No one had explicitly said so out loud before it happened, but there was something odd and stirring in the air the morning of that elusive arrival. And though it was quite possible no one said anything of it because a heavy, unspoken tension wasn’t a particularly unusual thing at this small Colony on the lonely Belvedere Island, but there would be a few after the fact who, if you asked, would swear that they felt no one spoke of it because there was some sort of spectral force that kept them from doing so. It was a chilling sense of dread that kept their mouths sealed tight, and breakfast was eerily quiet that morning. It was almost as if the Colony knew—as a collective, as a whole, though not in so many words, and certainly not on any individual basis—that something was coming.
And when it did, everyone knew that too. Even before those great, creaking wooden doors swung open, they knew, and heads began to turn or lift, as if hearing something troublesome that they couldn’t quite place. What was that? their eyes would say. Did you hear that? wary glances between friends would plea.
She swept into the entrance hall with so much power in her stride that it was almost as though she was both stomping and floating. Her tall leather boots clacked menacingly on the stone floor, and her footsteps somehow seemed to shake the place down, even though watching her walk was like watching a panther stalk its prey. She was agile, surefooted, ferociously silent. And yet there was a loudness about her, one that shocked everything around her into an uneasy stillness.
Laughter died and conversations ceased; citizens watched in a trembling and bewildered awe as she marched across the grounds and into the Colony with a handful of men at her wing—a foreboding emblem on their chests, which no one at Colony 22 would yet recognize, but would later come to know as the new official sigil of the NWRF. But they didn’t have to recognize the symbol, or the faces of these individuals, to know who they were and what they stood for. A bit like that unexplained celestial something in the air this morning, everyone already knew, without a doubt in their minds: these figures were from the New Wave Head Quarters—or were at least representing them.
The woman, her brow severe, the set of her jaw intimidating, headed directly up the stairs and towards the Chancellor’s office. Never had she set foot in Colony 22 before (as far as anyone that day was aware) but it was as though she knew exactly where she was going. She never spoke a word, and neither did anyone dare utter one as she passed. She found Quinn in his office and the door slammed shut behind her, one representative following her inside, the others waiting at the door. The silence that followed was deafening.
Rumours would start to circulate through the Colony like creeping ivy with every minute she spent behind that door, and by the time she left, as swiftly and ominously as she arrived, those rumours would begin to spread like wildfire. Somehow, it gradually became public knowledge that Reformists from HQ had been here, though no one knew who, or why—but the woman had had an aura of importance and power about her that could not be ignored. Just the breeze of her strut across your path sent shivers down your spine, chills to your very bones—like someone walked across your grave, if you were superstitious like that.
But what no one would know was the details of what went on in that office—how this woman (who’d introduced herself only as ‘Imara,’) got right up in Quinn Dervilia’s face and told him that if he ever so much as whispered a word of the truth about the parasite to anyone else, she would personally see to it that he would face the consequences—and she could not guarantee that his wife would be exempt from those consequences. How, when Quinn had asked who she was to be making such a threat and if she had the authority to speak for HQ, she’d replied only with a contentious, ‘as far as you’re concerned, I am HQ.’ The average folk would also not know that Imara had, as she explained, made the trip over because word had gotten to her while she was at a Colony in France, that 22′s Chancellor was deliberating breaking the news to the public. Evidently, somewhere in Colony 22′s infrastructure, there was a leak.
No one would know these things save, of course, for the Chancellor himself, Clove Modius, who was in the the room at the time as the Chancellor’s right hand, and a certain patrolling NWRF guard named Charlie Essex, who’d overheard, not all of it—not by a long shot—but likely more than he was meant to. Of course, he’d only been following orders—keep this hallway clear, the reps had told him. No one comes this way. And he’d done just that, ensuring that no one would overhear anything if voices were ever to raise—so it was hardly his fault, of course, that when her threats did rise, that he was around to catch some pretty alarming things.
Later, when the Reps left, the Chancellor would notify all NWRF members (and lab assistants or researchers already unfortunately involved) that they would, under no circumstances, be telling the public about the truth of the NWRF’s ‘experiment’. He would do this via PDD and Echo alert, as it was not open to discussion, or contestation. He would not say why, but he would not need to; that much was obvious. Someone had come. Someone had made it quite clear that their hands were well and truly tied.
The Chancellor did not know who had reported him to HQ, but he did not dare ask, and if Imara had known, she’d had no interest in sharing. Quinn also did not know for sure if the leak had been intentional or accidental, but either way, he was furious. Furious—but powerless. So he did not interrogate or attempt to flush out the nark, because it seemed futile at this point, and doing so would only implicate him further. Instead, he would abide by the NWRF’s demands and say no more of it. There was too much at stake, now, and his own life was but one of those things.
That isn’t to say, however, that he would be able to resist wondering: who had this person been who’d betrayed him? Had it been an act of spite or sheer stupidity? Should he take it as a threat or simply a wake up call? And finally, did these questions even matter? Would having any of these answers make any difference at all?
