“Is that how you’ve evaded Warren for so long? Because you know the city?” Its pockets and hidey-holes. How else could a rogue survive?
“That…and I’m even faster.” He slumped lower in his seat, but the movement didn’t look sloppy. His long- apparently speedy-legs sprawled like a desert spider taking hold of a rocky crag, and the top of his white shirt flared to reveal the hard lines of a smooth, honeyed chest. If I wasn’t currently so put off by male agents of Light, I might have been moved.
I turned in my seat, glancing back at Tripp and the others, but they hadn’t moved. Swiveling back, I found my glass again full. Carlos smiled. “Um, just so I can firm up my plans for the evening…you’re not going to kill me?”
“No.” He sipped.
So did I. “Why?”
His soft lashes curled up as he lifted his gaze, making him look angelic as he nodded at José. The owner silently crossed the room, lifted a bright orange sombrero from its peg, and removed a picture box hidden underneath. He then presented this to me as he would a menu, and the two men exchanged words in the smooth cadence of their native tongue while I flipped a clasp on the shadow box’s side and opened it up.
“Cuidado,” Carlos said, but the warning was unnecessary. My gasp told him I knew exactly what I held. Knew too who was depicted on the inside cover: me, my image drawn upon the manual…and done so long before I’d ever been born.
The book wasn’t inked, only penciled, and wasn’t even a proper comic, having been drawn well before the format’s Golden Age. The pages were bound together with a peeling yellowed glue, and every brushstroke had a sense of age to it, a style as easily discernible to the modern eye as a Pixar movie versus Bugs Bunny’s debut.
At least the subject matter was familiar. A woman cloaked in shadows, running through a tunnel while glancing over her shoulder. Her face was indiscernible, her body long and muscular and absent of the pinup features commonly associated with females in comics. Despite the shading, I knew this was me. The old me, though, Joanna, before my transformation into an action figure with body parts more important than the whole. The drawing perfectly captured how I moved, or at least how I felt when I moved.
Adding to its accuracy, and its mystery, this had clearly been sketched by someone used to the strong, serious lines of cartography or botanical drawings. I felt like I was holding a piece of art worthy of Sotheby’s, and flipped through it quickly to find the attached story. A jagged tear interrupted, though, and disappointment ripped through me as well. Some point in the manual’s storied past had found it rent in two. I glanced up to find Carlos watching me with sympathy, and knew he’d felt the same loss upon seeing the tear.
“How old?” I managed, my voice a mere creak.
“Closer to the first manual than anyone I know has ever seen. My father must have had it for years, maybe since he was a boy. He obviously knew what it was.” Carlos rubbed his bare chin thoughtfully. “He hid it under a pew in the cathedral just before the attack which took his life. It was an agreement between my mother and him. Her idea. She wasn’t as fast, but she was smart.”
I reached forward, unable to resist running my finger over the images. “What does it say?”
“It foretells the Kairos’s birth in this city. That here she would be raised, survive attack, go into hiding, and discover her true destiny upon metamorphosis in her twenty-fifth year.” He waved his hand over the open pages. “This legend on these pages was why he sent us here when our own battles were deemed lost.”
I shook my head, and the mescal took hold. I shook it harder to regain my vision. I couldn’t play savior to this man, or anyone, anymore. I’d tried it before, and look where it had gotten me. “Look, I did some of those things, it’s true. The commonalities are even uncanny…” How many other women in Vegas had done all that?
And how could every depiction on these panels ring so true and right in my marrow? “But you’re too late. Maybe if he’d had the full issue, or the one printed after this, he might have seen that.”
“You are the Kairos.”
“I am a mortal.”
“You underestimate your strength.”
“Understandable…since I have none.”
Carlos remained unmoved. “Did you read the text on the final full panel?”
“It’s in Spanish.”
He held out his hand. “Then I will read it for you.”
Cradling the manual like a prayer book, Carlos cleared his throat and began to read from the blurb on the inside cover in a strong, clear voice, his accent transposing beats in the sentence, like it was music. “‘Light returned to the valley, where the meadows had long been falsely lit, to lure and fool the unwary. But with this true light came genuine hope. Balance seemed possible…right up until the Great Sorrow. This event marks the onset of the Fifth Sign: the Shadow binding with the Light.’”
His deep, dark eyes blazed expectantly.
“More fucking signs,” I muttered, and poured myself some more fucking tequila. I took another sip of my liquor, holding it in my mouth so long it numbed my gums and swelled my tongue. Carlos obviously thought the fifth sign was my willingness to work with the yahoos making like Tony Montana behind me, but that wasn’t possible. I swallowed the warm tequila with a grimace. I was no longer Light. Or Shadow. I was no longer Joanna, or really Olivia. I was not a daughter. I was not a weapon. I was not the Kairos. I leaned my elbows on the table and said as much to Carlos.
“And that’s where I come in.” Carlos finally leaned forward, forearms on the edge of the table, fingers twirling his shot glass, though not a drop spilled. “I can teach you the tricks and trade of being a rogue. The power in being powerless. The Kairos is not meant for only Shadow or Light. She is preordained to be the deliverer of us all.”
I leaned forward as well, meeting his dark, pretty, zealous gaze with a cynicism earned by listening to too many zealots. “Carlos, you seem like a…nice man. Fairer than any I’ve met in my recent past, that’s for sure. But you’re too late. Even if I were the Kairos-obviously untrue-I’m not anymore. I gave up every drop of my power and aura and life force- chi, whatever you want to call it-to save a mortal child. There’s more power left in the bottom of this bottle than there is in my entire body.”
“I have total confidence in you.”
“That manual did nothing in my hands,” I pointed out, important because they once had. All written histories burst to life and color, “Pow!” and “Bam!” exploding from the panels in brilliant bursts when in the hands of an agent. Carlos shrugged, unmoved, and even in my increasingly drunken state, I knew why before he spoke.
“Because you’ve become an independent.” It hadn’t come to life in his hands either.
“You mean a rogue,” I said, raising a brow, testing him.
“I mean a part of this valley’s prophesied revolution. The woman who will rise from ash to become the leader of a new world order.”
“Gee, why does that sound familiar?” I tapped my chin like I was really considering it, then brightened. “Oh, yeah-because I already did that. And failed.”
Carlos only lifted a dark brow. “Tell me. What is Warren’s stated agenda for the agents of Light? Defeat the Shadow agents for good? Annihilate them from the valley?”
I shook my head. “Balance. He said a true and continual balance between the two sides will allow mortals the greatest choice in their own lives.”
“Yet he continues to seek the Shadows’ destruction.”
“As they seek his.”
“There is no balance when destruction is the goal. It’s like adding a fat kid to your end of the seesaw. The other side is forced to overreact.”