The Irreversible Reckoning
***
When we opened the front door of Eli’s house, we both actually gasped out loud, jumped back a step, and Eli actually kind of squealed. It would have been hilarious had we not been staring down none other than the man we had been calling a treasonous asshole all morning. Suddenly, Don Abba’s large eyes were not so comical; in fact, in the dim lighting on the porch, and with the dark gray clouds swirling behind him in the sky, they almost looked menacing. No longer were they that light blue, they were almost black. Or so I thought. When Eli recovered himself enough to invite Don into the house, and Don stepped over the threshold, his eyes were back to their normal electric blue, and I wondered if it was the lighting, or if he had forced them to change over. I wondered if he knew we were up to something, or if we were just getting paranoid.
We all sat down on the couches, Eli and I on one with Don sitting across from us.
“So Alice and John shipped out this morning?” He asked.
“I think you already know the answer to that, Don. Considering you’re the one who gave them the ship-out orders. You gave them the location, and told them to go.”
“Yes, and I’m sorry. I know you and Alice were having some issues last night, but I couldn’t have grounded her if I tried. You know she’d rather be out there than in here.”
He was needling me, and it was working. My teeth were clenching, and I was watching his eyes watch the tension in my jaw. Don, even when he was playing his little mind games, never came across as smug. He never allowed his opponent to think he was anything other than genuinely concerned, and when he was questioning someone, he never allowed them to think he was anything other than genuinely curious. I was supposed to let my guard down, but he knew I wouldn’t. I was supposed to get angry, and he thought I would. I couldn’t afford to lose it, though. He had come there for a reason, and we had to let him talk. He’d give himself away, at least a little bit.
“I do have the authority to step in and ground her, if I feel like she is a danger to herself and her team. If I feel like she’s distracted by her emotions, if she’s too… unsettled… I can tell her to stay, and I thought very seriously last night about grounding her, but when I saw her this morning, she was all business. Even after the, um…” He cleared his throat as though in discomfort, “The nature of your fight last night, what she said she wanted, she was still perfectly in the zone, as they say. Ready to go.”
Beside me, I could see Eli tensing, in both anger and in anxiety. He was pissed because Don was needling me like that; Eli was my brother, and when someone stepped to me, they were stepping to him, too. He was worried because we were both so emotionally frazzled, and the moment we snapped on Don was dangerously close as a result. Too much needling, and Don Abba would cease to exist, and regardless of how we felt about him, the Pangaeans and the former Eartheans in our camp liked him, and as a result of this tepid liking, they would be forced to uphold the law and imprison us, try us, and exile us. There were no executions besides those required by the war; we killed no one but Old Spirits, even if one of us killed another one of us. Don didn’t believe in sentencing any of his people to die. He “didn’t have that right.”
If I killed him, though, I’m sure his people would find a little asterisk next to that law in our Constitution, and the footnote would say, “If the great, powerful, and fearless leader, Don Abba, should fall by the hand of one of his own, ‘tis treason of the highest variety, and treason of this severity shall merit the unspeakable consequence of death!”
So Eli and I had to keep ourselves calm.
“That’s Alice for you.” I told him, and I grinned proudly, “You can never doubt her loyalty to the cause, can you, Don?”
“No.” He shook his head slightly, smiling with just his mouth; his eyes were struggling to turn black or red, so they were flecked with strands of both. “Not to the cause. I can doubt her loyalty to me, though.”
His smile widened, but his eyes remained devoid of any light. It was kind of amazing, the way his face looked. I almost wanted to take a picture, because I had never seen someone able to have such contrasting emotions on his face at once. In fact, in the many years I had known Don, I had never seen him pull that look before.
“Oh, she’s loyal to you, Don. You just don’t think she’s loyal because she calls you on your bullshit, unlike all your little peons on the Council.” Eli said. “You’ve gotten so used to people practically bowing to you, wanting to lick your boots and kiss your ass in the middle of the village square, so you think because she doesn’t do the same thing, she’s disloyal. Even though she’s killed and captured more of your Old Spirit targets than any other Commander, she’s disloyal, because unlike the rest of the assholes on your Council, she won’t drop to her knees and suck your…”
“Eli.” Don interrupted him, and his fake smile vanished, his eyes widened, and he looked genuinely horrified at what Eli had almost said. “Please don’t even suggest that. Alice is seventeen years old…”
“She’s actually in her forties.” I corrected him.
“Yeah, and I’m in my early seventies, but it doesn’t matter. We are what we are physically. Don’t you pay attention during the sermons?”
“No.” Eli and I answered simultaneously, and Don actually laughed.
“Of course you don’t.” He replied, with a genuine smile, “Have I ever told either of you how little I care that you don’t like me?”
He said it so genially, like he were saying the opposite: “Have I ever told either of you how much I appreciate that you like me so much?”
“Have I ever told you how little I care that Alice hates me, and John would love to see me dead, because of his perceptions of how I spoke to and looked at his wife…”
“Whoa!” Eli interrupted him, waving his arms slightly and sitting forward, “You don’t have the best track record with attractive women in their forties, Don, and John knew that. Whenever my mother was in the room, you couldn’t keep your eyes off of her. Now, he suspected, and I think he was right, that the fact that she had been an Old Spirit pariah made you want her more. Look at how you treated Savannah Mack. Look at how you treated that woman the Old Spirits pretended was my mom. You lust for their leftovers, for whatever reason. So, yeah, John was going to protect my mom, who had just suffered at the hands of men just… like… you.”
He put a pause in between each word for emphasis, and it had the desired effect. Don started to sputter in indignation about how he was nothing like the Old Spirits. Everything he ever did with a woman that we deemed ‘controversial’ was consensual, and that it was none of our business, and there was no way he ever would have laid a hand on Lara, because she was Eli’s mother…
“Oh, and if she weren’t my mother, she would have been fair game?”
“Of course not! I have never touched a woman who didn’t ask me to touch her! How dare you suggest that I could ever be capable of rape?! And what is this fascination that you all have with my sex life?!”
“Because those women come out of there regretting what they did.”
“Not all of them. Let me assure you. Most of them come back for more.” He said with a triumphant laugh.
“Well, let me assure you,” I jumped in, “…that if we were on Earth, you’d be following around blonde prostitutes in the Dead Cities, begging them to take your money, so you could…”
“You stop right there.” Don spat at me, and his eyes finally turned over red, “You will not talk about her. You didn’t know her, and you will not talk about her.”
“Talk about who?” Eli asked.
“If you weren’t the all-powerful leader, Don Abba, you’d have to beg for it.” I spat back, “But all of that is so fucking irrelevant, so why don’t you get to why you’re here, Don?”
“Why don’t I?” He asked, and he was calm. His eyes returned to their normal blue, he leaned forward, and he smiled again, “All I wanted was to ask why you two didn’t come to me with your suspicions?”
 
; Neither of us spoke. We weren’t surprised that he knew we suspected him, because we weren’t exactly the stealthiest or sneakiest of investigators. But we weren’t going to give ourselves away until he talked a little more, and we could determine how much he actually knew. He was counting on us to come right out with it, because he knew that we had been brash and bold in our pursuit of the truth, and would therefore be proud of finding it. But Eli and I didn’t take the bait, so for a few minutes, the three of us just sat in heavy silence.
“You’re waiting for me to tell you how much I know.” Don told us, “Right?”
“No, Don.” I replied, very sarcastically, but with enough convincing fake sincerity that he looked for a moment like he believed me, “We’re just waiting for you to explain what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Alright,” Don smiled with just his mouth again, “Quinn’s injury was a dead giveaway, as they say. I mean, this huge puddle of blood in the alley right beside the greenhouse, but no blood drops on any of the paths leading up to the greenhouse at all. Very suspect. Now, if you were your younger sister, Elijah, when you stole the Inventory Logs and the Patient Manifests, you would have replaced them with little black books that looked identical. They sell them in the bookstore; that’s where we get them. That could have possibly left a trail, though. So what would Brynna have done? Asked James to buy one, Rachel and Joe to buy one each, Tony and Tom… A diverse group of people who, though they are all connected to her, they do not create an obvious connection, see? Not as obvious as if she had asked you two, and Alice, and Violet to buy a couple. That’s assuming anyone found that the books for the previous months were fakes, replicas, what have you. But she would have accounted for that.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Don.” Eli replied. “Is there something in the Patient Manifests and Inventory Logs that would raise suspicions about something?”
“No.” Don shook his head, “Of course not, Eli!” He leaned forward, and his large blue eyes looked between the two of us, “But say there were. Say there was something in those books that was not supposed to be on those books. Or say there were some inconsistencies between the two books.”
“Say that there was, or say that there were.” I said.
“It would be no business of yours.” He said, and for a long moment, he paused, allowing his wide-eyed gaze to bore into Eli first, and then me, and then Eli again. “It is not your concern. You two are part of the muscle, and I am the whole brain. Leave the thinking to me, okay?”
I wanted to shout, “Leave the thinking to you?! Leave you to think up more schemes to kill all those who disagree with you? Leave you to think us into a civil war, since clearly, we don’t have enough with our world war?” But I held my tongue. Eli and I were on the same page, because he didn’t respond, either. We knew to keep playing it cool. Don’t confess anything, because we still didn’t have the whole story.
“Say you were right, Don.” Eli said carefully, “Say we had gone snooping, and say we saw that there were some inconsistencies in the logs. Say we thought, ‘Hey, maybe Don might have done something not so nice.’”
“Say that you were saying that.” Don replied.
“Well, we’d keep pushing until we had the whole story, because say you had done something not so nice, that something not so nice got my wife and several other innocent people killed. It also conveniently killed every person on that stage who was opposed to some of your suggestions. Conveniently, all your peons who would throw themselves onto a Light Bomb for you were far, far away from this Light Bomb.”
“Three of my closest advisors died.”
“Well, yeah, but thirty of your opponents died. Say all this were true, then I could say that the three of your closest advisors who died were there so no one could say that it was only your opponents. They were there to make the whole thing seem convincing.”
He was still smiling, except now, the flecks of red in his eyes were unmistakable. That should have been enough evidence for us to know that we were right in all of our allegations, but still, we were going to push until our evidence was so far past totally conclusive that there was no way a jury of even Don’s bought-off peons could deny that all we were saying was true.
“I appreciate that you boys think I am capable of pulling off such a scheme.”
“You shouldn’t appreciate anything,” I said, “Because it’s not a compliment. We’re not complimenting you.”
“Yeah, you left a fucking trail, man.” We both actually laughed, because it was so true, and so funny, “You can deny it all you want, but we’re not going to stop pushing this until we have our conclusive proof.” Eli stood up, moved to the door, and opened it, “So while I know that your visit here is supposed to intimidate us out of pushing this further, let me tell you that we’re going to keep going until we’ve got enough proof to put you away.”
“I wish you boys would reconsider this.” He told us regretfully from the doorway. “I wish you would see that you are wrong.”
“Well, we won’t. So enjoy your last few days as leader.” I told him, “It’s been a long time coming.”
“I really wish you would reconsider this.” He said again, “But I also really don’t wish it.” He smiled just as Eli began to close the door, “Let the games begin, boys.”