“It’s a hearing,” Agent Steel answered, her own voice firm and resolute, “to get to the truth of what happened this morning.”
Janis noticed Steel hadn’t addressed the under arrest part, but she nodded anyway. Janis’s fury from that morning, when she had pursued—and then lost—Reginald, had been replaced by a kind of slow-motion shock. Her return with Scott and Tyler to the landing site, where Creed’s body had been draped; their helicopter ride to the secure location; their immediate separation from one another. Janis had watched it all from a numb distance. Though she had made a few attempts, she’d been unable to analyze what had happened, much less what had gone so wrong. Maybe Agent Steel’s cold reasoning would help.
Steel consulted a portable computer before her. “You met with Director Kilmer and me yesterday following our team meeting. Is that correct?”
Janis nodded.
Steel raised her frostbitten eyes. “I expect clear, spoken answers.”
“Yes,” Janis said.
Agent Steel typed something into the computer. “And in that meeting, you requested permission to retrieve an object from the household of a person who had been operating under the alias ‘Mr. Shine’?”
“Yes.”
“And in the same meeting you were told that, under no circumstances, were you to approach this person or the object in question. You were told this person was, quote, ‘extremely dangerous,’ and that the object was very likely a trap. Do you remember this?”
Janis blinked back a film of moisture. “Yes.”
“You were also denied permission to leave the neighborhood.”
Janis nodded.
“Is that a yes?”
“Yes.”
“A second meeting took place at eighteen thirty-five hours, following Tyler’s attempted departure, in which Director Kilmer and I repeated our directive that you not approach ‘Mr. Shine’ or the object in question—either in person or by proxy. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Between the time of our second meeting and our departure this morning, did you obtain the object?”
She gave another yes and explained how Creed had delivered it to her.
Agent Steel entered the information. “Do you presently have the object in your possession?”
Janis hesitated, then patted her sternum, surprised to encounter a lump. She lifted the chain from around her neck, placed it on the table, and slid it forward. Agent Steel stopped the chain with a gloved hand. She drew a stylus from the side of the computer and prodded the stone.
“What’s its significance?” she asked.
“It acted as a psychic corridor between Reginald and me. A way for us to … communicate.”
Agent Steel lifted the chain by the stylus, holding it away from her as though it were a dead rodent. One of the agents flanking her opened a manila envelope and the chain and crystal fell inside.
Evidence, Janis thought numbly as the man sealed the envelope.
“So, you did communicate.” Agent Steel said. “In violation of our mandate.”
“Yes. We spoke telepathically.”
“I want you to tell me what you recall of your conversation, starting from the beginning.”
Janis did, first explaining Reginald’s illness and his relationship to the Scale. She then laid out his point-by-point plan, just as he had done for her the evening before. As she spoke, nausea rolled through her in waves. So naive. She had given him their pickup location. She had used her powers so Steel’s team wouldn’t see him. She might as well have lined up the shot and squeezed the trigger, like in her dream.
When she was done, Steel looked up from her computer. “And you executed his plan?”
“Yes, up until the shot.”
“Following the shot, you gave chase. But you claim the shooter escaped.”
“I had him. I nearly killed…” Her gaze fell from Agent Steel’s rigid face to her lean, muscled neck. Janis had very nearly killed her, too, when a similar rage had overtaken her the year before. She pressed on. “But someone I’d never seen before unleashed a sonic blaster on me and then made off with Reginald in a sports car. By the time I recovered, they were beyond my range.”
Janis remembered coughing the dust out of her lungs and then having to tell Scott and Tyler—especially Tyler, with his blood-stained suit and vacant stare—that he had gotten away.
“Was that part of the plan?” Agent Steel asked.
“Was what part of the plan?”
“The shooter’s escape.”
Janis looked from Steel’s staring eyes to the two solid men beside her and back. “Wait, are you suggesting that I helped Reginald get away? After … after …”
“Please answer the question.”
Blood burned up Janis’s neck. “No, that wasn’t in the plan!”
“You aided him in every other facet of the assassination…”
“Yes, but with the understanding that I would be the target. That I would fake my own death.” Janis was standing now. “Look, if you want to accuse me of being incredibly stupid, fine. I won’t argue with you. But I’m not going to sit here and let you imply that I went along with Creed’s murder.”
“Return to your seat,” Steel ordered.
Janis remained up, her breaths cycling in short bursts. She could feel Steel’s men shifting behind her, fingers moving from trigger guards to triggers. A part of her burned for a fight, a battle. But her rational mind intervened. Setting her jaw, she lowered herself down.
“My sole aim is to discover the truth, Janis. And that means exploring all possible explanations. Including your complicity. So you will sit there and you will answer my questions until I dismiss you. Are we clear?”
“Yeah,” Janis replied hoarsely.
“What you’re alleging is that the plan changed from how it was explained to you yesterday evening to how it was executed this morning? At the moment the shooter took aim at Creed?”
“I’m not alleging, I’m stating. Because that’s what happened.”
“Janis,” Steel said in warning.
Janis sighed and circled a hand for her to continue, which Steel did after further staring.
“And you didn’t detect this shift in the shooter’s plan?”
“I wasn’t looking for it.”
“Given the circumstances—someone aiming a high-powered rifle in the direction of your team—shouldn’t you have been?”
Janis opened her mouth but paused. “Yes,” she admitted after a moment. “Under the circumstances, I should have tapped into him. But I was already juggling three or four different tasks and…”
“I see.”
A recollection came to Janis. “But now that you ask, in the moment before the shot, I felt our minds enter into a kind of synchronicity.” She laced her fingers together in front of her. “And in that moment, his target was still me.”
“Are you suggesting he misfired?”
Janis shook her head, recalling the details as she spoke. “I gave him a clear shot. I was shielding those around me, just in case.”
“But not Creed.”
She’s doing it again. Trying to steer suspicion back toward me.
“No, not Creed,” Janis replied evenly. “Or Tyler. Or several of your men. Reginald assured me of his aim, and they were all a safe distance away from me. I didn’t feel the need to shield them.”
“Well, if he wasn’t aiming at Creed and he didn’t misfire, I don’t see what that leaves.”
“Another shooter,” Janis said, the idea landing on her.
Having reviewed the chain of events, especially those final moments, it was the only explanation that made sense. The person she had communicated with last night had been the light twin, not the dark. Shine, not Shadow. Janis had felt that truth, not just in Reginald’s words, but in his energy. He was genuine. She had felt the same energy that morning, in the instant their minds aligned. He had been aiming toward her. Someone else had taken aim at Creed.
&nbs
p; “We only found evidence of one person.”
Janis’s gaze had wandered to her hands in thought, but now it shot up. “One? Are you sure?”
Agent Steel nodded.
Janis scrambled to reorganize her shattered second-shooter theory. It was the only one that worked. The only one that would exonerate Reginald. Or was she trying to exonerate herself? After all, he had kept something from her last night, hadn’t he? A thought he hadn’t wanted her to see?
“Can’t you check the markings on the bullet?” Janis asked. “See whether they match the rifle?”
“Hypothetically, yes. But no rifle was recovered.”
“What? But I saw one in the grass, where I pointed out the shooter. It was propped up in the front with a bipod.” She demonstrated with her hands. “It was still wet with sweat!”
“The entire area was canvassed, Janis. My team was thorough. No gun was recovered.”
Janis felt a dizzying unreality taking hold. She had been crazy with rage when she’d pursued Reginald, but she had not hallucinated the gun. No way. So what in the hell was going on?
“On the basis of some trace evidence,” Steel continued, “we identified the shooter as Shadow, a member of the Scale. The person we warned you about yesterday.”
“No,” Janis said. “The person I communicated with was not her. I would have known.”
“She clearly assumed the guise of this personality you’d come to trust, convincing you—”
“No,” Janis repeated.
Agent Steel murmured something to the agent to her right, who whispered something back.
“Given your contact with the Scale,” she said, facing forward again, “and the inconsistencies you’ve presented here, we have no choice but to place you in solitary confinement, pending further investigation.”
Janis shot to her feet. But before she could launch into protest, something exploded at the base of her neck—an electroshock. Her muscles seized at once, and she fell sideways. One of Steel’s men caught her. A second took her wrists behind her back and clamped a pair of cuffs around them.
No! she screamed, but the words remained stuck in her head.
The man holding the cuffs gave a little jerk.
“Let’s go,” he said.
28
Saturday, December 28
Scott paced the confines of his cell-like room until he felt like his head would explode. He was going on two days living in virtual isolation, two days of interrogation by Agent Steel, and he had no idea where the others were. Every time he tried to contact Janis through their rapport, it felt like running into a wall.
He hammered one of the actual walls in his room with the side of a fist. The concrete was so solid that the impact made no sound.
As he massaged his aching hand, he looked around the room. It held a folding cot, a metal dresser, commode and sink, and nothing else. An energy field surrounded the room—to prevent psychic intrusions from the outside, he’d been told. But the field also blunted his powers, which Scott was beginning to suspect to be at least half the reason for its being. He could access the field, not its source. Neither could he and Janis communicate.
The entire place—at least what Scott had seen of it—had Agent Steel’s sterile signature all over it. Their interrogation sessions reminded him of the time she had taken him to her office at his high school to elicit Mr. Leonard’s whereabouts. Now, instead of using the neural probe, she was asking the same questions from a dozen different angles. The effect was almost as dizzying, but Scott didn’t have to lie this time. The truth was, he knew nothing about a crystal necklace or Janis’s supposed contact with Mr. Shine or their plan.
The only thing he withheld was Janis’s final message: No matter what happens, I’m okay. All right? I’m fine.
Scott still didn’t know what she had meant, but he would be damned if he was going to give Agent Steel a toehold to build a case of complicity against his girlfriend. He knew Steel sensed him withholding on her. She would keep summoning him back to that freezing room until he told all. He hated to pour sunshine on the Ice Queen’s parade, but it wasn’t gonna happen.
At that moment, the bolts to his door slid out, and two of Steel’s men appeared in the opening doorway.
“Right on time,” Scott said, consulting his bare left wrist. They had confiscated his Champions watch on the day of their arrival. “What does Steel want to know tonight? My favorite color?”
The rear man cracked a smile.
“Breakfast time,” the first one said.
“Breakfast?” His sense of time really had gone screwy. It seemed like dinner had arrived only a couple of hours before. He had napped, but … wow. He looked around for his tray.
“Cafeteria’s down that way,” the rear man said. “Third door on the right.”
Scott hesitated. “So I’m free to come and go now?”
“Until we’re told otherwise.”
Scott edged past them and broke into a jog. If he was out, the others probably were, too.
Including Janis.
He counted off the doorways in the barren corridor until he was stepping into a small mess hall, similar to the one in Oakwood. Tyler and Margaret were already there, at opposite ends of a long metal table. Tyler was bowed over his tray, while Margaret was engrossed in a thick book.
“Anyone seen Janis?” he asked.
Tyler shook his head. Margaret looked up and blinked as though she hadn’t heard him.
“Your sister?” Scott asked, taking a seat beside her.
“Oh, they have more questions for her,” Margaret replied offhandedly. “I’m sure we’ll see her later.”
Scott didn’t like the sound of that. More questions suggested that Agent Steel was intent on breaking Janis open and getting to a truth that probably only existed in Steel’s head.
His chest began to tighten. “Do you at least know where her room is?”
Annoyance creased Margaret’s face when she looked up again. “A level or two down, I think.”
Scott didn’t know Margaret outside of training. Not well, anyway. Every time he went over to the Graystones’ she was absorbed in her own doings, and Scott detected at least a touch of narcissism, which was probably putting it nicely. What more should he expect from someone so accustomed to getting her way? But Margaret’s present disregard for Janis angered him.
“Aren’t you concerned?” he asked.
“About what?” Her eyes remained on her book.
“Well, your sister being locked up somewhere, for starters?”
“Janis is a smart girl. She’ll figure out how to get herself back out of this.”
“‘Back out’? What in the hell is that supposed to mean?”
That got Margaret’s attention. She closed her book around a pencil. “She didn’t tell you about her meeting?”
“What meeting?”
Margaret glanced past him to where Tyler was still poking at the food on his tray, then lowered her head and voice. “The night before you-know-what happened, Janis talked with the shooter. He sold her on some ploy to defeat the Scale, which involved Janis faking her death. In exchange, she gave him our pickup location. I tried telling her the whole thing was a bad idea, but she insisted this Mr. Shine was one of the good guys.” Margaret’s lips tensed. “And I understand we have you to thank for helping feed that fantasy.”
“They talked?” was all Scott could think to say.
“In here,” Margaret replied, tapping her temple.
Scott chewed a thumbnail in thought. Steel hadn’t been baiting him. Janis had actually found and spoken to Mr. Shine. But what kind of ploy could they have worked out that involved her playing dead? While it explained her final message to him, it didn’t explain how Creed had ended up eating the bullet, instead.
“You shouldn’t assume anything,” he said.
“Who’s assuming?” Margaret asked.
He broke off their eye contact as an uncomfortable warmth filled his face. Was he the one
making the assumptions? That Janis had misread Mr. Shine? That the idea had been a bad one to begin with?
“Well, at least show some concern,” he shot back. “It’s your little sister, for chrissake.”
Margaret stood with her book and glared down at him. “I came here to read, not receive a lecture.”
Scott drew back as she whipped around, her hair barely missing his face. She clip-clopped from the room in knee-high boots. Scott knew he should have handled his anger better, but the thought of Janis locked up had taken his own feeling of being caged and multiplied it tenfold.
“I know Janis isn’t to blame.”
Scott turned to where Tyler had pushed aside his tray and was looking up with tired eyes. Scott scooted down to his end of the table.
“Steel’s just trying to cover her ass for letting that guy into the neighborhood,” he said.
Scott nodded. Though he disagreed with the implication that Mr. Shine was on the bad side of things, he could see where Steel would have an interest in deflecting criticism from herself. He feared what that meant for Janis. But in that moment, his concern lay with Tyler.
He cleared his throat. “Look, man. I’m really sorry about what happened to your brother.”
Tyler nodded as though to himself. “He was a jerk more often than he wasn’t, but it was a power thing. When we were kids, our dad took it from him. Acting out was Creed’s way of trying to get it back. It’s why he destroyed your fort that time. Helped break your arm.”
Unconsciously, Scott’s hand moved to the place where his right forearm bent out.
“But I know for a fact he liked being on the team,” Tyler said. “Liked you guys. It’s why he went out and grabbed that necklace from Shine’s house. He would’ve made it sound like she owed him afterwards, but that’s not why he did it.”
“Wait, so Creed brought it to her?”
Tyler gave a weak smile. “Ain’t that something?”
Scott couldn’t help but shake his head. Just when you thought you had someone pegged.
“I think it was his way of apologizing for hitting her in the stomach way back when. He would’ve gotten you for the arm thing, eventually.”
XGeneration (Book 6): Greatest Good Page 16