by Nikita Spoke
“So what’s that make you, since you need us so badly?” Jemma returned. “You know that if you’re right, we’re your best shot at proving it. You can’t get rid of either of us, can you? No matter how much you want to make it seem like you’re the one with the power, the knowledge.” She channeled all of her pent-up frustration at him, and he scowled. “What? Liked it better when I couldn’t talk? When you could pretend I was your obedient pet?”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “Maybe I should start out using this, after all.” He pointed the syringe in her direction. “This one isn’t laced with any of those nice pain medications I used when Dr. Harris was watching. It won’t injure you permanently. Probably. But it will hurt.”
Jemma closed her eyes. She couldn’t consult with Jack first, not without committing to what she was planning. Taunting Josh, though, as satisfying as it was, wasn’t going to delay him much longer. If they gave him what he was looking for, he’d have something to focus on other than injecting them and delighting in their pain. She had to hope that if—no, when—he was arrested again, he’d be locked up until he was incapable of any harm. If they could make sure he didn’t have any proof, then any claims he made might be dismissed as fantasy or as an attempt to earn favor by sharing scientific advances. Tied up, though, waiting on help to arrive, running out of spoken words that might do any good, Jemma was left with just this one course of action, and it was one she knew she excelled in.
Fixing her eyes on Josh, she reached out toward Jack’s hand, and he took hers without hesitation. She saw Josh’s eyes track the movement before he glanced toward her monitor. She started with a surge of emotion, a wave of affection and a request for trust. She felt Jack send back firm acceptance, and Josh’s eyes widened, flickering almost comically between the two monitors. “We’re not letting him use those drugs,” she sent Jack. “This will stall him.” She looked at Jack and saw him grin.
“Plus,” he sent, “we can say whatever we want without him overhearing.”
Glass clattered against metal, and Jemma looked back at Josh. He’d traded the syringe for a pen and had started scribbling, still wide-eyed, on a notepad. He was muttering as he wrote, but Jemma couldn’t quite make out the words.
“All right,” she sent Jack, “any ideas about how to get out of this place yet?”
“Still working on that.” Despite the situation, she could feel mild amusement in his mental tone. “You?”
“Not really,” she sent. “I’m hoping the agent who was supposed to be keeping an eye on us shows up soon. Just trying to delay things in the meantime. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to have a backup plan in case we need to get ourselves out of here.”
“Agreed,” sent Jack, “on all counts.” He slid his thumb back and forth against her skin as he sent consideration. Josh seemed content with the audible silence, which was broken only by the scratch of pen against paper. “The first step is getting out of these straps. I think they’re done up under the seats. Can you reach?”
She looked at Jack’s chair and shook her head, seeing a bit of loose end dangling from where it was fastened. “Yours is too far from me, and these chairs are too thick for us to reach our own.”
Jack looked back toward Josh, and Jemma followed his line of sight to the instrument tray nearby. “If we can get ahold of something sharp enough, we should be able to cut through the straps,” he sent. Jemma nodded, then watched as Josh turned his attention to them for the first time since they’d started Talking. She tensed, and Jack sent a soothing, wordless flood of emotion.
Jemma took a breath and spoke aloud before Josh could. “What are you getting from this that you haven’t already had a chance to see?”
Josh tapped his pen against the paper absently as he watched her. “Patterns, Jemma. One time is a fluke. Twice, a coincidence. Three times, and we start to see a pattern. Enough times, and we should be able to replicate it.” She opened her mouth, but he shook his head. “I’m not telling you everything. I know you understand that I’m in charge, that I know what I’m doing, despite your petty jabs. I don’t need to reveal my grand plan.” He said the last words dramatically, rolling his eyes. “Not that you could do anything to stop me, even if I told you every step I was going to take, every alternate action if initial ideas fail. I gave you telepathy, and I’m going to study it however I please, for however long I wish.”
“No, you didn’t,” Jemma said before she’d really thought the words through.
“What?” Josh blinked at her.
Jack answered. “You didn’t give us telepathy, did you? We were picked out beforehand from something in our blood. And now that Jemma reversed what telepathy you gave, we’ve proven we can still Talk. We don’t need you, you sadistic bastard.”
“You’d never have found it without my help,” Josh argued, turning his attention to Jack. “You’d still be just as useless as you were before the Event.”
Jack managed to twitch one shoulder far enough to approximate a shrug. “So you say.”
“We found each other without your help,” Jemma added. “We know more about what we can do than you’ve been able to find out, even after all this time.” She paused, watching him before she continued. “You still don’t even know how we communicated enough to escape the first time.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “And I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me?”
Jemma’s breath caught as she heard a noise outside. It might’ve been something as simple as a dog knocking over a trashcan, but it could be their rescue finally getting ready to make a move. “We could Talk without touching,” she said, a little more loudly than she needed to. Whether because he hadn’t heard the sound or because of what she’d said, he didn’t look away from her. “We Talked every day in the cafeteria.”
“There’s no way you could have Talked despite the shielding,” Josh protested. “Besides, we tested you for that. You weren’t able to Talk when you were in the lab together, not unless you were touching.”
“Weren’t we?” she asked, arching an eyebrow. Jack sent amusement, and Josh looked uncertain for the first time since Jemma had woken.
“There’s no way you could’ve fooled the monitor,” Josh said, his eyes flickering briefly toward the one she was currently hooked up to. “The patterns, they couldn’t have been anything other than you trying and failing to Talk to somebody.”
“And did they show you who I was trying to Talk to?” Jemma felt the urge to laugh as Josh looked first surprised, then impressed, then infuriated.
“You tried to Talk to me or Dr. Harris,” he said. “That’s part of why you were showing so much damage. It wasn’t just that you were trying harder, but that you were trying more often than we realized to do more than you were able. You could’ve ruined everything, Jemma!” Josh stood and paced, tossing the notepad and pen onto his chair. “The data is tainted, now. I can’t trust anything we saw before.” He wheeled toward her, storming to her chair and leaning in close enough that she could count the hairs of his eyebrows. “You brought so much of your pain on yourself,” he hissed. “The more you reached beyond your natural abilities instead of enhancing the ones that you had access to, the more damage you caused. Do that again here, and you won’t get the easy breaks while you recover. No. You’ll—”
Jemma closed her eyes, blocking out his face and ignoring the breath against her skin, then slammed her head forward as hard and fast as the strap across her torso would allow. She felt a twinge in her neck, and her forehead throbbed, but Josh’s howl of pain was worth it. He pulled away, and when she opened her eyes, she saw him clutching his nose, a muffled stream of curses escaping against his palms. Jack sent silent congratulations, and she watched as a trickle of blood found its way out from behind Josh’s hands.
“You’re going to pay for this,” Josh said, voice strained. “You’re going—”
He was interrupted again, this time by a series of bangs and crashes. Jemma looked toward the sound and saw armored men and w
omen entering the garage, through both the large door and what had to be a smaller side door just out of her field of vision. She looked back to Josh, who was holding his hands up, blood dripping down into his mouth as he was held at gunpoint.
“Joshua Stevens,” said a familiar voice, “You’re under arrest.” Heidi came into view, spinning Josh around roughly and holding him still while a policeman cuffed him. “You deal with this one,” she told the man who’d cuffed him, “and I’ll get these two.” She jerked her head toward Jack and Jemma, and the policeman nodded, leading Josh away and starting on a list of his rights.
“Heidi?” Jemma said, watching as the woman leaned down and undid her straps one at a time.
Heidi nodded and moved to Jack. “I’ll explain when we’re in the car. Grab that notepad for me, will you?”
Jemma blinked, then let go of Jack so she could stand, pulling the sensors away from her neck with a wince as they caught on fine hairs. She picked up Josh’s notepad and held it to her chest as Jack joined her, wrapping his arms around Jemma. She closed her eyes and leaned against him, listening.
Heidi seemed in charge of the operation, giving orders with a relaxed confidence that conveyed she had no doubt they’d be followed immediately. The lab was quickly photographed, and then the agents began dismantling and gathering equipment, preparing it to be loaded into vans and transported as evidence. “Okay,” she said finally, in a warmer tone, and Jemma opened her eyes to see Heidi standing next to them. “Let’s get going, and I’ll explain everything.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT:
Answers
For the first several minutes after they got into the black minivan, all three were silent. Jack and Jemma sat in the back while Heidi drove, and Jemma clutched Jack’s hand. Josh’s notepad rested on the seat next to her, a silent and unnecessary reminder of how they’d spent their morning.
“I know you have questions,” Heidi said, sounding more subdued than she had the last time they’d spoken. Her accent was a little less pronounced. “Do you want to start there, or do you want me to explain what I can first?”
Jemma tightened then relaxed her grip on Jack’s hand, and he ran his thumb across her skin. “Tell us what you’re going to first,” Jemma said finally. “That’ll give us a better idea of the questions to ask.” Heidi nodded, and Jemma saw her glance at them in the rear view mirror before returning her eyes to the road.
“You’ve figured out by now, of course, that I’m not just a bodyguard for hire.” Heidi paused, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. “The various organizations in the government who do undercover work and the like, we had a suspicion about Tricorp’s activities and their involvement in the Event. It started before the Event actually happened, rumors of a new weapon they were working on. They wanted to sell it to the military, so why wouldn’t they let rumors leak to the federal government?”
She rubbed her neck, then put her hand back on the steering wheel and continued. “They didn’t do anything about it soon enough. There wasn’t enough information. We didn’t know whether it was a real threat, and we had no indications they planned to silence the world. That’s not exactly something anyone ever worried about before.
“Still, we started setting up identities, establishing ties to the company where we could. We knew they were running blood tests. We could have done something then, but that wouldn’t have helped if they were planning something bigger, not a serious enough offense, and Tricorp would’ve known we were watching them. I had patterns in my blood similar to those in the people they were flagging, so I was chosen as one of the lucky ones, in case my genetics helped at some point. Your Dr. Harris would’ve referred to me as a ‘potential,’ and it did get them interested when they looked through their options for guards, but my abilities were too weak, and I was of more use with my gun than my mind.”
Jemma remembered when Heidi had brushed against her in the hallway, when her overworked brain had revolted and gotten dizzy. Heidi must have tried to Talk to her and almost gotten through. How much easier would everything have been if that had worked? Then again, it may have pushed her over the edge instead, rendered her useless for even longer, making them miss their escape attempt.
Jack’s thumb had stilled while they listened, and Jemma loosened her grip once more.
“So when the Event finally happened,” Heidi continued, “I was already in place. I was on their list of preferred contacts for muscle, and they brought me in almost immediately. Transferred me to Naomi after a while, which is when we met.” She looked in the mirror again, just long enough to meet Jemma’s eyes. She fell silent, her eyes back on the road as they merged onto the highway.
Jemma spoke up, asking a question that she realized had been bothering her since she’d seen Heidi for the first time that day. “Why didn’t you step in when you saw everything they were doing? You let them torture us.”
“And I hate that.” Heidi was vehement, her voice regaining that hint of southern accent she must have lost for work. “I couldn’t get the approval to make a move. All I could do was stay as close as possible to the person they were mistreating the most, keep you safe as best I could.”
“I don’t understand,” said Jack. “You must’ve had proof by then. Hell, you eventually walked Jemma out entirely. What changed?”
Heidi nodded, acknowledging the question, but it took her a minute to respond. “We couldn’t reverse the Event ourselves. We had our own scientists working on it, but without the required knowledge of exactly how the Event was triggered in the first place, we didn’t have a chance. I was to remain in place, to keep an eye on what Tricorp was doing. I had to maintain my cover until there was a cure. And knowing what I know now about how it worked, the combination of tech and living contagion? I don’t think the cure was ever gonna come from anyone but Tricorp.”
“So you could help us escape,” said Jemma, “but you couldn’t blow your cover until it was over?”
“Well,” Heidi drawled, “I didn’t officially help you with your first escape. You were Tricorp’s fastest means to a cure, as far as we knew, so helping you get out, well, it was a little counterproductive.” She drummed her fingers on the wheel again. “It wasn’t right, though. If you’d been treated better, maybe I wouldn’t have, but that wasn’t the case.” She sighed. “And then you came back.”
“We thought she had to,” said Jack. “We finally figured out what was going on, and, like you said, they were doing their best to make it seem like they needed us in order to save everyone.” Jemma felt Jack tense, and she sent a wave of reassurance. “If we’d known how they’d treat Jemma when she got back, we never would have done it.”
“I didn’t expect it to be that bad, either,” said Heidi. “It was that creep. He was worse than anyone had guessed.” She slammed a hand against the steering wheel. “And then they let him go.” She shook her head and took a breath. “But that came later. As soon as you told me about the cure, Jemma, I wasn’t willing to wait to be told again that I couldn’t do anything that might blow my cover. I’m not an idiot, and I was aiming to maintain my cover beyond all this, if needed, but with Josh threatening to destroy what we needed, I couldn’t risk being told ‘no.’”
“So you didn’t ask,” Jemma said, remembering how little time they’d had between her telling Heidi about the cure and actually going to take care of it.
“I didn’t ask,” Heidi agreed. “Then afterward, my supervisor still wasn’t giving me the go-ahead to get you out of there. Said he wanted the remaining employees to trust me. It made sense, so I let it go as long as I could, but that wasn’t exactly long. Soon as I knew Josh was still running those kinds of tests, still doing things to hurt you? I got you all out.”
“And you didn’t get fired or anything, obviously,” Jack said.
Heidi shook her head again. “They’d waited too long to get everyone out, and they knew it. I’m sure I’ll get a slap on the wrist when this is all over, but they can’t really say that I
disobeyed their orders, not when I did what was needed.”
“How’d you get here today?” Jemma asked. “I’m guessing you were either the agent who was supposed to keep an eye on us or you were called in when the agent lost us.”
Heidi huffed and exited the highway, following signs for the airport. “I was the one keeping an eye on you, and I never did lose you. After they screwed up and let Josh go—and I mean, they realized probably twenty minutes after he was released how much of a mistake they’d made—they were hoping to keep you two safe. At least, most of them were. We had too many agencies working together, and we’re not exactly used to that. Someone thought it would be a bright idea to leave your information where Josh would be able to find it. Use you as bait. Another was brilliant enough to place your safe house in the outskirts of the same city we thought Josh might set up in. They made it too easy, and we weren’t ready.
“I saw him and another man leaving with you. It was too late to stop them, but I was able to follow. Then it was a matter of waiting for backup, which took some time to scramble. Then there was another delay while we tried to figure out whether he had more than just the one accomplice. Finally, we were cleared to go in there and get you.”
“So he had help,” Jemma confirmed. “We already knew he was getting information from someone.”
“Just the person who helped him take you, a guy named Robert Maxwell. He owned the house Josh was holding you in, and apparently they went to college together. He’s a computer tech type who I guess was able to find information for Josh. He probably helped gather the lab equipment, too, without raising any flags. And the sedatives, which I’m sure you noticed. We arrested him upstairs, and he'll be tried as an accomplice.”
Heidi pulled into the short-term parking lot, stopping in a space not too far from what looked like the main door for departures.
“Do we get to go home?” Jemma asked, swallowing when she realized how badly she wanted to. The easy back-and-forth of Jack’s thumb resumed.