Chapter 122: The Unfolding Truth II

Third Person POV

The market was alive in every direction at once.

Colors and noise and the smell of roasting meat all pressed together in the way busy markets pressed together, chaotic and warm and completely indifferent to first-timers.

Stalls packed with fabrics in colors that had no business being that bright. Food smoking over open fires. Children weaving between legs with the focused urgency of children who had somewhere very important to be and could not explain where. Merchants calling out over each other in the universal language of people who needed to sell things before the day ended.

Helen walked close to Sonita and tried not to look like someone who had never been in a market before.

She was not succeeding particularly well.

Her grey eyes were going in too many directions at once, catching on everything and staying a second too long before moving to the next thing.

Her black hair sat against her shoulders and nobody looked at it. Nobody looked at her in the way she had spent her whole life being looked at. Pointed at her, or moved away. She was just another girl in a crowd and the novelty of that was sitting in her chest doing something she did not have a word for yet.

Sonita moved through the crowd like she owned every cobblestone of it. Brown hair bouncing, blue eyes scanning everything at once, that smile fixed in place with the confidence of someone who had never once walked into a space and wondered if she belonged there.

She grabbed Helen’s wrist and pulled.

"Come on, slow down. You walk like someone who has never been outside before."

"That is because I have not," Helen said, stumbling slightly, laughing despite herself.

Sonita looked back at her over her shoulder. "Well, get used to it. You are going to be out here a lot more from now on."

Helen wanted to believe that. She touched her hair briefly. Still black. Not a little white strand showing. She dropped her hand and kept walking.

They passed food stalls and fabric stalls and a woman selling small carved animals that looked almost real enough to move if you looked at them at the wrong angle. Sonita stopped at a jewelry stall, picked up a ring, held it to the light, and put it down. Picked up another. Put it down.

"So," she said, not looking at Helen. "I have an idea."

Helen’s stomach did something specific and cautionary. She knew that tone.

"What kind of idea," she said carefully.

"The fun kind."

Helen slowed. "Sonie."

"There is a place," Sonita continued, still not looking up from the jewelry. "Where the young men go. The ones with money. The handsome ones. They drink and they play games and they..."

"No," Helen said.

"You did not let me finish."

"I did not need to finish."

Sonita put the ring down. She turned and faced Helen fully with a smile that was doing all the work of an argument without using any of the words.

"Helen. You have black hair now. Nobody knows who you are. You can go anywhere and do anything and nobody is going to look at you the way they used to."

Helen looked at her. The problem with Sonita’s logic was that it was not wrong. And Sonita knew that. And the smile on her face said she knew Helen was already considering it.

"What exactly are you suggesting," Helen said.

Sonita grabbed her wrist and started moving.

****

They went through the main market and then away from it, down a narrow alley that got narrower before it got wider, then between two buildings so close together that Helen had to turn sideways. Sonita moved through all of it with the ease of someone who had made this trip before.

They stopped at a wall.

Tall. Wooden. Old. The kind of wall that existed specifically to keep people from seeing what was on the other side.

Helen looked at it. "Is this not illegal?"

Sonita was already looking for footholds. "For me, nothing is illegal."

"That is not how laws work."

"Then do not come." She found a grip and pulled herself up.

Helen stood alone in the alley. She looked at the wall. She looked back the way they had come. Then she heard Sonita’s voice from the other side, muffled but amused.

"Are you coming or are you going to stand there all day?"

Helen grabbed the wall and pulled herself up.

She dropped down on the other side and stopped.

The courtyard was hidden between buildings, tucked away from everything outside it. Lanterns hung from ropes strung between the walls, throwing warm orange light across the space below. There was a fire pit in the center, low and crackling. Benches. Tables. And men.

Young men. Dozens of them.

Some sitting and drinking. Some gathered around a table playing something Helen did not recognize. Some were standing in a loose circle near the far wall, shirts off, laughing at each other, shoving back and forth in a way that was not quite a fight but was clearly in the direction of one.

Sonita was already crouched behind a stack of barrels near the wall. She pulled Helen down beside her immediately.

"Sonie." Helen kept her voice low and urgent. "This is insane. We are not supposed to be here."

"That’s what makes it fun," Sonita whispered back. Her eyes were bright.

"What are we even doing here?"

"Watching."

"Watching what?"

Sonita gestured toward the courtyard with a sweep of her hand. "Look at them. They are like peacocks. They do not even know we are here."

Helen looked.

The men were loud. One had taken his shirt off and was spinning it over his head while the others cheered. Another was attempting to lift a bench with one hand and failing in a way that was more entertaining than he realized. They were eighteen, nineteen, and twenty. Young and loud and completely absorbed in being young and loud.

"This is ridiculous," Helen said quietly.

"It is," Sonita agreed, completely serious. "But look at them."

Helen looked.

And then she stopped looking at the group and started looking at one person in particular.

He was sitting on a bench near the edge of the courtyard.

Not isolated from the others, there were men around him, talking near him, but he was not participating the way everyone else was. He was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his cup in his hands and his eyes moving across the courtyard with the quiet attention of someone who was watching everything instead of performing for anyone.

His hair was black. Dark and slightly messy in a way that looked entirely natural. His eyes were green, she could see that even from here, even in the warm unsteady light of the lanterns. Bright and sharp and currently aimed at the general chaos of the courtyard with an expression that was somewhere between amusement and something more private.

He was tall even sitting down. Lean but not slight, the kind of build that came from use rather than show. And he was not dancing, not shouting, not spinning his shirt over his head.

He was just sitting there. Watching everything.

Helen could not stop looking at him.

"Okay," Sonita said, elbowing her. "Here is the game."

Helen did not answer.

Sonita noticed. She looked at Helen’s face and then followed her eyes across the courtyard to where they had landed and the smile that spread across her face was slow and knowing and deeply satisfied with itself.

"You pick one," Sonita said. "And you stare at him. You do not look away. Even if he notices. Even if he stares back."

"That is insane," Helen said. She was still looking at him.

"That is the game."

"Wait... Why am I the one being tested? Why can you not do it?" Helen turned to look at her.

"I have been doing it for years. I need someone else to carry it for a while."

"That is not a real reason."

"Do I look like I care?"

Helen turned back to the courtyard.

Her eyes found him again before she had finished deciding to look. Like they had never actually left.

He was still sitting on the bench. Still quiet. Still watching the courtyard.

Then his head turned slightly. Toward the shadows near the barrels. Toward the wall moved and then stopped.

She had already started the game without realizing it.

She was looking directly at him. Not hiding. Not glancing and looking away. Just looking, her grey eyes on his green ones across the lantern-lit space between them, and he found her.

His gaze stopped exactly where she was.

He saw her.

She should have pulled back. She should have grabbed Sonita and run before this became something.

But she did not move.

He did not look away either.

The noise of the courtyard faded in some way that had nothing to do with the actual volume of it. The shouting and the laughing and the crackling fire all stayed exactly where they were but something else was happening that was louder than all of it combined and it was not making any sound at all.

His head tilted. Just slightly. His green eyes narrowed in the way eyes narrowed when they were curious rather than suspicious. He was trying to figure out who she was and why she was there and why she was not looking away.

She was not looking away.

His mouth moved. Not a full smile. Something smaller and more private than a smile, sitting at the corner of his mouth like something he had not decided to put there.

Then one of the men near him slapped his shoulder hard.

"Hey. What are you staring at?"

He did not answer. He kept looking at Helen.

The friend followed his gaze. Up toward the barrels. Into the shadows. He found them immediately.

"Hey!!! There are people over there!" He pointed. "They are not supposed to be in here!"

The courtyard erupted.

Heads turned. Voices rose. Men were already moving toward the wall and some were laughing and some were shouting and all of them had found the same thing to look at which was two girls crouched behind a stack of barrels who were very much not supposed to be there.

Sonita grabbed Helen’s arm. "Game over. We are leaving right now."

Helen did not move.

He was standing now. He had risen from the bench slowly while everyone else rushed, not with any urgency, just standing and looking across the courtyard at her with those green eyes that had not changed their expression since they found her in the dark.

"Helen." Sonita pulled harder. "Right now."

Helen let herself be pulled.

They went over the wall fast, dropped into the alley, and ran.

Their footsteps bounced off the narrow walls and Sonita was laughing, the full uncontained version, not even trying to be quiet about it, and Helen’s heart was going so hard she could feel it in her throat.

They burst out into the main market and the crowd took them in immediately and Sonita kept pulling, weaving between stalls and people and a cart loaded with something she went around instead of through, until the sounds behind them faded into the general noise of the market and then into nothing.

They stopped in a small square. A fountain in the center, water trickling quietly. Empty except for them.

Sonita bent over her knees and gasped for air between laughs.

Helen stood still with her hand pressed flat against her chest, feeling her own heartbeat under her palm.

"That was incredible," Sonita managed between breaths.

Helen was not laughing.

"Helen." Sonita straightened up and looked at her properly. "Are you all right?"

"I do not know," Helen said.

"What do you mean you do not know? That was the most..."

"Who was that?"

Sonita stopped. "Who was who?"

Helen did not answer. She was still somewhere else. Still in that courtyard in the lantern light looking at green eyes that had not looked away.

Sonita’s expression shifted slowly. The laugh faded. The smile that replaced it was quieter and more knowing. "Oh," she said. "The game worked."

"I have never felt anything like that before," Helen said. Her voice was honest in the way voices were honest when the filter had not caught up yet.

Sonita stepped closer and put a hand on her shoulder. "That is called attraction," she said, gentler now. "It happens when you see a pretty face."

Helen shook her head slightly. "It was not just his face."

"Then what was it?"

Helen did not know how to explain it. The way he had been sitting apart from the noise without being separate from it. The way he had been watching everything was the same way she had been watching everything. The way he had found her in the dark and simply looked at her, steady and curious, without any of the performance everyone else around him had been putting on.

"I want to see him again," she said.

Sonita laughed softly. "You do not even know his name."

"I know."

A pause.

"I still want to see him again."

Sonita looked at her for a long moment. Then she exhaled and looped her arm through Helen’s.

"Come on then," she said. "I will walk you back. It is getting late."

"You do not have to."

"I cannot let someone steal my beautiful friend." Sonita pulled her gently into a walk. "You are far too pretty to be walking home alone."

Helen laughed. The first real one since the courtyard, loose and uncalculated, belonging to the square and the fountain and the quiet evening settling around them.

"You are beautiful too," she said. "Sometimes I get lost in your smile."

Sonita waved her free hand dramatically. "Oh please. Do not pull my leg."

They both laughed. They kept walking.

****

The streets were quieter now. The sun was lower. The market behind them was winding down for the evening.

Helen walked with her arm through Sonita’s and she was smiling and she was present and she was answering Sonita’s jokes with her own and everything on the surface of the evening was easy and light and good.

But underneath all of it, something was moving that had not been there this morning.

A feeling in her chest. Just below her ribs. Warm and quiet and persistent, pulsing with a steadiness that had nothing to do with the running or the laughing or the courtyard chaos. Something that had taken root in the space of two people looking at each other across a lantern-lit space and neither of them looking away.

She pressed her hand against her chest.

She did not know his name.

She did not know where he lived or who he was or whether he had felt anything when their eyes met or whether it had simply been the curiosity of someone noticing a stranger in a place she was not supposed to be.

But the feeling did not care about any of those things.

It just sat there.

Steady and warm and quietly insistent.

Wondering, without words, if somewhere across the town he was sitting on a bench with his elbows on his knees and his green eyes somewhere they were not supposed to be.

Wondering the same thing.