Miles away, lightning flashes silently as it streaks from thunderhead to thunderhead. She feels like she’s a thousand feet above the earth, higher than the archangels above. The bolts are pure white, their heat and energy tremendous in their capacity for destruction, and the clouds they originate from are darker than dark. They menace the Assyrian fields to the north as the storm rolls in from the Caucuses, threatening to dump its payload wherever it feels, taking entire cities as hostage. It reminds her of home, in a way.
Home, however, meant that the storms were welcome. Storms meant rain, which meant water for the crops of the academy’s farms and water for the wild grasses. Wild grasses meant wildlife, rabbits and hogs and pronghorns with their long, loping gaits, and game meant hunting, which meant target practice which meant a way away from Pastor Martin’s apocalyptic sermons. But in her new home, there were no wild grasses, at least nothing that could sustain a pronghorn or anything close. It was either deadland or desert, petroleum-ridden corpses that would return to petroleum, given enough time. The rain held no benefit, no escape. Just cold water being dumped on your head, pounding against your window, threatening to smash it open with its cumulative percussive force. And Pastor Martin’s sermons found a way to stick with you so she couldn’t even get away from him, more than an ocean and a sea away.
All of these thoughts raced through Jasmine’s head because it was four-forty-eight in the morning and she could not sleep. Both of her apartment’s bedrooms faced north and the curtains could only block a minimal percentage of the neon light from the new capital of the capitalist world. Either she had too many covers on and overheated or didn’t have enough and was freezing. Hanging one leg out and one leg under meant exposing that poor leg to the various ghouls, ghosts, and goblins that certainly haunted this land. She had no audiobooks and the television was too bright and she couldn’t figure out how to turn it down and there were no good channels on. The CBN had a channel here but even the 2:48am time block here meant it was the 6:48pm time block back home which meant slickly-produced shows about the U.S Navy S.E.A.Ls and Delta Force adventuring in strange foreign lands and various big-city police departments upholding the thin blue line against drug dealers, hoodlums, and human traffickers. It was too loud to fall asleep to.
At three in the morning she tried to exercise herself to exhaustion but, again, didn’t have any music to exercise too. Push-ups and sit-ups in the dark only serve to pull the worst thoughts buried deep below consciousness. Hers told her to run against that window to see if it holds and she only served to get her only pair of clothes vaguely smelly. She showered and washed and dried the tracksuit that Mr. Davidson gave her yesterday, and put it on and tried to fall back asleep.
That was at three in the morning. It was no longer three in the morning. It is now 4:49am, Nineveh Standard Time. She figures she should do it again.
She examines her radio-clock, trying to figure out what strange combination of buttons turned it on. On the left side was a switch that, when flipped, made the radio blare some sort of horrid pop music at her. On the right side were two dials, one atop the other, that controlled the tuning and volume, respectively.
A local station is kind enough to be playing some sort of alternative rock music that wasn’t entirely intolerable – just mostly. But it’s enough.
She drops to the ground and pounds out push-ups and sit-ups and dips in groups of 20, 20, and 30 and after each set she goes to the bathroom and drinks straight from the tap. Her apartment’s kitchen – her apartment has a kitchen! – has a dozen glasses that would be better suited for the purpose.
Then she goes back and does more and repeats the process, twice, thrice, four times, until her arms falter midway through a push-up and her abs cramp during a sit-up and her triceps fail during a dip and she thuds to the floor, panting.
Still need to do legs, she tells herself. Her tracksuit is sweat-drenched, again. The song on the radio now is worse, way worse. It’s an acoustic ditty about being in love with a beautiful woman. It sucks, it sounds like a worship where someone changed ‘God’ to ‘girl.’
Come on, get up. The song keeps playing. It’s sooooooooooooooo bad. The voice is soft and kind, possessing of some sort of Oklahoma accent that sounds familiar. Too familiar.
Promise me, Jasmine.
The voice comes from between her ears. She doesn’t hear it. Its not the same voice from the radio, the pitch of the singer is higher, whinier, but the accent is the same.
That you’ll stay just like you are until I see you again.
She hops to her feet and slams her hand on the snooze button atop the radio and she finds herself engulfed in silence again.
Across the river, she can still see some fires burning. The orange is dim, distant, and small, and barely visible through the neon of the skyscrapers surrounding the tower. She didn’t get the chance to do any research yesterday. The days before that she didn’t know where she was.
Rogue strands of her pure blonde hair fall in front of her eyes. She lays atop the sheets for a moment, breathing. She blows them out of the way, then she retrieves an elastic from the washroom and ties her hair back. It’s no scrunchie but it’s enough until she gets one.
The clock says 5:02am now. Last night, Dawn told her there was a gymnasium somewhere inside this building. Floor seventy…something. Nobody else who’s in their right mind would be awake right now, she figures. Best to check everything out when nobody can see her doing everything wrong. She swipes a plastic water bottle from her fridge and heads out. The hinges on her door are silent.
She’s met by the dim orange glow of the overhead lights. It gently washes over her, brightening by microlumens with every passing second she remains in the hallway. At the end of it is an elevator. She could take the stairs, should take the stairs, but she has no idea where she’s going. Perhaps the elevator will have a key of some kind.
It shows up within a second of her pressing the ‘call elevator’ button. Inside are mirrors on each of the four corners, a painting best described as ‘pretentiously abstract,’ and no floor key. Instead, it’s up to Jasmine to pick a number between 64 and 117 and hope everything goes well. Or she could press all of the buttons. It’s not like she has anything to do today. Her finger is drawn to button ’94.’
A digital bell rings, and the sliding doors start to close together.
“Hey!”
The voice came from outside. Through the quickly-closing gap between shining chrome doors Jasmine sees a figure sprinting towards her, pale and wrapped in a white robe, plastic flip-flops flapping and slapping the tile like a penguin’s feet.
Jasmine rapidly scans all the buttons – there’s so many buttons – and finds one with two arrows separated by a two line, each arrow facing away from each other.
←||→
She pressed it with enough force to jam the second knuckle of her index finger and the doors reverse their course. The robed figure slips between the doors and hits the other, opposite button
→||←
followed by the button for floor ‘73’. She’s breathing hard, panting like she just sprinted a marathon, hands on her knees and bent forwards at the hips. Sweat plasters bangs of night-black hair to her pale forehead. Running down a hallway in flip flops might be intensive, but that intensive?
“Are you all right?”
The elevator begins its descent as she asks the question. The woman forces herself to stand upright.
“Yeah. I’m fine.” The woman gets her breathing under control. Her eyes dart to the buttons. Is it just Jasmine or is the elevator really slow?
“What do you need at the greenhouse?”
Greenhouse?
“Uh,” Jasmine starts.
“Wait. You’re the new girl, right?”
“Uhh,” Jasmine continues. “Where’s the gym?”
The woman presses ’85.’
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Ma’am?” the woman asks. “Very formal.”
Jasmine doesn’t respond.
The elevator’s descent slows and the digital bell rings. The doors open to reveal an honest-to-God-greenhouse contained entirely within the floor, dozens of vegetables being grown in dozens of plots. Her academy’s farm was small-time compared to this.
Neither of the two step out before the doors close and the elevator continues its slow descent.
“Slow today,” the woman says. Jasmine looks at her to see her open her robe, flapping the collar down, trying to air herself out. Her figure was astounding, even though she looked like she had gotten an hour’s worth of sleep from twelve worth of trying. She’s wearing a two-piece swimsuit that exposes her toned abdomen, maybe white, or lemon yellow. Jasmine didn’t catch that – a sleepless night takes its toll on your observational faculties.
The woman sticks out her hand.
“Li Xiuying.” She pronounces it ‘Shiu-ying.’
“Um,” Jasmine stammers. She very gently shakes the woman’s hand. It’s cold and clammy and sweaty and Jasmine wipes her hand on her pantleg to get rid of the malaise.
“Jasmine Andersson,” she quietly introduces herself.
Then it goes quiet again. The elevator feels like it’s moving in slow motion. Jasmine isn’t sure whether elevator music would increase or decrease the sheer, compressed awkwardness within the steel confines.
“Um, ma’am?”
The woman turns her head. She’s very pretty even in her current state. Her dark hair tumbles down past her shoulders, practically to the middle of her back. Her face is ovular, jawline and chin and cheekbones and brow smooth, not too sharp; her nose is straight and her bridge smooth, not too sharp and not jutting out. Her lips are bottom-heavy, the lower one fuller than the upper one. Something about her feels, regal. Important. Perhaps only by proxy, but her poise is undeniable. She stands straight as an arrow like something is lodged parallel to her spine.
“Hmm?”
“Um…” This was a mistake.
“Yes, Jasmine?” Miss Li smiles at her. It’s forced and awkward, her downturned lips stretching thin as the corners unwillingly upturn. Not everyone has the ‘big smiler’ gene; some people are better as stoics.
But, it makes Jasmine feel better. This woman who’s way older and more experienced than her isn’t just blowing her off.
“Um, is, is everyone usually up this early?”
Miss Li’s eyes widen.
“Early?”
“Did, um, did I say something strange, ma’am?” Jasmine can feel her face redden.
“No, not at all.” The woman’s smile shortens. The tips are still upturned, ever so slightly. More entertained now. More confident. “You did say ‘early,’ right?”
“Yes, I-I did, was there something, um…”
“No. I just thought I slept in.”
A digital bell rings and the elevator slows. The double doors slide open and faint, muffled and echoed music starts to trickle in, but Jasmine can still feel it in her bones.
“This is your stop,” Miss Li says.
Jasmine steps out of the elevator and turns. The doors close as Miss Li gives that same smile as before.
“Good meeting you, Jazz,” she says before the doors close. Jasmine can’t get a response from her ears to her brain to her lips quick enough.
Jazz?
Jasmine shakes it off. The music is louder as she continues forwards, into a lobby that sits at a crossroads. To the left and right are rooms dedicated for either cardio or weight training. Behind her is the elevator and to the left and right of that are changing rooms and restrooms. To her fore is an empty reception desk and behind that is a pair of double doors, open, where the music is coming from. Jasmine approaches said double door slowly, carefully, like she’s walking through a minefield. The room dedicated to cardio has a number of boxing rings.
As the bass of the song shakes the dust from her bones, she begins to make out lyrics. The speaker wields a vicious British accent like a weapon, rapping about drugs and sex and murder and more importantly doing it with enough flair and confidence to make you think, ‘Yeah, that dude deserved to get stabbed!’ What exactly was she about to walk into?
This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
The door has been open for longer than she’s been on the floor, so she steps into the room and sees daylight.
It very quickly occurs to her that the noon skyline on three sides of the room is almost entirely fictitious. Instead of windows, the room is lined with enormous, LED-ridden screens. She can see the tops of the towers surrounding the Burj Wolfe, a reminder of the building’s true size. Eighty-five floors is unspeakably high and there’s far, far more above her head.
Maybe it’s a bit strange that she notices the fake-skyline first, before the actual people actually occupying the room. Underfoot is hardwood, like a basketball court, but the five inhabitants have two small soccer goals set up, blue plastic posts and crossbars with fabric nets hanging behind. Each are underneath the courts two basketball nets. And neither side has a goalie.
One side is of two, the other of three. One side has matching outfits and the other is only united in their utter lack of colour coordination. One side is full of strangers. The other has Dawn.
Her and her teammate are both in powder blue Manchester City hoodies and black shorts which what appear to be compression tights underneath and bright, vibrant sneakers – one wears white Air Force 1 hi-tops with red and gold highlights and the other equips themselves with pink and powder blue and white Converses.
Jasmine is struck by the similarity the pair have, at least aesthetically. Even if they weren’t wearing the exact same outfit, the two of them are both tall and dark-haired, with streaks of white running through them. It’s an interesting dye job. Dawn has her hoodie cropped like the one she wore yesterday and Jasmine wonders if that’s going to be a running fashion theme with her. Then again, what does Jasmine – straight out of what essentially was Baptist Janissary Camp – know about fashion?
The other three are far more uncoordinated. There’s an enormously tall man with dark, dark skin, shirtless and glistening with bright red shorts bearing the crest of a football club called Arsenal. There’s a scrawny blonde guy wearing a white collared shirt bearing the logo of Emirates Airlines – Real Madrid’s home jersey, but Jasmine doesn’t know that – and grey sweatpants. And there’s a short, well-constructed young woman in all-white, leggings and long-sleeve shirt, both with a white-on-white-on-white argyle pattern, blonde like you’ve never seen before.
Jasmine didn’t know the terminology for soccer. Just that they kicked around a ball and tried to score. But the way that the did it hypnotized her.
Dawn and her long-haired partner moved in sync, a soccer-playing wolfpack, passing and advancing and retreating wordlessly as if they were telepathic. The other three scrambled around like a swarm of hornets, constantly talking, to each other, to their opponents, to themselves.
A soccer ball with its hexagons the colour of the rainbow streaks high off of Dawn’s foot and slams right into the blonde man’s chest. It falls to the ground and he controls it and sends it back the other way, right onto the foot of the blonde woman. Neither Dawn or her partner were far back enough and the ball screams off of the blonde’s foot and into the upper right corner of the net, pulling the fabric taut.
Then she turns to Dawn and her partner with a lycanthrope smile. Speaks in a strange language that Jasmine can’t comprehend.
<
And after that she runs back to her team’s side of the court and jumps as high as she can and hi-fives the blonde man. Jasmine can’t tell if they’re related or just look similar. The tall, dark-skinned man looks at her, bemused. Dawn and her partner also look at her, more dumbfounded than anything else. A sort of ‘how did we let this happen?’ look.
Dawn’s mismatched eyes glance over at the interloper at the perimeter of the room, and she gives a gentle upwards nod. Jasmine freezes – people know she’s here, should she leave?
Yes, get out immediately.
But Dawn takes possession of the ball back, rolls the ball up onto the top of her foot, and with a flick of her ankle the ball goes skyward. She lets it bounce once and then sends a howitzer past the trio, so fast that Jasmine swore she heard the ball screaming in pain. It slams off of one of the posts loud enough to echo off the windows and wall and the ball comes to a rest at Jasmine’s feet.
Five pairs of eyes follow the ball, and then pivot towards her face and the reactions range from scowling annoyance to bemused curiosity to a big smile on Dawn’s face. The man on her team doesn’t react.
“Jazz!”
Again?
Jasmine stands still. Her mouth moves without her brain telling her to.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re up early!”
Was it early or late?
She figures since they all looked at her, she can look back at all of them. The short woman with the powerful accent has since turned away, pacing back and forth. She’s not stout, but densely built – strong muscles compressed into a svelte figure perhaps an inch over 5 feet. She’s muttering something only the blonde man can hear, he’s thin and pale and when he glances at her he does so with a pair of icy blue eyes. There’s the tall, dark-skinned man, whose glistening form Jasmine lingers on – he’s very, very handsome, and built like a superhero. There’s the man that Dawn is teaming with – tall, very, very, very pretty, with a face like a gender-blurring supermodel. She only knows he’s a guy is because Dawn told her so last night – Jacob, or Justin, or Jordan, one of those names. He doesn’t smile, either – she flags him as someone far too serious to take seriously.
And there’s Dawn. There’s the mismatched, dazzling irises and the shoulder-length dark hair flecked and streaked with white, or maybe it was white splotched and streaked with dark, the abs and the figure and her jawline, but foremost in Jasmine’s mind was her accent.
It was curious at the very least. If you threw Midwest American, Leeds English, Scottish, some Irish, and a pinch of either Australian or Kiki in a blender, the results are the sounds that come out of her mouth. Her voice was naturally husky, too, low and smoky like she was speaking through a cigarette’s veil.
“Have you met everyone else?” Dawn asks. The music in the background lowers its volume and the tale of Reginald T and his band of stone-cold killers comes to an end.
The last thing she wants to do is do icebreakers with all of these people at five in the morning. She shakes her head and Dawn’s friendly smile turns evil, cat-line. She turns and points to the tall, dark-skinned man.
“The guy you were gawking at is Tecumseh Sherman,” Dawn says, grinning all the while. Jasmine feels her face heat all up. “You met yesterday, right?”
Jasmine slowly nods. Tech pays no mind, he’s fiddling around on his phone, looking for a new song while some equally-as-menacing track plays, also about sex and drugs and murder and spoken by a man with some sort of British accent.
“You’re not the first, don’t worry. The two blondes are Anastasia Solovyova-” Dawn points to the short woman who was sneering at Jasmine earlier “- and Dimitri Zhukovsky.” She then directs Jasmine’s attention towards the guy in the Real Madrid jersey. The two are bickering in their incomprehensible language, fingers sharply pointed at each other. Anastasia loudly scoffs as something and storms away.
“Are, they, always like that?”
“That’s them getting along,” Dawn replies, dryly. The two eastern Europeans each put their hands on their hips and make efforts not to glare at each other.
“Oh! And then there’s Jake.” Jasmine follows Dawn’s hand towards the onyx-skinned man walking towards her. He doesn’t smile but flashes a short peace sign before settling on the other side of Dawn from Jasmine.
“Jacob Gillman, please,” he says in his own words. His voice is ultra-soft. It soothes her psyche just hearing it.
“Jacob Gillman, please,” Dawn echoes, an octave higher than her usual tone. She rolls her multicoloured eyes up and around her sockets. Something about her looks tired – she has these dark circles underneath her eyes. Jasmine can see the beginnings of crow’s feet on the far creases of her eyes and worry lines are etched softly into her forehead. Much to furrow a brow about in this city.
In the distance, the song switches. A different song, but still about drugs – manufacture and wholesale – and still rapped by a man with a menacing British accent. Tech bobs his head with approval.
“Hey, are we doing three-on-three now?” he asks, as he throws the volume half again high.
Dawn looks at Jasmine. The kid sees a plan formulate entirely within the brain of her new boss.
“How about basketball?”
Jasmine vigorously shakes her head from side to side. Anything but. They can’t know.
“Never played basketball?”
“No, ma’am.”
Dawn and Jake share a glance. Probably calling her a freak telepathically.
“Football?”
She shakes her head again.
“Soccer?” Dawn tries her best to imitate an American accent.
More side-to-sides.
“Baseball? Softball? Tennis?”
All noes.
“What the fuck, Jazz?”
Jasmine exhales through her nose and wishes she could stop being six-seven.
“It’s, um, hard to explain.”
“Where’d you go?” Tech’s voice approaches as he approaches. Jasmine does her best not to look at his figure – he looks carved from stone by a determined, and horny, sculptor.
“I, um, I-I went to Trinity, sir.”
“That’s the cult one, innit?”
“In Oklahoma?” Jacob asks.
“Yes, sir.”
“White nationalist?”
“I-I don’t know, sir.” She wasn’t going to say that she went to a white-supremacist academy surrounded by three brown-skinned people.
“Evangelical?” Jake asks again. His voice remains the same.
“I, um, maybe? We had daily prayers. No sports, either, because all the instructors thought it would result in conspiracy and sedition against them.”
Jake nods.
“It is absolutely the cult one,” Tech replies. He turns aside to Dawn, speaks quietly in her ear – but Jasmine still catches most of it.
“Do you think…deprogram her?”
“So, if you’ve never played sports, what are you doing here?” Dawn asks. Her head is cocked something like thirty degrees to the side.
“Well, um, I heard the music. I was curious?”
“Do you like it?” Tech asks. Dawn holds in a smile.
Jasmine listens, carefully.
“Drug lord/ I’m the black Escobar
My crew’s got ten guns/ you’ll never get far
One-fifty on the dash / bitch I run the race
One-fifty in jail / bitch I do the race”
She shakes her head, an affirmative ‘no.’
“She’s absolutely gonna be a project,” Dawn mutters to the other two. Her voice rises in volume. “Did you sleep well, at least?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You can just, go back to bed.”
“I’m not tired, ma’am,” Jasmine lies. She could say that she has nothing to sleep in besides the thrift-store tracksuit meant for someone of the opposite gender.
Dawn grins at her peculiar speaking habits. She turns to face Jake.
“Why can’t you call me ma’am?”
“That’s the last thing your ego needs.”
“What if I said please?”
“No chance.”
Jake has the same curious blend of accents that Dawn has.
“He’s just no fun,” Dawn looks back at Jasmine.
“I keep you from power-tripping.”
“I never power trip!”
Jake looks across at Tecumseh. The tall man exchanges the glance and slowly nods. Whatever thoughts they have, they remain inside their skulls. Keep them safe from their power-tripping boss.
“Tech, I don’t power trip, do it?”
“I suppose it’s more of a perpetual state,” Tech replies.
He flashes a billion-dollar smile at Dawn and Jasmine gets caught in the crossfire. Dawn sighs and heaves her shoulders under her hoodie and turns back to Jasmine, still trying to re-orient herself.
“At least give us the fucking ball!” The voice is distant and heavily accented, sharp and feminine, cold like iron, or snow. Belongs to Anastasia, Jasmine assumes.
Dawn looks down at the group’s feet, and her eyes dart to the ball still at Jasmine’s feet. She swipes it with her left foot – Jasmine puts up no resistance whatsoever rendering ‘swipes’ is a subjective term – then kicks it up to head height, lets it bounce like before, and hammers it far over Anastasia’s head.
<
“So, who else have you met?” Dawn asks, with the Russian interference dealt with for the time being.
“Well, I saw Miss Li in the elevator.”
The corner of Dawn’s mouth creep upwards into that cat-line smile. “Miss Li?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Dawn looks at Tecumseh. “Miss Li, huh.”
“Shiu-ying,” Tech corrects. “It is for our collective benefit that you stop calling everyone ma’am and sir.”
“Even you, sir?”
“Yes. We’re on the same team, here. No hierarchies.” Jasmine makes a mental note that Tecumseh is the singular, normally-adjusted, perfectly-matured person on this team.
“How did, Miss Li look?” Dawn asks.
Jasmine hesitates. She tries to remember the woman in the hallway. You don’t look that pretty if you’re sick, but…
“Did she look sick?” Jake asks. Jasmine looks into his eyes, stormy-grey. If he ever gets intense a thunderbolt might flash through them. Luckily, he seems like the most composed of them all here.
“Pale, sir. Um, pale.”
“Don’t call him ‘sir,’” Dawn replies.
“Don’t call her ‘ma’am,’” Jake counters.
The two glare at each other – Dawn with that cat-like smile, Jake as stone-faced as he always seems to be. They apparently, telepathically, reach some agreement unknown to Jasmine and Tecumseh and both of them move on.
“Speaking of Xiu, I’ve gotta go and talk to her. Do you wanna come?”
Jasmine nods. She wants to get out of here, out from under all these gazes.
“Can I come?” Tech asks.
“No.” Dawn is as quick as a wild-west gunslinger.
“Why not?”
“The new girl doesn’t need to see your eyeballs popping out of your fucking head, man,” Dawn replies.
“My eyes will stay firmly affixed in my head.”
“Can you promise this?”
“Depends what she’s wearing.”
Dawn looks at Jasmine. So does Tech. Like they’re waiting for a cue.
“Um, well,” she starts. “She, um, was wearing a swimsuit-”
“You’re staying fucking put,” Dawn says, through laughter, pointing a firm finger at Tecumseh.
Tech just shakes his head. “Fine. You can’t trust me because I’m irresistible to women, I see how it is.”
“We have serious things to talk about and we don’t need you staring at her, because she’ll get mad-”
“Distracted-”
“She’ll strangle you in front of me and Jasmine.”
Tech rolls his eyeballs. “Fine. My insight will remain hidden from you.” It was as if the more sarcastic he was the more flowery his syntax became. Who uses insight in common conversation?
Dawn looks at Jasmine. “We good?”
Jasmine nods.
Then at Jake. “You coming?”
Jake shakes his head. “I’ll stay here. Tell me how she is when you get back. If she’s got it bad, I’ll bring Tech and check up on her.”
“Think you can cure aether poisoning?”
Aether poisoning?
“No, but we know how to treat it. And she’s the only one of all of us who, you’know, really knows what she’s doing.”
“’Scuse me?” Tech asks.
Jake ignores him, but Dawn chuckles. Guess he’s capable of telling a joke after all.
“Yeah, I’know.”
“Did I miss something?” Tech asks and he remains ignored.
“We’ll be back in a few. Keep these losers entertained until we get back,” Dawn says.
Jasmine takes that as her signal to get out of here, and she gets to the door without looking back. When she steps through the threshold, she notices that Dawn isn’t by her side. She turns back around and sights her backpedaling towards the door, keeping eye-contact with Jacob. He sweeps one of his tattooed hands through his hair, trying to fix a perpetual cowlick at the right side of his head. It doesn’t work and the cowlick remained cowlicked, and when Jasmine returns to Dawn she catches her grinning to herself.
Sure, he’s pretty, and nice to look at. But he’s not that nice to look at, right? Jasmine figures there’s something she’s missing.
“Excuse me, ma’am?”
Dawn almost jumps out of her shoes.
“Christ, man,” she replies, catching her breath. She puts her hands on her hips and turns to Dawn. But it gets her gaze off of Jacob.
“Am I allowed to ask, ma’am?”
Dawn thinks for a moment, then turns and heads to the doorway. Jasmine keeps pace, easily.
“About what?”
“You and Mister Jacob. Do, you, well-”
“Know each other?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Dawn blows air from her nostrils. “God, it’s been, like, twenty years. Maybe more. Graduated from the same Academy, in the same class. I think we showed up there together, too.”
“I mean, do you like each other?”
“Be strange if we didn’t.”
That’s not what Jasmine meant.
“Oh, um, not like that, I, ah…”
“You mean, like-like?” Dawn clarifies. As opposed to ‘like,’ singular.
“The other kind of like, ma’am.” You can’t just straight-up ask someone if they love someone else; even a societal recluse like her spent years around other people her age. Even in an Academy like Trinity, kids still experience the pains of adolescence.
“Ooooooooooooooh,” is Dawn’s long, drawn-out response.
The sounds of music and sport fade away – Tech seems to have motivated the two Russians into another 2-on-2 game – and are replaced with the echoing footsteps of soles on the tile of the empty foyer, and Dawn doesn’t respond any more that what she already said.
“Ma’am?” Jasmine asks, for clarification.
“Hmm?”
“You and Jacob, ma’am?”
Dawn presses the button for the elevator and it dings almost immediately. The chrome-polished doors slide open. Nobody else is awake at this hour, it appears. The two step in and Dawn immediately hits the button for floor 73.
“Don’t be nosy, Jasmine.”
Her voice is sharp and dangerous, all of a sudden. Jasmine knows she’s treading in waters she shouldn’t. The doors close shut, and once again, she feels trapped in this metal box with someone infinitely more intimidating than she was.
And so the elevator ride down is silent.