"And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth." –Genesis 9:1
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Trixie woke the next morning to a knock on her door. This was becoming a habit, and not one she was all too fond of. As she peered through the window, she caught a glance of an unfamiliar man, crowned with blonde hair and dressed neatly in a suit. If not for the pleasant smile on his face, she might have mistaken him for one of the Peaky Blinders.
"Can I help you?" she asked.
"Hello," he greeted, smiling brightly. "I'm Professor James Bradley."
Professor, eh? "What can I do for you, professor?" Trixie asked, poking her head out the door and pretending to check for witnesses.
"Can I borrow some sugar?" he asked. His accent was posh-London smooth, his voice rich and deep.
She opened the door wider. "Come in."
"Thank you," he said, stepping in carefully and hovering tentatively by the door. As soon as it had shut, he turned back to her and said, "Sorry, had to get the formalities out of the way. Let me reintroduce myself—my name is Officer James Bradley, formerly of the Manchester Police. Inspector Campbell has invited me to the city to act as your personal guard."
Trixie nodded, still blinking the sleep out of her eyes and trying to process this. As if the constantly-being-woken-up wasn't bad enough, she'd begun having the most awful nightmares about Luca over the past few weeks. Every night, she lay her head down and opened her eyes inside a military plane, Luca in the pilot's seat and her strapped to the copilot's chair.
"Where are we going?" she always asked. She didn't know why she always asked—the answer never changed.
"We're going to the Barren Desert where the sky is always purple, Bea," Luca replied. "We just have to make a stop on the way."
And then, like clockwork, he would yank back the control lever and send them climbing up an invisible mountain in the sky, steep and unstable, and just as soon as she started to think she could make out a peak, just as soon as they were approaching it and ready to level out, a rapid spray of bullets would clang against the plane's wings, shattering the windshield. That was the bad part, but not the worst part. The worst part was that, every night, Trixie would turn and find that a bullet had cut straight through Luca's forehead. In a miserable, drawn-out motion, his head, eyes rolled back, a thick line of blood running down his brow, collapsed forward onto his hands.
