Chapter 39-
“You’re sure it wasn’t working?”
“I’m certain, the sign said so, and the maintenance light was blinking.”
Angelique sat across from Gideon in his private study; the window was cracked open, letting the cool sea breeze in to blow the curtains softly. From outside, the steady crashing of waves laid a comfortable blanket of noise beneath their conversation.
“You don’t think that’s strange?” the doctor insisted.
“Not really,” Gideon replied, nonchalantly.
Angelique sighed and took a drink from a small porcelain teacup held delicately between his fingers.
“That’s what I don’t get,” he proclaimed. “You just don’t question the world around you, I don’t get that!”
Gideon cupped his cheek in his hand and closed his eyes.
“It’s the most sensible way to live,” he explained. “If you stop and question everything you see, you’ll be swallowed up, you’ll never survive.” He paused before reciting his mantra.
“If you see it, you must follow it.”
“You mean to tell me,” Angelique raised his voice incredulously. “That on all of your adventures, there was never anything you saw that you couldn’t believe? That you wanted to find the truth of?”
“I don’t go on adventures,” the Captain replied matter-of-factly. “I have excursions. And besides, there’s a difference between needing to know something and wanting to know something.”
“So, you don’t think that wanting to understand why that elevator opened even though it was out of order is valuable?”
“It may be, I’m not denying that,” Gideon reasoned. “I just don’t see the point as of present.”
Angelique placed his teacup on the little table that sat between them and stood up from his chair, walking to a globe placed at his desk. With two fingers, he swiped it and watched it spin around until it was a blur of blue and brown colors; there was a small rattling noise as the axle rotated.
Without warning, his index finger shot into the globe, bringing it to a full stop.
“So if something unexplainable happened in…” he peered at where his finger had landed. “Cradle? You wouldn’t be curious about it?”
Gideon looked at him blankly.
“Can’t say I would.”
Angelique sighed dejectedly before Gideon spoke up again.
“Did anything interesting happen in Cradle?”
Like night and day, Angelique’s face perked up, his eyes filled with renewed vigor.
“Well,” he began excitedly. “Cradle is a small town by the Midwest Mountain range, as I’m sure you know.”
“I’ve never been.”
“You don’t need to, have you heard of it?”
“No.”
“Then just say that!”
Angelique didn’t mind a little squabble, he actually enjoyed arguing when it was friendly like this.
“Okay,” he continued. “A few years ago, when I’d just been admitted to the Academy as a researcher, my first on-the-road assignment was to Cradle.”
“Oh!” Gideon snapped his fingers together. “That’s why it seemed familiar!”
“So you did know!” Angelique cried.
“I just didn’t want to ask…” Gideon rationalized.
“That’s your problem! Like I said!” Angelique crossed his arms and smirked.
“See, now I’m offended.”
“Alright, alright, just tell me what happened…”
The doctor straightened up and finished his story.
“We had gotten reports of a strange sickness that was only infecting residents of that town. I was on the team that was called out to investigate it.”
“What was it like?” Gideon leaned forward.
“It wasn’t like anything I’d seen before, in any textbook,” Angelique smiled inside; this was the reaction he was looking to provoke. “Five people had died by the time we got there, they reported sudden dizziness and intense thirst, but they died even after drinking water from the local river.”
“Was it something in the water?”
“A-ha!” Angelique pointed excitedly. As soon as someone was invested in one of his stories, he felt he knew exactly what was on their mind. “You’re a step ahead of me! First, I did an autopsy on two of the unburied bodies, and found that their blood vessels had corroded.”
“Corroded??”
“Like acid had been poured through a pipe that wasn’t built to handle it. It was really terrifying, it turned out that the dizziness was a product of the heart pumping irregularly due to some kind of venomous substance, the thirst was harder to pin down, but it seemed to be a result of water loss from intense sweating.”
“My God…” Gideon listened on, enraptured by the story.
“So, we made a list of things each of the patients had in common, and after we crossed off most of them, we examined the water in the river nearby.”
“What was wrong with the water?”
“After taking a lot of samples and filtering them out, we found that there was a liquid in the water supply that we’d never seen before.”
“What was it?”
“We still don’t know,” Angelique admitted. “But after we advised the residents to use some of the filtration systems we brought, the incidents stopped immediately.”
“So… What happened?” Gideon pried. “Did someone spill something in the water?”
“That’s the funny thing, when we looked into the toxin in the water, it looked like it had traces of organic substances.”
Gideon’s limited knowledge of science was failing him.
“What do you mean ‘organic’?”
Angelique wore a look of surprise.
“You don’t-?” He stopped himself, or risked sounding pretentious. “Organic just means it came from a living thing.”
“Like an animal?”
“Sure,” Angelique cast his head toward the window. “There’s no evidence of any animal in that area that produces a venom, a few species of snake, but nothing that could make that much at that power.”
The cold afternoon light shone harshly into the room, and while it lit up his face, from his point of view, everything around the window was gripped by heavy shadows.
A knock at the door; Gideon looked back from his chair. Angelique broke his gaze from the window and strolled over to answer the visitor.
He was greeted by a young undergraduate researcher holding a slip of paper.
“This is for you, Professor Blackwell.”
Angelique accepted the delivery and dismissed the young man courteously. For a moment, he stood at the door and read it to himself.
“Official business?” Gideon asked, leaning his elbow over the arm of the chair. Angelique said nothing, his eyes intent on reading the whole document; his face now serious.
“What?” the Captain prodded, now concerned with what was on the paper.
Angelique was quiet for a moment, then collected himself; there was a trace of a chuckle in his voice.
“Remember that toxin that I was talking about?”
---
Black boots hit the pavement. He was in a wind tunnel between two tall buildings, in the middle of a draft that blew his petrified white hair around.
“Little spider, weave your web…”
Eroh Cidic strolled among the citizens of Hilltop, having taken the time to approach the city from the south, through the Chaff.
“What will you catch tonight?” he hummed, his eyes glossy and unfocused, his head swaying from side to side. The wound from his amputated arm had been fused up with caustic acid, and while it was no longer a health concern, it was unsightly all-around, so he chose to drape himself in a loose-fitting black cloak that hung off of his body, not sacrificing any of his much-valued breathable clothing.
Somewhere far off in the city, an enormous, pounding sound began ringing. Eroh stopped in his tracks and turned his attention to its direction. From the street corner he stood at, the massive bell-tower of Gallipe Church was visible. Inside, some poor prole was pulling a thick rope over and over again, ruining his hearing…
“All to tell the time for people who wouldn’t waste their spit on his grave.”
The thought brought a modest smile to his blackened lips; his eyes relaxed, he counted the bell chimes.
“Four… five… six… seven.”
And the bell was quiet. He stared off into the sky.
“I don’t have to meet up with them until noon.”
In three minutes, he was aboard one of the many municipal trolleys that moved the denizens of Hilltop across the city. With his one remaining hand, he stroked his chin. While anyone who looked at him could see the movement, they couldn’t have possibly heard the soft scratching noise his long, black fingernails produced. His thoughts and motives were similarly unassuming from the outset.
“Who’s more worthless today, the rich or the poor?”
Eroh’s eyes squinted in thought. Usually, the answer was just whoever was around him at the time, but a large city such as this, filled with all kinds of people, offered almost too many choices to him.
He looked around at the people who joined him on the trolley, his gaze settling on a man reading the day’s newspaper.
“You there!”
The man’s glance snapped from the paper to Eroh’s tall, lithe frame, he looked surprised.
“Sir?”
“Yeah, you with the paper!” Eroh had no interest in pleasantries. “What’s the worst news today?”
“The… the-?”
“The worst! What’s the worst thing that happened today?”
Eroh’s stare was intense, it practically compelled the man to answer.
“W-well,” he stuttered awkwardly. “There’s been a tax hike-”
“A tax hike? On who?”
“On anyone who makes more than $15,000.”
“I see! Awesome!”
The man with the paper found himself naturally leaning away from Eroh, who gave off an unnerving energy.
Wearing a big grin, Eroh threw his gaze out toward the nearest street sign.
“Hey,” he rambled to no one in particular. “We’re right around 22nd Street, aren’t we?”
With that, he leapt off the trolley into oncoming traffic, landing gracefully before jogging down the street, weaving through crowds of people.
“Let’s see…”
Eroh’s eyes darted around, looking for someone who made themselves an easy target. He had just passed into the heart of the Paper Square, where he was sure to find some wealthy socialite.
“Mello will hate it if I draw too much attention to myself, but one or two people won’t be a big deal, right?”
He broke out of the crowd into a large square lined with high-end retail shops; tables were scattered about the area where families sat around and ate, enjoying the day.
“It’s a holiday, so most people should be out with their families, unless…” he schemed. “...They don’t have family here?”
His gaze settled on a man in his mid-50s, sitting alone at a bench. He was dressed in a posh-looking blazer and top hat; his professionally tailored pants and shirt looked out of place on a day like this.
“Are you on break from your work?” Eroh thought, approaching the bench. “On this holiday? Are you still working? For a paycheck that’ll get taxed more? Or, are you just wearing that to impress someone else?”
He found a seat beside the man, whose nose was deep into a rather dry-looking novel.
“Well, you don’t impress me at all.”
“Good morning!” the pale-faced assassin greeted with an off-putting sincerity. He wrapped his arm around the back of the bench, his hand positioned just above the back of the man’s neck.
“Hello,” the stranger replied, not expecting any company. “What brings you here today?”
“Nothing, really, just feeling a little lonely,” Eroh answered, grinning. “What book is that?”
The man launched into a lengthy explanation of his reading material that lasted for several minutes. It was clear that he rarely had the chance to speak about anything he really cared about to anyone.
“Good, he’s either lonely or, if he’s not, nobody around him cares about him that much… so about the same,” Eroh reasoned, not listening at all to the exposition. Instead, his fingertips loomed over the nape of the man’s neck, steadily dripping a clear liquid onto his skin, so slowly and lightly that he never would have noticed, not through his raving explanation of his book.
In the span of twenty blissful minutes, Eroh felt the poison drain from his fingers and soak through this poor stranger’s skin to be absorbed into the bloodstream.
“Well,” he cut the man off abruptly. “I have to be going, later.”
Without even making eye contact, he got to his feet and stepped away with the wind at his back. Eroh could feel the distress and sadness his departure had caused this man, and it pleased him greatly.
“He’ll die faster if his heart is broken.”
For about thirty minutes, the man simply returned to his book and read on with all the strength of a fly. He could barely turn each page, his depression was so utterly crushing.
When he decided that he’d rather spend the day in the darkness of his study at home, the man stood up from the bench and experienced a sudden lightheadedness.
“I… I really must drink some water…” he thought, taking a step forward. As his other shoe hit the ground, his head was filled with the sound of soft static. The world around him turned into a nightmare of bright light and unintelligible views.
He hit the ground face-first. For a minute, no one in the square noticed his collapse, until a single woman caught sight of him and shrieked.
A few hours later, Angelique was standing in the basement morgue of the Hilltop Academy. At his side, the chief medical examiner of the police force informed him of the details of the death.
Angelique was stunned.
“So you mean to say that this man’s symptoms are similar to… what happened in Cradle?”
The examiner, a stocky man with a red face, nodded his head slowly and turned a clipboard around in his hands and extended it out to the professor.
“The autopsy results indicate the same damage to blood vessels seen in that case.”
The Cradle incident had become a well-known example of Angelique’s early medical prowess, and the fact that its source remained a mystery gave it a lasting legacy, as theories cropped up attempting to explain it. They had ranged from a terrorist attack to an unidentified species in the area, some had even spun it into being the work of a folk-tale monster. To add to the mystery, Angelique had long ago made all of his notes public; the fact that even a renowned scientist, who carefully explained away all rational possibilities, was still baffled only incensed conspiracy theorists.
“What was in his system?” was the first question the Academy’s lead researcher asked first.
“The most recent thing he’d had to drink was a glass of beer,” the examiner informed. “We believe he had it no more than an hour before his death.”
Angelique scratched behind his ear, a nervous tick he’d developed as an army doctor.
“I thought it could be a bacteria…” he muttered to himself. “A bacteria would make some sense, if it was organic, perhaps…” His eyes narrowed, looking into space. “But the brewing process kills any bacteria that might be present in the water source…”
---
“Gideon?”
The Captain looked up from the ground.
“You said that this ‘Fang Team,’ they could be domestic terrorists, is that right?”
The two friends had returned to the study, after urging by Angelique that this was a question that needed to be posed in private.
“It’s most likely,” Gideon affirmed, “that they’re working against the government. How, I don’t know.”
“Is it out of the question that they would use a chemical attack?”
“A- a-?”
“If they could launch a poison into the city,” Angelique explained. “That would fulfill some kind of purpose, to promote chaos?”
Gideon’s heart froze.
“You think that this death was some kind of test?”
“It’s just a crazy idea,” Angelique looked away. “But I can’t get it out of my mind.”
“If there was a chemical attack in Hilltop, there would need to be some kind of response from the authorities, wouldn’t there?” Gideon’s voice was now grave.
A thick silence hung between them, one could have heard the landing of a dust particle on the floor.
“The President is a compassionate man,” Gideon said. “It’s the kind of thing he’d speak on.”
Another pause; they looked at each other pensively.
“Isaiah should hear about this”
---
Mello’s eyes had been closed for an hour. He sat straight up against the concrete wall, zen-like in the dark room. Softly, slowly, the door opened from the other side of the space, only enough that light was able to spill out through the crevice and pour onto the frame.
Without opening his eyes, he knew that it was Gruse.
She leaned her face into the opening, cautious of widening it enough to fit her head through.
“Eroh’s arrived.”
She spoke as softly as she’d opened the door.
Mello maintained his posture; in truth, there was no way for her to tell if he was even awake, but she’d become so familiar with this ritual of his that she knew he was always acutely aware of his environment.
It was a meditation, of which he had no problem being interrupted. The first time she’d seen him perform it was when she was relatively new to the group, and he’d chosen her to accompany him on an assignment, along with Myst. One evening, while Myst was away from their base of operations as part of the mission, she received a message tied to a pigeon’s foot. Training messenger pigeons was a skill Myst had picked up from Susarion, and he’d made it clear to her that in the event she received one from him, it was of utmost importance and should be heeded as quickly as possible.
This particular message needed to be shared with Mello, but as she approached his space, she realized that he was in a deep, sitting meditation. The urgency of the task overpowered any fear that may have bubbled up in her, fear of incurring some incredible wrath he’d yet displayed, but was obviously capable of. In a soft voice, she called his name, and he gently opened his eyes to hear what she had to say.
This time was no different. He was able to rise up out of the swamp of his own thoughts as easily as breathing. The longer she spent with him, the more she began to realize what this practice represented for him. At one time, he said to her,
“There’s no reason to do nothing, even when you sit idly, you need to immerse yourself in the task at hand.”
“And when you sit still, what do you do?” she’d asked him.
“I contemplate my own hatred.”
Gruse had looked at him curiously.
“Isn’t hatred an active feeling?” she’d questioned. “When you don’t keep your hate hot, it’s just bitterness, right?”
Without so much as a moment’s hesitation, he responded.
“The hatred that exists before it’s born, that’s what I contemplate. The suffering that is yet to be.”
“You believe that it exists?”
“I don’t believe there is such thing as the future, but if I can live in that- if I can swim in that absent tomorrow, and defy the bounds of my own life, I will be stronger than any other man.”
Now, he opened his eyes, and without anger, without annoyance or displeasure, he stood up, his boots crunching against fragments of concrete littered about the room. Gruse knew that it wouldn’t upset him, but in the back of her mind, she wanted to make it as polite an exchange as possible; she didn’t have the sense that this was something to be casually interrupted.
Mello grabbed the door handle and threw it open silently, without even looking at her, and proceeded into the hallway that led out of the office-space and into the warehouse proper.
“Eroh?” he thought, passing closed doors and boarded windows to dark rooms. “I expected him today; I wonder if he’ll acknowledge his failure to me.”
Down on the ground level of the warehouse, Eroh was now making idle chit-chat with Noire and Advent, waiting for the right time to surprise them with his missing arm.
In a split-second, his instincts roared. His eyes snapped to the side. He whipped his arm out in a wild slash above him.
“[LULLABY]!!!”
A trail of poison splashed from his hand, forming a barrier against Mello’s descending strike. Advent’s heart hadn’t even beat again before The Tiger was standing beside them, holding Eroh’s cloak.
Eroh stomped his foot, trying to expend the rush of adrenaline, and panted heavily, bending over and propping himself up on his thigh. His left sleeve hung loosely at his side, only a gnarled stump of his shoulder remaining.
“You lost your arm?” Mello asked calmly, his head draped in shadow.
“Yeah,” Eroh spat between breaths. “Yeah I did, is that a problem?”
“There’s no shame in losing a limb,” The Tiger relaxed his posture and tilted his head to the side. “I’m just concerned why you wore this to hide it from us.”
Recovered enough to straighten himself out a bit, Eroh pointed lazily to Advent.
“Yure wears a cloak too, you’re not on his case.”
The youngest member shrunk backwards uncomfortably.
“Advent isn’t the type to keep secrets from me.”
Mello’s eyes locked with Eroh’s.
“I know you hate me,” the poisonous soul thought. “But I’m too important to kill.”
Gruse, who had followed Mello out to the scaffolding where he’d jumped down, passively observed them from above.
“Eroh’s quite like an untrained guard dog,” she thought. “He provides a service to the owner, but the owner could shoot him any time.” Her eyes flickered to Mello. “If there were a dog who were bullet proof and could kill the man, then the owner might have to let him live out of a need for respect, but their relationship isn’t like that. Their respect for each other is built on completely different needs.”
She ran her fingers through her black and red hair in a way that relaxed her.
“I suppose it keeps them out of competition, but it’s such a precarious situation.”
This knowledge didn’t cause her very much stress, because if there were any kind of splintering of the group, she knew which side she and the others would fall on. It would almost definitely be a one-man rebellion.
“Perhaps Dion’s Vocation is strong enough to match Mello,” she pondered. “But I doubt he’d betray him for someone like Eroh.”
Gruse didn’t have any particular affection for Dion, but having him on their side was another comforting fact. With Mello’s leadership, even their ragged band could take on the world.
Something occurred to her as she reflected on this, walking down the steps to the ground level, her boots clacking against the metal scaffolding. In a light jog, she hit the cement floor, her black shawl flapping.
“Hey,” she called ahead. “Do you know when Dion and Susarion are gonna get back?”
Eroh peered at her with drooped, uncaring eyes.
“Oh, I sent them after the targets.”
“You-?”
Advent and Noire looked at Eroh in disbelief.
“Wait, wait…” Noire ran the scenario through his head.
“So,” Mello smirked at the ground. “You lost an arm, lost the fight, and sent Dion and Susarion after them instead?”
“I should have scored a kill on at least one of them,” he replied, bitterness soaking his words. “It wasn’t the priority, but one of his companions.”
Noire spoke up.
“That means that Fars…”
“Yeah, he bit it,” Eroh shrugged it off.
Advent looked downward at nothing in particular.
“Oh.”
The death of the other youngest member of the team bit into him. Noire, however, was launched into a deep contemplation; a million thoughts raced through his mind, but the only part that made any sense was--
“That’s one lonelier.”
---
Far away, in Angelique’s study at Hilltop Academy, the sound of a pen scratching paper toiled away for hours. Despite the workload in front of him, he couldn’t get this feeling out of his body. It was a mixture of stress, excitement, and sheer exhaustion from the day’s tasks.
Throwing down his pen, only half-finished with a document, the professor leaned back in his chair and sighed. Heaving himself up from his chair, he walked to the back of the room, where a tall file cabinet stood. The third shelf from the bottom was marked “Notes 3.”
With a rumbling sound, he pulled the metal cabinet open and flicked through the library of manilla folders, finally landing on the one he wanted.
A folder marked “CRADLE 1864” hit his desk. Angelique opened it to read once more through faded, wrinkled papers.
His eyes glazed through notes upon notes, until he came across the portion of the report describing how the water samples were obtained. For some reason he couldn’t place, he fixated on a detail at the bottom of the page. A footnote, not written by him, but one of the other members of the research team. Written in scraggly letters, most unlike his own, neat penmanship, was a short, clinical sentence.
“Water collected at 39° North, 50° West”
This sentence stuck out to him for some reason he couldn’t place. Keeping one thumb on the page, he flipped to another place in the report, a series of maps of the area around Cradle. Carefully, Angelique traced the latitude and longitude lines with his finger, until his brow furrowed and eyes widened.
“The point they collected water at… Was downstream from Cradle.”
It was wintertime when they made the trip to the little town, and the river was largely frozen over.
“They must not have realized it when they took the samples.”
He ran through several more pages, looking for key details.
“Every victim was a man,
One was in his thirties, two were in their forties, another three in their fifties,
Each was a regular customer of the local pub,
Three of them had visited the pub the day before they exhibited symptoms,
The man who died today had the poison fresh in his system,
So it kills fast? Within hours?
The cases stopped immediately when we gave them the filtration system , but… if it wasn’t a filtration issue…?
Then…
Was the poison in the water a coincidence?
It definitely didn’t cause the deaths, but it was found nearby.
Did the victims have fevers?
Each of them stayed out late one night after drinking at the same pub… We thought the important part was the pub, but if they were out at night, in the cold, alcohol makes you more likely to catch a sickness in those conditions…”
All of the details lined up in a way that had never occurred to him before; like a thread flying through the eyes of twenty needles.
“The victims all had fevers! They exhibited symptoms of two different ailments, one was the fever, and the other was…”
“A poison.”
His stomach sank with the revelation.
“The same poison found in the river nearby, but now that I think of it…” his mind worked like a machine, whirring at a million rotations per second as he spoke aloud to himself.
“There’s no way it could have been an accident.”
Angelique planted his foot on the floor and cast his gaze out the window, peering at the massive, untameable ocean. In that moment, he felt as powerful as even that.
“The Cradle incident was the result… of a conscious attack.”