Closing the compartment, Nana picked up the tiny key again and locked it before placing the insert back into place. She returned the jewelry box to its position on the vanity table and then took the few steps to the small bookshelf on the other side of the room. A silver picture frame stood out in stark contrast from the faded antique books that surrounded it. She reached for it and took it into her hands. The faces of her parents gazed up at her and she looked down at them with a blend of love and sadness in her heart. Nana touched each of them, first tracing the outline of her father’s face and then her mother’s. She could still remember them so distinctly, from the sound of their voices to the smell of their skin when they hugged her. When she closed her eyes, she could still feel the soft fabric of her father’s shirt when he lifted her into his arms and carried around the house after coming home from work, or her mother’s hand brushing across her hair as she lulled her to sleep at night.
“It’s all working out now,” Nana whispered to the picture. “It’s all going to be fine. I’ll make sure that it is.”
Chapter Eleven
Gannon walked through the front door of Nana’s house and immediately sensed the frantic, almost chaotic energy that was in the air. It was the first time that he had been back to the house in a couple of days and it felt as though something within the walls had shifted. He paused just inside the door and looked around, waiting for something to happen, though he didn’t know what.
“Is something wrong?” Willow asked from behind him.
Gannon shook his head, not wanting to alarm her. There was still so much about himself and everything that he had been through that he hadn’t told her yet and that she wouldn’t understand. It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to know or that he was ashamed of what he had been through. He knew that in time he would be able to tell her everything and it would draw them closer together. For now, though, they were still building their relationship, exploring their newfound love as they got to know each other. He didn’t know what might be happening in the house, but there was worry in the back of his mind that it had something to do with Ryan. Gannon didn’t want to risk putting Willow into any kind of danger, so he glanced over his shoulder toward her and smiled.
“No,” he said. “Everything’s fine. I think everybody’s still sleeping.”
Willow glanced down at her phone.
“At this hour?” she asked. “At least Aubrey shouldn’t be. She should be getting ready for work. And I should, too.” She leaned forward and kissed him. “I’ll see you tonight?” she asked.
“Absolutely.”
Gannon kissed her again, never feeling like he could get enough of the feeling or taste of her lips. He wanted to sweep her up into his arms and spend the day holding her, but he knew that she couldn’t. Willow gave him another smile.
“Tell Nana that I came by, but I didn’t have much time.”
“I will.”
A final kiss and she left, walking back down the front stairs and to her car where she had left it in the driveway. As soon as she had driven away, Gannon stepped the rest of the way into the house and closed the door behind him. He could hear footsteps above him and knew that there was someone else awake in the house. He climbed the stairs cautiously, unsure of what he was going to encounter when he got there. When he stepped onto the landing, he saw a figure rushing out of a room toward him. The automatic defensiveness swelled in him and Gannon felt primed to fight, but an instant later he realized that it was Jonah coming out of his bedroom.
Gannon’s muscles released, and he chided himself for still not being able to control the urges that were within him. He wanted to free himself of them, to remove them from his mind so that he could live his life without always waiting for the next attack, the next imagined battle.
“What are you doing?” he asked as Jonah continued past him and started down the stairs.
Jonah looked back at him, but didn’t answer. Gannon followed him down the stairs and watched as he placed two large suitcases that he had been carrying beside the front door.
“Did anyone see you while you were gone?” Jonah asked.
“Just Willow,” Gannon replied. “Are you going somewhere?”
Jonah looked at Gannon for a few moments as if evaluating him and then gestured toward the stairs.
“Come with me.”
They rushed up the steps and into one of the small rooms off of the hallway that led to Jonah’s bedroom. Inside Aubrey was sitting at a table tucked into the curve of a large bay window. There were papers and books spread in front of her and she was holding a computerized map in her hands. She looked up when they walked in and then glanced at Jonah questioningly.
“What is he doing here?” she asked.
Jonah gestured toward the table and they both sat down with Aubrey.
“There’s something that neither of us thought about,” he said. “We’ve been looking through these files and books and trying to figure out what these people were thinking, but we never stopped to think of the unique perspective into all of this that we have had right in front of us.” He looked at Gannon. “A glimpse into the mind of the continuation of what started with Nyx 23.”
Gannon didn’t understand what Jonah was talking about, but he could tell by the looks on both of their faces that they considered him extremely important to whatever it was that they were doing.
“Gannon,” Aubrey said, leaning slightly toward him across the table. “Do you know anything about something called Izalux?”
The word tumbled around in Gannon’s mind, but he couldn’t connect it to any memories or meaning. He shook his head.
“I’ve never heard of it,” he said. “What is it?”
Aubrey looked back down at the papers and books in front of her and raked her fingers back through her hair.
“That’s exactly what we’re trying to figure out,” she said.
“Can you tell us more about the Valdicians?” Jonah asked. “Anything? What they look like, any words that they used that you didn’t hear anyone else use? Where they come from? Anything?”
Gannon shook his head.
“I don’t know what I could tell you that would help you, or that you don’t know already. We only saw them in their robes, just like you did. I can’t tell you if they used any strange words because those are the words that we always heard.” A thought crossed his mind and he stood. “Give me just a minute. I’ll be right back.”
He hurried out of the room and up the second flight of stairs to the bedrooms on the next floor. Rapping on the first door with his knuckles, Gannon leaned close to listen for any sound from inside. Finally, he heard footsteps coming toward him.
“Who is it?” a sleepy, suspicious voice asked from the other side of the door.
It was an expected response, one that Gannon knew that he was likely to give. Both still feared the possibility of the danger that they had left behind in the University reappearing and neither was fully ready to give up the guards that protected them.
“Mordecai, it’s Gannon. I need to talk to you.”
It was still strange to refer to the other hybrid man by the name that he had chosen, yet it felt completely natural for Gannon to think of himself with his own title. He knew that he was going to get used to it the more often he used it, and he was committed to saying it as much as he could, reinforcing it in his mind and in Mordecai’s, railing against Ryan with every time that the sounds repeated in his mind and passed his lips.
A few seconds later the door opened and Mordecai peered out at him. He looked up and down the hallway and then eased his way around the door to step out with Gannon.
“What is it?” Mordecai asked.
“I don’t think that we should talk here,” Gannon said. “Come with me.”
They made their way back to the room with Aubrey and sat at the table with her.
“They asked me about Izalux,” Gannon said to Mordecai. “Have you ever heard that word? Do you know what it is?”
Mordecai shook his head.
“No, I…” Gannon saw his eyes widen and Mordecai leaned forward slightly. “Yes, he said. I have. I just remembered. One time when I was in reprogramming, I heard the Valdicians talking. I’m sure they didn’t think that I could hear them or that I wasn’t paying attention because of what I was going through, but I had already been reprogrammed so many times. I had learned to block out the process and focus my energy and attention on other things that were happening around me. This was before they implemented the screens.”
Gannon felt himself shudder at the mention of the screens. He remembered how it felt to have them secured to his head and the horrific images that would flash in front of him for as long as the Valdicians kept him trapped in the reprogramming room. He wished that he could rid himself of those memories, that he could erase them from his mind and never have to think of them again. The pictures were like scars, though, branded into his mind so that he was never able to separate from them. Every moment of that was a part of him and he was going to have to learn to live with these existences in parallel, hoping that one day, the former fell away with the strength of his new life.
“What did they say?” Gannon asked.
“I heard one of them mention to another that they were running low on their supply.”
“Of Izalux?” Aubrey asked.
Mordecai nodded.
“I think that’s what they said. He said that they would need to go back to the factory where the storage was held to make sure that they had enough.”
“But they didn’t say what it was or what it did?” Jonah asked.
“No,” Mordecai said. “They just said that they needed to go back to the factory. As they were leaving the room they were talking about how many of them would go and how much of the Izalux they would need to bring back with them to make sure that those who weren’t able to make the journey with them had what they needed.”
“We need to hurry,” Jonah said, looking to Aubrey.
“Hurry?” Gannon asked. “Why? What are you doing?”
Aubrey looked at him, but didn’t answer. She moved the tip of her finger across the screen of the computerized map in her hand and then drew her fingers across it to isolate a certain part of the image.
“Are you going to the factory that the Valdicians mentioned?” Gannon asked. “Do you know where it is?”
Aubrey looked over Gannon toward Jonah.
“Did you finish packing?”
“Yes,” Jonah said. “Are you sure that the lab isn’t going to be expecting you?”
“When I called them yesterday I said that I was going to need at least two weeks.”
“And if you aren’t ready to go back in two weeks?”
“Then I don’t go back.”
“You are going to the factory,” Gannon said. “What is it that you think that you’re going to find there?”
Aubrey continued to ignore him as she gathered up everything that was on the table in front of her, but Jonah looked at him and nodded.
“We’re going to the factory,” he said. “We don’t know what we’re looking for or what we think that we might find. But this is all we have.”
That was that Gannon needed to hear. He stood and extended his hand toward Jonah.
“I would be honored to go with you if you will have me,” he said.
“You will?”
“You rescued me without question. I’m going to do the same. Whatever it is that you are looking for, or that you need to do, I will be there to help you.”
“So will I,” Mordecai offered.
Gannon saw Aubrey look between the two men and then met his eyes.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Don’t go.”
The sound of the woman’s voice stopped him before he was able to respond to Aubrey and they all turned toward it. Gannon saw Ilya standing at the doorway and realized that he and Mordecai hadn’t closed the door when they had come back into the room. Her hand rested on her swollen belly, Ilya stepped the rest of the way into the room and looked at each of them pointedly.
“You can’t go to the factory,” Ilya said. “It’s far too dangerous.”
“What do you mean?” Jonah asked. “How do you know that the factory is dangerous?”
The woman gave what sounded like an exasperated sigh.
“Because I know,” she said. “You need to stay away from there. Things happen there; you don’t want to be a part of them.”
“Why would you say that?” Aubrey asked.
Ilya turned toward Aubrey and gave her a look that bordered somewhere between smug and incredulous.
“Because I’ve been there.”
Chapter Twelve
Ilya couldn’t believe that Aubrey was looking at her as though she had never seen her before. It was frustrating and almost infuriating in a way that Ilya couldn’t quite put into words.
“You’ve been to the Izalux factory?” Aubrey asked.
“It’s the Orion Corporation factory,” Ilya said, “but yes, I have. But you already knew that, Aubrey.”
Ilya saw Aubrey’s face change as she went through a series of emotions in response to what she had said. At first, she seemed confused, almost repelled, by the assertion, but then slow realization washed over her and her expression relaxed as her eyes widened. She took a small step toward Ilya.
“You,” she said softly. “You were in the lab.”
Ilya nodded.
“I was,” she said. “I didn’t think that you would remember.”
“I didn’t,” Aubrey admitted. “I didn’t recognize you when I saw you. You were barely noticeable when you were in the lab.”
“Well, thank you.”
“No,” Aubrey said. “That’s not what I meant. I’m sorry. It’s just—you were so quiet. You kept totally to yourself. I never even saw you talking to anyone else. You were working on a different project, so I didn’t get a chance to interact with you. But I remember you. I remember you being there.”
“Do you remember me leaving?”
Aubrey nodded and took another step toward her.
“I do,” she said, her voice still softened as if she had forgotten that there was anyone else in the room with them and she was only speaking directly to Ilya. “You were there one day and then the next, you were just gone. There was a little bit of an upheaval because nobody could figure out what had happened to you. You hadn’t let anyone know that you weren’t going to be coming back in and no one knew how to get in touch with you, so we couldn’t check in on you. After a few days, though, we all just assumed that you had found another job somewhere else and hadn’t told anyone because you didn’t really socialize with anyone so there wasn’t anything to say. Those who were working on the same project that you were said that one of the very few things that they knew about you was that you didn’t have any family.”
“That’s true,” Ilya said. “I didn’t have anybody. It’s easy for someone to just disappear without anyone noticing when they don’t have anyone in their lives to care that they are gone. That’s what made it so easy for them to capture me and put me in the program. No one missed me when I was gone, so no one came looking for me.”
“That’s not true,” Aubrey said. “We did wonder where you were, but there was nothing that we could do. You didn’t have any contact information on file and since you didn’t socialize with anyone there was no way for us to get in contact with you or to check to make sure that you were really alright. We couldn’t look for you. Besides, there was someone in the lab who said that they heard you were dating someone.”
“They did?” Ilya asked, taken aback by the revelation.
“Yes,” Aubrey said. “They said that you had been seeing someone for a while, but that you were being quiet about it just like you were quiet about everything else. We figured that even with as quiet as you were, there would be some kind of indication that you were dating someone if there wasn’t something wrong with the relationship. He
would have come to the lab to visit you or you would have eaten with him some time rather than always bringing your lunch. It wasn’t until you disappeared that we started to wonder if maybe you were dating someone who was in the University. Since being involved with someone in certain positions or departments wasn’t allowed, you would have to be quiet about the relationship. We thought that maybe someone in their department or their superior found out about the relationship and threatened consequences, so the two of you ran off together.”
Ilya was surprised. She didn’t think that the people who had shared the same lab before she was captured even recognized that she existed a lot of the time, much less cared enough to go to that much trouble to think of reasons why she might have disappeared. While it felt like an invasion of her privacy for them to be conjecturing about her personal life and the motivations behind her leaving, it was also reassuring that they at least noticed that she was gone. She didn’t want to go any further into what had happened, but she knew that she needed to. The only chance that she might have to convince them to stay away from the factory was to tell them what she had gone through. She nodded.
“I was seeing someone,” she admitted.
“Was he a part of the University?” Aubrey asked.
Ilya looked into the faces of each of the people in the room, wanting to make sure that they were listening.
“Yes,” she said. “It was Ryan.”
Shocked gasps filled the room around her and Aubrey knew that her revelation had had the impact that she wanted it to. It wasn’t something that she wanted to talk about. In all truth, it was something that she didn’t even want to think about any longer. If she could completely eradicate him from her memory, she would. In that moment, however, he was virtually all that she could think about.
“You were involved with Ryan?” Aubrey asked, her voice sounding stunned.
Ilya felt a hard kick on the side of her belly and involuntarily pressed her hand against it. She felt Jonah take her by the arm and start guiding her back toward the chairs positioned around the table in the window.
The Alien's Clue (Uoria Mates V Book 3) Page 12