This time I woke up screaming, heart pounding, completely afraid in the passenger seat of the car. We were no longer moving – Aizel had pulled the car over – and now he was trying to hold me.
“Abigail! Abigail! Dammit, Jeannette! Wake up – you’re having a nightmare!” He was breathless by the time I opened my eyes. “There,” he said. “It was just a bad dream. Just look at me, alright, I’m right here.”
That’s right, I had fallen asleep in the seat of the car, and it only made sense that I’d have another nightmare. But it was so real! I shot Brakewater. Wait, no I didn’t. I… I stabbed him.
Once again, Aizel had pulled me out of the water, and I wanted to kiss him this time. “Aizel…” I breathed.
“That’s right, I’m here.” There was a silence for a moment, and then he spoke, very carefully. “It was about Brakewater, wasn’t it?”
I sighed and stared up at the stars above us, slowly fading as the purple gleam of dawn came upon them. “He’s going to haunt me forever,” I said quietly. “There’s not a thing in the world I can do.”
Aizel slowly leaned back and joined me in the stars above. “I wish I could tell you that it got easier.”
I turned my head and looked at him, and as I met his eyes I asked him, “have you ever killed anyone?”
He turned away and looked back up at the stars, and he was silent for so long that I thought he was going to ignore me, but he didn’t. “I have,” he said, “once. It was last year, on the nineteenth of April – it was a Saturday. I was part of a team that had been sent into the field to assassinate a man named Andrew McLoid, he was…”
“One of Lace’s most powerful supporting members,” I finished, remembering reading about his death in the paper.
“Yeah, he was becoming a real thorn in the side of the resistance. So anyway, I was just there for support – to make sure everything ran smoothly and that was all. We broke into one of his safe houses, and there was this guy just standing, he was armed in the end but at the time I didn’t know that. It was shoot first and ask questions later – those were our orders. So I shot, but the worst part was the terror I saw in his eyes before he died.”
I guess Aizel was in the same boat as me then, only he got there first. “How did you deal with it?” I asked him.
He gave me a sad smile. “You don’t. You just come to terms with it and try to move on. That’s all there is.”
He sat up and turned the key so that the engine rumbled to life and the lights snapped on. “Come on, I know a place where we can stay for a while. We’re far away enough from the resistance for a while so that they won’t find us. You can’t drive, and I need to sleep – it’ll be a while before we reach Lace and we need to make sure we’re ready.”
After that it was silence again until we pulled up at an old petrol station on the edge of town. It was completely deserted and most likely one of the resistance’s little hideouts. The place was empty and yet all of the gas pumps were in working condition. When Aizel pulled the keys for the front door from back pocket, he treated the place almost like it was home.
“Welcome to my personal favourite hiding place,” he said as he pushed open the double doors.
I followed him inside and looked around uncertainly. The place was dark and dusty and it smelt odd, but it seemed cosy enough – Aizel certainly seemed to think so.
“Finally, I can sleep!” he groaned, and he collected a blanket from behind the counter, dropped down to the floor and used his backpack as a pillow.
“When was the last time you slept?” I asked him.
“About three or four days ago, I think. It was before I went to retrieve the code but found that you had it. Yeah, Benson’s had me working missions not stop lately. There’s supplies here, grab what you want and then wake me up in an hour, or maybe two – that’d be nice.”
And then he was asleep, like, instantly, it was amazing.
I had a whole hour to explore the gas station, and my goal within that hour was to find a pair of shoes. That shouldn’t have been too hard, these places were constantly stockpiled so that resistance workers could stay here and re-supply, so surely they had to have shoes.
I began my search by checking under the counter – carefully stepping over Aizel’s sleeping body to see what I could find. I found whiskey beneath the counter, and then whiskey, more whiskey, an old fedora, and a packet of gummy bears – no luck.
Next was the back room, where I assumed they would have kept most of the supplies. So I opened the door, stepped in, and nearly fell to my death after slipping on an empty bottle – fortunately my hand caught onto the shelf above me. This part of my search was destined to be difficult because it seemed that the resistance did not know how to organise things. Yes, the room had plenty of supplies, but it was utterly chaotic.
The very first thing I spotted was a chocolate-nut-bar, which I ate as I proceeded to search through the rest of room. I found a crate full of water bottles that I dragged out into the main room so that we could use them later. We definitely need water, I had thought, but where are the damn shoes!
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