Consider

By:
J.D. Hoeye


Chapter
LXXXIIX


I prepared Cindy for the scene at the tower complex gates as best I could before we got there. She wasn't completely frozen in her tracks when we got there, but it did take some amount of coaxing to convince her to walk on by them, but I did manage to, and we climbed the last four flights of stairs to the Tower Four apartment. We had put the books on the large central table before we said anything after we passed those skeletons.

Cindy finally spoke her mind. "It must have been a horrible way for them to have died."

"Yes, but I can't see any reason for them to have done so. There was plenty of food in the store room, and the water system still functions to this day. It doesn't make sense that they'd have just laid down and died like that. By looking at the gate, there don't appear to be any marks indicating they made any attempt to get through it!"

"Maybe they couldn't." Cindy suggested, "Maybe they were already almost dead when they got to the gate."

"You mean like they were poisoned or something like that?"

"Yes. But by whom?"

I thought of the skeletons at the bottom of the elevator shaft, and told Cindy about them.

"My god! You mean the elevator fell to the bottom of the shaft?"

"Yes, that's what appears to have happened."

"How? Did the cable break?"

"It must have, why else would the car have fallen?"

Cindy shivered at the thought of falling in the elevator car, then a curious look came over her face. "Why were those people never buried?" then, "and why wasn't the elevator fixed?" She thought about it for a while longer then, "Why was this tower just locked instead?"

"I don't know any more than you do, but I think it may be possible that the group was poisoned to cover up some sort of foul play, but I don't know. As for why the dead were never buried, or the tower was just sealed, all I have is supposition. Maybe the tower was sealed to be their tomb. Maybe it was sealed to make cover up the extent of the crime, if there was one. There is one thing I believe to be certain however, the tower was sealed by order of the High Counsel, they are the only ones who appear to have that power to do that in this city."

Cindy thought about my last statement for a while, then said, "I think your right about the Counsel being the only ones with the power to close a tower, and that leads us right back to the question of why it was closed, what was their motive to do that?"

"Assuming that scenario is true, they must know what happened here." I was really talking to the room, thinking out loud, rather than Cindy. I was caught up in my own thoughts and didn't respond to her when she commented on the subject, so she drifted away from me and began exploring the dusty shelves of books.

*** *** *** *** ***

I'd sat down in one of the great leather upholstered library chairs when my mind took off on its flight of fancy over the Counsel's involvement with the deaths in the tower, and was not aware of the passage of time until much later. Cindy had been browsing through the books, and had finally come to sit near me to read. After some time she had laid down her book and gone to the buffet and poured us each a drink of the well aged liquor. It was when she handed me mine that my mind came back to the here and now.

"Thank you, I am dry."

"You're welcome." she responded as she went back to her chair to resume her book.

I sat and watched her read, while I sipped the drink. I remembered the evening we met in Tower One, and the conversation about words we'd had in that library. "Concubine." I said out loud. Cindy looked up over her book at me when I spoke. Her eyes were smiling at me with some sort of mischief, then she raised her book to hide behind.


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Chapter 87
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