“We’re basically child protective services with guns.” Rosa –or Petals, as she was apparently called– said. A mischievous smirk crept onto her face, the expression cracking some of the soot and dirt that had accumulated on her face. She hadn’t taken the time to freshen up yet.
“Svartheims most exclusive babysitting agency, more like.” Nathe said in a more serious manner. One he turned out to be feigning when his lips curled up into an identical grin. “I agree about the part with guns, though.”
“The Cradle of Branches operates throughout the city, ensuring the safety of children who have no-one else to look over them. We do all of it under the guise of being child traffickers ourselves, and that was what you were caught up in when you caught Petals’ attention.” Roke said solemnly, rolling one of his small fruits -fruits, not sweets, as Noah had originally thought– between his thick digits. “She filled me in while Nathe worked his magic.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you what was really going on sooner.” Rosa said, her smile evaporating like solid CO2 in an airlock. “I was afraid your shadows would make a move if they caught wind of my true intentions. Usually it’s only some sick honor-among-thieves that keep those types at bay. So as much as I hated doing it, I had to kidnap you to keep you safe.”
“Soo…” Noah began hesitantly. “The tracker wasn’t yours? There really were other people chasing me, and they got a tracker into my workskin?” He asked. He thought he understood the situation at heart, but his mind was still catching up, trying to get a bearing in the whirlpool of loyalties and betrayals he had endured today. The three members of the Cradle of Branches all nodded. Nathe let out a drawn-out sigh, then threw his hands into the air hopelessly.
“It’s a real shame you ended up wrecking it. That was some fancy tech.” He said, glancing sideways at Rosa. Or Petals, Noah reminded himself. That would take time getting used to.
“You’re welcome, by the way.” She responded with a scoff. “Who knows what kind of data-fiends that transponder would’ve uploaded?”
“All I’m saying is that we could have learned a lot from it, like how it was getting past a freaking signal warbler” Nathe came again, his voice growing more heated. He and Rosa –not Rosa, Petals– took on more tense postures as their conversation veered towards an argument.
Their following words were lost on Noah. He only heard them faintly, like they were very far away. The entire situation had a sense of surrealism to it. He went from going home to being rescued, to being kidnapped, to being a prisoner, only to now be a guest of the Cradle of Branches.
They sat on the velvety red couches he’d seen when he had entered. Rosa and him sat on one, keeping a meter of respectful space between them, Roke sat on the other. He might be a large man, but the couches were spacious enough for Nathe to sit next to him if he so chose to. Instead, the teenager had been pacing for the entire conversation, not standing still for a moment.
Noah sipped the drink a quiet servant had given him absently, the cool red-stained glass pressed awkwardly against his lips. For most of his life, he’d drunk from a tube. Drinking from a glass felt like a wasted luxury to him, especially since the materials needed to make actual glass weren’t native to his planet.
At least the drink was good, but he couldn’t quite place it. It was sweet and bitter at the same time, with only the slightest hint of staleness. It felt like something he’d tasted before, though, so he swallowed without suspicion and reveled in the refreshment sliding down his throat.
“Well maybe if you’d taken him to a null-chamber first we wouldn’t have had to use the warbler at all!” Nathe shouted, his face red with angered excitement. Rosa straightened her shoulders and got to her feet, stepping closer to her younger companion.
“You wanna go, exo?” She snarled, baring her teeth like a predator. Nathe took an unconscious step back, which Rosa capitalized on. She was easily twenty centimeters taller than him, and nearly as broad. If it came to a fight Noah knew who his money would be on.
“Enough, both of you.” Roke sighed, waving Rosa back with his hand. “You’re scaring the kid, Petals. Let’s just go over what we do know.” He continued, gesturing at Noah, who scowled back and covered himself with the velvety red pillows.
He’d longed to get out of his workskin after a long day, and his underclothes were by no means immodest, but he still felt naked now. Being protected from a harsh environment often equated to being uncomfortable, so now that Noah was no longer burdened by the weight of his workskin he naturally felt unsafe and exposed. The gazes of Rosa and Nathe falling on him only made things worse, and he pulled the pillows closer yet, hiding the marks he carried even though he knew both of them had already seen them.
One of the lighting orbs floated past, canting its’ strange, deep tunes and spraying its’ scented mist as it did, briefly obscuring the members of the Cradle of Branches before dissipating. When his view cleared, Rosa was in the process of sitting back down, taking deep breaths to calm herself.
“That’s better.” Roke said, then nodded to Nathe to continue. The young technician regained his posture in a similar manner, then pulled up a diagram of the now-wrecked device that had been hitchhiking in Noah’s workskin and displayed a hologram of it over the table.
“It seems like the bug was an all-purpose transceiver working on ultra-low frequencies well outside standard ranges. It pinged location and voice recordings at the very least, but it might just as well have plugged into his workskin’s internals–”
“Suits have hardly anything in the way of cybersecurity.” Rosa broke in with a shrug of agreement.
“Right, that means we can assume it transmitted everything from biognostics to camera-feeds. They’ve seen everything the twerp saw, and probably then some. At least until we turned the warbler on.”
“Um… I have two questions.” Noah meekly said. Everyone looked at him and he dove back in his pillows, not all that happy to be the center of attention. Nathe was clearly getting sick of being interrupted, while Roke seemed mostly amused by his piping up. Rosa smiled at him, and nodded encouragement. Noah steeled himself and sat straight up, looking Nathe in the eyes.
“Who are ‘they’?” He asked bluntly. “I mean, what do they want with me?”
“That’s the thing, we don’t know.” Nathe responded with a casual shrug. “There’s a hundred groups that take to kidnapping kids in Svartheim’s underbelly, but we’ve dealt with a lot of them. We’ll figure out who’s after you.”
“Potential suspects?” Roke asked Petals, who shook her head no.
“If that doodad is really as advanced as Nathe claims it is, I don’t think it’s any of our usual run-intos. His shadows were really good too, I only caught a glance of them a handful of times. The tracker’s too high-tech, the stalkers too well-trained. Meaning that it’s probably either a corpo or a private job.”
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Nathe shrugged and flicked the diagram of the transceiver around, pointing at it as if the still made everything clear.
“Nah, I don’t think so. If any corporation had tech like this they’d play it very close to the chest. And I really don’t see some rich slob ordering a nab on a toasted little miner twerp like him.”
The remark bit Noah, and his hand instinctively covered the burn scars on his shoulder, even though the ones on his face were fully visible. Rosa noticed, and stomped Nathe on the shoulder.
“A little sensitivity wouldn’t hurt for once, kid’s had a rough day.” She said, to which Nathe grudgingly relented.
“Anyways, we don’t know who it’s from, and that’s probably saying more than if the owner had written their name on it.” He said, his face twisted in pain as he rubbed his aching shoulder. “I think it’s some military cult.”
“This is about when you’d expect them to get more active.” Roke agreed with a nod, delving his fingers back into his pocket. Noah expected the older man to pull out yet another handful of the fruits, but a small blue box emerged instead. Roke gently placed it on the transparent table in front of him and looked around with expectant eyes.
Rosa rolled her eyes and groaned exaggeratedly while Nathe rested his chin on his hand, staring down at the box with the enthusiasm of a dead fish.
“Roke, you’re getting much too old to play children’s card games, big man.” She snapped up at him. “Divination like that is a hoax, and you know it.”
“Fits the theme of this place, though.” Roke said in response, a sly smirk creeping onto his face, his round cheeks making him look like a massively oversized baby.
Noah couldn’t help but look up at the tent-like interior of the hideout, feeling like divination would indeed not be out of place in a place like this.
Rosa/Petals threw her hands into the air as a sign of resignation. “Fine then, you go shake your stupid tarot.” She said, then turned back to Noah.
“You had another question, right?” She asked him, smiling gently to encourage him. He swallowed a gulp of his drink and tried to take another, but found that the glass was empty. He licked his lips, his thirst not yet fully sated, but bent over to place it on the table anyway.
“Um…I thought of another one, actually.” He said timidly, for some reason expecting Rosa to take offense to the additional question. When it was clear she didn’t, he gathered his courage and asked. “I was just wondering if I should call you Petals now, if Rosa isn’t your real name…”
Rosa’s telling smirk reappeared and she leaned back, clicking her tongue once. “Well, Petals isn’t my real name either. But that’s okay, I don’t like my real name. If Rosa works for you, then Rosa it is.”
“S-sure.” Noah said, then fell quiet. For a minute, the only sound that could be heard other than the strange, eerie music dispensed by the orbs was the rasping of paper on paper as Roke divided the cards in five neat stacks, shuffled each of them separately, then artfully combined each stack back into one like Noah had seen some street performers do. For how unwieldy his meaty fingers appeared, Roke turned out to have some serious dexterity with them. Not once did the cards slip away from him, it was sort of mesmerizing.
“And for your last question?” Rosa eventually asked, realizing that he needed the push. He felt a blush wash over him and found that he didn’t really want to ask it anymore. He turned away and shrugged his shoulders in a half-serious attempt to dismiss her, but her questioning eyes coaxed the words out of him anyway.
“W-when I tried to ku-kill you then why didn’t the pistol work?” He rambled in a single thrust of breath, tripping over his words with downcast eyes.
“Biometric security measure.” Nathe replied dryly. “We do a lot of switcharoos here, make our enemies think they’re in power. You’re lucky I gave you base level clearance the moment you stepped in. It didn’t let you shoot, but without it that power cell would have discharged all of its juice directly into your central nervous system the moment you squeezed the trigger.”
“R-right… Lucky me.” Noah said. He felt ice-cold all of a sudden and couldn’t suppress a shudder, the realization that he was way out of his depth with these people dawning on him like never before. In truth, he did feel lucky. Between shooting someone in cold blood and being electrocuted, ‘nothing at all’ seemed like the best option as he could have hoped for.
“You kids ready for the reading?” Roke asked, having finished his intricate shuffling ritual. He placed the deck in the middle of the table and motioned for Rosa and Nathe to move closer. Noah didn’t need the encouragement this time and sat on the edge of his seat, perhaps more eager to see more of Roke’s artistry with cards than the actual divination.
“Why are we even doing this?” Nathe asked, feeling the need to protest against the reading of cards a second time. “It’s bogus, Roke. Stupid superstition meant to wring money out of gullible suckers on marketplaces.”
Roke smiled, ignoring the teen as he carefully laid the first card down on the table face-down. “Do you have faith in the Oracles, little Noah?” He asked, taking a second card and placing it next to the first.
Noah nodded, then looked down at the cards. Their covers were decorated with five renditions of faces he knew all too well. The Oracles. Four of them occupied the corners, while the last was larger and placed in the middle. Oracle Neith, the Keeper of the Veil, was the one depicted most prominently. While he looked at the two cards, Roke placed down a third, and then a fourth.
“While usually in the background, overshadowed by the other Oracles, Neith is an important figure in esoterics.” Roke said, placing down a fifth card. “This is because Neith is said to be one with the Veil. The energy field that permeates through all of us, entwining our fates.
“It is said that when these threads of fate approach a crossroad of great importance, Neith’s thoughts are echoed through means like these. Especially if something, or someone, of great importance is involved.” A sixth card joined the others, laid down in a straight line in front of Roke. He paused, his finger pressing against the top of the deck.
Noah swallowed and looked up at the man, finding him staring straight back with a meaningful look in his eyes. Roke placed the seventh and final card.
Rosa let out an uncharacteristic giggle of glee and gently poked Noah in the ribs with her elbow. “Don’t take it too seriously.” She said, her eyes twinkling with excitement. “Roke’s a real swindler with a knack for theatrics. It’s just some cards being laid.”
“You say that, but militant cults like Maelstrom, the Wychhunters, or the Puritans would absolutely nab a kid over a card reading. Will you let me finish now?” Roke snapped, and Rosa lifted her hands in surrender.
Roke sighed, then turned around the first card. Noah leaned in to get a better look and found that, despite their previous aversion, Nathe and Rosa did the same.
The card depicted a young girl sitting on her bed, holding a stuffed doll.
“The Innocent.” Roke said, then moved to the second card. He turned it, showing a picture of two figures in an embrace, one larger than the other.
“The siblings.” Rosa gave Noah a sideways glance, but he didn’t react.
The next card showed someone in golden armor, fitted with grand blue wings. “The saviour.” Roke said, his hands trembling slightly.
A horned shape swathed in fire: “The Fiend.”
The night sky, filled with what Noah thought to be stars at first, but what turned out to be thousands of eyes instead. “The vigilant watch, inverted.”
An orb of gold, the top half broken in various places. “Veilbreak, inverted.”
Roke was visibly shaking now. He slowly turned the last card, and Noah felt his blood turn to ice.
“The last card is… the Death...” Roke said, mortified. Then the room erupted in a deafening roar of fire.