It felt like hitting the breaks. Like she smashed down on something deep inside of her and the harder she pushed, the slower everything became…until it slowed…and everything stopped. But not the newly resurrected Darker. Not Dr. Eakran, or the woman Alia and her brother with the wings.
When she let up, when she released the thing that was depressed, she found herself disoriented in a familiar place; Eakran’s house with Darker.
“I remember two things,” he said to her when it was clear that she was suddenly confused at her surroundings, like she had woken up to a different set of events that had transpired than the ones that brought her to her place in that present. “I remember arriving here and meeting that Alia woman outside, but that’s not what happened is it? When we arrived here, we met with Eakran and talked, and now we are here.”
Maria nodded slowly. That is how she would explain it after her mind adjusts, and then she shakes it off long enough to appear unaffected and her normal self. But she is not her normal self.
Maria sits in a park looking at people passing by. It is hot for early summer, it will only get hotter as the summer stretches on. There are children playing in a field, just beyond the walkway in front of the bench that Maria sits. They laugh, they have water pistols. Put ’em up! they yell at one another, never giving enough time for surrender.
A couple walks by, she leans into him. Maria has never leaned into any one this way. If he loses his stride or jerks away, she will feel the disruption, she might even fall. What is it to trust someone with such a small, intimate gesture, to lean into them as you walk?
She would try it with Darker later. He could support her, he had been her family since his resurrection. He even made her more sympathetic to Dr. Eakran, who was not the same man that she had witnessed murder his assistant. Eakran is not so self assured anymore. He is not as confident of his understanding of the universe as he had been and Maria thought that deflated his sails. He seemed to slouch when he walked. He was human.
Maria notices two birds bounding around one another, flitting their wings and chirping. And then a squirrel barrels through and breaks up their seeming courtship.
Maria is furious, squirrels are so rude, and she focuses her gaze on the squirrel that had come to rest on the branch of a tree with an acorn.
Drop it!, she thinks, and the acorn hits the ground.
Come here!, she thinks, and the squirrel makes its way diligently across the walkway and stands on two legs looking up at Maria.
“I know you’re small and people are rude to you, but if you show the world a better way to be, maybe things will be better for everyone. Watch where you’re going! Go!”
The squirrel scampers off and Maria chuckles to herself.
“That was insane,” she hears and looks up to see a handsome man her age admiring her.
“You go too,” Maria says with a smile, sure that the man would use the incident to try and ask her on a date. He walks away smiling.
It is a strange ability to control the actions of others. But Maria is careful not to abuse it. It is a gift, her tool to balance the scales against Eakran when the moment comes. He is sympathetic now, but how long before he regains his cruelty?
Maria leaves the park and meets Darker at Eakran’s home. The two sit in the backyard and Eakran joins them after a while. He looks sad and pensive. Darker puts an arm on his shoulder.
People change, Maria thinks and she tries not to stare at Eakran. She wonders why he is so troubled, but she has kept herself from asking for fear that it would only further endear him to her.
But was she any closer to discovering his alien homeworld? She had to take advantage of his changed mood, maybe he would speak more freely about it.
“You should use him,” Darker said to her when she asked his opinion later when they were alone. “That is what he would expect, that is his way of life.”
“The more I know him, the less I want to make him pay for all the horrors he’s committed. He has to pay Darker.”
“I imagine that he will. But you might as well get what you want in the meantime.”
There are more troubling things to Maria than Dr. Thomas Eakran, too, things that the doctor could be helpful with. Her time with Dr. Roy Worthington, the man who had resurrected Darker, had convinced her that he was doing something terrible in his immense laboratory.
She will keep living the life that she wakes up to, but she has to find her offensive posture.
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