Unhidden (The Gatekeeper Chronicles Book 1)

by Dina Given

  “I don’t think we entirely agree on the definition of ‘loving,’” I said with contempt. The memories of those years still haunted my nightmares, but now I knew who to thank properly for my time in hell.

  “Well, tough love is still a form of love, is it not?” He seemed to enjoy mocking me. “You really should be grateful. In fact, I would say that you owe us, and now it’s time to collect. The government simply wants its property back.”

  “I am no one’s property, least of all the government’s. Didn’t you know, I’m an independent contractor now.”

  “Emma dear, there is no need to get defensive. No one wants to hurt you. Just the opposite, in fact. We want to help you realize your full potential. We’ve given you ten years on the outside to figure it out on your own, and you have failed miserably. Your time is up, and now you need to come back.”

  Benjamin’s words came back to me: “They are very dangerous and powerful men who won’t hesitate to do whatever is necessary to achieve their objectives, up to and including murder.” I had no doubt this man was one of those Ben had been speaking of, and I had no intention of going anywhere with him.

  “Why now?”

  “You heard your dead friend there a few minutes ago. They are planning an invasion of Earth. We might be able to peaceably take in a group of docile elven refugees, but what about all of the others who will come pouring forth once there is a way available to them. You have seen those creatures, and they aren’t even the tip of the iceberg. What do you think will happen to Earth and humans when it is overrun by even more powerful monsters? We need all of the weapons we can get, and you are one of them, Emma. You can help us save the world.”

  I snorted. “I’ve been fed that crock of shit before, Mr. Connor. I believe it was right before every single one of my military deployments. None of them ever seemed to turn out exactly as promised.”

  “Our problems in the Middle East are child’s play compared to what we are facing now. We acquired the battle axe years ago, knowing that, at some point, you would be ready to learn how to wield it. Now is that time. We have some allies from Urusilim who don’t want that rift opened any more than we do. They have agreed to teach you in exchange for your loyalty.”

  I had been wondering what was taking Alex so long to make his escape, and I had suspected it was because he wanted to hear as much of this conversation as he could before leaving. He must have heard enough because the pull of energy blooming at my back increased to uncomfortable levels. I was vibrating violently and sweat beaded my forehead.

  Connor must have thought I was scared because he actually tried to reassure me. “No harm will come to you or your friends if you agree to join us. I promise you that.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said between clenched teeth.

  As if on cue, a blinding light erupted from behind me. I squeezed my eyes shut and grabbed onto Daniel, who had been standing by my side, pulling him to the floor. Gun fire immediately erupted from one or two less disciplined soldiers, and I could hear Connor screaming at them to stop shooting. I covered Daniel with my body as bullets whizzed overhead. One hit me in the shoulder, and I screamed as pain spiked down my arm. Then quiet settled around us except for panicked breathing and my whimpers. When I opened my eyes and looked around, Alex was gone.

  I sagged in relief and whispered close to Daniel’s ear, “Are you okay?” He nodded. “They’re not going to hurt you. Cooperate. Keep yourself alive until Alex brings help. And don’t worry about me. I can handle them.” My voice held more confidence than I felt, but I hoped it was enough to make Daniel obey.

  Strong hands reached down and dug into my wounded arm. I almost passed out as I was roughly lifted to my feet. A couple of soldiers did the same with Daniel.

  “Put her in room three-three-six and secure her. The boy stays with me. We have a lot to talk about.”

  I was placed in a small, sparsely furnished room on the third floor of the old hospital. There was nothing in the room other than a cot with a moth-eaten mattress and the folding chair that I was sitting on. My wrists and ankles were in shackles, connected to lengths of chain that were welded into the concrete floor. I had already tested my bonds, and there was no way I was getting free on my own. Above my head was a dim fluorescent light fixture, and a single window was covered with a thick, black curtain so I couldn’t tell whether it was still night.

  Blood ran down my arm from the gunshot wound, but they had made no move to clean and bandage it. I guessed we weren’t operating under the Geneva Convention here. My blood was seeping out at a slow rate; therefore, I wasn’t in danger of immediately bleeding out, although it had made me weak and tired. Between that and simple boredom, I found myself dozing off periodically as I waited for something to happen.

  It felt like several hours had gone by before Connor finally came in to see me. One of his soldiers followed him in, carrying an identical folding chair. Setting it down, he faced it toward me. The soldier then retreated to the corner of the room, placing his hand on his holstered revolver. The message was clear.

  Despite the long night, Connor looked well-rested and refreshed. He took a seat in front of me, crossing his legs at the knees and placing his folded hands on his lap.

  I didn’t let him speak first. “Where is Daniel? What did you do with him?”

  “No need to worry about your friend. He is being well taken care of. He’s actually quite a technological genius. That kind of talent isn’t easy to come by.”

  I breathed an inward sigh of relief. They wouldn’t want to get rid of a valuable asset like Daniel. The best thing I could do was keep the attention off him by not bringing him up again.

  “So, what is it you want from me?”

  “Quite simply, Miss Hayes, we want your loyalty, and in order to achieve that, we need to know everything about you.”

  “I thought you already knew everything about me. Isn’t it all right there in your top secret files?”

  “Alas, we don’t know everything.”

  “Well, if you want my loyalty, it would go a long way to show your good faith if you untied me and told me everything you do know.”

  He looked at me for a long moment then shrugged. “I’m not going to release you just yet, but I suppose we can trade information. Quite honestly, Emma, you turned our world upside down when we found you a decade ago. NASA picked up an unusual energy reading in the New Mexico desert from one of their satellites and reported it to the FBI, thinking it was a domestic concern. We sent in a standard response team, and what we found was you. You were lying semi-conscious in the middle of the desert, babbling like a mad woman. The earth around you had been displaced in a perfect circle with you at its center. We found you hundreds of miles from the nearest town, with no tire tracks or prints of any sort to show how you got there. You want to tell me how you got there?”

  “I have no idea,” I said, trying to hide my excitement. This was the first time I had been told anything about my past. “What did you learn about the energy reading?”

  “Smart girl. You ask the right questions. It took NASA a while to analyze the data, and during that time, we kept you in a government hospital under observation. They eventually came back and told us it looked like an Einstein Rosen Bridge. Do you know what that is?”

  It sounded familiar, maybe from a movie I had seen, but I couldn’t place it, so I shook my head.

  “It’s a stable wormhole that is believed to be a shortcut through space and time. It is theoretically possible,” he said, “but no one has ever been able to actually create one … except for you.”

  “I didn’t create it!”

  “Then who did?” he asked, leaning forward, placing his elbows on his knees.

  For a fleeting moment, I had been absolutely certain I knew the answer, but then it just slipped out of my brain as if it had never been there.

  I shook my head. “I honestly don’t know.”

  He nodded and sat up straight. “That’s w
hat you said to us when you arrived, but I’m not surprised that you don’t remember those first few weeks here. You were pretty out of it, coming in and out of consciousness, not making a lot of sense. You muttered a few words here and there. Mostly, ‘father,’ ‘Zane,’ ‘I love you’ … oh, and ‘kill them all.’” I tried to remain impassive when he said that; however, I was sure the rapid blinking and increased heart rate were noticeable. “Beyond that, we couldn’t get much out of you.

  “We knew you needed care, both medical and psychological. There was a lot of debate over what to do with you. We even held a secret Congressional hearing. Folks were on all different sides of the issue, from killing you as a security risk to letting you live among us in freedom. Bleeding heart liberals,” he said with scorn. He stood, stretching his legs, and began to pace the room casually. How I wished I could do the same. My muscles were cramping in painful spasms.

  “Do you think you could take these shackles off while we talk? As good as I am, I can’t get out of a heavily guarded building single-handedly, unarmed and injured. And any chance I can get some medical attention?”

  He stopped pacing and faced me, a smile crossing his face briefly. “That all depends on how cooperative you are.” He continued moving about the room. “In any case, Benjamin Hayes learned of your situation. After all, as the head of procurement, he pretty much knows everything that is going on in the government. Everyone thinks it’s the politicians that make things happen, but it’s really those who control the money.” He winked at me. “For some reason, he took an interest in you, pulled some strings, and got the votes to release you into a foster home in return for keeping an eye on you and reporting back. But the other side had some influence over the selection of your foster family. After all, if something unfortunate and tragic were to befall you there, we would have no further need for concern.”

  I didn’t know how to feel about Benjamin’s involvement. I was grateful he had stepped in on my behalf to try to free me, but he had always told me he didn’t know anything about my history. He had been lying to me for years, even failing to mention the other day that he had known about me from the start. Had he befriended me only to monitor me for the government? Was he reporting my every move back to them? Would he really betray me like that? I had trusted him, though I guessed that had been the whole point, hadn’t it? The betrayal felt like a knife in my gut. I blinked back tears.

  “Oh, don’t take it too hard,” Connor said with mock sympathy. “I have long suspected Ben was protecting you and not being forthright with the information he had promised to provide, which is why you are here today. Ben has clearly failed to draw anything useful out of you. Ten years has been more than enough time. Now I am taking over this project, and I have no intention of coddling you into submission.”

  Many people would have preferred the approach Benjamin Hayes had taken—building trust through friendship. However, for some reason, I understood Connor’s approach better and felt like I knew what I was getting with him. I could trust Connor to always betray me because his loyalties lay with something greater than me. When putting me against his country, I would lose every time, and I was okay with that.

  Even as my friendship with Ben had grown, I had never understood him. I couldn’t comprehend that his interests might be for my well-being. Maybe that was why I had never opened up to him. Maybe that was why I had joined the military, to be with people whose motivations and methods I could understand.

  “As it happens, I don’t respond to being coddled,” I said. “I am also former military and have as much loyalty to this country as you do. I have no intention of seeing it threatened by those creatures, but I can’t tell you what I don’t know. How do you propose recovering my memories?”

  “Emma, Emma, Emma,” Connor said, shaking his head. “You have already proven to me time and again that you are quite formidable. You have resisted Ben’s efforts at gaining your trust for ten years; you escaped my Black Ops soldiers … twice; you allied yourself with non-humans; and you made your way into this facility. A few pretty words from you will not be enough to make me believe them. However, you raise an excellent question. How am I to recover your memories and your abilities with them?” He paced toward me like a tiger stalking its prey. “We have already established that kindness doesn’t work.”

  When he got within arm’s reach of me, I knew I was in trouble. I recognized that look in his eyes. I had seen it many times in the eyes of psychopaths around the world who claimed to be fighting for a greater cause yet were really only looking for a legal way of indulging in their fetish for causing others pain.

  Connor reached out with a single finger and jabbed it directly into the bullet hole in my shoulder, digging and twisting until I let out a scream that must have been heard across the island. Tears streamed from my eyes and blood flowed freely in rivulets down my arm.

  “Perhaps pain will unlock those gates in your brain,” Connor said with a little too much pleasure.

  I didn’t have a snappy comeback. It was all I could do to keep breathing and try to remember my training. I had been trained not to reveal secrets under torture. In this case, keeping my mouth shut was easy because I didn’t have the answers he wanted. However, I needed to rely on that training to get me through this alive or at least until Alex came with the cavalry. I had to believe he would come for me, but that small voice in the deep recesses of my brain kept asking why Alex would save me when he knew where Sharur was and didn’t need me anymore.

  Connor did eventually send someone up to my room to provide medical care, which consisted of IV antibiotics so I wouldn’t die of infection yet did not go so far as to remove the bullet or stitch up the wound.

  Every once in a while, Connor had me unchained from the floor, only to connect my chains to hooks in the ceiling. After all, dangling me by my wrists was much more painful than allowing me to stay seated with my arms resting at my sides.

  When he got particularly frustrated at my lack of cooperation, he enjoyed using me as a punching bag, but most often, he resorted to psychological techniques, helped along by water boarding, electrical shock treatments, and drugs.

  In the darkened room, I had no idea how much time had gone by, though it felt like forever. I hadn’t stopped holding out hope that Alex would come for me—not because I believed in him, but because of the power hope played in keeping people alive. Hope was the strongest weapon I had right now, even if it was misplaced. While Connor was playing mind games with me, I was playing them with myself.

  “Emma, you know I don’t want to do this to you,” Connor said one day while paying me an unwelcome visit. He was dressed in his usual cheap business suit, this one navy blue with pinstripes, a white shirt opened at the neck, and no tie.

  It must be casual Friday, I mused absently. I was sure his own comfort was of the utmost importance to him while engaging in a fun torture session.

  “Actually, I’m guessing you’ve been looking forward to this all day,” I managed to croak through my parched throat.

  The corner of his mouth twitched almost imperceptibly, which told me I had been right. He struck me as a sadistic psychopath, hired by the government to do things normal people were uncomfortable with, like work with politicians and torture young women.

  At that point, the door opened and a soldier wheeled in a medical cart draped with a white cloth. He placed it in front of me and left, locking the door behind him.

  Connor removed the cloth with a flourish, as if he was doing a magic trick. I wasn’t surprised to see a number of stainless steel surgical instruments lying on the cart: a scalpel, bone saw, scissors, staples, syringes. Normally, I would dismiss the theatrics as mind games 101, but given what I had seen in the basement, I had no doubt these instruments had been used many times before for procedures that might or might not have involved anesthesia.

  I expected Connor to go for the scalpel first. He could use it to inflict as much or as little damage as he wanted, and if handled correc
tly, it could cause fairly significant pain while not being life-threatening. Instead, he went for a syringe that was as large as a fat cigar with a needle about three inches long. The clear vial was filled with a yellow liquid. He placed his fingers on the plunger and held it up to me so I could get a good look.

  “Normally, I would prefer starting with the instruments first. I find they are a good way to soften up my guests, making them more … cooperative. The drugs just give them that last nudge before they pour their guts out for me, both literally and figuratively.” He actually giggled, amused by his own joke. “Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of time, so we’ll skip the pleasantries and go right for the injection.”

  “What is it? It doesn’t look like sodium pentothal.”

  “Hah. Truth serum is child’s play compared to this. No, this beauty was synthesized from the toxin of the Lindworm, one of those marvelous creatures from your home world. It causes strong hallucinations, and you’ll do anything to stop them, including telling me what I want to know.”

  “But I don’t know anything. I would tell you if I did.”

  “Perhaps, but I am also hoping this serum will open up your mind and let something useful out. Now, let’s get started, shall we?” He took a step closer and squeezed out a golden drop, tapping the side of the vial to ensure there were no air bubbles.

  “Why? What’s the hurry?”

  “Didn’t you know?” he mocked. “We scheduled a war, and I don’t want to be late to the party.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  He placed the syringe to my neck, and I struggled in vain to pull away from it. Then, with a gleeful giggle, he stabbed it into the side of my neck. Searing flames burned their way through my jugular as he depressed the plunger. I instantly clenched my teeth, trying to hold back a scream, not wanting to give him the satisfaction. It felt like the syringe would never empty and the fire pumping through my blood would never abate. After an interminable amount of time, Connor finally pulled the needle from my neck, and I slumped forward in my chair.