Liz smiles with soft amusement.
"Maxine, why are you rushing to the point of choking? Drink your milk slowly."
She is in a long-sleeved grey top with a dark tone that softens her heavy curves while setting them off with how it fits her. And below, she has cropped pants with deep red strap heels. Her casual look, with striking curves, flat stomach, and gentle temperament makes a beautiful picture, but I'm unable to appreciate it. I can't even keep the image of her teasing earlier when I have had my back to her in my mind.
I can be certain she has held up her breasts to tease me, but the scene in front of me erases everything from my mind.
Liz is smiling, and the man who she let in is also smiling courteously. But that courtesy feels so fake to me, and I can feel it slipping away even as no brainwave pollutes the air, and I don't actively try to read his mind.
My daze makes Liz shake her head helplessly, before she waves her hand to the side and introduces the man to me.
"Say hi to Mike. You must remember him, right?"
That smile like she is presenting a pleasant surprise or something amusing only accelerates the fall of my heart as it slips downward to hit the bottom of my stomach with a sickening thud.
My hand holding the half empty glass of milk up is frozen, but Liz continues, only thinking that I'm showing the expected surprise.
"Mike and I met at the hospital some time ago. We had plans yesterday, but postponed it to today because he got held up. Since you are home, let's have you guys get to know each other again, what do you say?"
I… I say to hit him in the back of the head with the heaviest thing in the house and run, run very far away. What the hell were dad or mom, or both, involved in? Was the 'accident' that claimed their lives and almost killed me really one? And there is the second one that took the grandparents I have tried, 'we' have tried hard not to think about too.
All the composure I thought I have gained and cultivated slips away like a mask, and I smile, but even I can feel how forced that expression of mine is.
"Sis, are you trying to date?"
Liz pauses, then smiles indulgently.
"What? Don't want to share me with anyone else?"
I gulp. I don't even internalize her words to think about them, or imagine sharing her and observe the emotions that will course through me. I glance at the man a step to the back of Liz. The brown, almost blond hair, the fair but healthy skin, and the calm expression focused on me.
How can I not remember that face? It looks exactly like a few months ago, only without the calm sympathy of that time.
Liz continues talking as she crosses more than half of the distance between us.
"He got transferred to town in a new department. Come, let's have you guys reintroduce yourselves to each other."
I empty the glass of milk, and smoothen my smile, somewhat, and face the visitor with a better calm.
"Hi. Maxine Lockdream. We met before."
Even as I say that, my heart skips a beat because I notice that when 'Mike' has rang the bell of the house a few months ago as a border police officer to announce the accident that took our grandparents lives just after we got dad and mom's ashes, he has given no information about himself. He had made himself a ghost painted to the color of an official organization, a ghost most people, normal people, would never try to look for. Because, would they? And why would he come back here again?
He smiles, even as his eyes cool down.
"Mike Donovan. Liz has said much about you."
Liz gentle face lights up, and she enthusiastically interjects as she looks back, swinging her ponytail with the movement of her head:
"Mike, you can call her Maxine, or Max. Do you want to go out with us?"
The last question is directed at me, and when no reply comes, Liz turns back to me:
"Max?"
But my hand holding the empty glass trembles, and my face blanches. My focus is shaken and disconnected from the waves I'm reading, and fear floods my heart, no, my whole being.
'No need to continue pretending. The target is here, and this is the best place to extract her secrets. Discreet, with no surprise to be expected.'
Mike's eyes go from Liz to me, and he takes in my reaction.
'Indeed, the Lockdream might have succeeded. An insulator who can read minds. Either a guinea pig or the first perfect result. She is the only one I need.'
The detachment in the thoughts going through the mind of 'Mike' chills me. His face seems to have a mask slide off it to reveal cold, trained indifference behind it, and he looks from me to Liz. Everything seems slow to me, but in that slow world, I hear my heart create a fast background music that paralyzes me like an electric current.
I open my mouth, but even that doesn't happen fast enough.
"L~I~Z~!~!~!~ CA~RE~FU–"
'Mike' moves with the efficient but deadly grace of an action movie hero, or maybe the villain instead. His hand which is hidden by Liz in front of him goes back and comes out like a flexible poisonous snake, this time, holding a black object which he slams against Liz's defenseless nape before him before she can process anything and look back at him.
Her violet eyes lose their glow, a haze coming over them as they shake, and she loses her footing, like a puppet whose strings have been cut off, and whose fate is left to the whims of the filthy abyss we are all walking over.
My heart stops at that moment. My eyes follow Liz in her fall, disbelief warring with rational dread in my mind.
At this moment, I know that my life has changed, and it will never be the same again… if I survive.