The Gemini Age: Book One

[8-1] The Certainty of Change - Part One

    Her mouth was dry. Her chest pulsed with heat. What plagued Skye above all as she came to, however, was the way her eyelids scraped against her eyes as they peeled open. A clutch of coughs forced their way out of her constricted throat, and her vision drowned beneath the swamp of tears that swilled in her eyes and leaked down her cheeks. As the blur ebbed away, she wafted away the fog in her mind and pieced together the fragmented scenes that constituted her memories.

    The chemical stench of her flannel completed the circuit. Skye gave in to the sudden impulse to torch the car seat in front of her, but none of her many attempts to start a fire grew beyond sparks. "How dare you!" she cried at the back of Trigger's hairy head. "Do you expect my father to let you get away with treating his daughter this way?"

    Trigger did not stir from the steering wheel, though the road ahead of them was straight and clear of traffic. The person in the front passenger seat, who Skye pieced together through her hazy vision as Laz, flicked his eye at her over his shoulder but kept his mouth shut. Skye reached her boiling point. "Hey! I'm talking to you!" she yelled, kicking the back of his seat with what little power she could muster.

    "They haven't spoken a word," a voice to her side said. Surprised, Skye fell back in her seat and saw a tall, well-dressed man by her side. She supposed he was the target of this mission, at least according to Trigger's convoluted scheme, yet struggled to recall his name through the sludge clogging her mind. After a moment, she gave up. Provided he could get her to the Gemini, she did not much care who he was. "I assumed it was because I was their captive, but it seems you aren't in a better position."

    Skye scoffed, retching at the taste of ash that filled her mouth. "Shut it," she spat as she battled with her aching limbs to withdraw her phone from her pocket. "Captives don't talk."

    He shuffled in his seat and adjusted his jacket with his bound hands, their flesh drained of colour with the pressure of his bonds. "Nor do fellow conspirators, it seems." Resistance seemed far from his mind, despite Trigger's grave oversight in leaving his mouth ungagged and free to manipulate the air if he so chose. Escape might be implausible given his injured and bound condition, but he did not even try to make life more difficult for them, something that was so ingrained into Skye's thoughts that to call it second nature was still to place it too far from her instincts. The events of last night attested to his skill, yet his face lay steady as stone, cool and opaque as the lights that flashed overhead lit up his every wrinkle of years-old exhaustion.

    Switching her phone back on, Skye sighed at the number of broadcast messages sent by Taylor and Cole that painstakingly detailed the organisational changes her father had set out yesterday. Such was her exile from command that she was tagged in just one message, a roster of underlings intended to rub in the humiliation of her demotion, now recorded on official documents. Her name sat beneath the forgettable names of Trigger Ross' company, smothered, drowned, erased. She tossed her phone onto the empty seat between her and the captive in response. Petty admin pranks were all Taylor and Cole were good for.

    "You seem young for a gang member," he said, his dark eyes following her every move. "Where are your parents? Your family?" Still, he made no effort to defend himself. In fact, he seemed more than content to wait as long as necessary for her answer, as if this were any ordinary car journey.

    Skye stared out the window, too exhausted to threaten him into silence. "I don't need them," she muttered as she struggled to stop the sinking of her eyelids. "I'm fine."

    He furrowed his brow and tapped the tips of his deathly fingers together. "I used to say the same thing, about family, about friends..." he sighed, dropping his gaze to his scuffed shoes. "I lost a lot of years saying I was fine. I nearly lost those most important to me, too."