The reception underground is appalling. He expected it to be so when he was briefed on where he would be going, and was then pleasantly surprised when he was able to contact Wes while on the train on the way to his new apartment. The Black Pool, however, reaffirms his earlier concerns on how truly shitty reception underground can get.

​

He can barely hear the voice of the man talking to him. It sounds like a malfunctioning robot so defiantly struggling to continue on its mission. It’s a trial, but he can hear.  Of course he can hear. If he couldn’t, then something would be very wrong with him.

 

“Can you hear me?”

 

He nods, and remembers that the man he talks to can't see him. “Loud and clear, sir.”

 

“You made it safely?”

 

“Yes.”

 

A sigh on the other end of the line. Is it one of relief, or something else?

 

“Sir?” he says, trying his hardest to keep even a hint of sarcasm out of his voice. “What am I supposed to do after I find her? I haven’t been briefed on what exactly this mission is.”

 

All anyone ever did was give him a picture to go with, say that the person in it is his target.

 

He digs out the photograph from his pocket and looks at the back. There is a short summary of the girl whose likeness is the picture. Her name, age, height, ethnicity, the languages she can speak. Her family’s names, friends, and what their relationship to her is.

 

The folder in his backpack is more detailed. He has already perused its contents several times over. Nothing in it gives him any indication on what the hell he’s doing in the Lowlands, of all places.

 

He flips it and stares at the picture on the front. In it there is a girl with copper brown curls, pulled in a thick braid down her back, wispy curling bangs falling over her forehead and brushing over her eyebrows. Her surrounding resembles a university classroom, luminous lights hanging overhead to drive out the perpetual darkness. Her skin is a light brown, but too pale, like she’s becoming a ghost. Her eyes are a normal shade of brown, yet it feels like they are piercing through him, even though she doesn’t see the camera’s lenses trained on her.

 

He has the strangest feeling, a dragon curling in his gut lazily, about the girl in the picture. It’s like he knows he should recognize her, but he also knows that he simply doesn’t. It’s like his subconscious realizes that there is something bad about not knowing her.

 

Over the years, he’s come to realize that to stay alive he needs to trust these feelings. They warn him when his time is drawing close, when he needs to isolate himself to stop anyone getting hurt. He knows them as those primal instincts that kept humans alive in the times when they were the hunted, and not the hunters.

 

But he usually understands them. He always knows what they are trying to tell him. Now he has no idea why the dragon is stirring.

 

Nobody told him what he was supposed to do once he found the girl. All anyone ever did was give him a picture to go by, and a folder with mandatory inspection information. He suspects why he’s here, of course he does, but he doesn’t get sent on missions like these.

 

Besides, the girl seems perfectly ordinary – but then, that’s the thing, isn’t it? All of them looked normal on the outside, until they realized they weren’t. It’s what goes on inside their heads that sets them apart. Maybe this girl is like him, and that’s what makes her not-ordinary anymore.

 

He’s been told that he’d be briefed on what the next step of the plan is once he settled in the apartment. But he is talking to someone in charge now. He figures, why wait?

 

A pause. A long, heavy pause that stretches into a brief eternity. Then, “Watch her. See if she is like the others. Get her to trust you. Protect her, and make sure she comes to no harm.”

 

He is unduly comfortable with the man’s assumption. This girl looks timid and shy, hardly able to harm an ant, and certainly not the type to make enemies of anyone. He knows how little crime activity there is here. Who would risk the harsh punishment of the law here by hurting her?

 

“Who would hurt her, sir?” he asks, fishing. “Nobody knows I am here. Nobody saw us arrive. I doubt anybody realizes what she is.”

 

She probably doesn’t either, he adds silently.

​

“We have a mole in our ranks.”

 

This time it is he who hesitates. For a brief moment, he doesn’t know how to respond. He swallows his shock like a rock that’s stuck in his throat, and asks, “Do we know who it is?”

 

“Investigations are being discreetly conducted as we speak to find out. That mole has told the traitors that we have found another one, that we’re closer to what we need than ever before. They know you’re there, and they want her. They just don’t know anything in particular about her.”

 

He needs to know how much the ‘traitors’ do know about her. “Her name? What she looks like?”

 

“They don’t have a clue.”

 

That is good to know. Still, he wonders how reliable that assumption is when they don’t know who the mole is, or how much the mole knows and has already told the ‘traitors’.

 

“And what if she doesn’t want them?”

 

A short, brutal laugh. “If, by some unprecedented luck on their part, they get a hold of her – and I trust you will not let that happen – and she refuses to cooperate with them, they will kill her.”

​

The rock splinters a little, pieces falling down to chip at his chest.

 

“She’s more use to them alive than dead. They’ll just force her cooperation.”

 

“Yes, she’s more use to them alive. Yes, they will force her cooperation – yet that only lasts so long. They can’t force loyalty.”

 

No, they can’t. What they can do, though, is twist the truth around so many times it looped back in on itself and no longer looked anything like reality, so they wouldn't need to force her loyalty, if its to a reality she believes in.

 

He continues “They’d sooner want to see her dead and us at a disadvantage more than they want to use her. They don’t care to make people work for them if they refuse to. Understand?”

 

“Understood, sir.”

 

He is about to hang up the phone and fling it into the darkness of what the people here call the Black Pool. He does not want to be caught with the phone in his possession and asked troublesome questions he’d rather not deal with. But before he can, the voice on the other end stops him.

 

“One more thing.”

​

He brings the phone back to his ear, half-wishing he’d already discarded the phone. “Yes?”

 

Another lengthy pause. “Be careful. You’re on your own in enemy territory now, and their grip in the Lowlands is strong. More so than it’s ever been before. Take care of both of yourselves.”

 

His unnatural green eyes stare out into the empty space of the void in front of him as his hand tightens on the phone. “Understood, sir.”

 

“Take care of her, Ashton. We can’t lose her.”

 

“Yes, sir. Understood.”

 

He shuts the phone before his commander can lecture him more on the necessities of being hidden, of staying that way, of doing everything possible to remain under the radar of the enemy. He’s heard this lecture so many times before, for every mission his ever been sent on. He has no wish to hear it again.

 

Slinging his arm far back behind him, he jerks his shoulder forward and lets his arm follow the movement of his shoulder. In a half circle his arm moves forward and he lets go of the phone clasped tightly in his hand. In the deadly stillness of the black cavern, he can hear the whistle of the small device singing through the air.

 

He stands utterly still for a full minute before he hears the definite splash of the phone breaking through of the surface of the invisible water who knows how far below the lip of the edge of the cliff. His breath does not make a sound as it whispers past his lips. The only sign that he is not a statue of a Greek god as he stands and listens for the sound of intruding footsteps is the gentle but steady rise and fall of his chest.

 

He breathes like a fugitive. Like an assassin. Like a shadow caught under the glare of the sun and now waiting to see if anyone will notice it before it disappears again.

 

Visible but silent.

 

Even as he turns and finds his way back to the yawning mouth that is the entrance to the Black Pool, his feet make no sound. The only sign that he was ever there to begin with are a set of footprints that follow behind him as he leaves. He sees no need to cover those up. Even if the enemy were to come to the Black Pool in the unlikelihood that they knew he’d been there, they would be hard-pressed to find him from just his boot prints. The shoes he wears are standard issue, worn by millions of others in the Lowlands.

 

It would just be an unnecessary waste of time to bother concealing his footprints.

 

He turns the corner of the entrance, sees the swinging lamplight of the sentry who guards the Black Pool, and breaks into a light jog, heading for Apartment Building 23E.