Chapter IX

The interrogation starts again after the lunch break, albeit a little late due to Sylva's five-minute late arrival. He had told the other two earlier, so it was fine and he was excused, but Ava had stared at him with eyes full of curiosity as he entered the room in a hurry, heaving a little.

"Are you okay?" Ava asks after his breathing calms down and starts the recording.

Sylva laughs, embarrassed. "I'm okay, thank you. I just ran, that's all. Sorry for being late."

Ava shrugs. "It's okay," she says, then turns towards Seth, "Where were we again?"

"You agreed to become Aksel's friend," Seth says.

The girl shifts in her seat and nods. "Ah, right."

Ava liked Aksel's little house a lot. She liked that Father rarely came to that house, that there were no other children other than her brother and Aksel, and that the weather there is always nice, but most of all, she liked that it was the only place where she could feel safe.

After the war, a sense of safety and comfort is not a feeling that is easy to have for Ava, or any other Alkemians for that matter. The end of the war meant the start of Alkemian's suffering and she knew too much of suffering for someone who had only lived for a decade.

It was in every channel on the television and in every news website on the internet; but no, she had not learnt it from the media. She learnt it from the sight of her crying neighbours, wailing, begging, and screaming from the top of their lungs as they saw their sons and daughters getting into the same car as her father; then she learnt it from the strangers who only knew to yell and sneered at everyone she knew after the war ended; and finally, she knew it from the sight of her father's lifeless body as he hung by his neck on a gallow in the middle of the town square weeks after she had moved into Auntie's manor—it had been a coincidence, she thought perhaps after weeks of his execution, they would have disposed of the body; but no. There, hanging by their neck, smelling foul as death, a line of Diablery Masters hung on their respective gallows. People averted their gaze, but who could really ignore them when their smell was so pungent, so strong, so putrid? Ava would never forget about this sight—male, female, elders, young adults—nothing else mattered other than the fact that they were a master of the forbidden arts; they were all hanged and displayed to the public. Even the blind would know from their horrendous smell and the occasional creaking sound of the wood as the bodies swayed from the wind. Even now, Ava would hear the creaking noise; it came from the imaginary gallows inside her head.

The war was something that her people had started, so the books said. For a hundred years, her people had been thriving and living on top of the world, looking down on the people who chose not to surrender or defect. Now that it had ended, as quickly as it had started, they were living a miserable life; After the war ended, it was a lone battle of Alkemians against the world demanding them to pay for their sin, but Ava couldn't help but to wonder if it really her sin to pay when she had never participated in the war in the first place.

Ava doesn't remember much of her father, her memory of him felt like an image of a reflection on a body of water on a rainy day. She knew that he was there with her sometime in her past, but she could never make up a clear image of what exactly he had done for her during her childhood. Her family, the ones who had always been there for her, were her brother, Sana, and the wife of her father's colleague, Auntie. For Ava, they were her family as well as her safe place.

The school was far from being her safe place, even with Sana. It was the sneer and the hushed unpleasant words that went around about her that made her feel like she was still out there, out of the woods, in the middle of a city where strangers clad in blue uniforms roamed freely on the street, taking pleasure out of threatening and intimidating random people they came across.

Aksel's little house, though, was free of the nasty stares and whispers of the children from the school; free of the unjust treatment that Father had regarded her with. There were only Sana, Aksel, and she; three lonely children looking for something for themselves. They had everything they needed when they were together in that tiny house by the lonely creek.

Aksel's painting was stacked at the corner of the painting studio, like a colourful tower that was as tall as Ava, and his paints were scattered all over the floor, empty and filled tubes of acrylics with caps stained by still-wet pigments staining the hardwood floor. That messy studio was where they would spend their days in that place beyond the portal, in a shared jail that belonged to Aksel that she and her brother had come willingly to.

"I must be a boring company to you. I can't move like the two of you, and I don't know any fun games to play." Aksel said one day with his head lowered.

Aksel had never been with a lot of people due to his sickness— though not being ill, in Ava's opinion, wouldn't make too much of a difference had they not been taken by Father in terms of playing with other children. Had they not been taken by Father, they would most likely be dead or close to dying, sitting on the corner of the road with their hands cupping the air, begging for any help they could get from random passers-by who would probably be as miserable as they are. As much as she hated to admit it, Father had saved their lives.

"No, I like you," Ava said, "you're polite and nice to us." Unlike everyone from the school, she internally added.

The boy smiled from ear to ear at her, light grey orbs disappearing from his almond-shaped eyes as they crinkled. "Really?" the sibling nodded. "Then, that's good."

"How long have you been here, Aksel?" Sana asked, changing the subject.

Aksel tilted his head and tapped his finger on his chin, he said, "All my life, I was born here."

"You were?" Sana asked.

"Yes?" Aksel answered hesitantly, "They buried my mother under that aspen tree, she died after giving birth to me."

The tree he pointed at had been a tall aspen tree with a single marking that resembled a huge eye facing the window of the painting studio. It was the only tree without any leaves on its branches, and the trunk of said tree had chipped and cracked on some parts, the white trunk unique to aspens had blackened. "They", Ava noted, had buried Aksel's dead mother underneath a dead tree.

"Our mother died from giving birth to me too," Ava said, "and our father died from execution."

"Execution?" Aksel echoed, his eyebrows furrowed in shock and confusion.

"He was a diablery master," Sana explained simply.

His grey eyes blinked at the two. "So is Father, but he's still alive."