Chapter 15

It’s difficult to say what dreams might have haunted Warren that night in a dusty, unfamiliar room. And if he had remembered any of them, explanations might have been far from possibility. But troubled his dreams certainly were—for he awoke early, anxious and sore. The sun had already nipped above the horizon and extended its first few rays through the windows, laying them brazenly on the off-white wall opposite him. Warren tried to turn over and cling to the last vestiges of sleep, but found his brain already pondering the questions of the new day—namely where Ali had gone. He had surely watched as she had curled up next to his pad, hadn’t he? But now he propped himself on his elbows and scanned the room.
“Ali?” he said, coughing hoarsely afterward. He swallowed and tried again. “Ali, where are you, girl?” She was nowhere in sight and for a second he listened, hoping to catch the sound of any of her motions, the scratch of her claws on the wood flooring or the squeak of a sneeze.
Unsatisfied with nothing, Warren rolled out of bed, scratching at his scalp with one hand, and picking the sleep from the corner of his eyes with the other. The silence was desolate—nothing moved or ticked, not a shadow flickered nor a light flashed. He exited his room to find an empty, barren hallway. Dust lingered in the air, motes swirling lazily from his breath in the still beams of light, fixed in place by the shutters. Each step he took sent a small puff spiraling into shadows.
As he entered the front room, with a brazen, but dust-covered, chandelier hanging meaninglessly over the vacant room, Warren stopped. All the suitcases and bags and equipment were gone. The room had been stripped as bare as it had been when they arrived the previous evening. He glanced furtively around the room, nothing caught his eye at first, until he found a single notebook page, curled at the edges, resting in the early light. Warren approached the paper with obvious care—holding himself back, as if it might leap up and bite him—and his right eyebrow dropped into a scowl. He squinted at it, determined that it did, in fact, contain a lightly scribbled note.
When Warren crouched and picked up the piece of paper, he began to read the following, written in a loopy script:

“Walk east five blocks the moment you read this and you will live. Come unarmed and alone and one of your friends shall live. Give us what we desire and we may give you two more. Deviate from our instructions in the slightest, and you and your friends shall die.

--Sylvara

Warren’s heart must have missed a beat, for he stood there, looking at the torn piece of paper like a deer in headlights. He managed to read it again and react—he yelled about the house and waited for answer. None came. He spun and searched the walls, now brighter in the morning sun and he began to observe that which he missed upon first glance: several bullet holes. And something else, something new, came to his attention as he inspected the wall more closely. Fine little dots had been splattered across the bland yellowed wallpaper. Warren rubbed his thumb across one and it streaked red in the rising sun’s rays. He staggered backwards and hastily searched the other walls. Everywhere blood had been sprayed onto dust-coated surfaces.
He glanced back to the note; he figured he had no choice but to follow the note’s instructions. With the paper in hand, he burst through the doors and into an already balmy summer morning. He found the sun and began running east on the street just beyond the drive. It was a divided street with giant willows lining the middle, allowing only the tiniest snippets of light to fall on Warren like a fine crosshatch pen stroke. A squirrel seemed to notice his urgency and followed him in the trees, racing across the limbs and hopping lightly from branch to branch.
By the fourth street, his run had slowed to a minor jog and he couldn’t help but wonder where precisely he was supposed to be or what exactly the note-writer wanted him to do. But he felt his friends jeopardy acutely—he knew he wasn’t a soldier, like Livinstone, and had immediately abandoned hope of a forced rescue. He would have to play this game and trust his intellect to carry him through, Warren decided. Above all, he reminded himself the importance of questions—of asking the right ones, as Livingstone had taught him (although with a slight dose of frustration and humiliation).
But as he began down the fifth block, he found the sun’s light much intensified in only a couple yards. He squinted at the glaring light—flattened his hand over his brow. The tree just beyond him, nearly indiscernible in the brightness, seemed to be lacking foliage. Warren kept his feet moving, his hand at his forehead, his eyelids barely cracked. As he approached the first tree, he found its bark blackened, as if scorched from a fire, with only a few thick bare limbs stretching into the sky. Not a single leaf inhabited its heights, nor even the smaller twigs.
He looked back to the west at the brilliant, fully-leafed trees behind him, glowing green in the rising sun. A squirrel paused at the last healthy tree, quite reluctant to continue on. It chirped a couple times, its tail bobbing with each, and then scampered frantically back west. But then, on the street behind him, he saw a long, swimming shadow, stretching across the whole of the street. Warren’s right eyebrow dropped and then he turned to find the source. It seemed a figure in the sky—but he heard nothing of the thump of helicopter blades, nor the roar of a plane engine. Glancing back, he watched the shadow dancing on the street, approaching the long tower of his own. When the two combined forms, he glanced back up just in time to see a great span of wings silhouetted against the sun, hear a couple pounding flaps, wonder for a moment how big the bird must be, and then raise his hands to shield his face from the impact.
In the next moment, he felt as if a truck hit him. Then weightlessness occurred to him—he did not dare to open his eyes. He waited to hit the pavement again. When nothing of the kind occurred, he realized a dull but forceful pressure on his shoulders and armpits. His left arm went numb, followed by the realization of his weight again. He was hanging, Warren ascertained and tried to will himself to open his eyes.
One by one his senses returned to him—the deep monotonous wing beats assaulting his ears, the rush of a breeze on his cheeks, then sight of his legs dangling over a black and gray, debris-filled, smoking quarter of the town. Warren craned his neck upward in a failed attempt to ascertain his captor’s identity. Instead he focused on the vice-like talons hooked around his shoulders—they were the feet of an osprey, rough scaled toes with curving claws to keep prey from slipping their grasp. And the longer the flight lasted, the more acute the pain of the talons digging into his shoulders became.
Then Warren noticed a slight change in what was otherwise a fairly straight flight path towards what he thought was the center of the desolation. He felt himself dipping and turning north; then the banked turn became even more severe as he was dropped into a descending spiral—heading for what he thought the tallest building in the area, a six or seven story apartment complex with a gaping hole in one side. This appeared to be the target of his abductor and Warren found himself slightly concerned about the speed with which they were approaching the building. And all too quickly they dove through the opening and then he felt the wings spread wide and a brutal pain from the talons as they slowed from the descent.
Then he was free of the grip—but free falling to a large, emptied room. When Warren landed, face-first and sliding across the wood flooring, he cringed and coughed. He rolled himself over and grabbed at his left shoulder—it felt wet. He tried to use his tingling left arm to prop himself up, but failed and collapsed back to the floor. After a few short breaths while lying on his back and a grunt, he pushed himself into a sitting position with his right arm and glanced around the room. He found no sign of his captor, but just the cracked floor ending abruptly fifteen feet or so in front of him, affording him a good view of the surrounding buildings. Each seemed coated with ash; most of the windows were shattered and doors blown open. He wondered what sort of catastrophe had occurred here.
He pressed his right hand to his opposite shoulder again, pulled the collar of his shirt down to get a look at the wound. It didn’t seem to be bleeding too badly, so he kept some pressure on it and scanned the room. He imagined there had been another room between the one he was in and what used to be the edge of the building, as he found himself far within the cavity of the collapse. A room to his right, across the expansive hole in the building, was visible from his location, as well the one below it, and a section of the roof above it.
Sheer silence held the place captive, save a drip from a still-leaky pipe somewhere in the recesses of the ruins. Warren struggled to his feet and made a trip around his prison. The obvious first deterrent was the four-story plunge into wreckage. The wall to the right had no doors or windows, unlike the wall to the left of the edge. But when Warren inspected it, he found no doorknob, and it wouldn’t budge an inch when he kicked it—which told him that it had been boarded up or was otherwise blocked from the far side. A couple windows behind him were devoid of glass, and Warren wondered if they led to a balcony or fire escape. When he leaned out of them, however, he saw that perhaps there had been, at one time or another, a ladder of some kind, but nothing of the sort existed anymore. All he stared at was the cluttered ground, seven stories down.
Indeed his room was meant to be a self-containing cell, Warren figured, and sat against the wall by the door. An hour passed, while he massaged his shoulders and closed his eyes and tried to picture Sofi’s brilliant eyes gazing into his own. In fact, the percentage of time he noticed that he spent thinking about her served as an subject which ate up a rather substantial portion of that time. When he lost himself in thought, he watched the shadows shift along the skeletal buildings outside, in that repetitive sundial dance of daylight. What seemed to be more time than perhaps actually passed edged onward, while his throbbing shoulder counted the seconds better than any microwave timer.
These hours of solo introspection brought the same questions to his mind time and again: what am I here for? Who am I to these people—to Sofi and Livingstone, to the Mar, to the demons? How did it come to this? Why me? These, or other variations, sapped his mental energy while he sat there, on a cracked, dusty, wooden floor, rubbing his shoulder. As far as he could tell, he had no idea whatsoever to explain why he was in this particular position.
Warren felt it was series of disastrous and unexpected and flat-out strange events that had sent him tumbling to where he was now: like he was a rock that had been jarred loose on a steep hill and had gained too much momentum to stop on its own—as if he needed to hit something solid first. Problem was, he couldn’t find anything solid if he wanted to. He had been separated from his family in a morning. He had been driven out of his home town, even his home state, by several hundred miles. And now all of his new “friends” had disappeared overnight. What was solid in that? And now he found himself wounded and powerless, trapped in an exposed, seventh-story prison, awaiting who-knew what to save the lives of these people who had ruined his life.
Why was he so important? What could he possibly have or know that could have set off this chain reaction in which he found himself so impossibly buried at present? These unanswerable, but quite nagging questions pestered his soul to its core. Indeed, it seemed as though his very will had been stripped of him starting that night when he went to bed several days ago in his own bed, carefree and in love with life. Why had such change found him so quickly?
And the longer he thought about it, the more he meditated on these questions, the more it occurred to him that Livingstone was absolutely correct in renouncing the meaninglessness of such inquiries. What did it matter that this happened to him, one of billions (even on a single pathway…probably of billions more)? For every question that came to him, there existed a counter question just as far removed from an answer as the first. And the more he decided to lose himself in pondering these abstractions, the further he stretched himself from any answers. If there were a right way to dabble in abstraction, Warren decided that it wasn’t considering one set of questions without the other. Theory only amounted to something like an alignment on a racetrack. It was setting his wheels on the tracks. And bad questions only disrupted this process, and once set in motion, could steer him of course—perhaps ending in disaster.
So Warren decided to ask himself, “Why not me?” along with “Why me?” He thought about the consequences of his purpose as meaningful or as meaningless to the others he interacted with. And within a few moments, he determined that, if he were a drastic asset to either side, or completely worthless, his life still had value to him. And so if he sensed a necessity to keep an identity of value to keep himself alive, then so be it. If it seemed better to him to do the opposite, then of course he would. He would steer himself towards life at every opportunity.
The only issue for Warren, then, remained the question of Sofi—and whether he might tie his purpose to her. Unfortunately, nearly the moment he began to consider her value to him, a shriek pierced what had become a comfortable silence. It echoed up from the depths of the ruined apartment below him—and it certainly wasn’t human.