Things We Don't Speak

Weavers of Lights

De: Fabienne Paquin

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Somewhere off U.S. Highway 24—Cedar Key
He didn’t run anymore — not really. He drifted.
From border towns to scrubland motels. Places where the dust didn’t ask questions. Places with no cell towers, no connections, no noise. Just wind. Just time.
He didn’t choose Florida.
He never chose most places.
The Bureau had given him five names and three sets of coordinates. All temporary. All quiet. He picked the one furthest from the concrete, closest to the water. No metro, no trains, no skyline. Just sand, mosquitoes, and a weather-beaten RV park that smelled like salt and rust after a storm.
Cedar Key wasn’t the kind of town you found by accident. You arrived because you ran out of road — or because someone wanted you forgotten.
Tom parked the RV beneath a stand of pines, far enough from the other residents to avoid questions but close enough to the pond to hear fish jump at night. He walked barefoot through the overgrown lot the first evening to feel something that wasn’t tension.
He still carried three phones, none of them his. He still opened canned food with his left hand out of habit. The knife stayed near the door, the burner laptop slept in a false floor compartment, and every window had been tested for how fast it could be blacked out.
But the mission was over, at least on paper.
No one said it out loud, but they’d shelved him. He was too valuable to discard, too dangerous to keep close. So they gave him a story: a fake name, a background in consulting, a vague injury that kept him from returning to D.C.
They told him to write science fiction. “Something clever. Remote. Off-world. Nobody’s reality.” It was a joke, maybe. Or a leash.
He played along.
So he wrote. But not what they expected.
He wrote lists. Maps. Hypotheticals. Traced whispered trails in news articles, coded phrases on fringe message boards. Patterns in attacks that didn’t make the news. He still watched. He still listened.
He didn’t expect anyone to come looking. Not Anton. Not Madeleine. Certainly not a woman with a cracked passport and rain in her eyes who would knock on his door asking for a place to stay.
But the quiet had never fooled him. Quiet wasn’t peace.
It was camouflage.
And camouflage only worked… until someone asked the right question.
Tom sat on a bent picnic table behind an abandoned rest stop, watching the sky bleed out behind a line of trees. Writer lay nearby, head on his paws, eyes half-shut but tracking every sound.
In his hand was a key.
Small. Old. Familiar.
It had arrived without warning — a battered envelope forwarded through two dead mail drops. No name. Just the key, and a date scribbled in block letters on a torn scrap of map.
Only one person could have sent it.
Anton.
Tom closed his fist around the key. He hadn’t heard from Anton in six years and hadn’t said his name aloud in five.
But now he was moving again. Not because he wanted to.
Because someone was weaving him back into the light.
Julie wiped her palms against her jeans and tried to keep her breath steady as the customs line edged forward.
She’d done everything by the book. Short-term visa. Round-trip flight. One bag. Clean passport.
Still, she felt like she was lying.
Not because she had something to hide, but because she didn’t know what she was walking into.
Behind her, someone coughed. Ahead, the officer stamped a form without looking up. The air smelled like metal and recycled air. Her phone buzzed once in her coat — a glitch—no new messages.
She hadn't told her sister she was leaving and hadn't told her ex, but she had just boarded the flight.