Hurricane Heart

Arjan

She looked almost as bad as I felt. Her hair was a wild, untamed bush, standing out like a dark halo around her face, which was in shadow. She reached for the light in here, dim though it was, which I’d never been able to reach because of the chains holding me down. Since she left, I had been in total darkness, which was petrifying, and the thought that I might not see real light again for a long time was as scary as any.

As the dim but welcome light flickered into action, I could see her clearer. Her eyes were dark and her normally perfect makeup was smudged down her cheeks as though she had been vigorously wiping at her eyes. She looked pale, but not in her typically beautiful way. Instead she looked sick, and afraid, as though she’d been hearing too much bad news. This frightened me as well as saddened me, because it could only mean that things in the Dreamer world were getting worse.

But what she had said as she walked in had shocked me most of all. She’d said sorry. I didn’t know what she was sorry for—for Tobias locking me in here; for not coming to get me sooner; or for something else related to whatever they’d been talking about out there, but she was sorry nonetheless, and it was a phrase I’d genuinely never expected to be released from between her lips.

She moved quietly to my side, sitting down on the cold floor just a short distance away, her knees bent right up to her chest where she hugged her arms round them, rocking slightly, her face buried beneath dark curtains of hair.

‘What happened?’ I asked gently. All the anger that had been building up inside me in the hour or two that I’d been in here dissipated almost instantly when I saw her. She had not betrayed me. It was a mere misunderstanding, and only now did I realise how powerless she’d been to stop that bastard Tobias. She had no choice but to let it go and wait until they’d gone before she came and rescued me.

I was still conscious that chains bound both my wrists to the wall, but I let that go for a moment as I shuffled as close to her as they would let me.

‘Hurricane?’ I asked. For some reason, I got the feeling that she was not just about to give me the silent treatment.

‘I’m sorry for so many reasons,’ she admitted, only continuing to surprise me further. ‘I’m sorry for letting him bring you in here—no light; no food; no bed; and no knowing how long it would be until you were let out.’

‘It...wasn’t nice,’ I said, allowing myself just a small chance to make her feel bad about everything she’d done to me. I would have let it go by the morning.

‘And...’ she trailed off.

‘And?’ I persisted.

She seemed to make a decision there and then, and I had a horrible feeling that she was keeping something from me.

‘Nothing,’ she murmured, just about proving my theory.

‘You’re upset,’ I said. It wasn’t a question.

‘Tobias was telling me about the Institution,’ she said. ‘They’re getting worse. What they did to me was bad, but they...they tortured him!’

‘Torture?’ I asked in disgust. ‘Surely they can’t!’

‘Dreamers have no rights,’ she said. ‘Whatever they say about their Human Rights Act, Dreamers don’t come into the equation. We’re not humans as far as they are concerned. It’s a dangerous business.’

I could see that she wasn’t up for talking tonight; she looked exhausted, and both ready to fall asleep and ready to burst into tears the second I was out of sight. I desperately wanted to know what had happened to her in that Institution she’d once been in; I figured it was the key to her hatred and resentment, possibly even to why she’d given up on emotion, but tonight was not the night to talk about it.

‘Sleep,’ I told her gently, as though I was the one in charge. She ran a hand through her hair, pushing it back from her face and briefly disappeared without a word. I was just about to call out when she returned with a key, and she unlocked the shackles round my wrists. I stepped away from them gratefully, shuddering at the dark memories of the last couple of hours.

‘You’re in the bedroom on the left,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’

Without another word, she disappeared, dazed and almost dream-like, into the bedroom on the right; the smaller one with the double bed, and I did not see her again.

***

I dreamt that night. I hadn’t had a dream for at least three nights now, but they had returned with a vengeance. This one didn’t make a lot of sense; it was just dark, and I was running, and Hurricane was running, and she was wearing a mask, and her eyes were so vibrantly red I felt as if I couldn’t look directly into them. They were the colour of blood and anger and death. But then we stopped running just for a moment, and looked at each other...and at that moment, the mask came off and her previously red eyes shone a bright, piercing blue...

I woke up the following morning and obediently followed Hurricane out of the room, but I began to realise that that was not how things worked anymore. Things were changing around us; both between us and from exterior forces.

Last night, whilst I’d been cooped up in that prison cell, I’d been thinking. I’d been thinking about Hurricane, and about myself, and about our situation, and of course about the Dreamers. But the conclusions I came to were surprising, and at times a little terrifying. I liked her. However much I tried to deny it and hated the thought, the utter betrayal I felt open up like a rip through my heart when she let Tobias march me away was proof as much as any. And she liked me. That was a conclusion I came to after going to bed. The sincerity of her apology, and the fact that she’d made it in the first place, was proof for this matter.

So we were friends now, but I still wanted to get away, and yet at the same time I wanted to try and discover what she was hiding. And as for Hurricane, she just blatantly refused to show emotional ties to anyone. So where did that leave us? Could there be such thing as reluctant friends; friends who did not want to be so, but who were bound by some unbreakable and unknown force holding them inexplicably together?

Or was I just getting way too far ahead of myself?

I was quiet that morning, as I was most days, but it felt different. I was no longer quiet because I didn’t want to talk to her. Instead, I mostly did not know what to say.

‘Come on,’ she muttered as I sat eating.

‘Where are we going this time?’

Hurricane looked at me, almost pitifully.

‘If you haven’t worked out yet that asking that question will get you nowhere, then you are sadly ignorant, Arjan,’ she said with a sigh.

I shrugged. ‘I guess it’s just something to say.’

‘Well I’m not supposed to tell anything,’ she said. ‘Even I don’t know; not really.’ She stood up, making for the doorway.

‘Are we going now?’ I asked, dropping my plate of toast onto the table and standing up.
She looked round but did not smile. ‘No. Eat. I just need to go and phone Casper.’

‘Who’s Casper?’ I asked, noticing that I had never heard the name before.

She pulled a face. ‘He’s one of the English Dreamers; he came over shortly after their base was invaded. Apparently, he knows some of the people having the Operation.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I murmured, ‘for him. When’s it happening?’

‘I try not to find out,’ she said, typically vague and unknowing. For all the ignorance she was warring against, she seemed to rather enjoy remaining in the dark about things. However, I let the subject drop. I knew how the matter of the Operation hurt her, as it would hurt me if I knew anyone undergoing it. And it was only a matter of time before I knew one of them anyway.

She left the room without a word, and I heard her ascending the creaking steps outside, and then leaving out of the front door.

I threw yesterday’s clothes and my wash kit into the main bag, my hand lingering over her other, larger gun. This gun could kill. Most likely it had killed before.

I had held it the day she was kidnapped, and it had given me a strange sense of power; like suddenly everyone would listen to me. Only now could I see how guns entranced people; made them obsessed; made them crave power more and more. And I would never let myself become like that.

For it also felt, standing there, with it in my grasp, like I was wielding the hand of death. I had the power to choose a life. I had the power to decide whether a person deserved to live or to die.

I knew by the mere way my fingers remained in contact with the cold surface long after I should have let go, that I could never be trusted with such power. Suddenly, Hurricane seemed so much braver. She only kept a stunning gun with her permanently, but that didn’t really change anything. She could have shot me many times; not killed me, but hurt me, easily, without a fight. But she didn’t.

Eventually she returned back into the room, and I moved away from the gun like it was venomous, stowing away my guilty conscience and acting like nothing was wrong. Thankfully, she didn’t notice, or I was certain she wouldn’t be so happy about trusting me.

We drove on in silence and I gazed out of the window at the grey, damp morning. It was not raining now, but it evidently had done during the night, and we splashed down highways that spat spray back at the windscreen like it was alive.

At some point, we passed into the Czech Republic, and drove through the country for the majority of the day. It seemed that we were keeping south—I had expected us to continue west into Germany, but instead we drove along, hugging the border between the Czech Republic and Austria.