Chương 6: What she carried

It took her a long time to calm down. She told me that her name was Nadia, but little else that I could understand as she cried and shook. Before long, all the anger and adrenaline faded away and I realized I couldn't just stand there and watch her. I sat close to her, and she looked at me like a spooked cat, even as my cat peeked from the stairs and looked at us curiously. The night deepened, the house becoming increasingly colder while the rain drummed harshly against the windows.

I got up, gathering all the scattered wood across the floor to get the fire going, and noticed that she was shaking without me near her. I patted the sofa near me after making sure the fire could survive without me, and she nodded almost mechanically, scooting closer and closer to me as if I were the only source of warmth in the universe. When I got up to fix up something to eat, she almost didn't let me.

She was so vulnerable, flinching at every sound the creaking old house made, staring at every shadowy corner like she wanted to run away and hide there. I no longer saw the home intruder when I looked at her, instead I saw the human, the vulnerable woman. Eventually, she fell asleep against me, and I didn't have the heart to wake her at all. I just sat there, feeling her presence and the occasional hiccup leftover from all the crying, and fell asleep myself. I woke up shivering.

The fire had guttered out sometime during the night, and the room was properly cold and clammy, as if the humidity of last night's rain had soaked through the walls and invaded the living room, robbing me of my heat. That's when I registered an unexpected source of warmth and a soft snoring. Nadia had cuddled up to me in her sleep, covering both of us with the too-small blanket I managed to find last night.

The cat, who I thought hated everyone and barely even tolerated me, was there too; all three of us becoming a warm heap of bodies. He felt me stir, looked at me lazily, yawned and went straight back to sleep on top of the girl I was sharing a sofa with. She looked otherworldly. Her foxy features were softened now that she was sleeping, and her breath was even and calm. It took me a minute to stop looking at her, making sure I didn't move so that she could sleep a bit more.

Just like last night, I couldn't bring myself not to care about this woman, Nadia, and so I let her sleep huddled up against me, trying not to think too much about the strangeness of it all. I distracted myself with the feelings coming from the swarm of nanites that made up my second superpower. The sensations were strange to decode, unlike they had been when the swarm had digested my own power. Something like weight, maybe? Murky darkness, depths of space all around me like a field.

The sensation of life and vitality, but also of its opposite, of a mad search to grasp and turn the bustling motion of the living into the wilting brown of the dead. What the fuck was wrong with Nadia's former power? It felt like a burden to even carry it in its partially deconstructed form, and I really wanted to examine it. I wondered, idly, how it must have felt to be her and to carry such a power. It didn't feel right, and the wrongness was ten times worse than my time-slow had been before I fixed it.

No wonder she was frightened. No wonder she cried. As for her mutation… I felt it too, there, waiting together with the rest of the pieces. I could separate it from the power, if I wanted. I looked at her, my eyes drawn to her like a magnet. I remembered how she looked. Her features, elven and beautiful in that still-frame of frozen time brought by my ability. The realization hit me.

I had robbed her of all of that with my nanites in just an instant, and now I was treating it like it was mine, like it righteously belonged to me. And, of course… If word got out, people are going to hunt me. To do what, I didn't know. To kill me? To study me? But I'd be hunted, that much was certain, which brought me back to the problem sleeping snugly in my arms. What was I going to do with her?

As if feeling my thoughts gravitate towards her, Nadia began to stir, blinking twice and making a cute startled noise when the cat jumped away from her and bolted to the other side of the room, before he disappeared up the stairs. Then her face twisted as she realized she was hugging me and immediately retreated to the other side of the sofa, until it settled into something resembling longing. Silence descended on us.

I didn't know what to say, and despite my best judgement, her reaction had hurt me deeply, even though I knew it was entirely reasonable. I knew I was reading too much into the longing I thought I saw, but was probably not real. Still. I held hope. Fuck, I was falling for this girl, wasn't I? The moment stretched, the cold room almost stifling, the air too still and oppressive as it pressed down on us. Last night, she had looked at me with wide eyes and asked "how?" and I had not replied.

Now I felt as if that question had lingered, turned into a ghost in the night, haunting us, but neither of us spoke. When I got up to rekindle the fire, she simply watched me, hugging her knees with the blanket wrapped protectively around her. She didn't say anything, but I noticed the shiver in her body because of the cold, and how she opened up a little when the flames from the fire started warming up the room. I made breakfast. I was starving, and luckily I had enough milk and cereal for the both of us.

It was nothing fancy, but her eyes lit up when I brought it to her so that we could eat it by the fire. I didn't care that we were eating on the sofa. I sat again on the other side, keeping a respectful distance, and watched the dancing flames.

"Are you still hungry?" I asked her after she wolfed down pretty much everything I had scrounged up for her.

"I think I have some fruit." Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

"Yes," she said, almost monotone. Adding, only belatedly, a weak thank you.

"Anything else?" I asked, realizing the absurdity of the question only too late. She simply shook her head, letting me take the tray away to put it in the sink next to the dish I used instead of a tray. My kitchen wasn't very well furnished. I blamed the fact that I was a male who lived alone and that I never thought I'd have guests over, let alone gorgeous women. I washed the dishes, deep in thought, feeling the swarm within me was finally done with Nadia's power and doing my best to ignore it.

I came back with fruit, and Nadia thanked me flatly, and I took it as a cue to give her some space. I was forced to return, though.

"I don't have enough to make lunch for both of us," I said. She looked at me.

"I'm going to make a grocery store run. Please don't leave while I'm gone." She shrugged. I picked up the house key from the floor where we had left it last night, and pulled the front door behind me without locking it. I didn't even put on music as I drove into town and bought meat and veggies and tried to come up with recipes, somehow forgetting that I could ask the AI in my phone for help on that. What was I thinking, leaving her alone in my house?

I took the key, so she couldn't go around snooping in the cellar, but still… And yet, when I returned, she was still there. Still on the sofa, although I noticed that she had fed the fire some more sticks and logs. I made a run to the shed, thankful that the rain had stopped, and when I got back I saw that the cat had returned to the sofa, to sleep a safe distance away from my strange guest but no longer avoiding her. I sat, petting him.

Nadia avoided my gaze, looking at the bags of food still sitting unopened on the kitchen table, eyes darting back to me before she caught herself and went back to staring literally anywhere else.

"So," I began. The words felt heavy, with none of the rightful anger that I felt I belonged to me by virtue of being the one whose house Nadia had broken into, while she was just the interloper.

"I think you owe me an explanation." That made her look at me. So vulnerable, and I could get lost in her eyes, which were somehow the same eyes as her elf self, despite all the differences. Gosh, she was stunning.

"I was… sent here," she said. I waited, asking for more information that did not come.

"By who?" I asked. But she looked away, her body language shifting to guarded closedness before it shifted again into defiance, as if telling me that I too owed her an explanation. And I did, of course I did. The "how" from last night. How had I taken away her power? I didn't press. I wasn't going to tell her, and she wasn't going to tell me. But she still owed me answers.

"Your power," I began again, my voice so soft I surprised myself. She perked up, eyes searching for something in my own gaze, answers I almost wanted to give her but didn't.

"That violet blaze I saw. You did something to me, didn't you?"

"It was an accident!" she said quickly.

"My ability is—was—like an aura…" She paused, looking at the cat I was idly petting, then at me.

"I couldn't control it. You have to believe me, I never wanted to hurt anyone! I never wanted to hurt you, Adrian." My stomach did a backflip when she called me by my name like that, with so much hurt and grief in her eyes. Obviously, I had told her my name when she told me hers, as was an attempt to get closer. But this? There was a deep complexity to her I was beginning to slowly glimpse, one jagged edge of hurt at a time.

"You scared me," she continued.

"When you caught me, I mean. In my panic, my ability flared. It didn't target you specifically. You were just in its range, and it just did what it always used to do." More pain.

"So it's just an aura that hurts everyone?" I asked. If she noticed I was talking about her superpower in the present tense, she didn't show it. Somehow, I suspected she did, though.

"It was, yes," she said.

"Every living thing around me just… bled its life away. No off-switch, no peace." What she didn't say, was how the aura had hurt her, but I could see it. How old was she, I wondered? She couldn't be much older than me, which meant that she might have awakened years ago. And thus, had spent years alone, surrounded by nothing but death.

"That's why I felt queasy last night. The wilted patches in the garden, were they you?" And—but I did not say—that's why my cat just straight-up ran away from her as soon as he felt the touch of her power.

"Yes."

"And in the long run?" I asked. I knew. My nanites had finished, so I knew. Even without analyzing the power, the information was impossible to ignore, but I wanted to hear it.

"Death," she said. I noticed a tear she didn't wipe away, as if not wanting to acknowledge it.

"H-how do you feel now, Adrian? It shouldn't have had enough time to affect you but…"

"I feel fine," I told her, making a show of checking myself.

"I feel perfectly fine, Nadia. And, see, I'm not running away from you." I didn't know what I was saying, I felt like I was rambling like an imbecile, but her features softened into a hint of a smile, just a fleeting thing, and it was like it was summer again.

"I am glad," she said softly before blushing.

"That you are fine, that is. I'm happy I didn't hurt you. I'm happy I can't hurt you anymore." Then, as an afterthought: "Or anyone else." Damn. I looked at her, seeing her in a whole new light. Or, perhaps, my conscious mind finally made the connection and I realized why I had felt so protective of her, and why I never treated her like the intruder she was. She had been alone ever since awakening. Not by choice, but simply because anyone who got close to her got sick and died. I scooted closer.

Just an inch, nothing more, but her eyes widened a bit and she tried to retreat as if fearing the proximity. A habit ingrained into her by trauma and loss, no doubt.

"You said it, you can't hurt me now." To make a show of it, I grabbed her hand and smiled. When I realized what I had done, and the other meaning behind the gesture, I felt like my brain was sizzling inside my skull. And she was looking straight at me, with wide eyes and blushing cheeks. I wondered how I looked, if she was this flustered. I tried to let go on reflex, but she gripped me hard, frightened I might let go and disappear in a puff of smoke, and that all this would turn out to just be a dream.

I saw her steal a glance behind us at the mirror, as if to check how she looked, but it was facing the wrong way. Her other hand went up, seeking her ear, touching it. Complex emotions warred on her face, so I once again did something without thinking and grabbed her errant hand with my free one and brought her attention back to me.

"Nadia," I told her, and I could swear she flinched a little when she heard my tone. Soft, but what I was about to say loaded it with a bit more hardness than I intended.

"Am I in danger? You said you were sent here, right? Do they know you failed, and will they send more people in?" She did not immediately speak, and her hands tried to retreat away from me. I held them where they were, but did not apply too much force. If she wanted out, she could have her out. The happiness I felt when she relented, and instead squeezed me harder, was indescribable.