by Natalie Reid
His mouth twitched in agitation. “That’s a shame, ‘cause a few nights ago, one of our agents was killed in a part of town not far from your little charity project. It’s quite possible that one of the people you’re helping is Resistance.” He took a step closer so his face loomed over hers. “Now, if that was the case, I would be very careful if I were you. Aiding members of the underground Resistance is an offense punishable by a lot of things. Only the lucky ones get death.”
“Well I didn’t realize that doing some old lady’s laundry could be so deadly,” she responded in a hushed voice. “Next time I’ll make sure to use a less harsh cleaning detergent.”
“You military think you’re so racking funny!”
“It’s serious work, fighting Bandits. You have to keep your spirits up somehow. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath. When he looked back at her, he was staring daggers and spoke in an eerily calm voice. “No. The only thing you need to understand is this: If you make one wrong turn, one tiny step out of bounds, I’ll give the order for your immediate termination.”
He gave her one last long, hard stare, before turning around and walking out of the shop.
Jessie tried not to let his threat get to her, but she couldn’t help but feel the slightest nagging pressure of fear in the back of her mind. It was still there the next day as she entered into the main lobby at BLES with the bird cage and Ben’s finch in her hands. It was easy enough to slip inside with her unrestricted key. She had learned that the first few times she had walked in. There were no humans in the front lobby, only machines that checked your key and scanned you for weapons. Apparently, cylinder keys were regulated and handed out very strictly so that just having one was enough to get into one of the most secretive buildings in all of Aero City.
However, walking around BLES headquarters with a bird cage under one arm was a different story. Before, she could blend in and walk as if she belonged. No one questioned her because they had seen her around before and just assumed that she should still be there now. But put a bird into the picture and that’s when people start to realize they should be asking questions.
When she stepped into the elevator, planning on entering the Desolar Complex from the tenth floor, there was a scientist inside that raised her eyebrows at Jessie and looked quizzically at her bird.
Before the scientist could question her, Jessie held the cage up a little higher, saying, “It’s for Tag. He begged me to get a bird for one of his experiments.”
When Jessie pressed the button for the tenth floor, the scientist raised her eyebrows again and cleared her throat like a teacher might do when a student got a question wrong.
“Doctor Tag’s lab is on the sixth floor.”
“Oh, yeah,” Jessie responded with a smile. “But he wanted me to bring it to his assistant’s lab.” She lowered her voice to a whisper and added, “I don’t think he wanted it dirtying up his own space.”
The woman gave her an unsatisfied smile, but said nothing more. However, when the elevator doors opened on the eight floor, the level that the woman had originally pushed, she did not move to get off. Jessie glanced over at her, and the woman pushed the button to close the doors, silently waiting for the elevator to start up again.
Jessie looked down at the cage. The finch was standing on the bottom, picking away at a piece of bread she had put in there. The little guy was so hungry that he didn’t seem to care that he was in a strange new place. Jessie poked a slender finger through the bars, hoping that this bird was worth all the trouble he was causing.
When the doors opened on the tenth floor, the woman still did not get out. Jessie knew that she was suspicious of her, and she also knew what she would have to do. She nodded politely to the lady and then stepped out into the hallway. Immediately the lady followed, but remained at a spot near the elevators as Jessie made her way down the hall towards Tom’s lab. She didn’t know if she hoped he would be in there or not. If he was there, she would have to find some way to explain the bird. And, given how their last conversation ended, she didn’t think he would appreciate her just popping by unannounced. But if he wasn’t there…
When she peeked in the window of the door to his lab, she couldn’t stop a wave of disappointment from dropping in her chest. An irrational thought crossed her mind that Tom somehow knew she was coming and decided not to be there. She knew, of course, that he couldn’t possibly have known that she was coming when she didn’t even know herself until half a minute ago.
Closing the door behind her, she sighed and put the bird cage on one of the shelves. She felt a little guilty looking around his lab when he wasn’t there, but it wasn’t as if she hadn’t done it before. She let her eyes wander to the machine in the middle of the room. It felt like so long ago since Tom had seated her inside to run his test. Even their flight with the glasses, which had happened less than a week ago, seemed lost under centuries of time.
Her eyes roamed again, this time stopping on the picture of him with his mother. She looked back to the door and peeked out the window. The lady outside stepped into the elevator and disappeared behind its doors. She could go out now and safely slip into the Desolar Complex. But she didn’t. She walked closer to Tom’s picture and held it up. She studied the happy faces of the mother and son; studied the trees behind them, wondering what spot in the forest this had been taken. And then she noticed something. It was their shadows. They were so slight, she could barely see them, but they were being cast in several different directions. It was an unnatural effect that couldn’t have come from the sun. That meant there had to be man-made lights over-head, which then led Jessie to the conclusion that this picture was not what it seemed. The mother and the son may have been real, but the picture wasn’t taken in the forest.
Then she looked closer at his mother’s arm. There were tiny pricks of red, indicating that she had an IV or needle stuck in her skin on a regular basis. Jessie wondered if she had been a patient inside of BLES, and if this was where Tom spent his whole time as a Potentian.
Putting the photo down, she backed away. She didn’t have time for her wild speculations. Her time at BLES was sparse, and she had to spend it with Ben.
Ben was lying in bed, stiff and pale when she walked in. She placed the bird cage on the foot of his bed, and he blinked at it in confusion, as if not believing it was really there.
“My mother said that finches survived the Contamination because they were meant to help us,” she said. “This little guy was up in your attic, probably because he was meant to help you.”
Ben was too tired to say much. He smiled into the cage and poked a finger through the bars, wriggling it up and down as if waving to the bird. Jessie noticed a needle mark on the inside of his arm, and she figured that he had just undergone some testing. She was too brokenhearted to ask him about it, but Tom’s image flashed in her mind, and she didn’t know whether to be angry at him or not.
Ben reached under his bed and took out a sheet of paper and a small, stubby pencil. Working slowly, he sketched the drawing of the bird, pausing here and there to poke a finger inside the cage and stroke the bird’s tail feathers that were just long enough to reach. Jessie thought he was planning to hang the drawing up on the bare walls of his room, but when he finished, he handed it up to her.
“Something to remember me by,” he said.
She had no words for this. What was there to say to a boy that knew he was going to die soon? All she could do was stare at the beautiful, dark lines on the page, trying to memorize every curve and faded feather. Then she looked to Ben’s face and did the same with his own features, the clash of pale skin and dark hair, and those blue eyes that held a silent world of emotion. She wished she had the artistic gift of drawing like he did. She would have sketched his face right then and there so that the word would never be without its image. But she could no more draw in that moment than she could speak.
Before she left, she pro
mised to release the finch back to his home, back in the woods. She took his hand and placed it over the cage, saying, “You are connected to this bird, Ben. They never forget a face. So wherever he goes, you go. I want you to concentrate really hard for me, okay? Concentrate because, when I leave here, I’m going to set him free from this cage and release him into the forest. And what he’s going to see and feel will be so amazing, I don’t want you to miss it. Tonight, you won’t be lying in this bed; you’ll be out there with him, flying the skies and feeling the wind on your face.”
“Like you?”
She lightly touched his cheek. “Just like me, Ben.”
When she left his room that evening, she couldn’t get those words out of her head. They kept playing over and over in her mind in adamant discontent. What she had said made Ben feel better, but it made her feel worse. She knew why she had said it. She was afraid that Ben would die before she could convince Katherine to take him back, and she wanted to leave him with the only meager means of escape she could give him. She had said it because she had already acknowledged his death as an imminent possibility; saw the state of his mother and realized how hopeless it was for both of them.
But she didn’t want to accept that. She wanted to believe that he would hold on, just long enough for her to come charging through those metal doors with his Protector in tow. She needed to believe that; otherwise nothing made sense.
If anyone stared at Jessie and her bird on the way out of BLES, she did not know. She barely looked up at the elevator to see which button she was pushing, couldn’t say if she had stopped on the way down. An entire Task Force squad could have stepped on with her, yet even that would not have been enough to draw her away from her darkening thoughts.
Jessie had exited BLES and was halfway across its courtyard, passing by the large pine tree that stood in the center, when a name finally drew her out of her thoughts. It was her own name, yet that was not so interesting so much as the voice that called it. She froze in her tracks and looked straight ahead. She could hear his footsteps coming up behind her. The tree was directly to her right. One of its branches was just inches from her arm, yet it was too late to hide now.
Seeing that she wasn’t going to turn around, Tom jogged ahead of her so that he could face her directly. “Someone said you had a bird for me?” he asked, his eyes shooting down to the cage in her hands.
She stared down at it as well. The bird was looking up through the bars at the large tree. It probably would be much happier in that tree than in her cage.
“It’s not really…” she started, but trailed off, unable to find the right words.
“It’s for Ben, isn’t it?” He asked this so quietly, as faint as the fluttering of feathers. “I know you’ve been going to see him.”
Jessie let her eyes slowly close. “I kinda figured you knew.”
“He was always asking me questions about you. And then there was the paper fish.” Tom paused. The wind blew and knocked a few flakes of snow from the pine needles of the tree. “You know I won’t tell anyone, but…” He motioned to the cage. “Jessie, you can’t just bring a bird into BLES and think no one will notice.”
She lifted the cage in her hands, holding the bottom with two hands. “It was worth the risk.”
A man in a blue lab coat passed them, eyeing their encounter at the corner of his eye. Tom took Jessie by the arm and led her around the tree so they would have a little more privacy. Rather than brave his stare, she kept watch on the finch. One of the down feathers on its underbelly was sticking up, and she wished she could smooth it back down.
“How can they do it, Tom?” she asked quietly. “How can they just kill them? Can’t they see how wrong it is?”
He placed his hand on the bark of the tree near her arm. “For them it’s simple. Potentians can’t live on their own, so they aren’t human. It’s the same as taking someone off life support.”
Her eyes snapped up to his. “You don’t believe that, do you?”
“No, but…” He shook his head despondently. “I can’t do anything to change that. And neither can you.”
She clenched her jaw, the hurt evident in her eyes. “Goodbye Tom.”
As she started forward, he called out, “Jessie, wait, I didn’t…” but she did not listen. She kept going, heading for the break in the Aero City wall that led to the forest. If Tom wanted to dismiss the issue so easily and bury his head in the sand, that was his choice. But she would not be pacified into acceptance.
Chapter 12
Shot of Adrenaline
The thin sponge mop that Jessie was given to clean the mess hall floor with was no match for the present that the soldier Freddy had left for her under his seat at breakfast.
“Hey Bandit,” he had called out to her with a smirk. “Racking dessert for you.”
She tried not to flinch at what he had called her. Since she had gotten back to the air-base, she had run into a few soldiers that called her Bandit, either in secret whispers of fear, or in loud jests fueled by the need for payback. It wasn’t hard to make enemies when you were faster than everybody else. Then get racked and come back from the dead, surviving something that no one else could, and you get reminded fairly well of who your enemies are.
The “dessert” that Freddy had left for her was just that… dessert. It was a whole packet of chocolate pudding, mixed in with a variety of breakfast foods. Jessie shook her head as she tried to sop it up with her flimsy mop. Freddy hadn’t just made a mess for her to clean up; he had given her a message. He was willing to forego his dessert, something that virtually no soldier would willingly do unless the mess hall was on fire, just to cause her pain. She almost felt sorry for him. All that chocolate pudding would have tasted delicious going down. It was a shame he couldn’t taste it.
Just as she was finishing cleaning up his mess, she heard a pair of hurried footsteps running into the mess hall. She turned around to see Trid jogging towards her. He had on his pilot flight-suit, and she envied him for it.
“Carver told me to tell you,” he said, pointing his hand behind him and trying to catch his breath, “…that a scientist from BLES is here to see you.”
Her hands curled around the mop a little tighter. She was about to ask him who it was and exactly what he wanted, but she knew that it would be pointless. Carver would have only told Trid the barest amount of information in order to get her over there.
“Are they in his office?” she asked, leaning her mop against one of the tables.
“Yeah,” he said, clapping her on the back. He took her mop from her, saying, “Don’t worry, I got this.”
She shook her head with a smile. “It’s all finished, Trid.”
Pumping his fist into the air, he exclaimed, “Once again my timing is impeccable!”
As she walked to Carver’s office, her apprehension started to build. She wondered if someone from BLES was there because they knew about her sneaking into the Desolar Complex, or they could be there because they found something in a forgotten test and realized it was a mistake to let her go. And the words a scientist from BLES is here, kept rolling over in her mind. Which scientist? It made a world of difference.
The walk over to Carver’s office had never seemed so long. Before she knocked on his door, she wiped her hands on her pants to make sure they weren’t too clammy, and then lifted a fist to the wood.
Carver called her in, and when she opened the door, she wasn’t met with a pair of wide-rimmed glasses and messy brown hair, but with the ever-energetic smile of Doctor Tag.
“Jessie girl!” he exclaimed.
Her stomach turned. That’s what Ual called her, but coming from him, it somehow sounded wrong.
“Doctor Tag,” she greeting him politely.
Carver, who had been standing by the door with a grave look in his eyes, gave her a brief nod before slipping out behind her and exiting into the hallway. She glanced back briefly, wondering why it was that Carver never seemed to want to stay in the same
room with her for very long.
“Is there something wrong?” she asked, turning back to the waiting doctor.
Tag picked up a case he had placed on the desk and walked over to her with it. “Oh, no, not really. It just came to my attention that, when we put your new parts in, we didn’t account for the extreme elevation that they would be used in.”
She shrugged. “Well, I’ve felt fine ever since I came back up here.”
Tag’s face fell. “Even so,” he insisted, “I’d like to give you this shot all the same.” He set the case back down and opened it up, revealing a vial of blue fluid and a syringe. “I formulated this myself.”
She looked at him in apprehension.
“Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe,” he assured her. “It’s been tested before. See, many years back, I was part of a project that, well…” He teetered off and stared intently at the wood of Carver’s desk. Then shaking his head, he continued. “Anyway, it’s a similar situation, and I would feel better if I gave this to you, just to boost up the strength of your lungs.”
Jessie watched as he expertly stuck the needle in the vial and began to draw in the liquid. She gulped and rolled up her sleeve, but remained calm. She never liked needles. No matter how many times she was stuck with them, they always hurt and made her stomach knot. Sure, she was a soldier. She thought she would eventually learn to get over the pain and apprehension. Instead, all she learned was how not to show it.
She took a seat in Carver’s chair as Tag rubbed a wet cloth on the skin at the crease of her elbow. Her face was blank and calm as the point pricked her skin and punctured a hole inside. However, her teeth clenched and her free hand secretly gripped the edge of the chair as he slowly injected the blue liquid into her. It was so icy cold going in through her veins that she felt it was burning; burning through the walls of her arteries and leaving smoky and dried up vessels. She chanced a look to her arm. It looked okay. If the veins really did burn up, she imagined there would be some sign of it on her skin.