A MAN WITH NO HOME
Tell me, sweet stranger, do you know the story of Normant Lumensky, the man from a mystical land universes away from Earth? Making an ark out of his chains, he turns from a prisoner of war into a fugitive.
A WOMAN AGAINST THE WOR...
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IT WAS WORKING. The plan Austin and I had come up with to test Abel's trustworthiness would soon be crowned with success. Abel had not failed to notice the journal I had left on my nightstand, wide open, its pages inviting him in like the Sirens. He must have thought himself the luckiest man alive to have so arbitrarily found out about our secret mission. How foolish he was for believing he could be one step ahead of us. How cruel I was for toying with him like that . . .
After I informed Clairvoyant about Abel's wish to witness Pioneers fall, I went to bed, inanely thinking that regrets would not keep me up all night, tossing and turning like a maniac. But they did. Of course they did. And I could not stop myself from despising the person I had turned into. How had I done something like that? Where had I found the audacity to lie to Clairvoyant and tell her that it was Abel the one who wanted us to be part of his games and destroy the company we worked for when it was actually the other way around?
I kept reminding myself that it had all been for us to see if we could trust him, that it was not such a crime after all because that was what happened when you were in business like ours-you worked for monsters and then you became one yourself. It did not ease the guilt. Not when I knew that Clairvoyant would have Abel in her office and turn everything he said against him. If he confessed that we were the ones wanting to take down Pioneers, we would claim he was lying. Stella would insist that we had nothing to do with it, and Clairvoyant would believe her. It was that simple. And that ruthless.
At some I point I gave up trying to fall asleep. I gave up being crippled by regrets, as well. What was past must remain in the past. All those who were stupid enough to dwell on things that could not be changed were doomed. And I would not be one of them. That was how life worked, and I was not made to change nature's laws of order. You attacked and then you got attacked. A vicious cycle, no end in sight.
What I did instead of sleeping was read through all the emails that Bog had sent me during that past week; files that contained information and guidelines regarding the mission of retrieving the crystal. From the very beginning of our mission, I had been to inform him about every single step we took, every clue we stumbled upon. That way Pioneers would steer us toward whichever direction they saw fit. I could not let that happen. And I had not. That's why in every truth I told Bog, I planted seeds of lies as well. That was how life worked. You stabbed people and then you got stabbed in return, staining with blood the ones who were already bleeding.
Stella had searched through all the suspects-all the people who might have persuaded Maria and Stephen to steal the crystal and run away instead of returning it to Pioneers. She focused her research on antique dealers, people with a reputation of collecting items of great value and then selling them ten times their price. Then, she narrowed down her list of suspects by focusing only on those who had over the years had any real connections to Pioneers. In the end, she found someone that may be behind that.
I sent Bog an email, writing him that Noah Black was the man we needed to find, the one that had wanted the crystal. But that had been another white lie that no one would notice, not until it was a little too late. For Noah Black was a trader that had nothing to do with Pioneers, and Stella's team had been quick enough to delete every Internet research about the one who was actually behind it: Federico Down.
