Ambedo

[Fenris]

>> She walked slowly, as had become her right.

The weapon wasn't her prize. Not really. It was a perk, of course, and not one Nia planned to turn down. If it turned out to be something completely useless to her, she was at least in convenient proximity to throw it into the sea where it couldn't empower anyone else. Her pistol was convenient, fairly easy to use, had come with quite a bit of ammo and had proven itself wholly satisfactory in the job she had needed it for; she found it unlikely that whatever the terrorists had seen fit to reward her with would fulfill all of those criteria. Pessimism, perhaps, but that was hardly a newfound quality.

The food wasn't it, either, and not because she didn't particularly care for chicken salad, either. She would take whatever source of fresh protein she could get, not to mention the opportunity to taste anything seasoned by something more appealing than the dirt on her hands. By now half the island would likely kill for that much. Perhaps she was being ungrateful. That was her right, too.

No. Nia's true prize was time. Precious time, unmarred, unspent, unruined by constant nagging thoughts and paranoias, time she could hold in her hands. Time to breath, recollect, reconsider, time where no one could burst from the nearest bush with death at the ready, time the person she loved most in the world had had ripped away—


no time for that.

She walked, strolled, practically, she took off her shoes at some point. Dry, now that the rain had stopped, until she walked down closer to the shore. The waves broke on the beach, she walked, one foot scrunching dry sand between her toes, one foot leaving footprints that every new wave washed away. The rush of sand pulling away beneath her foot as the water pulled back only to push forward again.

Salt and iron still in her nose. There was still death, here, there was death everywhere, but it felt nice, anyway. Details she hadn't taken in before now. Irrelevant in the wake of a lack of cover and the possibility of an ambush.

She knew a fair bit about the sea, but it didn't mean the same as it did staring out at the horizon and seeing only sky.

Michael knew more.

No time for that.


She followed the shoreline. The pier was large, difficult to miss, decorated newly with a cheap fold-up table, a styrofoam takeout container, a can of seltzer. A number of pieces of metal. The prizes she was promised. A shock of paranoia hit her as she climbed up onto the pier and looked back, away from the bay, out toward the treeline; how far out was the line that demarcated the danger zone? She hadn't truly considered; she had kept a very wide berth from the declared zones herself, hardly wanting to test those limits, but someone a fair bit stupider than her might choose to take that chance.

Could someone shoot her from those trees? Even if they did it wouldn't allow them entrance; they would have to wait until the next morning to collect her prize, by which point the food would have likely gone bad. The weapon would be the only reward, and wouldn't someone capable of shooting her from such a distance have to have a powerful weapon already? It seemed to her like a needless risk.

Risking her own safety on the intelligence of others seemed like an unwise move.

Her time was sullied.

She stared at the trees. Hateful. Daring. Do something, she said. Move. Do something.

Nothing happened.

Her mind was poisoned.

She collected her prizes and dropped off the pier, tucking underneath. Shelter from nothing.

Sand between her toes, again.

Salt and iron.

She breathed.


The pieces of metal, unsurprisingly, were the pieces of a gun. Easy enough to fit together with the provided instructions, forming a weapon too large to fit in her bag fully assembled; a strike against it for inconvenience, certainly. Venom Tactical Taipan, the cover of the instructional booklet read in block letters that meant next to nothing to her. She didn't need the booklet to tell her she was looking at a sniper rifle; she didn't need it, either, to tell her that she was unlikely to make much use of it. This was a weapon for a professional, or at least someone with experience in the use of such things. The pier would have been a convenient spot to test it; underneath the pier less so, as the tilt of the land uphill prevented her from aiming at anything but sand.

She wasn't disappointed. This was near-inevitable.

She could throw it in the ocean and be done with it. How anti-climactic that would be.

But she imagined there were perhaps a bare handful of people on the island who could make any better use of the gun than she could. The likelihood of it falling into one of their hands was low. It was better to have a backup firearm than not. Practice would be wise, yes, necessary even if she planned to make any use of what she was given; somewhere with a decent vantage point, ideally. She could test from the pier, she supposed, but she'd be shooting blindly at the treeline with no real targets to make use of.

Unless someone did risk poking at the danger zone's lines of demarcation, she thought, she smiled, wouldn't that be funny? Not worth the effort, though. Not worth the time.

Chicken salad. It tasted like food. That was enough. An apple, a banana, an orange, lined up nicely, she closed the styrofoam container tightly and stuffed them in her bag. She used the seltzer to wash her hands. She'd never liked carbonated drinks. The bubbles felt odd on her fingertips. She let bloody water drip.


Salt and iron.

It clung to her skin.


Sullied time.

She flexed her toes and felt only how difficult it would be to run on such unsteady ground.


She kicked, petulant, at the sand.

No time for that.

>> No time for anything.