Chapter 29: The Girl Who Chose Herself First
The air inside MHCC was a manufactured chill, carrying the layered scent of fast-food grease, sweet bakery steam, and the faint, clean tang of disinfectant from recently mopped floors. On the second level, the food court buzzed with a steady, indecipherable roar—families arguing over trays, teenagers shrieking over shared phones, the tinny backdrop of pop music from a kiosk speaker. It was a temple of mundane choices, of cheap noodles versus fried chicken, of where to sit amid the chaos.
Lusiana had chosen a small table near the railing, overlooking the ground-floor atrium where people drifted like brightly colored plankton. She smoothed her denim skirt, adjusted the straps of her tank top, and took a careful sip of her iced lemon tea. She looked curated, an intentional splash of appeal against the chaotic backdrop. When Varek appeared, sliding into the plastic chair opposite her without a word, she offered him a practiced, welcoming smile.
“Busy place,” she said, her voice lifting to carry over the din.
“It’s perfect,” Varek replied. His eyes scanned the crowd, not wary, but appreciative, as if he were admiring the engineering of a hive. “No one listens. Everyone is occupied with their own tiny dramas.” He brought his gaze back to her. The warmth in it was steady, but it felt like the sun through a magnifying glass—focused, potentially burning. “How are you finding the selection process, Lusiana?”
She shrugged a shoulder, playing with the condensation on her cup. “It’s a lot. Exciting, you know? Overwhelming. Taitusi helps. Having someone here who gets it.”
“Does he?” Varek asked, the question soft. “Get it?”
“Of course. We talk about everything.”
“Even the past?”
The noise of the food court seemed to swell for a moment—a burst of laughter from a nearby table, the clatter of a tray. Lusiana’s smile didn’t vanish, but it stiffened at the edges. “Some things are better left where they are.”
“I agree,” Varek said, leaning forward slightly, his arms resting on the cheap laminate table. “But the past has a gravitational pull, doesn’t it? It bends the present around it. You can feel it in the silences.”
She knew exactly which silence he meant. The one that fell whenever Maraia’s name was almost spoken. The one that lived in Taitusi’s eyes when he thought no one was looking. She felt the ghost of that other girl in this very mall, in this city, a constant comparator. Her polished warmth was a defense against a shadow.
“Why are you asking me this?” Her tone was light, but a flint of defiance sparked beneath it.
“Because you’re surviving on a battlefield where the primary weapon is history. That takes a particular kind of intelligence. Or desperation.” He sipped from a bottle of water he’d brought, his eyes never leaving hers. “I need to understand which one you’re using.”
“I’m not desperate.”
“Prove it,” he said, and the word was gentle, an invitation to a game she suddenly understood had no rules. “With a simple choice. Right here, right now. If you had to sacrifice one to move forward, who would it be? Yourself, or Taitusi?”
She laughed then, a short, sharp sound that was swallowed by the ambient roar. “That’s insane. That’s not a real question.”
“It’s the only question that matters in there,” he said, nodding vaguely, as if the entire selection complex waited just beyond the food court’s sliding doors. “Capacity for self-preservation versus capacity for loyalty. I need the ratio.”
“It’s unfair.”
“Yes.”
The simplicity of his agreement disarmed her. He wasn’t arguing for the question’s morality. He was stating its necessity. The unfairness was the point. The terrible, clarifying unfairness of it all. She looked down at her hands, at her neatly filed nails painted a soft shell pink. She saw the hands of a girl who tried very hard. A girl who smiled through comparisons. A girl who might, in the end, disappear into the story of a boy who still loved someone else.
Taitusi was her present. But Maraia lived in the silence around him. She was the unspoken text, the benchmark, the ghost in the machinery of his charm. Lusiana had spent months trying to be brighter, kinder, more present, to outshine a memory. It was an exhausting, vanishing act.
She would not vanish.
She looked up, meeting Varek’s expectant gaze. The noise of families, of sizzling grills, of life clicking forward in its ordinary tracks, faded into a distant hum. In this pocket of focused silence she had created for herself, the answer was suddenly, perfectly clear. It wasn’t born of malice, but of a cold, sustaining logic.
“Taitusi,” she said.
The name hung between them, clean and sharp as a scalpel. She didn’t embellish. She didn’t try to explain that he was resilient, that he’d recover, that he had options. Those were just stories, the kind Taitusi himself would tell. This was simpler. If he could not choose her completely—over his past, over his ghosts, over his own charming weakness—then she would not disappear trying to prove she deserved to be chosen.
She would choose herself.
Varek nodded, a slow, acknowledging dip of his chin. There was no judgment in his face, only assessment. He had her number now, just as he had the others. Her percentage of survival instinct, quantified in a single, clean syllable.
“Good,” he said, and stood up. He placed his empty water bottle on the table. The interview was over. “Be ready tomorrow. The tasks test more than just intention.”
He walked away, blending into the flow of shoppers heading toward the escalators.
Lusiana sat perfectly still. She took a long, slow sip of her iced tea. It was sweeter than she remembered, almost cloying. Around her, the food court’s chaos continued, unabated and oblivious. She felt a strange, hollow lightness, as if she had just excised a tumor she’d been pretending was a vital organ.
She pulled out her phone. There was a new message from Taitusi, sent ten minutes ago.
Hey Lusi, thinking of you. Got us tickets for that band at Damodar City Friday. A surprise! Miss your face.
She looked at the words, at the easy affection, the promised future. The ghost of Maraia lingered between every line. She did not type a reply. She slid the phone back into her bag, finished her drink, and stood. She walked to the bin, disposed of her cup, and made her way to the escalator without looking back.
The choice was made. It no longer felt like a betrayal. It felt like the first real step she had taken in a very long time.
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Suva Flea Market, Suva, Fiji — on Rodwell Road, across from the Suva bus stand.
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Suva Flea Market, Suva, Fiji — on Rodwell Road, across from the Suva bus stand.
The market was a collision of color and sound, a sprawling grid of patched-together canopies where the air itself felt woven from frying oil, cinnamon, diesel exhaust, and the ripe, sweet smell of overripe mangoes. Karavi moved through the cramped aisles with familiar ease, a half-smile for Auntie Liti selling piles of wrinkled chili peppers, a raised chin to the man mending wicker baskets, his hand instinctively steadying a wobbly table of carved tiki masks without breaking stride. He was a gear in this place, essential and unnoticed, known only when the mechanism stuttered.
Varek observed this for ten full minutes before making his presence known, watching how the young man was less a visitor and more a function of the market’s ecosystem. He finally stepped into Karavi’s path near a stall hung with bolts of vibrant floral fabric. “You know everyone,” Varek said, not as a question.
Karavi blinked, then his easy grin flashed. “Just the grid, boss. You live here long enough, you learn where the current flows and where it gets stuck.” He nodded toward a vendor yelling about a blown fuse. “See? Be right back.”
He ducked away, borrowed a screwdriver from a tool belt, and had the old cooler humming again in under a minute, refusing the offered dollar with a laugh. He returned to Varek wiping his hands on his jeans. “See? Gets stuck. You just help it flow.”
“A useful philosophy,” Varek said, falling into step beside him as they navigated past a shouting match over the price of a sulu. “Applied to people, too, I imagine.”
“Sure. People are just sticky currents.”
“And what un-sticks a person? In your experience.”
Karavi shrugged, picking up a wooden comb, examining it, setting it down. “A laugh. A decent meal. Sometimes just showing up. Most problems aren’t cracked open. They’re worn down, gentle-like.”
They reached a slightly quieter corner near a stall selling second-hand paperbacks, the smell of damp paper and ink a temporary reprieve. Varek leaned against a concrete pillar. “And your own currents? What sticks them?”
“Me? I’m a simple circuit.” Karavi’s smile was reflexive, practiced. “Work, friends, family. The usual topology.”
“No romance in the topology?” Varek’s tone was light, genuinely curious. “A significant other to help you… flow?”
Karavi let out a short, genuine laugh. “Love? That’s a whole different voltage, brother. Mains power. I’m running on batteries here.” He shook his head, looking out at the crowd. “Too complicated. You start changing your wiring for someone else, you might not fit the socket you were built for anymore.”
It was a good answer. Poetic, evasive. Varek noted the metaphor shift from currents to wiring, a retreat into the technical. “Some would say that’s the point. Being rebuilt.”
“Some would.” Karavi’s eyes tracked a child running after a scattering chicken. “I’m the fixer, not the fixture.”
Varek let the silence settle between them, filled by the market’s symphony. He tried a different tap. “Niyan said you were the most loyal person he knows. A constant.”
A flicker then, in the corner of Karavi’s eye. Warmth, and something else—a faint pinprick of pain. “Niyan’s my brother. That’s the only constant I need.”
“He mentioned you had a mystery, once. A love you never talked about.” Varek delivered it like passing the salt, watching carefully.
The easy posture didn’t change, but the air around Karavi seemed to solidify. His smile remained, but it became a object, a thing he had carved and placed on his face. “Everyone’s got a history. Most of it’s just sentimental clutter.” He looked directly at Varek, his gaze flat and final. “That door’s locked, boss. No power running to it.”
Varek accepted the boundary with a slow nod. He had what he needed: the location of the locked door was itself a data point. The secret wasn't the story; it was the fact of its imprisonment. He shifted his weight, his voice dropping a degree, the casual probe becoming a clinical instrument.
“Understood. A practical question, then. This selection is about advantages. About ensuring your future fits a new, better socket.” He paused, letting the market noise swell and recede. “To secure a decisive advantage, what percentage of your loyalty—to your friends, to your code, to this,” he gestured at the market, at Suva itself, “would you be willing to betray?”
Karavi didn’t look away. The joking warmth was gone, stripped back to a calm, neutral calculation. He’d heard the game. He knew the scores. Maraia’s twenty-seven, whispered in the quiet of their shared worry. Niyan’s thirty-four, carried in his brother’s stoic shame. He knew the currency they were all dealing in now.
He weighed the number. He thought of Niyan’s trust, solid as a mountain. He thought of being the reliable one, the background fixture. He thought of a locked door and the hollow quiet on the other side of it. The number he gave needed to be believable. It needed to fit the man they all saw.
“Forty-six percent,” Karavi said. The number left his lips cleanly, a reasonable, middling figure. Not a saint, not a sociopath. A pragmatic man willing to get his hands dirty.
Varek’s mercury eyes held his. A slow, almost imperceptible smile touched Varek’s mouth. It wasn’t approval. It was recognition—the recognition of a skillful lie. The answer was too quick, too perfectly calibrated. The truth, Varek knew, watching the sealed door behind Karavi’s eyes, was a much higher voltage.
“Noted,” Varek said softly.
He pushed off the pillar and melted back into the current of the market, leaving Karavi standing alone. Karavi didn’t watch him go. He looked down at his hands, the hands that fixed things, and slowly clenched them into fists. The market sounds blurred into a meaningless roar around him. He had just priced his soul at a discount, and the man had seen right through the bargain.
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Sacred Heart Cathedral, Suva, Fiji — on Pratt Street, in the heart of Suva City.
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Sacred Heart Cathedral, Suva, Fiji — on Pratt Street, in the heart of Suva City.
The cathedral’s interior swallowed sound, leaving only a vast, echoing silence that felt heavier than the humid night outside. Flickering vigil candles painted dancing shadows up stone pillars that soared into darkness, and the air hung with the smells of old wax, polished wood, and faint, lingering incense. Viviana stood near a side chapel dedicated to some merciful saint, her hands clasped loosely in front of her simple floral dress, looking not like a supplicant but a sentinel.
Varek’s footsteps were absorbed by the ancient floor as he approached. He didn’t speak immediately, observing how she held herself within the sacred space. She didn’t turn. “I preferred the market,” she said, her voice low but clear in the quiet. “God’s house feels wrong for this conversation.”
“It’s a house of choices,” Varek replied, stopping beside her to gaze at the altar. “Sacrifice. Covenant. Judgment. The architecture suits us.” He turned his head, the candlelight catching the metallic sheen in his eyes. “You’ve avoided me.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“You’ve been insulating Maraia and Niyan. A worthwhile effort, but the insulation is about to be tested.” He shifted his weight, facing her fully. “I need to understand the insulation’s composition. Its breaking point.”
Viviana finally looked at him. In the soft, unsteady light, her face was all planes and resolve. “You want another number. Like you got from them.”
“I want a vector. A direction. When protection fails, what is its failure mode?” He let the question settle into the holy silence. “So. A simple direction. If forced, who would you sacrifice: yourself, Maraia, or Niyan?”
Her lips pressed into a thin, pale line. She looked past him, toward the shadowy nave. “I won’t play that game.”
“It isn’t a game. Your silence is an answer. It says you would let all three be harmed by indecision.” His voice was clinical, dissecting. “That’s a data point, too. A costly one.”
A muscle in her jaw tightened. The candle flames shuddered in a draft. She could feel the weight of his expectation, the terrible, utilitarian math that had already scoured her nephew and niece. To refuse was to fail them. The calculation was its own kind of sacrilege, here in the dim light. Her breath left her in a slow, controlled stream.
“Myself,” Viviana said. The word was soft, ripped from a deep, dark well. It sounded less like offering and more like a sentence.
Varek nodded, a simple acknowledgment. “Accepted. Now sharpen it. Between Maraia and Niyan. If the choice is absolute, who falls?”
This was the cut. Viviana’s face didn’t crumple. It changed. The maternal softness hardened into something else, something ancient and strategic. Her love for them didn’t diminish; it reorganized itself into a brutal hierarchy of survival. She saw Niyan’s fierce, stubborn anger, a fire that would rage and burn but would keep him alive. She saw Maraia’s quiet folding, her tendency to absorb hurt into silent, disappearing parts.
The silence stretched, long enough for a dozen prayers to go unanswered.
“Niyan,” she said, her voice now hollow with certainty.
Varek tilted his head. “Why?”
“Because he would survive hating me,” she whispered, staring at the saint’s serene stone face. “He would use the anger as fuel. Maraia…” Viviana shook her head once, a small, pained motion. “She would just disappear. Quietly. She would fold that betrayal into herself and a part of her would just… stop. I can’t allow that.”
There it was. The core of her. Protection wasn’t a blanket. It was a triage. Varek had learned what he came for: Viviana’s protection had teeth, and it knew precisely where to bite to preserve the whole. It was ruthless, maternal, and utterly reliable.
He didn’t thank her. He simply nodded again, the transaction complete. He had his vector.
Varek turned and walked back down the side aisle, his silhouette swallowed by the gloom. Viviana didn’t watch him leave. She remained perfectly still, her eyes fixed on the flickering candles, feeling the ghost of her chosen sacrifice settle around her shoulders like a bitter, holy weight. The cathedral’s silence pressed in, absolving nothing, remembering everything.