Faith - A Maiden’s Pondering

The unconscious mobster was restrained again with zip ties, and two Leonians moved the body back into the bus. Faith hadn’t interacted much with them, so she could barely remember their names. She cared little about her foster siblings, since only Leon mattered.

Everything ended well, even for the mobster. He gained a mark on his neck, but at least he survived. The captives occupied quite a lot of space on the bus, meaning some Leonians had to travel back on foot. Faith wouldn’t wish to be one of them, and luckily, she managed to secure her spot next to Leon again.

The goons at the back, mouths covered with rags, protested through muffled grumbles at first, but they gave up eventually. Whether it was due to hopelessness, a strategy to preserve strength, or the silence being their objection, Faith couldn’t care less, because Leon was right next to her.

Eyes almost unblinking, Faith had been watching him recount his fight with the gangster. “He wanted to tear me off. I said, ‘Not in a million years.’ Keeping my hands firmly on him…”

Oh no. Faith snapped her gaze away from Leon. Her teenage years of reading sensual boys-love novels were catching up to her. She patted her cheeks to stop any blush and chuckles from surfacing. At least, she hoped she could.

To distance herself from those sacrilegious thoughts, she opted to peek through the gaps in the drawn curtains to the outside. The midnight streets of Osnovav were drained of any other human presence; the weak moonlight did little to return color to the desaturated land. Sparse lampposts disturbed the veil of gloom, but this sliver of order couldn’t hope to shake off the feeling that the bus was sailing on the vast ocean.

On the bright side, the emptiness also gave Faith a sense that all the land had already belonged to Leon. And that she was his queen, positioned next to his throne. The high from the fantasy sustained her for the rest of the journey, and she wasn’t even aware that she had been ignoring Leon’s tall tales.

The vehicle was parked in front of the hotel that Leon had reserved as their base of operations. The Leonians escorted the twenty or so mobsters one at a time into the building. During the short distance from the bus to the lodging entrance, a few prisoners hopped off the straight path, holding some bizarre belief that they could somehow flee while their four limbs were bound.

Justice caught each one of them. And Faith, assigned to stand watch by the double doors, bit her lips each time he leaped into action, hoping that she could fight as well as he could. Even though her hand-to-hand combat skills were the top among the girls, she hadn’t once defeated Justice in a practice match.

After the thugs were settled into two spare rooms and the shifts to monitor them were worked out, Leon announced that everyone was dismissed for the day, and he retreated to his room. However, for Faith, even though it was already two in the morning, her night had just begun. A mystery simmered in her head. Leon seemed to have dismissed the ambush as anything serious, and though she had missed his explanation for what they were doing in that unfinished part of the city, even she could infer that something else was supposed to happen.

Or maybe, she was just finding something to blame for her failed confession.

She couldn’t ask Prudence or Mercy, since they were among the Leonians who agreed to take the trek back, and they told Faith that they would take advantage of this to go on a night date. Determined to get answers, Faith barged into the room to find the person who could give them. This boy would never keep his door locked at this hour, so she didn’t think to knock. “Wisdom, I want to ask-”

A torrent of laughter trimmed Faith’s sentence short. Sitting on the bed, Wisdom turned his gray eyes to her; his black taper fade glimmered under the ceiling bulb. His chubby cheeks and sharp chin emitted an aura of femininity; perhaps that was why Faith could storm into his space in the middle of the night so comfortably.

“What is it?” He asked. The chuckling obscured his voice, rendering it barely audible. Faith craned her neck towards the bathroom, where the noise originated. She could barely make out four male Leonians huddling around the basin.

“Don’t mind them. They are just testing how long each of them can submerge their head inside the toilet bowl,” Wisdom explained with a shrug.

“Yuck.”

“It’s better than the sixsome that Chasity has scheduled later tonight.”

“What did you just say?”

“Never mind, what are you here for?”

Another streak of cheering pierced the stale air. Faith eyed the washroom again and gestured for Wisdom to follow her outside. Shutting the door behind them, she looked down at him because of their height difference, instantly reminded of her encounter with Mercy earlier, but she chose not to tell him that.

“What was that about?” She asked instead.

“I told you, they want to challenge the limits of how long they can hold their breath. Technically forever, but reflexes are a bitch.”

“No, I was talking about the shootout earlier.”

“That? Honestly, I would be more surprised if dealing with the Slavic mob didn’t end with them stabbing us in the back.”

“The Slavic mob?”

Wisdom cradled his head with an exaggerated expression. “What? Do I have to start explaining from the communist revolution?”

“No. No. I remember now. The Slavic mob. Yeah, how dare they do this to us?” A vain attempt on Faith’s part to hide her ignorance. Instead of accepting her words at face value, Wisdom narrowed his eyes.

“You were probably too busy fantasizing about Mr. Leon to hear the plan. Watching you fail was entertaining. I’ll give you that.”

His ruthless verbal beatdown left Faith’s cheeks flushed, stunning her for a good second. She had to clear up this misunderstanding, or her image would be forever ruined in his head, and that wouldn’t fly when she became Leon’s wife. “Hey! That’s slander! I didn’t fail!”

“So you admit that you didn’t listen clearly to his presentations? That tracks, even rose-colored glasses can’t make his ramblings interesting.”

Panic flooded Faith’s every pore. And she struggled to find the correct hand gesture to match her speech; flapping hands was all she managed. “Wait… No… I meant… No… That’s not…”

Wisdom breathed out a sigh and shrugged. “I was just teasing. I owe you one for your plan back then.”

“What plan?”

Wisdom blinked. “Are you serious? I’m talking about your plan to release one of our captives for Mr. Leon to fight. Convincing him to leave would be a bigger pain in the ass than… I don’t know, an actual abscess.”

He spoke as if that wasn’t her duty. She had only calmed Leon from his fit of imagination, as a spouse should do. It wasn’t anything devious like a plan. But she didn’t argue with Wisdom. As his name implied, he would slap her with some twisted logic. Better to stay quiet.

Before Faith could say her goodbye and retreat to her room, her Cesium Extreme satellite phone beeped from her belt. She glanced at the caller and scrunched her face. “It’s Liberty,” she said to Wisdom.

Wisdom didn’t have much of a reaction to the information. He only crossed his arms. “You don’t need my permission to answer a call.”

Faith was actually hoping for Wisdom to offer to deal with Liberty, but the chances of that happening weren’t high in the first place. After a deep breath to steady herself, she pressed the answer button.

Before Faith could get a word of greeting in, a voice boomed from the speaker, sounding more assertive than a telemarketer. “You know, just got off the phone with boss. Guess what? He hounded me about Feb again. But I already told him so, soooo many times. Nothing ever happens in the hospital. Feb lies there as if he’s dead already, and he will die for real soon too. No idea why boss still holds on to the delusion that the old man would accept the ascension…”

He wasn’t done spewing his monologue, merely catching a breath and drinking a gulp of water. This was even though he didn’t need the oxygen and hydration, and Faith thanked his reflexes for giving her a respite. The rant about February was a repeat of what he would say every time he called her, but she was at least impressed that his phrasings varied between each diatribe.

“Have fun!” Wisdom took the gap in Liberty’s speech as a cue to leave, giving Faith one last hand wave. Faith responded with a glare, but by then, Wisdom had already turned away. To her surprise, he wasn’t returning to his room, but continued his stroll down the corridor.

Faith didn’t have time to think about that, because Liberty was ready to hold her ears hostage again. She could hang up, but in previous times when she had done that, Liberty would just keep on calling back until she answered. “Boss is so paranoid. The hospital has its own security, so why did he ask us to install hidden cameras within the building? ‘We need to prepare for they infiltrate the hospital to get to February.’ Guess what, boss? You are the intruder, and I will snap Feb’s neck myself if this goes on. Do you know what he just told me?”

Faith’s ears perked up. She had almost interrupted Liberty to reprimand him for his insult to Leon, but she didn’t want to miss a glimpse into Leon’s secret conversation. Maybe they even talked about her.

“He said that you caught Nadia Petrovna’s lackeys. The next step would be-”

“He praised me? Oh my God! You should have led with that! He praised me!” Faith’s pitch rose with her heartbeat. A burst of energy overtook her, flooding her with the urge to punch the tatty wall nearby.

“Are you stupid? He was clearly talking about the group as a whole.”

“Oh…” Faith whispered. The heat in her body dissipated in a flash, and her temperature seemed to drop so much that ice might cluster on her skin.

“Anyway, my view is that we can get a head start interrogating the goons you’ve captured. Oh right, and by ‘you’ I meant everyone at your end, not you specifically.”

“I got that, but who is Nadia Petrovna?” Since Liberty had mentioned it, this name of a mysterious woman lingered in Faith’s thoughts. Was Nadia a lover? An ex-lover? Another ex-wife? Faith knew that Leon hadn’t had any contact with his other ex-wife, Verity Marshall, but who could say whether Leon had another ex-wife that he hadn’t disclosed to his adopted children. The more she thought about it, the more she slipped down the spiral of realizing that she possessed only the minimum of insight into Leon’s past.

“She’s the head of the Shadow Bears, which is the biggest Slavic mobster organization in Osnovav. Do I need to explain what the Slavic mob is? Or do I have to start from the communist revolution?” Liberty echoed a familiar rhetorical question, but Faith couldn’t bring herself to reply, too busy wallowing in speculation about the woman’s relationship with Leon.

Liberty took Faith’s silence as permission to continue his rant, though he wouldn’t have shut up regardless. “How can I understand more than you about what’s happening, but I’m stuck back in America watching a fossil die, while you are having sixsomes and mobster beatdowns?”

“I’ve never been in any sixsomes.” The ridiculous word finally grounded Faith back in the conversation.

“I wasn’t talking about you specifically! Bloody hell!” After that declaration, there was a brief quiet, bringing an interval of forced self-reflection. A terrible revelation followed, seizing Faith by the throat. In her dash towards romance, she had neglected her duty as Leon’s wife-to-be. To support his dreams and missions. If she wanted Leon to accept her, she first had to prove herself to him.

“Okay. Okay. I’ll go to the interrogation to find out who this Nadia woman is!” Faith started marching towards the hotel rooms that served as holding cells.

“Where she is! We already know who she is. My God…” Faith could almost see Liberty’s exasperated face from his drawled speech. He was probably rubbing his forehead too.

Faith slammed open the door to one of the makeshift jails. The drab, stuffy room was at least four times the size of hers, enough to contain half of the captured mobsters, strapped to the bed or other handles. She spotted two Leonians speaking. One of them was the familiar face who had just abandoned her minutes ago, while the other, the person on guard duty, whose name was… She drew a blank. But she did recognize Wisdom, which should count for something.

“What’s happening? Describe it to me.” Faith ignored this annoying request from her phone, and strode towards the pair. Wisdom, having apparently guessed what was going to happen, rolled his eyes and vented a groan.

“So, who are we interrogating first, Wisdom?” Faith smiled deviously.

Wisdom conceded, allowing Faith and Liberty to join the interrogation, which he somehow decided would be best held in Faith’s room. For their first ‘interviewee’, Wisdom chose a tall and slim man with a scar on his left cheek. His justification for this selection was simply, “I don’t remember him from any of the documents about the Slavic mob.” Faith didn’t know if he was showing off his memory or if this was his real reasoning.

“I will tear your face off, you…” The man hurled a flurry of Slavic words at Faith and Wisdom right after his gag was removed. Faith couldn’t grasp quite a few of the terms he used, but she could deduce that they must be insults. She racked her brain for what she should do, or what Leon would do to get information from the gangster. Nothing came up.

“What? Can this asshole speak slower? I can’t translate the words in time,” Liberty yelled amidst the man’s frantic cursing.

“Faith, keep his head still,” Wisdom said, barely audible to Faith. She had no idea what Wisdom had planned, but she trusted that whatever he had in mind could force the man to cooperate.

She gripped the sides of the man’s skull. He struggled enough to shift his head, but its movements had become predictable. Wisdom wound back his arm and jabbed it right into the man’s mouth. The curses turned into muffling, lowering the noise in the room to a bearable volume.

But that wasn’t the end of his plan, as Wisdom slid his arm deeper down the man’s throat, ignoring the victim’s efforts to retch and bite down. He kept pushing until tears started welling up in the gangster’s eyes.

Even amidst the man’s warped screams, Wisdom enunciated each of his syllables in perfect Slavish, crisp as the beat of a drum, “Don’t you get it at this point? We are immortal. We won’t die, AND we will live forever. Good news, we can make you immortal too. Bad news, if you don’t tell us everything you know, we will make everyone else immortal, except for you. Think about it. Is your loyalty to your boss worth dying alone, watching everyone else enjoy their undying life?”

Wisdom drew back his arm and wiped his hand on the bedsheet. Faith grimaced but didn’t complain. The man coughed and gasped, but he didn’t protest any longer, and he even stopped struggling. He lay on Faith’s bed, hushed and pensive. The two Leonians matched the silence, and Liberty did nothing to break it.

It was so quiet that Wisdom’s recent question reverberated in Faith’s ears. But she shook the thoughts away; even entertaining the hypothetical sent her shivering in a cold that didn’t exist.

Oh, right. I forgot to ask why Leon was trying to meet with Nadia. And so, she latched onto this unknown piece of trivia.