
Fear.
Sure, I felt fear around portals no matter what. Anyone with half a brain would. Only an idiot wouldn’t know the kind of danger that that thing signaled.
This wasn’t fear of the portal though, not of the dungeon or even of the monsters inside. Instead, this was all about what would come through that portal. Or rather, what might not come back through at all.
I’d been stationed at portals before, with other squads, and I’d never really given a fuck whether they came back or not.
In fact, there were times when a part of me almost wished they wouldn’t.
If they never came back, I would never have to guide them.
I’d never have to address that pain inside me, the anxiety, the helplessness.
This time though, the idea of any one of those four fuckwits not coming through that portal terrified me.
In fact, a very stupid part of me felt drawn toward the shimmering boundary, compelled to enter it and retrieve them as though they were my property. As though no dungeon was going to get the chance to take them from me.
Thankfully, before I made a fool of myself like that, the purple shifted, swirling, and dark figures appeared through the center of it. It took a long moment for them to fully pass, to move from shadow to substantive figure.
I was able to identify them as they appeared. First, it was the other team. The guide I’d spent time with squealed, then rushed forward like greeting a husband back from war.
It gave me a moment to stare, to wonder what it would be like to feel that way. She ran over, greeted by the team like some long-lost lover. It annoyed me, especially after the things she said, but I could hardly deny that a part of me craved that kind of closeness.
My attention returned to the portal just as three figures broke through the surface. Carter was, yet again, covered in monster blood. Beside him walked Kenyon walked, with Shear next to him, and while both looked tired, neither showed any obvious injuries.
Those nerves inside me didn’t go away though, because three wasn’t the full number that should have returned.
I took two large steps forward before I stopped myself, and the last person appeared in the purple shimmer of the portal. I recognized that figure even before it all came into view. Except when Ingram did appear, he made Carter look clean and put together.
He limped and held his arm against his front, tight to his stomach as though it didn’t work right.
I had no chance to stop myself this time.
I rushed forward at a dead run, and even when Kenyon tried to stop me, I ducked around them.
The portal collapsed in on itself just as Ingram passed through.
It told me they’d cleared the dungeon, either by monster or heart, so at least they’d done their job.
None of that really mattered, however, in the face of the way that Ingram walked.
I skidded to a stop just in front of him, staring up into his face. He wore a strange expression, some weird level of contentment. How could someone look that happy when hurt and covered in so much blood?
It made me wonder if I knew him at all. Or, maybe it was better to say it made me recognize I didn’t know him, that I might not ever really know him or understand him.
“You’re hurt.” My words were stupid—even I knew that much. The problem was that my brain refused to work. Seeing him that banged up bothered me.
“I’m fine.” His word slammed shut the door on any sort of conversation.
“You are not. Look at the way you’re holding your arm.” I gestured at him as though that had to prove the point.
He shifted to hide it, as though leaning the other direction would make me forget what I’d seen, as though I couldn’t see any longer that he still had that arm pinned to his side.
“Kenyon already looked at it and healed me.”
“Then why are you still like this?”
“Because it still takes a while to fully go away. What are you, my mother?”
Those words stung, more because he spoke true. I thought over to that other guide, to how annoyed I’d been by her actions, but she’d been welcomed, hadn’t she? They had at least a false sense of closeness—we didn’t.
I dropped my hands and curled them into tight fists when I didn’t know what else to do with the energy coursing inside me. I didn’t even understand why it bothered me so much.
“You probably need guiding,” I said, the words soft, quiet, meek. I hated that the worst.
His silence spoke more than his words had. It was one hell of a rejection.
“I can tell you need guiding,” I pushed.