“I know it’s selfish,” I say, stumbling over the words, but needing them out there between us, “but I can’t make a choice right now. Please don’t ask me to.” Tears from the reservoir that I thought I’d depleted an hour before resurface. “I can’t. And I constantly feel this pressure to do so. Like somehow, because I love you both, I’m a crappy person. The guilt I feel over how it kills Jonah to know that I love you, and how you are miserable because I’m with him—I drown on a daily basis in it. There are no life rafts, no boats. I’m barely treading water here, Kellan, in the middle of the ocean.”
He drops his hand and sighs. I cry silently as the insects around us sing their night songs. Twenty-four hours ago, they were brimming with life and happiness. Tonight, they’re mournful. And my heart breaks clean in half, because as we listen to this symphony, Kellan shudders in the tiniest way when he breathes. Just once or twice, but it’s enough to notice.
My stomach twists until I’m breathless myself.
I scoot closer and lean my head against his shoulder. One of his arms loops around me and we sit there, anguished, knowing nothing either of us can do or say can change the fact that Fate has royally screwed the both of us.
On my desk is a thick file held together by a rubber band. A yellow sticky note on the top from Fraank Mountainhold informs me to return it directly to him rather than the Guard.
I sink into my chair and stare at the file. After coming back from Costa Rica last night, I forced myself to think not about my unraveling love life but about Jen Belladonna’s charges against me. Weird as it sounds, it’s easier to deal with this potential trauma than the one I’m actually living through with the two most important people in my life.
It’s a standard Guard file. Brown, with an embossed label on the front detailing the mission specifics:
Frejahnii Civilization / Cliff Dwellings
Gnomish / Ragnopikk Baldurmei Frejan Mountains
41.6041? S / 3.4829? W
CL-1-219C
My fingers slide over the raised series of letters and numbers designating my responsibility for the mission. Responsibility. It’s something I have, no matter whether I want it or not. I have a responsibility to fulfill my duties as a Creator, and as a Destroyer, too. I have responsibilities towards the countless people stretched across seven planes.
Of the handful of people I’ve quizzed, none admit to keeping track of any deaths that might occur due to their crafts. The reasoning is always the same—it’d drive them crazy to know such facts. And I get it; it’s a soldier’s mentality. Sometimes, to stay sane, you have to accept things without knowing the specific details.
And part of me never wants to know what the side effects of my craft might be. Just the possibility of knowing that I might be the cause for anyone’s death, purposeful or accidentally, is soul crushing. But I also know that, after years of wandering like a bumbling fool in the dark, I don’t think I want to live that way anymore.
I flip the folder open and sift through the papers. There’s the official Council order, including votes; the Guard mission overview; Tracker reports pre-mission; my detailed report. But my signature isn’t the last thing in this file. Behind my report is a post-mission Tracker report I’ve never seen and a handful of laminated newspaper clippings.
I scan the Tracker report first: the tiny Frejahnii civilization is officially extinct. No full-blooded Frejhanii citizen remains; smatterings of lingering bloodlines can be found in nearby heavily populated regions after the area had been conquered roughly five hundred years prior. An Intellectual will be dispatched within the next decade to drive a quest to rediscover remnants of the civilization for academic purposes; an Emotional will follow within a year to foster national pride toward the now-forgotten group.
The mission itself had been uneventful other than it being a windy day and the helicopter I’d been riding in felt more like a roller coaster than air transport. I’d been on the Gnomish plane for all of half a day, which was standard, considering I’m Human and nobody wanted me seen. I remember thinking the cliff dwellings beautiful albeit worn by age, feeling it was sacrilegious, in a way, to break apart such history. But I did it, and until Jens Belladonna mentioned it last month, I hadn’t thought about the mission again.
I slide the first newspaper article out. Written in a Gnomish dialect and script entirely different than any language on my plane, I have no idea it says. But it’s obvious it’s about the Frejahnii cliffs, because a picture of the desolate ruins is featured front and center. Further on down the page, though, is a pair of photos of young, twenty-something Gnomes wearing backpacks and big smiles.
My heart drops.
I slip the second newspaper article out and it is much of the same. Same photos. Same guys. Same smiles. Same cliff dwellings. The third article follows suit.
On the back page of the file I find another yellow sticky note: Inform Councilman Brievssonn of need to accelerate secondary mission.
I insert all the documents back into the file in the order I found them. Then I write out a new request form for Fraank Mountainhold because it’s clear I need a dictionary.
“So.” Jonah sits down on the couch next to me. “I hear you had lunch with Kellan and Sophie Greenfield while I was gone.”