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123

Author: Thekla Jackiv
last update Last Updated: 2025-10-01 04:47:39

The chandelier had finally stopped fidgeting. It hung there like a veteran who’d learned better than to flinch at loud noises. My best friend in the room, a dusty crown of dim bulbs thinking about sainthood. The oak table below it now looked like a butcher’s conscience—cleaned in a hurry, not that convincingly. Blood sat in the seams where the wood joined, a stubborn punctuation telling the rushed sentences to mind their manners. Someone had wiped the surface with linen that used to be white and now had a future as vital evidence. The survived elders of Jennings clan leaned around that table the way old vines lean on a fence: too frightened to stand for themselves, too proud to climb under it.

My father lifted his hands, palms out, the international sign for I come in peace and also for Don’t shoot the man you may need to clean your mess. The room eased, the way a sore jaw eases when the dentist finally stops talking about flossing. Even the smoke took a breath. Nicos could calm a rio
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  • The Vision She Hid   136

    I caught myself thinking that even if Elky was right, and “they” were really fighting with pens, “they” seem to excel in it. That morning Palermo had the kind of heat that didn’t come from the sun. It came from very old grudges and even older engines and the kind of air that took its time crawling off the warm water. You walked through it like through a sauna room. Even the seagulls looked fed up.Elky and I had been pretending to rest in the hotel lobby — the sort of lobby that smelled of too new leather. The hotel staff accustomed to talk softly because the walls had been known to have particularly good hearing. We sat in matching, fancy brown armchairs that probably had names. Mine felt like it didn’t want me there.The receptionist was a small girl with dark Sicilian hair and soft brown, old-soul eyes. She approached us with a practiced smile that was all tact and polish but somehow felt like a fruit that’d gone bad on the inside. She held a cream envelope between two fingers with

  • The Vision She Hid   135

    The storm came in sideways over the hills. You could hear the vines complaining through the old stone. Christofides house held the noise the way it held everything else—behind thick walls, under a roof that had seen more convincing threats. We had taken the long dining table away from food. No plates, no candles. Just laptops, printouts, three cold coffee pots, and enough wires to trip a small army. The crystal chandelier above us looked confused. It was built for weddings and gala dinners, not for corporate autopsies. I sat halfway down the table with a stack of shipping logs on my right and a legal pad on my left. The pad stayed mostly clean. The logs did all the talking. Novazene LLC. Novazene Holdings. NovaZ Therapeutics. Then the same thing in Maltese, Cypriot, Greek, and whatever language tax men can dream of. Corporate addresses in Wilmington, Valetta, and Limassol. One phone number that rang in Zurich but nobody picked up. Nicos sat at the head of the table because he a

  • The Vision She Hid   134

    There was an obscure modern building on the edge of Buenos Aires. It felt the way a bad idea sits at the edge of a man’s mind—half in shadow, half pushing him to do stupid things. That white container building used to be a language school. You could still see the painted vowels under the sun-bleached posters for “Phase II: Community Renewal.” A row of white plastic chairs lined the clean enough corridor, the kind you find in underfunded government offices. They creaked despair even when nobody sat on them.Inside, the fluorescent hummed like old men bad dream. The white tiles were cracked in the lazy way tiles crack when nobody expects the flooring to make a good impression. A woman in a blue hairnet pushed a mop around without bending her back too much. She’d seen better messes; this didn’t scare her off.Room 4 smelled of antiseptic and sweat. The fan on the ceiling spun slow and lazy. A man in his thirties sat on the metal cot with his hands clenched between his knees. His legs sho

  • The Vision She Hid   133

    Nicos spread the shipping logs across his knees like a map he’d spent a lifetime learning to hate. The laptop’s flat glow bathed us in a pallid honesty—tired but unflinching. He scrolled and tapped as though each keystroke were a punch in the gut. Dates piled up like nasty debts, ports repeated as if echoing our forgotten sins, and flags on the screen promised lies wrapped up in neat corporate lawsuits.“Here,” he said, his voice as clipped as a bank teller’s, and the line on the screen offered a poetic name: NOVAZENE LLC. Wilmington, Delaware. Just another subsidiary of a subsidiary stashed away in a trust with a name that sounded like a Florida golf club. The same wire routes that fed those shabby clinic shells, the same batch code—Δ-12—and the notes column, ever cryptic, declared odd “biological consumables.” A message as cold and final as a price on one’s ruined life.“Uh-huh. It’s Lucia’s paper trail,” I said, letting the words hang in the stale air.“She likes American mannerism

  • The Vision She Hid   132

    Our helicopter climbed until the town went flat and the Sicilian lemon groves turned into dark plates with neat black seams. The pilot killed the lights and held the nose steady. Nobody was in a mood for idle chat. We had the thump of the blades, the hiss of air through the vents, and the thin metal whine that files at your teeth. The oldish wireless printer sat bolted under the console with a separate battery pack, like somebody’s bad joke about office work on the run. I though it was rather handy joke. I thumbed through the settings until it coughed itself awake. It hesitated, thought it over, then spat pages into my hand! Gianni’s ledgers, neat stack of them, slid into my plastic sleeve like fish in the net. The paper smelled of disinfectant and burned coffee. Ink had bled on the first sheet and then made up its mind to be professional. The numbers looked odd. They’ve ran in Anatole’s tight, crabbed style. He wrote things as if someone was watching and he didn’t plan to make it ea

  • The Vision She Hid   131

    The helicopter came in low over the roofs and shook flour off the bakery like dust from an old rug. The rotor wash turned the square into a wind tunnel and gave everyone a free bad hair day. People ran to their doors because that’s what people do when a machine drops from the sky on their town. Dogs barked because nobody was there to tell them off.We stood in the alley by the basil cans and waited for the noise to become something we could work with. Celeste kept one hand in her pocket and the other on the old stone wall. Maria shielded her eyes with a flat hand. Andrew looked like a man counting his unpaid debts. Elky was there, but only just. I tasted jet fuel and lemons and thought the mixer is vile.The pilot settled in the schoolyard at the edge of the square. The school had a roof with a gap where a tile should. When the rotors slowed down, a man in a black suit jumped down and unlatched the side door like he did so every weekend. He didn’t care to look at us. He looked at the

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