The Thunderproof Sky

by Loretta Lost

  I sigh, wishing she had experimented more when she had the chance. I was usually always triggered into taking control of the body while she was having sex with men—not that I minded that.

  But damn, Lucy is gorgeous. She is Audrey-Hepburn-level gorgeous.

  I have spent my whole life staring at Cole, and will probably spend the rest of my life staring at him. For tonight, I think I’m just going to stare at her, as much as possible.

  And my food, of course.

  I gaze at all the beautifully plated dishes as they arrive. I pull out my phone and begin to take photographs of the steak and lobster with excitement—just in case this is my last meal. Not last meal as in I’m going to die, but as in it could be the last meal I’m allowed to enjoy all by myself.

  “So, Cole,” Luciana is saying as she uses her fork and knife to cut a jumbo shrimp into smaller pieces. Her newly manicured hands are so pretty. “How did you find Sophie so quickly? When you left for Canada, I had my team working on it, and we had no clue where she was. Detective Rodriguez was trying, but he was stumped.”

  “I wasn’t stumped,” Rodriguez says. “I was… distracted by the skeletal remains of dozens of little girls.”

  Dozens? I try to ignore this, and focus on the lobster.

  Cole shifts around uncomfortably. “Let’s just say I had a hunch, and I called in a favor with some people. Now, I have a question for you two. If Scarlett can handle me discussing this?”

  “Discussing what?” I ask, buttering a roll of bread.

  “Joy.”

  I freeze. My hands freeze in the middle of the buttering motion, and I can feel myself slipping. Joy? Where is Joy? I can imagine her little face vividly. I miss her. My eyes blink rapidly as I fight for control. I take a deep breath, and steady myself, noticing that everyone is looking at me. “What about Joy?” I ask calmly, forcing myself to continue buttering the roll like nothing is wrong. “Did you guys find her… body?”

  “No,” Luciana says softly.

  I don’t realize that I have been buttering my roll mechanically, wiping the knife on the bread over and over and over, until Cole says my name.

  “Scar, I think that’s enough butter.”

  I probably would have continued to butter this piece of bread for a good ten minutes if he hadn’t said that. I stare at the knife, blinking in confusion.

  Luciana places her lovely hand on mine. That immediately calms me, and I look up to see her gazing at me with those smoky eyes, filled with kindness and sensitivity. Yes, I think I’m definitely attracted to women, because I can feel warmth spreading through my stomach with the way she looks at me.

  She is so fucking pretty.

  “We could never find any evidence that you had a baby four years ago, Sophie,” Luciana explains. “I still have people looking into it, especially combing through Benjamin’s past, to see if he was having you watched, or having you drugged. We might be able to find notes from a private investigator, or something like that.”

  I shake my head. “You won’t find anything—if Benjamin did something to me back then, he would have covered it up. But I think it was all in my head—due to being drugged out of my mind under that farmhouse. I was hearing Benjamin say strange things that weren’t real while he tortured me. He even used electricity,” I say quietly, and I see a look of horror on Detective Rodriguez’s face. The other two are expressionless—they are able to conceal it more.

  I clear my throat, trying to brush it off. “It’s okay. It just brought back a lot of unpleasant memories from my childhood—and probably just guilt and distress over the miscarriage, and leaving Cole.” I make eye contact with him briefly, and look away. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he says, putting his hand on my knee under the table. “I understand why you left. I was a bit of a jackass back then.”

  “Pregnancy hormones,” I say suddenly. “When I started working for Luciana, they did a complete physical, including bloodwork. They asked me if I’d recently had a pregnancy, and I told them it was a miscarriage. But if you can access that information, maybe the precise amount of hCG levels in my system, combined with the date I left Cole, after finding out, it could tell us how far along I had been.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Luciana says.

  “I would have known if I had a baby. I’m not crazy.”

  “Of course, you’re not crazy, babe,” Luciana says, popping a piece of shrimp in her mouth. “Would I hire a crazy person to do top secret government things? Things we can’t even talk about in front of the boys, because they are such cool and classified things? Nope.”

  She makes me feel like I am special, part of some inner circle.

  “I really hope you’ll come back and hack for me, someday,” Luciana says. “I miss you.”

  My fingers strum against the table. I don’t know how to tell her that I can’t really hack very well. I see that Cole is watching me, and I know that hacking was on the list of things Serena needs to do for her health. “I would love to come back to work soon, but I’m not sure I’m ready. Maybe I’ll reevaluate after Switzerland.”

  “Whenever you’re ready,” Luciana says.

  Rodriguez grabs the wine bottle to refill his glass. “What about you, Cole?” he asks. “Any plans to return to the world of architecture?”

  “Well,” he says quietly. “There is this one project everyone keeps bugging me about, that has really piqued my curiosity. Levi and Miranda keep bombarding me with texts about it.”

  “What is it?” Rodriguez asks.

  “You guys know how I’m involved with building parts of this new city in Pakistan?”

  We all nod.

  “Well, there’s this nearby area that’s prone to a lot of lightning and thunder. Apparently, there are storms all night and people can’t sleep. Someone at the company joked that I should design a tower that was so soundproof that everyone could sleep peacefully. So that even when the storms were raging just outside the window, it feels perfectly safe indoors.”

  “Thunderproof,” Luciana contributes softly, pausing with her mouth full. “That’s interesting.”

  “Yes,” Cole says. “It’s not really the lightning that wakes you up. It’s the noise—that’s what makes children run into their parents’ bed for hugs, to feel protected. That’s what makes puppies and kittens hide, trembling in a corner.”

  “A good reason not to leave them out in the rain,” I mutter under my breath as I work on my lobster tail.

  “That sounds really cool,” Rodriguez says, with wide eyes. “Why do you have the coolest job?”

  “It gets even better,” Cole says. “So there have been some new developments in lightning-harnessing technology, and in a region like this—where the lightning is so concentrated, it might be possible to extract some electricity from the lightning, using the tower.”

  I pause. Something in me is awakened by this idea, and I pick up my phone, beginning to do quick research on the subject. “This technology is useless. It’s in its infancy, and it wouldn’t really do much. You could probably achieve more with solar panels, and most of your buildings already have solar panels.”

  “But maybe you could help me,” Cole says softly. “There are only a few regions in the world where the concentration of lightning is high enough for us to possibly harness it. Some lake in Venezuela, and—”

  “A small village in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” I say, as I scroll through my search results. “Some places in Florida, Malaysia, Singapore.”

  “We are thinking of doing a practice tower in Pakistan, and then building better ones in Miami and Singapore.”

  “It doesn’t seem very practical,” I muse. “The amount of power you’d receive from the lightning? Very small. But—it would definitely be a novelty design, and it could attract a lot of positive media attention for your company.”

  “Exactly. Maybe even enough to offset the tragedy of the CEO getting murdered—because that really hit our stock prices, and I ow
e it to my shareholders to come back from the dead. At least in spirit.”

  Rodriguez clears his throat. “You really should have thought about all this before retiring. I warned you. I went through all that trouble to help you fake your own death, and I did such a good job.”

  “I’m going to stay dead, and retired—but maybe they could say they found these designs for the lightning tower in my belongings.”

  “You could have it power a lightshow,” I add suddenly. “Even if the lightning isn’t enough to give electricity to the whole building—the solar panels will be. But whenever there’s lightning, you can have the whole building light up in different colors, in an entirely unique lightshow that is triggered by the unique energy signature of the lightning bolts. I could program it for you.” As I say this, I almost wonder what I’m saying. I couldn’t program anything, could I? I mean, I have watched Serena do it a million times—would I be capable?

  “Scar… that’s brilliant. And beautiful.” Cole is looking at me like he loves me again. He is looking at me the way he always looks at Serena when she says something intelligent.

  Rodriguez has even paused in the middle of munching on his rack of lamb. “It would be like God was playing a visual symphony on the building. Like playing the piano for your eyes.”

  Cole smiles. “That would turn the storms into something way more pleasant. Anyone caught in the rain could look up through the thunderstorm, and see the building lighting up like a beacon.”

  “There are a lot of towers with light shows all over the world,” Scarlett says. “I was just in Toronto, with Zack, and the CN Tower has a beautiful light show every night.”

  “I know,” Cole said. “The placement of the lights and the colors are considered an architectural enhancement. Different colors to commemorate different holidays, or the city’s sports team winning a game.”

  “But I think that we can do better,” I tell him with a smile.

  “Okay, I’m jealous,” Luciana says with a pout. “Cole, back off. She’s my hacker and programmer of very important things.”

  “No way. I had her first.”

  “But she’s mine, now,” Luciana whines.

  Why is it so enjoyable to have people argue over you? I smile, resting my chin on my palm as I watch them bicker. Maybe I’ll just fantasize that it’s sexual jealousy and not the professional kind.

  “My projects are way more creative than yours,” Cole complains. “It would give her way more pleasure and satisfaction to work with me.”

  “On some ostentatious, phallic publicity stunt? Please. Sophie’s better than that. You know what they say—the taller the tower, the more the architect is compensating for his insufficiency below the Gucci belt.”

  Rodriguez coughs on his wine, and Cole glares.

  Is it just me, or is this getting strangely sexual?

  “You’ve seen me naked, Luciana. You know there are no insufficiencies.”

  “Wait, when?” Rodriguez asks, with hurt in his voice.

  “He was wearing Pikachu boxers,” Luciana says, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “A really flattering look for a grown man.”

  “I’m rich, and I’m my own boss. I can wear whatever the fuck I want,” Cole says. “Also, I still managed to kick your ass.”

  “Only because I was taking it easy on you,” Luciana says with a scoff. “But as enticing as you look with your ass covered in Pokémon, I’m sure Sophie prefers to work in an office in D.C. where people put actual clothing on.”

  This is not entirely true. When Serena is hacking, the whole world disappears.

  “Why would she want that? And what has the CIA done lately that wasn’t boring and yawn-inducing?” Cole demands.

  “Excuse me? National security is a teensy bit more important than programming a fancy intercom for an apartment building.”

  “Okay, what I did with Cole was more exciting than that,” I tell Luciana.

  “Well, we can be exciting too. We can give you more complex jobs. What do you say, Sophie? I need your hacking expertise badly.”

  “I’m not sure,” I say with hesitation.

  “I can hire you as a freelancer, and you could work from anywhere in the world,” Luciana suggests.

  “Oh, really? That could be nice.”

  “See?” Rodriguez says, as he heaps food into his mouth. “You two don’t have to fight over her. You can share.”

  Cole looks glum. “I guess I can share a little,” he admits.

  I can’t help smiling widely at this. “Don’t worry, Cole. If you’re in the same room, and you can watch, it’s not cheating.”

  “No, he absolutely cannot watch,” Luciana says. “Highly classified, remember?”

  Detective Rodriguez chuckles at this, while Cole mutters to himself and eats his dinner.

  Luciana snaps her fingers. “Actually, Soph—or should I say, Agent Shields? There is one thing I need. Would you be comfortable doing a quick psych eval for me? After everything that happened, with Benjamin… It’s just standard protocol, you know.”

  “Sure,” I respond, but I feel a little nervous. “Do I have to meet with someone?”

  “Oh, everything is online now. I’m going to text you this link, and if you could just complete that questionnaire, it would be a good starting point.”

  I nod as my phone buzzes in my lap with the receipt of the text message, quite quickly. “I’ll do this right away,” I tell her, opening the document.

  “You don’t have to do it right this instant,” she says, “but whenever you can.”

  I am expecting some sort of questionnaire about depression or suicidal thoughts, and it would be easy enough to lie that I’m fine. I mean, I am fine—Serena might not be, but I am. It’s not technically lying if I answer on behalf of myself! But as I begin to read, my eyes grow narrowed. These questions have nothing to do with depression. As I keep reading, my mouth goes very dry.

  My whole body grows tense, and I find myself staring at the screen in surprise. I notice Luciana staring at me intently, so I try to gather my composure and do the questionnaire. I am supposed to answer on a scale of 1-10. There are little bubbles I am supposed to mark for my answers, and I do a few of them with relative ease. I try to lie, but then the questions start to make me feel deeply unsettled.

  “Luciana,” I say softly, feeling a bit sick. “What kind of a psych eval is this, exactly? These questions…”

  “Oh, it’s just a new standard protocol test we’re using. You don’t have to do it right this instant—why don’t we just enjoy our dinner?”

  I stare at the beautiful woman who is being decidedly evasive and flippant about all this. Suddenly, I don’t see a friend, but an enemy. Why would she send me questions like this? Cole and Rodriguez are talking, but everything starts to feel very far away. I get a sort of strange dizziness as I stare at the words of the questionnaire, reading them over and over again.

  Please determine the degree in which the experience described in the question applies to you as a percentage of the time you have the experience:

  Some people have the experience of finding themselves in a place and have no idea how they got there.

  I look up nervously at the people at the table, starting to feel like I am an imposter in my own skin, about to be discovered. Everyone is talking and chatting and laughing, but I can’t hear anything they are saying.

  Some people have the experience of finding themselves dressed in clothes they don’t remember putting on.

  I’ve very rarely put clothes on in my life. Like I said before, even brushing my teeth is a new experience. I have always woken up wearing clothes I didn’t put on… up until a few days ago.

  Some people have the experience of feeling that their body does not seem to belong to them.

  I don’t even realize that I am rising to my feet, consumed by anger and the urge to run away from the restaurant. Of course my body doesn’t belong to me! It belongs to Serena.

  How does Luciana know?r />
  I stare at her, and she is looking back at me with an unreadable expression.

  “What is this?” I ask her. “What are these questions for?”

  “You don’t have to do the test if you’re not comfortable!” she answers immediately. “Or save it for another time. Seriously, Sophie, don’t worry. Just sit down and enjoy dinner with us.”

  “Agent Lopez, I’m serious. Why these specific questions?”

  “It’s just what the department requires—”

  “Bullshit. This is crazy specific. ‘Some people have the experience of finding new things among their belongings that they do not remember buying,’” I read out loud. I look down at my dress, feeling suddenly guilty. I swallow, knowing this is the first article of clothing I have ever purchased. I don’t think I’ve ever felt I had the right to buy anything I wanted before, while Serena wasn’t there. I thought that maybe I could do such things, now that she’s sort of aware of my existence. But what if she isn’t totally? What if she just was able to temporarily access me better, due to being drugged or in a weird mental state of being tortured? What if she has no idea that I’m in charge?

  I’ve always been so careful not to do anything weird to confuse or startle Serena.

  “It’s nothing,” Luciana says, standing up to touch my wrist. “Look, Sophie—”

  “Don’t touch me,” I whisper, pulling my arm away from her. “How do you know about all this?”

  She hesitates, unable to respond.

  “Some people have the experience of looking in a mirror and not recognizing themselves,” I read to her, in a voice filled with venom. “Some people find that… they are sometimes able… to ignore pain.” I lift my eyes from the phone to look at Cole with utter shock on my face. “You told her.”

  He rises to his feet too, placing a hand on my back, trying to soothe me. “Scar, I didn’t tell her anything, I swear.”

  “Then how does she know?” I demand.

  “After Benjamin…”

  “Fuck Benjamin! You told my boss I’m mentally ill. You told my boss at the CIA that I’m mentally unfit to do my job, and now she’s making me do a psych eval while pretending to be my friend. But really she just wants to lock me up in the psych ward again.”