Waters of Lethe, Book 2

58. Ossi

Two weeks later, we were in Cairo. Within the two weeks, Scott and his assistants continued testing, continued picking our brains apart. Which continued to give me pounding headaches and ill feelings. We worked our way through the crowded, narrow streets of vendors, tourists, and natives as we searched out our target, who, in an amusing way, was here on holiday.

I strolled along behind Alex, trying not to have a claustrophobia induced panic attack, while Jai followed behind me. Alex looked around, behind him, behind me, until he grabbed my arm and tugged me up beside him so he could talk quietly and still have me hear him.

He dipped his head so that his mouth was an inch away from my ear. "Nothing like Ghent, huh?" 

Ghent was a beautiful city in Belgium, one that made me feel two inches tall and nearly as insignificant. It was marvelous, from the way boats floated along the waterways that ran between the buildings to the ancient-looking buildings themselves. 

Although I would have loved to stop and sight see, we didn't have time.  As much as I tried not to think of Ghent and the phantom pain that shot through my thigh as we walked through Cairo, I couldn't help but run back though the night in five seconds flat.

*****************

"You alright?" Alex whispered behind him. 

I tried to stomach the nausea that had come with the brain monitoring, along with the headaches and sour moods. When Alex spoke to me, it took a while to figure out what he said. "Yeah." I stared at his silhouette in the dark light of the old, grand church we were in. Ghent was full of old Roman Catholic churches, so it took a while to find the right one. 

The green stain glass windows cast an eerie glow on Alex as he passed in front of them, one by one, pistol raised. "That yeah doesn't sound very convincing. Need to take a break?" he whispered again.

I stifled a laugh. "You're kidding, right? We don't have time."

"I'd rather you take a break than puke all over me."

"I'm fine."

I pictured him nodding in frustration as we turned the corner in a large hallway, one that had religious paintings of naked people under apple trees with little angels flying around their heads.

"Would you like to come back here one day?" I asked him, sweeping my gun behind me to scan the area as we advanced. An unsettling thought crossed my mind. "Do you even know where you're going?"

"Maybe. What makes you ask? And yes."

"I don't know," I whispered back. "It'd be nice to have a vacation, you know? We shouldn't have to see the world this way. And good. Because I don't know where the heck we are."

He seemed to take my words in as we were ambushed. It was the first time we had ever been caught off guard, but what could we say? We were trained well.

A bullet grazed my right thigh. It happened so unexpectedly that I didn't have time to scream or yelp or do anything to let the world know that I was in pain.

It didn't matter. The fact that I'd been hit, or that Alex's eyes got wide when he saw the oddly high amount of blood seeping through my black pants, making the fabric even darker in the dark hallway we'd retreated around.

"I'm... fine!" I gasped. And that was the truth. I could tell from the location of the pain, how it was localized, that the bullet hadn't lodged itself in my leg. Even more assuring, I pulled the tight fabric away from my leg to show Alex where the bullet had torn it in a long line as it made its pass.

He nodded vigorously, trying to get his bearings. 

The shooting hadn't stopped in the minute it took to assess my leg or the damage. I brought my bloody hands back up, pointing my gun at the hallway we'd came from, as Alex did the same. We listened to the gunfire as we thought.