“On his way back from a deposition; Bliss asked for him to be there.”
He wonders if he should point out that, three and a half months after they rescued the surviving girls from the burning Garden, she’s still using the Butterfly names, the names the victims were given by their captor.
He doesn’t point it out. She probably knows. The job is easier, most of the time, if they can put everything in neat little boxes in their minds, and who the girls were before they were taken is harder to integrate.
He needs to get to work. It’s a paperwork day, or mostly, and he really should make at least one of those piles disappear by the end of the day. His eye falls on the colorful tower of folders that lives on the back-right corner of his desk, growing over the years with more folders but no answers. That stack never disappears.
He leans back in his chair and studies the two framed photos atop the squat filing cabinet that holds his office supplies and blank forms. One is of him and his sister on a long ago Halloween, one of the last times he saw her before she got snatched off the street on the way home from school. She was only eight years old. Logic tells him she must be dead. It’s been twenty years, but he still finds himself examining any twenty-something woman who resembles her. Hope is a strange and fickle thing.
But then, so was Faith, strange and fickle, back when she was just his sister rather than a missing-child statistic.
The other photo is newer, just a couple of years old, a souvenir from the most disturbing and unexpected day trip he’s been on that didn’t involve work. Priya and her mother dragged him on a number of strange sightseeing trips during the six or so months they lived in D.C., but that jaunt was the stuff of nightmares. He’s not even sure how they ended up in a field full of massive presidential busts. They did, though, and at one point Eddison and Priya had climbed up onto Lincoln’s shoulders, both pointing to the very large hole in the back of the statue’s head. Realistic? Yes. Intentional? Judging from the battered condition of the rest of the twenty-foot-tall busts . . . no, not so much. There are other pictures from that day—safely tucked away in the shoe box in the crawl space in his closet—but this is his favorite. Not because of the thoroughly discomfiting bust of an assassinated president, but because it’s the one where Priya surprised herself by grinning.
He’s never known the Priya who grinned without thinking. That Priya shattered just days before he met the girl who grew from those broken pieces. The Priya he knows is all sharp edges and snarls and smiles that slap you in the face like a challenge. Anything softer—anything kinder—is accidental. Her mother may see some of that softness still, but no one else does, not since Priya’s sister was reduced to photos and facts in one of the colored folders on the back corner of his desk.
Eddison is fairly sure he would never have become friends with the old Priya. He’s still startled to be friends with this one. She should have only ever been the sister of a murder victim, a girl to interview and feel sorry for and never really know, but in the days after her sister’s murder, Priya was so damn angry. At the killer, at her sister, at the police, at the whole fucking world. Eddison is very familiar with that kind of anger.
And because he’s thinking about her, because it’s a paperwork day after a string of bad days fighting to contain the media on the Butterfly case, he pulls out his personal cell, snaps a picture of the framed photo, and texts it to her. He doesn’t expect a response—the clock tells him it’s only nine where she is, and without school to wake her up, she’s probably still burrowed in her blanket burrito.
A moment later, though, his phone buzzes with a reply. The photo is a long shot of a red-brick building that should be stately but just looks pretentious, one stretch of brick covered by rusting iron lattices that probably hold ivy in the warmer months. Tall, medieval-looking narrow windows are scattered through the brick.
What the hell?
His phone buzzes again. This is the school I almost got stuck going to. You should see their uniforms.
I knew you were only doing online classes so you could stay in pajamas all day.
Well, not ONLY. You know the headmaster protested when Mum told him we wouldn’t be enrolling? Told her she was doing me a disservice by allowing me to slide by with an inferior education.
He winces. I can’t imagine that went well.
I guess he’s used to flexing his dick and getting what he wants. Mum’s dick is more impressive.
A weight drops onto his shoulders and he flinches, but it’s just Ramirez. Her concept of personal space is drastically different from his, in that he actually has a concept of what it should be. Rather than argue, because it never seems to do any good, he tilts the screen so she can read it.
“Flex his . . . Eddison!” She flicks his ear hard enough to hurt. “Did you teach her that?”
“She’s almost seventeen, Ramirez. She’s perfectly capable of being crass all on her own.”
“You’re a bad influence.”
“What if she’s the bad influence?”
“Who’s the adult?”
“Certainly neither of you,” observes a new voice.
They both cringe.
But Vic doesn’t remind them that personal cells aren’t supposed to be out during work hours, or that they have things they really should be doing. He just walks past them, the smell of fresh coffee wreathing around him, and calls back over his shoulder, “Tell Priya hello.”
Eddison dutifully taps it in as Ramirez slinks back to her desk. He laughs at Priya’s instant response. Awww, did you get detention?
What are you doing awake, anyway?
Wandering around. The weather finally turned.
Isn’t it cold?
Yes, but it is no longer snowing, slushing, or otherwise shitting cold wet things from the sky. Just seeing what’s here.
Call me later. Tell me what’s there.
He waits for her affirmative, then slips the phone back into the drawer with his gun and badge and all the other things he’s not supposed to play with when he’s at his desk. In the damn-near unrelenting slog of horrors that is his job, Priya is a prickly spark of life.
He’s been in the Bureau just long enough to be grateful for that.
Huntington, Colorado, in February is freaking freezing. Even layered up enough to feel three times my size, the cold has a way of creeping between fabrics. We’ve been here a week, and this is the first day it’s been almost nice enough to explore.
So far, it all feels very much like any of the places we’ve lived in the past four years. Mum’s company shuffles us all over the country so she can put out fires, and in three months we’ll be leaving again, maybe even for good, so she can take over Human Resources in the Paris branch. Not that France is necessarily final, but I think we’re both hoping it will be. Priya in Paris has a lovely sound. In the meantime, Huntington is close enough to Denver for Mum to sensibly commute, far enough that it’s supposed to feel more like a community than a city, according to the company agent who let us into the house our first day.
After five days of slushing, it snowed over the weekend, leaving the lawns fluffy and white and the borders nasty and grey. There is very little uglier than plowed snow. The roads are clear, though, and all the sidewalks are tinted blue from the salt. It feels like walking over the remnants of a Smurf slaughter.