Sifting Sand
- 1-
Far from home in a place both familiar and foreign, two mostly strangers try to keep their heads attached to their bodies and have little reason to hope of finding their way back. One desperately wants answers, the other is haunted by them.
She was
half a block away talking to a man in chainmail. Waves of heat bent the world
between where he stood and where she was standing with the other man. She looked as if she belonged in that street
surrounded by dust, heat, and the scent of sun-baked manure. He knew that look.
It was no accident that they found themselves thrust back in time. She was too
prepared. Her lies were too smoothed by research. The truth has holes that no
one would bother to question but she had an answer to questions unasked. He
receded further into the shadows of an overhang with hope that no one would
look at him close enough to notice his odd clothing. Definitely planned or she
wouldn’t have commented on his clothes earlier in the office. Yet, she was just an intern with an
associate’s in arts. How could she have known? She was nobody. How could she
have done what the organization had failed so many times to do? While he was
thinking, she’d walked back his way.
“Follow
me,” she mouthed before moving past him and turning into an even narrower
street. He did.
“Knock
him out when he gets here,” she told him when he caught up.
“What?”
he asked, blinking slowly.
“Just
do it. I’ll explain after,” she hissed.
He
didn’t have time to think about it because a few heartbeats later the man she’d
been talking to bumped into him. He moved before the man had a chance to react
to his presence. His elbow collided with his nose. The man had been wearing
chainmail. It was the only opening that would take him down quickly. It was
deadly. A pool of blood gathered on the dusty ground. The smell of it was
overpowered by warm trash and waste but someone would notice the man
eventually.
She was
pale when he looked back at her. She was looking at the corpse. He wanted to
ask her what she expected but the footsteps and voices from outside the
stillness of the alley were making his spine crawl. He took her roughly by the
upper arm and dragged her away. Her feet were barely moving but she wasn’t
resisting.
“Stop
looking back,” he said when they were a ways through the maze of alleys and
onto another street.
He
expected clever words and a biting tone. Instead, he got silence and obedience.
He caught her eye for a moment and felt as if he’d stepped over an ancient and
revered grave. He shuddered in the scalding air. There were no tears in her
gaze and they lacked the sharp look of her ire. There was only a look that
belonged better on a corpse than a woman with a heartbeat. He didn’t disturb
her silence after that.
“We can’t
leave the city right now,” she whispered. The sun had begun to set and they had
neared the city gates.
“We
have to,” he said without looking at her.
“Only bad sorts leave a city at
night and they’re remembered. Decent folk leave before dawn to make the most of
daylight travel,” she said before catching his gaze.
His
heart quickened and then slowed when he saw that her expression was one more
befitting of the living. He got her message. Her shoulders relaxed at his nod.
She handed him a small leather pouch. It looked full but felt empty.
“You’ll
have to pay for the room and say I’m your wife. I won’t be able to speak in
there,” she said.
“That
man ---,” he started.
“Thought
I was a whore,” she said with an odd half-smile.
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