No Sense (anything can happen) part 11

"I'm sorry," I said, "What?" Noah looked at the ground. He swallowed and then said, "I know. I'm sorry. I don't want...I mean, I don't want to keep you...locked...locked up in here, but- but they were going to execute you, Vanessa. They want to kill you, and if you go strolling back to the House, that's exactly what they'll do." Of course, this made sense, and I wanted to trust Noah, but...I looked around the tiny little house and took a deep sigh. "Fine," I said, after a minute, "Are you going to be staying here too? Because somehow I doubt they'll take you back into the...Great House...I doubt they'll take you back particularly courteously." Noah laughed, genuinely, and replied, "No, I don't think they would. They'd have my head, if I know them at all." He was grinning, but I couldn't do anything but look back over to the hearth. "Have my head". It sounded medieval, as if they were royalty, and the image of Noah on his knees, his neck placed under the knife of a guillotine, presented itself in my mind before I could stop it. I looked quickly back at his face to distract myself before the blade could fall, and asked, "So you'll be living here, then?" Noah nodded, and then added, "Yes, but I won't be here all the time, like you will. I'll have to sneak out to get us food, and such. And I..." he trailed off, his eyes lost in wondering about something distant. He cleared his throat and met my eyes again, "I'm going to try to figure out a way out." My eyebrows shot up at this. "Of course, it will be even harder, now that I'm on the outside, than it would have been before. The Contact Room was off-limits for me, of course, when I was a Great One, but I could have found a way in, if I really wanted to. Even then, though, it would have taken me a long time to discover how to sneak out, and my visits to the Contact Room would have to be short and spread out, so they would not be detected. Now..." he sighed, "now I've got a lot of work ahead of me." He didn't say anything else, after this, and though I wanted to ask a million questions, I could only think of one that I thought he might answer immediately. So I cleared my throat a little and asked, "Do we have any food?" Noah cracked up at this, clearly grateful for the change of mood, and when he was done laughing, he answered, "No, not at the moment. The fridge and the supply closet have long since been empty, but I can sneak out tonight, and get us some things." This answer rose more questions and more hunger, but I said nothing else, instead sitting on the stool in front of the hearth and staring pointlessly. Noah sat on the stool by the table and stared at the kitchen doors, his mind clearly at work with something. As I stared at the ashes, I leaned closer towards them, and realized that some of them were fairly recent. It hadn't been long since a fire had been lit here. "Noah, how long have the people who lived here been gone?" I asked, glancing over at him. "About a month," he replied quickly, not looking at me. I rose my eyebrows and looked back in the fireplace. "These ashes look more recent than that." Now Noah turned toward me. "Oh," he said, but his tone sounded more like he was confused than remembering something, "yea. Well, they are. The Great Ones couldn't know about this place, couldn't know that those servers were gone. So I've, uh, been lighting fires in here frequently, you know." It seemed strange, to me, almost too coincidental, that Noah just happened to have this little hiding place ready and waiting, as if he knew I was coming, knew I would need to be hidden. "It's strange," I told him, "Convenient, I mean, but strange, that you just...you know. That this place was yours just in time for me to be hidden here." Noah nodded, and looked toward the front door. After a moment, he said, "Well, you know...I've been...wanting to get out of there for a while." He grinned at me, "You're not the whole reason I ran away." I nodded, though this didn't really suffice to silence my confusion about the timing of his acquiring this little house, and after sitting in silence with him for what couldn't have been more than five minutes but felt like five hours, I got up, crossed the approximately ten feet to the other side of the house, and lay on the bed closest to the wall, closing my eyes and coaxing myself into sleep.

© 2011