“It’s been so long since I went back home that I don’t want to return,” Kai confessed to Lila, looking down into his empty mug.
“Then don’t return. Go straight to the police. I can’t stick around here forever trying to protect you. It’s not realistic and it’s not practical,” Lila answered him from where she was stood at the counter.
She was cleaning the fancy mugs on the shelf, wiping them down with a white cloth, ridding them of dust and any other bits of little debris that caught her eye.
“I still don’t want to, though. Just look at me, there’s no way that they’ll take me seriously,” Kai gestured to himself with his hands.
“It’s still better to have at least tried and gone to them. There will be record that this has happened and if, one day, the worst happens, then they can be prosecuted and I won&
"I'm Green_Six. I did a Masters in Astrophysics. Also born in an outpost," another man then called out, introducing himself.He punctuated his two short sentences with a tired sigh, before returning back to the state he was in prior.Not once did he open his eyes throughout the statement he gave, looking the most exhausted and weary out of all of them, and Gretel could not blame him in the slightest. He looked about as tired as she felt with heavy, black bags hanging the bottom of his eyes, the skin there visibly swollen and looking as if it had been barely hanging on to his skull for a long, long time.Gretel had to have sympathy for him, as she watched him lightly sway as if he was about to fall onto his face on the floor at any second now."My name is Yellow_Two. I studied medicine," another lady introduced herself as.She had the most fake and plastic smile plastered over her
“Do you think that it’s a bit too late?” Kai questioned, staring up at the bright, glowing blue geometric shape nailed above the door of the painted white and blue police station.“No. I swear, they’re meant to ‘protect’ people. They’re open 24/7 for a reason. They’re useless if you can’t report a crime when its happening because they’re closed,” Lila ended up hissing out, keeping a firm grip on him as he swayed slightly in the faint, night breeze.“I hear that there, ‘protect’ them. Heh,” Kai noted, looking increasingly more and more unstable.“Yeah… yeah. They’re fucking useless to us. Time to prove that their worth something… or anything whatsoever,” Lila indicted.“You’re not exactly helping me here, bitching about them,” Kai suddenly and forcefully snapped.Lila couldn’t help but sag in relief
"Belinda, computing," the final woman at the end of the line introduced herself as, her voice small and taciturn, as she kept her arms crossed over her body, as if giving herself a hug, shivering and shaking as she stood there curled inwards with her head bowed down and face hidden in the shadows of her hair.Gretel immediately wanted to take her into her arms and give her a hug, reassure her that everything was going to be alright, and reminded her distinctly of the children of the soldiers who were forced to attend the funerals of their deceased parents.They had often just wanted to curl up somewhere quiet with their loved ones and bawl out all their emotions, but were forced to keep their faces black to not disrupt any of the state ceremonial proceedings, and if they wanted to cry, if their faces scrunched up bright red, then they would be paraded around as symbols to show off exactly what the Sýnnefan Empire had done and why it n
The easiest way to get to the box was to line up once, and Gretel found herself doing that exact thing again, quickly managing to get to the front of the queue and picking up a sheet of paper.It was preserved inside two other clear sheets, and after a moment, Gretel realised that she had been holding plastic within her hands.She ran her fingers down the smooth sheen of it, noting how the surface was slightly cloudy in colour - a clear sign of the plastic having been taken from an already used item and then being recycled and being made to be as clearly as possible - and how it seemed to quickly warm up underneath her fingers, not at all inviting the same screeching sound as glass did underneath her nails.The first thing she noticed on it was the symbol Theta, and wondered if she had maybe picked up something that she would need to put back to try to get something else that she could actually solve, but as she took a c
When she had finally finished tracing over the top of the diagrams and more lightly marking out the mottled and burnt areas of the sheet to make clear which areas were the result of her own extrapolation, a hand suddenly lightly poked her shoulder, causing her freeze.Somewhere within Gretel, the instinct to turn around with her fists raised to retaliate against the shock to her system rose up out of a pit, but at the same time, the image of the spy, begging for his life, flashed through her mind, the scene playing out in front of her, forcing her body to stop to a juddering halt in fear of retaliation.So she did nothing."Sorry for surprising you," a voice called out, apologetic in tone and whispering to be heard over the deafening and ringing silence of the room.She recognised it immediately and turned around to face Green_One, who was leaning over with a slightly sheepish and worried look.
"I had to go to one of the city ones for that job, and they did pay for everything, but I had siblings to look after and work to provide for, so I couldn't move to one of the Border Schools to go and study. Where did you go?" Green_One explained to her, tapping against his arms lightly with his fingers, just as he had done to Gretel to try and get her attention.It looked as if he was fighting within himself to keep himself in the world of the outside."I went to R2," Gretel succinctly replied, knowing that the name of her educational institution was infamous enough to provide all the adequate information and context needed.It took anyone and everyone with almost legendarily low prices for their places, with the drawback being the general environment and the absolute terror that was instilled in everyone who attended.Green_One gave a visible flinch when he heard the words coming out of her mouth, a
Lila clenched her fists anxiously in her lap, outside sitting in the waiting room next to a small, painted radiator and a water fountain.There was a train station only two streets away where she knew was a coffee where she could buy hot chocolate for herself to warm up the freezing blizzard that was raging inside of her.Her hands were shaking, and she forced her fingers to relax, laying her hands over her knees. Taking several deep breaths, Lila made sure to focus on the mechanical motions of it, doing her best to clear her mind as best as she could.It only worked for a short time and, within less than half a minute, Lila jumped out of her rickety plastic chair and began pacing the room.Her right arm was beginning to ache again, so she brought up her left arm to begin massaging it from the shoulder downwards.To distract herself, she poured herself a cheap, Styrofoam cup of water, and willingly shivered and suffered as she downed the whole drin
“What happened to your shoes?” Kai asked her when they had turned off of the street.“I gave them to the woman in the waiting room. She looked like she had panicked and run there in a hurry, so I gave them to her,” Lila explained to him, her blood buzzing right under her skin.She leapt up onto one of his arms and whispered,” Did everything work out alright?”Kai took a larger than usual step, ducked down a little, and then grinned at her.“Yeah,” he breathed out,” Yeah.”“I’m staying with you for a bit, because it’s a safe place to stay, and because I’m going to be an adult in less than a day now, I don’t have to go into foster care or live like Tracy Beaker,” he went on elaborating.It was as if the clouds had parted, and Kai couldn’t stop talking.He confessed that the police officer had been perfectly polite and kind to him, notin
“Why’re you sleeping on the floor like that? Come on, get up. You’ll hurt your back doing that,” Doctor Marigold chided, dragging all her bits of heavy machinery around the office space to prepare for her demonstration.Behind her, Lila remained still.“I know that you’re not dead. Come, get up already,” she called out, stepping over a few sheets of paper that she had laid out to grab Lila by the shoulder and heave her up into sitting.The stubborn girl just flopped down again, not opening her eyes.“If you get the fuck up, we can move the flight a week forward so you can stop worrying about it,” Lucy Marigold shouted across the room.Like a rubber band, Lila snapped back up and finally opened her eyes.It had been harder to see the bags below them when they had been closed and Doctor Marigold wondered if she should buy the girl some sleep tablets.“I’m awake,” Li
Yolanda seemed to understand that she needed to back off and stop teasing Gretel, when the other woman's eyes suddenly misted over, and it was if she was no longer a part of this world.She kept the bubbling annoyance within her away from her face, putting on instead a mask of concern as she reached out and poked Gretel's arms, trying to maybe prod her out of her stupor and bring her back from the recesses of her mind.Yolanda had never actually seen somebody collapse inwards to a catatonic state over her own actions.It was interesting to see it all happen and fold out in front of her.She poked Gretel again, touching her in the face lightly to see if that would possibly work to pull the other woman out of her mind and back into the world where she was needed proper.It wouldn't reflect well on her if Gretel didn't wake up within the hour.It didn't feel as
When she awoke, she was sat ready to eat and was dressed just like her mother, in a pastel blouse and a lungi down to the floor.Lila looked down at herself and jumped when she heard rattling, noticing the ten, or so, bangles on each arm and the lines of mehndi that ran down all the way to the hems of her sleeves, resting halfway between her shoulders and elbows. A pin held her blouse shut at the top and a quick once over of her hair, with one of her hands, revealed that it had been styled in a simple bun and adorned with flowers.“This is weirdly romantic,” Lila commented, staring at the lit candles nestled in the variously sized candelabrums set around the circular room.There was no door, but a giant window which led to a balcony outside. There was no ceiling but the walls reaching upwards, all the way up, until they formed a dome in the same shade of dull brown that coated the floor and the giant, round table in the centre.The only dishes
“So, is she finally asleep?” Emmet asked the boy stood behind the counter. He was exceedingly slim for someone surrounded by sugar all day and Emmet could make out the outlines of his spindly elbows through his shirt. His face held a no nonsense, blunt, and almost bored expression. “Yeah, she is. She’s been knocked out on the sofa since I sent her back there,” Kai answered the long haired man in front of him, his hair pulled back by a ribbon matching his eyes before being pulled over his shoulder once more. He looked vain. “Oh good. Don’t tell her that I was involved,” the man asked, putting both his palms up to face Kai. “I’m telling her that you’re a fucking weirdo for that,” was the scowled answer. “No. Seriously, don’t tell her. She doesn’t like me and I don’t like her. She’s known my partner for longer that I’ve known him. She doesn’t trust me with him. Why’re you making that face?” Emmet tried to justify himself before giving up
“Are you sure that you’re getting enough sleep?” Kai asked Lila, watching her sway on her feet and clutching the front counter.“Yes,” she gasped, dropping her head into her hands, elbows on the table.“Go and lie down on the sofa. Go to sleep for a bit. I’ll wake you up when I have to leave for college,” Kai instructed her, tapping her on the shoulders and shepherding her towards the office.“… fine,” she conceded, letting Kai move her along towards the back.“You know that this just proves my point,” Kai pointed out, pushing her through the boundary of the door and closing it behind her.“Fine,” she whispered back to him, talking into the silence of the office.She let herself fall over the sofa, draping her upper body over the arm rest and letting her head be cushioned by the pillows. Shuffling a bit over to put her body entirely on the sofa, Lila f
“One! Two! Three! Four! Five!Now again!One! Two! Three! Four! Five!Now keep on going!”Lila landed each punch, timing her breaths to the count as she moved her fists, dodging underneath the swing that came towards her head, before blocking the second hit that came to her and moving along with the force of the fist that hit her arm.The swinging punching bag forced distance between Lila and Tweedle Dum, and she stepped back to where she was stood before, within the path of the moving bad, to put more distance between him and her.“One! Two! Three! Four! Five!One! Two! Three! Four! Five!”Lila punched the bag once more, landing all of her hits.“Okay, time for a break,” Tweedle Dum announced, grabbing the punching bag and pulling it back to him as Lila moved away from the centre of the room, sitting down on one of the rickety plastic chairs at the side of the room.She took of
“Bitch! Why’d you run off and abandon me like that!?” Lila shouted from behind the counter when Kai finally walked back into the store.She was waving her hands about and wore an apron covered in flour as the single customer in the store, an old man precariously balancing on his cane, slept whilst leaning on the radiator.“I thought that you wanted some bonding time with your family so I left you to do that it private!” Kai answered her, tiptoeing past their unconscious patron, in a combination of whispering and shouting.“They’re hardly my family and you left us in the middle of a public café!” Lila cried, not modulating her voice at all.In the background, the old man began to snore.“But you still talk to them a lot like you do to me, so I let you, and besides, I got about fifty more pages of Good Omens done in Waterstones,” Kai appealed, finally at the counter and opening up the
Gretel and Silver had their fun as he continued to teach her how the interface worked and how he had managed to figure out that the system was an older model from the lack of integration between the screen and the touch pad, and explaining how easily it would potentially be to do so once the technology, as displayed in this device, had been demonstrated and established to work in a functional product."We were working on something like this as well, back in the workshops back home for the company that I was in the research and development department for. We were trying to get our motion sensors to be as small as possible for more commercial and personal use of technology that we could sell to the public and those who couldn't afford the contact computers.We had no idea on how their tech worked, because of trade and company secrets and all, but we managed to piece together a few things by looking at the patents and when we bought a few and m
“Alright, the shop’s free. Why are you actually here?” Lila questioned, crossing her arms and staring down at the tablecloth of Jasper and Emmet’s table.“I’ve got lesson now. I’ll be back in a few hours,” the teenage boy behind Lila announced, picking up a bag that had been hidden behind the counter the entire time and rushing outside.Lila continued to stand there, waiting for a reply.Jasper couldn’t help but notice that she wasn’t meeting either his or Emmet’s eyes.“Are you planning to leave us?” he asked her back.Lila’s fingers dug into the creases of her shirt,” I’m going to be leaving for a trip soon, and I’ll be back as soon as I can. Kai’ll be running the shop and will be looking after things, broadly. He lives here now and I scheduled my leave for when his school term ends so he can take care of things.”“On thi