Hurricane Heart

Arjan

I was with Hurricane. There was no way of knowing where we were, but it was dark; the sky, or indeed ceiling, a deep, bottomless black far above us. Golden-white lights shone around us, suspended in the air as if caught in a web. They could have been city lights, or we could be standing in amongst the stars. There were no other indications of where we could be; no landmarks or objects or infrastructure. Just the darkness, and the lights.

Hurricane looked somehow different. Under the semi-darkness of the iridescent night her skin glowed an almost ethereal glow, and, as well as her normal leather jacket, she was wearing a vibrant, blood red dress. I had to also admit that she looked very beautiful in it.
It was at that moment that I realised we were not alone. There were men and women standing in concentric circles around us, all of them wearing dark clothes; most of them suits. And yet, every single one of their faces were turned away from us, towards the outside of the circles, whereas we stood in the very centre of the rings.

Hurricane walked towards one of these people as if at random, and spun him round. Therefore, I did the same. I walked up to one; a woman; and turned her round to face me. She was wearing a mask.

So they were Soulless, then.

The woman stood, motionless as a china doll, watching me, and I ripped the mask from her face. As it left her skin, her eyes, which had been pale a moment ago, faded to darkness, and she fell to the floor; not dead; just defeated.

I continued clockwise round the innermost circle of Soulless, turning each one round in turn, ripping off his or her mask, and watching them fall silently to the ground. Hurricane did the same, moving in the opposite direction, and the whole act seemed like a strange, silent waltz of the most macabre kind. After Hurricane and I had finished the first circle, we moved onto the second and the third, spinning each Soulless round like moves in a dance, and watching them fall in unison. There seemed to be an endless number of them, and time passed in a blur.

And then there was one left. Hurricane and I reached him at the same time, and spun him round by the shoulders simultaneously.

It was Scarrus.

He did not move; he just watched us. And, together, Hurricane and I lifted one side of his mask each, and ripped it with a shiver-inducing tearing sound from his face.

Like all the others, he crumpled.

And then, Hurricane moved back to the very centre of the fallen circles, and, as if from nowhere, produced a great torch. Ignited by some invisible force, it seemed to explode into flames before me; great, white-gold talons licking the sky, and, as one body, the Soulless all got to their feet, and ran, screaming, from the sudden burst of light. They all ran in different directions, but all away from us; away from the light of Hurricane’s fire and into the darkness of the nearby shadows.

I woke up. I had been dreaming again; one of the strangest dreams I had ever had. I couldn’t think what it meant. Was it symbolic in some way? Or maybe it really was just a dream; an insane fantasy controlled by something more than just my conscious mind.

When I got up, I could already sense how things had changed between me and Hurricane, almost beyond recognition.

Almost, but not quite.

‘Come on,’ she said impatiently, pulling on her leather jacket and preparing to leave. I rolled, slightly dazed and more than half asleep, off of the bed, rubbing at my tired eyes and stumbling into the bathroom.

Half an hour later, we left that hotel room in Austria after undoubtedly the most intriguing night so far. She had taught me her precious saying of ‘deep into that darkness peering,’ sharing a priceless and beautiful, yet inexplicable moment between us. And then, perhaps even more importantly, she had told me her story. That was the fuel to start the fire. I still couldn’t understand her. She still irritated me. I still wished she could be a little more reasonable and kind. But I was getting there. We were on better terms than we had been on any other day.

‘What do we do now?’ I voiced aloud as we pulled out of the small car park. She was silent. I knew that she knew that I was not just talking about where we were travelling to. Things had changed between us.

‘Where do you want to go?’ she asked. This was a slight improvement on not answering my questions at all, but it was still not up to the standard of normal people. She was perfectly intelligent enough to realise that I was not talking about something so simple.

‘Uh, I don’t mind,’ I muttered, slightly distracted. ‘But you know what I mean. That’s not what I’m talking about.’

She looked purposefully at me, her glare cold. This gave proof, if proof was even needed, that she knew what I was trying to say.

She turned away, not answering.

‘What?’ I cried incredulously. So she was still the same old Hurricane. ‘I thought you were better than that! I thought you had changed!’

Her glare grew even darker and colder, and I withered underneath it.

‘I don’t change, Arjan. I am who I am. Surely you’re the same.’

I scoffed. ‘Not as such. People change, Hurricane. I thought you were changing, at least towards me.’

‘Well, I’m not!’ she snapped. ‘I’ve already told you far too much. Everything you know, you can use against me.’

‘But I wouldn’t do that,’ I said, lowering my voice and turning the volume down before this turned into an insane shouting match. ‘You always expect the worst of me but, as much as we don’t get on, I’m on your side.’

‘I’ve learnt during my life never to trust anyone,’ she said coldly.

‘Oh!’ I retorted. ‘So saving your life was not good enough? I don’t care how many times you’ve been hurt and betrayed; surely you know by now not to only ever expect the worst of everyone. It doesn’t get you anywhere! You can’t live life on your own. You have to trust.’

Suddenly, this was about so much more than what we were doing and where we were going. This was about life. This was about humanity. This was the heart of everything.

It wasn’t right, but I felt responsible for Hurricane. Despite all her guns and fighting skills and good lines, she was no superhero. She was so much the opposite. She was merely a girl, broken and betrayed so many times she felt it was easier to distance herself from everyone she loved and run from life; run from her past; run from herself. It was not good. No one should have to face such things.

I didn’t believe she was really horrible. I knew she was capable of great kindness. For a few precious moments since we’d met I’d managed to catch rare occasions when she took off her mask, and I saw the girl behind the machine. And she was so much more beautiful when she showed her true colours.

And the other thing was that I felt like it was my mission to change her. Whatever her mission was—to kidnap me and fight Soulless and stay hidden and find out some crazy secret from me—mine was next to impossible. But I had to do it. I felt it was my duty. I had seen too much of her and her life now to pretend any other way, and as much as I sometimes disliked her, I knew she was better than that. And I was willing to find it within her, even if it killed me. I wanted her to return to humanity, and see everything she was missing. She didn’t have to live a lie.

So all for the greater good, I quietened down, allowing her anger to subside for a little while. I didn’t ask anything else. It didn’t matter where we drove today. I just didn’t want another argument.

‘Arjan?’ she said, sometime close to midday. It was the first she had spoken since our argument.

‘Yes?’

‘What if I told you that there was a Soulless; possibly two, following us right now?’

I fell silent. ‘Are there?’

She nodded her head, never once averting her eyes from the road. ‘Yes.’

‘How do you know?’

‘The tracker. It’s not perfect, but I get a horrible feeling they’re gaining on us far too fast for my liking.’ She shuddered. ‘And I can feel them...all around us, I can feel them closing in.’

I bit my lip. This was never good. So far, my experiences with Soulless had been pretty bad. On one occasion, I’d been forced to jump out of a window four storeys up—not something I did lightly. On the other, I’d pointed a gun in a man’s face, threatening to kill him. That was not me. I was not like that.

‘How far away are they?’ I asked.

‘I can’t tell exactly,’ she said. ‘We’re still a few miles ahead, but I don’t know how many, or for how long.’

‘Great,’ I muttered sarcastically. ‘So, what do we do?’

Hurricane was in business-mode. Well, she never really switched off from it, but now she was serious, a thousand and one ideas swarming through her mind.

‘We’re going to change direction and head north,’ she decided. ‘And we’re going to go to Hanover—it’s far enough away to throw the Soulless off our trail for a bit, but near enough to get there before nightfall. We’re going to stop there, and we’re going to go underground. If they’re following us and we’re expecting an attack, it’s too dangerous to go and stay in a hotel. If they come for us, and other people or CCTV cameras see it, the public will be on the side of the Soulless, and we will be caught, Arjan. So we’re going underground. There’s a small group of Dreamers around there—whilst the main German base is in Berlin, Germany is big enough that we also have groups in about eight other cities.

‘Hopefully, we’ll find them, and we can seek refuge with them for the night. If the Soulless come for us, though, there’s a good long chain of tunnels that run under the city and beyond—we can use them to hide in. I’d rather not have things come to a fight, but if it does, then it does.’