nemo
New Member
Posts: 8
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Post by nemo on Mar 16, 2020 0:31:27 GMT -6
Rubano paused at the door, silent and still. He turned to face her slowly, as if unsure how to respond. It might have been the only time she had ever seen him look even remotely surprised.
“Hell,” he mused. Suddenly, he threw back his head and laughed - not the practiced chuckles he used for interviews, but genuine, deepthroated laughter. It tumbled about the room like distant thunder. “Yes. Of course. Hell! What else? We shall depart one hell for another, no? How prophetic. And it could be nothing less! You and I Drulovic - whatever becomes of us - we deserve to share a hell with one another.
The chairman gave a slight bow of his head.
“Until we meet again, Arianne.”
And he was gone.
It would be some time before the guards came to collect her; whatever bribe Rubano had paid evidently kept them occupied. At last the door opened - armed agents entering to collect her.
“Let’s go.”
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Post by Ylanne on Mar 16, 2020 1:00:14 GMT -6
The sun had disappeared entirely from the horizon by now, leaving only the deepening and darkening night with little trace of the former dusk with its vestiges of light remaining yet. The old woman once hated silence, but now it offered its own strange familiarity, for in its space she heard the faint fluorescent hum ebb into and out of the HVAC system's drone, the occasional creak, and the soft rise and fall of her own breaths. With little else to contemplate, the weight of her physicality expanded in her mind's space, the pain that had been creeping throughout her body now forefront among her senses, the wounds that Andrade had inflicted but weeks ago still aching, burning, pulsating. It occurred to her that the door had been left unlocked - a grave security oversight, no doubt - when Rubano left without needing escort out, but she made no move toward it. She couldn't have moved quickly enough anyway, not injured and fatigued as she was, not shackled so needlessly, and in any case, it seemed just about everyone knew that even if she left the walls of the place, she had nowhere else to go.
When the guards finally returned, she could hardly look upward. "I certainly hope Mr. Malijin paid you well enough to take so long at your leisure," she said, sighing. Drulović struggled to her feet, stumbling and nearly falling before one of the escorts grabbed hold of her arm to steady her. By the time they finished their search, one of them repeatedly muttering about her struggle to move even half as fast as they wanted, and returned her to her cell, every other door in the hall had been shut and locked for the night. The cavernous space became quickly cacophonous, conversations floating across and through each other, hardly pausing for the interruption of Drulović's return, voices rising and falling as breaths or winds, a multitude of languages at once furious, hopeful, and grieving, creating new tongues and idiom.
Terra had a relatively small prison population, both pretrial detention and post-conviction incarceration, compared to many of its geopolitical rivals going by per capita rates. And the multitude of voices of beings from all corners of the planet, and beyond, who Drulović rarely had opportunity to see here, in maximum security, protective custody, suggested that whatever Terra was, it had long since surpassed what dreams Lelantus Haima or Ed Cranford, or even Rubano Malijin, had once summoned and hoped to manifest. Theirs was a living world - and perhaps a dying one - for if nothing else, she knew too well how death cleaves to life, how birthing must come with dying, how whatever they were might mean something for those to come, and yet, would so soon disappear meaningless. Lying again on the thin pad that passed for a mattress, she stared impassively at the irritated red marks about her wrists from wearing the handcuffs too long while waiting. Pain meant so little now. It was her only constant companion.
Where Terra herself had once offered abundance, she now seemed barren. Desolate. Forlorn.
Perhaps Rubano would agree with Drulović - Cranford might have been the luckiest of them all in the end. He never saw his own death coming.
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