There are moments in your life when you realize that you cannot go back; that you’ve stepped on to a moving train and nothing that was will ever be as it was again. From that point forward you have to decide what you want the future to look like. The past is gone and the seeds that formed that past are less and less relevant as the days pass because you made a choice in a moment and that choice is now everything. I made a choice. I made several and they added up to put me deep beneath the earth in a place that time forgot; a part of New York proper once known only to the Lenape tribe and a sacred place deep below what they called Manahatta.
I’m here because I was hired be a Naga to look after a man, who turned out to be more than a man. I still don’t entirely understand who or what he is, but I know that he’s in danger. I am in danger as well, though it isn’t because of him. I killed a gangster, largely because I was having a bad day, and that is going to blow back on me eventually. This is how the world works, you know. You make a choice and it leads to another choice and so on. Eventually you’re left to figure out how to assemble some sort of life from the wreckage of what you’ve wrought or you decide that it is too much to go on and you do what so many others do. you stop moving. You cast yourself into the fires of forgetfulness. You jack into the matrix 24/7 or you fall out of a normal life until you’re just another squatter on the street panhandling to make ends meet, focused on the singular idea of survival because that is so much easier than trying to live.
I don’t intend to fall out in either of those ways. I don’t intend to take the other way out either. I’m not dying any time soon. So, what I am going to do is finish this job, get paid, and then try to decide what life looks like after that. Sounds easy enough right? Well it isn’t. There’s still the pesky little problem of the corporate manhunt for the man I was hired to protect, as well as the dawning realization that once we get to the surface, I have no idea what to do with him.