Brindlewood Bay Episode Eight

On a good day, I was their protégé and they were my teachers. On a bad day, I was their pet and they were my owners. I didn't really care one way or another, the work was important and I never really cared for other people. Maybe in some part of my heart I hoped they saw me as their daughter. Seeing as how this all shook out...they eventually disabused me of that notion.

I disappeared from the world. They funded my transition, my new identity, my studies, my work for them. A history student can access a lot of materials without raising a brow. Put together a historiography of the Bay, looked at surveys, maps, stories. Why did nobody else know about this? Why did a teenage boy with a spectrograph get a community killed and the NSA, with all their fancy toys, had no idea? Mysteries abounded, deeper, ever deeper. I became their pet scholar, their witness. I figured out who else would know. I probed, confirmed, helped construct a threat dossier.

In 2012 we held a sort of convention. All the threats in one place to be assessed, weighed, measured. I did not attend; the three of them wanted to consider the targets without my immediate bias. And I was busy with moving to the island facility. We had to consolidate everything we had and ensure it could hold enemies and witnesses.

The first night in Flagg House I couldn't sleep. Found myself sitting on scrubby, shitty shore in the twilight, bare feet dipped in the shifting tides, smoking a cigarette. It was there, and it was real, and I would be its neighbor until the day I died. A part of me was tired of the loneliness and compartmentalizing, and I decided. If we were to be neighbors, maybe we should learn more about each other. And so I put out my cigarette in the sand, took off my dress and waded out into the surf.

https://thecoffin.club