Alternate Realities

Secret Guard

A little Fade for ya'll...

Diana Farley had a secret. She had many secrets that belonged to the Guard. The type that put a thousand lives at risk. For those, she carried a pill. But their was no remedy besides denial for the secret that only belonged to her.

The first rule of covert operations was simply not to get caught. And over months not even she admitted what was plainly playing in her heart, a distraction. Like all thing that were not tangible, it started small. A flicker of preference, an ounce of added trust, a desire to meet the peculiar creature behind the looping letters that passed through the chain with cleaver, coded phrases. Maybe it was the game layered on top of the war that drew her in: the codes. Strangely subtle and all at once revealing in their context. Each one written like a wayward letter, words for a sister, a mother, always a female. It was easy to imagine a house of women missing him.

That... Imagining. Musing. Ascribing comfortable traits to an informant, a brave nobody doing his part. No, not a nobody. Shade Barrow.

Shade. She imagined him like a shadow at midday: dark and severely sharp. And letter after letter stretched him into long, mid afternoon shapes that fuzzed soft and gentle with poetry under each turn of phrase.

She barely hid her anxious embarrassment, climbing from a sewer grate just outside the officer quarters. Out of a girlhood habit, she ran her hand over the stubble of her fresh hair cut and regretted her masculine choice. She wanted to impress this soldier. The realization was humiliating, but thankfully private. Except it wasn't. Where she thought no one stood, someone filled the dark slip of shadow.

"Rise," she hissed.

"Red as the dawn," he answered and she felt her heart thud at the richness of his tone.

Diana Farley had a secret, and it scared her to death.

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