This Isn't About Reya

Chapter Fourteen

Reya continued visiting Azrael every day, sneaking out of her house on the weekends and sometimes skipping school to spend the day with the mysterious being that called the woods it's home. The more she interacted with him, the more Azrael was able to decipher human interaction; he became more human with each passing day. Reya began to detect emotions when he spoke, and could see how naive Azrael really was.

Or perhaps... pretended to be.

"Azrael," she asked one day, "why do you never venture outside the woods?"

The shadowed being, with only its boyish face peeking from behind the veil of its thousand ceaseless black cloaks, blinked, as if the thought had never occurred to him. "I've never needed to," he said plainly.

Reya furrowed her brow and touched her cheek in a contemplative fashion. She watched Azrael float through the air, circling her. It occurred to her suddenly that, because of the way the cloaks billowed, it looked as if he were swimming through the air. "What do you subsist on in here?" she asked, watching with growing interest at his peculiar movements. 

"I need little to survive," he said, his electronic voice tinted with what sounded like mild annoyance. Reya smirked at this. "The sunlight provides energy," Azrael continued. "I bask in the light that penetrates the grove."

His cloaks billowed on one side of his body and made a sweeping motion. At first, it confused Reya, but as she broadened her field of view, she realized it was a gesture. He was indicating the clearing they were standing in.

She nodded knowingly. "You don't need to eat or drink then?"

Azrael shook his head with human-like movement. "My internal organic systems are self regulating, aside from the energy required from the sun."

"And you're never cold."

Azrael shook his head again. "My skin is airtight and radiates little heat. I release excess heat on occasion if my body temperature becomes too high."

Reya smiled at the being. It was synthetic, obviously, and learning how to be human. She marvelled at the ingenuity. Whoever created him knew what they were doing.

That brought her to another thought: he had certainly been created, and by someone impossibly clever and willing to toy with the ethical implications. For what purpose then? Why was this hulking mass of shadow with such a cute human face living in the woods of Aquilo-Nix, not a thousand meters from the capital city of the New Soviet Union?

Reya could only guess that some type of subterfuge was at work. Azrael had to be part of a larger picture.

She had not inquired as to Azrael's origins or intentions since the last time they had spoken about it, when he had told her that the planet of Aquilo-Nix was to be repurposed. She remained suspicious of her own role in the matter; honestly, how was she, a fifteen-year-old girl with no social importance, supposed to change anything, let alone the purpose of an entire planet? She couldn't even get the damned Russians to leave her alone until she saved Svetlana's life.

The thought of Svetlana derailed her thinking process. That girl... once her reason for hating life, now her only friend. Well, her only human friend, anyway. How could someone change so drastically in so little time?

Reya shook her head to clear her mind. She had to ask Azrael about why he was here.

She'd have to be careful about it, though.

A plan began to formulate in her head. With a smirk on her lips, she looked into Azrael's sapphire-shattered eyes and asked, "Azrael, do you never get lonely, staying in these woods all the time?"