The Last Magician

Red Rising

The strength of the sun seemed to have waned by the time the trio stepped through the door of the Police Station.

Inside, only the cell room had remained standing following the quake. The main office on both sides of the arched divide had all but collapsed, rendering the station as unstable as everything around it.

Jack felt a little refreshed after being out of the sun while they had been inside the building. He wanted to give his thanks to whichever god watched over the tormented land and had reduced the heat bearing down upon it. Small mercies were all he expected but he would take them as and when they came.

”So where are we going?” Kurt enquired, limping slightly but able to walk unaided.

”Back to the house,” Jack said.

He wanted to say home, but it no longer felt right. Home was a safe place, a familiar place. All they had found here was danger and uncertainty.

“What house?” Kurt asked.

“Just a house.”

Jack could feel Amanda’s gaze on him. She had noticed his refusal to call it home but so far she had not questioned him directly. He hoped it stayed that way.

“So what are we going there for?”

“Kurt,” Jack said. “Give it a rest with the questions. We left some things there earlier and now you’re here I think we can carry all we need to.”

“So that’s why you helped me out of the cells,” Kurt said. “You needed a pack-mule. Great.”

“Would you rather have stayed there?” Jack waited for a reply but none came. “Okay, well we’re going back to the house to pick up what we can carry then…”

Jack continued walking, but his words dried up.

He did not know what to say next. Since finding Kurt in the cells Jack believed that his control over what they did and where they went was minimal. He wasn’t leading them, directing them or moving them towards answers. The only thing he was doing was freefalling from one event to the other.

Every decision he made seemed to have been made for him. Something was driving them, controlling them, making their actions appear to be their own while planting suggestions in their heads.

Jack had awakened to a blank memory. He knew nothing of his past, nothing of his surroundings yet somehow he found the house where Amanda was waiting for him. How could he have known where to go when he was not certain of his own name? Then there had been the lure of the Police Station, the idea that someone was inside had come from somewhere. Someone was pulling their strings and making them dance.

But who and how?

”Jack?”

Amanda’s voice dragged him out of his thoughts. He felt a sudden flash of rage and irritation. He wanted to tell her to shut the fuck up, fuck off, go to hell. He was trying to make sense of the situation the newly formed trio were in, and the bitch couldn’t keep her mouth shut for one bastard...

He mentally slapped himself. Where had that come from? He had no reason to be angry with Amanda. If not for her he would have died on the doorstep of that rundown house he had believed to be his home.

“Sorry,” he said, his usual calm immediately back in place. ”I was just thinking.”

“You were saying what we were going to do,” Amanda probed.

”That’s what I started thinking about but I can’t finish the sentence,’ he confessed. ‘All we can do is go back to the house and see what happens next.”

Amanda studied Jack’s face. She knew there was something wrong but couldn’t tell exactly what. Did Jack know something? How could he? He had seen nothing more than she had. There was just something preoccupied about him as though he was troubled. She couldn’t blame him; they were all troubled and they had moved barely any distance from where they had awakened. None of them could be prepared for what could be waiting out there.

Kurt did not bother with any deeper meanings or future worries.

‘Great plan, Chief,’ he said. ‘If we have no plan, nothing can go wrong. I like it.”

Jack shot him a glance, a flash of the anger he had earlier felt briefly resurfacing. Kurt visibly flinched and Jack felt guilt wash over him sweeping away the red rising in his mind.

Why was he struggling to control his temper?

What was happening to him?

As with so many occurrences, Jack knew he would not hold his breath for an answer. He just had to try and keep some kind of control over the situation, make sure that he remembered they were all in this together. It had to stay as simple as that.

The three companions retraced the path that led Jack and Amanda to Kurt’s prison, noticing how nothing had changed and the quake left little impact on the outside world. A couple of buildings had collapsed further to the ground, others sported wounding cracks along their walls.

They passed the vacant lot which had been momentarily occupied by Amanda’s vision of the vanishing Motel. Passing the lot, vacant as she knew it should be, gave her mixed feelings. She had wanted the building to be there, willed it to appear again. Nothing materialised. Maybe it had been the heat of the sun, but why a motel? Mirages were hallucinations based on a maddening need; she didn’t need an American guesthouse.

That was something else she didn’t understand. She wasn’t American. This wasn’t America. She didn’t think so anyway. The Police Station was not American to the best of her knowledge. She had seen police cells before, her type of cell had a door with a hatch; American cells had bars.

“You okay?” Jack asked, pulling Amanda from her thoughts.

“Yeah, fine.”

They continued walking through the deserted streets, throwing glances around them for anything new, any signs of others.

Jack noticed nothing until they approached the front door of the house and even then it was something that wasn’t there; the feeling of being watched. The sense of eyes on him had been present the whole time they had been out of the house, possibly the eyes of the elusive “other” they had startled in the house; the floor dweller.

The door of the house remained slightly ajar. It was as though they had never been away.

Jack walked into the hallway and stopped dead. The others bumped into him, briefly uttered questioning grunts then fell silent at the sight before them.

Just a little way along the hall, a gaunt, painfully thin figure crouched over the findings from Jack and Amanda’s earlier search.

As he raised his head in the dim light, it was clear The Floor Dweller realised he was no longer alone.