Poseidon's fury

[Elias Donovan]

Elias shrugged. “Could be real or it could be a bunch of bullshit. It doesn’t matter. We all end up the same place,” he grumbled, eyes on the sidewalk as they moved. He was tired of being fucking depressed. “Just like the leviathan that Alvis is supposedly researching. That fucker probably ran off with Damien’s money and is laughing at all of us somewhere.”

He shook his head. Asha would get upset again if he kept down this path. She was trying to help, and while he had zero clue why she even cared, he preferred she not abandon him like everyone else.

Shit but what a depressed fucker he was.

Maybe he should try drugs? They seemed popular among his group. Despite his stylistic choices and that everyone assumed otherwise, he’d never ventured into that sort of thing. Tony would no doubt find the hook up, but hell, the CCD had machines on every other corner for consumption like candy bars back home.

“I don’t want to go there, either.”

“I’m sorry, Asha,” he frowned, looking around. “The walk was a good idea.”

He was toying with asking her about the drugs idea when a buzz vibrated in his pocket. He pulled the wallet, blinking that the app was issuing a new alert.

For a brief moment, his heart flickered with beats of hope. His jaw dropped and he showed it to Asha. “Look! The signature is back, and it’s not in the Moscow river at all. No wonder we’ve found nothing all this time.”

He grit his teeth into an awkward smile like his mouth wasn’t used to the shape, and he almost hugged her.

[Ashavari]

“Oh, El. So we’re all going to die. That just means it’s what we do before then that counts. It’s the only thing that counts.” Asha slipped her arm through his, despite the drag of his mood flaring all the deeper for the contact. She’d thought if there really was some way to divine the future, perhaps it might be a tool they could use. But even if Rowan’s insights had had a taste of divination to them (and she didn’t know if that was the case or not) the chances of finding another real source was unlikely. Probably Asha’s senses could go some way towards shifting out the worst liars, but she wasn’t infallible. Some people didn’t feel guilt or anything else at all when they lied.

Asha stifled a sigh, knowing it was a bleed through from his restlessness and not something of her own. She desperately wanted to suggest something that would cheer him up, and she didn’t care what, but she also didn’t know how to pierce through the gloom. At least not with anything other than the answer to his riddle, and if she’d had that she would have offered it up already. So she just walked alongside instead.

She felt his mood change before he spoke, rising like bubbles of renewed breath from a drowning man. It was such an unusual indulgence from him, and so sudden besides, that it filled her up almost giddily as she peered at the wallet screen. “Siberia?” His attempted smile prompted a more natural one of her own. “Then we’re going to Siberia?”