Finally, she opened her eyes and stared back. “It’s Jonathan Tibbs. Mankind’s piss-poor excuse for a messiah. Do you go by Brings the Rain now?”
She . . . she was mocking him . . . he loved her for it. The words put a warmth in his chest that spread through his limbs revealing just how ice cold he had been a moment earlier.
“The Patron Saint of Monster Slayers?” she asked.
He was about to speak, but fear stopped him. He didn’t want to break this dream. At the same time, what good could possibly come from speaking to his own delusion? He wasn’t sure if he were sane, but should he choose a road that could only end in madness? Looking at her, he knew that madness might be the closest thing to safety he’d felt since the bond had broken.
“Oh, come now, give me one of those witless comebacks.”
He wanted to obey.
She didn’t give up. “You know, Tibbs, I hope this isn’t what you meant when you said, we don’t cease to exist.”
The lights flickered again, and she stopped to glare at them. When they steadied, it was almost as though they did so out of fear of her, and she went on like there had been no interruption.
“If all you meant was that you’d remember me, then you seriously oversold the situation.”
He shook his head. She had to know that wasn’t what he’d meant.
“No? Oh good!” Rylee said, her relief exaggerated. “For a minute there I was worried my big legacy was going to be being immortalized in the PG-13 way you remembered us.”
He really wanted to ask what she meant by that. She’d known he would—she was baiting him after all. Rylee finally sighed when he didn’t give in. For a moment she seemed to drop everything. While she looked like Rylee, this momentarily became a costume worn by someone else as her mannerisms and words fell out of character. “You can’t lose anymore of yourself talking to me, Jonathan. I won’t hurt you. I can’t hurt you.”
Jonathan looked down at the floor and nodded. “Okay, PG-13, let’s hear it.”
She was Rylee again, acting as though the mask had never slipped. Her smile returned as she tapped a finger on the side of her head. “All the NC-17 action was stored in my head,” she said.
He smiled.
He smiled right up until the moment his brain ruined it by thinking. “That was funny. You’ve always been funnier than me.”
“Thanks?” she said, the statement so obvious that she’d said the word as though it were a question.
“How can that be, if I’m just talking to myself?”
She smiled at the question in what seemed a deliberate hint that she knew something he didn’t, but she didn’t answer.
“You know, you weren’t even going to talk to me,” she said, as she reached behind her back and brought out his father’s pocket watch. She flipped the face open, acting as though she’d been timing him since he first arrived. “You caved in like eleven seconds. Clearly, I’m irresistible.”
She was in her training attire, which despite its utility had always been distractingly skintight. As such, Jonathan was left to wonder where she could have possibly been hiding that watch.
“Eleven seconds huh?” he said, with a skeptical frown. “Except that thing hasn’t kept time in years.”
Rylee rolled her eyes. “I know, I wanted to fix it for you.”
He felt himself relaxing again, growing comfortable and safe. He knew then what she was doing. She’d changed the subject, distracted him when he asked if she was more than a dream.
He remembered the first thing she said to him when he stepped into the garage. And he wondered out loud. “Messiah, I’d never call myself that.”
“Doesn’t fit, right? Like you bought your jock strap in the men’s aisle instead of the little boys’ department,” she said.
He ignored her jab, his mind wandering to what Hayden might have said. And a memory joined them in the garage. As though suddenly he could see Hayden sitting on the living room couch lecturing Collin. “Champions just save people from danger. Gods save people from ceasing to exist. Messiahs save people from themselves—from internal threats—threats to their soul.”
“What about a savior?” Collin asked. “They’re a little of both.”
Just as quickly as they’d appeared, they evaporated like a dissipating fog as Rylee walked through them. She scoffed as though offended. “Don’t bring them into this. You can argue theology with your roommates on your own time.”
He hadn’t adjusted to the strangeness of the whole event. “I didn’t know that would happen . . . wait, my time? Whose time would it—”
“Stop. Do you ever stop thinking so damn much?” Rylee asked.
He didn’t know what to say, she looked so angry. “Maybe, I died saving your ass because your alien friend had me convinced it was game over for everyone if I didn’t. Maybe, I don’t need your humility. Maybe, I don’t want to stand here and listen to you say that, actually, you’re not that big of a deal.”
She may as well have slapped him.
For a second, he didn’t know what to make of her—and he began to fear this wasn’t what he’d thought. That the bond was tricking him, using his imagination against him to conjure more elaborate tortures.
But no, her words hurt, but as she held his eyes, they still felt different from the bond. She was justified saying these things. She, more than anyone, had every right to demand he step up and be what was promised.
Slowly, he turned away. He looked out of the garage to the edge of the light. He pointed to the darkness, it had moved closer while he’d been here with her. “You know—better than anyone—there isn’t any fighting that.”
She didn’t speak right away. When she did, her voice had an honesty to it—as though she were simply stating a fact. “You can’t fail.”
“I assure you I can.”
“No,” Rylee said, shaking her head. She held his eyes again, no nonsense in her gaze. “Listen to the words. I can’t fail.”
He stared back wondering how she could have such certainty. His eyes pleading to make those words mean something real.
After a time, her face softened. She leaned back and folded her arms across her chest as she considered him. He could swear that she thought he was up to something even if he hadn’t realized it for himself. “I get it. You don’t remember.”
“Remember what?”
“‘I can’t fail’. They’re your words, not mine.”
Something slippery and vague sparked in his memory. He’d remembered looking into his own eyes—but not in the mirror . . . and he had whispered, or maybe thought, those words over and over again.
I can’t fail.
He couldn’t grasp any more of it, couldn’t place where it fit into the story of his life. All he knew was that in that moment, he’d believed.
“Stop, you’re trying to force it, Jonathan,” Rylee said. “For now, take some comfort. Get past this one little—obstacle—and you’ll see. All the hard stuff is taken care of. Heyer has been planning for years, all you have to do is get it done.”
He closed his eyes. “Heyer’s plan?”
Jonathan sighed, he felt like a doctor walking into a hospital waiting room to tell a family that the surgery hadn’t gone as hoped and their loved one hadn’t made it. “Rylee, I get that you’ve been out of the loop on account of being—”
He was interrupted by her exaggerated gasp. “You’re about to bring up how I’m dead!”
“You . . . you just brought it up a minute ago.”
“You ass! I can bring it up, you can’t,” she said with mock severity that was already giving way to a grin. “Jeez, I don’t point out all of your shortcomings.”
“Right, you’d never do that,” Jonathan said.
She was making him laugh again. Distracting him, as though she didn’t want to hear him tell her the truth. He forced himself not to leave it unsaid. “Heyer’s plan . . . it’s broken. It’s dead.”
She rolled her eyes, as though he were being overly dramatic. �
�You know Jonathan, when I was a little girl, I broke a vase. I knew when my mom found it there would be trouble, so I picked up the pieces and put it back together. It was . . . not pretty, I mean, I used glue and duct tape. But I fixed it.”
“Rylee, this is a bit more complicated—”
“I’m not done,” she interrupted. “You see, my mom took one look at the vase and she knew what happened. She was pissed—ohhh was she pissed. She was going to ground me for a month. So, I took the vase, filled it under a faucet, and you know what . . . didn’t leak.”
“Something tells me you still got grounded,” Jonathan said.
“Oh yeah, I definitely did,” Rylee said. “Vase was apparently a family heirloom. I was too young to understand what that meant. My mom told me to go to my room and think about what I had done. So, I did, and I concluded that she was completely out of line. Do I need to tell you why?”
“No, I get it,” Jonathan said. “It wasn’t pretty, but it held water, it worked.”
She nodded. “You say Heyer’s plan is broken? So, get some damn duct tape and fix it.”
He nodded, but as he looked out at the creeping darkness he said, “I don’t know if there is time.”
She looked at the pocket watch, shrugged, and tossed it to him. “What was the point of me dying all heroically if not to buy you time.”
He caught the watch and looked down at it. “What if it isn’t enough?”
“Find a way to make sure it is.”
Clank.
The noise was loud and didn’t belong. Was like hearing thunder in a world without lightning. Its mere presence shook the fabric of his reality. As the entire garage rattled, the lights began to dim and flicker. Rylee’s presence shuddered. One second she was the woman wearing the brave smile, the next she became the far less confident girl in the pink hoodie.
Clank.
The noise struck again, worse than before. The fluorescents above threatened to go out entirely. The shadows moved, agitated like sharks sensing blood in water. Jonathan could feel the weight of that blackness. It pressed in on the garage, as though the light were only a bubble it knew it could burst.
Rylee came to stand beside him. She took his hand, and he looked down to see she’d disappeared, and he was holding the hand of the little girl. She had tears in her eyes.
“If we can’t find another light,” she said. “Then we need a place to hide.”
Clank.
Clank. Clank. Clank.
His sight was blurry when his eyes opened to the white floor. He was stiff and uncomfortable. He’d never bothered to crawl onto the bed, just fallen asleep against the wall until he slouched onto the floor. Now that he was awake, he found he couldn’t muster the desire to improve the situation.
The noise came again. Clank. Clank. Clank.
He glanced up. Surprised to see the cell door’s sensory deprivation had been deactivated. Four guards were looking down at him through the clear plastic.
“Nap’s over, Tibbs,” said the guard who’d been knocking her baton against the door. “Get on your feet. Your presence has been requested.”
To each side of the guards, he saw Collin’s and Hayden’s faces watching him from their cells. They looked worried for him.
A thought crossed his mind, and for a moment his eyes were a little less vacant.
Something was wrong.
If Jonathan were a turkey, he definitely hadn’t been in the oven long enough. The point of white room torture was long-term isolation. There was no way he’d been there for more than a day or two. These guards were taking him out too soon.
The thought was gone as quickly as it had come. The bond taking back his mind—and there was nothing in him with the power to stop it.
CHAPTER NINE
OCT 15, 2005 | 2 PM | JBLM FACILITY
TOO SOON, HAD been Harrison’s thought when the order came down. The plan had been to leave the kid in deprivation for at least eleven days before testing his resolve. A precaution, in the event the alien couldn’t be made to talk.
One look at Jonathan and she wondered if Command knew something she didn’t. He looked broken alright, but not the right sort of broken at all. In time, Tibbs would have become desperate to see any human face. Right now, Tibbs just looked like he wasn’t really there at all.
Her team wouldn’t let the man’s appearance on the monitors lower their guard. Professionals, they would behave as though Jonathan intended to make trouble at any moment. Once they stood outside his cell door and deactivated the isolation current, Harrison nodded for Rolland to get them underway.
Clank. Clank. Clank.
“Nap’s over, Tibbs,” Harrison said. “Get on your feet. Your presence has been requested.”
Jonathan didn’t move, rather his eyelids fluttered as though he were falling back to sleep.
“You’re not going to like what happens if we have to come in there,” Harrison added.
The seconds ticked by, and Jonathan’s demeanor remained unchanged. The man didn’t move any more than was necessary to breathe. Behind her mask, Harrison tongued the inside of her lower lip. If this was how he planned to play things, then he wasn’t leaving her any choice.
“The prisoner appears to think I’m bluffing,” Harrison said, with a pat on Rolland’s shoulder.
“That does appear to be the case, ma’am,” Rolland said.
With a nod, Harrison gave Rolland permission to enter the cell and begin the motivational process. She knew her business, where to strike to cause pain but not permanent injury. They needed Tibbs to be able to talk once they delivered him. For that matter, this whole process was also a lot easier if he was able to walk himself there.
What followed was something Harrison and her team had never seen before, and they had dealt with their share of insubordinate prisoners. Rolland’s cudgel came down on him again and again, and Tibbs didn’t cry out. He moved, but it was a strange thing to watch. Almost as though he did so unconsciously, his body reacting to pain that Tibbs himself didn’t care enough about to waste energy on.
For a few moments, there were only two sounds in the shell. Metal thudding dully on flesh and Jonathan’s roommates pleading for Rolland to stop.
“Enough,” Harrison finally said. Rolland had stopped mid swing. Harrison was at a loss for a moment. She’d watched the cudgel come down, Jonathan’s eyes closed once with each strike—that was all.
She stepped tentatively into the cell. For a moment, his eyes did follow her, but returned to the floor the moment she stopped moving. As though she wasn’t enough of a threat to matter. She had to consider that something was medically wrong with him, but if that were the case, she’d rather let Olivia make the call on whether to take him to the infirmary.
Olivia was not going to be happy to learn another prisoner was avoiding their comeuppance by slipping into a state of unconsciousness.
“Put the restraints on him,” Harrison said. “If he won’t walk, then we’ll carry him out to the prisoner dolly.”
Rolland sighed in annoyance as she and the other guards carried out the order. Once the various sets of restraints were all locked and tightened in place, she got a nod from each that they were ready to move.
She could tell from their body language that they were a bit unsettled. The four of them had all seen prisoners put on a show of apathy before interrogation. Most men would wear forced smiles meant to look carefree and spout brave lines about how they didn’t give a damn what happened to them.
Thing was—anxious men all had tells. Many were too stiff. Others couldn’t hide their shakes as they fought a losing battle with adrenaline. Some came with shifty eyes, trembling lips, and sweaty palms—something always betrayed the truth.
Jonathan had a look so far away Harrison wondered if he’d somehow sedated himself. She didn’t believe that was the case because she couldn’t imagine how he’d have managed it. Each prisoner and everyone with access to the shell was searched before entry and had been under constant
watch since they were brought in.
Perhaps Command knew something she didn’t, Harrison considered. While she hadn’t been present when he was taken, she’d heard Jonathan had exhibited enough resistance that the agents hadn’t taken their fingers off their triggers until he was fully restrained.
One night in the white room and the kid was a hair’s whisper short of catatonic? Something wasn’t right here.
“Alright,” she said. “Bring him out.”
Harrison took the lead, only turning around once more when they reached the shell’s exit. Just before she triggered the decompression of the chamber door, she pulled a blindfold out of one of her belt pouches. Jonathan, unwilling or unable to hold up his head, forced Rolland to grab him under the chin while Harrison got the fabric in place. But in that moment, something did register in him.
Jonathan’s eyes swept over his surroundings momentarily and locked on the occupant of the last cell on his left. Harrison had been on duty late last night when Grant Morgan had been brought back to his cell. The man was unconscious and would likely remain so for hours after what he had been through.
The moment Jonathan laid eyes on him sleeping in that cell, his pupils dilated with recognition. His jaw slowly tightened. His fingers seemed as though they were trying to ball into fists, but the effort was like chewing steel for him. Just as his breathing was beginning to accelerate, Harrison put the blindfold in place over his eyes.
Within seconds Jonathan’s condition returned to the barely conscious lump they’d had to carry out of the cell. Harrison said nothing, only exchanged glances with the rest of her team before turning to swipe her security badge over a wall panel to depressurize the chamber. Three steps later, the shell door resealed behind them.
That very moment, Jonathan jerked violently in his bonds. At first Harrison though he’d suddenly woken to find himself blinded and restrained. He caught himself, grimaced slightly as his feet flailed and finally found the ground beneath him.
He hadn’t had time to get his balance before he jerked again, more violently than the last. But he wasn’t fighting his restraints. He looked more like he was being assaulted than struggling.
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