Haline

Chapter 2: Part 3

LATE EVENING, EPSILON RING

Natasha heard a rustling and opened her eyes to see Adler emerge from the ground gate. Upon stepping out, he too looked up into the unusually clear late evening sky with its bright quarter moon and stood a moment before walking over and sitting down next to her. He was silent, then spoke softly: “The team was just watching a recap of his address.”

“And?” Natasha asked, eyes closed again, uninterested in the expected reply.

“And...it was pretty good, Natasha. He’s leaving nothing to chance even with his popularity where it is.” Adler let out a defeated sigh. “Xander, Ambrose, and Teena tendered their resignations after the broadcast and left with their things. They wanted to say goodbye but...they had everything ready and didn’t want to—”

“It’s his job.” Natasha ignored the news of more of her troops giving up the fight—giving up on her—and focused on the only thing that would justify her years of struggle and grant her victory: engineering a popular boycott of the Election.

“And of course he’s leaving nothing to chance. If he wins this Election unopposed and with support from eighty percent of Halinites he might never need to run again.”

Adler opened his mouth as if to say something but changed his mind, keeping silent. Natasha opened her eyes and looked up at the quarter moon. She waited a long moment before continuing.

“My mother was a senator. Did I ever tell you that?”

“No...I had no idea.” Adler’s look of surprise gave way to a chuckle. “Natasha, you barely talk at all about yourself. Some on the team wonder if you were sent here during the wars from some other underground in some other country.”

Natasha smiled at that.

“I was born here, long before it became Haline, of course.” She threw Adler an amused glance. Perhaps she should be more open with her team. At least, perhaps, with Adler.

“Both my parents were serving at the time, my mother as a senator and my father as a district judge. I even had—” she stopped suddenly. “Or maybe I still have,” she continued a second later, “an older brother. Eleven years older.”

Natasha caught Adler’s expression out of the corner of her eye and laughed, giving him a knowing smile of embarrassed acknowledgement.

“Yes, I probably was a surprise, but my parents embraced me with love. My brother left for boarding school when I was only two. I never saw or heard from him again.”

Natasha sat up a bit, pulling her jacket closer around her. At Haline’s altitude, the nights cooled quickly.

“I was nine when my mother died. Transport accident.” She paused, remembering. “But as I stood at the doorway, trying to understand what the police chief was telling my father, I didn’t believe him.” She turned to look at Adler, to see his eyes. “You remember what it was like back then.”

“Yes...yes I do.” Adler’s mind visited his own mental closet where he stashed away his painful, pre-Haline memories. He remembered his father, deported for being of foreign birth when he was only seven. His mother, killed that very morning when they came to take his father away for standing in the way of the soldiers. His baby sister, all he had left in the world, taken from him the next day as the provisional government commandeered their property and sent the two children to two separate orphanages.

“For your own good, son. You’ll thank us later,” the marginally official-looking officer had said as he opened drawers and cabinets in the house looking for valuables to pocket before taking them away.