Page 23 of Edge of Oblivion (Night Prowler 2)
There followed a long, uncomfortable silence. She ate, trying to ignore him while he sat still as stone in his chair, examining her with a gaze so heavy it was touch. Heat across her cheekbones, fight-
or-flight adrenaline coursing through her veins. But she was not— not—going to look at him.
At last he spoke, and she instantly wished he hadn’t.
“Why did you do it?”
Concentrating on the contents of her plate, she speared a ripe piece of melon on the tines of her fork, folded a paper-thin strip of prosciutto over it, and lifted it to her mouth. It melted on her tongue, savory and sweet.
“I thought I told you. I wasn’t running away. I just wanted to look around a bit before we got started.”
“That wasn’t what I meant. Which you know.”
His voice was quiet, barely audible over two elderly gentlemen at the next table arguing vigorously over a game of chess. In spite of herself she glanced at him, expecting to find derision or contempt. But there was only curiosity, that and something deeper, something indefinable that glittered dark in the golden depths of his eyes. The air between them crackled.
Apprehensive and uncomfortable, she dropped her gaze to her plate. “What difference does it make? What’s done is done.” She savagely speared another cube of melon, then dropped her fork to her plate with a clatter and sat back against her chair, her appetite vanished.
“As a matter of fact, it makes a great deal of difference.”
“To who?” she replied, unhappy. Her sentence was iron-clad, her fate was sealed. Whys no longer made any difference to anyone.
“In the end, everything matters” was his cryptic response. “The big triumphs and failures are what we most remember, but all the little mindless moments, all the forgotten details of your life matter, too. It all matters, because it all adds up to who you really are.”
Surprised, she glanced up at him. That look of curiosity was still there, intense and unflagging, and she was held in it, suspended like a fossil pinned in liquid amber. All at once her apprehension and unhappiness disappeared and she felt only that odd bud of hope again, the one that had first taken root last night. It burned through her heart like a spear of fire.
“Who I really am,” she repeated, uncertain. Was this a test?
He nodded, the smallest motion of his head.
“I’m nothing. I’m no one. I’m...” she cleared her throat, wretched, “...a traitor.”
“Are you?” he murmured, with an almost imperceptible accent on the first word.
His eyes were hypnotic, sunlight and shadow, searching and searing and washed with ancient sorrow that darkened their pure luminosity but allowed her a glimpse into a well of torment so deep, so unfathomable, it was frightening. For a moment as he watched her, his mask of perfect indifference slipped and she glimpsed beneath it something that she recognized all too well.
Pain. Just like her, this beautiful, unrepentant killer was in pain.
In the space of one moment to the next, something vital changed.
“Haven’t you ever wanted a different sort of life?” She blurted it, unthinking. It came out small and pleading. Raw.
“A different sort of life,” he echoed, hollow.
“That’s all I ever dreamed of, since I was a little girl,” she rushed on. “Something more.
Something...else. Anything else.” She gestured to the people strolling past, the whistling waiters, the arguing chess players, a pair of nuns in black habits walking arm in arm up the steps toward the church. “What they have, but I never will.”
He sat in absolute stillness, watching her with unblinking eyes, his face rigid. “Freedom.”
“Yes,” she said, surprised he had guessed. “Liberty and independence and, especially, the choice over who we can love.” His face turned ashen when she said those words, but she pressed on, ignoring it. “ ‘One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.’ Do you know who said that?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Nietzsche.”
She laughed, surprised again. “An existentialist assassin! Yes, Nietzsche. And he was right.
Death is always preferable to a life in chains. If nothing else, at least we should be allowed that.” Her hands shook. She pulled them into her lap, clasped them hard together. “But we’re not. We’re allowed nothing. And for me, for a woman...”
Her voice faded. There was silence between them for a moment before she resumed, low, to her hands. “I thought becoming an Assembly member would change that. I thought being more Gifted than most of the other men in our colony would change it. I thought if I worked hard and tried my best to be like them...to fit in...I thought things could be...different.”
