XII – I have no eyes and I must blink (Part 3)

- / Glitch - /

“Come in, princess, what are you waiting for?” asked Sammy’s mother, opening the door for Adela and Thief King Edward. A smell of smoke, brand new furniture and dust came to greet them. Music and loud voices agitated the environment.

“Wow, this is totally not what I remember. I thought Sammy only lived with her mother,” remarked Adela, grabbing the Thief King’s arm. She glanced at all the plastic-wrapped furniture standing on their path. “Come; be careful not to stumble upon anything.”

Edward, trapped inside the purple-eyed man’s head, felt jealous. “She knows you did not injure your leg that bad, right?” he snorted.

Adela narrowed her eyes at a group of people who sat on a couch and were the origin of the uproar. “Hey, I’m sorry to bother. But Sammy’s bedroom wasn’t over there?” she asked, pointing at a bedroom with nothing but boxes.

“Sorry, I have no idea,” replied a man. “I’m just a cousin.”

A woman by his side replied with her own identity, “And I’m his wife.”

The people around the table identified themselves one by one:

“Grandmother,” “cousin,” “uncle,” “niece,” “fourth-degree cousin”, “Reverend Joseph,” “friend of the family”, “husband of the family friend”, “accountant”, “heirloom lawyer”, “neighbor”…”

Adela wondered what alternate dimension that extended family had crawled from. She recalled that silence and resentment were her only hosts when she visited that apartment before. “Alright, I should just ask Maria,” resigned Adela, walking to the house’s tiny kitchen with a skeptical look on her face. “Excuse me, Ms. Brito,” she spoke to Sammy’s mother.

“What, princess?”

“Is Sammy’s bedroom that one with all the boxes?”

“Yes. We were just packing up to move out. Didn’t you hear?” replied the woman with a wide smile on her face. “My godparent Anthony Usfat, may his soul rest in peace, died and I inherited some of his wealth. We are rich now!” said the woman, lifting a plate of food for all the guests. “Cake?”

Edward spoke in Thief King’s Head, “An inheritance! So this explains all the extended family!”

Thief King frowned at the food. “No, thanks,” he replied, narrowing his eyes at Ms. Brito. “I know I am stranger, but beware those folks over there”—he glanced at all the other guests—“be careful if the first word you heard from them in months is a ‘please’.”

“O-Okay,” replied the woman, confused.

Adela rose her voice, “Ms. Brito, you wouldn’t happen to have some medicine lying around, do you?”

“Sammy injures herself all the time, I’m sure she has it somewhere in her bedroom.”

“Thank you.”

Adela and Thief King walked to Sammy’s bedroom. The girl looked left and right. “Sammy generally kept a first aid kit around here,” she said. “Maybe they put it in a box? Help me check out!”

The purple-eyed man rolled his eyes as if her concern for his welfare were a bore. “I could be firing-of-Mourgiana a blackmailer right now,” he snorted.

Adela glanced at him. “Did you say something?” she inquired, yanking books from a box.

“I was stretching out. I’m knackered.”

“I noticed your accent. Are you British? I love how you talk!”

“Really? Tell me more,” replied Thief King, sarcastically. He did not give her a single glance.

“Yes! My dream is to move to England,” she said, not noticing the irony. “I just want to leave all this rubbish behind”—she grinned—”that’s how you say in England, right? Rubbish?”

He nodded.

She continued dreaming, “Just imagine leaving all this rubbish behind and moving to Britain! With all the tea, the biscuits, the Royal Family…”

Thief King snorted, “You know England is a bloody hellhole, right? It’s a banana republic, except it is also cold and miserable. Might as well stay in Chicago.”

“Don’t be so rude, Elizabeth! I wish I were there listening to her!” intervened Edward. “Look”—he guided the man’s attention to a sobbing Adela—“you made her sad!”

“Brilliant. She must take that idea out of her head.”

“Elizabeth!”

The man heaved a loud sigh and turned around. Adela cried as if she mourned her romantic European dreams.

“Hey”—he blushed—“ sorry for saying what I said. I have some past in England that I’d like to forget. I’m still embittered. I just wanted to say that you should not move there. You are a good gal and they really don’t deserve you—”

She smiled wide.

“—because the only thing England deserves is a nuclear holocaus—”

“Elizabeth!”

Thief King corrected himself, “Never mind. The point is that you don’t need to run away. Happiness is anywhere the people allow it in.”

“Strange that you say that. I’ve never met anyone who was happy.”

“I’m sure you won’t have a better luck in England,” said Thief King, grinning at her. His bright smile contrasted with his sinister looks and gave him an air of humanity.

Adela blushed as she grinned back at him. “R-Right,” she mumbled, frowning at the boxes. “I should just keep looking—”

“Hey, look at me,” said Thief King, walking to her.

“What are you doing, Elizabeth?”

He cupped her cheek with one hand and yawned so loud and wide that a lion would envy him.

Adela recoiled. “W-What is it that you are doing—”

Her eyes closed and a loud yawn overtook her as well.

“Look me in the eyes,” he said, facing her as she yawned.

She obeyed his call and reality distorted around them. The girl felt drowsy as if in her mind she yawned forever. Adela stood still, daydreaming and drooling. Purple tears crept down her cheeks.

Edward shouted in Thief King’s head, “Wait, you Mourgiana’d her? What the hell, Elizabeth!”

“The problem with the blackmailer can now be safely solved until tomorrow morning. The Fire of Mourgiana did not devour her, only gave her a light tan,” explained Thief King, staring at the girl. He saw numbers hovering over her head:

“And we’ll get Sprites coming to Sammy’s house! Congratulation—”

An old camera slipped off Adela’s hand and opened. The ‘On’ button hit the ground and the object’s screens brightened.

Thief King looked away, nonchalant. “Let’s go solve the problem with the blackmailer now,” he said, grabbing the bedroom’s knob. Yet he did not open the door. Something troubled him.

“What is up?” asked Edward.

“Anthony Usfat was a Glitcher.”

“Who?”

“The mother’s godparent was the billionaire Anthony Usfat. Did I hear it right?”

“That guy used to adopt orphans from Chicago all the time. Let’s just be happy for them and—”

Thief King turned around and yanked Sammy’s old camera from the ground. “What is in the cartridge? Something about Anthony?” he asked, browsing the movies and pictures of the girl. “This girl was a vlogger?”

Edward stared at another image, displaying the now bald girl with a long hair and clothes as large as a cloud. “She was a hippie too?” he asked. “Wait, Elizabeth. Why are we looking at her private files?”

“Something came to my mind. Ever heard about the Book of Job?”

“People don’t bother waking up early on Sundays anymore…”

“Ever heard of Faust?”

“People don’t bother teaching German plays anymore…”

“Never mind,” replied Thief King, suspiring loud. Let’s watch the video.”

He pressed a button and a video from Sammy began. The girl faced the camera and spoke without cuts:

“…mother’s voyages, mother’s friends, mother’s dreams. It all disgusts me. The single thing that I hate the most is coming back and staring at the line of false friends that only now I realized existed. They praise how much I’ve grown in size and beauty since the immemorial times when we first met, yet they seem to think that my brain shrunk as my bones stretched. I can see through their façade: for a fraction of what my mother has won, they’d be tempted to murder her. Yet she smiles, opens our doors to them and bakes them a cake.

I cannot tell if it is idiocy or a foolish altruism that moves her. These people squandered every single cent that they have already touched, what makes her think they’ll do anything with her gifts besides indulging in futilities and bringing the date of their demise closer? No action denounces the poor character of one than trying to look rich.

This place is rotten. I praise the Universe for having given me the eyes that reveal the mysteries of our false world. This society is desperately thirsty for something amazing and I will show it to them, no matter what I have to do. All else, as I’ve spoken before, is pure mediocrity—”

Thief King turned off the camera. “It’s only the diary of a rebellious teenager,” he concluded.

“We shouldn’t have listened to it,” faltered Edward.

The purple-eyed man grunted, disappointed. “Only God knows how many hobbies those who hate their families have,” he said. Elizabeth, who was in control of his body, had the romantic belief that she would find information regarding Anthony Usfat and that the information would lead her to understand what the Heart in a Vat had done to her. She cursed herself for being so foolish.

Edward reflected, “I’ve always wondered why Sammy was so weird. Maybe she is not that different. The mystical just seems to be her way of feeling unique. She wants to avoid being home with all these fake people. I think we are not that different, after all. We just picked different hobbies to escape from.”

“You also believe in the will of the Cosmos?”

“No, but I believe in people. There are times I feel like her belief makes more sense,” he remarked. “But what’s up with you? Why the sudden interest in her? What were you expecting to find? She’s just a kid like me.”

“It’s a long story, Toothpick. Let’s go meet the blackmailer.”

“You will leave Adela there? Like a breathing doll?”

“She is a big girl. She doesn’t need a little dad. Now let’s go.”

Judy Park, Hughes Road 222 was the ruins of an amusement park.

GEO and Sammy shared the cabin that hanged closest to the sky on a Ferris-wheel.

The girl had her arms crossed. The wind sent shivers down her spine. “W-We spent the whole day here,” she snorted, trembling with cold. “Why didn’t the winds whisper in my ears the basic idea to include time in my photo? L-L-Learning how to exploit g-glitches better be worth it,” she told GEO.

Yet the man was nonchalant. He sat down with his legs crossed and searched the surroundings for signs of invaders.

The girl groaned impatiently, “don’t we ever leave this place? I am exhausted—”

GEO rose his voice, “she is here.”

“She? Who is she? I thought Edward would—”

“Thief Queen is here,” he replied, smirking. “Every Glitch leaves a trail. The trail has finally led me to you."

Lightning colored the skies as if the heavens anticipated the fated reunion of the Skulls.