Excerpt: Freefall

So I had been right. Even people within the organisation thought it was going sour. I was definitely glad I fainted, despite the taste it left in my mouth.
I thought of how the man’s eyes had flickered to the door when he mentioned Merla. Why? It seemed like a perfectly normal door. I didn’t have that much experience with doors, but it seemed the prime example of doorishness. It doored very well, and overall was very doory.
On a whim, after checking the corridor was clear, I pressed my eye to the crack between the door and the wall. It took me a second to see the scene: Merla reclining on a chair, with a man I hadn’t seen before standing in front of her. He had the same skin as she did. Perhaps he was her brother.
I moved to press my ear against the door so I could hear the conversation and keep an eye out for trouble. The first voice I heard was Merla’s.
“She’s a problem.”
The next voice was the male’s deep and strong with a slight accent I couldn’t place. It wasn’t Erudican. Perhaps he came from Tenal. I had never seen someone from Tenal, so maybe all Tenalians had dark skin. I didn’t know.
“Is she really that dangerous?”
“She isn’t. But she has connections, and the connections are dangerous. She could spi8ll all the beans to that geita and he’ll tell his colleagues and then the whole world will know. And even if she doesn’t, she definitely wasn’t at the meeting today to join the rebellion. She doesn’t want one, that’s the problem, and she’ll do anything she can to stop it. Annoying little schaz.”
Were they talking about me, by any chance?
“How are we going to get rid of her?”
When they are afraid, people say that they are too scared to breathe. That’s rubbish. I was terrified, but I was breathing as deeply as I could, aware that these breaths may very well be the last breaths I ever took, so I better fordin well make them the best I possibly could.
The man spoke again, answering his own question. Perhaps he was thinking out loud. “ We could martyr her… no, that would scare the people away. They think that they’re safe, that they won’t die. Someone like Tommy would be good for martyrdom. He’s a leader, a talker, a thinker… they would see him as a hero. But a normal person, someone who’s on their level… if she died, that wouldn’t be good for public relations. They’ll be scared.”
“Hmm…” There was a pause in Merla’s voice. “Perhaps we can… control her. I wouldn’t suggest it if it were a big problem, but she’s the only one we know of with such a close connection to a geita. Anyway, we could… influence her.”
“What with? We don’t know any loved ones, and we don’t have any of her possessions…” The man trailed off into silence.
I pressed my eye to the crack between the door and the wall. Merla was staring at the man with a patient expression, waiting for the tana to fall.
I saw it all. The surprise. The understanding in his expression. The respect as he looked at Merla, both of them thinking of the thing I had hoped they would not think of.
Tybalt.
Oh, earth and sky, what had I done?
Just then, the man’s head swung toward the door, and his gaze locked on to mine, though he surely couldn’t see me.
“Someone’s there,” he said.