Some days, it was hard to move forward.  It felt as though there were hooks in his skin pulling him back.  He had to force himself to drag his body through the daily routine.  Brushing his teeth, showering, shoving tasteless food down his throat were all done automatically—robotically.  And days blurred into months.

"The nightshift again?  People are going to start to think you're a vampire or something."  Delgado's joke was forced.  His smile faked.

Jamie Haddad never made small talk when he passed through the security center.  Barely ever spoke at all.  His coldness made the Major and the other guards visibly awkward around him.

"I like the quiet." Jamie said, raising his arms to allow the wand to circulate around him.  It's the most he had spoken to them all week.  "And it doesn't really matter when I do my work."

"Well, it should be pretty quiet down there now.  Ms. Kendrick just left.  You should be the only person until morning."

"Yes, the only person."  He didn't try and hide the sarcasm from his tone, which elicited a curious look from Delgado.  Sometimes Jamie forgot that the above ground workers didn't know about Amy.

Cleared through security, he stepped onto the elevator and prepared for the long ride down.

September 14th.  The date rang in his head like a mournful bell.  It was his and Glen's anniversary.  Exactly eight years ago, they had their first date.

They had met for dinner at a seafood place in the city.  It was near the bay and would have seemed like some tourist spot if it weren't for the chic Nordic wood on the walls, the industrial iron chandeliers, and the crisp, white linen tablecloths.  Jamie had gotten there early and became increasingly more conscious of his dorkiness as he waited.  His shirt collar was too tight but in the mirror, at home, he hated how it flopped to one side when the top button was undone.  His hair hung over the frames of his glasses making them feel conspicuous.  He pulled his hair back with his sweaty hands and drew it into a ponytail that began to creep back the moment he released it.

He still couldn't believe that Glen had asked him out.  The man was from another world.  Jamie lived in a universe of theories and statistics.  Glen inhabited the solid, real world—a realm of physical labor and direct actions that led to concrete results.

Glen had been renovating the townhouse next door all summer long.  He was a general contractor and a professional house flipper.  The man had been an object of curiosity while he labored on the old tenement.  Most of the time he could be seen in a tight white shirt and naturally distressed jeans, ordering his crew around and carting in supplies of hardwood flooring, drywall, and lumber, like it weighed nothing.

However, on the fall evening that Glen finally asked him out, his usual rugged look had been replaced by an Italian wool suit with a conservative blue tie.  There had been some attempt to coif his hair, even if it only was some gel slicked back with his fingers.

Jamie was on his way home from work, cursing that he had been forced to park so far from home—grumbling over office politics or his unreasonable workload—when he turned the corner and his vision focused in on Glen.

The street was cast in the gray light of a quickly vanishing afternoon and it gave clarity to the scene that full daylight never could.  He was coming down the steps of his townhome with a petite woman in an elegant skirt suit.  They walked together smiling and chatting, looking like they were on their way out for a night on the town.  The two of them stopped in front of a new BMW and lingered, their bodies just inches from each other.

Jamie felt the dual twinge of bitter jealousy and self-conscious foolishness that can only materialize by the disappointing failure of a fantasy relationship.

The woman was absolutely stunning.  Her buoyant chocolate hair seemed to draw an errant ray of sunshine to shimmer along its waves.  Her skin was porcelain white and showed off her wide almond eyes.  She was the perfect match for the handsome contractor.  He said something, no doubt seductive, with his sumptuous lips.

Time seemed to slow as Jamie approached them but he hurried his steps.

She was seated on the driver's seat with her Gucci heels still on the street.  She looked up at him, her smiling face nodding, as he leaned over her telling her something so fascinating she was unable to commit to saying goodbye.  They looked more like a couple from a movie than reality.  A film where a confident, firecracker of a district attorney is targeted by the mob, and it is up to her sexy but capable boyfriend to protect her and unravel the conspiracy.

Jamie tried to shake the strange thoughts from his head as he turned from them and headed up his steps.  They might as well be characters from the cinema for all he would have to do with them.  They were perfect beings from another plane of existence from him.

He was pulling the mail from the box when he heard the sound of a car pull away and Glen yelled out, "You'll be happy to know I'm all done."

It was only when Jamie glanced back that he realized that the words were directed at him.  Not only that, but Glen was walking toward his door.  His mind began parsing the syllables he had heard and he tried to order them into something that made sense.  "What?"

"The job's all done."  He reached the walk and waited at the bottom of the steps.  "No more noise.  Sorry.  I'm sure it must have been very disturbing."

"No, I...  It's been fine.  Hasn't bothered me at all."

"You must be lying."  He let out a boyish aw-shucks laugh.  "But it makes me happy to hear that.  I don't like upsetting the neighbors.  Anyway, it's done.  I just met with the real estate agent.  With any luck, you should have some nice new neighbors soon."

"It's too bad you won't be living next door."  What the hell did I just say?  "I mean, after all that work, it's a shame that you won't get to enjoy it."

"That's the job.  That's the life."  Glen lifted his arms in a half shrug with his hands held loosely towards the sky, in a gesture saying: what are you going to do?

"Well, sorry to see you go."  This was it: that awkward moment where a man braver than Jamie would steer the conversation toward something more personal.  But like the coward he was, he started to wrap things up.  "It was nice meeting you."

Glen looked off toward the setting sun and his hand wrung out tension from the back of his neck.  "Look, I have to take care of some more business tonight.  But I really feel like celebrating after this."  He pointed lazily at the property he was working on.  "This was a real gut job."  Catching himself drifting into work jargon, he glanced at Jamie looking slightly embarrassed.  "It was a really hard house to fix up.  Anyway, what I'm trying to say—would you like to grab some dinner tomorrow night?"

It had been the first dinner of many until nearly every dinner was spent together.  Then Jamie was arrested and that happiness abruptly came to an end.

Jamie entered his lab and switched on the lights out of habit.  He was tempted to turn them back off.  The soft light from the monitors and the multitude of LEDs from the equipment was more soothing than the harsh flood of brightness from the lab's overheads.  He could have easily maneuvered through the maze of tables and machinery; the layout had become deeply ingrained from long days and nights shut up in the lonely room. 

Amy's genome had been fully mapped.  In a sense, his job was done.  Without others of her species, there was no way of identifying the genes that allowed her transformation to take place.  But the DTAA wouldn't let him go that easily.  They gave him the futile task of comparing her sequences with those of other mapped species.  The computers were in overdrive going through the catalog of big cats, now that the entire canidae family of dog-like mammals had been exhausted.  He glanced at a monitor and watched as it marked off similarities and differences between her and a jaguar.

He puttered around.  There was equipment to adjust, new samples to insert, logs to enter, results to file.  Meaningless busy work.  Meaningless because nothing they were capturing was useful or informative.  What did it matter that Amy and the panthera tigris had one shared synteny block, which regular hominids lacked?  At the end of the day, the common genes between the girl and the tiger were nothing but static.  None of the statistics and charts got them any closer to figuring out how her body did what it did.  None of the analysis told them why.  And nothing came remotely close to touching the person she was.

He was becoming suffocated by the way his profession dehumanized Amy by breaking her down and reducing her to a sequence of letters or a jagged graph on a printout.  It reminded him of an old parable about men trying to identify an elephant in the dark by touch.  One feels the ear and says it's a fan, one touches the leg and says it's a pillar, another puts his hands on the back and declares it a throne.  Genetics was like this.  How can you say what a human being was by examining a million separate markers and never seeing or speaking to the person?

If someone slipped him a sample of his dear sister's blood, would he know it was her even with all the technology at his disposal?  He would be left with an avalanche of data but no deeper understanding of Nadia.  She would still be lost to him—a distant memory despite the facts and figures.

She was gone from his life like Glen was.  Somehow the loss of his parents didn't seem so great.  His father was an angry absence in the household.  And his mother a cold wraith lost in shopping and gossip.  The servants were more of a family to him.  But even with them, there a wall separating him from their affection.  Or perhaps their affection was never there and the kindness they showed the boss's little brat was merely a duty.

In his whole life, it had only been with Nadia and Glen that affection broke through and reached him.  An impotent fury built inside of him at the thought of being kept from the two people he loved most.  It was directed like scattershot at the government officials who kept him away from Glen and his parents who kept him from Nadia.  But it also fired back, inward.  Deep down, in the cellar where he kept all the unwanted junk and detritus of his life—all the unwanted memories and emotions—down in that musty, crowded little room, he couldn't hide from the fact that it was his own cowardice that kept him from them.

Raging with regrets, he stormed out of the lab.  If he was willing to dare wrath and consequences, he could see them again.  But day after day, he made excuses and wrapped himself in a cloak of fear and called it sensibility.

By the time he got a rein on his emotions, he was in the empty Observation Center.  It was mid-month.  Halfway between full moons.  There was no risk of transformation and the novelty of Amy had worn off with the staff and the people in charge.  They had grown bored of watching her twenty-four-seven and now the task was mostly left up to the cameras.

Jamie crossed straight through to the office and called to her over the intercom.  She came over to the window without hesitation.

"Were you sleeping?"

The lights were dim but Amy shielded her eyes from them.  Or perhaps from Jamie.

"No."  She spoke low, but the rawness in her voice could still be heard.

"You've been crying." 

She nodded.  Her fingers weren't protecting her from the light but sweeping away tears.

"What's wrong?"

A sob broke from her mouth and she shook her head back and forth suggesting that everything was wrong.

"Are you still upset about what happened?"  It had been a week since she had last mentioned the episode with the pig.  But through their many tear-filled conversations shortly after the event, it was clear that she was unable to free herself from the guilt.  Killing that small animal had broken something inside of her.

"It wasn't your fault."  Jamie tried to keep his voice calm and soothing but his earlier agitation crept in and gave it a nervous tremor.  "The others made you do it.  You have to remember it was the wolf, not you.  You don't have control of it—you're not responsible."

Amy collapsed in the chair and wept.

Jamie placed his hand on the window, wanting to reach out and console her.  The cold surface of the barrier reignited his fury.  Something was always in the way.  But only part of the anger was due to the physical obstacle.  The rest was aimed at how much he allowed these things to stop him.

It's time to stop being afraid of the consequences, he said to himself.

"Hang on a second, Amy."  Jamie got up from his chair.  Through bleary eyes, she glanced at him curiously as he left the office.

He strode down the corridors, almost running.  It was as though he weren't just racing to get to Amy's room but also trying to outrun his own timidness.

At the portal, he punched in his code and performed the retinal scan.  Waiting in the airlock, sealed in on both sides, an exhilarating mix of emotions made his body feel light.  He was finally doing the right thing and defying the demons in charge.

The door cracked open and he stepped into the pink bedroom.  Amy stared at him. Was it awe in her face or apprehension?  There was a sense of blankness, as though after all that time, she never expected to see a real person again. 

Before the door had shut, he was at her picking her up in his arms.  Reluctantly she returned the hug.  Her thin arms wrapped around him.  A hand grabbed desperately at his back.  In that moment, it was as though each one had transformed into a surrogate of loss.  Jamie became father, mother, and brother to the girl.  And Amy returned Nadia to him.

Jamie forgot himself and where he was and why he was there.  He had his sister in his grasp.  Hope swelled up and drowned out the despair.

Slowly, he was brought back to reality by the girl's crying.  Her tears dampened his shirt where she buried her face.  He was surprised to find his own tears, streaking down his face.

"It's okay.  It's okay," he repeated as he rocked her.  They were words of comfort for him as much as they were for Amy.  Say it enough times and maybe things might really be okay.

"I don't remember doing it," she said in a ragged voice between gasping sobs.  "But I keep dreaming about it."

"You're not to blame.  It isn't you when the animal takes over.  I'm sure that wherever that piglet is now, he's looking down and doesn't blame you for what the wolf did."

"You don't understand."  She pulled away and spoke over Jamie's cooing noises.  "In my dreams.  Every time, when I...  When my teeth...  I...."  She looked down and drew her arms back.  The movement shifted her weight and threatened to pull her away from him.  Her fingers sought out her head and she grabbed handfuls of hair as though she were in agony.  "When I do it, I enjoy it."

***

Author's Note:

Here ends chapter 8.  I would love to hear what your thinking about this. Is the story living up to you're expectations?  Are you losing interest?  Let me know.  And if you're enjoying it, please vote. 

I feel I'm picking up the momentum again both with my writing and with the story itself.  I'm hoping to charge through to the end now.  There will be thirteen chapters in total and I plan the last three to be shorter than most of the others.

If you're interested in the strange details of this story like the Ulfberht sword, check out my Pinterest page (http://www.pinterest.com/davidjthirteen/the-things-we-bury/).  It contains lots of images and links to my research.  You might even find some interesting hints at upcoming events.