“Solid.
So what about the other guy?” Regulus asked.
Vertin did not answer right away.
She leaned on the wall inside the suitcase, her coat still damp from the Storm, her hands folded.
The little room around them was quiet.
APPLe floated near the ceiling, staying silent as it often did.
Regulus sat across from her, arms crossed, waiting.
“The one who stood in the street?” she said finally.
“Yes.
Him.”
She looked down at her own hands.
“I keep going back and forth on it,” she said.
“Whether I actually saw what I think I saw.”
“What do you mean?” Regulus asked.
“I mean I’m not sure if it really happened,” she said.
“Or if the Storm was simply playing a trick on my eyes.”
She frowned, like she was trying to read a page that kept moving.
“It looked like the Storm was trying not to hurt him,” she said.
“Like it was being careful, like what happened to that building.
He didn’t even flinch as if he expected it.
That’s not something the Storm does.”
Regulus tilted her head.
“You think it was avoiding him on purpose?” she asked.
“I do not know what to think,” Vertin said.
“That is the problem.”
She looked up at Regulus.
“Did you see him the same way I did?” she asked.
Regulus thought about it for a moment.
“I saw someone standing there,” she said.
“Arms behind his back, looking very pleased with himself for some reason.
Until you pushed me inside of this thing.”
The slight displeasure in her voice was clear.
“And the rest?” Vertin asked.
Regulus went quiet.
She rubbed her temple, like she was trying to push a memory back into place.
“The rest is strange,” she said.
“I try to picture his face and there’s nothing there.
Just a blur.”
“Same,” Vertin said.
“I can’t even tell you what color his coat was.”
She rubbed her own temple too, an unconscious mirror of Regulus.
“It’s like trying to remember a dream a few hours after waking up,” she said.
“The longer I try to hold onto it, the more it slips.”
APPLe finally spoke up from its spot near the ceiling.
“That is not normal forgetting,” APPLe said.
“Forgetting fades slowly, piece by piece.
This feels more like something is standing in front of the memory on purpose.”
“Like a veil,” Vertin said quietly.
“A veil,” APPLe agreed.
“Something between you and the memory itself, not the memory falling apart on its own.”
Regulus crossed her arms.
“That’s a comforting thought,” she said.
“Something’s hiding a man from our own heads.
Wonderful.
Just what I needed today with all of those other things.”
Vertin was still turning the same thought over in her head, again and again, like a coin she could not stop flipping.
‘Something doesn’t want us to remember him clearly,’ she thought.
‘But it let us remember enough to know he was there at all.’
‘Why leave that much behind, if it wanted to hide him?’
She did not have an answer for that either.
Vertin nodded slowly.
She closed her eyes and tried again, one more time, to picture him.
“His shape was there, at least,” she said.
“Roughly a man’s shape.
Rather tall.
Nothing more specific than that.”
“His voice too,” Regulus added.
“I remember he spoke.
I don’t remember the words very well, but I remember the sound of it.”
“What did it sound like?” Vertin asked.
“Deeper than I expected, like way deeper,” Regulus said.
“Deeper than his build should have allowed, if that makes any sense.
Like his voice belonged to someone larger than him.”
Vertin opened her eyes again.
“That matches what I remember,” she said.
“A deep voice.
Nothing else about it stayed with me.”
“What did he even say?” APPLe asked.
“Either of you?
Anything at all?”
Regulus squinted, like she was trying to read something written very far away.
“Something about being rude,” she said slowly.
“And something about an abomination.
He pointed at the sky when he said it.”
“He pointed at the Storm and called it an abomination,” Vertin said, “and then he smiled at me right after.”
“That’s either extremely brave,” Regulus said, “or extremely stupid.”
“With most people, I would say stupid,” Vertin said.
“But he saw the Storm clearly.
Truly saw it, the way we do.
That’s not something someone manages to do by accident.”
“Maybe he is both,” APPLe offered.
“Brave and stupid are not exactly strangers to each other.”
Vertin allowed herself the smallest, tired smile at that.
“Maybe,” she said.
She looked down at her hands again, turning the thought over slowly.
“A silhouette, roughly male,” she said, half to herself.
“A voice, deeper than it should be.
That’s all we have.”
“That’s all we have,” Regulus repeated, “and even that feels like it’s slipping while we sit here talking about it.”
Vertin was quiet for a moment.
“I want to know more about him,” she said.
Regulus raised an eyebrow.
“Why?” she asked.
“He’s strange but the Storm seems stranger.”
“Because of what he did,” Vertin said.
“He stood in the open street while the Storm tore the whole block apart around him, and he did not have a scratch on him afterward.”
She looked straight at Regulus.
“I have never seen anyone survive the Storm like that except me,” she said.
“He’s the only person besides me that I have ever seen walk away from one untouched.”
“Maybe he’s just lucky,” Regulus said.
“Maybe,” Vertin said.
“But I don’t believe that, and neither do you, not really.”
Regulus did not argue that point.
She uncrossed her arms and let them fall into her lap instead.
“Alright,” she said.
“Say he’s something more than lucky.
Say the Storm really did go easy on him, for whatever reason.
What does that change?”
“Everything,” Vertin said.
“If something out there can stand against the Storm and walk away whole, I need to know what that something is.”
“For the mission?” Regulus asked.
“Or for the truth?”
Vertin did not answer that right away.
“Both, probably,” she admitted.
Regulus studied her for a moment, the way she might study a card she was not sure how to play yet.
“You have a certain look on your face when something interests you,” she said.
“You have that look right now.”
“I wasn’t aware I had a look,” Vertin said.
“Neither did I,” Regulus said.
“…
So I want to find him,” Vertin said.
“I want to know what he is, and why the Storm treated him the way it did.”
“Find him?” Regulus said, and let out a short, humorless laugh.
“Vertin, he vanished into thin air in the middle of the street.
One moment he was standing there, and the next he was simply gone.
How exactly do you plan on finding a man who disappears out of nowhere?”
Vertin opened her mouth to answer.
Nothing came out.
She sat there for a moment, turning the question over, trying to find some thread of an answer inside it and finding none.
‘She’s right,’ Vertin thought.
‘I don’t even know where to start.’
‘A face I can’t picture.
A voice I can barely recall.’
‘For now, I’ll continue with my original plans.’
Before she could say anything, the whole suitcase shook again.
The little room trembled around them, the walls groaning faintly, like something large had bumped against the outside of it.
Vertin was on her feet before the shaking even finished.
“I have to take care of that first,” she said.
She was already moving toward the door of the little room, her hand reaching for the handle.
Regulus watched her go, then let out a long breath and leaned back where she sat.
“Mr.
APPLe, could you please give Vertin a hand?” she said.
“I…
need some time to think about all this…
About everything you said.”