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“Well, I’d appreciate it if someone would tell me what the fuck it says. Unlike you lot, I wasn’t taught some useless dead language growing up.”
“It’s not useless anymore…”
“It is if you can’t understand it.”
He’s got a point.
Stepping down on the gas pedal, he peels us out of the alleyway. We’re about a block away from the destruction. It was worse than I feared, but at least no one was injured—that should at least buy us some much-needed time.
“Tell me if you can make sense of this shit,” I ask, bringing the note close to my face.
“Hit me with it.”
In real time, I translate the cryptic words for Ray.
“Old and new come together,
If you learn from the dead, you can burn together,
Ancient secrets, buried forever,
School is out, the future is never.”
Silence follows my rendition of the strange poem. Then, “… What the fuck does that mean?”
I can’t help but roll my eyes. “That’s what I was just saying. Translated, this shit just turns into some nonsensical, twisted nursery rhyme.”
“It’s ominous,” Ray notes, slowing to a stop at a red light. We may be in a hurry, but we have no destination. “What did your brother say about it? I assume he knows Latin too?”
“Not as much as me. Either way, he couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”
“Is that why he left so quickly?”
I don’t like the implication in Ray’s question.
“He left because he has other things to worry about,” I warn my unlikely partner.
Ray may be something not unlike a friend to me, but I’m still a boss, and he’s still just a soldier.
Suddenly, my conversation with Sophia earlier runs through my mind.
If you can’t kill one of your own, are you really free? Do you really have power?
Fuck. I don’t want to kill Ray. Not even a little bit, but all of my life I’ve been surrounded by people I could kill at any moment, and without consequence.
But could I kill one of the Kilpatricks men and get away with it?
And if I can’t, does that mean I’m not really free?
“I didn’t mean any disrespect,” Ray clarifies. “It’s just that it sounds like there’s a ticking time bomb out there somewhere—we need all the help we can get. Yet it seems like we’re the only ones left to work out just what the fuck is going on.”
“We’re the only ones without families,” I quickly note. It’s the obvious observation.
“I suppose you’re right,” Ray nods. “It’s for the best, I guess. I’d rather be out in the field any day of the week than caged in some mansion with a loving wife and a pen full of rambunctious children.”
I can’t tell if he’s being entirely sarcastic or not, but it doesn’t matter. We’re out on the streets, and we need to figure this shit out.
“That’s why we make a good team,” I grumble, focusing back on the note. “Because we agree on things like that.”
