All The Lies We Told Ourselves

20 - The Inevitability of Loss

Rue

*****

June 3rd, Saturday

The past week had seen a steady fall of rain from a gray sky. It even stormed a couple times. I always liked to watch the lighting from the window and feel the thunder mold me small in comparison. The streets were quieter. Those who usually wandered around them mumbling harsh words to people passing by had retreated somewhere dry. A couple people here and there sat smoking on blue crates under awnings that did little to keep the eaves from spitting water at their sandaled feet.

I was walking home from the meeting in the dimming evening, my gaze fixed on the sky to feel the rainfall on my face, the way it smelled and the way it soothed. Passing into a darker alley, I concentrated on what was in front of me, though not forgetting someone could be following me.

I had been twelve when some kids a few years older than me had tried to take my money, in that very same alley, without success. I didn't have money to carry around and neither did most of the other residents of that part of town. Anyway, after that my mother had given me one of her whittling knives and taught me how to wield it in case of danger. On my sixteenth birthday my father got me a proper new one, and I carried it around wherever I went.

A shadow covered my vision and instinctively, thinking it was a drunkard, I passed to the left to continue. Celestine and I had agreed to meet at nine, but I had left the CT at home so I could only guess what time it was, maybe eight thirty by then. The shadow followed me a step to the left.

"You're the pickpocket." He said and in the moonlight I could barely recognise Ace Hargreave. There was another guard standing behind him. "You have my watch, don't you?"

"No, I don't." I said, loosening the knife from its sheath. I was hesitant to use it. The smell of iron as I cleaned it of the dead guards' blood was still a rotting thing there, in some nook of my mind.

"I could report you."

It wasn't the first time a guard had threatened to do that, and I had grown tired of it by now.

"So could I. You know trading in the outskirts is illegal."

A few weeks ago someone from our faction had seen Ace trading morphine and benzos by the canalside. Well, you couldn't call it trading, really. We knew he and some of the other researchers had lured unsuspecting people in and offered them what they needed in exchange for a quiet labrat, someone to partake in their studies. But really they were bought into silence on the basis of debt they knew they could never pay back.

"Let alone the stuff you've been trading. You'll be on the wall soon enough-"

I had barely finished saying it when a jab hit my face and pushed my head against the hard wall next to me. The side of my head ached and I tasted blood. My mind's response was a thousand prickling needles heading for my fingers, red hot sizzling anger pushing itself out in fury.

I struck my clenched fist at Ace's face and when bone met bone, he stumbled backwards. Ace raised his hand again but this time I was ready and I dodged the hit. I went to strike him but the guard next to him pushed me and I fell to the ground. Of course he wouldn't have a fair fight, the coward he was.

A kick to my stomach sent the breath flying out, and for a moment I was aching and halted, a hollow thing echoing nothing but pain. A hand grabbed the front of my collar and a fist struck my face again, sending another dull aching against my cheekbone. I reached for the knife on my belt and slashed the hand holding me. A scream followed.

It was too late when I realized my face was headed for the drum of rainwater, filled almost to the brim because of the rainy season.

In the pitch black and dull world of nothing but I don't want to die, I swung the knife in my hand, hopelessly and without result. A hand grabbed at my wrist and twisted it away and I heard, through the water, that it clattered to the ground. My lungs burned in a plea for mercy when finally, someone grabbed my hair and yanked me up into the world of sound and light and why is everything so loud? A voice spoke all too close to my ear, quiet, like when you don't know where to put the frustration so it just sizzles there, in place.