The rain was pouring hard as Brayton Miller walked the opposite way of regular traffic on the sidewalk. He looked at the faces of the people walking by, some with open umbrellas in their hands or jacket hoods pulled over their hair. The day had been dry and sunny all day when he'd left the hideout, only a few dark clouds in the western sky, slowly moving east, so he hadn't considered sipping on a jacket and now cursed himself silently. He wore only a pair of dark blue jeans, a black long-sleeved shirt underneath a soft red hoodie, which was now almost soaked through from the rain.
No one on the street ever paid much attention to anyone else, just minding their own business like kind city folk should. The hustle and bustle of bodies moving around each other to get to their destination, only worrying about themselves and their families. He pondered for a minute as he pushed through the crowd, how people could be so selfish and narrow-minded. There are people all over the world working harder than these people to make one dollar a day, and all these city workers seemed to care about was getting to work on time, or the economy.
He couldn't understand, but then again, he was only seventeen.
Ever since his mother had been killed, and his father soon after, he had lived in the boarded up, old part of Seattle. The people he lived with were either undercover for the Unseen or were in the same situation he was, and had been in, for two years. His mother had been killed, a harsh accident of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, when he had been ten. Four years later, they had come back for his father. Luckily he had been out of the house at the time, otherwise he'd've been sure as dead, and they had never seemed to trace or track his whereabouts to finish the problem. Yet, he added as an afterthought.
He had stopped living in fear of being tracked only one long year ago. Then, he hadn't had much training, or any knowledge about what he was dealing in, but now it was different somehow. He thought maybe it was because he'd started to fill out, muscles forming in his arms and legs, and growing taller. Or maybe it was because the people in the Unseen decided he wasn't a threat to their whereabouts or going to lead the monsters to their hideout, and they trusted him.
Trust, he thought, must be such a valuable thing if it took them that long to warm up to me.
Sirens of a fire truck blared across the street and made him jump out of his thoughts and realize where he was. Just across the highway was the Thai take-out he had so many times offered to go pick up food from. Everyone was busy working on new missions or old missions to worry about food, and so it gave him something to do to make him feel more helpful.
Today was no different than any other, and he stuck his freezing hands into the pocket of his hoodie as he turned to cross the street among many of people stuck in the midst of rush hour. He led them across the street, leaning into the wind with his body and was aware of many different eyes of people in the cars surrounding him.
He reached the door of the restaurant and it clanged loudly when he opened it. The interior was decorated in native fish paintings and drawings framed along the walls, with patterns of rice crops on the wallpapers. Seated in the cheaply upholstered benches and chairs were people eating and conversing in a muddle of different languages he couldn't decipher well. The air was thick and humid, and smelled strongly of curry and raw fish.
He flicked his wet hair out of his face and wiped his feet on the black mat in front of the door, looking around. From the doorway he could see a white plastic bag filled to top with Styrofoam containers. Steam floated from the opening, creating condensation on the mirror next to the counter. A smiling man, dark haired and native Thai skin color stepped around the wall separating the kitchen from the rest of the restaurant.
