Taking three-second sample readings at intervals of five minutes, it took him an hour to find the first evidence of light before the date the box was left to be found: almost exactly two days ago, on Sunday, September 17, at 1031.
Through a shimmering haze of blue vari-color fabric, he could make out the features of two middle-aged men. One was standing next to the box. He knew that face from the files. It was Drummond Morgan, holding Dani’s box and Dani’s baby blanket. The other man was visible on a viewwall a few feet away. The men were talking. He listened through the neurolink.
“Some precious memories here,” Morgan was saying. “A shame that I will have to leave them behind on my next trip to town, but it will be necessary.”
Lexil paused the playback. Morgan was making trips to town? While he was being held captive? Something wasn’t right.
“Why?” asked the other man—and now Lexil could see the resemblance—Dani’s father. “Why are you doing any of this? Why are you holding me prisoner? What more do you want from me?”
“We need to bring them here, the people who are looking for us. You will see your daughter one last time, and then this will all be over.”
It dawned on him what he was seeing. Dani’s father wasn’t the kidnapper. He was the victim! And Drummond Morgan had been orchestrating this all along. He scooped up the stones and ran back to the lab.
He grabbed the first person he saw, who happened to be Zaidee. “I’m going to go find Dani. Got something important to tell her.”
He ran out the door, calling Dani via eyescreen, getting no answer. Now what? He left her a message to call him back, urgent! And then he headed for the police station.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Unity
BLAKE ISLAND HOSPITAL, Blake Island, WA. 1710, Tuesday, September 19, 2215.
Dani was exhausted from worry. She’d given up pacing and had gone to find a nurse. The nurse could only tell her that they were doing all they could, but had promised to come and find her when they knew something definite. The receptionist had checked her records a half hour ago and had been able to tell her they’d called in some nanotechs. Dani hoped they were as good as Egan. Now it was after 1700, and she was lying down on the cushions, trying to get some rest. On the other side of the waiting room, Officer Littleton was sitting silently, ready to take her father into custody and back to the mainland.
Dani’s stomach growled. She hadn’t had anything to eat all day. She decided to go downstairs and look for a food machine.
As the elevator doors opened, she could see people coming in through the doors at the opposite end of the building. Her eyes were bleary, and they were far enough away that she couldn’t make out details. But something made her keep looking. When Jored came in, she recognized him. And there was Kat. Within a few seconds, she’d identified the rest: Lexil, Kat’s Uncle Royce, and her mom.
Kat reached her first, and threw her arms around her. Fatigue and worry had drained Dani. The warmth of Kat’s touch broke something in her and she sobbed.
“Is he okay?” Kat asked.
“I don’t know. They would have told me if he died, wouldn’t they?”
“They should have told you something by now.” Lexil was frowning. “It was smoke inhalation. It wasn’t as if they had to put bones back together.”
“They told me they’ve called in nanotechs.”
“That means his lungs were badly damaged,” her mother said. “Nanotech is his only hope, at this point.”
“How did you all get here? Uncle Royce?”
He nodded. “Having property on the island, I can come and go as I please.” A look of awe crossed his face briefly. “It still feels wonderful to say that. ‘Come and go as I please.’ Anyway, I took everyone else back to the mainland. Detective Rayes and Officer Spar took Doyle, Morgan, and Althea to the station to debrief them.”
“He walked with us to our helicar,” Kat said. “We’d all gotten in and were getting ready to take him to our place for the night when I got a call from Lexil. He sounded…well…”
Lexil interrupted. “I’d been trying to reach you, and you weren’t answering. I even went to the police station to see if they knew where you were.”
“And they did?” Dani wasn’t sure how much the detective had told them at the station when he left.
He nodded. “Detective Rayes wasn’t there yet, so I told the officers on duty what I found. They immediately started digging into things, so that by the time Rayes got there with a couple of officers, Doyle, Althea, and her dad, they already had enough to implicate all three of them to some degree. They had me repeat the whole thing for Rayes, and then they took them all into custody.”
“What? Why? What did you find?”
He came to her and cupped her shoulders in his hands, gripping her lightly as if she needed steadying. Well, maybe she did. “Dani, your father was the victim here.”
Her head swam. He was studying her, waiting for her reaction. What did he mean? The years of threats? “They’re not going to charge him? But why would Althea and Doyle be involved?” Or did he mean…
“No, sweetheart, Morgan was the one holding your dad captive all this time. He and Althea worked together to make everyone believe it was the other way around. Turns out she felt as bitter about Wade’s death as he did, and everything was staged. Like another incident I just found out about.” He shot a dark glance at Royce. “Your father is innocent, and so is Marielle.”
Dani’s knees buckled. Her head was swimming, and she wasn’t sure which shocked her more, the sudden switch in perspective or Lexil calling her “sweetheart.”
She had to admit, they both felt wonderful. She couldn’t even remember him steadying her, or dissolving into his embrace, but there she was, her head against his chest, centering herself to the strong beat of his heart. He stroked the back of her head, calming her even more. She closed her eyes.
Then she opened them again and leaned back just enough to look up at him. “But what about the button? The call we overheard?”
“The button?” He frowned, puzzled, but then his gaze cleared. “Oh, the button was planted—the only metal object in the room, just before he pretended to get the call. As soon as we thought to check, Rayes found that there was no call placed to Morgan at that time. He staged the kidnap scene for the police investigators, and staged the call for us. I guess he assumed we’d be called in, or covered his bases just in case. It was all an elaborate act to mislead us from the start.”
“And the man in the overcoat?”
“That was your dad, but as soon as Morgan knocked him out, he ducked between the helicars and swapped coats. The rest of the time, it was Morgan.”
Her tired mind sifted through the last few days, curiosity leading her on, driving her to make everything clear.
“So my dad didn’t cause the anti-grav accident?”
“No, for one thing, he had no way of getting back and forth from the island. That had to be Morgan or someone who met him periodically just outside the island’s privacy shields, someone working for him.”
It couldn’t be Althea, so…“Doyle?”
He nodded. “We believe he set off the pulse that disrupted the anti-grav and also tampered with your safety bag.”
“He could have killed me!”
“Yes, he could have. I don’t think they cared about that. Morgan’s idea was to make your dad experience the same loss he had suffered, do as much damage as possible. Prolong your life only to prolong your dad’s suffering. You were the target all along.” His voice softened. “I’m awfully glad he didn’t succeed.”
One more question. “How did you figure it out?”
“Your baby blanket told me. Somebody put stones in the corners.”
She laughed. “My dad, to keep me from kicking off the covers. You scanned them?”
“Yes.”
Satisfied, she sank back against his chest.
Jored tugged at her sleeve. He had a big grin. “It’s the right ribbon now,
Dani.”
“You saw this?”
He nodded happily. “You guys hugging. A lot of times. And kissing.” He wrinkled his nose. “Oh, and your dad’s going to be fine.”
A wave of relief washed over her, and she realized that somewhere along the line, she’d come to trust his “dreams” as much as she did the anomaly indicators at the lab. Her dad was going to be fine. She wanted to shout it.
“Uh oh, here it comes.” Jored hid his face in his mom’s jacket.
Their lips touched, and the hesitation was gone. She reached up, pulling his head toward her. When he kissed her, everything else faded. She couldn’t feel the floor any more, but somehow, she felt infinitely secure. She tasted his lips and they tasted of the timestream, the right timestream, carrying them along.
She wanted this moment to last forever, but a voice interrupted. A new voice.
“Excuse me? Ms. Adams?”
She had forgotten there were people around them. She turned toward the voice. “Yes?”
“I’m the nanotech doctor on your father’s case. We’ve succeeded in restoring tissue in his lungs, and in five or six days, he should have full function. He’s a lucky man. If they had found him ten minutes later, he’d be gone.”
She glanced over at Jored just to see the smug grin she already knew would be there.
The doctor continued. “He’s awake. We told him you were here. Would you like to come see him?”
Dani nodded happily. Kat pushed at her. “Go to him. We’ll wait for you out here.”
The loneliness she’d lived with for years was draining away. Her dad wanted to see her. And her mom was right here at her side. Her mom, whose eyes were brimming with tears of relief and joy.
Smiling, she took her mother’s hand. “We’re ready. Let’s go see him.”
PINE LAKE PARK, Sammamish, WA. 1400, Sunday, September 24, 2215.
“So this is the lake you used to swim across?” Dani stood, with her hands on her hips, judging the distance.
Lexil paused in the middle of handing her mother the mayonnaise and mustard from the cooler and looked out over the rippling water. “This is it. My dad and I used to race. Well, I raced. He pretended. He was a lot faster than I was.”
“Okay, but did you swim that way?” She pointed west, across the broad expanse of the main lake. Her eyescreen told her the opposite shore was over 300 meters away. “And back again?”
Jored went running toward the edge of the lake, just to see what she was pointing at.
Lexil didn’t answer right away, so she glanced over at him and caught him trying to hide a smile.
“You didn’t, did you?” She gave him a playful shove, and he almost dropped the water bulbs. “So where, then? Over there?” She pointed to the south, across a narrower leg of the lake, maybe a hundred meters across.
“It seemed like a long way when I was a kid.” He laughed.
“Can I go swimming? I could swim out to there.” Jored threw a rock out and it plunked into the water a few meters out. He wrinkled his nose. “That wasn’t very far. I could swim farther than that.”
Marak was setting plates and utensils out on the old picnic table. “Don’t throw those back this way, Son.”
“Why would I do that? Anyway, I’m hungry. Can we eat now, Mom?”
“Pretty soon. Come help and it’ll be sooner.”
Dani carried a box of packed sandwiches over to the table. The picnic had been Lexil’s idea, as a way to celebrate Dani getting the sheaths off her legs and, two days later, her dad’s discharge from the New Harborview Hospital, where he’d been transferred from Blake Island. In the meantime, Dani’s mom had stayed with her in her apartment, somehow finding a way to clear her schedule for another week. And here they all were, her family and her closest friends, together.
Honestly, she couldn’t imagine changing anything about this moment. It couldn’t be more perfect.
She took a deep breath, inhaling the clean lake air.
Her father’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “How’s my daughter? Have I mentioned yet today how much I love you?”
Dani turned with a smile. “Only about a dozen times. And I love you too.” She gave him a gentle hug. She knew his lungs were still healing, even though the nanites had done their work and been flushed from his system in the same way as they had from hers.
“You’re going to have to get used to it, you know. We have a lot of catching up to do.”
Dani nodded happily, her heart too full to answer.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Hey! You made it to the end. But are you still wondering where Jored’s dreams come from? Do you want to find out who sent those messages to Uncle Royce in the prison? I am excited about writing the next book in the series, and your comments can contribute to the next part of the story. What and who would you like to see more of? Let me know through your favorite form of contact below. I’d love to hear from you.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kim K. O’Hara is a high school math and publications teacher who lives in Lacey, WA, and relishes frequent visits from two irresistible granddaughters. She loves reading, writing, and recreational math, but seldom gets in the mood for housework. You can reach her by email at [email protected]. Sign up for new book notifications at www.pagesandnumbers.com.
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A Chronetic Perspective (The Chronography Records Book 2) Page 24