In the end he made his way back to the hotel, hoping that maybe Jenna had shown up. Of course, according to their original plans, they were supposed to be on their way to Seven Falls by now, but even if something unexpected had convinced Jenna to leave, where else would she come back to but the hotel where she’d left all her belongings?
Unfortunately, the hotel room was just as empty as it had been when he’d left it two hours before. Housekeeping had been in and straightened things up a bit, but there was no sign that Jenna had stepped foot through the door. Her clothes still hung in the small mirrored closet, and her bag of toiletries hung untouched in the bathroom.
Groaning in frustration, he flopped down on the bed and pulled out his flipcom. He was exhausted—he’d had barely any sleep the night before, and it felt like he’d traipsed around half the city—and his shaking fingers stumbled over trying to pull up their bank account. Netbands like the one he had on Terra had finally begun to be commonplace here on Zenith, but Jimmy had never bothered with one. His budget for the latest gadgets was small, and, honestly, he’d found that once he had gone back to using a flipcom, he preferred it. But now he was wishing he had a netband with its neural implant that would let him just mentally communicate what it was he wanted to do. Finally, he managed to pull up the bank screen and scanned the entries, looking for some sign that Jenna had accessed the account since the day before.
Nothing other than the restaurant last night, his breakfast in the morning, and his taxi and tube fares. He grimaced. Jenna hadn’t spent so much as a senine from their account since she’d disappeared. How was she eating? What was she doing? Where was she?
The worries harassed his mind, leaving him a speck short of going mad. Was this how Jenna felt all the time when she worried about her sister? No wonder she’d had trouble eating and sleeping. For the first time, Jimmy began to have a true inkling of how hard the last few months had been for her.
Taking a deep breath, he decided that it was time to comm Mrs. Smitz. She needed to know that Jenna was missing, and he needed to check on the children anyway. Plus there was always the slim chance that she had heard from Jenna. However, Mrs. Smitz didn’t answer his comm. He left her a high-priority message (basically stating that there was an emergency and please comm him right away). Feeling utterly frustrated, he dropped the flipcom beside him on the bed and closed his eyes. Maybe he just needed to rest. He pressed his face against the pillow, not bothering to even take off his shoes. He’d close his eyes for just a few minutes. Maybe he would wake up with a brilliant idea that would lead him to his wife. Maybe he would wake up to find her beside him . . .
Brrreeeeeeet!
Jimmy shot straight up in bed, gasping in alarm. He blinked, his vision fuzzy. Where was he? What was going on? He looked around the room in confusion, trying to place where he was. Reality slowly crept back into his brain. He was in the hotel room in Omphalos. Jenna was missing. His flipcom was still shrilly buzzing, the source of the awful noise that had jolted him awake. He fumbled with it for a moment, finally silencing the blood-curdling noise. Jenna had chosen his high-priority alert for him ages ago, insisting that only an alarm obnoxious enough to resurrect the dead would wake him up if he was sleeping. Suddenly, his thoughts cleared. A high-priority alert! His heart leaped in hope. He snapped the flipcom open, eagerly looking for the new comm. Maybe the admiral had found something. Maybe Mrs. Smitz had heard from Jenna. Maybe Jenna herself had commed him . . .
It was from Jax. He frowned. That was ominous. Jax almost never commed him.
The text was short and direct: Jimmy, come home now.
He sucked in his breath. What now? He immediately tried to comm Jax live. Of course, he didn’t get an answer. It didn’t surprise him. Jax hadn’t answered a live comm in at least ten years, not that Jimmy knew of anyway. He tried a text comm instead: What’s wrong, Jax? Without waiting for a reply, he tried Mrs. Smitz again, but she didn’t answer. After several minutes without a text reply from Jax, Jimmy pulled up a newsfeed for Tarentino, wondering if there was something unusual going on the town, but he couldn’t find anything that would have disturbed Jax or would make it impossible for him to get hold of his family. Tapping a finger against his lip, he finally decided to try to check on Mrs. Smitz and Jax by their security tags. He hated to invade their privacy that way; he had never used this function of Jax’s security system before, but this was the kind of situation that it had been created for. Pulling up the security app, he selected the location map. Jax’s system could mark all the family members by their flipcoms, assuming they were inside the property’s security perimeter. To his utter dismay, there was no blinking dot marking the location of Mrs. Smitz. Jax’s light blinked in his bedroom, but that was hardly a reassurance. Jax usually left his flipcom in his room. Though Jax couldn’t be very far, if he had recently commed Jimmy.
After a moment of debate, he decided to contact their neighbor Leo. They weren’t terribly close to Leo—their property was pretty large, and so Leo’s house was at least a mile away. But over the years they had scraped up an acquaintance, a positive one despite the fact that their property line had originally been disputed. Pulling up Leo’s terminal address, he commed him live. He wasn’t sure Leo would answer—Leo ran a mechanic’s garage repairing logging equipment, but at this time of day in Tarentino he was probably getting ready to call it a night and head to bed. He might even be asleep already. But he was Jimmy’s best bet in this situation.
He was lucky—Leo answered right away. “Hey, Jimmy! This is a real surprise. What can I do for you?”
“Hi, Leo. Did I wake you?”
“No, I was just reading. What’s wrong?” His voice was concerned. Jimmy obviously wasn’t comming just to chat at this hour.
“I need a favor pretty badly,” Jimmy admitted.
“Sure. What can I do?”
“I’m in Omphalos with Jenna, and we’ve had an emergency here. We left the kids with Mrs. Smitz, but now I can’t get her to answer a comm. My brother commed me and told me to come home, but he won’t answer when I try to get him live, and he’s not responding to my text comms.”
“So you want me to run over to your house? See if everything’s all right?” Leo asked, his voice muffled. He was thumping around a bit. Maybe Jimmy had caught him in bed, and he had to pull on clothes and shoes again. Jimmy didn’t feel any regret, though, at interrupting his neighbor. He just felt relief that Leo was willing to help.
“If you would,” Jimmy said gratefully. “I’m worried, and I’m half a world away, so there’s nothing I can do about it. Our security system doesn’t show Mrs. Smitz at home, though I can’t think of a good reason she would have left with the kids this late at night.”
“Can I get through your security?” Leo asked. His voice echoed as if he was heading through a hallway.
“Yeah, comm me at the gate, and I’ll request a window so you can walk in.”
“Give me about ten minutes, and I’ll comm you back.”
Jimmy shut off the flipcom and pulled himself off the bed. He stretched, his muscles aching in protest. He was still so tired. How long had he slept? Checking the clock, he realized that he’d slept for almost three hours. He had only two hours until it was time to leave to meet Marian at the shuttleport.
It had been almost a full day since he had last seen Jenna.
He finally got Leo’s text comm saying he had arrived at the Forrest front gate, and Jimmy entered the override code that would allow him in. Then he settled back to wait.
It might have been fifteen of the longest minutes in his life.
When Leo finally commed him again, Jimmy answered breathlessly, “Hi, Leo. Did you find any of them?”
“No,” Leo’s voice was puzzled. “Your house is dark and locked up tight. I knocked several times, figuring they might already be asleep, but there was no response at all.”
“Are you still at
my house?”
“Yeah, I haven’t headed across to the other buildings yet.”
“Go ahead and try the handle,” Jimmy suggested. If Mrs. Smitz and the kids were asleep, it might scare them to death to have somebody walk into the house in the middle of the night, but what if they needed help?
“Locked tight,” reported Leo. “Want me to look in the windows?”
“Sure, if you can be discreet. The last thing we need is one of the girls having nightmares about a stranger staring in their window at night.”
There was a brief moment with nothing but low crunching sounds in the background as Leo stepped on the bushes surrounding the house.
“I can’t see anyone in any of the rooms.”
Jimmy’s stomach dropped.
“Well, maybe they’re at Mrs. Smitz’s house. Let me try to comm Jax again and let him know you’re there,” Jimmy said.
“OK. I’ll comm you again in a couple of minutes.”
Jimmy ended the comm and tried his brother again. He got no response, so he left a message stating that Leo was at the house and if Jax needed help to open the door. He tried Mrs. Smitz again too, but of course got no answer.
When Leo commed again, it wasn’t encouraging. “At Mrs. Smitz’s home there were lights on, but no answer at her door. I couldn’t hear or see anything in there. I tried your brother’s place too, but I didn’t really expect to get an answer there,” he said. His tone was concerned. Jimmy sighed. It would have been too much to ask for Jax to answer Leo, but he had to be home. Why send a cryptic comm and then refuse to explain?
“It looks almost like your whole family has been gone for days,” Leo reported in bewilderment. “Are you sure they were going to be here? Or could they possibly be in your brother’s home? I didn’t poke around there much because I didn’t want to get sliced to pieces by a laser.”
Jimmy’s heart sank all the way to the soles of his boots. This was not a good sign. “OK. Thanks, Leo. I owe you one. If you happen to see any of them, even the kids, will you comm me right away?” Leo agreed willingly, and Jimmy closed the connection, letting his flipcom slowly drop to the floor without noticing.
Now what was he going to do? Jenna missing here in Omphalos. Mrs. Smitz and the kids and maybe even Jax apparently missing in Tarentino. What should he do? Where should he go? Should he stay here and search for Jenna in Omphalos or return to Tarentino and track down the rest of his family?
In the end he decided to stay in Omphalos. Marian was going on to Tarentino. Hopefully she would be able to get some answers. But he couldn’t leave the city, not without Jenna.
Reluctantly, he sent an update to his father-in-law, wondering if this was just going to make things worse. Maybe not even the admiral would believe him now. Maybe he would think that Jenna really had left him, only she’d taken the kids and Mrs. Smitz with her. Sudden doubt plagued him. Perhaps there was some elaborate conspiracy—only it was woven by Jenna herself. What else could explain this? Then the most obvious alternative answer came to him. All his childhood he had been drilled in safety, threat awareness, followed by bodyguards, and basically so restricted that as soon as he had reached adulthood he had rebelled against all of it. But his father had seen the constant kidnapping-defense state as necessary. The ultrawealthy were always targets for ransom, the well-connected were targets for political demands, and those who had ties to the criminal underworld could be targets for revenge. His father was extremely rich, politically influential, and had ties to the shady underground world. What if Jenna and the kids had been kidnapped? He shook his head in frustration. The problem with that theory was that Jenna had voluntarily left the restaurant. There had been nobody with her forcing her to do it.
●●●
Late that night he waited at the gate in the shuttleport for Marian. He shifted uneasily, wondering what kind of state his mother-in-law would be in. Both of Marian’s parents had died when she was still young. She had then gone to live with her aunt and uncle only to have two of her cousins—close enough to be like her siblings—die when she was a young adult. Then Marian’s youngest child died in an accident when he was only nine. As if that weren’t enough tragedy for any single life, one of her daughters had crashed somewhere in a Zorian forest when she was nineteen and had been missing for years until the news came half a year ago that she was on Corizen. All this had a terrible effect on Marian. The whole time Jimmy had known her, she had been extremely paranoid and often seemed overwhelmed by fears. Her conviction that all these tragedies were the result of the curse by that Roran man only made things worse. Would Jenna’s disappearance finally break her?
However, when Marian strode out of the gate, she didn’t look either neurotically anxious or overwhelmingly sad. She looked . . . resolute.
She marched right up to him and hugged him tightly. “Jimmy,” she greeted, her voice stoic.
“Hi, Marian,” he said in return, his voice raspy.
“Have you eaten?” she asked briskly.
Jimmy grimaced. “A little, this morning,” he said. Eating had been the last thing on his mind. He’d spent two hours repeatedly comming his brother and Mrs. Smitz and searching newsfeeds and obsessively following posts on Lilah’s “Find Jenna!” feed.
“First things first, then,” she determined. “Let’s get something to eat, and then you can tell me everything. I want to hear it from you. Richard might have missed something.”
Jimmy cringed. He still had to tell her that he couldn’t get a hold of Mrs. Smitz or the kids.
He finally gathered his courage once they were sitting in one of the shuttleport snack bars with a meal grabbed from the dispensers. The place was nearly empty. A single attendant sat at the far table, a book reader in hand, while one other customer sipped something steaming while staring at the terminal screen on the wall. Jimmy looked down at the stuffed rolls on his tray and then took a deep breath. At first the words wouldn’t come, but just as she was urging him to at least taste a roll, he blurted, “I’m afraid the kids are missing too.”
Marian froze, her spoon of yogurt part way to her mouth.
“What?” she exclaimed faintly.
“I can’t get Mrs. Smitz to answer a comm. Her flipcom doesn’t show up on the home security map. My neighbor Leo went by the house to try and check on them for me, and he couldn’t find anybody. The house was dark and locked up, and nobody was at Mrs. Smitz’s place either, which doesn’t make sense because it was nearly midnight there,” he explained in a rush. “Where would they have gone?” Just saying the words out loud made them seem more real. His stomach churned, and he looked at his soup in distaste. How could he eat when his family was in trouble?
“I’m too late,” Marian muttered, her forehead creased. “I knew the children would be next. I wanted to get there first, try to stop it.”
“What are you talking about?” Jimmy eyed her suspiciously. “You knew the children would be next? Next for what? Do you know where Jenna is?”
“No,” she sighed. “But I’ve just had this feeling, this strong feeling lately, as if some doom were hanging over the family. Almost like an outside force pressing on my mind. A gloating force,” she added, her words more quiet.
That’s ridiculous, Jimmy wanted to argue. But he couldn’t. Jenna had walked out on him. The kids and Mrs. Smitz were who knew where. Nothing seemed impossible at this point. Even invisible malignant forces attacking the family.
Finally, Marian straightened her shoulders and took another bite of her yogurt. “I’ve cowered in fear long enough. I refuse to sit around and wring my hands in worry any longer. It is time to break this curse. Whatever it takes. I won’t sit around and watch everyone I love be taken away.”
Jimmy wished he could feel her optimism. But all he could feel was a burgeoning sense of dread. The feeling that he was running out of time. There was something he was missing in all this. But what
was it?
“What about Jax?” she asked. “Have you spoken to him?”
Jimmy shook his head. “He sent me a text comm earlier today that said to come home now, but I haven’t been able to get him live. I don’t know if that’s because something’s happened to him too or just because he refuses to answer the comms. That would be normal behavior for him. It was unbelievable that he commed me at all in the first place.”
Marian frowned thoughtfully and continued to eat. Jimmy pushed around his food half-heartedly. Finally, Marian rebuked him.
“You will be useless to your family if you can’t keep up your strength. You have to eat.” Grudgingly, Jimmy obeyed, but it was tasteless, and every bite seemed like it would choke him.
“What if she really left me?” His voice came out in a harsh whisper. “What if she really was so unhappy that she just walked out? She could have taken the early shuttle back to Tarentino this morning, picked up the kids, convinced Mrs. Smitz to go with her, and left.”
Marian chuckled a little, putting down her spoon. Jimmy bristled. He didn’t see anything funny about it at all.
“Oh, Jimmy,” she sighed. “Think about what you’re saying. If Jenna wanted to leave you, don’t you think she’d just tell you that? Why go through the hassle of traveling here to Omphalos and then going back? Even if she just wanted to slip away and hide from all of us—which I don’t believe she’d ever do to me, let alone to you—she would have just left from Tarentino Bay. It would have been so much simpler.” Jimmy considered that. Of course it would have been simpler. Of course leaving him here in Omphalos made little sense. But nothing about this situation made any sense.
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