Cassie nodded. “But how would you know that, if you didn’t send them all?”
“I only sent you one dream,” He said again. “There is another explanation for the others, though I doubt it will make you less angry with me.
“I suppose I should confess, before I continue, that I haven’t been one hundred percent disciplined with my influence since I met you. But it was never to you! Just occasionally to those around you,” Kyler admitted sheepishly. “But I couldn’t handle sitting by watching some of those guys!”
“The night before I first saw you on campus, it was you in the car!” Cassie realized. Her astonishment edged out some of her anger. “It looked like you, but that was too much of a coincidence.”
“Yes, it was me. And while I didn’t know what was going on at the time, I knew I couldn’t just leave you there… it was an empty parking lot!” He said exasperated and angry now.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Well, it’s kind of creepy, right?”
“Not really. Despite everything else, I’m grateful for that,” Cassie told him. “There was more going on than it looked like.”
“I know, I heard it later. I followed you home that night. I listened while you were telling Jenna.” He laughed guiltily. “Then I went and found him.”
“Okay, it is creepy. Why would you do that?” Then his last sentence registered with her, “Wait, found him? You didn’t! It was you? With the army?”
“Yeah, I was ten times more furious than you are with me.”
“Why? What happened? And what did you do to him?” Halle asked quickly. She was trying to stay out of it, but her curiosity got the better of her.
“This isn’t really the time,” Kyler said embarrassed.
“No,” Cassie agreed. “I’m more curious as to why you followed me home.”
“I wanted to know who he was. I needed to know how your life was. If you were… unavailable.”
“That’s weird, Kyler,” Cassie said bluntly. “Normal guys just ask girls out.”
“I know. But I didn’t want to come back into your life in the middle of a relationship. If you’d been happy with someone else, I would have just left you alone. Then I would have come back a year or so later and tried again.”
“What do you mean, back into my life?” Cassie asked suspiciously, a realization dawning on her. “You can’t mean—”
“You know, Cassie. You told me the story, you know where I fit.”
“It was you in the car. I mean the other car. The night I forgot everything,” She said quietly. No one answered her, but she knew it was true. “Of course. That’s why I’ve been dreaming of you. They started before we even met. Right after I saw you for the first time. Why didn’t you tell me sooner? There has to be more to it. My parents never understood….”
“Parents?” Halle interjected, before being interrupted by Kyler.
“I’m really sorry, Cassie! I wanted to tell you so badly! But I thought it would be best if I told you everything at once, and for that I needed Halle!” He begged.
“Everything?” Halle questioned him softly from the back seat.
“Halle! Not now,” He said sharply, and then ignoring her, he turned back to Cassie. “The truth is in your dreams. Tell us a little about them.”
“They’re mostly of us in France, us three. I room with Halle, you’re next door. You’re mean and distant. Halle’s trying to hook us up. Um,” Cassie humored them. “You took me out to eat, then got angry and deserted me… and—oh my gosh! I only just remembered. It was the General! He came to talk to me afterward, it was bizarre. Then I heard you and Halle arguing in the next room, you admitted you trusted me. I don’t know; it’s just us on vacation in France. Going to the Louvre, eating in cafés, and so on,” She ended, feeling foolish. It didn’t sound like a dream intended to manipulate her.
Halle laughed delightedly. “I didn’t know you listened in on that!”
“Me neither.” Kyler smiled.
“Excuse me?” Cassie asked.
“Cass, your dreams are the answer. They really happened,” He said simply.
“Really, Kyler? That’s your story? You were what, driving me home from France when we got in a little car accident and you left me by the side of the road?” Cassie was angry again. She felt a little better. It made more sense for her to be having dreams of them if she had known them before she lost her memory.
“He’s not lying. They are real,” Halle said.
Cassie rolled her eyes at both of them. “It can’t be. I have no month-long gaps in my memory where we went off to France that I just don’t remember. I think I'd remember that.”
“I thought you had several years missing in your memory.” Kyler pointed out.
“Really? You’re really saying we were in France? Kyler, that was when I was 15. And I already asked my mom, I’ve never been to France. But even if I had, these dreams are with me and you, and Halle now. Not as teenagers.”
“I didn’t know you before you were nineteen, Cass.”
“But you just sai—”
“I met you in France, eight years ago. You were traveling with Halle, and she and I were to meet up there. We’d left Ramford two years earlier, but he’d almost caught up with us six months before Paris. So when we met, I was suspicious of you. I didn’t trust you.”
“Kyler—” Cassie began, shaking her head.
“Shhh!” Halle demanded. “Let him tell you the story, and then tell us whether you believe or not. I promise you, neither of us will influence you in any way.”
It seemed pretty pointless, but Cassie agreed.
“As I said, I didn’t trust you. But Halle did. Entirely. I didn’t understand why for a long time. Not until I got to know you better and you told me how you two met. Then I realized that you weren’t the one who befriended her, as I thought. I imagined you buddying up so you could find me and report back. Not so. Quite the opposite.” He grinned.
Cassie looked at Halle, she was smiling, too. “What can I say? I knew you’d like her.”
“But after the exchange you mentioned, in the restaurant, things changed. I felt horrible. You were just so… perfect. I couldn’t figure out why in the world you would like me, but you apparently did. Even after you knew everything. We dated for a few months before I had the guts to tell you the truth. I told you everything. What we were, that they were after us, and always would be.” Kyler was investigating the windshield of the car with intensity while he spoke. “But you stayed.”
It was ridiculous, Cassie knew that. And yet, while he spoke, flashes shot through her mind of scenes and places she didn’t know, but at the same time, that she recognized.
“You even got m—” Halle tried to contribute, but again she was interrupted by Kyler.
“Hal, please. Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“She needs to have the option to choose.”
Cassie looked from one to the other. This is crazy. I don’t believe them, do I? “So how come I don’t remember all this?”
“Two and a half years after I met you, Ramford almost caught us. He knew about you and it didn’t even seem like he was after us anymore. You had a solid name and family he could trace and use.
“And so, I made the worst decision of my life. I agreed to your plan.”
“My plan?” Cassie asked.
“Your plan,” Halle said. “You were quite insistent about it, actually. So you really can’t be that mad at us! It wasn’t our fault it went off the rails!”
Kyler silenced Halle with a look in the rearview mirror.
“The plan was to get to the members of Congress that Ramford was using, and manipulate their decisions. We were going to not only get Ramford shut down, but also have him resign.” He sighed. “But I didn’t want him to know about you. I wanted him to think you were a passing phase. So I planned to leave you somewhere safe. You refused to go. You didn’t want to sit around wondering what was happening, if we were safe
or even alive. Or if we’d been caught.
“We’d discussed the possibility of getting Ramford’s memory wiped by a gentleman we know in New York City. Not only was it completely immoral, but it also wasn’t feasible. However, it gave you the idea to have your memory wiped. The whole idea was scary. But he assured us that the memory loss would only be temporary. When we were ready, we could use certain stimuli to bring it back. I didn’t want to, but you convinced me.
“The idea was that you’d be safer and happier not knowing about us. When we were done, we’d come get you, use the techniques given us to get your memory back. And then, if something terrible happened to us, you would be plenty happy because you had no idea you were—” He stopped. “Well, the doctor didn’t think you would ever regain your memory without help, but he wasn’t sure.
“Anyway,” He continued, “We left you in Northern California, near a little town in the middle of nowhere, in a car by the side of the road. You were still unconscious from the memory sweep, but we left you with a fake driver’s license and birth date. You were one Cassandra Pine, sixteen years old. We thought you’d be safer a few years younger, and you always looked young. Ramford would never think to look for a teenager. Then we left to try to permanently fix things. But nothing went at all according to plan. As soon as we came near the Congressmen, they closed in on us. No matter what we tried they seemed to know who or where we were. We tried again and again, but each time was more dangerous, and we came closer to being caught. Finally, we fled. But they followed. They always knew where we were! It was incredibly frustrating. It took us a couple of years to realize they were tracking us when we used our abilities. We still weren’t really sure how until last night when you told us it was by the brain waves. Everyone we caught to question would talk about the satellites, but no one knew how it worked.”
“Did you know it’s only when you manipulate others thoughts or vision that they could pick up the waves? Not when you move objects physically. General Ramford didn’t seem to know why,” Cassie told them.
“No, we didn’t know that. I’m still not even sure how they can find us when we change what they’re seeing on those scanners,” Halle said.
“It has pressure sensors on the back. It points to where you are by touch,” Cassie said.
“Oh. That makes sense. In any case, it took us four years to figure out how to avoid them, and then I spent months making sure I’d shaken them off our tail before I could come find you. In the end we had to split up to do it. Halle traveled around sending up false red flags anywhere she could think of but the eastern U.S.: where you were,” he said.
Cassie shook her head, none of it made any sense, but she found herself wishing it was true.
“It took me a while to find you. Your name had changed again to Cassandra Larsen. And you’d moved from across the country to Virginia, and then again to Pennsylvania for school. When I finally did find you, I wasn’t sure what I would discover. It had been so long, would you remember? Would things have come back naturally? If so, would you hate me?
“That first night, in the park, at first I was sure you knew everything. It was obvious from the first moment that you recognized me. At first I thought you were just messing with me. And you just seemed so you! When I realized that you didn’t remember anything, I didn’t feel right about claiming you without giving you a choice. I wanted to find out how you were. How your life was. I wanted to give you a chance to keep your new life and not come back into mine. Things were dangerous for us, and it seemed like they always would be. I had to try, though.”
“Kyler, that’s ridic—” She stopped. Something had just come back to her. Something her mother had said. ‘He'll find us, he'll find us. We have to get away. You have to get away.’ Shockingly, it made sense. It all made sense. It was like her life clicked in a way it never had before. But still...
No one said anything for a while. Cassie just sat there thinking. Finally, she shook her head.
“Kyler—” She began.
“Cassie, think about it! Everything comes naturally to you. Socializing, schoolwork. That’s because you’ve done it before. You’re older than the rest of them. You’re not doing things for the first time like everyone else is. And that makes it easier,” Kyler told her. “Not that you aren’t exceptionally smart on your own. You are. I’ve always been jealous of how much you knew, and now you know more than ever.”
Cassie ignored his flattery. “Kyler, I want to believe you. I love you, and I hate to think that that isn’t real. But… I was 15 when I was found in the car. And what about my parents?”
“Frankly, I have no idea what that is about. I was shocked to hear you talk about your mom and dad. And you told me you were fifteen when you lost your memory.”
“Fifteen?” Halle asked from the back, unable to help herself. “And you didn’t have parents when we left you. You had cousins, three uncles, one aunt and a grumpy old grandfather, but no parents. They’d passed shortly before I met you.”
“What?” Cassie was baffled.
“If you want to know about that you’d have to ask your ‘mom’,” Kyler said.
Cassie perked up. “Could I? I haven’t talked to her in so long. She probably thinks you killed me.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, the General spread the word among the local police that you kidnapped me. And everyone in my building saw what looked like police barge into my room, ostensibly looking for you.”
“Wonderful. I didn’t even think of that. You do need to call her.”
Halle poked her head between Cassie’s head rest and the passenger side window and said, “I have to say I’m extremely curious about what happened with you right after we left. The sooner you do it, the better.”
“Really?” Cassie asked, excited.
Halle set her chin on the top of Cassie’s chair. “Yeah. We should stop at the next exit. They might not be tracing your mom’s phone until tomorrow. And if they already are, we want to be as close to the base as we can, to give them less of an idea of our direction.”
“How long have we been driving?” Cassie asked, peering into the darkness again.
“A little under five hours.”
“Where are we?”
“Close to Las Cruces, New Mexico. Which is perfect. They won’t know if we went south into Mexico, west to California, or back to the east on the main highway,” Kyler said to both her and Halle. “We’ll stop in Las Cruces for something to eat, and for Cassie to call her mom, but then we need to get out of there.”
“Where do you want to go from there?” Halle asked him.
“I’m not sure,” He said slowly, looking at Cassie. “Do you want us to take you somewhere?”
“What!?” Cassie asked, shocked. She never imagined leaving them. Surely if she went back home they’d just take her again? And despite her anger at Kyler her feelings hadn’t changed. Whether they had come from him, or were all her own, she couldn’t stop loving him now. She desperately wanted his story to be true. She would finally have all the answers. “No, I don’t want to leave you guys. I—well, if you know how to bring my memory back, why haven’t you? And I want to help fix things. So you don’t ever have to run again!”
“We can fix your memory but it’ll take some time. You’ll be confused for a few days. I don’t know that we’ll have time to do that and make a plan in the next four days.” He seemed nervous, still.
Cassie was quiet for a few minutes. “Really, given everything else I’ve discovered, your story is practically tame. I’ve waited years, I can wait another week,” she told them. Kyler looked a little too relieved. “There’s something you haven’t told me, isn’t there?” She accused.
Kyler watched her anxiously, “Maybe you should just remember on your own?”
“Kyler!” She demanded.
“I’m sorry, Cass! I just can’t do it. You need to remember. I promise, if the memory recovery doesn’t work, I’ll tell you everything!”
“He
has a point, Cassie. It’ll be much less awkward for you to remember on your own. He has plenty of embarrassing moments that I’m excited for you to relive,” Halle squeezed her shoulder, then sat back.
He laughed quietly, then offered her his hand face up on the center console. She took it without a second thought. He sighed in relief, watching her out of the corner of his eye. Maybe he’s right. I’m freaked out enough from…everything. Remembering things naturally won’t be as disturbing. The dreams are fun. And they do seem so real. But really? We were together for years?
“Seriously? You got us separate hotel rooms and we’d been together for over two years?” She grinned at him, teasing. She felt happier than she had in weeks. And maybe in years. For the first time in memory, she had hope of remembering her life. I guess I do believe them.
He laughed a little. “I wanted you to be able to decide if you still wanted me. I knew that making you run with me was changing things, but I wanted to give you as much space as possible. Incidentally, I planned on telling you everything soon after you admitted you loved me.”
“About that… sorry. Not for saying I love you, because I do. But that night—I never should have left. I thought I’d be fine calling my mom and letting her know I was okay. That’s how they found us.”
“It’s alright. I heard you leave and followed, but I was too late to do anything. They probably had teams go to all of the destinations originating from our stop. We should have gotten off and taken a cab somewhere else.”
Halle snorted. “Seriously, don’t apologize to him! This was all his fault! Showing off!”
“What do you mean?” Cassie asked.
“She’s right. I was showing off. I couldn't help taking you to a fancy party. I wanted you to see a different side of me. And my stupid pride couldn't let me lose at poker. It was careless and incredibly foolish. We should have been much, much more careful."
“How much of that was real? Do you really know Jonathon? And those girls—” Cassie asked him.
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