Heat washes over my skin and I panic, ducking back into the shadows before I’ve even opened my eyes. I dash down the rapidly disappearing shadows under the duvet and slip into the darkness beneath the bed. If I had lungs right now, I’d be panting.
“Rise and shine! It’s time to – hey, where’d you go?”
From my hiding place, I see the duvet land in a crumpled heap in the corner of the room – a room currently bathed in daylight from two separate windows. There are a pair of feet there as well – barefoot, the colour of hazelnuts. They move around anxiously pacing around the room in obvious confusion.
“I could have sworn…”
She paces around anxiously, before dropping to one knee to peer under the bed. It’s Ember – I’m not sure why I expected someone else – but she’s not in her work clothes… or her work clothes. Instead she looks like she’s just got out of bed; I can’t see any other reason someone would willingly wear shorts that short. I watch her from the shadows for an instant, her hair an unruly mess that frames her face as she peers under the bed, before forming my eyes in the scant few patches of darkness deep enough to hold me.
“There you are.” She grins at me. “C’mon, you can’t spend all day in bed! It’s already midday!”
It’s midday… I’d honestly forgotten that existed. I don’t want to go out; I want to stay here where it’s dark, where it’s safe, but I know that’s not really an option. So, I start to slink through the shadows at the edge of the bed, thinking of the dry room, the bed and the company over and over in my head like a mantra, and stretch out an arm. It feels uncomfortable in a way I can’t quite explain, but not as bad as it could have been. It must be because it’s not quite direct sunlight, just light bleeding in from the room’s small windows.
I know I shouldn’t fear light like I do. Sometimes, when I think about sunny days or the bright lights of the city, I feel a sort of distant longing for them. I used to look out the broken window of my ratty old room in that factory, and find something close to comfort in the glittering lights – a sense of distant familiarity. It never lasted. I’d always lose that feeling beneath an overwhelming sense of unease, and whenever I saw the sun rising over the ocean that unease would turn to outright fear, and I’d bolt back to my gloomy home like a rat scarpering for shelter.
But I can’t do that now.
Fear creeps through me as I step into the light, and I realize something. It’s not the light I’m afraid of, but the absence of shadow. Daylight permeates every inch of the small room, leaving me nowhere to hide. At night, there’s always somewhere within arm’s reach that I can creep into, some shelter I can find when things get too much. But there’s none of that in the day; what few shadows there are simply aren’t dark enough.
Ember’s already left the room – I can hear her feet on the stairs – so I creep out after her. Now that I know why I’m afraid, it’s a little easier to deal with. It’s still there, but fear is always less drastic when you understand it. Even so, stepping out into the hallway – with its expansive bay window opening up onto a vista of blue water and even bluer sky – feels like willingly walking into a furnace, while turning away from it and clambering down the comparatively shady staircase feels like leaving the furnace for a room that’s hot, but not scalding.
There’s a small gasp from the kitchen, and I pounce down the last four steps in a single leap, landing with catlike grace before cautiously poking my head through the doorway, dearly wishing that there was a shadow nearby I could spy from instead. Ember is poking her head through the door to the living room and, when she turns back to look at me, I see a bemused smile on her face.
“Did you clean up?”
I nod, beaming up at her.
“Why?”
She sounds more than a little exasperated, but it’s not like there’s anything I can say. How am I supposed to explain that I’ve been living in dust and filth for weeks, and that if I never have to see a single speck of it again then I’ll die happy? How exactly do I get across to her that cleanliness is next to godliness when I can’t even speak? I chirp enthusiastically, and shrug all four of my shoulders.
“Right…” she sighs a little, “we’ll need to figure that out, but I’m not going to do it on an empty stomach. Switch the stove on, would you?”
She opens up one of the cupboards, a strange one that’s separate from the rest of the kitchen and made from a strange white material. It’s quite sparse inside, but what really shocks me is the slight chill from within, and the electric lights illuminating the whole thing. I guess it’s just another thing I don’t understand.
I use my forelimbs to lift my torso up to the stovetop and start to look around for a box of matches, only to stop short as I see the flat surface where the gas rings should be. There are circular outlines, and the dials needed to control the flow of gas, but the actual stove itself is missing. I reach down in confusion, turning one of the dials to the highest setting and listening for the tell-tale hiss of gas. There’s no sound; instead, red rings start to glow on top of the flat surface. I reach out hesitantly and almost put my hand on one before common sense prevails.
It might not look like a stove, but it has most of the components of a stove – if not the most vital ones – and Ember called it a stove. Even I can put two and two together.
Ember returns with a pan and a packet of bacon, wrapped up to preserve it in the cold cupboard, or so I assume. She cooks the bacon in a frying pan, before setting it aside on two plates and scrambling four eggs with a dash of milk and a knob of butter. There’s something so wonderfully normal about the sight – even with the strange stove – that I spend a while just drinking it in. It feels like I’ve come in from the cold.
Actually eating the food proves a little troublesome, not least because I freeze up at the sight of the sun gleaming off the lake outside the massive bay windows. Sitting down is the main difficulty, but eventually I’m able to sit on the dining chair in much the same way that dogs sit on the floor, my forelimbs gripping onto the edge of my seat while I use my hands – and the helpfully provided knife and fork – to tuck into my breakfast. From the look in Ember’s eyes, she seems to find the sight a little sad - which doesn’t do wonders for my self-esteem, but I can see where she’s coming from.
She seems to catch herself, maybe seeing her sadness start to spread to my own face, looking away from me and around the room, her sadness changing to surprise and confusion.
“You must have been up all-night cleaning this…”
In spite of her statement, she seems surprised when I nod in agreement, her mouth widening ever-so-slightly.
“When did you… hold on a second.”
She leaves the room, while I wait perched on my seat. When she returns, she places a notepad and pen in front of me before returning to her seat.
“When did you go to sleep?”
She sounds a little more confident this time. I pick up the pen – idly noting the strange translucent barrel and the even stranger pencil-like nib – and start to scrawl out my answer in disappointingly unsteady handwriting, turning the notebook around and sliding it across the table to her.
‘When the sun rose.’
She winces, looking more than a little guilty.
“Sorry for getting you up, even if it was midday. Seems like your sleep schedule is even more fucked than mine is.” – I wince at the foul language, but she doesn’t seem to notice, or care – “So you’re properly nocturnal?”
I stretch my arm across the table – almost falling off the chair as I lose my balance – before Ember takes pity on me and passes the notebook back over.
‘I sleep most of the day, only heading out after sunset.’
That answer seems insufficient to my eyes, so I scrawl another line.
‘I don’t like the sun. There’s nowhere to hide, and that makes me feel afraid.’
“Are you afraid now?”
I nod my head, hesitantly, while waving my hand a little to indicate uncertainty.
“I am sorry.” – She looks even more remorseful now. – “I can’t promise that you won’t need to come out during the day, but it won’t ever be for a mission. It’s just that some of our people keep normal office hours…”
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
She trails off as I slide the notebook across the table.
‘I can endure a little discomfort.’
I mean it, too. I’ve got warm food in my belly, a roof over my head and the softest bed I’ve ever known. Sure, daylight is a nuisance, but it’s nothing compared to living on the streets, stealing sandwiches from random stores and sleeping in a derelict factory.
“Okay, but if it gets too much, I want you to tell me.” – I give her a pointed look and she groans – “Fine, I want you to let me know. Unfortunately, we need to head out today. Jaeger got back in the city yesterday, and he’s been asking after you. He handles a lot of our enforcement and security work, so he likes to meet the new Capes. He’s a bit of a hardass, but I’ll be there with you.”
I nod my head to show I’ve understood. Truth be told, ‘enforcement and security’ doesn’t exactly sound appealing to me, but I guess this is the price I need to pay. Ember disappears back upstairs for a while, before reappearing dressed in some of the same clothes I saw on businesswomen returning late from work.
She holds up the back of her grey jacket, and I gratefully slip into the space between it and her soft pink shirt. From the way the light moves, and the occasional glimpse down the back of her skirt as the jacket shifts in the wind, I’m able to follow along as Ember walks to her car, though my view drops out entirely once she’s sitting down. With this much daylight around, there’s not really any sufficiently deep shadows anywhere that isn’t completely enclosed from the sun. It means I can’t sneak a peek every now and then, instead forced to wait until the jacket starts to move again, as Ember leaves her car. The harsh sunlight gives way to harsh electric lights and Ember stops.
“I need you to come out now.”
I slip out of her jacket quite quickly, though not as quickly as I could have. I don’t want to risk undershooting my exit and ripping her jacket from her shoulders. In an instance, I’m standing by her side. She’s put her mask on, but not her costume.
“Have I told you how weird that is? I couldn’t feel you at all, not even when you were pressed between me and the car seat. You’d make one hell of a spy. Plus, it saved on the blindfold.”
I would cock an eyebrow, if I had one. Instead I tilt my whole head, and blink three sets of eyes at her.
“I’m joking. Nobody’s going to blindfold you.”
She strides to the end of the short corridor, pushing open a set of double doors with both hands.
“Even if you weren’t supposed to see this place, it’s much safer to just drug people.”
A cavernous hall opens up before me, lit by lights that hang from a crisscrossed lattice of metal struts that run all along the ceiling. There are at least two dozen men and women in the hall, engaged in some strange form of group exercise, sprinting from point to point before dropping to the floor and exercising their arm muscles. I can see sweat on each of their foreheads, and they seem to carry themselves like soldiers, though I can’t see any officers supervising their exercise. Unlike Ember, none of them are masked.
“Hey. Want to see something funny?” Ember whispers conspiratorially to me, before taking two steps forwards and cupping her hands around her mouth.
“Solomon!” she shouts in a commanding tone, and the delicate military machine falls into disarray. There’s nothing drastic, but the sheer volume of the effect is impressive. Sprinters stumble momentarily, while other exercisers are thrown slightly off balance. Two dozen heads turn to look at us, before they seem to regain their senses. They subject Ember to a brief but violent cacophony of the foulest language I’ve ever heard, all their previous unity having gone out of the window, before going back to their exercise.
Their noise has drawn another man, who strides leisurely down a flight of stairs set into the wall, on the opposite side of the hall to us. He’s clearly another soldier, but he’s masked like a cape. His uniform is formal, well-tailored, and somehow more recognisable to me than the ones worn by the grey or black-clad soldiers that patrol the streets. The uniform is the deep green of the forest, held together by black buttons and trimmed with red at the collar and cuffs. Every inch of it screams discipline and precision, from the polished jackboots to the silver crest on his cap, while the pistol holstered on his thigh is an unspoken threat.
Behind his mask, I can feel his eyes roaming up and down my body, assessing me with a dispassionate gaze. I shuffle a little to the right, moving much of my body behind Ember to get that comforting feeling of being even a little out of sight. She seems to notice my distress, stepping forwards to head off the man – who must be Jaeger.
“Isn’t this the part where you admit defeat? I was right about her, and the soft-sell worked.”
Jaeger’s eyes flick off me, the corner of his lips curling up in something that’s almost, but not quite, a smile.
“Whether it would work or not wasn’t the point. It was whether it was safe.”
His accent is a little different to Ember’s, but it’s not like I’d be able to use that information to tell where he’s from.
“I’m still up a hundred dollars,” Ember replies smugly.
“We should continue this in my office,” Jaeger says by way of an answer, turning and walking back up the stairs without asking for us to follow. He simply expects it.
His office is nicely furnished, with plush carpeting and rich wooden furniture of some dark wood. The décor is distinctly martial in theme, with firearms prominently displayed on the walls and some much more advanced models in a secure case by his desk. He takes a seat in a high-backed leather chair, leaving me and Ember to the slightly less ornate chairs on the other side of the desk. Ember practically melts into her seat, while I perch unsteadily on mine.
“So…” he begins, turning his eyes on me, “you want to join the Elite.”
“She’s already in the Elite,” Ember retorts, while I simply wilt under his gaze. “You agreed that I’d handle this my way, remember? That means she’s my hire.”
“Can’t she speak for herself?”
I shrink into my chair, my tail unconsciously drifting into the shadows beneath his desk. I want to run, to hide, and it takes everything I have to keep myself corporeal. I can’t meet his eyes anymore, instead looking at the front of his desk.
“No she can’t, you insensitive prick.” Ember leaps to my defence, and my gratitude towards her grows.
“Ah…” For the first time since I got here, Jaeger’s eyes soften a little. There’s a hint of pity in them now, something I find just as painful as the cold, calculating, stare he had before.
“Has she chosen a name?”
It hurts that he asks Ember, rather than me. I know why he’s doing it, I know that I won’t be able to answer, but it still hurts. He seems to have written me off as a crippled and broken thing.
I may be mute, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it when people talk around me.
“We settled on Nightcrawler.”
“Crawler? Really?”
“Nightcrawler. The ‘Night’ is important.”
“I’m sure it is…” Jaeger mutters to himself, his fingers clattering over a strange board set in front of one of those picture screens.
“Night. Currently in use by a vigilante in Los Angeles. Formally used by a vigilante in Salt Lake City, but they had to change it to Midnighter when they cut a plea deal with the Protectorate. Used by a minor villain in Boston… That one’s a Nazi. How lovely. The copyright is held by a corporate cape in Houston.”
“We’re the Elite,” Ember interrupts, “why should we give a shit about copyright? Besides, it’s Nightcrawler. The ‘crawler’ is important.”
Jaeger leans back in his chair, looking down his nose at Ember.
“You’re fucking with me.”
“Always. But Nightcrawler is the name she chose.”
That brings his stare back to me, but this time I’m determined to meet his gaze. Being blindsided like that has wounded some reserve of pride I didn’t even know I had. I stare at him, six eyes overwhelming his two, and open my beak just enough to show him how sharp it is.
“I suppose it fits.”