The Ascent

Chapter 50

"How could the government hide something as important as that? They should have warned us! Maybe then... Maybe then we would have been able to resist it," Asher said, tears running down his cheeks. "Maybe my mother wouldn't have been taken. And we would have still been together fighting whatever this was."

Seeing Asher, a guy who rarely showed emotions, so overcome broke Jasmine's heart. There was something both sad and beautiful in the sincerity of his feelings.

Without even thinking about it, Jasmine enveloped Asher in a hug, his tears wetting her shoulders without her caring about it the way she usually did.

In the past, she was always disgusted by any bodily fluids and would have done all in her power to avoid each and every one of them. Now, she was embracing all of it, the good and the bad. She wished to comfort the one man who did his best to understand her.

"Daddy, are you okay?" Ariyana exclaimed upon noticing Jasmine hugging him, running to him immediately.

She was closely followed by Arman while Isaac lingered behind, seemingly unsure of what he was supposed to be doing in a situation like that one.

"I'm fine, munchkin," Asher said, breaking Jasmine's hug to secretly wipe away his tears so his daughter wouldn't get worried.

"Did black clouds cover your sun?" Ariyana asked, looking deep into his eyes.

"Yes, they did," Asher said, smiling sadly. "But I'm okay now."

Ignoring the last part, Ariyana and Arman climbed onto Asher's lap, where he was sitting, and hugged him tightly.

The empathy his children were capable of surprised Jasmine because most of the ones she had met could never show such a high level of empathy. Asher must have been one of those people who raised his children the right way.

"Better?" Ariyana asked sometime later, ending the hug.

"Much better," Asher said, kissing the cheeks of the children and making them giggle joyfully.

During the whole exchange, Jasmine had one eye on them, thrilled with the sweet relationship they had with each other. She had the other eye on their captors, who were whispering something in the corner.

Jasmine didn't like whispering. It never led to good things. After all, it was what preceded her parent's divorce.

"Alright, everyone, you can stay here for a while," Plague said theatrically like he was offering some great honor not afforded to many mortals. "Rest up, and then we'll bring you to our city authorities."

"Are there any authorities left?" Jasmine asked, her gaze focused on the guy, trying to decipher whether or not he was lying.

"Of course there are," Plague said, annoyed. "Our town isn't that big. I guess it wasn't worth experimenting on."

"Then what's with the Robin Hood game in the forest? Why scare people like that?" Jasmine asked the following question, already pouring in as she said the first. "What do you mean experiment? What kind of experiments? What do you know that we don't?"

"I think that's enough questions for now," Plague said, kicking an invisible speck of dirt or something. "I'm tired. I want to sleep."

Looking around the room, Jasmine noticed that most people were in that extreme drowsiness, which wasn't that surprising considering the time of the day.

"Come on, Jasmine. You need rest, too," Asher said, getting up with his children in tow.

She obeyed because she knew that even if she got her answers, her brain was too worn out by fear and tiredness to process them properly.