Waters of Lethe, Book 2

23. Without a Paddle

A month had passed since Alex and I retrieved the Tibetan boy, whose name turned out to be Kalden. That first mission, Alex told me, would haunt me for weeks to come.

"It's normal," he told me one day while we were stretching for a game of basketball. "You'll wonder what you could have done better, what mistakes you could have avoided. If you'd have taken this or that shot, if we went fast enough, if we would have made a right turn instead of a left turn. Don't let it get to you. And as far as the Americans go... well, stuff happens, doesn't it?"

Every day I wondered how we made it out alive, how we'd gotten past the Americans who had tracked us down, somehow. It wasn't a stroke of luck on their behalf, though. I knew that they'd seen me on the cameras in the airport at Shimla. I didn't want Alex to take them out, but they were dangerous looking, almost vicious. When they began to pile out of their vehicles, weapons drawn, Alex put bullets into each of them before they knew who exactly they were dealing with. I didn't protest due to the fact that I was in complete shock. What if they weren't evil people? What if they wanted to help me? Help Alex? I didn't say much to him on the trip back. I made myself useful by placing a stun dart in Kal's chest every time he woke up and began muttering in a language we didn't quite understand.

It was funny, however, because as soon as his first week in brain wave monitoring passed, a period we all went through so that they could monitor us and make sure we were who they thought we were, Kal began speaking perfect English. He was a quiet guy, tall and muscular, tan skin and black hair. He blended in soon enough with the r

I didn't bother talking much after that first trip. I'd been on two other trips since Tibet: a trip to Yokohama, Japan with Alex and Enzo, and a trip to Lima, Peru with only Alex. Lima was pretty much a scouting run, where we went and scoped out a potential target that Scott wasn't too sure about. It was a dry run, something that Alex told me happened more often than they'd like. It was costly to send two people to another country and have them stay a few days just to come back empty handed.

In Yokohama, however, we'd retrieved Rin. We (Alex and Enzo) had ambushed her while she was on her way home from a school function one night. I watched as she kicked Enzo's ass before Alex could get a hold of her, restraining her arms behind her back as I put a dart in her stomach. She slid down Alex's legs, out cold, her jet black hair falling in front of her face. She was nineteen, two weeks away from finishing high school.

Standing there, watching Enzo catch his breath while Alex laughed at him for being a wimp, I thought about how cruel the world was. Two weeks away from graduating high school. We couldn't have waited two weeks and one day later to do this?

That night, back on the plane to Toronto, I thought about the two weeks that were stolen from Rin. The life that would be stolen from her. As I drifted off to sleep, a memory came back to me.

I sat in a warm house on a leather couch, the familiar Asian guy sitting across from me in a recliner with his lean,strong legs kicked up. Though the house was warm, the atmosphere was made cold by the handsome man. We were talking. He looked disgusted with me, like I had disappointed him somehow.

"I hit you, and you think I'm too nice still?" I asked him.

"Do you see a black eye?"

I shook my head. "Well, no, but....I still tried. And I'm proud of that."

He rolled his eyes. "You shouldn't be."

"Why are you so mean?" I asked.

The words I said to him replayed over and over in my mind. Why are you so mean? That was the first memory I had of him where he felt mean, as if I could feel the anger coming off him in waves. After that memory, more angry ones followed. I'd try to fall asleep in the living quarters back in Toronto, only to get on the edge of unconsciousness and have a memory of him return to me. In one memory, he stood in the kitchen of the warm home made cold by him as he sipped on one of the many bottles of alcohol he had stock piled in his cabinets. In another memory, we were on a plane. I'd made him angry, made him stalk away from me to the back of the plane. I made the mistake of following him to the back, only to have him spin around and get in my face about something. I never knew what it was he got in my face about because I'd always jolt awake, afraid of him, not wanting to see that side of him.