Page 13 of Love, Nemesis
“You’re starting to get worse again,” Manaj said, offering him his flask. “What’s wrong?”
Lethe remained focused forward, eyes barely cracked open with his hands still clamped over his head. “Nothing’s wrong,” he said with a peculiar and unnatural cool. “Why do you always think something is wrong?”
After a few minutes, Manaj sighed and spoke.
“You are on fire,” he whispered, re-screwing the top of Lethe’s flask before handing it to him to drink. “You were on fire when I found you alone up in those mountains.” Manaj waited in the flickering candlelight of the room. “The man who has no faith left thinks he can only offer his blood to get what he needs, and so you sold your soul to the devil to save the world you loved.” Manaj leaned forward and placed a fatherly kiss on Lethe’s head.
“You are on fire,” he repeated. “Every day, I pray it rains.”
Chapter 4: Return
ANA MEASURED HER feelings as she packed for a trip to the capital. She tried to coax out that eager warrior, that drive, that out here in the wilderness she’d buried to give rise to something new.
She’d worked the past two years since her retirement to foster something peaceful inside herself. Though she was young, it was the end of her career, and she’d dug a hole for her past, filling it with her achievements, ambitions, and skills. She’d hoped those things would decompose inside herself, break down from lack of use, and become the soil from which a sense of lasting accomplishment could grow. She could retire like a hero, looking back on a career well spent.
She was wrong.
She fought off the lingering sense of her miscalculation as she prepared her things, changing into a pair of old riding boots and pants with a loose, brown shirt.
Hailey was a problem, her last mission a death sentence, but not the most singular source of her dread.
Instead of decomposing in the peaceful way she imagined, everything she’d buried had festered into a cancerous fear. She felt it in her chest now, radiating like heat at the mere notion of leaving her cabin again.
The world, in all of its unpredictability and severity, scared her more than anything else.
She’d trained long and hard for years to become a good soldier, and at the Dal Hull mining tragedy, in a day, she became a traitor.
She’d started this morning watching a remarkable sunrise, and an hour later, that version of her life was over.
It was as if the surrounding universe was just as conflicted as she was. Unending, unpredictable, uncomfortable conflict.
As she saddled her horse, she couldn’t resist the image of digging into the grave and removing everything she’d buried: her skills in combat, military strategy, drive, bravery. Not quite what it used to be and yet interrupted from becoming what she’d wanted it to be.
Getting back on her horse and embarking on what had once been a familiar journey felt like an imposition into the past.
She rode through the woods of Satellite, a town only by name that was composed of wide ranges of farmland and forests. There wasn’t another human being in sight until she crossed onto the main beaten path to the capital a few hours later. Hours on horseback brought her to the cornfields.
She admired the capital beyond them. It rose in the distance like a great, white giant, the clock tower glimmering like hot gold in the sun. The white-washed walls reflected the grandeur of an ordered empire, a symbol of hope that, aside from the corruption she knew existed with any system, always burned as a beacon for her.
Unlike the En Sanctans, Statesmen didn’t hide. Unlike the Mystics, the Statesmen didn’t bow to The Eating Ocean or the memory of the Strike.
Statesmen could be proud and severe, but to Ana, they were the embodiment of courage and hope. They were mankind’s best chance at a bright future.
Ana rode past the ring of huts on the outskirts of the capital and then took her horse up the stone paths that wound along the villas of politicians and government officials. The sides facing the town were layered in political flyers. The headings read, “The Great Fright.”
It was a nod to the En Sanctans’ legend of The Great Light, a powerful phenomenon that had apparently hidden many dark mutations and healed the world after the terror of The Ocean’s War.
It was hated by Statesmen, who, as ardent intellectuals and historians, despised the idea of anything being covered up. John Hailey and the Var had pushed their political agendas under that banner and sent more Statesmen into En Sanctus. The touted goal was to disprove the existence of The Great Light. The actual goal, lesser known, was to discover war secrets that could be weaponized against the Mystics now poking at State borders.
Two soldiers in uniform stared as Ana trotted past the gates of the capital building. Dressed in civilian clothes, she imagined such boldness in the capital seemed peculiar. She rode past rows of barracks overlooking the training grounds beyond as she tied up her horse near the stables.
A familiar face greeted her when she entered the storage building next to the barracks.
“Ana?” Pamina said, lowering the book in her hand as she tried to get a better look from behind the protective bars. With porcelain skin and platinum hair, she looked like a jailed ghost. “What a surprise.” She folded her book over her thumb as she stood from her chair. “Are you visiting Jasper? He should be out of classes soon.”
“Something like that,” Ana said. She stopped in front of the bars. She removed a copper card from her belt and set it down on the iron desk between them, sliding it through a small window.
Pamina took it, adjusting her glasses as she read the codes etched into the card. She looked up at Ana with those intent, studious eyes.
