About The Scarlett Kite
Hi! I'm Scarlett Kiteway, I'm 20 years old, a journalism student in Perplex City and this is my blog all about the excitement over the search for the Cube. I'll be keeping track of what the media over there is saying about it, and maybe a little bit about my life as well!
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Friday, March 17, 2006
Claire's confession
Category: story, 02:07 PM
I said: "What do you mean 'what our family did at Viendenbourg'? I don't understand."
Claire Castille sighed and looked down at her hands again.
She said, in a voice so low I could barely hear her: "What did he tell you?"
I shook my head, still puzzled.
She spoke again: "What did my father tell you?"
I think I understood then, before she even explained it to me properly. But my voice spoke, even while my brain raced to the conclusion of the story.
"He told me a great wrong had been done to your family, at Viendenbourg. That you were sacrificed to save the city. I saw him crying while looking through the evidence in the military archives, and that was because of what had been done to you. He told me that he wanted to achieve justice."
Claire looked at Allain, then back at me.
"We do," she said, "we do want to achieve justice. We need to find out the truth. But the family legend is not that we were sacrificed. We were complicit in what happened at Viendenbourg. Our family was destroyed, but we were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of others. I suppose," she took another swig from her mug of tea, "that he was crying because he knew that. Because of guilt. Which we still feel after all these generations. That's why we have to know what really went on there."
She took Allain's hand and held it between hers. She smiled at him.
"And that's why I told you to stay away from your grandfather. Because I couldn't bear him to know that someone is trying to do again at Viendenbourg what was done in the past. And what we think was done here, at Anjsbourg." She looked back at me. "I don't know for certain. All I have to go on are some fragments of information, some family legends, and some information I found at the Viendenbourg base. But I think we might find the answers here, in the ruins of Anjsbourg.
"And there's something else as well." She sighed again and smiled a strange, wistful kind of smile. "Allain, I can't go back to the city. If you want to go, I can't go back with you. Because someone's after me, and if he finds out where I am he'll come, and he'll find me, and he'll kill me." She smiled again. "This probably sounds crazy, like a paranoid woman gone mad from too much time by herself, but I'm afraid it's true. I worked on a job in 267 - an illegal job, I sometimes take them on to fund our Viendenbourg research - but this one went bad. The man who employed me has eliminated the two others who worked on the job with us and I'm certain he'd come after me if he could."
Allain, who had been silent all this time, his eyes half shut against the sun, suddenly stirred. He bit his bottom lip, ran his hand through his hair and said:
"Who? Who is it who's after you? We can find a way to stop him."
And Claire Castille smiled again and said:
"He's a shadow, a figment. You could never find him. I only ever knew him as V," she shook her head, "and that's no help at all."