Chapter 3 White Table #2
“You came out of the embolism mostly intact. You’re a walking miracle.” Samual didn’t seem surprised by her brashness in neglecting to visit a doctor, nor did he seem worried. “When everything mutated for that moment, when it was broken down and mixed together, do you remember what you felt?”
Ella swallowed, reluctantly revisiting the scene as she rubbed her hands together. “No.”
“Don’t judge it with your mind. What do you feel like happened? You remember Listening, don’t you?”
They’d sit in the woods with their eyes closed, just feeling things around and inside, naming them off like a game. It was a basic Listener practice, and it seemed so childish now, but yes, she remembered.
Ella felt ridiculous considering his instructions, and more so that she knew exactly what she’d say. “I don’t know. Fear. Just so much fear and loneliness. I felt like I was drowning in it, in an ocean of it, and I couldn’t see the shore. I thought I was going to die. I felt so out of control.”
Samual didn’t rush her. “Your entire life flashed before you as you died, didn’t it? All of your memories, even those you’d forgotten, were laid bare, even if just for an instant,” he said, “what else?”
“I feel like a part of my mind is still trapped in it.”
“In what?”
“In one of those memories, like something grabbed me and won’t let go,” she said, rubbing her head as if the words themselves brought on a painful headache.
She vaguely remembered sitting at a white table, but like emerging from a fuzzy dream, that was all.
Her entire body hurt, Ella unable to distinguish the pain of grief from any side effects of the embolism.
“Maybe something did grab you as you walked through your memories.” He gave her that open look as if he wasn’t intent on any real conclusions. She was frustrated by it. She wanted to wrestle the feeling and wring meaning from it, twist it in her hands until it showed its usefulness.
“You know why Amnesiac’s take Amnesia?” Samual asked, but then explained it anyway as if eager to remind her.
“There’s a Listener belief that meditating on the past takes us there, and powerful Strike, in their defiance of the natural world, can see us when we time travel like this.
When we look at the past, at a memory of them, they can look right back at us. ”
Samual fell silent, and she traced the direction of his thinking,
The anger must have shown on her face, because Samual finished his thought as if she were already arguing. “You said something grabbed you.”
“Unbelievable.” She marched from the kitchen, dodging past the furniture, ready to leave. “I thought you were above it all, but I guess I was wrong! You’ve been alone out here too long!”
Samual followed her, as if startled by such a dramatic change in her mood. An unusual urgency in his voice unnerved her. She could tell some kind of proclamation was coming that she wouldn’t like.
“Something had to have saved you!” Samual said, “Something from your past that had the ability to reach out to you. Something Amnesia caused you to forget!”
Ella burst through the door, taking snap steps down the stairs as Samual fumbled after her.
“I’m sick and tired of this!” she shouted back but didn’t slow down, “Strike have been dead for over a hundred years! That’s not speculation, that’s history!”
“You can’t deny the mystery in this world. You can’t deny fate.”
Ella turned like the flip of a knife, looking up at Samual who waited in the doorway with a deep expression of hurt she didn’t understand.
“Fate denied me first!” she shouted. “All of these ghost stories! Using Strike and Spirits to spread fear and control people! I’m sick and tired of it!
People make monsters out of nothing! They’re turning us,” she teared up, “they’re turning my team into monsters!
We hunted monsters! We saved people from monsters!
You—you see spiritual messages in—in,” she threw her hand out, “used tea leaves, and burning wood, and you pray to stone figures and paintings that never talk back but you can’t see people—real people when you look at them.
You can’t look at people’s suffering without seeing something disgusting and I–,” she choked for a breath, wrestling one into her lungs between sobs, “I can’t believe Crow would do this to us. We saw each other.”
She pushed her hands out as if throwing a picture forward that she wished he and everyone else could see. “What my team had wasn’t because of the Spirits or fate. We built it. It was ours–not part of anyone else’s plan! It was a family. We loved each other!”
Samual didn’t say anything else, and Ella wiped her face, rarely given to tears. She gasped for air and calmed down, leaving nothing but stillness inside as the words she’d wanted to say finally escaped, leveraged against someone she loved.
“I’m sorry,” Ella said, unwrapping the reins of her horse from the tree limb.
“I’m tired. I’m tired of seeing things break, broken people and things.
” She buried her stained nail beds in her fists, unable to completely hide the subtle marks of the blood she’d furiously scrubbed.
“I’ve always tried to build a livable world, but all I have are these hands and my entire life has still been just too little to spend on helping anyone else.
So much effort and for what? The world is still just as broken, and now I’m alone in it. ”
Samual watched her hop on her horse, extending his hands up to her.
Ella let him take one, not resisting this time when he pressed his thumb into her palm and wrapped her hands in his.
Looking into her eyes, he said, “You’ve never been alone.
You aren’t at war with brokenness, Ella. You’re at war with life.”
“What else can it do to me?” Ella laughed bitterly through the tears, wiping her face a final time.
“My daughter,” he said, a phrase he’d often used at the end of a difficult lesson or reprimand.
It was the phrase of reconciliation. “You know my heart is with you. Listen,” Samual breathed, “Listen, please. Listen to the world around you. Listen to yourself before you do something brash. You have so much power. I only wish you could see it.”
“I’ve got to go,” she said, looking into the old man’s eyes as she swallowed hard, unsure why his words stung so badly. “I love you,” she added tersely.
His hands loosened around hers as if sensing the permanence of the goodbye. She turned and rode off, unwilling to look into Samual’s eyes and risk seeing her fate.
She felt numb on the ride back, focusing on the sounds of the horse’s hooves and shifting colors of the horizon until she reached the designated meeting spot she’d noted for Kay.
It was a remote hill overlooking much of the capital and had once been a discreet and quiet place for her team to gather and prepare for upcoming missions.
Kay was standing almost at attention when she arrived.
To her surprise, his horse had been saddled up similarly, and he was waiting in full uniform nearby.
She left her horse free to graze on patches of grass near the dilapidated shed where they hid from the sun.
She walked through the silence between them, and when she was within reach, he handed her a wrapped handgun, a similar one on his hip.
She caught sight of his horse. He’d brought all of her gear and provisions for her journey, and then brought just as much for himself.
“You’re packed,” Ella observed, unwrapping the gun as if it were a fragile message capable of slipping right through the cloth.
Ella got the sense that neither of them was keen on getting too emotional. She felt like a wrung cloth, eager to leave the capital and find relief in something else. The tortured glean in Kay’s eyes betrayed his silent rigor, and at last, he exhaled and embraced her in a stifled hug.
“You’re an idiot for doing this,” he said, Ella catching the faintest hints of strained emotions. No doubt he’d done his share of mourning since hearing the news. Kay was softer than she was, despite the rigidity of his intellectual exterior.
“You’re an idiot for coming with me.” Ella replied into his shoulder.
They separated, sharing a short walk to the nearby shed and settling down in the grass facing the city.
He cursed Crow’s name. “Making fools of us. Jade…Alex, neither of them deserved to die like that. You hear about casualties all the time. It’s brutal out there, but it’s just not…
” Kay trailed off and seemed to veer away from the coming emotions.
“Seems like Samual told you what you needed to know. Did he have any words of wisdom?”
“I put too much trust in Crow and that a Strike saved me from the embolism. He sounded like one of the street preachers that warn about Strike still existing among us.”
“I think half the city breathed a sigh of relief when Samual retired and moved out to that cabin,” Kay said, “I doubt the isolation has made him nicer.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “You think we’ll get shot in the eyes?”
“It’s where the name Crow comes from. There are worse ways to go than a sniper’s bullet,” she joked dryly.
Kay made a disgusted face, nervously tracing a scar over his brow. “I don’t want to be buried without my eyes.”
“We can replace them with grapes,” she said.
“Gross.”
Ella laughed with a desperate soreness in her chest. She needed to laugh so badly.
“Fate’s taking over my classes while I’m gone,” Kay replied after another minute.
“Did you tell him what was happening?”
“Bits and pieces. The two of you used to be so close.”
“The two of you are close,” Ella said evenly.
“I’m not the one he professed his love to,” Kay replied in the same tone and Ella didn’t respond, sensing that he had a specific purpose for bringing this up.
“Jade’s told me a few times before, but I need to ask before we do this. Can you tell me honestly, are you in love with Crow?”
Ella stared up at the sky and after a moment of silence replied with a simple, even, “No.”
They watched the rolling clouds, swallowing the horizon, shifting the colors in the sky like a kaleidoscope. The thunder drummed above them. A light breeze brought the first sprinkling of rain.
“I can’t make up another answer,” she added.
Kay consented to believe her. She couldn’t blame him for asking. Love, or the loss of it, was what motivated him. Ella wouldn’t mention that either. He and her teammate, Jade, had been engaged to marry.
Silence settled, the fullness of the day lingering, waiting to be discussed. A few minutes later, they set off for Tunedyl.