Freya had been missing for a day, and a couple of search parties had gone out in trucks in every direction once they had determined she wasn’t just elsewhere in the village. The sietches were deceptively large, and the search would have been harder had it not been for the fact that Freya, as a blonde-haired and fair-skinned human, stood out rather prominently in a village full of blue-skinned djinn.
Azjar had been in a panic for most of the day. Jack, oddly, had been distracted, seeming to stare off in space. So Tessa had done her best to make herself useful as best as she could.
Tall Man was dead, and she hesitated to reach out to Mr. Flow while he was in the hospital. She did not understand djinn physiology very well – she had previously just assumed that things worked more or less the same on the inside – but even with his wounds cauterized, Mr. Flow, or “Soka” as they called him here, had not been released from the doctors’ care.
There was a strange… mood to the desert. They had been there only a few days, and yet it felt as if they had been there much longer. Tessa’s academic work felt far removed from the recent events, with blood and destruction, and now hiding out in this very friendly but very alien village.
Mr. Flow had pulled a ripcord of some sort, perhaps. He had gone home. It hadn’t ever really occurred to Tessa that she could go home. After all, what was home if not the House?
She had once been a little girl out in the Redlands, and the House had saved her from her abusive stepfather. She had processed that. She had recognized that her mother had failed to protect her, but Tessa had forgiven her for that. People take risks when inaction is unsustainable. Her mother had found a man that could provide for them, unaware that there was a monster within him. It was not a unique story. And if it had not been for the House, the story would have, again, not been terribly unique. But her own story would have ended a lot earlier. Tessa never doubted that – that her stepfather would have ultimately killed her too, maybe “accidentally” as he had her mother, or maybe not.
But the House had made sure that he was dead, and they had given her Ellie, had given her Tom, and had even given her the name she now used.
She did not think herself naïve. The House was not just some network of friendly people. But she had never hurt anyone working for them, and she had worked for them since she was a child.
And so it was terrifying to see one’s family falling apart.
The woman with the auburn hair did not speak a great deal, but she also didn’t drive away immediately. Jenda Marada, the village elder, had come out to speak with her, and had apparently invited her into the sietch.
Freya had sunburns, but all in all she did not seem to be too badly hurt. Once the fuss had died down about getting her back, and when the four humans were back down in their rooms, Freya downed a massive bottle of water before speaking to Jack.
“I met someone out there in the desert, Jack.”
“That woman?”
“No. I mean, obviously yes. That’s Sar. She works for him. There’s a bunch of them out there.”
“Who are they?” asked Jack.
“The guy in charge, they just call him ‘Boss Man.’ And he said something really strange. He said you were Jack Milton, not Jack Cart. Is that true?”
Jack looked to Tessa, and she silently groaned at his lack of subtlety. “Yes, it is.”
“So… uh, why?”
To his credit, Jack did not make eye contact with Tessa again. “That is a long story, but… I guess, given everything that’s going on…”
Azjar took a step back. “Tessa, is he really your boyfriend?”
She had not expected to be called upon like that, and she hesitated to respond, so Jack spoke. “No, I’m not. I’m actually a cop.” Tessa wondered for an instant if the others would take this non-sequitur and not follow up on the whole “boyfriend” question, but already she could feel a jolt of panic beginning to build up within her like the static electricity that leads to a lightning bolt.
“A cop?” asked Freya. “Wait, what?”
“Narcian National Enforcement. But… ok, let’s see if I can break it down.” And then he proceeded to tell a story that even Tessa had not heard – of a strange woman in a deep cell, of someone he called the “Shabby Man,” of the Diplomat and the faceless man. Of the land of day and the land of night, and then… of meeting Tessa, at which point the story became less detailed.
By the time he had finished, Azjar had taken a seat to process what he had heard. Freya had been sitting in bed, but got up to take another bottle of water. “Well,” she said before gulping down nearly half the bottle. “I guess this would explain why he wants to talk to you.”
Tessa spoke: “What does this ‘Boss Man’” look like?
Freya shrugged. “He’s white, mostly, I think. Sandy blond hair, scruffy beard. Wears a tan duster. Kind of hot, if you’re into that sort of thing.”
Tessa wracked her brain to see if that sounded familiar. But she had been a traditionalist. Aside from Ellie and Tom, she had only ever really interacted with a few other House Agents.
“What does he want? Why hasn’t he just come here?”
“I don’t know,” said Freya. “It’s sketchy as fuck.”
Jack nodded.
“What are we going to do?” asked Azjar.
They looked to him.
“I mean, a couple days ago, a bunch of people tried to murder us, and then the telescope fell down. So… do we just go home? Are we safe?”
Jack shrugged. “I wish I could tell you that we were. Or that you were, at least. I don’t really know what my part in all of this is. I’d tell you that if you went home we couldn’t guarantee your safety, but…” Jack sat down. “You know, before all of this, I was a pretty respected law enforcement officer. And yeah, I dealt with arcanists and sometimes even magical creatures. But this… these faceless men… I have no idea what to expect from them. I don’t understand how they work. And before that night when the telescope fell, I didn’t think we could do anything about them.”
Tessa frowned, and now spoke: “What do you mean?”
“There was one of them there. I think… I think it was leading the people who attacked us. Or, if not leading, it was… guiding them? Controlling them?”
“I didn’t see anything like that,” she said.
“You can’t. It’s… the first time I saw them, I needed to drink that weird ‘coffee’ the Diplomat gave me. But later, after I’d puked it all up, it was like I didn’t need it anymore. It felt like I’d been looking at it all along, but only now was my brain registering that it was there.”
“And it was there?”
“Yes. And then I… tore it in half. And it was gone.”
Azjar nodded. “And that’s why this guy wants to talk to you.”
Jack cocked his head to the side, as if he had not thought of that. “I guess that would make sense.”
“But we don’t know what he wants to do with you,” said Freya.
“No. But then, he’s not the first person to want me because of this,” he said.
Azjar now looked to Tessa, and the question she had been dreading formed on his lips. “Tessa, how do you know Jack?”
She ran through several scenarios in her head. She had practiced for nearly a month before she met Jack Milton all the contingency plans, but now, she realized, it had all fallen away. She had gotten comfortable with the charade that they were simply a couple and for some reason had never felt like Jack would contradict the story. It was foolish, but now she hesitated.
“She had orders to recruit me,” said Jack.
Tessa felt her stomach lurch. She looked at the confusion on her friends’ faces – friends she had known for over a year, with whom she had built a rapport and had lived with, side-by-side. She looked to Jack, his face betraying no sense of guilt, no remorse for exposing her. Instead, there was what looked to her to be a calculated curiosity.
She had believed the story, just enough for her to trust that Jack was already on board, already concealing the secret. And in the worst possible way, she realized in this moment that she had grown to like the fiction that they were a couple. Never before had she dissociated so much internally between her cover story and the truth of her life as an Agent of the House. For an instant, she felt hot with rage at Jack. But that would not accomplish anything. It was not clear what would. And so, at a loss, she turned around and walked out the door.
She did not know where to go, and so she marched across the sietch to a public bathroom. She went into a stall, sat down, and buried her head in her hands. Tears streamed down her face as she contemplated all the errors she had made in these past months.
“Hey,” said a female voice. The accent was Narcian, perhaps. She could see the woman’s feet outside the stall. “You ok, there?”
It must have been the woman who had brought Freya back. “It’s just…” but she couldn’t come up with another word, so she repeated “just.”
“My name is Sar – short for Sarah. My boss sent me here to bring your friend back. Is she doing ok?”
“Oh yeah, she’s doing great,” said Tessa, too loudly.
“That’s good to hear.” The woman’s feet shuffled a bit to the side. “So, listen,” she said. “I’ve got to take Jack to see him. And I know that might not be what you had planned, but I assure you he’s going to be perfectly safe with us. And we aren’t going to keep him for long.”
“Um…” said Tessa. Unless Mr. Flow made an appearance, she was cut off from her Chain, and so she had no idea what she was supposed to do. “Why are you asking me?”
The woman said. “Unfortunately, I’m not asking. And also, there’s another thing: he’s going to want to talk to you too, Agent Dust.”
(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2019)
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