Anna had learned there was no greater ambrosia than watching a powerful man groveling amidst the ruins of his station. Even pushed into a corner, they would rather bargain with the shreds of their wallets than fight their own fight.
---
Soldiers in uniforms and armed with rifles stood at every entrance to the city, at every checkpoint down the road that led closer to the beating heart of the urban metropolis that was Nairobi.
The atmosphere could have been politely described as ‘tense’, but she sat unconcerned in the backseat of a large, black, bulletproof van. The air conditioning did wonders for combatting the Kenyan heat, and the tinted windows afforded a view of the sprawling city and its many skyscrapers, but more amusing to her, it let her watch the hurried citizens, under constant scrutiny by the guards assigned to watch for trouble.
The people here who weren’t simply running from appointment to appointment had a haunted expression on their face, as if they knew some great danger was looming in, and they felt powerless to stop it.
---
People had a natural proclivity towards saving their own lives, but powerful men moreso. Even if they knew they were the sole target, they would rather sequester themselves away behind wall after wall of defenses rather than face their predator.
---
Sitting next to her, an old professor opened up his camcorder to film the passing sights, amusing himself by filming the city, providing narration.
“This will be my nineteenth trip to Nairobi.” Dr. Bedford said in a heavy British accent. “And the seventh time I’ll be meeting with President Birgen. Accompanying me today is my new assistant, Jennifer Whitman.” The camcorder swung towards Anna, who turned to smile at it. “Say hi, Jenny!”
“Hi everyone!” Anna greeted in a Welsh accent, waving at the camera.
---
Hundreds of men would be assigned to their defense, armed with the best weapons money could buy, the most heavily reinforced walls, doors, and security systems available, all with the justification of importance and intelligence.
---
“Doctor Bedford!” A smiling man said through the window. He was a rough and dangerous looking man, with an eyepatch and a cigarette hanging loosely out of his lips, his assault rifle and uniform marking him as a member of the military, his pins and uniquely-colored cap identifying him as a distinguished individual.
“It’s wonderful to see you again, General Gathii.” The two men shook hands, despite being so greatly different; not just in physicality, but profession. “I trust the president is in good health?”
“Good health,” the general said in his swahili accent, “and good spirits. He and Natori are looking forward to seeing you again. I will personally be escorting you and yours to his office.”
“Wonderful, so wonderful! Thank you, general. Come along, Jenny.” Dr. Bedford ordered, climbing out of the car with Anna close behind.
Neither men could so much as feel it as her mind gently layered over theirs, the slow process giving her the opportunity to focus on conversing with the general as they walked into the state house.
---
Some deserved it more than others, in retrospect. Not every soldier was loyal by their wallet alone, but in Anna’s experience, most people in power could only buy their protection. Some of the most powerful men in the world did not deserve to die.
---
President Birgen and his son both rushed from the president’s desk to take Dr. Bedford’s hand. They laughed together, and Natori, the son, lifted his shirt to show the surgery scar left behind by Dr. Bedford’s life-saving procedure.
“I’m so glad to see you both safe.” Dr. Bedford admitted, letting a little concern slip into his voice. “Has the army managed to find any evidence of the Brain Scythe’s intrusion? Any at all?”
“No, my friend.” President Birgen admitted, but his spirits remained high. “Perhaps they looked at our checkpoints and thought it was too much trouble! Though, not all of us agree.”
Both Natori and General Gathii looked a little ashamed, but the general’s expression firmed. “Scaring our citizens like this may do more damage than the Vimelea ever could.”
---
But some were fraught with discourse, surrounded by dissent, and with as much power as they had, were capable of making decisions that put these people's morals into a state of peril. If Anna had learned anything from observing religion, it was that morality could lead to certain permanent decisions.
---
The four men discussed, bantered, debated, and argued over Nairobi’s heavy military lockdown and the resulting concerns of the citizenry. Dr. Bedford used his camcorder to take statements from the president’s mouth that Nairobi and he were safe from the Brain Scythe.
President Birgen trusted few men more than the three he chatted with: his son, his general, and the man who had saved his son’s life. ‘Jennifer’ was all smiles, polite conversation, gently diverting the flirting from Natori and filming the four men together as they laughed and shared a good time.
General Gathii excused himself to the bathroom while Anna replaced the camcorder’s battery and reviewed the footage. When the general returned, he lifted his assault rifle, Natori his pistol, and shot both the president and Dr. Bedford to death.
---
Anything was believable to a powerful man’s enemies, no depth of his corruption too deep. What few allies he had could be dismissed as blind to his faults by the glint of wealth loaned to them, and the apathetic citizenry would consume any amount of political pageantry as long as their lives went on unmolested.
---
General Gathii and Natori spent two hours holed up in the president’s office, yelling that they were justified, that the lockdown was too much, and that Nairobi needed to be free. They fired upon the breaching soldiers, and were quickly gunned down.
News spread like wildfire about the political betrayal, the death of a president and a famed foreign surgeon, about the city’s egregious military crackdown, and a succession was quickly held while General Gathii and Natori Birgen were buried as criminals and traitors.
In the worldwide discussion of the news, it slipped out of public consciousness that little Jennifer Whitman had been a hostage to these two violent rebels, and aside from a post-rescue interview to ensure she was okay, the name of Jennifer Whitman was lost amidst a sea of political furor.
---
When powerful men fell, an unsettlingly large void was left to be filled. Opportunists scrambled to take control and cover the mistakes their predecessor had made, while a disquiet fell over others who were in power. If one man of such stature could be felled, what of the rest?
---
Jennifer Whitman was sent back to her home in England, where she disappeared into the crowds of Englishmen, forever traumatized by the betrayal she had witnessed, with few remembering her name.
Anna, meanwhile, took a boat from England to Spain, to cozy herself into the life of the next tool she needed to get to her next target. A little hair-dye, a change of clothes, practice a language she could easily steal from the minds around her, and nobody would recognize Isabella Garcia from television.
---
But… to what end? What did chaos leave in its wake? When powerful men died, good men did not always take their place. Constructive growth was a unique and difficult thing to manage, but Anna did not care about these things at the time.
All that mattered was the mission.
----------
Anna woke up slowly in her own bed, in her own home, in her little patch of land on her side of Arizona.
The scream President Birgen had made when his own son drew a gun on him still echoed in Anna’s mind over fifteen years later. It was a sound nobody expected a powerful man to make; the anguish, the pain, the choking sobs that came after.
But President Birgen wasn’t just a powerful man, he was a man, one that had been full of hopes and dreams and love for his family, unaware of the suffering he caused in his own paranoia and fear.
Anna tried to drown out the man’s screams by humming a distressed little tune to herself, but it wasn’t until a wet tongue ran up the back of her head did the aged memory vanish back into the abyss.
She turned to stare up at her big blue pup, Cao Cao panting excitedly down at her, either unaware of her emotional state, or knowing exactly what she needed at the moment.
“... Walkies?” She asked him with a forced smile, and Cao Cao lept off of her bed and out her bedroom door, and she heard his nails clicking down the steps.
Anna slid out of bed, and made a decision she hadn’t had to make in a long, long time. She headed for the bathroom and paused mid step as the medicine cabinet opened before she’d even entered the room.
“Stop it.” She whispered to herself, trying to somehow convince her mind to calm down as she walked in, the bottles of medicine already flying out of the cabinet until she clutched her temples and growled.
Painkillers and indigestion relievers clattered to the floor with a maraca-like rattle as she forcibly stopped herself from using telekinesis, but as her mind woke up, she became more aware of her surroundings than ever before.
She’d have to contact an exterminator to deal with the little family of mice that had found a crack in the walls near the kitchen… though it occurred to her that she could just… so easily dispose of them by herself.
She shook the thought out of her head and started grabbing bottles out of the cabinet, reading labels through sleepy eyes until she found her target.
The bottle of Cozitomine had yellowed from its age, and Anna’s nostrils flared in disgust; she really should have thrown it out, but it hadn’t been on her mind in years.
It had expired a little over seven years ago, and a quick glance inside confirmed the normally seaweed-greenish pills had yellowed as well… and her powers told her that there was fungal life teeming at the very bottom of the bottle.
With a long, labored sigh, she slowly turned to stare at her phone sitting on the nightstand. Did she dare throw that suspicion on herself…?
A low whine peeled her eyes off of her phone, and she stared down at the impatiently tapping Shar Pei peeking through the door, and resolved to make another very difficult decision after Cao Cao had his morning pee.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
----------
The kitchen was a whirlwind of activity as Zina quickly bounced between warming some baby food for her son, oatmeal for her father-in-law, and a pair of simple pork omelets for herself and her husband.
One of God’s greatest gifts to Earth was fire, because fire meant cooking, and no matter the pressure, no matter the time limit, there were few things that relaxed her more than cooking a good meal.
Three years ago she would have had a third omelete going for Madeline and a waffle baking if Taz had spent the night, but nowadays she had much fewer pots and pans to tend to. It broke her heart a little bit, but she was getting older, and the energy she had when she was cooking meals for six had slowly evaporated over the years.
Randy stood by the coffee machine, making his wife a mocha cappuccino with Mexican hot chocolate while he talked on the phone.
Zina was a busy woman behind him, bringing Teddy his Gerber, and giving Jebediah psychic control of a plastic spoon, the old man grinning as he fed the giggling baby small spoonfuls of a brownish-orange mash.
“Yeah-huh… uh huh, four palettes is gunna be enough.” Randy said, pausing mid-chat to lean down and kiss his wife on the cheek. “Hey, you tell that pinche idiota off if he tries upcharging you again, we’ve got another distributor we can talk to if he wants to be cheeky.”
“Randy.” Zina hissed to her husband, making him hold the phone away to give her a curious look. “Watch the cursing around Teddy!”
“Sorry love.” He gave a somewhat shamed smile, and carried on his conversation as he made the coffee, passing Zina her mug and stepping in to carry on her cooking on the omelets. “Uh huh… no, no we expect it to be done by late-March depending on the weather. Uh-huh… humm…” He then paused, twitching in surprise as he glanced at his phone, his brows raised. “Luke, I’ma have to let you go, getting another phone call. Yeah, we’ll talk more once I’m onsite. Yeah, bye.”
Zina didn’t think much of her husband changing conversations, simply enjoying her coffee as she brought Jebediah his oatmeal, the man easily manipulating both spoons to feed both himself and his grandson as Zina listened in on her husband.
“¡Hola mija! ¿Qué pasa?” He asked. Zina immediately glanced over, wondering which mija it was… “Of course, angel, just making some breakfast with your aunt.”
That answered that question.
“Mhmm… no need to be nervous, angel, just tell me… uh huh… uh huuuh? Yeah? You are?” Randy suddenly laughed, and Zina found herself hovering nearby, her eyes wide and curious as Randy held a hand up to her. “I was waiting for you to figure that out!... Of course I knew; chica, I remember walking in on you during a sleepover, transfixed on the TV with Fast Times at Ridgemont High playing.”
“Randy?” Zina whispered, but Randy held up a finger to her.
“It’s okay, angel, nothing’s changed, I can just buy you some more interesting stuff going forward.”
“Randy!” Zina insisted, almost bouncing on her toes in curiosity.
“Hey, you wanna tell your aunt?” Randy asked with a grin. “She’s right here about to leap all over me to talk to ya!”
Zina stared at the phone and dared Taz to say no. Lord knew she would find a way to get that girl to pick up her phone if she did…
“Alright, here you go. Love you, Taz!” Randy grinned, passing the phone over to Zina, who took it like a precious treasure and quickly swung the phone over to her ear.
“Hi baby!” Zina said, trying to not act too excited as her husband gave her a wink and a thumbs up.
“Hi Aunt Zi!” Taz answered, but her joyous tone was tempered with an undercurrent of nervousness Zina locked onto immediately.
“What’s going on, baby girl? Is everything alright?” Zina asked gently, nudging Randy so he’d get the omelets out of the skillet before they burned.
“Yes ma’am, everything’s okay.” Taz said, but Zina could hear the additional weight at the end of it. “Just…”
“Yes baby?”
“... Aunt Zi, I love you a whole lot.”
“I love you too, honey, but you didn’t call your uncle to tell me that.” Zina reminded her, meeting Randy’s amused eyes as she tried to contain herself.
“Aunt Zi?”
“Yeeeeeees?”
“I’m… um… while I was here, I kinda met some people, and did some realizing about stuff and, um… I’m gay.”
Zina sighed, long and loudly, and smiled as she leaned against the countertop. By this point, Jebediah was looking at her, wondering what was going on, and at his gentle, curious prodding, Zina sent back a little promise for later.
“You know, I wondered if it was going to be highschool or college that helped you figure that out, baby.”
“You knew?!”
“I knew.”
“How does everyone know but me?!”
“Taz, honey, remember when I found you in the attic flipping through your uncle’s girly magazines?”
“UUUUUGGGGGH!” Taz groaned, and by the sounds of it, flopped onto her bed in annoyance. “I just wanted to see what pretty looked like!”
“And you were seein’ real hard, honey, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Zina giggled to herself. “Well you still have a seat at my table, your name in my will, and a big ol’ place in my heart, honey, so don’t you fret.”
A moment of silence, other than some light breathing, and then Taz spoke. “Thanks auntie. I was so nervous calling you guys… I feel so stupid.”
“It’s okay, hon, it’s a big deal for you, but I’m going to treat every girl you bring over like I would any boy. I’ll tell you if I think some chica’s a floozy.”
“Oh god…” Taz groaned, and Zina privately delighted in the girl’s embarrassment. “Well that won’t be anytime soon! I’m too busy with PA stuff to think about dating!”
“You say that now…”
“But it’s true!” Taz huffed.
“Does Maddy know?”
“Yeah, she figured it out by, uh…” Taz coughed. “She made a guess.”
“Does your mom know?” Zina asked next, choosing to ignore Taz’s total lack of subtlety.
At that, Taz went completely quiet.
“Taz?”
Taz groaned before she spoke. “I’m trying to figure out how to tell her…”
Zina frowned a bit, grabbing some Tabasco sauce out of the cupboard to pass to her husband as he dressed the omelets. “Taz, you know your mom won’t give a damn—darn.”
“But what if she does…?”
“Don’t you go gettin’ in your own head with those questions, baby,” Zina warned worriedly, “think about your mom and what she’ll do for ya. I know she can be a tough mother, but the last thing she’ll make a ruckus over is who you’re attracted to.”
Taz was quiet for a while again, but spoke up before Zina could try and speak again. “She is going to scare off every girl I try to bring around…”
“If anything, she’ll probably be relieved. I know you never dated before, but the number of conversations I had with her about how you could one day get pregnant caused her to—”
“EEEWWWW stop stop stop! No!” Zina could hear her niece flailing on her bed. “None of that! Ever!”
Zina tried her hardest to stifle a laugh. “I mean, artificial insemination is still an option.”
“Ew ew ew ew ew ew—”
“Which reminds me, you brought enough birth control up there, hon?” Zina basked in her niece’s embarrassment. “I can send you a little money to buy some more if—”
“I am FINE! I am super-duper fine! REAL fine! I don’t need boys, I don’t need birth control, I just—I’m gay! That’s all I wanted to say!”
“I’m proud of you for discovering a piece of yourself, baby.” Zina spoke with genuine pride in her voice, and Taz once more went quiet.
“... Thank you, auntie. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“I’m gonna start packing up for class. I’ll call again soon.”
“You’d better.”
“Love you!”
“You too~!”
The call ended, and Zina leaned against Randy, laughing and squeezing his hands.
Breakfast was plated, coffee was refilled, and Zina was about to sit down with her family for their pre-work meals when another ringing phone made them all look up.
Zina was frozen in her seat for a moment.
It wasn’t Randy’s cellphone, and it wasn’t her personal cellphone, it was her work cellphone, upstairs in her office. She frowned a little bit, but stood, Randy giving her an understanding nod as she went up to her room, locked the door to her study behind her, and swept her cellphone up in her hand with the intention to be as short and snappy as she could.
Except that the name on the caller ID gave her pause.
For a moment, her blood chilled, her mind went blank, and her stomach dropped. She clicked the answer button and slowly walked over to her chair behind her desk, sinking into it as she spoke slowly.
“Anna, is everything okay?” She asked as calmly as could be, a number of possibilities racing through her head.
“Good morning, Zi.” Anna’s voice was soft, obviously in a bit of distress, but she wasn’t trying to jump into something dramatic, so Zina willed her shoulders to sink a little bit. “I’m sorry if I’m interrupting something.”
“No, nothing important, Annie.” Zina tried to force herself to be calm and relaxed, but this phone had a very specific purpose, and Anna calling her on it… “What’s going on?”
“I need a refill on my Cozitomine.” Unlike her daughter, Anna answered her right away with no dramatic pause for Zina to fill in the blanks.
Zina tapped the arm of her chair as they slowly revolved to face the window, thin beams of sun barely peeking through the blinds. “You haven’t needed a refill in a long while, Annie. Is everything okay?”
“Yes.” Anna answered, but Zina trained her ear to listen very carefully to her inflection. “I think being at that spa rattled some things loose in my head. I-I don’t know if it was just being away from home, or Taz being at PA, or…” Anna sighed, and Zina forced herself to calm down.
She’d always had that nightmare, again and again, of seeing Anna’s name on this phone and being told some bad news. Even now, she wasn’t able to relax; an alarm was ringing in her head and she couldn’t think of why.
“It’s okay, baby.” Zina said as calmly as she could. “I’ll get a bottle from the agency and bring it by after work. Or do you need it now?”
“No, later’s fine.”
“Did anything happen, Annie?” Zina tensed up in her chair.
“Nothing—well…” Anna sighed, and Zina winced. “One of the masseurs got a little fresh with me while I was on the table. I was half-asleep when I felt him try to… anyways, I panicked for a moment and lashed out. I only had him for a moment, nothing happened, but I wiped his memory of the incident and ended the session early.”
Zina drummed her fingers against her knee. She couldn’t find any lie in the story, so she took a deep breath, and gave an unseen nod to reassure herself. “Okay, Annie. I’ll bring the pills by, and we can talk about what happened.”
“The rest of the stay was wonderful, if it’s any consolation.”
“Hardly.” Zina grunted. “Some asshole putting his hands on my girl? Gimme a name and I’ll find some reason to detain him for a few weeks.”
Anna’s laugh was soft and sweet, and Zina felt relieved to hear it, but still, that alarm, quiet as it was, still rang in her head.
“Thanks Zi. I’ll see you this evening.”
“You too, Annie.”
Zina waited for Anna to hang up the phone before she laid bonelessly back in her chair and took a deep breath.
Holy shit she was tense. Just seeing Anna’s name on this phone… lordy, she was scared of who she’d have to call the black vans on by the end of it. But, just a bottle of Cozitomine?
She could only wonder how her best friend felt after letting the leash slip just a bit… After all, psychic powers were as natural as using your hands.