9.2
"I killed lucas!"
With the sun just escaping in the horizon behind him, Zero smirked down at Jelani.
"How do you feel?"
Jelani's labored breaths stopped. His body needed oxygen, but his lungs wouldn't move.
His eyes glossed over, reflecting the floating smiley face in a pool of tears.
Both hands, no longer holding anything, hung limply at his sides. Blood dripped off his fingers onto the pavement.
"Woow! I can tell you're shocked! It does make sense. You killed all those people for no reason, after all!"
Jelani's jaw quivered, mouth slightly open.
Silent tears crept out of the corners of his eyes again, running in streaks down his face and joining the droplets of blood as they plopped onto the street.
"You let your brother die," Zero continued, furrowing his brow in thought and holding out a finger on his left hand. Then he added a second finder, as if counting. "And then you became a mass murderer! I didn't expect you to turn out like this."
Jelani drew a rattling gasp of air. His chest heaved again and again, rattling with the weight of the tears on his face.
Zero's figure in midair blurred in and out of focus, and Jelani finally dropped his eyes to the ground, head hanging low on the end of his neck.
"Hey, don't get too upset, Jelani. You still have another brother!"
Jelani's weight shifted left. He slid his right foot forward, never lifting the sole of his boot off the ground.
The road was long and straight. Head tilted down, he shuffled onward so slowly that it would be hours before he reached the end.
For a moment, Zero disappeared. But then he returned with his pockets stuffed full of something and positioned himself in the air directly above Jelani, floating along at the same slow pace.
What Zero had gathered were little pebbles. One at a time, he extracted them from his pockets and, releasing them from between a pair of pinched fingers, dropped the rocks onto Jelani's downturned head.
There were hundreds of rocks to drop, and Jelani had thousands of steps to take.
But long before supplies ran out, Zero heard something suspicious. The sound, he realized, was an army of tramping boots.
"See ya, Jelani!" he said with a grin and turned to leave. But he stopped.
"You won't give up just because of this, right?"
With those parting words, Zero left Jelani. He went in one direction, and Jelani kept dragging his feet in the other.
The other end of the long street filled.
Dozens of Russon soldiers, all decked out in full tactical gear, approached Jelani with their semi-automatic rifles raised.
One soldier stepped to the front. He carried no weapon.
Jelani wasn't aware of their presence. He was still looking at the gray surface of the street, not really seeing anything at all.
With a gap of some hundred feet between themselves and the target, the soldiers stopped. Their feet slammed into the ground with a singular thud, and then there was silence.
Commander Wolf proceeded forward.
Jelani, still blind to the world, kept dragging his soles across the ground until a pair of boots entered his field of vision and his robotic march finally came to a halt.
Now standing with no more than five feet between them, Commander Wolf stared, expressionless, at the top of Jelani's head.
The commander opened his mouth, but then, shocking even himself, he snapped it back shut.
Under the dim artificial light on the street as day faded to night, the two brothers engaged in a silent standoff.
"Jelani," Commander Wolf croaked at last. "Look at me."
Precariously, as if it was being controlled by a teetering pulley system, Jelani's head lifted to vertical.
The blood coating his face had dried, and within it ran the thin streaks where his tears had fallen.
Commander Wolf's face tensed when he saw Jelani's mask of cracked blood. His nose wrinkled, and his jaw clenched.
"What did you come back here for? Why is… why is…" his voice faltered, but he kept his eyes locked onto Jelani's. "...Lucas dead?"
Jelani said nothing. His eyes had gone back to being a dry, empty expanse.
"After Mom…" Commander Wolf pursed his shaking lips then growled, "How could you let this happen again?"
He advanced a step closer to Jelani.
"I'll never forgive you. And with the number of people you killed, the law won't, either."
Commander Wolf averted his gaze with a grimace, because looking at Jelani was physical torture.
Biting his lip, he slowly dragged his eyes back to his brother's.
"You should appreciate this moment. It's the last time you'll ever see the sky."
He grabbed Jelani's limp arms and cuffed his wrists behind his back. The cuffs were infused with the element of strength for maximum security, but that didn't matter.
Jelani was lifeless. He only walked when Commander Wolf pushed him, and he did not, as his brother had suggested, glance even once at the night sky above him.
The mass of soldiers flanked Jelani, providing an unbreakable entourage through the streets of Russon.
Commander Wolf walked with his hand always pressed against Jelani's back. Apart from an occasional grimace or shaking breath, he maintained his professional posture as he led his own brother to what would eventually be death.
Up ahead, a pair of people burst into the street, gasping for air and glancing around frantically. When they saw the horde of armed soldiers, they both froze. Even from a great distance away, the fear on their faces was obvious.
Eve craned her neck, trying to see through the mass of bodies.
Echo stepped forward, eyes narrowed to thin slits.
"Get out of the way!" one of the leading soldiers yelled as they approached.
But Echo didn't budge, and Eve was right behind her.
The soldiers stopped. Those in the middle stepped aside, and their commander emerged to confront the strangers.
"Who are you?" Commander Wolf asked impatiently.
"We're with Jelani," Echo snarled. She nodded her head at the soldiers. "Is he in there?"
Commander Wolf hesitated. He was going to repeat the first soldier's command, but the emotion in Echo's eyes made him stop.
"What is Jelani to you?" he finally asked.
Echo glared at him.
"I'm here to make sure he's alright. Anything else you wanna ask?"
Now, Commander Wolf glared back. "Get out of the way."
"Nah," Echo replied, "I'll pass."
In a few long strides, she closed the distance between herself and the commander and held one finger up in front of his face.
"I can kill you, no problem," she told him as yellow sparks flew from her fingertip, nearly singing the ends of his hair.
Commander Wolf stepped aside. With a wave of his hand in the direction of the soldiers, he said, "Go ahead. Ask him if he's alright."
Again, the soldiers parted, and Echo strode through the gap, Eve following close in her wake.
When Echo saw Jelani, who was wavering on his feet with his bloody face lowered, her steps lost all their urgent energy.
She approached him slowly, craning her neck to better see the thing that was supposed to be his face.
"Jelani?"
No response.
"Yo, Jelani!"
Eve scurried around her mother and crouched to the ground, looking up into Jelani's eyes.
But his didn't meet hers–he stared straight down. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
It was happening again. The Jelani she knew was disappearing.
"He killed people."
Commander Wolf had followed them.
"Less than an hour ago, Jelani went on a killing spree. The number of casualties is almost too high to count."
Eve's body began to shiver. Echo turned to Commander Wolf, eyes widening even as she looked at him.
"There is nothing you can do to help him," he said solemnly, examining Jelani as if he was a piece of criminal evidence. "It's too late."
The soldiers began to move, stepping around Echo and Eve like a storm blowing between trees.
"J-je," Eve stammered, watching Jelani's back as it receded through the crowd.
But she couldn't move, and neither could Echo. Some invisible force was anchoring them to the ground, forcing them to remain where they were, so all they could do was watch as the storm blew by and the soldiers faded from view.
Eve's breath shook, and tears rolled down her cheeks.
Echo watched the now empty street, eyes frozen wide open.
"jelani…" Eve sobbed.
"jelani…"