"Do you know the novelist who wrote under the pen name Humal?" Indra asked suddenly.
Obero nodded. "I know of him. Infamous, isn't he? I never read his books though."
Indra let out a faint smile. "There used to be one of his novels, Twist, in our house. Goodman forgot it there. When we were kids, Arthur used to read it to us. We loved it. I still don't understand why people call it the worst book ever though.
But there was a passage in it… and while we were walking home that night, it kept echoing in my mind."
He recited it slowly:
"It was a beautiful day with all our wishes coming true, it was a beautiful day with smiles coming to us once again, it was a beautiful day with everything being perfect again, and on that beautiful day, our eyes which were glued to our fists holding the eternal happiness made us blind to see the dark wave coming at us; our ears which were busy listening to the laughs around us made us deaf to hear the angry cries of the waves; and the warmth we felt from holding each other made us numb to sense the coldness of the wave; and by the time we noticed the hungry wave, it was already devouring us."
"I do not know why," Indra whispered, "but those words would not leave my mind. They circled again and again, until suddenly Sophia grabbed my hand and pulled me out of my thoughts.
She dragged me into a narrow alley beside the road. It was dark, lit only by a single torch flickering above. Before I could ask anything, she kissed me. Hard. She kissed me until I ran out of breath and began to suffocate. When she finally pulled back, I was gasping. She hugged me tight."
He swallowed.
"She said, 'Don't think of anything other than me when I am with you.'
And when she said it, she looked… sad. Lonely in a way I had never seen before. I hugged her back, kissed her until we both felt warm despite the cold snow falling around us.
When we stopped, she stepped back. 'Stay happy like this whenever you think of me,' she said.
Another step back into the darkness. 'Think of me, each and every second.'
Those were the last words she spoke to me.
The moment she finished, the whole alley went silent. It felt like she had vanished into the dark.
Indra's voice grew hollow.
"Before I could call her name, she stepped back into the light. But she wasn't alone. A man was behind her, one arm around her waist, the other holding a knife to her throat. And out of the corner of my eye, I saw two more men closing in on my side.
Looking at her tense face, the tiny tears trembling at the corners of her eyes, something inside me snapped. I lunged toward the man holding her, but the instant I moved he pressed the blade closer to her throat. I froze. Forced myself to breathe. Forced myself to think.
Seeing me calm down, he eased the knife away again. He did nothing else, only stood there as if waiting. A heavy silence settled between us until the sound of footsteps echoed from the alley's entrance. The man turned, and both Sophia and I turned as well.
A tall, muscular polis officer was walking toward us. When his eyes caught the dim light, they glinted red. The man holding Sophia immediately released her and stepped back toward his companions. Sophia ran into my arms, trembling, and the three men grouped together near the mouth of the alley.
Relief flooded us as the officer walked past them, straight toward us. We even smiled, convinced he was going to arrest them, convinced that help had arrived.
But he did not stop at them. He walked into the shadows, stopping right where Sophia had been standing moments earlier. He looked at us with a crooked, wicked smirk.
Then he demanded everything we owned, speaking in a tone that made it clear he thought we were wealthy kids out for a night in fancy clothes.
Hope vanished. Fear took its place.
I tried to explain. To tell him the truth, that we were poor, that we had nothing. But Sophia… something in her changed. She gripped my hand tightly, her body shaking. It was as if she remembered something, something terrible.
The officer grew irritated. He backed up into the darkness and gestured for the other men to take our belongings. They swaggered forward, trying to intimidate us, unaware we did not have a single silver between us.
A moment later, the officer ordered them to kill Sophia.
The moment I heard the word "kill," instinct took over. My limbs moved before I could think. I lunged for the man with the knife, but the other two grabbed me before I could reach him. They were too strong. Their hands clamped around my arms and chest until I could not even flex a finger.
The man with the knife walked toward Sophia.
But just before he reached her, a fist slammed into his face. The knife clattered across the ground, sliding toward me.
It was Arthur.
He kicked one of the men holding me hard between the legs. The man dropped instantly. Arthur spun toward the other one, fist raised—but he never saw the officer behind him. With one brutal blow to the back of the head, the officer knocked Arthur out cold.
Sophia screamed. She begged them to stop as the men threw him to the ground and began stomping on him. He did not wake, no matter how hard they kicked.
The thugs searched Arthur and just like us he didn't had anything but finally they found a pair of documents from beneath Arthur's shirt. The officer skimmed a few lines, then began kicking him again, harder, angrier.
He finally stopped and walked toward Sophia. "Give us one quad, and we will let you go," he said.
We had never even seen a 10 gold coins together in our lives and he was talking about a Quad. Sophia tried to explain, but he refused to listen.
Then one of the men gripping me said, "Take her necklace, it looks expensive."