Callisto

Jespar Alone (pt. 2)

He waited in the dark.

The bunker's cold, ever-buzzing mechanical lights blazed their burning amber above him. But they offered no radiance, no prospect of warmth. They presented the faint suggestion of heat only.

He had had time to think since the interrogations had begun. But he had had even more time since his most recent spat with the marked man who now ruled this place since Nicole's father had passed away.

'Passed' being the operative word, he thought. Bullshit.

For three months, they'd been at their mercy. For three months, he'd been subjected to endless training and questioning. The training was harsh and unrepentant. It was to make him into something that could survive "out there." That's how they referred to the outside. It was the "out there" – some far-off, separate dimension.

But the questioning – the interrogations – they happened in the dead of night, in the dimly lit room filled with only the ghostly serpentine whisps of twirling cigarette smoke that obscured the faces of his captors. They weren't about him, really. They were about his dreams. Dreams that told of shifting sands and dying winds – dreams that told of horrors he'd never even seen but felt some intimate connection with. It was as though the tremendous hulking spiders, giant worms, chittering buzzards, and God knows what else out there were some long-lost cousins, driven mad with longing as they too dreamed dreams that told them of the world they now inhabited.

And the tiny thing that lay at its core. That tiny thing held galaxies of possibility and abysses of despair.

"Do you really know where it is, Jespar?"

Nicole had asked him one night in the lab after he had sent the soldiers off on another wild goose chase, and he had felt the fury of the marked one's fists across his already misshapen face. She had tried her best to cuddle and console him, but these days all he felt was blind rage.

"Course I do," he replied. "But they'll never get it."

"But you know where it is," she said again, almost shaking him. He could see the grief in her eyes and the glint of purpose in her words. "Tell me."

He looked up at her, close to tears himself.

"You trust me, don't you?"

Of course he did. How could he not? But deep in his heart, there was a place that told him she was still a human. Even so, he was too far gone now. He loved her. She could've told him to throw himself into the evil winds that blew out there, and he'd do so gladly.

But as he told her what he knew, he saw the realization creep across her face of the sheer futility of it all. She nodded as he weaved the story and had to keep her mouth from gaping open at the revelation of why they wouldn't ever find it. When he finished, she was as composed as a scientist could be, and a strange kind of resolve overcame her features.

"Jespar," she said. "If this is true, nobody can ever find it. Nobody – except you."

He nodded. "You got that right. But try getting that through their thick skulls. He won't hear it. He won't accept it, Nicole. He won't accept that something out there can't be his. That's the kind of man he is. That's why, even if I tell them where it is, it's pointless."

She nodded again. "They need you. You're the key."

He scoffed. "And don't I feel special?"

He meandered for a minute before seeking out his water bowl and slopping up the liquid inside. As he sloshed around, Nicole watched him, pondering as she often did.

"I can feel you watching me," he said as he finished, licking his lips.

"Jespar," she began. "You're going to tell him where it is."