The Fallen Goddess

Out of the City

"What are we expected to do now?" I ask.

Koreena and I are sitting in the room of a hotel, still in the same city. I'm sitting on one of the two beds in the room and Koreena is sitting at the desk in the corner, messing around with the TV remote.

I hear as the TV keeps switching channels due to Koreena's constant button-pushing; one minute the TV is spewing bits about basketball players' moves in the latest game, and the next minute a rerun of My Little Pony is blasting horrific music in our ears.

"Well, there's no way my sister could track us down in one night," Koreena says, switching the channel to something better and then facing me. "So I say we stay the night and figure out what to do tomorrow."

"If she can't find us in one night, why can't we take a plane to... to somewhere? I mean, there are flights that are that short."

Koreena just sighs, exasperated at my ignorance.

"On a plane or boat, she has a way of tracking flights and boats and all the people that board either one. There are too many hotels and not enough places to look for our information for her to be able to find us where we are at," she explains wearily, turning back to the TV and changing the channels again. "Though, we still can't stay in a hotel for long; she'd catch up eventually."

I sit in silence for a moment until Koreena, staring determinedly at the remote now, says, "What is this thing?"

"It is a remote. It controls the TV, which is what you were playing with a second ago," I explain, pointing at the remote, then at the television.

"Oh," she says faintly, still studying the remote.

"Koreena, when was the last time you were on Earth?" I ask, thinking about her scattered knowledge of things like planes but not televisions and phones. Thinking, most of all, about her not being comforted in a while.

"Well, I've actually never been," she says simply. Then, as if reading my mind, she adds, "I only know the little that I do from my sisters; they mention some things and others they don't. Not very happy family conversations."

"Really? Never. It's a pretty effed up place."

"Doesn't seem so bad," Koreena reassures me.

And, as if I never spoke, she goes back to flipping through channels. I let her amuse herself for nearly another hour, but by 11:30 at night, when I start to feel ready to put an end to this crazy day, I stop her.

"Koreena, go to sleep. We have a long day tomorrow."

Koreena, however, ignores me.

"Shut the TV off," I say, lifting the covers of my bed and laying beneath them.  "Koreena, please. Get some sleep."

"I don't sleep."

"Well I do so just turn the damn thing off!" I shout, my temper rising.

"Shut it, Blake. Learn to live with the noise."

I reluctantly get up from the bed, grab the remote from Koreena, and turn the TV off.

"You're like a freaking child that doesn't want to be told what to do!" I tell her, setting the remote on my bedside table and getting back into bed.

"I'm a goddess, and if you were smart you wouldn't tell me what to do," Koreena sneers.

I twitch slightly, as if about to do something, then, realizing it's not worth it, I back down.

"Just stop," I say, keeping my anger in my voice but doing nothing more.

Koreena sniggers, as if letting me know that I have no control over her whatsoever. But she gets into her own bed and turns out the lights in the room all the same.

"Wake up, sleepy-head!" I hear a voice yell in my ear.

I jump up as if hit by electricity and look around groggily to Koreena, not for the first time, standing beside my bed. This time, however, she has two muffins and a shirt, and is waving them in my face with an excited expression on her face.

"What'sit?" I ask, jumbling up my words out of exhaustion.

"Look what I got you for breakfast!" she exclaims, holding out the muffins. She then tosses the shirt on the bed, saying, "And look what I got you from the front desk. They have shirts there, for whatever reason."

"Uh, thanks," I say, seeming to be able to speak like a normal person again, and grabbing the muffins from Koreena. "How did you pay for this?"

"I didn't. I punched the guys who were selling the stuff and they just gave it to me!" Koreena says excitably. I smile against my will.

Through the course of eating, showering, and putting on the new shirt, however, I can think of only one thing: how Koreena seems to have no memory of our spat last time.

Sure, it wasn't big, but after her emotional disconnection yesterday, it has me a bit, if irrationally, worried.

"Hey, Blake. You should come see this," Koreena says, and her voice snaps me out of my reverie.

Lost in my thoughts, I had not noticed she had turned the TV back on, and she was currently watching CNN.

"Blake Strogan, a 21-year-old young man, who lives in San Francisco, California, has been reported missing by local authorities."

I hear a reporter say as a picture of me flashes across the screen. When the man finishes speaking, the news piece cuts to clip of an interview. Crissy, my girlfriend, is suddenly taking up the screen, crying and looking terrified.

"During Blake's break from work on Tuesday, he said we could meet up the following day, on Wednesday. I called around 11 a.m. and he didn't answer. I was really pissed, so I kept calling him, and finally, probably out of frustration at my constant calling, a woman answered the phone.

"At first I thought it was someone he had hooked up with, so I started yelling at her and telling her to put Blake on, but that's when she said that Blake was gone, and that if she could help it, he was never coming back."

Crissy gives a great sniff and starts crying.

The screen cuts again to another piece of the report, but I can't hear a word the man is saying. My ears are ringing and, if it weren't for the fact that I'm sitting on my bed, I'm pretty sure I would collapse on the ground.

"The police still think you're alive," a voice, managing to cut through the ringing, says. Koreena. "Which means there is going to be a manhunt for my sister and for you."

I nod, understanding.

"We have to leave," I say, and, mimicking her earlier words, "and run. Your sister is going to searching for us even more avidly, and there is nothing the police can do."

This time, she nods.

So we leave our room.

We run through the lobby, being yelled at by the people at the front desk.

We run out onto the sidewalk, and keep running until we find a taxi, which we flag down.

We don't know where we want to go, so we just tell the cabbie to get us out of this city.

And he does.