Chapter 9 Cursed #4
“I mean, you saw his memories. You saw real images from the war that shaped our world. Experiencing the war first hand like that, the uprising of humans against the Strike,” his tone began to change from horror to fascination and then horror again.
“I can’t imagine what it must have felt like to see history like that.
There’s no way you’ve come out unchanged. ”
“I just need to sleep. I need a break and tomorrow I’m sure I’ll feel more like myself.
” She tried to placate his nervousness, and baited the ardent intellectualism she sensed coming alive in him as she added, “It was really fascinating seeing some of the battles. I can tell you more about the details tomorrow. It was like having a front row seat to history.”
She didn’t feel that way at all, but knew implanting those words in Kay’s head might spur him to act a bit more irrationally too.
The words worked better and faster than she ever imagined they would.
Hearing something rustling behind her, she turned her head to see Kay inspecting the ROSE utility belt thrown over a branch.
Kay took the heaviest item from the belt, a skull-like lighter.
He clicked it back as the flint hissed, the fanged skeleton opening its mouth to the flame.
His eyes filled with childlike wonder as if for the first time he saw it as a historical artifact.
The fearless intellectual in him blazed to the forefront, leaving all qualms behind.
“Of course,” she said, trying to sound less deliberate than she felt. “Now, I bet you’re jealous you’re not the one who saw the memories.”
“I’m not saying it’s not concerning,” he said, but his actions betrayed the anxieties he’d voiced only seconds ago. He still watched the flame burning in front of him as if it were magic.
“It’s a cherry knife,” Jackson said, walking back from the river. Kay was frozen in place, but now holding onto the lighter as if he were determined to take it back to the Imperia as a museum piece. Ella half expected him to run off into the woods with it.
Jackson didn’t seem to mind, throwing his soaking clothes over other branches as he elaborated, wearing soldier’s fatigues that he’d stolen from camp.
The tan shirt exposed his tattooed forearm arm and the infamous ledger of names marked across it.
“You lock a porous blade into the hilt and light it once it soaks up the oil. Fire is one of the only things that does enough irreversible damage that it’s hard for Strike to repair the tissue,” he removed a packaged meal bar from the bottom of Ella’s bag.
“When it burns long enough, the blade turns cherry red.”
He took a bite of the bar, still hunched over the bag as he inspected what else was inside.
Chewing and packing it into the bag, he sat back and they all seemed to inspect each other in silence.
She could almost feel Kay’s mind churning as if he’d just found a treasure trove of valuable insights, the only thing capable of overriding his moral qualms about interacting with the ROSE at all.
As if averse to his own interest, Kay shifted restlessly and returned the lighter to its place before grabbing his change of clothes. He looked over at Ella and she nodded back to say she was fine, before he walked off to wash out of his salted and sandy fatigue.
“You’re doing this to track down one person who killed your team. It’s stupid,” Jackson said to both of them, causing Kay to stop dead. He must have heard them discussing it as they trailed behind.
“You couldn’t possibly understand what our reasons are,” Kay took the bait, and Ella looked forward, relieved that she didn’t have to answer any questions.
Her throat, arm, and fingers all throbbed, pulsing through her body as if communicating to each other in code, one responding to the other, over and over.
“Try me,” the ROSE said and Ella listened as the very different characters engaged in a conversation behind her.
“It was our team. People we loved,” Kay said.
She could imagine him standing behind her with crossed arms and a proud chest. She knew his strong front hid a deep woundedness.
Kay had only shown her a fraction of the grief she knew he felt.
She hoped this conversation wouldn’t stir him too deeply.
He was intelligent, and he was passionate, but he was fragile all the same.
“Love? Who did you love?” Jackson replied in an easy and relaxed way that completely contrasted the tone of Kay’s convictions.
Jackson, she knew, had lost everyone and everything.
She’d seen the losses first hand, and so he broached the subject with a nonchalance that made her wonder if the topic stirred him at all.
Ella was struck with the personal nature of the question, and the sense that he’d had to ask Kay about a specific person.
It did seem like an important skill set to get to know people quickly in the circumstances Jackson had come from.
She looked over her shoulder again and exchanged glances with Kay, curious if he’d answer.
Jackson was analyzing them, poking like a surgeon, relaxed and alert in a disorienting way she could only guess was strategic.
It was peculiar how well he was adjusting to being present again, present and alone, in a completely different time and place.
It was as if nothing existed but his goal of finding Peter.
“Why pretend to ask about something you don’t care about?
” Kay said with a rising edge in his voice, unlocking his arm only to gesture over at the relaxed posture that mirrored Jackson’s tone perfectly.
He sat next to Ella’s bag, arm propped up on it, one leg stretched out and the other tucked close to his chest.
“I understand. I’ve loved plenty of people.
” There was something in Jackson’s ease of mood and bluntness that almost made him child-like.
“We fought alongside each other too,” Jackson said, “but when they were dead, they were dead. I didn’t create missions at the risk of my own life just to figure out how they died or why.
I knew why. Life is chaotic and unpredictable,” he said, “you’d be better off looking for revenge, not an explanation. Revenge at least, I’d understand.”
“She wasn’t plenty of people,” Kay argued back, both arms unfolding now as if he were preparing for a fight.
“Doesn’t mean I loved them any less,” Jackson said.
A long silence ensued. Ella felt the discomfort in the pit of her stomach, exchanging glances with Kay who seemed disarmed and yet angered by Jackson’s evenness.
Kay gave Ella one last glance that she returned sympathetically before he swallowed, turned and walked off.
It was hard to argue when words themselves felt too incomplete to translate the pain. She didn’t blame Kay for leaving, though she had a feeling another argument might soon be on the horizon.
Ella wasn’t sure what Jackson represented to Kay, but it stirred something tender in him. Jackson stirred something in her too, and so when Kay was gone, she eagerly returned her gaze to the view of The Quiet and hoped Jackson would leave the silence be.
After a few minutes, Jackson walked up beside her and leaned against the opposite tree, looking off at the sunset with her. She wasn’t sure if the space between them felt peaceful or hostile, but the tension caused her to shift against the tired discomfort in her body.
He didn’t say anything for a long time, and removed another cigarette to smoke.
He offered it to her, and though Ella didn’t smoke, she took it anyway, if only for the sake of having a distraction from the pain in her arm and having an intuitive sense of the ROSE’s language.
She kept waiting for him to offer her a drink which she knew would have a healthy dose of Amnesia.
“You didn’t see any Strike in my memories?” Jackson asked as she inhaled. “Not hearing any voices since getting out?”
Ella exhaled and shook her head as she handed the cigarette back to him.
She was acutely aware of his gaze. His eyes soaked in the world in a vastly different way than Kay’s analytical stare.
Kay’s mind was busy as a bustling mailroom, always producing some return in the form of speculation or judgment.
His mind was always in the past or the future, but Jackson was grounded, so deeply grounded that his eyes arrested like anchors and every time she looked at him, it felt she was jerked into the gravity of the present.
She couldn’t quite reconcile the strange mix of gravity and lightness that he manifested, but it reminded her of a river several miles from Samual’s cabin.
Infamous for pulling fisherman under, the surface was calm with a powerful undercurrent.
Ella had known to learn from the risks of nature, understanding that the people capable of embodying its power had their own dangers.
“You’ll need to learn how to avoid time traveling,” Jackson said.
“Time traveling?” she asked, meeting his gaze full on for the first time since he stood beside her.
“Thinking about the past and future takes us there. The present moment is a ship but every version of the past and future are just waters around us. Strike can swim those waters with more than just their mind. Madness breaks down their human constitutions and makes them fluid. They can drag people into the past and torture them with their own memories, or interrogate them for information among other things. It was one of Strike Amiel’s favorite tactics. ”
“I didn’t see anything,” Ella said defensively, and as if on cue she thought she saw the familiar white table out of the corner of her eye, as if the pull of the image opposed her every attempt to ignore it.