Reborn Heart of Steel

It was weeks of hard feeling the presence of The Raven and not having a good night’s sleep after that happened. Chase and I were let go after just a few hours of aggressive interrogation which ended with the warning that we should not get involved with affairs that did not concern us. But it was the cold, calculating eyes of The Raven which threatened us even after he was gone, those moments when he toyed with us from shadows were what we remember, what we feared. But why will he even let us go? We have withdrawn emotionally and socially as well, which made us strive to attend our classes and pretend to live our mundane lives. But, what is left unseen is resentment and anxiety. Powerless we were, as we saw, our well-researched information was now worth nothing to The Raven as he knows that we are onto him. But everything was about to change, on a Wednesday, a gloomy day during lunch break at school. Chase and I were sitting in our favorite place in the cafe, ordering food that we hardly ate when a shadow covered the table.

“Do you mind if I sit next to you? ” I raised my eyes and discovered Zoe Chen was the girl; she is from Physics class, and she is generally rather introverted. I was caught off guard, and we had never really talked anything beyond a few shared work about group assignments. I looked at Chase and said, ‘Uh, sure. ‘ Zoe sank down on the bench and there was a very conscious, deliberate, almost portentous stiffness in her actions. She looked around the cafeteria as if she was secretly talking with someone, then whispered. Looking her straight in the eye she whispered: “I know what you have been doing. ” “And I want to help. ” My heart beat spiked. ‘I don’t think I know what you are talking about,’ I blurred out as I hoped that my voice didn’t betray me. Zoe’s eyes’ pupils dilated with resolve. “Stop playing the innocent woman here, I know you’ve been investigating The Raven alongside the Phoenix Organization and I have something that you need to hear. ” Chase and I looked at each other again apprehensively with a hint of surprise. How did she know? But more to the point, could we believe her? “Not here,” Chase said Finally, “Let us meet after school today. We will be in the yard behind the Gym facing the old tall oak tree. ” Zoe sighed and responded in the positive, then got up from the chair as sharply as she had arisen and strode out of the room. Chase and I stood unmoved for a while, puzzled at her reaction. The rest of the day seemed to be an eternity and time was passing so slowly. Many thoughts were going through my head. What more information could Zoe have? Was this a trap? Or is it possible that we have now managed to get an ally in our desperate battle against The Raven? Once the final bell finally sounded, Chase and I headed off to the agreed upon location all the while keeping our eyes shifting from side to side. Zoe was there when I got there, by the big trunk of an old oak tree, she was walking back and forth in an agitated manner. “Okay,” I replied when we were closer. “Start talking. ” She was going to give us a piece of her mind, but she just sighed and took a deep breath instead. “My cousin has been missing for three months. The police say she eloped. I don’t think that is possible. Mei would not run away. ” “Sorry,” Chase answered quietly, and with guilt in his voice, as he felt terrible about what he had done. The question has been asked as to this topic of The Raven and what it has to do with the subject at hand. “Everything,” said Zoe, passionately. “Mei called me the night before she vanished, she said she had gotten on to something big, something risky, she was frightened and did not want to go into details but said that what she was working on had something to do with The Raven. ” Suddenly, I felt like I could no longer breathe anymore. And this was the first time we ever heard of The Raven that was directly associated with loss of life. They are white, young, educated and a couple or at least they looked happily married but why are they telling us this? “The other time I was advised to go to the police. What do you suggest I do now? ” Zoe laughed bitterly. “I did my best. They ignored me, telling me that I just wanted to hear something conspiratorial because I was a kid. But then I began to pay attention: You both are always murmuring, always glancing around and then there were the things that people said happened last week… She didn’t finish her words and I shuddered as a cold feeling came over me. It had got around that we had met The Raven, much to our intentions to keep it hushed a secret. “I decided to draw a gamble,” Zoe went on to say. “I thought perhaps you two would be perhaps the only ones who would believe me and would help me look for Mei. ” I looked at Chase, who looked back at me blankly. We had vowed not to get involved in this, thus sacrificing our lives and our loved ones. Though, could we afford to skip a man or a woman who would be in dire need of someone’s assistance?

But we believe you,” I replied after a long time. “But Zoe, you need to know that doing this is very dangerous. The Raven he is… he is not nice. ” Zoe nodded solemnly. “I know, but Mei is family, she is my cousin, and she is someone that I cannot abandon. ” I looked at her and then took a deep breath, for we knew the decision that was to be made wasn’t going to be easy. “Okay,” Chase said at last after a few moments. “You have to recount all that you saw or heard. From the first to the last thing. ” After that, I just allowed Zoe to recount her narrative for the next hour. This is when she shared with us all the things about the girl’s behavior before she vanished, the messages Mei left for her friends and family and the things Zoe noticed that seemed unusual to her once she started investigating the case of her missing cousin. As she spoke, Chase and I slowly started establishing links with the case that we were investigating. They were as super imposable as some of the places that Mei had referred to. Some of the names that she had dropped tallied with some of the shell companies we had discovered. “Here is something else,” Zoe took an object from her backpack. From her pocket, she took out a pocket notebook, thin and much worn. “This was Mei’s. I discovered the pad locked in her room weeks after she had vanished from the community home. In the scrawled writing at the corner of the pad, there was something that looked like a code. She passed a notebook to me. I opened one of the pages. The pages were lined with two types of characters; the alphanumeric characters and other figures that seemed to be the work of a child. There were figures drawn all over the pages which could be associated with the constellations. “We’ll need time to study this,” I told them, my thoughts already contemplating how I can take advantage of this. “Is it possible to hold on to it for, let’s say, three days?” Zoe nodded. “…alright, just don’t let anything bad happen to it. It’s all I have left of Mei. ” When the time came to say goodbye, I was happy yet scared at the same time. We have agreed not to participate in this any longer, but here we are right back on it again. The possible implications of these actions were serious, and I kept on thinking about them all the time. “Zoe,” I said, grasping her arm before she could leave. I said “Thank you for trusting me. But as of now, you, too, could be in danger. Is that what you want?”

Her eyes locked with mine with the same intensity with which our fighters fought for their victory. “Yes, I am sure. For Mei, I would do anything. ” We watched her walk away as we waited for the consequences of this new partnership to sink in. “Now, what?” Chase whispered dangerously. I felt the tension; gripping Mei’s notebook tightly in my hand. “Now we rise, and go back to war. This time isn’t merely for ourselves. This time is for Mei and for however many like her. ” When we turned back in the direction of the house, I saw something shiny that looked like metal. I glanced up at the school building that sat directly behind us. There I saw a silhouette on the roof and then it vanished out of sight suddenly. My blood ran cold. “Chase,” I said in very low tone, “I believe that we are being spied upon”. His cheeks turned white as he studied what I was looking at. “Are you thinking it is one of the men from the group?” I could not respond to that before my mobile phone began ringing in my pocket. With trembling hands, I pulled it out and saw a text from an unknown number. With trembling hands, I pulled it out and saw a text from an unknown number: “Clever creatures, are you? I just hope you are not back to your regular ways. Because you know, too much curiosity draws death like it happened to a cat. You do fancy yourself as the creature of wisdom, but he who feeds on dead men’s bones, would you pick the next card right?” As an attachment, I had a picture which could have stopped my heart a perfectly clear shot of all three of us under the oak tree, taken only a few moments earlier. I stared into Chase’s face and said, I looked up worriedly, Every human heart holds a secret in it. This account brings a very insightful thought to life by highlighting this question, “What have we gotten ourselves into?”Contentt bel0ngs to N0ve/lDrâ/ma.O(r)g!