Jae
It was almost a decade ago now, at some point in our old house in Medina, that I had my last normal conversation with my brother. I don’t remember exactly what it was about or what the context was, but I do remember him telling me something about how I was the kind of person who was better at matching other people’s energy than creating it myself. I guess he meant that I would always feel or act the same way as the people around me, but I didn’t really have my own personality to bring to the table; I can only feed off other people. I could be excited or happy when somebody around me was excited or happy, but if I’m with anybody who’s like me and quietly keeps to themselves, I would too.
Brice must have seen it too after I was taken in. He would say that my “ability” to quickly adjust myself to different people and situations was valuable to the militia. Still, I couldn’t see it as anything other than a gamble. Deescalation is a far more important skill to have in a job like mine, and putting me in heated or tense situations where I’m unable to do that could make everything go sideways fast. I guess that today proved me right.
I wouldn’t tell anybody that, though. I’ve been a part of the militia for far less time than most other people yet I’m one of its highest-ranking members. And while I know that everyone has a degree of respect for me and for Brice’s decision-making, I can still sense some bitterness in how quickly I rose past them, and they won’t hesitate to jump on me if given the slightest sense that I’m coming undone. Keeping myself contained will become far more difficult from now on, but as long as I can keep thoughts of the man that I shot out of my head, I can keep the militia on stable ground throughout the mess with Eclipse.
It was almost 10:30. I was sitting in the breakroom with the “squad,” also known as Karan, Eliza, Kacey, and Lennox. Everyone else had already left for bed. Eliza was trying to pull off the door of the empty vending machine to get their quarters back, Karan and Kacey were looking over the stack of maps we took from the apartment hoping to find something we missed that left an opening for the fire to start, Lennox was reading a book at a table in the corner since he couldn’t sleep, and I was standing at the counter waiting for a sandwich I left in the fridge to dethaw. Admittedly, standing idly in a silent room staring into oblivion isn’t the best thing I could be doing to keep my mind occupied.
“This doesn’t make any damn sense!” Kacey yelled, throwing down the last map. “The second elevator doesn’t go below the eighth floor, and the fire had to have started after we cleared the building and blocked the main elevator. Nobody could have gone down there.”
“But,” Karan added, “there was also the elevator entrance in the garage. It leads directly to the third floor that nobody was guarding, so that’s a clear path in and out of the building with nobody to see or stop them.”
“But if that’s what happened… this had to be planned in advance. They wouldn’t run in blind just hoping that they were in our blind spots.”
Eliza backed away from the vending machine. “Unless they did. This could have been a random employee who was panicking and ran inside, accidentally starting the fire.”
“No,” I said, dramatically spinning away from my sandwich to face them. “No, no. This was no accident. There’s only one person who could have been watching everything we were doing and had access to the elevator.”
Karan and Lennox were the only people here who’d know what I was talking about, but Lennox wasn’t listening, so Karan naturally caught on first.
“That fucking security guy, of course! That explains why the elevator was already on our floor when Brice went to use it. Fuck me, man.”
“Security guy?” asked Eliza.
“He was just some jackass watching the security cameras that we found below the top floor. He gave us that other radio we used.”
“Right below the top floor.” Eliza paused. “Could he have planted that bomb as well?”
“Yeah, he could have,” I recalled. “There was timed C-4 in a weapons room on the same floor, and two blocks were missing.”
The creeping anger, mainly among those of us from Team 11, barely had time to settle before it dissipated into terror at the sound of the door bursting open, violently disrupting the quiet peace that had existed in the room. Kacey yelled out, “FUCK!” as Finn charged into the room, loosely being followed by Graham, who looked as if he was chasing him.
“The Woodbury? 8:00 tomorrow? Is that what the fucking plan is?” Finn shouted.
“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted back.
“The Woodbury! 8:00! Is that what the plan is!”
“What are you talking about?”
Finn walked into the middle of the room and scanned around it. “Where’s Aiden?”
“Not here,” Graham sighed. “Thank God.”
“What do you want Aiden for?” Karan implored.
“We don’t. We don’t want Aiden at all. Just… Did he tell you guys anything?”
“Get to the fucking point, Graham,” Lennox scolded, closing his book.
“Aiden was on Brice’s walkie-talkie with Orion, the guy who took us up the elevator at Eclipse. He wants Aiden and Finn to meet him at The Woodbury tomorrow to explain some kind of… I don’t know, ‘ceasefire’ is probably the wrong word… preemptive armistice, maybe?”
“Are you serious? Why didn’t he say anything?”
“No fucking idea! He explicitly told me not to tell anyone, ‘especially not Brice.’ I tried to press him on it, but he just bolted the fuck off.”
Lennox jumped from his chair. “Dammit. I’ll tell Brice, we need to plan ahead on this.”
“Wait!” Eliza yelled, freezing everyone in place. “Do you guys not see what he was referring to?”
“What? Does Aiden have some grudge against Brice now?”
“Orion? Remember?”
Whatever Eliza was referring to, it went completely over my head. But come a few seconds later, the others started to catch on, and their faces sunk.
“No fucking shit,” Karan muttered with a hint of dread in his voice.
Graham was glancing around the room, just as confused as I was. “Uh… am I missing something here?”
“Tomorrow at 8:00, you said?”
“Yes? I’m sorry, but what the fuck are you people referring to here?”
“AM or PM?”
“AM, now can you answer my goddamn question, please?”
Within moments, Lennox, Karan, Kacey, and Eliza were all standing and huddled together as Graham, Finn, and I stared at them.
“We can’t have Aiden at that meeting, so one of us is going to have to accompany Finn instead.”
“What are we going to tell Brice, though?”
“Excuse me! We’re still over here!”
“We tell him nothing. We can leave without permission, he’s not our dad.”
“You think he’s going to let anyone just leave the base right now?”
“Hello? Why are we not telling Brice about this?”
“Nobody is going to be guarding the elevators to make sure no one leaves. We’ll be fine.”
“But they will be checking on Finn and the others.”
“Then we tell them he’s sleeping in. It’s going to be 8:00 in the morning, they’ll understand.”
“And what if somebody sees him leaving?”
“We’ll leave earlier, then. Besides, it’s been a long-ass day, and not many people are going to be waking up before 8:00.”
“How much earlier?”
“8:15. The Woodbury is just over 10 minutes drive away and we’ll need time to prepare.”
“For fuck’s sake, guys, don’t you think that this is moving a little quick?”
The huddle dissolved. Eliza turned around to the rest of us and said, “It’s getting late. You guys should go to bed. Finn, we will wake you up before we leave, so get as much sleep as you can before then. Jae, you stay here.”
All three of us stared blankly at them. Graham left first, slowly backing out of the room while glaring. Finn, who had been standing silently in the middle of the room the whole time, followed him shortly after, not making a sound.
“Is one of you going to explain to me what the story is here?” I said.
The four of them briefly exchanged looks. “No.”
“Are you serious? I more than deserve to know why this secret is so important that not even Brice can be told about it. Plus, I outrank all of you.”
“You’ve also been here for only six years. This is personal, and you don’t need the details of it.”
“Why? Have I not earned a place in your private boy’s club yet?”
“Jae, the fact that you even know there is a secret puts you above everybody else. We’ll talk about this later, but for now, you’re going to help us keep all of this a secret until we consider Orion’s peace deal.”
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I sighed and slumped back against the counter. “Right. Of course.”
That whole scene had played far too fast to understand any of it. It’s things like this that have endlessly frustrated me since I’ve been around, most of all when it comes to the squad. Everybody else has a long history with the militia and each other and they never shut up about it, while I’ve always been one of the few people who doesn’t know enough to join in, sapping me of any sense of community. I like to think I’ve made a place for of my own in the squad, yet even after spending six years of my life with them, I’m still the first to be left on the shelf during their interpersonal matters. Whether it’s a product of sheer ignorance or contempt, it’s enough to make me wonder what I’m worth to them if this is all I get at a time when it matters. I’ve dedicated a quarter of my life to them, but in the end I’m still just an outsider to a community that’s long already built. And this is what I get for it.
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“Alright, uh… any drinks for you guys to start off with?” the waiter said as soon as he approached our table. He looked and sounded like a generic college freshman, with the carefree attitude, curly hair, and monotone voice to match.
He looked at Finn to answer first. “Uh… I guess I could go with a lemonade right now.”
And then me. “Just a water, please.”
“Stickin’ with the basics. Okay.” He jotted it in his notepad for little over a second. “Alright. Be back in just a minute, then I’ll get your regular orders. My name is Marco, by the way.” He strolled down the aisle, almost bouncing with each step.
I set down my menu. “Jesus, who hired that guy?” I muttered to Finn, who was sitting to my left.
He looked over at me, perplexed. “What does that mean?”
“I’m just saying, you would expect waiters at a restaurant like this to be a little more… y’know, professional.”
“I didn’t see any problem. I mean, sure, he’s pretty distinct from your average restaurant waiter, but it’s not a bad thing. Every restaurant waiter acts the same.”
“They act the same way because that’s what their job is. Customers know what to expect from waiters, and acting in that kind of off-putting way in a groggy morning like this doesn’t do you or the restaurant any good.”
“The job of waiters is to move things along and not be a dick. I think he did well on both of those things.”
“It’s about making a good impression, not just not being a dick.”
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t really give a shit about impressions. They’ve been worth absolutely nothing in my experience.”
I turned my body to face Finn. “How so?”
“First impressions about anybody are always misleading. I mean, Percy and Skyler nearly ran me over the first time we met back in college, and now I’ve been fucking living with them for the past five years. My uncle, on the other hand? He greeted me as a 15-year-old with open arms, a handshake, an obscure story about his brother, and all the reassurance in the world that he would be a better parent than him. And spoiler alert: he wasn’t. It doesn’t matter what your initial thoughts are about a person, because no matter what, they are always going to be wrong.”
“But if you aren’t willing to put at least some effort into making sure someone you meet doesn’t think you’re some careless asshole, what does that say about you?”
“It says that you have nothing to prove. The most honest people in this world are the ones who don’t go out of their way to impress you. I’ve always seen good first impressions as a major red flag. Part of that is just my general skepticism, but it’s also part experience.”
“Huh. I can tell that you’ve thought about this before. But we are still talking about that restaurant waiter, right?”
Finn snorted. “Maybe. There’s always the chance we’ll randomly bump into him on the street again. Maybe he’ll rescue us from a burning building one day.”
“I wouldn’t count on it. He looks like he spent even less time in college than you.”
“Ouch. At least I graduated.”
"Yeah, with an Associate's. That’s like the chump change of college degrees.”
I could tell from the beginning why I was the one they chose to go with Finn to The Woodbury: I can’t tell him anything about the ‘big secret,’ and I’m already friends with him. This way, they have an excuse to get rid of me so I don’t (rightfully) hound them with questions about Aiden, and neither will Finn. And now both of us are wrapped up in another secret where it’s of paramount importance that nobody else knows about it. It’s enough to make me wonder whether or not I would have known about this at all if I wasn’t in the breakroom last night.
If I wasn’t there, then I probably would have gotten sleep. Instead, I sat in the breakroom for nearly an hour with the others figuring out excuses for leaving the base with Finn. But the excuses weren’t a one-size-fits-all ordeal because we also had to account for each individual person and how they might respond. The reason we would give to Kane was different than the reason we would give to Nadia. And even though the reason was generally some variation of taking him to the training yard two miles outside the city that we haven’t used in almost three years, it had to be worded differently depending on the person. Roman already knew about the elevator fight, so he wouldn’t buy me just saying that Finn was scared of Eclipse and needed self-defense training, but Robyn, who didn’t know about it, would believe it.
Every single possibility was discussed for nearly three hours and then rehearsed for another hour, all for the grand reward of keeping Brice in the dark on a meeting that he really should have known about from the beginning. And yet, even after all of those hours of planning, memorizing what to tell other people, and getting absolutely no sleep because of it, from the moment I left the A-wing with Finn at 8:15 to the moment we drove away, not a single person showed up to stop us. That was five hours of my life wasted that I will never get back.
But that reminds me: Finn was already at the door and ready to leave the second I showed up this morning. I couldn’t help but wonder if he managed to get any more rest than I did.
“So… are you still holding up alright after that whole bloody fiasco back in Eclipse? You don’t look like you slept much last night.”
“Eh. It’s a whole different ball game when it’s in the moment than it is after the fact. I’ve tried to keep my mind off of it all, but… I don’t think my body is keeping up. I’m still pretty pissed at Adrian, though. I’m not getting off of his ass until he has an answer for bringing us to Eclipse in the first place.”
“Do you really think he would have set you up?”
“I don’t think we weren’t set up. But the fact that Adrian still won’t acknowledge the connection between Solaris and Eclipse even after it’s cost us our home, our freedom, and the lives of five fucking people is what irks me.”
“But, like, are you handling the situation of being kidnapped and nearly murdered well?”
“I… am not sure. I mean, I’m sure the others have already gone over the whole spiel about how ‘nobody has ever tried to kill us before,’ and all that garbage, but I don’t really care about that. Because while we’ve experienced our share of shitshows before, nobody was ever actually killed as a result of them. Those four people in the explosion at least got a quick death, but that guy who got shot… He wasn’t that lucky. And all of that blood is on my hands.”
He must have sensed that his rumination didn’t do any favors for my mood regarding shooting that man at all, and he quickly backtracked. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I know that there was nothing else you could have done in that situation. It was either him or Lennox that was going to die there, and you obviously couldn’t have just talked him out of it. It’s just… I don’t know. I guess I shouldn’t have been looking, that’s all.”
8:59. Orion should be showing any second now. The aisle traveling along all the tables was barely wide enough to fit two people, and that’s only if the barstools opposite the tables were pushed in, which they weren’t. Our booth was only the third away from the entrance, so nearly everybody who walked in would pass by our table. I had forgotten entirely what Orion looked like, so I braced for his sudden arrival with every person that walked through the front door.
“What was he like?” I asked, keeping my eye on the door.
“Who, Orion? Um… well, he was a dick first and foremost. The no-nonsense stickler type of guy, kind of like he should have been the one running the organization. He certainly takes his job more seriously than his boss.”
Before he could even finish the sentence, a figure appeared out of nowhere and slid into the opposite side of our booth, startling the both of us. Even after sitting in patrol mode for 10 minutes, Orion still managed to catch me off guard.
He stared directly at me, his gaze like a thousand needles stabbing into my chest. “You’re not Aiden.”
“And you’re not Steve Buscemi,” Finn sneered. “What else is new?”
“Her, apparently.” He continued deathly glaring at me, then took his phone out and set it on the table in front of us. There was some company document opened on it. “Alright, let’s get to business. This is a sales report on Solaris from the second half of October. $650,000 was donated to K-8 Math Tutors on Thursday the 20th, then $1.3 million disappeared from reserves the next day. Roughly $1,622,500 was lost in the following week. Now, if this were Summer 2020, that kind of money could be made back within a couple of weeks, but this isn’t the recession anymore, and fewer people need charity. The business model of Solaris was destined to be a temporary affair and had been losing the organization money for months, but nevertheless, it continued business into fall this year and kept dishing out hundreds of thousands of dollars to whoever asked, simply because they knew we would pay it for them. That left the door open for you people. So of the $3,572,500 that we lost in October, we only made $426,991 of it back. Combine that with rising inflation, and that leaves us in a bit of a predicament.”
“If your business model was shitty and you were losing money, then shouldn’t our grand robbery have been like a wake-up call for you?”
“It was. Solaris folded last week.”
“Then what the hell are you all so pissed about? Isn’t Eclipse a multibillion-dollar company?”
Orion put his phone back in his pocket. “Eclipse has over 3000 employees making six-digit salaries, and the building costs millions more to operate. Sure, we may have had a big billion-dollar startup in 2017, but you can’t just raise billions more every year from clueless investors and NFT sales. Eclipse may look big from the outside, but it is anything but a moneymaker.”
“But a charity is tax-exempt and relatively cheap to operate,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“Alright. So what are you proposing here?”
“Solaris was a done deal from the beginning. It was never going to work out for us long-term. We lost a lot of money trying to keep it afloat, but there is continued insistence behind the scenes that we could have eventually gotten a run for our money. So, to appease them and keep us both from getting wrapped up in a childish turf war, I’m offering reimbursement. Four million dollars, cash, to make up for the Solaris damage.”
Finn jumped. “Four million? Are you serious? How the hell do you expect us to get that?”
“$1.95 million that you stole, $1.6 million from the other businesses that were no doubt under your wing. The rest is for lost revenue to smooth things over. Pay for that however you choose. That is the final offer.”
Orion stood up, and Finn followed suit. “Wait a goddamn second, how is this supposed to be done? Do you expect us to just drop the money at your fucking doorstep?”
“East Cleveland. Brightwood and Forest Hill intersection. 4:00 PM. Tomorrow.”
Fuck. Neither of us expected the deadline to be that early, but neither of us was willing to complain about it.
“And if we don’t have the money tomorrow?” Finn asked.
“Then your chances of survival will be left to how generous Jax is feeling come Sunday. Today is Friday. You have 32 hours. So get to it.”
He stepped out of the booth, but before he could leave, I suddenly asked, “What did you want Aiden here for?”
He glared at me once again and quietly laughed to himself. “Wow.” He walked away and back out the front door.
Finn remained standing in place, silently staring at the door. “32 hours to get $4 million.” He fell back into his seat. “Dammit.”
“We have to tell the others about this.”
“Will they agree to that?”
“Probably not,” I sighed. I grabbed my phone and called Karan. “Guys? We have our peace offer.”
“Damn, that was fast. So, exactly how screwed are we?”
“They want four million to be delivered to East Cleveland at 4:00 PM tomorrow as so-called reimbursement for the Solaris robbery.”
“Wait, dollars? He wants four million dollars?”
“Four million whole. In cash.”
I could hear Karan’s phone slam onto a table. A few seconds later, he picked it back up. “We’ll figure something out. Just head back to the base for now.”
“Okay.” I hung up.
Marco the waiter suddenly appeared in front of the table holding our drinks, once again catching me off guard. “Hey, you guys know that dude who was just at your table? He a friend or somethin’?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, if you won’t be needing a third drink, I got the two of yours’ right here, and if you got your food orders ready, then we can knock that out of the way as well.”
I looked at Finn, who hesitantly muttered, “Yeah. Sure.”
“Sweet. So what can I start you guys off with?”
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