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Carmen Farooq-Lane had learned from her mother to deflect from questions about family, wealth, and lifestyle with a simple phrase: “We’re comfortable.” It was a cliche for a reason- it worked. It glossed over all the unsightly details like the high interest savings accounts and the lawyers on retainer and yet managed to convey specifics like the gorgeous townhouse and the luxury vehicles.
Comfortable meant spending more time worrying about the story her extracurriculars and APs told on college apps than whether the check for private lessons would clear. It meant being embarrassed to bring home friends because her parents would interrogate them and not because of the state of the house. Most of all, “comfortable” meant sweeping a lot of awkward emotional baggage under the antique rugs in order to make the house the perfect place for stifled dinner parties with other comfortable families.
For all that she grew up comfortable, it takes Farooq-Lane some time to learn the specific dialect of comfort that Liliana speaks so fluently.
——
In a white-washed farmhouse with trendy, updated copper roofing, Liliana lends her a sweater because she’s shivering in her silk blouse while they lounge on a squishy leather couch.
“That’s better,” Liliana says softly, once Farooq-Lane is tucked into muted blue merino wool. It is better. Liliana has some wild white hair at her temples that refuses to be held back by her headband. Farooq-Lane thinks it would feel differently from the red curls on the rest of her head, courser to the touch. Her fingers twitch.
She had gone to the store with Liliana, of course, back when she’d first been assigned to the Visionary, but she hadn’t paid much attention to the small mountain of sweaters, shawls, dresses, and leggings that they’d charged to the company card. This sweater is one she doesn’t recognize, even though the smell of Liliana’s goat’s milk soap, soft and a little sour, means she must have worn it recently.
Farooq-Lane goes back to skimming field reports from Lock, building her mental map of the drunken path the Potomac Zeds have been cutting across the Appalachians. Liliana continues a knitting project she had begun on their drive here. If anyone involved is following a pattern, it doesn’t show.
Later, in the bathroom mirror, Farooq-Lane notes that the sweater is baggy and hides her waist, that the shade of blue doesn’t suit her undertones, that the collar of her blouse is all bunched up underneath. Still, she finds herself smiling at her reflection. It turns out she likes the wry little half moon of her lips, and that makes her smile a little deeper.
——
In a squat retro house with a lot of wood paneling and a rock garden out front, Carmen paces on an ugly orange carpet. She likes the clean lines of this rental’s furnishings: dynamic mid-century modern pieces with straight slopes that guide the eye around the space. There are echoes of her old minimalist apartment in their shapes. The colors, however, are atrocious. The way the oranges and olives and blues vibrate against each other irritates her.
It’s not the soft, eclectic bohemian style that Liliana would choose for them. There hadn’t been time for the usual process of the Moderators putting together a list of short-term rentals for Liliana to peruse.
They’d been in Roanoke, cleaning up from yet another failed operation, when the vision had hit an already distressed Liliana. Sometimes she knew when they’d hit, right down to the minute. Others seemed to sneak up on her completely. Farooq-Lane thought she was beginning to see the pattern to them. This one had caught them both off-guard, leading to a rushed escape and an unlucky homeowner on a riding mower being sent to the ER with an imploded limb.
The Zed from the vision was outside of Norfolk with a complicated international escape attempt already in progress. Lock and Ramsay had managed to obtain a helicopter with the help of some agency contacts and set out immediately. Local reinforcements would meet them there. Farooq-Lane and Liliana had been left in Nikolenko’s custody, flying down interstates at a speed that conflicted with Farooq-Lane’s belief system. She was supposed to have an attack plan for them by the time Lock and Ramsay touched down.
By the time their car had pulled up, Nikolenko squealing to a stop, the Zeds had been gone for twenty minutes, and the effects of their dreamt weapons were already dissipating. Farooq-Lane had gotten chewed out by Lock so badly that she hadn’t even noticed Liliana’s wrinkled hand in hers after the fact.
Now, Liliana sits on the cornflower blue couch, pillows from the bedrooms bolstering its insufficient cushions. Farooq-Lane is not being quiet about wearing a hole into the shag carpet, but Liliana just glances placidly at her every so often. She’s knitting again, something new from the dandelion yellow yarn she’d found at a local shop in Tennessee.
She was that feather.
She was that feather.
Pacing is not doing it. The feather is not doing it. Farooq-Lane rips out the elegant pins holding her updo in place and shakes out her hair like an agitated dog. Even the roots of her hair feel wrong. The Potomac Zeds shouldn’t have been able to beat them here, not when they had a helicopter on their side and Moderators already on the ground.
“Carmen,” Liliana says. Farooq-Lane’s head whips up, scared of yet another surprise vision. Liliana is old enough right now that she should be able to give hours of notice, but it’s been a marathon day. “Come sit.” She sets her knitting aside and gestures to the floor in front of her feet.
Farooq-Lane bristles, but she finds herself doing what was asked of her. She settles between Liliana’s knees, arranging her own legs in a butterfly position that lets her continue some of her anxious movement from before.
Liliana’s fingers comb through her hair, just aimless soothing motions. Farooq-Lane’s bouncing legs slow, but she can’t help shivering whenever Liliana’s touch brushes behind her ears or down the nape of her neck.
Her movements take on more purpose, beginning to weave a braid that starts on one side of Farooq-Lane’s face and then wraps over the crown of her head and down.
She shocks herself by saying, “My mother used to braid my hair. Before we got older and she took more hours at work.” That ‘we’ makes her throat hurt. Liliana hums and reaches for the hair tie on Farooq-Lane’s wrist.
“You usually just do twists,” she observes.
“Faster that way,” Farooq-Lane confirms.
The elastic secures Liliana’s work, and she rests her hands on Carmen’s shoulders for a moment. It’s grounding, but she feels a pang of longing for the electrifying touch of Liliana’s finger on the shell of her ear.
——
In a gardener’s bungalow behind a historic mansion, Liliana puts on some folk music while she rinses and preps vegetables in the cramped kitchen. She’s young today, younger than Farooq-Lane, but she carries herself too calmly to be adolescent. She doesn’t bother wearing an apron- she just wipes her hands on the yoga pants she’s stolen from Farooq-Lane. Left to her own devices, Liliana isn’t much of a cook, but she makes an excellent sous chef.
Dinner is hissing on the stove, and the harmony rattling from Farooq-Lane’s phone is putting goosebumps on her arms when Liliana starts looking out the window with her eyebrows pinched. She can’t be seeing much; sunset comes early this time of year. Farooq-Lane knows what it means.
“Farooq-Lane,” Liliana begins.
With a hand on her shoulder blade, Farooq-Lane ushers her to the front door that sticks every time they open it. She nudges a pair of loafers toward Liliana’s feet, gets them mixed up and turned toe-to-heel and has to leave Liliana to right them distractedly.
Farooq-Lane directs her, “Go behind the house, past the hedge, away from the manor. There’s a wooded area. It should be far enough.”
Liliana rushes out the door, doesn’t close it behind herself. She looks back at Farooq-Lane with agony in her eyes, and then she rounds the corner of the cottage and is gone. Her footsteps are hardly audible over the pounding in Farooq-Lane’s ears.
She hesitates to go back to the kitchen since it's at the rear of the house, closer to the copse of trees she had mentioned. But dinner is still hissing, and the music is still going.
After a quick risk assessment, Farooq-Lane returns to silence her phone and switch off the burner under the stir-fry. The bottom layer of veggies has gotten a little brown and soggy, but it’s salvageable. The clock tells her the rice is probably ready.
She is plating their dinner in shallow bowls when the air shudders and her breath catches in her throat. Too many snow peas fall into her bowl, and she carefully redistributes them while counting the passing seconds. The bowls go on the table, and Carmen speedwalks back to the door.
Liliana shuffles back around the corner, looking shaken but apparently unharmed. She’s older, maybe middle-aged. Her temples are damp with sweat despite the cold, her eyes wet.
“Anything usable?” Farooq-Lane asks with bated breath, voice a little strangled.
Liliana nods, swallows. “Further west now- a Dreamer on the move in a trailer.” Something is off in her voice, but it doesn’t sound like worry and it doesn’t look like it either. Anticipation, maybe, in the set of her jaw? She’s on edge somehow, Farooq-Lane knows for sure.
“Take off your shoes,” she says, coming to a decision. “The others can wait for us to eat dinner. A trailer can’t get too far in twenty minutes.”
That makes Liliana smile like a firecracker, like she had when Carmen had punched Ramsay. Farooq-Lane smiles back, full of the satisfaction of a good decision that’s part of a good plan that’s part of a good system.
——
In a charming bed and breakfast in a Boston suburb, she lays in bed with Liliana sleeping, head in her armpit, flyaway red hair tickling her neck, and she wishes so badly she had a place she called home. She wishes she had people to take Liliana to visit so that they could tell her how good Liliana was for her, like that would be news to her.
Farooq-Lane tries to remind herself that home wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Home was where she was Carmen, and Farooq-Lane was a legacy to be upheld. Home was where Nathan had first gotten the idea that some people were expendable, killable.
Her mother probably would have implied that Liliana could use a diet. Her father might only have ever called Liliana her “friend.” She certainly couldn’t have brought Liliana to company functions, what with her vacillating age and appearance or her charmingly odd turns of phrase. She’d never brought a date to one anyway, hadn’t even gotten around to mentioning to her coworkers that any potential plus one would be a woman. She had thought that there was plenty of time for that.
But on nights like this, even the bad parts make her eyes water. She has to bite her lip until it bleeds to keep them from overflowing. Every time she tries to picture that fucking feather she just sees her parents sat at the table in their ridiculous dressing gowns, each with a section of the morning paper in their hands and half a grapefruit on their plate.
A section completed, they would pause to attack the grapefruit with the special spoons with the serrated edges, and then they would swap sections. Her mother would make a deadpan joke about the mayor’s latest controversy, and her father would let out a single sharp syllable of a laugh. Nathan would work in his sketchbook, tuning them out and angrily tracing over the lines of a drawn blade over and over.
Farooq-Lane’s throat makes a sharp but sticky sound like a sap-covered branch snapping, and Liliana stirs. She presses a hand to Farooq-Lane’s heart, still half-asleep. She taps out the beat of Farooq-Lane’s heart, baba-boom, making it real in a way it never feels when it’s hidden away in her chest.
Liliana keeps going until she is dozing off again and Farooq-Lane’s ribcage is no longer in danger of splitting open. She nestles down further into the covers, into Liliana, into this temporary comfort.