by Meli Raine
I bite my lower lip. I ignore the screaming pain in my Achilles tendons. I shake my head.
“We’re waiting for him.” Romeo’s words echo in the increasingly warm room.
Sweat sprinkles itself along my hairline. I’m trying to belly breathe, inhaling slowly, exhaling even slower, but the oxygen just doesn’t seem to want to give me a break. I can’t get enough of it in me.
“Him?” I finally say, using a little bit of the spare air that I need to survive to ask a question he seems to expect.
“Your lover.”
“My what?” I don’t mean to answer that way, but I do, because his comment catches me completely off guard. His smile chills me to the bone, all the warmth in the room disappearing into his mouth.
“Your lover, Lily. Duff. That’s not his real name, is it? That’s not his real name at all. We’re waiting for him. I know he’s on his way. I know what kind of man he is. Until you came along, I didn’t have to worry about what kind of man he was. But then you had to be the one at that counter, didn’t you, Lily? You ruined a perfectly good plan.”
My ears ring, the sound like crystal bowls all being played in unison, thousands of them at once, echoing, filling my mouth with the taste of metal. I have no idea what he’s talking about, but I get the sense that the longer I keep him talking, the longer I live.
“I did?”
“You made this mess, Lily. But it turns out you’re also the best tool for cleaning it up.”
Whatever expression I have on my face as he looks at me must make it clear I’m confused. He leans in, resting his hand on my knee as if he has every right in the world to touch me at will.
“He fell for you, Lily. I appreciate that. Thank you for being appealing enough to him. You're helping me. I’ll finally complete my real mission.”
With that, he stands and moves to the door.
My throat’s gone dry, the back of my tongue swollen, as if stung by a bee. I can still breathe, though. All of my senses go into a strange, spiraling frenzy.
What did he mean, ‘real mission’? How am I helping him? I don't understand.
I want to ask what he means, but asking will make him stay longer.
So I don't.
As the door snaps shut, the lock turns. I watch the doorknob. There’s no visible sign that I’m imprisoned in here. It’s just a normal doorknob, one that clicks. It does its job. Objects are supposed to serve us. I’m an object now.
I’m Romeo’s object.
It seems I’m fulfilling whatever purpose he’s kidnapped me for. But the ‘real mission,’ involving Duff? What’s he talking about?
Suddenly I don’t want Duff to come. Not because I don’t trust him.
Because I don’t want Romeo to get his hands on him.
I stand shakily, my ankle turning in, the pain almost welcome. In pain, I can feel. In numbness, I can’t.
The words inside my mind all start to blur, like smeared paint on a wall-sized canvas. Some of the words are on my chest, on my knees, on the fine, soft skin at the bend of my elbow, or at the wrist. The words smear like blood, like indigo, like purple and white.
They smear with pain.
Stumbling, I grab onto the wall, half expecting to feel a viscous wetness there. Words don’t connect to anything anymore. Pictures flash through my mind. The left side of my body is working slower than the other, and then one word slams into my consciousness.
A memory.
A warning.
Stroke.
A waterfall is inside my brain, except the water is trickling down hard granite. It’s cold, and then it’s hot.
And then it’s nothing.
I’m still here, though. I can feel my forearms scraping against the wall, the palm of my hand flat, seeking. I move a foot, two feet, fingertips touching, then palm, then wrist. I slump against the wall. I touch a curtain. Behind the curtain there’s a door, a door with a doorknob that does rotate. Except it’s not quite a door.
What’s the word for that, again? I don’t remember.
The fact that I don’t remember terrifies me.
Jane. I remember Jane. Jane told me about this room. This must be the room that she was held in, too. She told me Romeo came in through a back passage, that he embraced her, that he said things she couldn’t interpret as supportive.
Now we know, don’t we? Except Jane doesn’t know. No one knows.
Only I know.
Maybe Duff knows. But maybe he’s not coming. Has Romeo killed him?
I force myself to take one, two, three breaths, my mind needing to slow down. The pulse at my neck races and my shoulders raise up, pushing too hard.
Hospital. That’s what I need. I need a hospital.
When you have a stroke, that’s what you’re supposed to do.
Go to the...
What's that word again?
Electricity bursts through the left side of my jaw, radiating up behind my ear into my scalp. It is horrible, and yet it feels pleasant. What am I supposed to feel right now?
I let my hand feel the door that isn’t the door, and I walk down a small hallway that’s like a canal between two different rooms. It’s so narrow that my shoulders need to curl in even to fit. What is this? Where am I? Is this how I escape? Is this how I find Duff?
There’s no way Romeo would let me find a way out. This must be a trap.
Ahead, there’s a dim light. I move towards it, my breath sounding like waves of the ocean. I get to the end, and there’s nothing but a hole in the wall, a little bit higher than my eye level. I look out of it and see a man. It’s Duff!
No. Wait. Close, but not Duff. Not Sean.
Not my rescuer.
He turns and looks right at me, but sees nothing.
I open my mouth to scream, to cry out, to get his attention, to do anything with the words that are smeared all over my body in bright colors, but then I stop. Romeo appears, talking to him. The man twists his neck in full view of me.
That’s not Duff. He looks like Duff, but that man has a stain on his neck, like someone poured red wine on it. Why would you pour red wine on your neck?
My hand tingles. I can’t quite curl it. The high heels press down on the floor like vampire stakes. My knees buckle. As I slide down, Duff, who isn’t Duff, nods sharply before I fall.
And fall, and fall, the ground opening up, the heels of my shoes turning into the spade of a shovel that you use to dig a grave.
Duff
Jets are too slow.
We’re on a plane to D.C., about halfway across the country. I imagine that puts us somewhere around Nebraska or Kansas. My mental map of time and space isn’t working the way it normally does. It’s broken, like everything else, but the pieces are aligned with one focus:
Get. Lily. Back.
I don’t know whose plane this is. It’s not the one we normally take. This is a small jet with fewer amenities than the others. That’s fine. I don’t need fancy. I just need functional.
I'll trade fancy for speed.
Drew is sitting across from Silas on the other side of the plane, heads huddled together in conversation.
I want to be alone. The only thing worse than not being able to act is being stuck in transit. You’re moving forward, working towards your goal, but you can’t speed it up, can’t take action. You’re trapped in the sky aboard the moving plane. It’s a double bind.
Men like me don’t use the word helpless. That’s a state for other people to experience.
But I have to admit to myself that I’ve never felt anything quite like this before.
At least, not since I was eleven.
Drew and Silas stand, moving over to the seats across from me. They swivel around, faces taut with purpose.
Here it comes. They’re about to interrogate me, twenty-five thousand feet in the air in a metal tube that I can’t escape. At least I forced them to go to these lengths to get what they want.
“Your real mission,” Drew says, cutting to the chase. He
’s casual, his body leaning back in the chair, hands in his lap, shrewd eyes on me.
Silas is a little more tense. Eyes narrow. He’s not quite as cold and jaded as Drew Foster. He’s been through a lot, but he hasn’t been through the physical torture that Drew Foster had etched into his soul. In that sense, I’m more like Drew than I want to admit.
No, I wasn’t violated the way he was. The marks on my body are different from the kind of brutality I know he experienced. My physical scars aren’t the same, but the psychological scars?
Maybe those aren’t so different.
They took my parents. They took my brother. They took everything when I was at an age where I could do absolutely nothing.
Only I’m not that age now, and with Drew and Silas’s help, I can do damn near everything.
I size them up as they play the waiting game. My ability to save Lily is in their hands. It’s time.
It’s time.
I’m having an argument inside my own head with a voice that tells me to shut the fuck up. I disobey it. I need to go AWOL in my heart and soul.
“I’m trying to find my brother,” I say in an even, steady voice. The words come out over my tongue, pass my lips, and float over to Drew and Silas. I’ve betrayed myself by telling the secret.
Sometimes betrayal is the only form of freedom.
“Your brother?” Drew leans in. “The one who went missing?”
“Yeah.”
He crosses his arms over his chest and just waits. Training and interrogation techniques teach you how to do this. Silence is underrated when it comes to getting the really important information out of people. He doesn’t have to use any of these techniques. I’m a done deal, but he doesn’t know that yet. The stakes are too high for me to keep secrets.
Even the biggest one.
The one I’ve carried for twenty-three years.
“When I was eleven...” I halt, swallowing. The words come out as if we’re around a campfire and I’m telling a ghost story. The analogy is apt; it feels like I’m stirring up ghosts, spirits long gone that still haunt me. “When I was eleven, my parents lived off the grid. My dad worked in product development for a munitions company, but he railed against society. He used to talk about how true freedom came from living off the land. He bought a big chunk of land out in rural Pennsylvania, built a cob house by hand with some buddies. By the time my little brother was born, when I was seven, we lived without electricity, with well water, farmed most of our own food, raised livestock. You know.”
I shrug.
“Your dad went from working for an arms company to being a hippie?” Drew asks. He’s clearly perplexed by the direction of this.
“More like a survivalist.”
“Who was he trying to survive against?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Because he didn’t. He became more and more paranoid, and when my little brother was born he insisted on not recording the birth.”
Silas jolts. Drew starts to say something, but stops himself. I know the word that was on his lips. It starts with an S, but I’m not the one who will say it first.
“Wyatt was a crazy little kid. I was in school when he was born, so I didn’t spend a lot of time with him when he was a baby, but he was running by eleven months, had ears like you wouldn’t believe. Could hear a squirrel taking a piss from a quarter mile away. By three, Dad was teaching him how to hunt with a bow and arrow, and damned if he didn’t have better aim than I did. Crazy, huh? But when you live out in the middle of nowhere and your goal is to teach your children how to survive against an enemy that—”
I break off my own words. I’ve never tried to explain this to anyone in any coherent fashion. It feels like it’s coming out in individual fragments, like I took a bottle, put it in a bag, smashed it, and now I’m pouring the pieces out one by one, trying to describe what the bottle looked like before it broke.
“How old was he when your parents died?”
“Four.”
“And they never found him?”
“No. Gran tried. She tried so hard to figure out what had happened to her daughter, my dad, little Wyatt. I don’t know much about what she went through. I just know some hunters came across our cabin after the fact. The people who attacked us set it on fire. I was outside, my body by some stacked wood. They thought I was dead.” My fingers go up to the corner of my eye. “They bashed my head in pretty bad.”
“That’s from when you were eleven? You tell everyone it was an IED.”
“Yeah. It was both.”
They both make gestures that only people who’ve done tours could possibly muster.
“It took weeks before I really understood what was going on, and then Gran told me I was going to stay with her in Philadelphia. I moved into the city, started school, kept to myself, stayed away from everyone. We never knew what happened to Wyatt. They never found his body. Gran went kind of crazy, but not in some abusive way. She was great. In fact, she was wonderful.”
I shake my head. I’m getting too emotional here, but at the same time they need to see the emotion, because if the emotion makes them more empathetic, then I may get better results.
They need to see that this is the truth.
“When I was twelve years old, Gran reached out to her old friend Alice. She had been Alice’s nanny since Alice was nine. This would have been twenty-odd years ago. You already know this.”
Drew holds up a hand, stopping me with one finger. “Alice started the investigation because she was trying to help find your brother?”
“Yeah.” I nod. “I said that before.”
“I know,” he interrupts. “But I want to be crystal clear about the implications of what you’re saying. Because if I’m hearing you correctly, Duff, you’ve got a little brother who was stateless and a grandmother who got the daughter of a vice president and Supreme Court justice to start an investigation into finding him, and her investigation led all the way to Harry and Monica Bosworth.”
I nod. “Yep.”
“'Yep' doesn’t cut it,” Drew says, running the palm of his hand across his forehead, fingers through his hair, a long, hard sigh capping it off. “Jesus fucking Christ, Duff! Do you have any idea what you’re saying? The chances that a four-year-old got kidnapped and–and what? What do you think has happened to him? Because if the authorities assumed that they just killed him and dumped his body somewhere, they’re probably right.”
Sadness coats his face, brow turning down, a troubled look coming into his eyes. His shoulders drop as he lets another long exhale out.
“All this effort,” he says. “All of this investigation. And you…” He peers at me. “You’ve spent how many years trying to find him?”
“Two-thirds of my life, sir.”
He braces at the word sir, skepticism melting away. “You have any serious reason to believe that he’s part of the Stateless Project?”
“I spent the last couple of years getting to know Romeo and Ralph, and a couple of other people, who are all stateless,” I grudgingly admit. It feels like gravel is rolling up from my stomach through my esophagus and getting stuck between my rib bones, but the words have to come out. “Wyatt was born with a port-wine stain right here.” I touch my left collarbone. “It spreads up the neck just a little. It pokes out above most shirt necklines. I’ve heard through the grapevine that there’s an agent about his age working here and there in the D.C. area. My inquiries have been careful. Maybe too careful. I don’t want to tip my hand.”
Silas speaks up. “Tip your hand?” he scoffs. “Duff, this is the first anyone’s hearing about it. How the hell would you think you’ve tipped your hand?”
“I didn’t,” I tell him gravely. “That’s the whole point. Wyatt has no idea who I am, and the chance that there’s some guy who’s twenty-seven years old with a port-wine stain working in the D.C. area as part of the Stateless Project… well, it seemed too coincidental to just be—”
“A coincidence?” Drew inter
rupts again.
“Right.”
“You think that your little brother was kidnapped and taken into the Stateless Project, trained in their ways, and works with Romeo now?”
“I don’t know about the Romeo part,” I admit. “I’ve never seen them together. I’ve never even set eyes on Wyatt since that day when he was four. But I know that someone came and took everything away from me and my Gran, leaving us with nothing but this.” I touch the scar on my eye again. “Listening to my grandmother cry and pray for God to relieve her of the pain of losing her only daughter and worse, listening to her beg for Wyatt to come back, was as bad as waking up to find my house burned and to look over at the bodies of my dead parents. I don’t have any illusions that my brother is alive and is part of Stateless, or that there’s going to be some big happy reunion if I find him,” I say, my voice dropping low, the words harder and harder to breathe out. “I almost don’t want to meet him,” I confess. “I just need to know. I need to know that the last twenty-three years of questions weren’t in vain.”
“Alice gave you a position on her team because she knew that somehow you would be connected to the Stateless guys,” Silas says, leaning forward.
“Yes.”
“And the information she found on Monica Bosworth was just… collateral damage,” Silas adds.
“Icing on the cake,” I say at the same time.
We look at each other as Drew just shakes his head.
“What are you going to do when you finally meet him… if you meet him?” Drew asks me. “Invite him over to watch the game and have some brewskis?”
“I don’t think it works that way, Drew. I’m more likely to meet him with a gun pointed at my head.”
“During the Civil War,” Drew says, making Silas and me do a double take at the strange change in topic, “brothers on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon line dreaded fighting one another in battle.” He sits forward, forearms on his thighs, hands loose. “And yet, on battlefields, it happened. It happened more often than we think. In every war, the possibility of being on the opposite side of someone you love is there.”