Participants:
Scene Title | The Silence of the Angels |
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Synopsis | Hana takes some personal time. |
Date | January 7, 2009 |
The Middle of Nowhere, Quebec
She left the motorcycle behind a hundred miles ago. Paid for its temporary storage. Bought the sort of Arctic-winter gear she hasn't used in nearly three years. The snowmobile, she took for a few dozen more miles, then left behind for later retrieval.
"Give me half a ration of water and a full pack to carry, and I can survive a desert."
Some, plowing though Arctic snow on nothing more than their own two feet, would only be here if they didn't intend to survive in the first place. But dying is not an option; not a possibility. Not an interest of Hana's. She's here for another reason entirely.
The woman stops, tipping her head back to look up at the pitch-black sky, the light in her hand thumbed off. It's late, but no stars gleam amidst the depth of darkness no city can shelter beneath; the heavens are completely occluded by clouds.
Clouds do nothing to block Hana's power.
High above the earth, high above the clouds, the satellites that weave an invisible web of digital signals around the world go about their everyday existence, distant and uncaring. The travails of human life mean nothing to machines of metal, plastic, and silicon, to computers far below the threshold of self-awareness.
There's a crystalline purity to their communicades, solitary whispers set apart from the murky and all-pervasive static of human desires and needs that fogs up the urban jungle. Here and now, Hana can stand in near-perfect silence, with only the digital music of distant soloists as a backdrop to her thoughts.
It's as close as anyone living might hope to come to hearing the voices of angels.
Was I wrong?
There is no power backing the mental query, no technopathic shout to gum up the operations of Earth's mechanical angels. For all that she casts the thought outwards, as though to some audience not herself, its true target is Hana… and her own heavy burden of memories.
Was I so very wrong?
The dead cannot speak. The shades of her mother and grandmother have no guidance to offer the Gitelman daughter; no advice, no support, no sympathy. Only Hana stands in the darkness of a snow-laden tundra, weighing herself against figures made far larger than life by a child's loving memories.
Would you have listened to him? Would you have trusted him?
For all her suspicions, for all that she kept Bennet at arm's length, reminded him forcefully and often that his past transgressions had neither been forgiven nor forgotten… in hindsight, Hana had let herself trust him far more than she meant. Waited, because he waited. Bound herself in obligations to the Ferrymen and Phoenix. Accepted his advice… often enough, at any rate.
She had believed he would take down the Company.
She had believed they could be allies.
He proved her so very, very wrong.
Have I failed you?
Normally, Hana's answer would be to find someone to kill. Bennet, preferably. Any given Company agent after that. An outlet that expresses soul-deep pain in the only way she knows how. But…
"If you go, it'll all fall apart."
Obligations enforced by honor. An impossible bar to live up to, set by her own heart. She can't leave. Can't set off on a lone operative's mission, one woman on the warpath with the insidious and evil dragon that is the Company in her sights.
Staying means giving it up. Training Phoenix has driven this lesson home — turning the next wave of 'good guys' loose against the forces of evil. Standing back and watching them go, the taste of jealousy's bitter ashes on her tongue.
Why?
Why does it have to be me?
The clouds are dark. Without even snow falling from the heavens to catch any distant and diffuse light that might find its way onto the tundra, there is nothing to see.
All I ever wanted was to carry on your legacy.
The angels — mechanical and human alike — say nothing at all.
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