08-16-2019, 07:35 PM
“A plan. For what to do.”
He lobbed the words at their source’s turned back in a tone halfway between resignation and disappointment, as if hearing them in someone else’s voice might make him realize how meaningless they were, how unhelpful. Maybe unhelpful was the whole point, the construction of an unscalable wall of unhelpful as a passive-aggressive effort to get Near to lay off. But why bother with the extra effort of passive when a glimpse of aggressive would have done the job and better? Near was pretty sure the kid could turn him inside out if he felt like it; he had to realize he’d cease and desist if asked. But no, he just kept offering up answer after answer that added up to nothing, got neither of them anywhere. Running in place.
An exit could be the closest thing he ever got to a definitive, Near realized, and resolved not to follow as Jude wandered off into the hall, where, if the powers that be had any shred of altruism in their hearts, he would dissolve into the paneling, an hallucination after all, induced by a gas leak or mushrooms Near had forgotten he’d taken earlier in the evening.
He was trying to settle on how long to wait, how much of a head start the kid deserved, when he wandered back in, still fiddling with the cutting board, still talking, and if he was tired of being asked what, why, he should have offered a smooth surface of silence and not these little hooks of ambiguity that caught and tugged and begged to be clarified.
“Maybe.” Uncertain agreement. Maybe Courtland had left a plan, a weapons stash, the Arc of The Covenant, who knew. The heir hadn’t finished digging through everything yet. “I wouldn’t --” from his pocket pealed a string of jingly noises that he had to pause and to recognize as the notification tone of his phone, which hadn’t had reception the last seventy-four times he’d looked at it. The thought the sound had cut into lay severed on the kitchen floor somewhere while he dug it out and squinted at the screen, which displayed the fractured evidence of a day’s worth of missed messages.
Another jingle as the triangle in the corner went hollow again. “Goddamn it, Isa ...” He glanced back up to Jude with all of his its and what they told hims. “Do you have reception out here?”
He lobbed the words at their source’s turned back in a tone halfway between resignation and disappointment, as if hearing them in someone else’s voice might make him realize how meaningless they were, how unhelpful. Maybe unhelpful was the whole point, the construction of an unscalable wall of unhelpful as a passive-aggressive effort to get Near to lay off. But why bother with the extra effort of passive when a glimpse of aggressive would have done the job and better? Near was pretty sure the kid could turn him inside out if he felt like it; he had to realize he’d cease and desist if asked. But no, he just kept offering up answer after answer that added up to nothing, got neither of them anywhere. Running in place.
An exit could be the closest thing he ever got to a definitive, Near realized, and resolved not to follow as Jude wandered off into the hall, where, if the powers that be had any shred of altruism in their hearts, he would dissolve into the paneling, an hallucination after all, induced by a gas leak or mushrooms Near had forgotten he’d taken earlier in the evening.
He was trying to settle on how long to wait, how much of a head start the kid deserved, when he wandered back in, still fiddling with the cutting board, still talking, and if he was tired of being asked what, why, he should have offered a smooth surface of silence and not these little hooks of ambiguity that caught and tugged and begged to be clarified.
“Maybe.” Uncertain agreement. Maybe Courtland had left a plan, a weapons stash, the Arc of The Covenant, who knew. The heir hadn’t finished digging through everything yet. “I wouldn’t --” from his pocket pealed a string of jingly noises that he had to pause and to recognize as the notification tone of his phone, which hadn’t had reception the last seventy-four times he’d looked at it. The thought the sound had cut into lay severed on the kitchen floor somewhere while he dug it out and squinted at the screen, which displayed the fractured evidence of a day’s worth of missed messages.
Another jingle as the triangle in the corner went hollow again. “Goddamn it, Isa ...” He glanced back up to Jude with all of his its and what they told hims. “Do you have reception out here?”