#a-shadow-far-cast

@a-shadow-far-cast

As Eleanor paid close attention, she couldn’t stop the wheels from turning. The blades of grass beneath her boot, the leaves that fell from the trees, the strong and steady brick of the structures and the people that resided within them...

Eleanor Novak was, legally, queen of it all.

The weight of everything and everyone pressed down on her shoulders. But \she knew it needn’t be that way. “If there is a more opportune time for change,” she lamented, “I’d hate to see the cataclysm that precedes it... But you’re right. The power’s in my hands. And I don’t have to wear a crown to do good. Two ideas that that are leading me to another...”

Before Eleanor could finish her thought, Floss’s phone pulled her attention away. Lissy, no doubt. As Floss sat on the tree stump, Eleanor saw movement in the corner of her eye, deep in the trees. She studied it for a while before the saw hints of brown fur. She readied her rifle took a prone stance and waited. It was not unlike the waiting games she played as a Naval officer. But her target here would move far sooner than an enemy soldier on the field....and to miss wouldn’t mean immediate danger--

A fool’s thought. Eleanor tossed it from her head. She wouldn’t dare miss.

It poked its head from the cover of the tree it stood behind--a sizable buck, at least 300lbs, maybe more. Eleanor’s finger was primed to pull the trigger when a thought intruded upon her focus and destroyed it.

She was the queen of the deer, too.

The trigger was too firm to pull. Eleanor stood from her position and turned back to Floss, who had an earful to say. The whole circus was coming with an unconscious O-Ren in their care. “Well, I guess Pan is relying on her friends rather than avoiding them. Finally. We should probably tell Molly she’s on her way....and....”

Eleanor looked to the trees once more and found them empty.

“We should probably order out. That deer is long gone. While we’re figuring that out, we can see if my old cellar survived.” Eleanor began to disassemble the rifle. “Not my finest hunt. But we all have our off days.”

Floss’ brain spun with that old scientific fascination. Despite everything, and perhaps due to her own past, she still had a morbid curiosity for poisons. Whoever had cooked up the one in the report was good...But she was better. 

“We’ve got nothing less than a delegation about to land on us, pretty much literally. Sounds like they’re not wasting much time about it either.” A shrug. “Oh well, you’ll hear no complaints from me - there’s good Italian and Cantonese places in town. Maybe I should drive in and pick it up myself, get this sequence running ahead of time. The University wont give me any trouble over it.” 

Floss’ boots moved slowly over the moist grass, a thoughtful look on her face. She was good at keeping secrets, it was part of the job. But she respected Eleanor too much as a colleague and a human to keep this particular hot coal in her pocket much longer. She watched her expertly disassemble the rifle. A light drizzle was starting to fall.

“But before all of that.” The words were almost abrupt, she stopped in her tracks, eyes cast slightly downward before rising to meet the eyeline of the markswoman. 

“I wanted to get something out of the way before Molly joins us...And half of the Japanese underworld not long after that.” She bit her lip.

“I sent an email to Pan. About Agnes, about the Somnia programme. I don't know exactly where you stand on it. There are calls for justice, reasonable calls, but I thought maybe...Maybe I could engineer a non violent solution, something to permanently disable the hypnotic capabilities.”

The light mist of rain clung to the dark curls of Floss hair like dew in a cobweb.

“If you don't find that sufficient for justice I’d accept it. I respect your opinion. But...I for one don't long for anymore causalities.”

Her expression had a tinge of pleading to it. “What do you think?”

-

@a-shadow-far-cast

“Tear it down, build it back better. That’s the idea, right?” Eleanor replied bitterly. “I try not to speak ill of Lissy’s dad, but I have to wonder how much of everything that has happened is ‘acceptable,’ to him. I love Lissy too, as much as any one of us who know her, but....the world wasn’t his to offer her. And the lives lost weren’t his to take. But at the same time...yea. You’re right. The machine is wrecked. And the people who can build something in its place just all happen to be best friends.  Well, all of us except for Paris. I’m sure we stand to benefit from her inclusion in some way.. but right now...I don’t see it.”

Her frustration grew as she scanned the trees again and found them defiantly still. “Apparently I don’t see our deer either.” She hoisted her rifle over her shoulder and started for the treeline.

As Pan’s right hand, Eleanor had grown used to the questions about her disappearance. The standard issue reply that it was above their clearance came as naturally as breathing. But the silence in the air was heavier than the constant barrage of inquiry. “One thing more tiring than that line of questioning is being alone in the truth.” Eleanor stopped moving. She sighed. A resignation occurred as she set her eyes forward and started moving again.

“I only pretend to be an idiot.” Eleanor admitted. “Lissy told me the particulars of her disappearance the night she left.” She stopped again, looking around the landscape. The only creatures other that Floss there were now the wiser were the birds. It made speaking a little easier. “She had a suspicion and she wanted a bit of peace and quiet if it turned out to be true. So she bought a beachside villa off the books. Then the truth hits her and she suddenly had the idea of tying up loose ends; started flying O-Ren ishii all over the place. All the tribulation aside, I’m excited for this new phase of her life...but she’d using duty to mask panic. She has friends who had helping her as best as they can....but if she does too much more, we have an idea to convince her to come home. That’s...if Molly doesn’t beat us to it. As for Cyanne...”

Eleanor paused once more. “I don’t know. There was a space-faring artifact that made landfall a month or so ago. The tech is old and alien but somehow easy to interface with it. Cyanne was leading research into it when she touched it and...reacted to it. She insisted that she and the stone be quarantined...but she wont say what happened or why. She took all of her research and placed it on a private server with no network access of any kind. No one’s talking about it, Floss, because no one knows about it.”

“It’s an old adage, I know, but there is truth in the idea that the best people to have power are the ones who don't actually want it.” Floss responded levelly, hands pushed into her pockets. 

“And since we’re blessedly unobserved I’ll take the opportunity to say that I’d trust Delun Doi’s motivations about as far as I could throw him with my bare hands...Which is not far. He had no right. He’s just one man, who is he to decide?” Floss frowned. 

“But there’s maybe another way of looking at it. I had a singularly inauspicious induction into this organization; I knew going in I was compromised, morally. I made horrible decisions. But something in me changed the last few years...”

She let her gaze drift out toward the edge of the woods. It felt peaceful.

“...Whether we want it or not we have the power, we could walk away - let the next person come in to fill the void. Or we could try and do something with it. I get the impression from what you’re saying that Pan is feeling that. What I know about Ishii you could write on the back of a post-it note but Pan’s responding to something. Perhaps as sense of responsibility, maybe she just cares.”

“But all that said about power and doing right-” Floss raised one eyebrow, her expression was soft, but serious. “-That doesn't mean you have to submit to having a crown put on your head.”

She shrugged, lightening. “That’s it. That’s the pep talk. I’ll promise I’ll stop going on but...what on earth, space faring artifact...??”

The phone buzzed in Floss’ pocket, derailing the question. She fished it out suspecting it was Molly. Though it wasn't like her to be unable to track the scientist’s footsteps.

“Well, speak of the devil...If you forgive the saying.” She uttered and sat back down on the tree stump. Her brow fell in concentration as her eyes took in blood panels and features of the particular poison all laid out in the reports sent by Pan. Floss could process this kind of information the way most people unthinkingly perceived melody in music. She typed back rapidly with one finger on her phone;

Well whoever cooked this up was a dab hand with a gene synthesizer, and a grudge, I suspect...

It’s a extremely effective toxin, but lucky for us it’s elegance contains it’s undoing; using all the genetic information here I just need to synthesize a corresponding rna strand to unravel it and return the genetic expression to normal function. After administration of that, the victim will almost certainly return to full health.

I don't have a gene synthesizer on hand, but there’s one in the Cambridge University labs that I could commandeer.

I’ll get on it asap...I am, slightly, distracted at present. Eleanor is here at the house with me and Molly, I’m hunting deer if you can believe it.

If you can get the patient to Cambridge I can have the antidote ready within a day or two at most.

It’ll be good to see you, toxins aside

Floss

Floss hit send and looked up at Eleanor. “I think we might be about to have even more house guests...” 

She explained everything. 

-

Molly was on the way back from Elsworth. Her fingers drumming absently on the steering wheel as mile after mile of unusually empty English motorway rolled out in front of her. She could tell Floss was trying her best, that it was well intentioned. But it all felt so obscure to her, and Liss had been about as communicative as a wall for...who even knew how long.

There it was. A tinge. The faintest touch. A single drop of ink in a glass of water. Her breath caught in her throat and her mouth dropped. Her eyes darted up and examined the rear view mirror.

The back seat was empty. Of course it was. Whatever it was it receded but it had felt like...What? She searched herself for the meaning. Sometimes she could still feel her little sister’s hand in hers, the afternoons they had walked around Brattleboro Falls. Or was it Rocket? Those nights she’d gone to find her in the bathroom on her own, picked her up and brought her back to the dorm.

@a-shadow-far-cast

Good. Floss still knew how to track. People, at least. Most lab-bound nerds tend to forget field training. Or perhaps that was Eleanor’s skewed perception of intellectual-based beings driving her prejudice. But even if it was, the idea of Floss hunting anything in the wild was enough to coax a snort out of her.

Such light-hearted moments were in short supply. She clung to it while it was still solid, but it quickly fell through her fingers like grains of sand.

Are you alright?

It was an innocent enough question, and it came from a place of love. But it broke itself over Eleanor’s like a baseball bat splitting over the back of her skull.

Eleanor opened her case and slowly assembled her rifle. “I own a studio apartment in London,” she began, “a little love nest hitting above Hilltop Hotel. I haven’t been there in years, not since Lissy called me out to help her close the Panem theater. Ever since then, I was always with her, in her cabin. In her house. And now, in her Palace.”

She double-checked her assembly. It wasn’t the automatic rifle she was used to. Her rifle of choice was a good old-fashioned bolt action rifle, with nothing but iron sights to look down. Satisfied, she pulled back on the bolt and slotted in a single round. “I haven’t seen it yet, but everything about the reports coming from London suggests that the Hilltop Hotel survived.” Eleanor’s face was dripping with self-loathing. “People who were lucky to keep their lives lost everything they ever knew. But me? The future queen? The Shadow with a liberal wallet? She’s the owner of an apartment she hasn’t seen, slept, shat, or fucked in for years. Bitch doesn’t even remember what it looks like. And get this; the apartment is totally fine. It even still has power.”

Her eyes scanned the trees for the deer...but it was hard to find it behind tears.

“Life isn’t fair, Florence.”

The pain curled off of Eleanor like a mist that stung to breathe. Florence realised how numb she had become in the last few weeks, how hyper focused she had made herself in order to deal with all of this. She perched down on a tree stump. The chilly English air smelled like rain and lifted a dark curl across Floss’ cheek as she thought. She weighed the words carefully.

      “You know I stopped off at Broadmoor Hospital on my way back? That place where I got my bordered envelope. It’s a complete ruin. Not much of it standing but the bones of the building. And the worst thing?” She paused cautiously. “I was glad. I was glad to see it gone”

She frowned, tucking her hands in her pockets. Her gaze drifted away over the countryside. The fields rolled away beneath the grey sky, clusters of houses here and there, the woodland to the east of the house spreading away like a dark smudge. Sheep still grazed on the hills, and farmers still tended them.

      “In the most brutal honesty I can give you, there are parts I’m glad to see gone. But they’re not the parts with the people. Not Camden, or the Science Institute on Russel Square, or Chinatown or Soho.”

Floss looked at the Markswoman she had known from a distance for years, the woman who might be Queen.

      “I grieve that, it hurts. Oh it hurts. But I don't grieve the demise of the people and machinery that kept it, as you say, unfair. Maybe we can do better.”

She gave a soft laugh at herself, and brushed a hand over her face, getting to her feet.

@a-shadow-far-cast

What was home?

Home was a collection of pulverized buildings overtaken by Mother Earth, now. And after she saw it with her own two eyes, she flew away with her best friend and never saw England again.  An unconscious fear ate away at her, reminding her that sooner or later, the Crown would find her, sit atop her head and command her: fix this.

She couldn’t fix this. Even with the power Delun Doi engineered for her and her friends, this problem was bigger than a single person. It was bigger than an already broken monarchy, all too easily flattened by a mad woman.

The flight to Cambridge filled her with a certain unease that she worked overtime to suppress. She spent the journey with her head against the window while a young boy swapped between a plethora of Nintendo Switch games. His enduring youth in midst of turmoil put her mind somewhat at ease. The people were bruised, yes, but they were not yet broken.

The joke’s on you, psychopath.

The plane landed in Cambridge, where she collected the only two luggage items she wished to bring: a duffle bag, and a rifle case that security gave her a minor hassle over. Rather than simply flying private, or using some deceptive method to mask the rifle, Eleanor opted to be a normal citizen and simply declared the rifle to security. A few checklist items and padlocks later, it was accepted as checked baggage and returned to her upon landing.

The cab ride to Floss’s estate was a short one. The driver dropped her off at the end of the gravel driveway and the calm of the property immediately washed over her. The sound of tree branches swaying in the gentle winds, the birdsongs in the canopy... Only then did she realize the amount of noise Pan left her with. Together with Cyanne, who recently quarantined herself, and Paris, who was having trouble reconstituting her own psyche after her conditioning was undone, she was responsible for leading the Shadows in Pan’s absence. And now that Eleanor herself was taking a break, the only force truly leading the Shadows was her idle hand, barely on the steering wheel while her focus was elsewhere. She often wondered if this new status quo, the Shadows without a proper Board of Directors, was behaving as Delun intended.

Eleanor spotted a deer, nestling in the underbrush a few yards away. She dropped her duffle but held her case firmly in hand. After sending a single text message, she left the bag in the middle of the driveway and pursued cautiously.

“Come outside. We’re hunting deer.”

Molly Reass stood thoughtfully in the large garage off the house, a list in one hand and a phone in the other. Since London had been struck by the missiles, supply problems, fuel shortages and power outages had plagued many cities in England while the adhoc collection of councils and government bodies tried to scrape things together. 

She pushed the phone into the back pocket or her worn jeans, her parka jacket swaddling her comfortably. Her long blonde hair was pulled up into a single ponytail and her face wore no less determination than it ever had. In her book, if you had the capability and the resources, you were on the line to act. Four women she loved had given up their lives for that sentiment.

With care she loaded two large boxes of antibiotics into the back seat. They were the last of the type available in the country, sent over from Addenbrooke's hospital to be redistributed to doctors surgeries around the area.

Molly’s hand was on the door handle of the truck when the inside door from the house opened. Floss peeked out.

      “Oh, are you off again?”

Molly nodded. “Yeah, just one more run today.”

Floss nodded and leant against the wall, crossing her arms over herself in the chilly garage.

      “You’re doing brilliant work Molly but, I did bring you here to try and get a break from things, you know? Why don't you go tomorrow? Come have some of my disastrous lemon cake.” Floss smiled in that brilliant self effacing way that had disarmed many extremely dangerous people. 

Molly paused with the car door open, she had opened her mouth to speak when the phone in Floss’ pocket buzzed. She fished it out and smiled at the message. Molly looked suspicious.

      “Who is it?”

      “Well, technically, it’s the Queen of England, and she’s somewhere down the drive with a hunting rifle.”

Molly laughed. Floss raised an eyebrow.

      “Don't you bloody dare tell her I said that! Looks like we’ll be having venison for a few days.” She turned her eyes upward to the blonde. “Come on, don't leave me alone in the wilderness with Eleanor, you know it’s not my forte.”

Molly seemed to think about it a moment. “Ok, but I at least need to get these to the surgery in Elsworth. It’s less than an hours drive there and back.” She climbed into the drivers seat. “Take your phone, I’ll catch up, ok?” 

The door of the garage rolled up and Molly started the engine. Floss knew better than to press the argument further, it was a start. She watched the car disappear and returned to the house. When she emerged out of the front door a short while later she was bundled up in her barbour coat and boots. She preferred it to some of the garb she’d worn in her line of work...but less than her lab coat.

It only took her a few minutes to find the bag and track quietly to the sniper’s position. She smiled with genuine relief at the sight of the other Englishwoman.

      “Eleanor.” She uttered warmly and laid a hand on her shoulder.

      “You’re a sight for sore eyes. Molly will be with us shortly, I couldn't dissuade her from a supply run.” Floss’ brow furrowed with concern.

      “How was the trip? Are you alright?”