Chapter 5 - THE ROAD

The first couple of minutes on the road were oddly quiet and tense.

The hill had long sunk into the horizon behind them, leaving them surrounded by nothing but arid, empty planes as far as the eye could see. It was only after they passed the first village, and other cars began to join them on the highway, that Gabriel and Kassia broke the silence.

They were having a heated argument about what music to listen to on the radio, or something along those lines. Ada wasn't paying that much attention, to be honest. She couldn't stop staring out the window, her wide eyes drinking in as much as she could from the scenery whizzing past their car.

The banana plantations, the Humbe cattle roaming the fields, the tall dry grass and the thick baobab trees. The small brick houses and the huge number of people she'd see, off and on the road, more than Ada had ever seen in her whole life, and all of them so different from the pristine, uniform-clad men and women that would visit the Professor.

Ada couldn't get enough of it.

So it took a while for her to realise that the car had gone eerily silent again. When she did turn her gaze back to the front seat, she unconsciously met Gabriel's dark, hooded eyes, staring at her through the rear-view mirror, and almost jumped in her seat.

"So, who is she, anyway?" the boy asked Kassia, nodding his head towards Ada.

"Ada is Dr. Kizua's..." the older girl trailed off with a frown. Twisting around in her seat, she threw the other girl an uncertain, almost confused look, "adoptive daughter, right?"

The question threw Ada off. She had no idea how to answer it, so, in her panic, she just reflexively nodded.

"Wait, what? That man has a kid?" Gabriel sputtered, voice cracking. His eyebrows shot up and his jaw dropped, trying desperately to keep his eyes on the road even as they kept stealing glances at the girl in the back seat. "I mean, no offence, but... that must suck."

With the speed of a snake strike, Kassia jabbed her elbow into the boy's side. "Gill!" she hissed at him through greeted teeth.

"What?" the boy snapped back, shooting the older girl a glare even as he tried to squirm away from her, rubbing his side. "I'm just being honest here! Like you weren't thinking it too."

"It does suck sometimes..." Ada said, her tone soft, barely above a whisper.

The other two froze, turning their full attention on her.

There was shock in their wide eyes, which confused Ada, until she realised a second later that this was the first time she'd spoken since she'd gotten in the car. She hadn't meant to throw herself into the spotlight like that. The words had just come out of her mouth, unbidden.

Swallowing around the lump in her throat, she looked down at her lap and thought about what to say. Memories of Dr. Kizua drifted into her thoughts, these unconnected but interchangeable bits and pieces of the constant blur that were her days, his cold, clinical eyes staring down at her in almost everyone of them.

Ada shivered and frowned, nails sinking into the skin of her arm, "Some days are better than others," she said, her voice low and strained.

For a brief stretch of time, there was only this tense and thick silence between the three. Kassia and Gabriel traded meaningful glances, both of them wearing this taut, uncomfortable, almost sad expression on their faces.

In the end, it was Gabriel's rough voice that broke through the awkward silence.

"Well," he snorted, his tone dry, "isn't that fucking relatable."

Ada blinked and looked up at the boy's face through the rear view mirror, scrunching up her face at his response. Kassia, who must've noticed her confusion, was quick to address her.

"You know my dad, right?" she asked with a strained half-smile, waiting for Ada to nod before continuing. "Well, Gabriel's father is a Lieutenant General, and his mother used to be a doctor on the frontlines." She shrugged, smile growing even more bitter. "We're both army brats, and our parents aren't exactly the easiest people to deal with, so we kind of know how you feel."

Gabriel glanced at Ada through the mirror, his expression pensive.

"I heard Dr. Kizua has been doing some research or whatever for the military," he said, his dark eyes going back to Kassia. "That's why your dad is always visiting him, right?"

"Who knows what the hell my dad does with him all day," Kassia snapped, clicking her tongue and turning back around to glare at the road ahead.

"Says it's 'top secret'," she mocked, emphasising the words with air quotes. Lips pressed tight, the older girl sunk back into the seat and propped her feet up on the dash board, mumbling "I couldn't care less about his stupid projects," through greeted teeth.

Both Ada and Gabriel blinked at Kassia's tensed figure, unsure of what to say after that outburst. After a swift change of lanes on the highway, Gabriel raised a slow, careful hand and picked up the older girl's legs by the heels, letting them slide back down and off his dashboard.

"Anyway," he drawled in a lighter tone, "What I was trying to say is, if Dr. Kizua is involved with the military, then that kind of makes Ada over here an honorary army brat."

Kassia instantly perked up at that, her sour expression shifting to a beaming smile. "Oh, yeah, you're right. Army brats unite!"

Twisting her body around, she raised a fist towards Ada. The younger girl blinked, eyes jumping between the offered hand and Kassia's grin, before realising that the older girl was expecting her to do the same. Copying her movements, Ada also raised her fist, and Kassia immediately bumped it, only to break down into a fit of giggles that had the younger girl unable to resist a laugh of her own.

"Welcome to the club, kiddo," Gabriel announced with a chuckle, face breaking into a toothy smile. "Group therapy sessions are on Wednesdays."

Again, Kassia jabbed the boy's side. But this time, she put almost no force behind it, and the smiles never left either of the teen's faces as they spent the next couple of seconds mock-wrestling, a smirking Gabriel swatting away Kassia's attacks while trying to keep his eyes on the road.

Ada giggled at the pure silliness of it, her laughter spurring them on.

Even this was new to her. She never knew cheeks could hurt from smiling so much, or that her sides could ache from laughing so hard. She never knew someone could feel this warm and relaxed and light. It was like a huge weight she didn't even know she'd been carrying around was lifted off her shoulders.

She could breathe again. And it was the best feeling in the world.

As the other two bantered back and forth, Ada glanced at her window just in time to catch a glimpse of dark blue between the slopes and trees.

The laughter died in her mouth and her smile dropped. Instinctively, she threw herself against the door, palms pressed flat against the window, nose inches from the glass as her wide eyes took in that new blue horizon.

"What is that?" she asked in a breathless voice.

There was a beat or two of complete silence. Through the gap between the passenger door and the front seat, Ada caught Kassia squinting at the passing scenery, eyes flitting about before eventually settling on something.

"... You mean the sea?"

Ada turned back to the window, eyes growing even wider and lips parting in sheer amazement as she gazed upon that line where the sky met water. She drank up as much as she could before it disappeared once more behind the rest of the landscape.

"Have you..." Kassia hesitated, a dazed look in her eyes as she blinked at Ada through the gap, "have you never seen the sea before?"

Noticing the odd tone in the girl's voice, Ada turned back to face the front window. She caught an equally confused looking Gabriel throwing furtive glances between them.

"I, hum," Ada stammered, realising very quickly by the other's reactions that she'd done something abnormal. "I've never stepped outside the house... until today," she replied, eyes dropping to her fidgeting hands.

There was a beat of silence, and then Gabriel burst out laughing.

But his snickering died just as abruptly once he caught Kassia's pointed stare. Frowning, he glanced back at Ada, who was still refusing to meet their eyes, lips pressed into a thin line, knuckles going white from gripping her legs too tight.

"Wait, for real?"

Nobody said anything, but the serious expression on both the girl's faces seemed to be enough of an answer for Gabriel.

"... Holy shit," the boy cursed in a breathless exhale, dazed eyes staring off into the road ahead.

The car fell silent once more. But this one felt heavier than the last one, weighed down by Ada's confession, the implications of her words just now settling on the back of their minds.

As the silence stretched and grew, so did the sinking feeling in Ada's stomach and the buzzing in her mind. She didn't want to think about anything anymore, so she fixed her eyes on the road ahead.

They were approaching an exit on the highway, but Gabriel didn't slow down, signalling instead to the other cars that he was going to take the left lane to keep himself on the main road.

It was at that exact moment, right before Gabriel started to steer the SUV to the left, that Kassia flung herself towards the driver-side of the car, gripped the wheel between Gabriel's hands and stirred sharply to the right.

The sudden turn jolted Ada to the side. Her head banged against the window, the side of her body pressed flush against the door, seatbelt digging into her neck.

"What the fuck!"

Gabriel immediately tried to take back control of the stirring wheel and steer the car back to the left. But by that time, it was too late. They were already at the exit, and all he could do at that point was quickly press down on the breaks to make the curve and keep the car from crashing into the cement barrier or going off the road completely.

Every car surrounding them blared their horns and rolled their windows down to throw obscenities at them. But Gabriel ignored all of them in favor of tearing Kassia's hands off the wheel and shoving her back against the passenger-side door.

"Are you insane!" he screamed at the top of his lungs, knuckles going pale from how tightly he was gripping the steering wheel.

In the back seat, Ada groaned and cradled her throbbing head, breathing hard and heavy through her mouth. She could hear her own blood pumping in her ears.

Kassia had slowly straightened herself up, hands clutching the back of her head, where it had also hit the window after being shoved into it. When she spoke, her voice was oddly calm and clear.

"We're going to show Ada the beach."

"What!" Gabriel snapped, torn between glaring a hole through the older girl and keeping his eyes on the almost serpentined-like road ahead. "No. No fucking way. I picked you up to go to the market. I have important shit to do there. We had a fucking deal goddammit!"

"And we're still going there," she interjected in the same calm, but firm voice, her round, brown eyes staring into Gabriel's hooded ones.

The young man remained quiet, all of him tensed up, movements stiff as he tapped away on the GPS, looking for the shortest way back to the highway. But his breathing had evened out, nostrils no longer flared up and veins no longer prominent on the sides of his forehead.

"Think of this as just a short detour," Kassia pressed on in a lighter tone, never taking her eyes off the boy, "Plus, it's a good excuse to avoid the main road."

"No."

Without warning, Kassia slammed her hands on the dashboard, making both the boy and Ada jump.

"The poor girl has never seen the sea before, Gabriel!" she yelled at him, gesturing widely at the younger girl in the back seat. "The fucking sea! Can you even imagine what that'd be like? If you couldn't even have that one escape from your shitty life!"

Not for the first time that day, Ada felt this odd sense of disconnect, an off-kilter reaction to the realisation that the words she was hearing might not mean what they mean. That, somehow, Kassia was not talking about just the beach anymore. And that both she and Gabriel knew that.

For a long minute, the young man just sat there, gripping the wheel and glaring at the cars ahead. Even without looking directly at each other, it still felt like a staring contest, with both Kassia and the Gabirel refusing to back down.

Bitting her lip, Ada's eyes darted between the two, feeling like she had to say something, but not knowing how to begin or if her words would even have any weight in the decision. The anxiety only grew when she noticed there was a roundabout up ahead, cutting whatever time they had left even shorter.

Then, without ever changing his expression or saying a word, Gabriel turned off the GPS. With smooth, swift movements, he entered the roundabout and took the exit with the sign that showed the symbol for waves.

"Fifteen minutes," he said after a second or two, his voice curt and rough. "Tops."

"Thirty minutes," Kassia shot back in the same tone.

Gabriel clicked his tongue, left eye twitching.

"Fine! But I'm holding you to that," he barked out, pointing a ringed finger at her. "Half an hour and we're out of there."

"Deal." Kassia quickly nodded, the smallest hint of a smile breaking through her serious expression.

"And don't you dare pull that fucking stunt ever again!"

Another nod, slower this time, and more serious.

Sighing, the boy turned his sour look to the road ahead, grumbling to himself, "why do I keep letting myself get dragged into your shit."

Ignoring him, Kassia turned around to face the girl in the back seat, her earlier serious expression vanishing under the sheer brightness of a beaming smile. Confronted with such an excited grin, Ada just blinked back, still too stunned to throw anything more than an odd, tilted, half-smile at the other girl.

"You're going to love the beach, Ada."