Warm Soup

It had been a few days since Tracker had found Mirah in the streets, having taken her to a large building in one of the better areas of Melbourne. It was a slim building, squeezed between two on its sides, but it was much taller, floor stacked upon floor, a generic reproduction of the floor below.

At first, Mirah had thought it to be a hotel, but as she had been let in by Tracker, and taken up to floor eight, she found herself in a corridor with five doors. She was led into room two, which turned out to be more of a small apartment than a hotel. It was nice too, better than anything that Mirah had lived in herself.

Mirah was told that she would be able to order food up to her room at specific times during the day until her team was all collected, then she'd be expected to eat in the cafeteria with her team. Mirah simply nodded to any rule that was given to her. She almost didn't care about this team, and more about the free food and room. She guessed that the training would quickly become the cost of what was freely given.

Mirah was just about the last person to be enchanted by anything, but the food here was like nothing that she'd ever eaten. She didn't even know what the names of these foods were, so she chose a sandwich, something that she had managed to get her hands on a few times, usually out of the hands of pitying workers.

This sandwich was different, though. It was packed tightly with a mess of greens and meat, and some cheese for prosperity. It was one of the best meals she had ever eaten, and that was only breakfast. The hours passed, and she felt obscenely full. When lunch finally rolled around, Mirah was hard pressed to force herself to order anything.

An hour after the slated time for lunch had passed, there was a knock on the door. Mirah cautiously looked through the installed peephole, wondering if Tracker had returned for whatever reason. She hadn't. In fact, she saw nothing at the door, except for a large cup sitting on the floor at the foot of it with a small piece of paper leaning on it.

Mirah opened the door, peering out both ways—making sure the coast was clear—before snatching the cup and its piece of paper from the floor, returning quickly to the comforts of the room.

It was a moment after she sat back down with the large cup and piece of paper that Mirah realised that her heart was beating furiously in her chest. She gently touched herself on the flat of her chest with a look of consternation on her face. She hadn't realised just how out of place she felt here, how worried that someone would see her here and drag her out. She sighed, trying to put the anxiety aside, and looked into the cup.

Peering inside got her a face full of hot, delicious smelling steam. A moment of simply closing her eyes and breathing in the smell later, she realised that it was pumpkin soup.

Memories washed through her, memories from many, many years ago resurfacing from the depths like trapped air in the sea. Happy memories, one of only a few she could hold dear anymore. She lifted the cup to her lips and gently drank from the sweet soup, the smooth, buttery liquid coating her tongue before the delicate amount of spice hit, giving another realm to the heat of the soup. As she swallowed the substance, it warmed her in a way she could swear she hadn't ever been before. It was an experience she wasn't ever sure she could reproduce, even as she was experiencing it. It almost made her sad, knowing that finding this exact combination of emotions and food might never happen again.

It took only a few minutes for her delicate sips to down the cup of pumpkin soup, leaving her with an empty cup.

After a moment of just experiencing the aftertaste, she picked up the small piece of paper lying on her desk. It was a flimsy and slightly see-through, nothing Mirah had ever seen before. She saw the text that was back to front and flipped the paper to read it.

A young girl needs her food. I hope you enjoy your time here, Mirah –Chef.

The text was written in incredibly fine, flowery print, betraying how taciturn the message was in essence. But to Mirah it was something special. A total stranger had been so kind as to create something so…

She didn't even have words for it, even to begin classifying how astounding that simple soup had been to her. She folded the piece of paper gently and squirreled it away into her bags. It was something that wouldn't ever be stolen, a memento that means nothing to anybody but her.

For the first time in a long time, Mirah crawled into a corner on the ground, surrounding herself with her bags, and slept soundly.

---

There were three solid knocks against the door of Mirah's room. Mirah's eyes snapped open at the sound, wary of anyone who came knocking on her newly inherited door. She didn't get up to open the door, no. She was far too wary for even that.

But after the fifth set of three knocks, there was a point where the frustration overtook Mirah and she stormed up to the door and threw it wide open—just about ready to kick anyone she saw on the other side, only to be met with a giant of a man.

In comparison to Mirah's relatively average female height, this man was nearly a whole foot taller than her, towering above her height and almost as tall as the door frame. The man wore his thick, dark brown hair down to his muscled shoulders, falling onto tanned olive skin. His face was etched with a kind smile, on obviously Greek features, sporting a thick nose in the centre of his face.

"Good afternoon. I didn't want to wake you up, but I was told I had to meet you, no matter how much knocking I had to do." The large man grinned sheepishly at the much smaller woman. He gently extended his hand, slow enough that Mirah could see it coming and prepare for it.

Mirah looked quizzically at the open hand. Did he not worry that she'd try and break one of his fingers? Was he plotting something?

"Ajax." He said simply, granting her a slightly amused expression. Mirah had a moment of pause before she realised. She had seen the gesture a few times when she was young. A handshake. She had never shaken anyone's hand before, not when her main objective was to stay as far away from others as possible. She steeled her expression, which wasn't hard as it was already stoic, and gently placed her hand in his and gently shook it before pulling away quickly.

"Mirah."

There was a moment of silence between the Greek giant and the smaller woman. Ajax had never really experienced such a cold reception of a greeting before. He could see why this experience had come from her, though.

To be perfectly blunt about it, she looked like a street rat. It practically oozed from her every demeanour. Ajax had never met someone from the slums before, not the more recent versions of the slums anyways, and he could already tell. The way her body language was already on the defensive, her overly pale skin and clearly malnourished body. Well… not to mention the scar.

Mirah had a large scar right across her face cutting through her vaguely Mediterranean features, splitting her right cheek open and travelling unevenly across the expanse of skin. Finally, the scar ran through the girl's top lip, breaking the delicate flesh and cutting a notch out of her bottom lip as it passed through. Ajax had never seen a scar like it, or a facial scar so severe, really.

"You are a Linked as well, yeah?" Ajax asked the girl gently. He gave her a moment to respond. She ran a hand through her cropped, boyish hair before answering, a slight look of hesitation on her face.

"Yes. I don't know how they found me." She said, honestly airing a fear that they were able to track her far more easily than she liked. Ajax thought for a moment beginning to nod to the sentiment.

"Me neither, honestly. I was out in the woods chopping down trees." Mirah's eyebrow raised at that.

"In the woods?" She couldn't even conceive of the idea that someone would live out in the woods, being so removed from her own little reality. Ajax just shrugged.

"Why not? I'd been living in the countryside for years and once everything…" he paused, hesitant for a moment, "went to shit for me, I just decided that maybe living out there would be better than trying to go live in the city, y'know?"

Mirah did know. And now that she heard of it, she wondered if there were more people like Ajax, hiding away in the woods, away from the burning trash pile that the city was. She was almost jealous that she hadn't had the same mind to do so, even if it'd be a death wish for her. The silence began after that dragged on, and every moment it progressed, Mirah felt herself become more and more tense as she stared at the man before her. He seemed totally unperturbed by the silence, which only worried Mirah more.

"This stuff about teams." The man thought aloud to her, dissolving the one-sided tension. "How do you feel about it?"

How did Mirah feel about it? She didn't know herself.

"I don't know." So, she said as much. Ajax thought on that for a moment.

"Don't you think it's weird that they would want to bring together a bunch of undefineds and have them team up?" The man scratched his chin thoughtfully, before glancing back to Mirah to see a face of stoic confusion. He raised an eyebrow at her confusion. After a moment she realised he was waiting on her to tell him what she was confused about.

"Undefineds?" She asked quietly, slinking back half a step from the giant. Ajax didn't seem to notice or pretended not to. The man hummed thoughtfully, trying to piece together an answer that was remotely helpful.

"Well, it's hard. Undefineds are just people with links that don't have a totally measurable effect or have inconsistent or unmeasurable conditions for activation." He thought again humming as he did so, and Mirah soaked in that information herself. Under that definition, undefined certainly did fit her link.

"I guess, to put it easily. It's just when a link is too complicated to be able to rely on," he shifted his weight to his other foot, placing a hand on his hip in contemplation, "like if someone can punch hard, and whether they can punch that hard all the time, or if there is another condition to it and how understandable that condition is, y'know?"

Mirah was trying to understand, but she'd never thought of Linked as anything more than scary, monstrous beings that lurked the night, preying on those without a link of their own.

"I think so." She said dryly. The man nodded, seemingly chuffed with the response and then the dreaded silence returned, with Ajax staring off into space and thinking while Mirah had the growing need to run away from the presence of the man.

"How do you feel about eating together, for dinner tonight?" He said offhandedly. Mirah's eyes narrowed, the suspicion leaking back into her mind, unable to stop the thoughts that told her that the brutish looking man couldn't be trusted.

"No." Mirah didn't leave the man any time to respond, closing the door in his face. Ajax, while a bit miffed, wasn't all that shocked. He wasn't an idiot and had been trying his best to make her feel comfortable in the conversation. With mixed results, obviously.

He sighed, running his hands through his long hair and turning to walk back to his room. Number one in the line of five doors. It was worrying to think that he might have three more people on the team similar to Mirah was, and he wasn't sure how he was going to handle it.

Being selected for a team was already kind of wild to Ajax. Teams barely existed in Australia, maybe in Brisbane, but in Melbourne it was all controlled by gangs, and had been that way for a good portion of Ajax's life. For there to be 'crime fighting' teams of Linked was dichotomous to say the least. Were they even supposed to be crime fighting teams?

Ajax opened the door to his apartment. It wasn't as spacious as his log cabin, but at least he didn't have to worry about building and maintaining it at all. Hundreds of hours he had spent, making that cabin. He had got it pretty good, too. Only needing to go into a nearby town for a few things here and there and for some basic modern conveniences. He had worked very briefly as a handyman for a few people before he met someone who could put proper insulation into his home.

He plopped down onto his bed, which was surprisingly spacious enough so that his legs didn't stick a few inches over the end of it and let his thoughts reign for a moment.

He didn't know how he would talk with Mirah going forward. She was like talking to a rock wall, just incredibly uncomfortable and unwilling to crack. He was even slightly worried that she would be totally uncooperative when it came to doing 'team' things.

His life had been turned upside down once again, and now he was left to scramble to put it all together again.