Brenkai

Professor Carson McGail dragged his hand down his face in an attempt to focus his attention on the last ten minutes of class. The day had been long. Too long. He had no one to blame but himself, packing eight courses onto his plate for the fall term. Two months in and he was already looking forward to summer. Thankfully this was an advanced lab course and required little of his immediate interference. Except, their independence brought the length of the day into full light and allowed him to feel it. At fifty-seven years old, after eleven hours of lecture, standing – because he had never really been able to remain idle for long, Carson hated to think that he was getting old. Daily reminders from his joints certainly didn’t help.

The lab room was one of the smaller of the physics lab at the University of Connecticut, housing only twelve stations. Students were wrapping up whatever project they had begun at the beginning of the term, and eyeing the clock like a constant companion. Stations were crowded with lab equipment, notebooks, and student supplies – quickly disappearing into bags as the minute hand crept closer and closer to 7. His own desk, sitting in front of a well-used chalkboard, was empty save his gray laptop, closed now.

Impatient to be done and headed home, Carson released the class early. After the last of the students had left, he wandered the room. Righting chairs and securing equipment, doubl checking that everything was off and dormant. With a sigh of relief, he existed the room, locked the lab and headed for his office. The sound of his shoes echoed comfortingly along the hall, where co-workers smiled and greeted him. All equally as tired looking as he felt. Late lectures tended to take it out of one.

The last seven years had been quiet, he mused. Quiet years, quiet days. It was the longest he had remained in one place. The longest he had stayed one person, invested in normal routine and built a deep routed life that he could call his. He had developed friendships here, familiarity. Yesterday had been normal, today was normal, tomorrow would be norma -

Carson’s office sat on a corner, two windows buffing the hall connecting to his and two within the confines of it. As he rounded the corner to the door of his office he froze, thoughts lingering on his last sentence like a broken record. The door to his office was cracked open. The lock that always kept the door tightly sealed in his absence, was broken, the knob hanging loosely from its socket. Slowly, Carson placed his bag on the linoleum floor, the sound of the zipper clicking against it, too loud in his ears as adrenalin kicked his heart into overdrive before training slowed it to a deadly calm. He took stock. The hall was empty. It was twelve minutes after seven. The sun had already slipped beneath the building-broken horizon and left only hints of its presence painted dull pink across the sky. The blade nestled against his right calf and lower back burned his skin, and his muscles tightened in anticipation.

The door made no noise as it was pushed open. The small office – four book shelves, two chairs, filing cabinet and desk, all appeared untouched. Ordered just as he had left them. The chair in front of his desk, was still pushed slightly to the left from the student counseling he had done at two that afternoon. Two term papers, stapled, lay on the floor before his feet, deftly shoved under the crack when he had been in lecture. Common. All of his books seemed untouched, nothing out of place. The air was stale. As it usually was after hours of being unoccupied.

No one was there.

The revelation did nothing to his state of readiness. No one was there now, but someone had been. The faint smell of unknown lingered in the space and formed a cold knot in the pit of Carson’s stomach. While nothing appeared to be missing or out of place, something had been added to his usually clean and uncluttered desk. A laptop fan stood empty before the second chair that he usually occupied. A small lamp, gifted to him by a friend, watched blankly over the wooden surface, covered only by a laminated calendar. And a white gold frame with a picture of his sixteen year old daughter was perched facing his empty chair as it always was. It was by her picture that the extra item sat.

Unassuming and confusing if one didn’t know what they were looking at; the egg was the size of a baseball, the mottled green shell nearly pearlescent in the dying light leaking from the window, was sitting on a curved stand to keep it upright. The ground bottomed out from beneath him. He should have known he would be caught. That his discoveries, his secrets would never be allowed to remain just as they were. Secret. He had secrets for the last thirty years of his life. Had even been a secret himself, at times. He had invested in secrets. Secrets that weighed his pockets. Secrets that dusted the cracks of his hands and left pieces of himself behind when he touched. Secrets that sometimes moved in the shadows, that caught his attention, swiftly and momentarily. Always dancing on the edge of his peripheral. Always tailing his steps and molding everything he devoted himself to. Secrets, he knew would catch up with him. Secrets, he now feared had.

They would be wanted. They would be used. And he had foolishly believed that disappearing, that hiding the evidence would be enough to protect it from those that would most abuse it. But here it was. His past catching up, pulling down all of his carefully built assumptions. He had been naïve when he first ran. Convinced that all of his training would keep it safe.

Stupid. Ridiculous. A child’s dream, surrounded by too much reality. Fantasy, when he lived and fought for a world full of gruesome, ruthless truths, brandied about like a weapon.

Dread had begun to take on the restlessness of panic as his eyes trailed from the egg to the picture of his daughter.

Rose.

Carson turned smartly on his heels and long even strides pulled him down the hall, pausing only long enough to snatch up his bag. He yanked his keys and phone free, before dropping the heavy thing back to the linoleum floor and racing through the building to the parking lot where his car sat idly.

He phoned his daughter three times before he reached his car. Each attempt delivering him to her voicemail, only escalating his terror. He had been a soldier for too long not to know that terror clouded objective thinking and often led to mistakes. But he hadn’t had a daughter then. He hadn’t had something worth leveraging. Not when he had made the discovery, had given them a view of it, let them taste it, and realizing their purpose, had snatched it from the people who had hired him. But – and there was always a but in equations like these.

But he had her now.

Dozens of scenarios brought themselves to mind, digging out of his subconscious where he normally kept them locked down. The worst of them all was that they had found his daughter, would use her innocence in all of this to make a choice between his secret and the life of his only child. There could be no compromise though. They both had to be protected. That he would be choosing one life over many was of little consolation to him. That he was protecting the world as it was known from being irrevocably altered did nothing to stop the sinking feeling in his stomach as he drove towards home, knuckles white on the steering wheel, foot heavy on the gas, wandering through all of his experience for one that would prepare him if they had already found his daughter.

Red lights didn’t matter as he flew through the streets, urgency pushing the speedometer higher and higher as he wove through evening traffic.

Carson managed to pull into his driveway only fifteen minutes later, having broken every traffic law he could. He took twenty precious seconds to calm his breathing, steady his hands, and walk to the front door, ready. The house was warm. The lights on as he stepped into the entrance hallway of the house. A soft floral scent hung welcoming in the air - a fancy of Rose’s, her wax burner an olfactory trigger that always helped him relax when walking in the door. Against his will, Carson could feel himself begin to unwind. Five steps and he rounded the wall leading from the entryway to the kitchen, finding his sixteen-year old, lifting her head from where she was bent over a text book on the kitchen island. Everything was ordinary. Rose was still on the stool, loose yellow and brown plaid pajama bottoms pooled around her long legs. A light brown tank top compounding the routine of the night. She was calm, relaxed.

“Hi dad.”

Relief was violent, almost taking his feet from beneath him.

Rose cocked her head in question, fiery locks dropping like bits of flame over her thin, bare shoulders.

He was moving into his study without doing so much as acknowledging her, pulling out drawers in a desk he had dragged around with him since his days in West Africa. The common nightly routine before him only sunk the trained calm deeper into Carson’s muscles, spurring action, planning. He needed to think ten steps ahead now.

Once the left side of the desk was gutted, he reached in, fingers searching for a small split outlined in a circle. Finding it, he wedged his finger into the crack and two small pieces of wood slid aside, revealing a half inch hollow space to which he retrieved an old heavy key. Rose had followed him into his study, worry etching lines across her freckled face. Blue eyes like storming seas were narrowed in confusion, body unnaturally still. A gift from her late mother, one he had tried to help her out of, but wounds like that never really heal right, and the habit had remained.

“I want you to go pack a bag. Light. Make sure you have only the essentials.”

“Dad – “

“Go.” His tone brooked no argument, but then Rose never argued anyways.

When she was gone, when he could hear her soft footsteps on the stairs and then the quiet rustling of her overhead in her room, Carson turned, and with a great grunt, shoved the heavy desk forward nearly four feet. Beneath the desk was bare hardwood. Nothing present to the naked eye. Carson reached for the corner of the darkest of the newly uncovered planks. Scratching at the corner, a thin veneer peeled off, revealing a key hole underneath. With a soft grinding pop, eight boards lifted as the key was turned. An old, battered, metal ammunition box was pulled from the compartment. The lid was yanked off and passports, fake ids, four burner phones, two unregistered handguns – one Walther P22 and the other a SIG Sauer Mosquito – an old leather-bound address book, ammunition packs, and two stacks of 50 hundred dollar bills were laid out. He reached back into the floor compartment, hand searching for the farthest side and pushed in on the back of the wall. A small pop, like a sudden sigh filled the room behind a large, full book case. Getting up, he pulled five books off of the left side of the second to last shelf, the wall had opened there and a safe tumbler was exposed. With a few quick twists, the safe was open and a brass caged pendant was pulled from its depths. Within the interwoven brass sat a round stone, labradorescencent, with shades of mahogany and silver shifting with the light. An indent in the bottom of the solid part of the pedant was the only evidence of the information stored within. And the stone, the only physical evidence of the secret that information would expose. He came back to the pile of things and studied them, quickly slipping the necklace into his pocket.

It wasn’t much. Nothing really to prepare Rose for what he was about to do. But then all of the things he had already taught her, in his paranoia, might have her at least ready. He picked up the address book, flipped to J, snatched up one of the burner phones and made a call.

Rose came down fifteen minutes later, one of his old army bags strapped across one shoulder, held there by her hand, white-knuckled where she gripped it. She had replaced pj bottoms with black khakis, the ones she always wore while shooting, bare feet now covered with her favorite black hiking boots, her tank top with a long sleeve purple shirt hidden beneath a faded tan coat he had gotten her three years ago for her first hunting trip. She had tied her long hair into pony-tail, wisps like sparks floating around her face. Pride and terror nearly choked him, reached like fingers into his chest and stroked his heart with ice.

Rose eyed the items on the floor in silence. Her face remained unreadable as she flitted her gaze back to him. He watched her try to work out what was going on, watched as the cogs whirled in her head. It had only been seven years. He had only had seven years with her and so many of those he had spent trying to open her up, heal the wounds caused by the abuse of her mother. He had given her an outlet in training, offered her a new perspective of the world, where her quiet disposition became a strength instead of a crippling disability.

“What’s going on?” Along with her stillness came an unnerving stare, one she was drilling Carson with now. A car backfiring startled them both and reawakened the urgency that had fueled him since finding the egg in his office.

“You’re leaving. Now,” he said, reaching for her bag. She pulled back.

“Why?”

He reached again for the bag, pulled it from her shoulder and began stuffing the items into it. “There’s a man in Nova Scotia. You’ll go there first. It’s already been arranged. You need to get to the Grayrock Ridge Airstrip. It’s private. A man by the name of Terran Jackson will be waiting for you. Your passport and new id are in here for when you get into Nova Scotia. Terran will be with you the whole flight. Do not leave his presence until you are with a woman by the name of Leona Vet. Do you understand? If she gives any other name, you tell Terran. He’ll know what to do.”

“Dad - ”

“Here,” he said handing her the Walther. “Keep it on you at all times. There is extra ammunition in here as well.”

“Dad! Stop!” Rose never raised her voice, the fact that she did so now gave him pause. He took a breath. “Tell me what is going on.”

Carson was having trouble thinking objectively. Fear for himself was overridden by fear for Rose. If they found him, they would still never get their hands on what they wanted, but he had no idea what they would do if they got their hands on his teenage daughter, no idea what horrors they would put her through to get him to break. And he couldn’t afford to break. Maybe he was selfish; he didn’t want to have to choose. So if she was sent away and he disappeared, all would be good again. Carson hadn’t considered the consequence of his actions as they related to others, only thinking that he had to preserve what he had found, keep it a blipping question, forgotten in all of the other things those people had their hands dipped into. Now all of his rash behaviors were doubling back and he had no one to blame but himself. The fact that he was now at fault for condemning his daughter to a nomadic life hadn’t escaped him either. Carson hoped that one day she could forgive him.

He had become careless in the last few years, left too many traces to be tracked. When he had been confronted with the birth of his daughter and then with her custody, he should have doubled his efforts, made sure every move was above reproach.

“I worked for a research lab that branched off from the military, do you remember me telling you that?”

Rose nodded. A soft movement that betrayed the intensity sitting in her eyes.

“I was a researcher, an explorer, you could say, when I found something. I took some research, findings that they intended to use in very bad ways. They want it back.”

“And they found you. You’re trying to protect me,” she paused, studying. “Who are you?” He smiled. Rose, despite her withdrawn nature, there was an awareness she possessed that Carson had always admired and been wary of in equal measures.

He moved over to her, handing her bag back, he cupped her face, brushing his thumb against her jaw. How had he been so stupid to think he would never be found? There was nothing he could do but push her from the nest and pray that all of his teachings would be enough for her to fly with. That still didn’t excuse what he was thinking of doing, because what he was about to do next was unforgivable. He pulled the chain from his pocket, fingers tangling in the thin chain before reaching up and placing the locket over her head. Rose never broke her gaze from his face.

“I’m your father. I will always be your father. I just go by a different name now. Many different names. I need you to keep this safe for me. I need you to run and to hide.”

Rose reached up, fingering the pendant,” What is it?”

“That’s hard to explain, and there’s no time to. Just know that you carry a whole world on your neck. And it must never fall into other hands, do you understand? They are going to hunt you. I need you to be safe, but I need that safe too. Can you do that for me? I know I’m placing a terrible burden on you, but I know you can handle it. You’re smart and brave, and the strongest person I know.”

“You aren’t coming with me, are you?”

He shook his head. “Follow US-6 E. Stick to brush cover as much as possible until you get there. Familiarize yourself with your new identity.”

Blue eyes rimmed red, welled with tears that never fell as she sent them around the trashed den.

“Hey, remember, ’Stay low.”

Rose refocused on Carson as she grasped onto the silly rhyme he had found and used while training her, to focus her. 

“Go fast,” she whispered.

“Kill first.”

“Die last.”

“One shot.”

“One kill.”

“Not luck.”

“All skill.”

He stepped forward, wrapping his hands softly around Rose’s upper arms. “Do we ask questions?”

“No.”

“Do we hesitate?”

“Never,” she whispered.

Carson pulled her into his arms and held her, his chest a knot of dread.

Hisdaughterhisdaughterhisdaughter.

After a few short seconds, he pushed her back, looked at her, memorizing all that he could. “Go. Be quick and quiet. Don’t look back. Be safe.” He pushed her towards the door.

A dog barked down the road.

“I love you dad.”

“I love you too. And Rose… I’m sorry.”

Something sounded at the back door, a shadow flickering against the porch light, the sound of boots on cobbled stone. Too late. Rose caught the sound too.

“Dad?”

“Go! Now!”

She twisted on her heels, bolting for the front door. She didn’t look back as she flung it open. The last he saw of his daughter was her back, flames following in her wake as she disappeared into the night. Carson strode from the den and into the kitchen, turned on the gas burners on the stove, pulled out the knife drawer and emptied it on the kitchen island over Rose’s abandoned text books, grabbed the Glock he kept behind the bread box and turned just as the back sliding glass door exploded.