Through the Static

by Jeanette Grey

  As she was slammed backward, her eyes connected with his across the room.

  The dissonance hit him like an impact. A fresh burst of agony in the center of his forehead.

  Enemy. Lover. Friend.

  Aurelia.

  Trust.

  Enemy.

  Love.

  He banged the back of his head against the railing of the bunk behind him, but it did nothing to clear the clashing words all fighting for dominance inside his mind. The unknown voice was gaining power now, overwhelming Curse and Charm and their commands to subdue and report. To look away.

  He couldn’t look away.

  He remembered… A flurry of images and sensation tore through him. Kind eyes and her naked breast, his hands on her skin, stitching and healing. Her fingertips in his hair and her body underneath his. Her lips. Kindness.

  Love.

  Lightning streaked from the base of his skull down his spine, and he closed his eyes.

  “Bring your prisoner here, soldier,” Curse ordered, and it was a relief to have that command in his mind. Clarity amidst chaos.

  This was all he was. A soldier. Nothing.

  He was nothing.

  He lifted the woman from the ground and ignored the quiet voice repeating, Mother. Once Jinx reached the other members of his Three, Charm grasped the older woman’s hands, securing them behind her before pushing her back to the ground. The redhead was similarly bound, sitting against the wall.

  Don’t look.

  He didn’t. He didn’t even think he could.

  Curse put a hand on his shoulder. “Good to have you back.”

  Hidden memories belied his words, an undercurrent of hostility radiating from both Curse and Charm. Visions of his own face as seen from below, incensed and struggling. Pain and blows.

  You did that, the secret voice told him. You hurt them. Don’t you wonder why?

  He shook the thought off. Looked his leader in the eye. “Was I gone?”

  He had been. He knew that. But it was all so dim. Like a dream inside his dreamless sleep.

  Curse smirked and squeezed his arm. “Not at all, my brother. Not at all.”

  Aurelia’s lungs felt like they were tearing from the force of her screaming, her feet and legs all cramping with the way she kicked. The leader of the Three slapped a piece of tape over her mouth, silencing her, but it did nothing for the shredding in her chest.

  She couldn’t stop screaming.

  When he shoved the butt of his gun against her temple, slamming her into the wall and then pushing her to sit, it was almost a relief. She saw stars, so she didn’t have to see him.

  Jinx. Jack. Whoever he was.

  God, she didn’t even know.

  He wouldn’t look at her. She’d recognized the conflict in his eyes when their gazes had connected, had felt the struggle to come back to himself deep in the shuddering synapses of his mind. But now he was staring straight ahead into the eyes of his commander, his expression blank. It was like he’d never known her. Like she’d never known him.

  Had she?

  And the vision of him, silhouetted against the opening in the ceiling was so familiar. So like the worst moment of her life, it made her quake. Because it was a new worst moment.

  It was happening all over again.

  A foot nudged hers, and she turned her head. Isabel’s face was streaked with tears, her temple bleeding from where Jinx had struck her as he’d tackled her to the ground. A shiver racked Aurelia’s body. One minute, he’d been staring at his mother like she hung the moon, soaking up her words and holding her hand. The next he’d had her life in his hands.

  “You okay?” Isabel mouthed.

  Aurelia nodded and instantly regretted it. Her head ached.

  In no possible universe was she okay.

  She looked up at Jinx again. He was holding a silent conversation with his leader, Curse, and Aurelia probed the edges of their minds. Where two days prior it had only taken a few passes to open a conduit into their communication, today she came up empty. The gaps in their security had been closed. Everything was tight.

  She closed her eyes and squeezed back the threat of tears. She could have prevented all of this. If she’d just done that damn sever. If she’d closed up the hooks into his brain, they could never have taken him back. He’d still be hers. She might have lost her connection to his mind, but…

  Her ribs hurt inside her chest. How could she have been so selfish?

  Three more pairs of boots hit ground in front of her, bodies spilling in through the door in the ceiling one at a time and coming up with guns pointed, ready to attack. Aurelia’s stomach lurched as her gaze narrowed in on the blue LED behind each man’s ear, the tattooed network of stars. She recognized the man she’d disabled the night he’d attacked her car, could feel the sickening way his abdomen had burst as she’d pierced it with her shattered glass. He was standing tall, but the bunching of his shirt around his middle hinted at bandages. And the way he looked at her, it seemed he recognized her, too.

  “At ease,” Curse grunted. He tilted his head and held up one hand. Satisfied, he nodded, then directed his attention back at the two Threes at his command. “Cepheus?” One of the men stepped forward, a big man with copper hair and hard eyes. “You’re down here with these two. Aries. Orion.” He pointed at the last man in the room and then at the one she’d injured. “You’re with us.” Curse’s gaze shifted to settle on Jinx. “Spellcaster wants to see us.”

  Jinx’s throat bobbed, but he showed no hesitance.

  “What about me?”

  All eyes shifted to look at Stan. He was back to wringing his hands, hunched over himself, one eye spasming.

  Curse lifted the corner of his lip. At the shift in the man’s expression, Jinx faltered. The motion was subtle, just a half step backward and a twitch of his hand. But it was all Aurelia needed.

  From behind the tape, she cried out, but Charm’s arm was already up in front of her, Curse’s smirk deepening. Addressing Stan, he said, “We thank you for your service.”

  The deafening blast of gunfire split the room as crimson spattered the wall behind where Stan had been standing. His body sank to the ground in a limp pile. Aurelia’s cry stuck in her throat with her sob. She’d already given him up once, had already seen him die in front of her. In that brief moment when he had been himself again, before everything had gone to hell, it’d been clear he’d been compromised. But to see him slaughtered in front of her again…

  Curse kicked the body and muttered, “Shitty-ass reanimation algorithms. Lucky he didn’t give us away sooner.” Gesturing at the man he’d called Aries, he said, “Take care of that.” Then to everyone, “Come on.”

  The man lifted Stan’s broken body to his shoulder and shoved it up through the hole in the ceiling before hauling himself through. One by one, they each disappeared above. With only Cepheus and Charm left behind him, Jinx reached up to touch a hand to the edge of the opening, then stopped. As if fighting with himself, he wrenched his head so slowly to the side.

  His gaze connected with hers across the room, and her hands went limp inside her bonds. His eyes were haunted. They looked like regret.

  They looked like goodbye.

  A shudder traveled through his body and his gaze turned forward again. In one smooth movement, he leapt and pulled himself through, never looking back. Even after Charm let Cepheus help her up, even after the trapdoor was firmly shut behind them, Aurelia kept her gaze fixed on that point, though. On the last place where she had seen him.

  It didn’t matter that Isabel was tied up beside her or that Cepheus stood guard over them.

  Her mind stayed fixed on the moment when Jinx had left her all alone.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Jinx had shown Aurelia the world of static in which he lived with his Three. She’d heard the e
erie not-quite-silence, felt the restless anticipation. But it wasn’t until that seemingly endless moment as she sat there, staring up at the door in the ceiling he had left her through, that she truly understood. Her ears roared, and time careened over a cliff, without her. An infinite fall.

  Alone. In her heart and in her mind, she was alone.

  And she was bound on the floor with a member of a Three standing over her, gun drawn.

  Sound crashed back over her as the clock in her mind finally hit ground, shattering along with her sense of paralysis. She didn’t have time to mourn. Not now. And for all that Jinx’s abandonment was a gaping wound in her chest, she wasn’t truly alone. She darted her eyes toward Isabel, then looked up at the man lording over them. Cepheus. He’d been one of the ones to pursue her into the forest after his Three had attacked her car, one of the ones she’d leveled with the EMP weapon in her locket. And from the looks of things, he hadn’t forgotten it.

  He bent to crouch before her, a good meter’s worth of distance between his face and her foot. “Such a little thing, for all this trouble. For all this pain.” His brow furrowed. “You almost killed my man Orion, you know.”

  She forced her shoulders to stay straight, her face expressionless. Internally, she was just waiting for him to strike.

  But he surprised her. Extending his hand toward her mouth, he tilted his head. “You going to be a good girl if I take this off you?”

  The diminutive made her chafe, but after considering for a second, she nodded.

  “I won’t hesitate to put it back. Not a peep.”

  The sting of tape peeling back almost broke her resolve to earn his trust. She let out her breath in a rushing exhale through her mouth, stretching her jaw and wishing she could rub her hand over the raw skin around her lips.

  “That’s better.” Cepheus flashed her a hint of a smile, then balled up the tape and retreated across the room, retrieving one of the stools from the lab area. He hauled it back, positioning it against the wall opposite her and Isabel, between them and the door. And then, to her absolute shock, he leaned into the plaster, tipped his head back and stared off into nothingness.

  Aurelia gaped. He wasn’t being cruel or taunting. Didn’t hurt them any more than he had to. Hell, he smiled.

  Had she been wrong about everything when it came to Threes and their humanity?

  She shook her head. It wasn’t as if his lack of abject cruelty would do anything to help her now. He was still her captor and she was still stuck here while all her research was at risk. While the man she loved was bound by chains even tighter than her own. While the man she loved…wasn’t that man at all. And wouldn’t be again. Not unless she could set him free.

  Unable to move at all with her body, Aurelia reached out with her mind, feeling for the shape of her jailor’s. She’d studied Threes at length, learned all the ins and outs of their minds, but at each channel she tried to tap into, she was rebuffed, pushed back by new security protocols. Ones she’d never seen before. Apparently they’d learned something from her papers already.

  Isabel shuffled beside her, louder than was necessary. Aurelia could have hit herself, if she’d had her hands free. Of course, it wasn’t Cepheus’s mind she should be entering. Keeping her gaze trained on the floor in front of her so as not to give herself away, she changed her focus, zeroing in on Isabel’s matrix. Only Isabel had always had the highest security of anyone. There was never any chink in her armor. Except—

  Except Isabel was trying to let Aurelia in. Aurelia homed in on the open channel deep in the other woman’s matrix, heart thundering. After tunneling through three layers of pointedly ineffective security, she was almost there. But then a brick wall flew up in front of her in their shared mental space.

  She chanced a glance at Isabel only to find the other woman staring straight at her.

  “You know his name now,” Isabel whispered.

  Oh, yes, she did.

  And the wall in front of her was really a door.

  Aurelia took the shape of the word Jack and twisted it into the encoding only she and Stan and Isabel knew, watching it become a key. And she inserted it into the lock of Isabel’s mind.

  Instantly, her thoughts were a whirl of questions. “What happened? Are you all right?”

  “I’ll be fine,” Aurelia assured her, even though she wasn’t sure yet if that was true. “They took him back. I knew I should have cut him loose.” The confessions were pouring out of her now, a deep well of guilt overflowing. “I could have prevented all of this.”

  Earlier, while waiting for Jinx to come around, Aurelia had told Isabel about her debate with herself and about what she’d decided.

  “Shh. You did what you thought was right. You weren’t even sure if you could set him free. Not safely.” Isabel was right. Of course she was right.

  It didn’t ease the lump in her throat. “But they have him. He never wanted to go back to them. He wanted to be free.”

  “He wanted to be bound to you.”

  Aurelia looked Isabel in the eye. “How can you be so calm?”

  Isabel’s gaze was fierce. “Because he was stolen from under my nose once. And I’ll die before I let it happen again.”

  They had so much else to talk about. So much to figure out about how to make this right. But for a moment, Aurelia couldn’t help herself. Looking away, she asked, “He’s why, isn’t he? I always wondered why. Why you live the way you do.”

  “He’s why,” Isabel confirmed. A crackle of static spread across the channel between them. “He’s why I’ve done everything I have.”

  They didn’t have to speak to understand that he was the reason they would do whatever they had to, now.

  But Aurelia couldn’t let the guilt go. Not yet. “I’m so sorry. You just got him back…”

  “And I’ll get him back again.” Her eyes grew distant. “He’s not the son I raised, but that man is in there somewhere. I know it. And we’re going to find him.”

  “You seem so sure.”

  “I have to be.”

  Aurelia had ideas for how they could get him back, but each was more terrifying than the last.

  Could she, even? Could she let Jinx in that way?

  She turned to Isabel, her chest aching with the pain and fear of opening—of letting down the walls she’d spent years constructing. And it was so fitting, that Isabel would be the one she had to ask. After all, she was the one who had taught Aurelia to never let anyone get close to her again.

  “Do you trust him?”

  As if already knowing what Aurelia was about to propose, Isabel gave a soft, sad smile. “I think the question is, do you?”

  Except it wasn’t a question. It wasn’t really one at all.

  Glancing at Cepheus and listening for any signs of conversation from above, Aurelia sighed. “This isn’t going to be easy. I can’t get into anyone’s head. And we can’t overpower him.”

  “No. No, we can’t.” Moving as if to try to scratch her upper back, Isabel shifted forward, leaning deeply away from the wall. At just that moment, the locket around her neck fell out from under the collar of her shirt, and Isabel smirked. “But the other question is, do you trust me?”

  Aurelia led up to it in a hundred different ways. She squirmed, wriggling inside her bonds, idly testing knots she knew were secure. Darting her gaze from Cepheus’s motionless form to the lab table where her equipment was still laid out and back again, she transcribed her intentions. Isabel, for her part, played her hand equally well. She sat there, near-catatonic. Seemingly indifferent to everything.

  Finally, Aurelia cleared her throat. Only once Cepheus glanced over did she speak, though, in tones that were quiet and respectful. “Excuse me.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed in suspicion as he regarded her, but he let her continue.

  “All our equipment is still out. I ha
d delicate experiments running. Please, I just need to clean them up. Put the enzymes into refrigeration.”

  He raised one eyebrow. “They’ve been sitting out for an hour already.”

  “I know.” She shifted, projecting anxiety. “I didn’t think we’d be sitting here so long. Honestly, I thought we’d be dead by now. But if we’re going to live, I’d like my experiments to survive this, too.”

  Glancing at the lab bench and back, he asked, “What kinds of experiments?”

  The best lie was always half truth. “Since we had Jinx captive, we wanted to look in his head. See how neuro-inhibitors affected his link.”

  Just the word neuro-inhibitor had Cepheus sitting up straighter. They were notoriously unstable at room temperatures, and several classes of them were known to interrupt psychic links. With wide eyes trained on her, he tilted his head to the side and raised one finger, his gaze growing distant. The silence dragged on to the point where Aurelia was starting to sweat. But then his attention refocused on them. He straightened his neck and dropped his arm.

  His posture radiating tension, he said, “You’ll tell me what needs to be done.”

  “You want to handle those chemicals?”

  “You think we trust you to?”

  They sat there, at an impasse. Aurelia barely breathed, crossing her fingers behind her back and silently praying he’d come to the conclusion they hoped he would.

  Finally, after another tilt of his head and a squinting of his eyes, he shifted his gaze to Isabel. “You.”

  Isabel kept staring forward, unreacting until he prompted her again. When she did lift her head, it was with dull, glazed eyes. “Me?”

  So much rode on this moment. On the years Isabel had spent all but off the grid, staying quiet and lying low. Surrounded with security designed to keep anyone from knowing what she was doing and trusting no one. Now Aurelia had to trust her.

  “You know about the experiment she was running.”

  Isabel shrugged. “The basics.”

  “Then you can clean it up.” He rose at the same time he gestured to Isabel. “Stand. And you.” He pointed at Aurelia. “Don’t even think about moving.”