A Brotherhood of Crows.
Chapter 13

The Mosque Kitchen was beginning to quieten down after the lunchtime rush. Outside, the rain had grown to the usual Edinburgh deluge, and inside the windows were thick with condensation. They’d barely sat down by the time Zularna has begun to wolf down her chickpea tikka, heaping food into her mouth. It was the first thing she’d eaten in nearly two days.

“You don’t say much, do you?” she said, with her mouthful.

Across from her, Elijah sat, both his hands wrapped a plastic cup filled with steaming black coffee. “I was waiting for you to finish eating before we talked.”

“Nice of you,” Zularna swallowed the last morsel of curry and wiped the sauce on her plate with a scrap of naan bread. She nodded at Elijah’s own untouched plate. “Not hungry?”

“No, not really.” he replied. He hesitated, and then pushed the plate over to her. “Be my guest.”

She half smiled in acknowledgement and began to eat. Outwardly, though focussed on her food, she was watching Elijah intently. He had unbuttoned the greatcoat and removed his hat when they had sat down, and wore beneath it a simple white shirt, a waistcoat that had seen better days, and faded blue jeans, which ended in sturdy but battered looking army boots. Without the hat, she noticed his hair, long, wavy, which fell to his shoulders, and was held off his face with a half pony-tail. His beard was scraggly and unkempt, below a nose that looked like it had been broken at some point.

It was his eyes, however, which got her interest. The eyes themselves were an unremarkable brown, but beneath them were the deepest, darkest bags she had ever seen in her life. When she’d first caught a glimpse of them, she’d sworn he’d been wearing thick eyeshadow. There was a gauntness about his face - his cheekbones were sharp, and would have been attractive had they not been so hollow, and those rather dull eyes were unblinking, giving them an instenstiy that outstepped their mundane colour. It was only later that she realised that she was looking at the face of a man who was severely sleep deprived.

Perhaps more noticeable - but only to her - was that Elijah Avaron sat in his out little cloud of fog. She could read absolutely nothing from him. As he had passed her the cheap wooden spoon and fork with which she now attacked her food, she had accidentally on purpose brushed one of his fingers, in an attempt to see if physical contact showed her a flash of memory. Nothing had happened, so now she regarded him, this hollow eyed, scruffy man who smelled faintly of tobacco, with suspicion.

“You want to smoke, don’t you?” she said, pausing her meal.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said you want a smoke, don’t you?”

He frowned. “What makes you say that?”

“Well,” she tucked back into her food, “Your fingers have nicotine stains, so I’m guessing you smoke a lot. Also, you left hand hasn’t stayed still since we got in here. Guessing you want to roll one. You are left handed, aren’t you?”

“Ambidextrous,” he replied. “But good deduction nonetheless.”

“Go have a smoke if you want?” she took a swig from the cup of sickly sweet orange juice she’d ordered with her food.

He smiled faintly. “I’ll be fine for a bit. It was a hard job replaceing you. I’d rather not lose sight of you until we’ve talked. Also you owe me a hat.”

“Not planning on going anywhere.” she said. “You got me lunch. Least I can do is have a chat. Also, how did you replace me?”

For the first time since they had sat down, Elijah looked away from her. “That’s...complex.”

He looked back at her and blinked. And something strange happened. He seemed to flicker, for the briefest of seconds turned almost translucent. The outline of his body blurred. And then his eyes opened again and he was whole.

All of this played out within the few short seconds of a blink. His eyes fixed on her’s again.

“Yeah, complex.” He repeated, “It would take too long to explain,”

Zularna considered pressing him - the idea that someone could replace her out of the blue bothered her to no end - but there was something about his voice, some terrible weight to his words, a kind of sadness, which stopped the question before she could speak. “Alright then,” she said, and pushed her plate away from her. “What do you want to talk about?”

Elijah shifted his weight in his seat, and took a sip from the coffee. “I wanted to talk about what happened two nights ago. In Waverly.”

Immediately, she wanted to snap back at him how did you know it was me in Waverly? You never saw my face. But that question also died in her throat.

“Okay. What about it?”

“I -” he hesitated, and blinked, slowly, flickered, and then was back. “It’s hard to know what to ask...I suppose I wanted to know if you were okay?”

Zularna put her head on one side. He seemed earnest enough in asking that, but she realised it wasn’t just the absence of his memories that made him hard to read. “You wanted to know I was okay,”

“I guess.”

“Someone you’ve never met.”

“You almost died.”

“So did you.” She crossed her arms and tried to ignore the cloying absence in his fog. “I guess I owe you one...he almost got me.”

Elijah smirked, a tad mirthlessly. “I’m not sure ‘he’ is the right term. More of an ‘it’.”

In saying that, she was suddenly reminded of that unease she had forgotten - those fractured terrifying seconds of metal teeth, steel claws and fires burning in empty eye sockets.

“You do know that...it wasn’t human, what we fought, right?” he said, tentatively.

She rolled her eyes at him, “I guessed. I don’t know what it was. I’m not sure I want to know.”

“What were you expecting?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know...the usual.”

“Define usual.”

Zularna paused. For a brief second, she wondered how she had come to be sitting here, across from a man who had saved her life, and yet she was meeting for the first time, and in whom she was about to confide. “I kill men.”

There was a short silence. She expected him to be shocked, or at least react, but he simply nodded slightly, never breaking her gaze with those tired eyes. “What sort of men?”

“Murderers...rapists...wife beaters...the worse sort.”

“And how do you know who are the murderers, rapists and wife beaters?”

“I -” why am I telling you this? I barely know you. “I see things. About people.”

That got his attention. He leaned forward suddenly, his grip around the coffee cup tightening. There was apprehension in his voice when he spoke: “What do you see?”

“...fragments. Bits of memory. The pasts of others. I know what they’ve done. I know what they’ve planned to do.”

She was startled as he sighed, with a sudden heaviness, and sagged back in his seat. He seemed disappointed. “And you don’t see anything else. Just other people’s pasts?”

Zularna suddenly felt a plume of irritation. “Dude, I just told you I can think, feel, hear, smell, taste everything that everyone else in the room has ever thought, felt, heard, smelt or tasted. And that doesn’t surprise you?”

Elijah shrugged. “I’ve heard stranger things.” He sighed again, and rain on his hands through his hair, wearily. “So you’re just a killer, then.”

That crossed a line. “I take lives,” she snarled at him, “from people who deserve to die.”

“In my experience, very few people deserve to die.”

She snorted. “That’s a bit rich coming from you.”

“How so?”

“Oh come on,” she waved a hand at him. “Wear that big old coat all you like. I clocked the revolver on your hip. I saw you use that thing. Hardly non-lethal, is it? Also, either you have really big forearms, or those are literally knives up your sleeves! Katai blades, right?” she thumped her palm down on the table. “For someone who doesn’t like killing, you’re pretty heavily armed.”

“You like killing people?” he challenged her, still not breaking her gaze.

Zularna leant back in her seat, and crossed her arms tightly. “When it’s for the right reasons, then yes. Some people are too dangerous to be left alive.”

Elijah grimaced. One hand stole into his coat, and draw out a pouch of tobacco, papers, and filter tips. He began to roll a cigarette, one handley. It seemed like a reflex action, denoting stress. “These weapons? They aren’t for killing. I use them to protect myself, when I have to.”

“You mean to tell me you’ve never taken a life.”

“No. I have. But always in self defence, always because I had no choice.”

“So you’ve never killed anyone in anger?”

The hand rolling the cigarette froze.

“Once,” He said, after a moment. “And I don’t plan on doing it again.”

She waited for him to elaborate. He did not. Instead, he continued to roll the cigarette between his fingertips, then raised it to his lips and swiftly licked the paper, before sealing it with a practised move.

“Look,” Zularna said. “I didn’t come here to be judged by you for the things I do, the things I have to do. That’s between me and Allah, so if you’re done, I’m going to -?”

“Allah?” Elijah said, sharply. “Wait, you’re Muslim?”

Zularna visibly bristled. “Yes, I am, actually. Do you have a problem with that?”

“No...well, yes, I mean I...I’m not a fan of religion - any religion - in general.”

“Oh, and that stops me being a Muslim, does it?”

“No,” he said, in a measured tone, underpinned by a slither of irritation. “I just hadn’t pegged you for being a Muslim.”

“Because I’m white?”

“More the killing thing than that,”

“What I do,” Zularna was angry now, and spoke through gritted teeth. “Is between me and God. It’s nothing to do with you.”

“No, you’re right, it doesn’t have anything to do with me,” He tucked the now finished cigarette behind his ear. “I just never understood faith.”

“So you don’t believe in anything?”

“Not strictly the dictionary definition of atheism, but sure, we’ll roll with it.”

“...don’t tell me you don’t believe in something,” she motioned to his coat, “I saw your pin.”

Elijah glanced down at his lapel. Pinned to it was a tiny button badge: a black portcullis on a white background (the symbol of the Palace of Westminster) with a tiny fleck of red across it, almost crossing it out. If you were close enough, it was possible to see that the fleck of red contained the number 75.

*

Six years before, students had marched on Parliament Square. Thousands had turned out, from across the country, and many from abroad, protesting the skyrocketing cost of education. The protest, planned after yet another hike in fees and another cut in funding, took on a multi-faceted form. The students were joined by anti-war campaigners, women’s groups, queer activists protesting the increased power of the Ministry for Theological Justice, radical eco-warriors, anti-thaumaists (who believe that only the birds should fly), trans-humanists, young families, pensioners and war veterans, many of whom had been robbed of limbs in long forgotten conflicts - in short, a whole tapestry of the oppressed and disenfranchised, snaking across the streets of London, marching and chanting and banging steel drums.

As the march had moved into Parliament Square, the Police had moved in to kettle. Rows of exo-suit wearing riot police blocked off the bridges, roads and side streets. Thousands of people were penned into Parliament Square.

At first, the protesting crowds were unruffled by the kettling. Bar a few scuffles around the police lines, there was a party atmosphere of sorts. Music blared from various sound systems, everything from hip hop to folk to heavy metal. A stage was hastily erected from park benches, and speakers from radical groups and community organisations delivered rousing, upbeat speeches to the crowd, calling on the ministers of the government, locked away in the Palace, to lift the kettle and come out and meet the protesters and listen to their demands. People settled down and began to eat, sharing the food they had with them, in some latter day mimicry of the feeding of the five thousand. Overhead, press skyskimmers vied in the sky for space with the darker, Met skimmers.

As the hours passed rumours abounded among the trapped protesters. They would be held for days. The police would lift the kettle soon. The government was in emergency session, and the Prime Minister himself was going to make a statement. This was the biggest protest in Commonwealth history. Solidarity demonstrations in other Commonwealth cities were going into occupation. There was talk of revolution, an end to the war, and a better tomorrow. Such was the clamouring and excited chatter among the protestors, that no one heard the first shot.

To this day, who fired that shot remains a mystery. After it was done, and the cleanup had begun, the Met found an illegal pistol on the body of one of the students. Yet this caused suspicion. That first shot had come from the ground, and had not hit any protestor or police officer, but had instead struck a BBC News Skyskimmer. It had passed through the reinforced glass of the skimmer’s cockpit and killed the pilot instantly. A report on the protest was being broadcast by the journalist in the skimmer at the time of the shot, and her words were cut off by a crack, a suddenly spurt of blood, and her screams as the pilot’s dead hands released the skimmers controls and it spiralled into the crowd below. Five people were killed. They were the first. Later, suggestions were made the gun found on the student’s body didn’t have the calibre to hit a skyskimmer. It was a 9mm, the kind of weapon that would be lethal at close range but not enough to shoot down a skyskimmer one hundred feet above.

The crash of the skimmer coming to earth caused heads to turn. Music continued to play but no one was listening. Gasps and screams rippled around the crowd. And then, those on the fringes of the police lines heard orders barked, two words which were, for many the last words they ever heard:

“Weapons free!”

The inquiry into what happened failed to address the key questions. Why had the anti-riot police, normally armed with tear gas, stun prods and glue guns, been equipped with assault rifles? Why had the order to fire on the crowd been given less than 10 seconds after the BBC skimmer was shot down? So many questions. No answers.

The front row of protesters died instantly. The Met skimmers flying above the Square opened fire as well. The police began to advance, firing and moving forward, crushing the bodies of the injured and the dying beneath the metal boots of their exo-suits. The firing lasted just under a minute before someone saw sense and ordered a ceasefire. By that point, seventy five protesters were dead. Thirteen of them were children, a group of schoolgirls who had joined the protest as it had passed their school gates. Their bodies were strew over a homemade sign reading “We believe in future generations!”

Mass arrests were made. The gears of justice and governmental response because to turn with brutal efficiency. The Prime Minister decried the violent assault on the police, and praised the Met for its “proportionate” and “disciplined” response. The perpetrators of this massacre would be found and punished. Sources close the PM’s office leaked convincing memos of anarchist groups, intent on violent uprising, infiltrating the protest. Severance collaborators were rumoured to have disguised themselves as students. The youth has been brainwashed by anti-British propaganda and had run riot. The dead pilot and reporter were held up as martyrs.

Trials began swiftly. Courts worked 24 hours a day, with judges sleeping in shifts. Some hearings lasted a matter of minutes. Students and other protesters were given huge prison sentences; others faced hefty fines or forced conscription. The media went into a frenzy and it struggled to keep up the pace demonising the radicals, the hippies, the ungrateful. Tabloid outrage reached a peak when video footage emerged of a man urinating on the steps of Westminster Cathedral. The papers claimed the man was a protester. No one, or at least, no one vocal, pointed out that the man was simply wearing black, and there were thousands upon thousands of people wearing black that day. But that hardly mattered. Appeals to patriotism tend to drown out anything else.

Less than a month after the massacre, the world decided to move on.

Except for those who refused to forget, those who had watched armour piercing bullets (why had the police had military grade ammunition) tearing through the bodies of children, the velocity simply ripping their bodies to shreds and strips of what was once people. Robbed of a way to speak, those who remembered took up a sign, a badge, worn discreetly on a lapel or on a bag: a portcullis gate, a flick of blood, and a number - 75.

*

“You were there, weren’t you?” her tone softened somewhat, “the day that they turned the guns on the students?”

Elijah didn’t reply. He eyes fixed on his badge, unable to meet hers. “...Yes.”

Zularna’s anger began to fade. “I’m...I’m sorry.”

He still didn’t meet her gaze. “Were you?”

“No...I was too young - they didn’t allow us out of school. I watched what I could on the holo before they cut it off...then I tried to follow it on the Holo before the network went down…”

He nodded, rather dully, eyes fixed on the little badge, as if the weight of it were threatening to drag him into himself. Zularna cleared her throat.

“Did you...did you lose people?”

Elijah looked up, and the weariness of his eyes bored into her.

“Everyone I ever knew.”

“I’m sorry,”

“Too few people were.”

“Were you Fueur Frei?”

“We all were.”

There was silence again. His eyes returned to the pin, drawn inexplicably back, as if to the heart of the sun on a summer’s noon.

“But you do believe in something,” Zularna said. “People who wear that badge believe in a lot. It’s not just a memorial. You want there to be a revolution,”

“Believing in revolution is a little bit different to believing in an almighty, all knowing benevolent creator,” Elijah replied.

“Really?”

Elijah glanced around them, and then leaned in, almost conspiratorially. “You don’t have to be there that day to know that something’s going to break soon. What’s happening now can’t last. Come on, look at the war - we’ve been fighting the Severance for what, twenty, thirty years now? How many millions have died, and what have we gained from it? Look around you; half the country can’t even feed itself, we’ve got the British Patriot League running riot in the old industrial cities, attacking immigrant homes, almost every family has lost a son or a daughter or a father or a mother to the war. Do you think this can last? There will be a revolution. There has to be.” he looked down for a moment, and then said, in a tone that sound almost like reassurance. “There has to be.”

“Okay, well, then, why hasn’t it happened? If everything is so bad (and I’m not disagreeing with you) why haven’t the people risen up?”

“It’s not the right time, I guess.” said Elijah, leaning back. “But it’s still going to happen.”

“Prove it.”

“Now you’re just being silly -”

“Belief in something without evidence is faith,” Zularna countered. “You have faith that there’s going to be a revolution. That’s come out of your experience. I believe in Allah. That’s come out of mine. How did you survive?”

“I’m sorry?”

“After...that day. How did you survive? They still have warrants out for people who were on that protest.”

He smiled, the first genuine smile he’d had in the whole meeting. “I live off the grid. Very much off the grid.”

“That’ll only last so long.”

“I’ve managed.”

“How? You must have registered address.”

“Nope. Technically I’m missing.”

“So...where do you live? Sleep, I mean? You’re not homeless, are you?”

“Not at all. I live on Arthur’s Seat.”

“What, in the old zeppelin factory?” she said, incredulously. “So you’re squatting?”

“Kind of. But I’d like to think my place is bit nicer than a squat.”

“How do you deal with retinal scanners? Finger prints?”

He smiled again and held up his finger tips. Zularna squinted at them - they were smooth, and unmarked.

“An easy procedure to do, if you know the right people. Also, watch.”

He reached up and lightly tapped his eyeball. There was a shimmer, and his eyes went from a dull brown to a brilliant blue.

“Contacts,” he explained, “But special ones. The guy I live with made them, He’s kind of a child prodigy, but don’t tell him I said that, his ego will expand another mile. They’re linked to a national identity database, so any retinal scanners will read them as another living person. Currently, I’m an old lady called Fran who lives on South Uist,” he tapped his eyeball again, “And now I’m a guy called Pierre who recently moved over from Lyon,” tap, and his eyes suddenly went red and fiery, “Now I’m...Sauron? Oh, fuck you, Tobias, very funny.”

“He sounds fun, your housemate.”

“He is, at a safe distance.” Elijah tapped his eyeball again and his normal, brown eyes returned.

“What about the weapons? How do you get through metal detectors?”

“These,” Elijah tapped the sheaths on his forearms, “Are nano-ceramics. As hard and sharp as the best steel, but pretty much invisible to scans. This,” he rested his fingers lightly on the holster on his hip, “Also nano-ceramic. Only one of it’s kind. I’m told. The problem with using ceramic in weapons is the heat generated when they are used - lot of prototypes just ended up melting. Tobias figured a way around it. Same with the ammo - looks like standard lead, but it definitely isn’t. To be honest, I don’t know what the rounds are made of, and I don’t really care, provided that hit what I’m aiming at. In other words, as far as a metal detector is concerned, I’m clean.”

“What about money?”

“What about it?” he shrugged.

“Ha ha, Comrade, but seriously, if you live off the grid and steal other people’s biodata, how do you hold down a job?”

“I get by well enough without money. Lots of people owe me favours.”

Zularna rolled her eyes at him. “You must have money. You just paid for lunch?”

He smiled again. “Did I?”

Zularna frowned. At the time they had ordered food, she had been more preoccupied by her inability to read Elijah. Now that she thought about it, at no point had money changed hands between him and the cashier. They had just nodded to one another, and shaken hands while two steaming plates of food had been placed on the counter.

“Azim, the guy who runs this place, was having some trouble with a few lads in the British Patriot League a few months back. I had a quiet word with them. And then a less quiet gun battle, but I think they got the message. Now he gives me a free meal whenever I’m passing by.”

Shame you don’t eat, she thought. “And is that what you do, then? Help people out?”

“Broadly speaking. I’m more in the business of answering questions for people. Questions like what it was that attacked us in Waverly. And why the two of us ended up in the same place, at the same time, facing off against the same thing.”

The smile was gone now, and replaced by the same tired earnestness she had seen at the beginning of the conversation. She paused, thought carefully, and then said. “Okay, so if you answer questions for people, answer me this: why can’t I read you?”

Elijah seemed surprised. “You can’t?”

“Nothing. You’re the first person I’ve ever met who’s past I cannot see.”

He looked down, and smiled faintly. “Handy.”

“What? “

“Nothing. That, I’m afraid, is a question for another time. Now I have a question for you, several in fact, that I had been meaning to ask. What happens when you close your eyes?”

“Um?” the question caught her off guard. “It goes dark?”

“So you don’t see anything? Anything different, unusual?”

“No…”

Elijah grimaced with annoyance. “Have you ever had red hair?”

“I don’t see why that’s - ?”

“Please, just answer the question?”

That anger that she had felt earlier rose again. The extent to which it was because of his questions, or because he sat there, inscrutable, in a memory-less fog, was hard to say. “No, I’ve never had red hair. Look, we’ve been talking for half an hour now and I’m still not sure what you want with me, so just get to the fucking point!”

Elijah hung his head, sadly. His eye closed at he did so, and he faded (why did he do that) briefly. He muttered something she didn’t catch - it took her a moment to realise he was cursing, angrily under his breath. He looked up again, and she saw that tired sadness once more.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’ve not been clear...I just...I’ve had a question, one I’ve been trying to answer for a very, very long time, and I hoped...I hoped you might be able to answer it. I’m sorry, it was a stupid hope. A fool’s hope.”

He hung his head again, and seemed to sink into himself. Zularna exhaled softly. Too many thoughts and questions of her own were dancing about in her mind, but there was something so palpable about his dejection that she couldn’t ignore. “I’m sorry...I’m sorry I can’t give you the answer you’re looking for. I’d ask you what the question was, but I doubt you’d tell me, and let’s face it, you’re the first person I’ve ever met where I can’t figure it out myself. I just see the pasts of others. That’s it.”

“The pasts of others…” he repeated. His head came up again, and instead of sadness, she saw a light of inspiration in his eye. “Could you see the past of something that was dead?”

That, that she was not expecting. “I...I don’t know, I mean… I’ve never tried?”

“Want to?”

“...why?”

Elijah cleared his throat. One hand stole into his coat, pulled a fob watch out of a waistcoat pocket, which he glanced at before continuing. “I’m working a job right now...well, two jobs, but one of them is my own. It’s about that thing in Waverly… Tobias - my housemate - he may have a lead on something, but I may need your help.”

Zularna found herself becoming lost. “And...what, that something is...dead?”

“Yeah, my bad but he was kind of asking for it. Look.” he drained the remains of his coffee in a single gulp and held her gaze once again. “You have a skill, and I need people with skills in my line of work. All I’m asking for is a few hours of your time. I’ve got an airship to catch, for another job, but,” he fished in his coat, and passed her a thin sliver of card. “If you have time tomorrow, call on me.”

Zularna took the card and examined it. “‘Sleepwalker’?” she read out, skeptically.

“Yeah, I know, I know,” he waved his hand dismissively. “Not my idea, blame Tobias, okay? On second thoughts, I know you haven’t met him, but as a general life rule, when it doubt, blame Tobias. It’s remarkably satisfying.” He picked his hat, and placed it on his head, pulling the brim down low over his eyes. “Will you help me?”

Zularna turned the business card over a few times in her hand. “I’ll think about it.”

“Best I can ask for.” with that, Elijah Avaron rose to his feet. “Do think about it. And if you think it right, call me. I’ll be at Arthurs Seat.” He hesitated, “Assuming what I’m about to do goes well…”

Zularna opened her mouth to ask what that might be, but with a polite doff of his hat, Elijah swept past her, and out into the rain. She watched him, for a moment, in the street, as he lit a cigarette, glanced back briefly, and then was lost in the crowd.