A Place Where There Is No Darkness

Ten

Since it had got progressively darker over the past hour, it wasn’t as easy to navigate the forgotten streets. Add to that the long time I had been away, and finding our way became a real challenge. Nothing I couldn’t handle, though. My feet – one socked and the other still hanging on to its drenched shoe – sauntered confidently over the hard ground, one in front of the other.

We made our way back to the village and then we passed houses, big and small, old and new. Some of them I remembered, others had slipped my mind, but all in all, the scenery looked more than familiar. I smiled on the inside, but I was careful to keep my features schooled and clear of feelings. The last thing I needed was another emotional breakdown.

The particular house I was aiming for was old and run down, located more or less in the centre of the little village. It had once been a cheerful yellow, but now the paint was crumbling away, leaving behind a patchy dull grey wall. The windows were small and leaky, as I well knew, letting through wind or rain or any other inconvenience they had been designed to keep out. But I couldn’t bring myself to mind the building’s shaggy appearance, seeing as it looked more like home than anything had in a long, long time.

“We’re here,” I whispered, not bothering to turn around to face Mitchell or to see that he was still there. I could hear his steps clear enough and anyway – he had no choice but to follow me.

I snuck up to the old, wooden door and went to press the doorbell. My hand stopped just short of the little button, shaking uncertainly in the cold evening air. I needed a few seconds to fight and win against all the doubts in my mind, but once I did, my finger was more determined than before. Even from the porch, we heard the bell sound through the house loud and clear.

Mitchell stepped up beside me and together, we waited. Nothing happened for a really long while – so long, in fact, that I started worrying she had moved away and left the house behind, empty. But my fears were quickly quelled when a light went on in the hallway and a familiar voice called, “Coming!” Even more familiar was the face that appeared in the doorway a few seconds later: pale, huge blue eyes, dark red lips. She had changed her hair a little – instead of the long braid she had worn when I last saw her, she now carried it in two little pony tails, one on each side of her head –, but otherwise, she looked exactly like she had three years ago.

Her eyes wandered around, then froze on me. She grew, if at all possible, even paler than before. I tried to smile, but it felt like a grimace, so I stopped, letting my facial muscles relax back into what they were more accustomed to.

We stood like that. Then a voice from inside the house shook us out of our reverie. “Hannah! Who is it?!” We heard steps coming down the stairs, which was Hannah’s cue.

“No one! Just the postman.”

“At eight in the evening? Tell that crazy man to go –“

“I’ve already sent him away, Nana. Calm down.” The door slammed shut in our faces.

“Well, that was a bust,” Mitchell commented sharply. I put a finger to my lips, urging him to be quiet. God knew the doors and walls were thin enough to hear through.

“We have to go around,” I mouthed, turning to lead the way. Now it was impossible to hear Mitchell’s steps behind me, even though I knew they were there. Sometimes I forgot that he had completed training of his own, acquiring skills normal people didn’t possess.

We were two shadows in the night – virtually undetectable. In that moment we could have hidden from anyone or anything – we could have crept close to someone, stabbed them in the back, or we could have run away from something, unnoticed. The world was at our feet, waiting submissively to see what we were going to do with it. I realised something, as I had so many times before, watching the Elite work and conquer: king isn’t who shows off, wears diamonds and pearls. The true kings of our world are invisible, hidden behind curtains and masks. It’s easier to succeed this way. You can do anything, bend fate to your will, and nobody will complain, because there is no one but a mask to complain to.

I felt mighty and I knew Mitchell did, too.

We reached the back of the house and I looked up. The room above us was still dark, but that changed quickly – the light was flicked on and I heard the window open noisily.

“We’re going to have to climb up,” I said, taking off my remaining shoe, which would only slip on the devious surface of the wall.

“Are you kidding me?” Mitchell hissed back, clenching his jaw. “That’s like – that’s the first floor.”

I rose, looking up at him with arched eyebrows. “Are you scared of heights?”

“No,” he assured in what could only be described as a defensive manner. “Scared of dying, though. And I think we’ve come close enough often enough today, thank you very much.”

I chuckled. “You’re not gonna die. Just follow me.”

I gripped the ledge of a window on the first floor and pulled myself up onto it. In terms of being noticed, this was the most dangerous part of the way. While standing in front of the window like that, I was easier to spot than to miss for anyone standing in the living room, which was why I liked to get this over with fast and then take my time with the second part of the climb. I latched myself onto the gutter, which ran up the house right next to me, and yanked myself clear of the window.

I paused and listened. Nocturnal noises had kicked in – the oohing of an owl not far away, the scurrying of a mouse on the ground beneath me. Fortunately, nothing out of the ordinary – no one yelling for me to come down, no “What are you doing?!”, no “I’m calling the police!”. I sighed, relieved, and let myself enjoy the moment a little.

Then I looked down.

“Okay,” I whispered sharply. “It’s clear.”

Mitchell looked up at me, then nodded. His whole body was a single shadow beneath the night sky, moving swiftly and smoothly. When he started climbing, however, he faltered. Since he was tall and strong, trained for the FBI, I was sure it had nothing to do with his strength or his abilities. No, he was really and truly scared of heights.

I decided not to be a b***h about it. He was clearly suffering enough.

Our climb was slow and painstaking. I kept looking down, expecting to find Mitchell having fallen to the ground and broken all the bones in his body. The thought itself made me feel surprisingly uncomfortable, and I tried to guide my mind in another direction. It didn’t really work and in the end, I opted for worrying, but not showing it, not even by batting an eye a single time.

Finally, I managed and so did Mitchell – if with a little more strain. We heaved ourselves over the window ledge and fell onto carpeted floor. I took in a few gulps of air, letting it rush through my lungs and my body, letting my burning arms rest on the ground, letting sweat and water and tears dribble away.

“What the hell?!”

I jumped up. Only now did I realise that I had left a huge stain on the beautiful blue carpet Hannah had in her room, but she didn’t seem to mind that. In fact, I doubted she had even noticed. Instead, her eyes were trained on me, on my face, and with a flicker of confusion, I noticed the clear and searing anger in her features.

“Hey.”

She came a few steps closer, made a fist and hit me in the jaw.

It wasn’t nearly as painful a swing as I knew Hannah was able to produce. Still, my head was thrown to the side and my arm shot out of its own accord, coming up to protect me before I had even processed what had happened. Through all the fog, I felt Mitchell next to me go tense, but before he or I could react in any way, I felt Hannah’s tender arms around me, pulling me close, warm and comforting.

“Where the hell were you for the past three years? Huh? So busy you couldn’t even give me a call?”

I gently broke our embrace, letting my hands slide down her arms – remembering how Mitchell had tried to touch me not even an hour ago, how I hadn’t been able to stand it – and looking into her eyes. “Kind of.”

“What in the world does that even mean?”

“I, uh …” I smiled ruefully, feeling tears in my eyes for the second time that blasted day. I was really ready for it to be over. “I was kind of in prison.”

“What?!”

“Yeah.”

“How did I not know about that?”

“You know I couldn’t call you from there. It was for your own protection.”

She sighed. “I know. What were you in for?”

It was funny how Mitchell loved answering that question for me. As if it was his own personal right. As if he was in charge of all my biggest sins.

“Murder,” he spoke up from behind me. Only this time, there was something else in his voice – some sort of severity, like he was reminding himself as well as everyone else. I was still a criminal. He was still an agent. The reality was simple, a one-plus-one matter, but somehow it seemed much more complicated than that.

Hannah looked past me and studied him appraisingly. She assessed all of his bruises thoroughly, weighing the threat behind them. When she was finished, she didn’t look impressed, much less intimidated by the agent’s strong stature. She only shared a meaningful glance with me and we both made our scepticism look extra good.

“So, is that where you found him? Prison?”

I laughed. »I wish. He's an FBI agent.«

Mitchell was quick to protest. “Hey, you can’t just go around telling that to people.”

“Hannah isn’t people,” I informed him coolly.

“Who is she then?”

I sighed. “I guess now’s as good a time as any. Hannah, this is Mitchell. We’re on a mission together. Mitchell, this is Hannah. We were in a group home together.”

“A group home?”

“Yeah, are you deaf?”

»No. But we’re going to talk about this later.«

***

We did talk about it later. Hannah snuck us into the bathroom, gave us some of her dry clothes – Mitchell was not impressed with the dotted grey pyjamas he received, but he knew better than to protest and only thanked her politely – and then brought us to a pantry she said her Nana hardly ever used. We had to promise her, however, that we would not leave the room under any circumstances, not until she came for us the next morning.

Mitchell didn’t wait long after Hannah had closed the door behind her, leaving us in the dark with a flashlight and two blankets between the two of us. The regular lighting in the pantry didn’t work, so I turned on the torch, casting a mysterious glow over everything in the room.

“So, a group home, then?” Mitchell said innocently, making me turn towards him. I sighed inwardly and steeled myself. If this was going to happen, it was probably best it happened now, when we weren’t actually in danger yet. If we had to get these stupid emotions out of the way, it was best to do it when they couldn’t get us killed.

Though I had kind of hoped not to do it at all.

“Yeah,” I said, trying to sound uncaring. “My parents died, as you know; of course I was put into the system. No need to be so surprised.”

He shrugged. “Just didn’t take you for the group-home type of girl, is all.”

“Well, that’s probably why I’m not there now.”

I felt him thinking about something intently, but I couldn’t see his face well enough to try and read his feelings on the matter. I was overtaken by the sudden urge to shine the flashlight directly into his face, but that would have looked a tad too awkward.

“So, if you had all that, why run away?”

I chuckled. “You’ve clearly never been to a group home, have you?”

He didn’t seem to know whether to laugh or not. In the end, he decided to play it serious. His mouth stayed straight. “I just mean – the Elite had to be worse. Why run to them?”

“I wasn’t running to the Elite,” I clarified, shaking my head. “I would never do that. I was just running away from the home.”

“But why?”

I looked away, even though I doubted he could see my eyes clearly enough to realise it was happening again. Third time that day. If this stupid emotional weakness wasn’t going to pass soon, it might just drive me mad.

“Willy,” was all I managed to get out.

I thought he was going to ask more, demand to know the details, but he didn’t. That surprised me, mostly because I knew he wanted to know. But he held back. I couldn’t comprehend why until I turned to him and saw his face. I didn’t need a lot of light or a lot of clarity to see what was going on there.

Not pity. No. Understanding.

Somehow, incredibly, through all his layers of hypocrisy and indifference, he understood exactly what I was talking about.

Even though I still hadn’t told him almost anything.

Maybe that was exactly why I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. Or maybe it wasn’t even me. Maybe something else decided it for me, because as far as I knew myself, I would never have done it. Whatever the case, I sat up straighter, faced him, placed the torch next to my leg so it was shining away from the both of us, giving us as much privacy as possible in a little pantry like that, and got ready to tell him a story.

“It was immediately after my parents died,” I told him. And then I waited. I thought he would ask how it had happened, how we had lost them, because to an FBI agent that would have been of vital importance and I had never opened up my mouth to an officer about it. The formal report said car accident, but with my past, people had started wondering often enough if there was more to the story than met the eye. If Mitchell had tried to dig deeper there and then, I would have stopped talking immediately, lain down, turned my back to him, gone to sleep and forced myself to forget about that moment. But he stayed silent, completely and irrevocably. He simply waited patiently for me to go on and he looked as if he was willing to wait the whole night if necessary.

So another deep breath in it was, and then I was telling him everything. “This annoying social worker took us under her wing and brought us to this stupid home.” I rolled my eyes. “But I guess everything seemed stupid or annoying then. Anyway, we got there, and of course it wasn’t ideal, but Willy liked a lot less than me. He could never understand that. I couldn’t understand it myself, but somehow I was … you know … happy.”

Mitchell nodded, using his voice for the first time since I’d started pouring my soul out. I hoped he was going to be considerate, that he wasn’t going to make me close off again. I really wanted to get this out now.

“Hannah,” was all he said.

I nodded silently, looking to the floor. “She was great. Really. She was the first real friend I’ve ever had. So I fell into that friendship and I was happy. Even though I felt like a traitor … you know. Our parents had died. How could I spend even a moment not being sad?”

This was the part where every normal person would show pity, where they would try to tell me it hadn’t been my fault, that I deserved to be happy. Which was typically when I stopped talking. But not with Mitchell. His stoicism urged me on.

“One day Willy came to me and told me he had problems. Which was a big step for him, because ever since our parents had died, it had been hard for him to ask for help. But he came anyway and he told me that he wanted to run away. Only I didn’t believe him. I didn’t want to, you know? Because maybe I could live like that forever, with Hannah and with the other kids, pretending that everything was fine.

“Well, that dream popped quickly. Hannah was adopted soon after and I was left alone. Then one day I stumble into a room – by pure chance, by the way – and I see some older kids beating Willy. He was lying on the ground, and what they were doing to him looked really bad, but he wasn’t even crying. Or screaming. I think he was kind of past all that, you know? He was just lying there. Passive. Which is so much worse. A kid should never have that kind of look in their eyes.

“That evening, we left. And I didn’t care about anything, just that we got out of there. I managed to take care of us on the streets for almost a year. We weren’t in the best of health, sure, but we were doing okay, I guess. And then …”

“The Elite,” he realised.

I nodded. “They needed me. And they made me think I needed them. They’re real masters at recruiting people. And once you’re in with them–“ I shook my head, unable to find the right phrase – a phrase brutal and bitter enough to describe the Elite.

“There’s no way out?” Mitchell suggested.

And it did sound ominous. Maybe even ominous enough. Because he was right. Once the Elite had you, they had you.

I thought that that was quite enough gloominess for one day. “But I don’t have to tell you, you’ll find out soon enough,” I tried to lift the mood with something that had sounded like a joke in my mind, but in the cold light of day wasn’t funny at all.