chapter 18 - my shadows

"Enough about me, I'm interested in your story." Elias asked with a smirk.

He was looking at Zara when he said it.

Zara looked back at him with the expression she wore when she was deciding how much a question deserved.

Then she looked at Caelith.

Caelith said nothing. Just waited.

Zara set down her mug.

"My shadows," she said. "That's what we called our trainers. Everyone in the organisation did. You don't use their names. You don't ask for them. They are simply the people who made you what you are and you call them your shadows because they were always behind you. Always watching. Always there before you knew you needed them."

Elias opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Opened it again. "Okay."

"I was born into it," Zara continued. " My mother was in it before me. Her mother before her. It is not the kind of thing you find. It is the kind of thing you are born already inside of. Not like I know much about them" She said it the way you state a fact about geography. This is where I am from. This is the landscape I grew up in. "I was trained from the time I was old enough to be trained. Languages. Surveillance. Close contact work. How to enter a room and leave it without being remembered. How to find people who don't want to be found." A pause. "How to get rid of them when necessary."

“I know, your normal assassin shit”. Elias chirped. “Forget I said that. You seemed to enjoy it”

The room was very quiet.

"I was good at it. Being good at something and liking it tend to arrive together."

Elias looked at the ceiling briefly. Then back down. "Right”.

"And Jessica," she said.

Something shifted in Zara's expression. Small but present.

"Jessica was a failure." she said. "Born into it the same way I was. Trained the same way." A pause. "She was supposed to become a specific kind of asset. The organisation had been working on it for years before she was even born. A program. A particular combination of psychological conditioning and specific training designed to create someone who could operate at a level most people in the organisation couldn't reach."

"A human experiment," Elias said quietly.

"That is one way to describe it."

"Is there another way."

Zara looked at him. "From the organisation's perspective it was an investment. A very long term one." She turned her mug slowly. "It didn't take. Whatever they were building in her developed in a direction they didn't intend and couldn't redirect. She became something they couldn't read properly. Couldn't predict." A pause. "So they let her go. Quietly. The way the organisation lets things go when they become more risk than asset."

"They tried to kill her," Caelith said.

"She figured it out early, escaped and survived somehow. And went looking”.

"For Morrha."

"I don't know the details of how she found what she found," Zara said. "I know she had access to certain family records before she left. Things from her bloodline that the organisation had kept and studied. She would have had fragments. Enough to follow if you were determined enough." Something moved briefly behind her eyes. "Jessica was always determined."

"You knew her," Caelith said.

"We trained together for a period." Flat and factual. "She was good. Better than most. The organisation should have seen it earlier, that she was building toward something of her own. But she was careful." A pause that had something underneath it. "She was always very careful."

Elias had gone quiet in the particular way he went quiet when he was processing something he hadn't prepared himself for. Caelith recognised it. She had seen it across two years of seminars and late nights and conversations that went longer than either of them planned.

He looked up.

"This shit," he said carefully, "is significantly deeper than I thought." A beat. "Are you sure I'm supposed to be hearing all of this."

"No," Zara said.

"Fantastic." He nodded slowly. "Fantastic."

Caelith looked at the three of them in her small apartment. Elias on the couch processing depths he hadn't signed up for. Zara sitting with the particular stillness of someone for whom none of this was surprising because it was simply the water she had always swum in.

And herself, in the middle of it, watching the shape of everything get larger every time someone opened their mouth.

The ritual group. The journal. Morrha. Jessica built specifically and then abandoned. An organisation that had been watching in the spaces between things since before any of them were born.

She's a key to something unknown. At this point she wondered if she would ever meet the stranger again. Perhaps he could answer more of her questions.

"Every time I think I can see the edges of it," Caelith said quietly. Not to anyone in particular. "It gets bigger."

Nobody disagreed.

Outside her window the city moved in its ordinary evening rhythms, entirely unaware, the way it always was.

Caelith looked at her hands.

Ordinary. Completely ordinary.

She pressed them flat against her knees and breathed.

It kept getting deeper.

And she was only at the surface.