Hiding in Plain Sight

[Thalia]

Mira was slow to respond to the barrage of questions, adrift in the most surreal cognitive dissonance. Perhaps Arikan considered her simple. It wouldn’t be the first time. She glanced down at her hand, wiggled her fingers slowly, like she had never truly considered the question. But that wasn’t true; she had been White once, with a White’s sharp and enquiring mind.

By then Arikan’s interrogation had turned its razor focus. Valtin’s nerves should have driven the fear deeper, for Mira had never seen him subservient like that, and yet it burst stars behind her eyes. She did not like it at all. Her chest hitched like someone squeezed her in a fist. If she had always imagined Valtin would one day leave, she had never considered that it would not be to a received welcome and due reward for the staunch loyalty of a decade.

“Why are you angry?” she asked Arikan, surprised. The question blurted genuine, even as something inside shrivelled with foolishness. At which point she blinked down in confusion at the arm Valtin had stuck out, and which she had bumped into when she stepped forward. “We have been here,” she said, like it explained everything. Which to her, it did.

She swallowed in fear after, though. The slide of Arikan’s gaze felt like the dip of a firebrand against skin, hot enough to recoil from. Answers were not something she had in swift supply, and certainly not when he was looking at her like that. Though it was difficult to look away too, like somewhere in all that black space behind his eyes was the spark of a loose connection. Why him? Why all these years?

“I don’t see them,” she said carefully, to his earlier demand for answers. “I only wake up and draw. Sometimes I know they are things that will happen, but only sometimes is it that way. When the images stop, I know they must be in the past. Other than that, they seem to be in no order.”