Caspian sat next to her on the train, reading the journal quite closely, his nose almost literally buried in the book. Anya sat nervously, twiddling her thumbs and drinking from her Russian equivalent of Coca Cola.
What is he thinking? Gah! I wish he had he’s goddamn emotions so I could ask him. She thought, her eyebrow twitching.
“Bilet pozhaluysta?”
“What?” The more-American-than-Russian-when-you-think-about-it girl looked up, startled.
The man sighed through his nose and said carefully in heavily accented English. “Ticket please?”
“Oh,” Anya muttered, “Sure, yeah here.” She handed a crumpled ticket from her pocket to the man. He made a few clicks with his... Ticket-thingy and handed it back to her.
Caspian looked up from the journal to see the ticket man staring at him. “Oh,” he muttered emotionlessly (what a surprise). He whipped a piece of paper out of thin air, or so it seemed, and handed it to the man.
The conductor narrowed his eyes at the Shadow Guardian and took the ticket slowly. Caspian spoke in fluent Russian, “K sozhaleniyu, ya ne videla vas tam.”
Anya struggled to translate it for herself, it sounded like: sorry, I didn’t see you... There? Sorry I didn’t see you there.
The man took the ticket and left them alone, moving to the next group of passengers slowly, glancing behind him warily at the dark-blue haired boy.
“You know,” the Gatekeeper growled, stabbing him in the side with her fingernails (this resulted in a jump by the Shadow boy, which satisfied Anya a bit), “you can’t just make things appear out of thin air and expect people to be okay with it.”
He answered, “the conductor didn’t ask twice.”
“Because you- agh! It’s just because you knew Russian. That’s all. If you spoke English he wouldn’t have forgiven you that easily,” Anya spluttered.
Caspian let his lips curl up in a stony-eyed smile. “I speak every language that humans speak.”
“French.”
“Oui, madame.”
“Everyone knows at least that much French!”
He let his smile deflate back to his usual straight-lined gaze. “Not now, Anya. Not now. If it’s not needed, I won’t speak a different language than you speak.”
Anya muttered, “So... English.”
“Indeed.”
“‘Indeed’? Jeez, you need lessons on 2013 dialect.”
Caspian ignored her and went back to the journal.
The black-haired girl noticed that her cola was finished, and felt the need to get up and look around the train. “Do you want anything? I’m going to the dining car.”
“A bottle of water please.”
“Got it.”
The dining car was quite far away from their car, and there was a very long line. After getting the water and another cola, Anya stopped at the restroom and made it back to the booth about thirty minutes after she left.
Caspian was asleep.
The Gatekeeper girl set down the two drinks on the table and sat right next to him, studying his face. Instead of the heartless determination that usually was etched on his face, she saw a careful innocence that he would never show when he was awake.
YOU ARE READING
The GateKeeper of Atlantis
Science FictionOff the coast of Siberian Russia, an old city forgotten by time sits at the bottom of the ocean. For many years, the guardians of Poseidon have kept the city safe from the winds of Hades that threaten the life of the sleeping souls. Anya is the nex...
