Trent

For the first time in nearly twenty years, Norton had been correct. The parthume, the sacred herb of the desert, filled Trent’s lungs with a drug so potent he felt like he was twenty-one again. The cancer was still there, of course. The merchant selling the herb had told him as much. “Think of it as a concealer. You will feel no symptoms. But that does not mean you are healed. And whatever you do, do not take more than you need.”

With his strength restored, it was time to get back to business. The owner of the hotel, Kaiden Harroun, was a bitter man. Trent had spent five hours… Five miserable exhausting hours trying to get him to talk last night. The best he’d gotten out of him was: “I do not know and I do not care.”

His team had attempted the same, with even worse results. Most of them didn’t speak his language. And the one who did wasn’t exactly the most charming person in the world. Today, he’d given them some free time… with a warning, of course. Alicia and Hope had pranced away for God only knew what reason. The boys, on the other hand, had chosen to sleep in, calling the desert sun a “miserable bastard”.

As he made his way down the steps of the fine establishment of mud and gravel, a child’s voice caught his attention. She sounded about seven years old. The same age Casey had been when he…

He paused and listened. “Papa! Papa! Can I go to the plaza? They’re holding a festival in the main district. There’s gonna be a play and sweets and-”

“Slow down, little angel,” Kaiden Harroun answered in the gentlest voice Trent had ever heard. “Take your sister with you. And here’s a tenner. Get something good. Have fun. But be back before evening, got it?”

“Yes! Yes! Yes! I love you, Papa! I promise. Come, sis, let’s go!” The door slammed shut with an energetic bang.

By the time he reached the lobby, the joy had all but evaporated from the old man’s face. Trent coughed lightly to get his attention. “Your girl?”

Harroun looked at him, half-mad and half-engrossed in his newspaper. “Why do you care, foreigner?”

“I have a girl too,” he confessed.

“You do? I’m amazed. You do not have the look of one who could commit to anything.”

Trent scoffed at him. “What do you know about me?”

“I’ve lived a long life. I can tell plenty just by looking at a man.”

Trent grabbed a chair and sat across from the old man with the look of one entertaining a child. “Is that so? I’m sure you would humor me, then. What can you tell from my face?”

“I can tell you’re somewhere you don’t belong.”

“Aren’t we all, at some point?” he laughed.

“I can also tell that you’re scared. You laugh but your voice has no joy to it. You smile and yet I feel no happiness from your expression. You act all confident and yet you’re sitting with an old man waiting for him to tell you what you already know.”

Trent had heard enough. “Okay. Okay. Lots of accusations are being thrown right out of the gate. But what about you, sir? Tell me, do your girls know about your past?”

“I don’t know what you speak of, boy,” the old man mumbled.

“Do you honestly take me for a fool? Do you think it’s sheer coincidence I chose your miserable hotel of all places? Oh, no. No. I know all about you, sir. They called you the Reaper back in the day, didn’t they? When you were a general in Yousef’s army.”

The old man replied with his carefully rehearsed answer. “I do not know and I do not care.”

“Look, pal. There’s no point in playing dumb. I spent a long time looking for you. I will not be denied when I’m this close to my goal.”

“I do not know and I do not care.”

“Just tell me where they’re storing the server and I’ll leave you alone. My team will be out of here in an instant. Just tell me. I beg you, one father to another.”

“What color are her eyes?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What color are your daughter’s eyes? Tell me and I’ll help you.”

Trent laughed with confidence. The utter absurdity of this man! Does he take me for a fool? His mind raced back to the time his wife had gone out shopping. He’d spent all day playing with his little girl. Her joyous cackling set his heart aflutter. The most beautiful sound in the world. He remembered her lips, brighter than the freshest roses. Her delicate eyebrows, darker than twilight and twice as graceful. And then… nothing. No matter how hard he tried, he could not recall anymore. His head was clouded with nothing but seas of blood and vengeful thoughts. There was no more place for love.

No more place for his own daughter.

“I… I do not remember,” Trent answered, his head bowed in shame.

“You want me to put my girls in danger for someone like you? You should be ashamed of yourself for asking at all.”

“I made a vow, a long time ago,” Trent mumbled. “I vowed never to show her my face until I’d avenged her mother. I… I never intended for it to take this long. I cannot face her like this.”

“How long has it been?”

“Fifteen years.”

“God almighty,” Harroun exclaimed. “Not just a coward, but an incompetent coward at that.”

“All I ever wanted to do was give her the justice she deserved. Everything I’ve done, everything I’ve sacrificed, it’s all been for her.”

The old man offered him a consoling glance. “I saw you writing last night. I haven’t traveled too much but I know that they don’t normally write letters in your country. Was it for her?”

Trent nodded; his hands ready to rip his own throat out in anger. How could I forget her eyes?

“Do you ever send them? Your letters, I mean.”

He remained silent.

Trent felt a sudden throbbing in his chest. Is it the plant? His ears rang with the violent trembling of an explosion. It was distant but powerful. He jumped to his feet but the old man remained seated, his expression, more annoyance than fear.

“What the devil?”

“Calm yourself, young man. This is just everyday life in Noor. It could be the dogs from Western Wadin or the dogs from Eastern Wadin. Hard to tell sometimes. All the noise starts to blend in after a while.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Is he slow or just plain stupid? “What about your girls, you old fart? They’re still out there!”

Harroun coughed, then told him plainly, “They’ve lived their entire life surrounded by flying bullets. They’re my girls. It will take more than a few fireworks to scare them.”

If you want the truth out of someone, look into their eyes. You can train your face to be as still as the Mitsurugi waters. But your eyes will always betray your true intentions. While the old man’s body was an unshakable boulder, his pupils trembled with fear.

Once the door was flung open, a wave of relief washed over his wrinkled features. He opened his mouth in elation but found only one of his two girls standing in the doorway, her clothes ripped and her eyes red from crying.

The old man jumped over the counter with unnatural agility and got down on his knees in front of her. “Raina! Sweetheart, are you okay? Where is your sister?”

“They… they… took her… I tried but… they were many. I’m sorry!” she muttered through her incessant sobbing.

Kaiden Harroun’s face took on the quality of a grave. He comforted his girl with a shivering arm. “It’s okay, Raina. It’s okay. I’ll bring your sister back. Go and fetch me the keys to the store room.”

Trent followed the old man into a cabin in the back of the hotel. The atmosphere felt more dirt than air. When an oil lamp was lit and the inside became visible, Trent’s lips curled into a smile on their own. He whistled at the countless medals dangling from the mud wall and wondered if the old man had killed more than him.

Before he could come up with an exact number, something else caught his eye. A large steel trunk seated in the middle of the room. Unlike the rest of the house, it looked oddly expensive with all sorts of engravings decorating its golden surface. He sneaked a peak over the old man’s shoulder as he crouched down to undo the lock. His eyes widened at the number of military-grade rifles practically oozing from the trunk.

“Quite the armory you’ve got in there, sir.”

“I never wanted to come back here,” said the old man. “But one way or another, I’m getting my daughter back. Those dogs will know the Reaper once more.”

“I suppose that Reaper fellow must be lying in the store room somewhere. Look carefully, let’s hope he’s still as young and strong as he was forty years ago,” he joked, hoping Harroun would get the hint.

“Laugh all you want, foreigner. I’ve been through much worse when I was younger.”

“When you were younger,” he emphasized. “And pray tell, who will care for your family if something happens to you out there?”

“What’s the point if there’s no family left to care for?”

“Listen to reason, you moron! Look, I will only say this once. You cannot save her. You’ll be gunned down before you make it through the first guard. If you have a death wish, go ahead. I’m not stopping you. But think about your girls first. They have nowhere else to go. Who will they look up to after you’re gone? Your coffin?”

“Get the fuck out of here!”

Trent stepped forth and slammed the wall with such power, the old man dropped his rifle in fear. “Listen, man, there’s no point in getting mad at me. I’m only telling you what you already know. You cannot win this fight. Just look at you, hands trembling at the sight of a gun. You’ll be dying for nothing.”

Kaiden Harroun fell to his knees. His face carried helplessness only a parent could understand. “But... But… my child.”

In what remained of the bloodied abyss that was his mind, Trent still remembered one moment as clearly as it was yesterday. It was the day Lisa had told him they were expecting a baby. It’s funny, really. He couldn’t recall what dress she’d worn that day. He couldn’t even tell when he’d received the news. But the one thing he did remember in perfect detail was how he’d felt when he heard those words for the first time, “We’re having a baby girl.”

Fear was his first emotion. He knew this with absolute certainty. It was accompanied by thoughts of “no no no no no” and “I am so not ready for this”. But there was also joy and relief. Joy because, well, that hardly needs an explanation. Relief, because now, he finally had a reason to put the life of violence and bloodshed behind him.

That day, he’d sworn that even if faced with all the evil the universe could conjure, he’d never let anyone lay a finger on her.

“Stay put. Will you, sir?” He left the storeroom, breathed in another puff of parthume, and threw himself into the blood-soaked streets of the Golden City.

∆∆∆

The bombing ceased after claiming one too many lives. Cries of the wounded emanated from the very flesh of the city. The ones closest to the bomb were lucky enough to get an instant death. The survivors had the worst of it. Some had gotten away with only losing a limb or two. Others, close enough to be kissed by the flames but not far enough to avoid the fallout, were left with charred skin and melted faces. They were breathing but not one person in the city dared to call them alive.

The blood on the streets had dried and the sun had set on the Golden City of Noor when Trent returned to the hotel. Kaiden Harroun’s eyes nearly popped out of his skull. He dashed to greet the former Knight but was immediately forced back by the smell of blood and shit. Even looking now, he could hardly believe the man was alive. A large scar on the side of his thigh made him walk with a limp. A deep stab wound on his abdomen gushed blood with every breath. Even so, he smiled through the pain. “Forgive me for taking so long. It took some time to find her.”

Trent did not believe in miracles. From the very day he’d been thrown into the Trials room and asked to kill the sixty other children, he was certain that if a God existed, he had abandoned the universe a long time ago. Any time a person claimed something to be a work of God, he’d call them names. Rebuke them. Chastise them for being deluded morons. But on that day, when Kaiden Harroun saw his daughter, breathing and clutching onto his arm for dear life, and fell to his knees in prayer, for one moment, he let him believe that miracles did exist.

His mission complete, he smiled with joy and allowed himself to fall flat on the ground.

∆∆∆

Trent woke up feeling like barbed nails were being driven through his skull, stomach, and legs at the same time. He was mildly disappointed to see it was just bandages.

When a man spends his entire life surrounded by people trying to kill him, he often ponders about how he would meet his own end. This had a been huge topic of contention between him and Rob. The ginger oaf insisted that beheading was the best. Trent was of the stance that nothing beats impalement. Rob would say, “No no no. Hanging would be the best way to go out.”

And he would say, “Gunshot, man. One bullet. Instant finish.”

“Electrocution.”

“Frostbite.”

“Explosion.”

“How would that even work, you moron?”

And then, they’d keep bickering for another hour until Caroline was forced to come and knock some sense into them.

That was a lifetime ago.

Kaiden Harroun entered the room to find him staring at the roof like an idiot. He placed a warm cup of ginger tea next to his bed, took his temperature, and sat down with an audible thud of exhaustion. “Your friends returned shortly after you left.”

“I see.”

“I cannot thank-”

“Sea green.” Trent raised his head with a painful groan and met his gaze.

“What?”

“You asked what color my daughter’s eyes were. They were sea green. Still are, presumably. Haven’t checked in a while.”

The old man rubbed his eyes with a tired grin. “You damn fool. It was never about the color of her eyes.”

“It was for me. It matters to me that I know what color her eyes are.” His voice was shaky. “If I can’t even recall as much, none of this matters. All this bloodshed, it’s for nothing.”

Harroun widened his eyes and mocked him with a pitiful chuckle. “You are a bad parent.”

“Yes.”

“But you still love her.”

“More than my own life.”

“Then why not return to her? And don’t you dare say it’s for justice or some other crap like that. I’ve seen it in your face. I know how little justice matters to you. Tell me, son, why do you keep her at bay?”

Do I tell him? He asked himself but the clever part of his brain had already checked out thanks to the painkillers. Eh, what’s the worst that could happen?

“Mr. Harroun, I did not have a happy childhood. I never knew my real parents. Spent a long time living out of a dumpster. On a lucky day, I’d find a half-eaten bag of chips. Other times, it was empty bellies for supper. One day, I met a man wearing the most beautiful clothes I’d ever seen. He said to me: Son, you deserve a better life than this, and brought me to his home.”

“And he gave you a better life?” The old man handed him his tea.

Trent breathed in the fumes of ginger, sighed, and smiled. “Like hell, he did. Raised me to be the perfect killer, that man. Used me as his gun for years. He pointed, I killed. By the time I stopped, I had too much red on my hands to ask for anyone’s forgiveness. I cannot change who I am, Mr. Harroun. But I can ensure that my girl never comes within a mile of that life.”

“And your revenge?”

A devilish grin flickered in the corner of his mouth. “Oh, that, sir, is very much personal. When I met Lisa, my wife, for the first time, I was the kind of monster they put in bedtime stories to scare little children. But that woman, God only knows how she saw something in me. Step by step, day by day, she made me human. And someone, some miserable pile of shit I once called my friend, took her from me. I won’t rest until he’s six-foot-deep, Mr. Harroun. And no force on Earth can stop me.” He drank from his cup in slow deliberate sips.

The old man reclined in his seat; his face covered in tiny beads of sweat. He wiped them away with a towel and sighed. “I don’t know whether I should curse you or pity you.”

“No one says you can’t do both, sir.” He smiled playfully.

“But you did return my daughter to me. You risked your life for a stranger. I can only imagine how much you love your own child. Helping you would be betraying my country. But not helping you would be betraying God. What do you need to know?”

Harroun’s words brightened his injured face with the brilliant glow of the midday sun. Just you wait, Roland. Just you wait.