Josef wasn’t sure how much time passed in the cramped and cold bunker. All he and everybody crowded in there could do was sit and wait for the rumbling to stop, and even when it did, they still remained there. Nobody wanted to brave the above-ground. For all they knew, Verdigris could have been leveled to the ground.
Eventually, Josef peaked his head above the sea of heads that coated the hard concrete floor of the basement to find his sister. The dim lighting made finding her a little harder, but it still didn’t take him long to find her out of the crowd. She wasn’t necessarily the most standard looking person.
He started to make his way over to where she was, weaving his way through the crowd of people both standing and sitting, talking, crying, staring at a particularly interesting oil stain, some were even sleeping.
He eventually reached where Sina was. He somehow ended up behind her while worming his way through the dense crowd. He put his hand on her shoulder, and while she didn’t outwardly appear scared by the action, Josef could still feel her jump a little under his hand.
“Want to go see what’s going on out there?” Josef said quietly. Even in his whisper, it seemed like the sentence that suggested doing the exact thing nobody in the room wanted to do boomed above the rest of the mindless whispers. He could have sworn the room became quieter after he said that.
“Probably,” Sina said, keeping her eyes on the crowd. “Nobody here seems even willing, so we might as well.” Josef only nodded at her. She continued to look at the crowd.
“I don’t think Mom is in here, Sina,” he said quietly. She didn’t respond. “Come on, let’s go see what’s going on outside.”
Josef moving through the crowd by himself was almost uncanny. He seemed to be the only moving human in a mass of mindless, unmoving and unthinking creatures that were approximately bipedal. Nobody responded to his gentle pushing and shoving and squeezing. The most they did was bat an eye, but even that was a rare occurrence. Everybody kept to themselves or to their small family or group of friends. This time, however, with both Josef and Sina moving through the crowd, it seemed as if they had brought the mass back to life. They started to shift more, to move through the crowd, to talk now that both of the twins were gently shoving their way towards the stairs. Josef couldn’t tell if this change was because it was now two people moving through the crowd instead of one, or if it was because they were moving towards the stairs.
When they finally reached the stairs, the ambient whisper that had filled the room grew to a collection of mumbling and sobbing. Nobody stopped them when they started to climb the stairs, but the room’s mumble did fall silent briefly. Josef could feel that they were staring at him and his sister, but he didn’t mind. It wasn’t an unsettling stare. He interpreted it as a stare of hope; a stare that was to say “good luck out there.”
The heavy metal door to the basement opened up easily as Sina led the way into the lobby of their apartment building. It seemed as if it was relatively untouched. Some of the windows had shattered, and papers were scattered across the floor, but that was it. The lobby, and by extension the entire building, Josef assumed, bore less damage than Josef had expected. Much less damage. It was nearly unsettling. Josef looked over at Sina. He could tell she was thinking the same thing.
“What even was it then?” Josef asked.
“No clue,” Sina said. “Wonder if maybe our building just got out lucky?”
“I mean we can try and find a rooftop to try and see, but I’m not sure if that’s entirely smart.”
“Why?”
“A giant light flew into the city and caused what I can only assume were explosions, I have a feeling that the enforcers are going to be flooding the streets once the coast is clear.”
“Let’s make it quick then. We can get to our roof rather easily, and it has a good enough view of the city around us.” Sina started a slight jog over to the stairwell, and Josef followed.
The building Sina and Josef lived in was not tall by any means, especially compared to the high-rise apartments of the inner-city, but it was at least tall enough to make climbing to the roof a good exercise. The roof access was always unrestricted, and even though the door was labeled to say that opening it would trigger an alarm, Josef and Sina had learned a long time ago that it never really did anything of the sort. As far as they knew, the door never did anything. So Josef and Sina nearly grew up on this rooftop.
Stepping onto the rooftop still felt unfamiliar for Josef, however. He was not used to the sky being dark while he was up here with his sister. He never went up here when it was dark. He was rarely up here during dusk. But aside from the world being dark, there was nothing different about the world around him that he could see from the roof that stood out to him. The middle-city looked nearly untouched. No, not nearly. It was untouched.
Josef looked down and saw that, in the faint light of the moon and the stray street light from buildings that towered above them, his steps left footprints. Bending down, he dragged his finger across the surface of the roof, and, unable to see in enough detail to discern what he picked up, rubbed his fingers together. It felt like his finger had picked up something that wasn’t usually there. It was thicker than dust. Soot?
Josef turned to find his sister, who was now staring up towards Verdigris tower. Josef hadn’t noticed that a few stories in the middle of the tower were still on fire, as he was too occupied scanning the area that he considered home for major damage. He never thought to look up at Verdigris tower, a colossal thing that was so ever present in his life that his brain had all but filtered it out completely.
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He slowly walked over to Sina, her long wavy hair enjoying the freedom from her usual bun, flapping happily in the breeze.
“That explains a lot,” Josef said under his breath. Sina only stared blankly at the burning tower. The only part of her that was moving was her hair.
“Hey, the middle-city is untouched,” Josef said after a long pause. “I’m fairly confident Mom is fine.” Again, Sina didn’t respond in any way.
Verdigris tower was a fortress. Josef was convinced that even if the first two stories were completely removed from existence the building would still stand. It was designed to withstand hell and back, and whatever the thing that was launched against Verdigris was, it had barely made an impact on the tower. A few stories, probably administration offices that were not populated due to the ungodly hour, were on fire, but the fire wasn’t really spreading. The tower was designed to contain fire effectively. If a fire were to start on any one floor, it would stay on that one floor unless something else carried it to another floor. The fire that raged through the offices would probably be out in the next few hours after burning everything there was to burn, and then some.
“Come on, let’s go to bed. We’ll find Mom tomorrow.” Josef turned to walk back towards the door, and Sina almost didn’t respond. But when Josef was just about to stop and ask her what was wrong, she tore her eyes from the tower, and started to walk back towards the door. Her eyes were glued to the floor as she walked.
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A knock came at the door. Sina did not react, as she assumed that nobody would be knocking at the door at such an hour after such an event. So she continued getting ready for bed, but the knock came again, rhythmic and confident. This time, Sina acknowledged the knock, but she did not walk to the door. Again, the knock came after a pause.
Josef was asleep by now, and although Sina intended to do the same, her eyes did not feel tired. They felt heavy, but energized, awake, and stained by the images she saw just a half-hour before. Those colors were keeping her eyes open, whether she liked it or not.
She looked through the peep-hole and saw the distorted and fish-eyed image of a man dressed in a fantastically nice suit with a briefcase in his left hand. He was clean shaven, his hair was cut and done to an exemplary degree, and Sina knew just by looking at him that he had business with the government. That made her uneasy. But she opened the door anyway.
“Ah, I was starting to think you both had already fallen asleep,” he started. “I assume you are Miss Sina Scheller?”
“I am,” Sina started. She was going to ask what his business here was, but was cut off by the man inviting himself into their apartment.
“I will try to be quiet and quick so as to not wake your brother,” he said, placing the briefcase down on a counter. He spoke in a voice not quite a whisper, but quieter than a regular conversing voice. Sina closed the door slowly behind her, keeping her eyes on the man the entire time. “To get straight to the chase: I have a job offer for you and your brother from my employer. They want to offer a job that is particular to your talents. According to them, you two are particularly good at slipping away from the eyes of authorities.” Sina just stared at the man, still standing near the door. He was now opening his briefcase.
“Now, I am expecting that you are not going to immediately want to take this job, but I will warn you that my employer, the person that is employing you, technically, is not somebody that you would want to deny. I should be clear that this isn’t a threat, it’s more a word of advice from somebody who has been working with this person for most of my career. That is how I want to preface this pitch. It is in your best interest to take this job.” The man finally opened the suitcase, and took out a sheaf of papers and took it over to where Sina still stood.
“Most of what this job contains is outlined in these documents, but the basic gist goes as such: my employer has taken interest in you and your twin’s skills, and my employer has a lot of things that wants done and people to be dethroned that they cannot do themselves, or with any of their current contacts. I don’t know if they just don’t have the employees with the skill, or if they want somebody else that is hired in a much more, lets say, under-the-table manner, but either way, they want you to do some things that might get you arrested, hurt, or, if you piss off the right people,” he said with a smirk, “dead in a back alley.” Sina stood there speechless, slowly flipping through the thin sheaf of papers. The text was small, and, through her quick look at the contents, was mostly made up of descriptions of people, who they were, and what this fabled employer wanted done with them. Some of them were subtle, and some of them were not.
“Any questions?” the man said.
“I have a few,” Sina said very slowly, “and while I am assuming you can’t answer my first one I’m going to ask it anyways: who is my employer?”
“You are correct, I cannot answer that. Although that is purely because you are a new hire, you cannot be entrusted with that information as of now. If you accept the offer, if you do the jobs, and if my employer sees it fit, they will reveal themselves to you and your brother.”
“Do we have any protections from your employer?” Sina immediately asked.
“Yes. Getting arrested is sometimes a part of the job and is unavoidable, and we have resources to provide to you to make sure that you are never in a jail cell for long.”
“How will you know if something like that happens?”
“We will keep our eyes on you. No communication can happen between you and us, just as a nature of the job you are running, especially if you have been detained. But we will know, and in a respectable amount of time we will have you out of that detainment and free to continue the job. With other punishments with this job though, we cannot help you, obviously.”
“Pay?”
The man started to smirk again. “My employer is generous on this front.” He walked over to the suitcase again, and this time Sina followed him. From it he pulled out three bricks of cash, and placed it next to the suitcase. “A simple down payment, and with each completed job, more will be provided.”
It was more cash than Sina had ever seen in one place in her life. They could eat like the Conclave for months on the down payment alone.
“Can I talk to my brother about this?”
“Go ahead, although I do have to leave. I cannot stay here for long. Talk with your brother, and keep the money, whether you take the job or not. We know how much you and your mother need it.” He packed up the suitcase, which was now empty, and made his way out of the small apartment. Sina held the sheaf of papers in her hand, frozen with the mention of her mother, who was still missing.