According to Rose, Part One: The Boy and The Wolf. 1 (ATR).

Begin Freely, America, Central Xandria, June 02, 2158

BEGIN FREELY

“Hosea stood and watched her figure stricken by the city’s lights, covering her clumped, raven strands with glossy colors like a damp painting freshly composed of oil-based strokes.”

With enough time–we’ll get what we deserve, but hopefully not all that soon. Hosea was certain this place would carry it out, by punch or by gun; by substance or by structure, this place would carry it out. And as far as Hosea was concerned—so be it. He had no qualms with death. Better yet, death owed him one. He had no deal with the reaper. Perhaps no such relationship existed. Father Time and Mother Nature weren’t lawless dissimulators, conveyors of chaos irresponsibly doling out blessings just to beat them away. They were free of persuasion or bribery. They barely knew each other, and the only arrangement the two agreed upon was “start” and “finish.” Hosea at least understood those confinements. 

Hosea found himself curious about many things concerning life, not just death or nature, but also the metaphysical branches of existence. His work in the city drove his mind to places he’d rather it not go, the places that required him to consider his morality. The place required much of him, and he felt it never rewarded him enough to put up with the residuals of the burden. As he sat at the perimeter of the most populated block of the whole city, its central region, he looked out toward the crowd of people crossing each other’s paths, their scents and hair, footsteps and loose clothes trailing behind, weaving a complicated pattern like the work of an Araneus spider. Their motions lit up in Hosea’s vision—he could see it all exceptionally well. For him, their traveled paths lingered, ghosting behind them to authorize his perception of the events in plain sight. 

He sipped his tea and remained observant. 

The tea was warm, panting silver streams up toward the miles of vacant space overhead. The cafe he sat at, the one at the corner of Block-A in Central Xandria called Heartland Cafe, had indoor seating, but something about the crisp air that ventilated into and through the city right as the sky turned dark blue-purple, pleased Hosea. That was also around the time the city displayed the pictures of an aurora on the dome above, waving contrasting green and pink as if curtains covering an open window during the dead of night. If he’d let it, the wind would have picked up the pages of the journal ahead of him, flapping and flipping them until the flyleaf of the last pages awoke, deciding between turning over or sticking to the final stiff piece usually married to the back cover. Also, if he’d let it, the traveling air would have gently wafted away the warmth from his cup, seizing all charm from the Oolong he routinely enjoyed. 

In some such way, Hosea knew quite a lot about Oolong. He often considered making some at home for himself, and he had done so on occasion. Remaining consistent with making his tea wouldn’t be difficult, but it might have disrupted the magic of his experience when enjoying a cup at any of his preferred cafes. Getting to know Oolong was a short endeavor but gave him an insight that helped with his appreciation of the brew. A species of evergreen shrub identified as the Camellia Sinensis is made up of leaves, buds, and stems that are used to produce tea. Wither the leaves under the strength of the sun, and let the natural world transmute itself, invoking an oxidation process. Oxidized just enough, not quite like green tea, but a considerable separation from that of black tea. Then the leaves are curled to help produce a flavor sweet and floral, but vegetable-like, like chewing on an unripened sugar cane, with a buttery consistency that coats the pallet with a glaze petitioning the soft disengagement of the tongue and the roof of the mouth, further activating the senses. 

The flavor of the tea gave off a sense of remoteness—different from black and green tea, but close enough that upon first glance, one might guess black, but upon tasting, they might guess green. Remote like a bug prey to a spider caught in a web. The arachnid interpretation of burying someone alive. 

To be buried alive.

Hosea contemplated this. What would it take to be buried alive? It’s not something that happened at the time, at least, not unintentionally, but he’d heard about it happening fairly regularly some centuries ago. His confidant in all things archival (not strictly a confidant, and also not a requested position to be filled) informed him so. She associated it with the Lazarus Effect. A separate phenomenon, but not necessarily mutually exclusive. She described the times before expansive technology, and how sometimes doctors got it wrong. It seemed as if their patient had gone to the other side, when, in fact, they had not. They would come alive moments later. Even farther back in time, when there was virtually no notable technology to speak of, patients would be buried before they had the chance to come alive again. Their markings from having clawed the inside of the coffin often led some to believe in supernatural things, like resurrections or witchcraft.

There was no need to blow into his cup of tea to cool the liquid with his air as Xandria did to him. He just sipped and sipped, three sips deep and counting. No sugar—no milk, just pure tea steeped for a little over three minutes. Hosea sipped without restraint, then forced himself to slow down in hopes of enjoying the rest of the experience. By then, he had drunk half of the tea, the ripples settled after going untouched for several seconds succeeding his placing it back onto the table. Hosea found his focus at the center of the cup where the ripples spawned. When he had placed his cup somewhat hastily onto the table, the tea reacted by nearly jumping out of the cup, forming a bulb followed by a line of liquid that rose and then fell. A clear indication of another sort of restriction Hosea was meant to abide by. A reminder that the world had laws, and no matter his desperation, his agency could only be taken so far. The effect of his action was followed by the laws of physics in the form of a ripple. The folds in the liquid that was his tea flowed toward the lip of the cup and subsided over time. The cause of the ripple effect was his placing the cup down a little too hard (his action). A subtle disturbance in the homeostasis of the beverage, innocent or an unintentionally aggressive disturbance. He grabbed his pen and began to write in his journal as he separated his lips to the expansion of webbing growing denser around him: The Lazarus Effect, taking note of his thoughts. Appearing to have died, just to shock the world with an unanticipated revival.

I guess resurrections were possible, after all. 

There was only one way to find out if Hosea was even alive—to find out if he were human or robot, a simulation, or something in between. A cruel joke to have put him there like that; in that state, he was jumbled and twisted like trying to make sense of a foreign language. Because he lived as if he were a ghost with no tangible connection tethering him to a physical space, and though everything he had seen or touched, smelled or tasted felt real, sometimes he did not recognize his sentience. But, he had recognized a touch that started at his shoulder, then squeezed the base of his neck from behind, gently guiding his focus while his resolve failed to do so, which it had done often.

Relieved, Hosea knew when touched by Amy. His vision settled, calmly following her movement rather than the others walking beyond her.

Hosea had been made mad by daydreaming. He expressed to Amy before about how he saw people as if they were a sea: wet envelopes that crashed and flipped over one another. Noisy waves that made sounds they shouldn’t have. They spoke—they rang, loudly and constantly. He and Amy were in the middle of it all. Though, they were untouched by the chatty current. Had the sea ripped apart while they sat as if it were poorly sewn together? They should have been swept away, swallowed by the motion to be with the rest of them. It was the way of things. 

She tried to sit and started with: “Sorry, I don’t think I’ve ever been here. I didn’t realize that the train would stop so often, and then I had to hop on another train–”

Hosea waved his hand, stood to interrupt her, gave her a quick hug, and reached his foot underneath the table, sliding the chair across from him over the porous pavement.

“Don’t worry about it,” Hosea said. “I found myself people-watching anyway.”

Amy sat, tapped the screen attached to the side of the table, and chose which beverage she wanted as she joined him. She then placed a card on top of an outline designed to take payments and gestured toward his cup.

“Oolong?”

“I’m in a mood today.”

“A decent one, I hope.” She situated into the chair. 

Amy rolled her eyes because Hosea was a sarcastic person constantly finding ways to tease or joke, and she anticipated this upon arrival. Rigid and outwardly seemingly uninterested, Hosea presented as though unbothered and not easily entertained. Though, when his guard was down, she’d be lucky to get a strictly serious response out of him. Nevertheless, Amy sat with a smile on her face, thinking of what to say next.

What a beautiful person, he thought. He was allowed to think that. He had told her before and would continue to tell her. She assured him she took his appreciation to hear, and then returned the favor. That was the first time they exchanged those words. This happened many months before this moment. Since then, they had gotten together regularly, until December of 2108, when Hosea announced his temporary leave. An overseas trip to Europe–Poland to be exact. Gdansk, Poland, to be specific. 

Amy often tucked into herself, hiding her hands in her coat as if turtling away from the world. Granted, it was cold, but that was her typical body language. Her hair couldn’t help but do the opposite, as it flared outward in wavy clumps that blurred at the tips, not exactly coarse but not quite like silk. Black ripples heavy enough to surf overtop undulated from her head, lining her face like how the canvas of the sky lined the shape of the moon, eyebrows thick sitting high above her bottomless brown eyes appearing as two craters punched into a wall. The necklace she wore held an emerald the sort of green a tree breathes when its company reads red, orange, and yellow, changed by the season that paints dew over a pasture; this perfectly accented the soft brown of her skin similar to the layer below wet bark thumbed away from the trunk of a maturing tree—brown, not quite a dark brown, slightly lighter as it sheds its layers from last year’s contentions. Her coat was black and puffy, and the pants she wore were faded-black, cuffed at the ankle to sit at the top of her boots. And unsurprisingly, her boots were black, along with her thick, ribbed Henley. The black-themed attire was not an expression of her personality.

With Hosea determined to take the lead, he said: “So, I’ve been journaling as you suggested.” He caught the pages as they flipped because of the wind, closed the book shut, and raised it for her to see. 

“How do you feel about it?”

“I think I’m getting something out of it. I mean, I’m sure I am. Even if I don’t notice it yet.”

“What do you write about?” Amy asked.

“Oh, you know,” Hosea started. Growing uncomfortable, he pulled at his jacket, inching the lapel closer to his neckline. “Just stuff, like what I notice when around the city on the job. I wrote a little about my trip overseas. What an experience!”

Hosea took note of how he felt when he said that, wondering if he’d actually gained something from journaling. Because when he wrote, it felt like he was giving a little of himself away with each word.

“But, anyway, I’m glad you were able to make it.”

The two of them looked earnestly into each other’s eyes, not breaking contact for an indistinguishable amount of time. Hosea’s eyes are what got him the most compliments. The subtle rising of the shape of the upper eyelid and its slight descent as it traced toward the side of the head gave him an elegant aesthetic. That, and his hair: eyelashes and eyebrows, and even his head hair, dark, short, and coarser than Amy’s, strengthened his face, giving a strong boost to its bottom half. He had a habit of clenching his jaw and deadening his eyes—that is what made him look so serious. But when he smiled, his cheek fat squished his eyelets close to closed, reminding Amy of when having watched Hosea leave her apartment as her door slid shut, seeing him through the slit formed between the door and the door jam. A short half-second right before the door softly pressed itself into the wall, which had felt ten times longer than that, had separated the two of them until this night. 

Despite it all, the one feature that outshone the rest of his aesthetic was his glow. It wasn’t his respectable height that won others over, he wasn’t that tall. Nor was it his round shoulders or long arms, but it was the pale yellow bloom that pulsed in the colored part of his eyes. Amy thought it made him appear feline as if he were a cat catching the glare of a distant light during dark hours. This seemed appropriate, as Hosea shared other commonalities with a cat. He preferred to be alone. He found it easier to deal with himself than for others to try and deal with him. His devotion to his cause and obligations drew him as a selfish person. He thought it responsible to keep others at arm’s length out of respect for their time and not wanting to waste it. Amy assured him that she liked his company and would like him to share more of it, but Hosea saw himself as a liability. If Xandria wasn’t looking after him, one of his adversaries had to have been. It came with his job.

Hosea was a hunter for the city. “The First City’s Hunters,” or just “Hunters” is how they were commonly referred to. Officers within the walls of Xandria patrolled the streets, guarded buildings, escorted low-level officials in and out of politically-charged functions, and surely, one could imagine what else they were tasked with, or what they did outside of what they were tasked with. In Xandria, control of perception was of importance. So, your casual resistance against protests, an ever-growing unease of the officers in the city since the word “revolution” had been casually thrown around leading up to a small election at the time, had become a regular concern for the policing units. However, that is not what Hosea was. 

Where officers upheld the law (occasionally stretching the law placed over them—the laws keeping them in check) and helped organize the foot traffic in Xandria, busted down on offenses such as drug use, and using what they deemed to be acceptable force as an intimidation tactic to help with it all, Hosea operated outside of view. His operations were covert, and therefore, lawless. Oh, he was not Father Time or Mother Nature. He had no confinements, and he wasn’t meant to uphold any promises to abide by a rule. He was free of judgment, with total impunity. He was a conveyer of chaos. It was all he knew. Amy didn’t want to believe it, because Hosea seemed to have such a big heart when it had come to their exchanges. Hosea also believed himself to be kind-hearted and calm, sweet and the like, and someone not expected to thrive in the field he worked in. He figured it all a test—something to do with integrity. To his credit, despite the red he had seen working in his field, a course of actions where one hole would be a gross misrepresentation of how truly punctured his fairway was, a course with many more holes than one, Hosea wasn’t what you expected of a Hunter. Verily, he considered himself at peace with what he did, but he was no Hunter. He could hardly recall how he got started in the occupation. He often complained to Amy about his lost memories, which is what influenced her suggestion that he start journaling. He also confided in Amy the things he feared most about himself, the places he went, and the things he had done that spooked even him when he stared at the cover of his journal knowing what the ink spelled out on the pages behind the cover.

Amy found it rather alarming that, when asked, Hosea couldn’t recall much of his childhood. This remains true for his early childhood until he began working for Xandria, his early work being his most vivid recollections. She wanted to know him better, and maybe part of that was her curiosity about the inner workings of a Hunter. Childhood is where it all starts for most. That is where it started for Amy. See, Amy had an affinity for Xandria since her young academy days. Her deep interest later evolved from pure astonishment to inquisitive but quickly turned sour for reasons later discussed, but in short: she wanted to know how to burn Xandria to the ground. Every moving piece that made Xandria the empire it was, interested Amy. Whether it was subconscious or an asserted conscious effort, she found herself attached to a Hunter. Many would consider Hunters a significant fraction of the formula that made up Xandria’s governmental branch. The two were an odd pairing. One worked for Xandria but did not like it. And maybe he’d felt Xandria betrayed his integrity. Something told him Xandria might have been withholding data, keeping details about his past life hostage. The other was infatuated with Xandria and its glorious rise but wished it a fiery death. 

Xandria was cruel. It had the power to save many lives, but it watched as the world outside of its walls was destroyed, consuming their last crumbs, begging at the gates of Xandria to be let in, to be fed just the scraps of its plate. But she knew the consequences of its actions would haunt the city. She was not afraid when she realized she was a part of it. At night, Amy convinced herself she could hear the people beyond the walls of her apartment. It wasn’t possible, as she lived too deep inside the walls, but she convinced herself of it. It may have been the hum of the city, its unbothered whisper of a lullaby putting itself to sleep, mimicking what it heard at its gates as those who suffered, poor, hungry, and swept up in the crime of the world outside of Xandria, begged from a crouch to be given an opportunity. 

She wondered if he could see it on her face. Her quarrels with Xandria had been made clear to Hosea by then, but her deeply rooted disdain for Xandria and its function remained a personal discussion between her and her journal. However, when Hosea’s eyes glowed yellow as if highlighting Amy’s inner thoughts, she feared he could see it written all over her face like the thick foam she wore on her lip from a cappuccino after a considerable sip.

Amy placed her cup onto the saucer, nodded at the waiter, and said, “It’s perfect, thank you.”

“Looks like it’s half foam,” Hosea noted, having patience for the waiter to leave them.

“Is there something you want to tell me, Hosea?” Amy asked, cutting the corner. Frankly, she’d expected him to “break up” with her. They had not been “dating” dating, but they were casually exclusive. On the surface, Hosea seemed content with their arrangement but she guessed it was possible he’d found something more meaningful—something more fulfilling. 

Unbothered, Hosea lifted his cup as if to drink from it, then set it back down. He leaned forward onto his elbows, and looked with his glow around Amy and then at her. 

“I’ve been writing about a lot more than just my feelings, Amy.”

Something about how the words sounded as if they formed all at once in the back of his throat before surfacing, paired with the sincerity with which Hosea said them, made Amy shiver. She couldn’t turtle anymore than she had already done. Instead, she took air through her nostrils, mouth closed, and blinked one slow blink before inquiring what he meant without saying as much. 

He told her he couldn’t go into detail. Instead, he dug around the inside of his shoulder bag strapped over the ear of his chair and placed a second journal on the table. 

“You’ve seriously helped me with my writing. I’ve become a lot better because of you. Funny enough, the more I get to know myself the more I realize I’m more than half an asshole.”

“Hm,” Amy drank. 

She grabbed the journal, flipped open the cover, and ran her fingers across the opening page. The warm air that traveled under the cafe pushed through ducts, dulling the effects of the cold breeze that swept across their faces. Amy couldn’t decide if she’d liked it. 

He smiled and said: “There’s an art to torturing oneself. At this point, I’m not even sure I’m aware I’m doing it.”

Amy looked up from the pages, eyebrows asking him to continue. 

“Who am I talking to? You’re the one that opened my eyes to that type of thinking. I was fine with my life since I didn’t know I was living. Last year, before my trip, you told me something like ‘Men lie about their nature, but the last thing nature would do is lie.’”

“In such similar words,” she responded.

“It just feels like we’re the villains. Or, I feel that way. Maybe a little, at least. I’m starting to think we’ll never be happy.” He drank. 

Amy closed the journal and asked to keep it with a tilt of her head, leaving the first of his journals on the table for Hosea to reclaim. Hosea abided. Then it felt like it was only the two of them there. The web of lies and deceit, self-torture, and pity continued to grow as Xandria’s civilians moved around those streets so fluidly it was as though they swam through the Xandria as if the ground was lost to a flood. Cups and silverware clanked against saucers. An indistinguishable low chatter hadn’t ceased since she’d gotten there. 

“Hosea,” Amy said slowly. “I’m afraid I’m not following you.”

Hosea lowered his head, letting the edges of the paper inside his journal fall from the grip of his fingers in rapid succession as the pages counted themselves in their language. 

“Poland changed you.”

Hosea seemed to grow embarrassed or apprehensive. She couldn’t tell. 

“If only you knew the half of it,” he said, voice free of inflections.

“Maybe you should tell me!” She scooted her chair closer to the table and slid her cup to the side. 

“Please, just go over my journal and help me improve my writing,” he said. He nodded at her bag.

OK—now he was being silly. She suggested as much with an unbroken gaze. 

“I’m a little paranoid, I admit it.”

“No one’s watching you as closely as you think. We live in a free state,”

“You’re only as free as you perceive yourself to be. That is what I’ve learned. God, there’s so much more left to uncover. I can say this: you’re right to feel the way you feel about this place. And you’re right to feel conflicted about me. What’s your opinion on redemption?”

As if queued, the snow had begun to fall, which meant it was an hour past sunset, which at that time of year happened rather late. Hosea interrupted himself to better situate in his chair, taking in the musk of the city, turning to view the tops of the wall that encased Xandria where the dome of the sky concluded.

They sat together and spoke of less dramatic affairs, like Amy’s job as a bookseller, or how her friend Kary was doing. That was for another thirty minutes, and when they left a party of three people who had been waiting to be seated took their place. Hosea remained enigmatic with his phrasing, suggesting there was something to be discovered in that journal he lent Amy. She would wait until she got home to briefly glance at a few pages before placing it on her shelf and forgetting about it for a few days. Until then, she had two train stops to endure. She was asked about her motorcycle, the vintage Suzuki GR650 she had ridden around the city despite the frequent snowing. She told him it was a little colder than she’d anticipated, and then questioned and cursed Xandria for keeping the city perpetually freezing and snowy or rainy all year round. Never having been a fan of the cold despite growing up in the city, Amy couldn’t agree with or understand why the city needed to be as frigid as it remained. Maybe the electronics that made up what she guessed was eighty percent of the structures would overheat without such measures. No need to pretend like she knew the authentic reasoning. 

Hosea claimed to have work to do, even at such late hours. She didn’t question him. Truthfully, she trusted him but didn’t trust his judgment concerning his well-being or his character. She was relieved he didn’t come back from Poland with a desire to ghost her. He was enough of a ghost without any intentionality. They hugged each other goodbye and then realized they were walking in the same direction departing Heartland Cafe. Hosea grabbed Amy’s hand as she turned for the train station once reaching the end of the block across from the cafe, pulled her toward him, and kissed her. She embraced him once more, softly pushed him away, and made stride for the train to not miss its departure. Hosea stood and watched her figure stricken by the city’s lights, covering her clumped, raven strands with glossy colors like a damp painting freshly composed of oil-based strokes.