“Yeah, I caught that,” Jonathan said. “You two aren’t buddies, but are you saying her dislike of you is so strong that she is out to get you?”
“I have reconstructed her movements prior to her arrival,” Mr. Clean said. “Within two days of her last engagement in The Never, she left Manhattan. Her route was a straight shot across the country, straight to you, Jonathan.”
Heyer tapped his knuckles against the seat of his chair thoughtfully. “Gnothi seauton,” Heyer said. “It’s Latin—do you know its meaning?”
“Know thyself,” Jonathan replied.
Heyer smiled, that look of an approving professor on his face again. “So quick. An aphorism you came across in your studies?”
Jonathan’s face squirmed a bit as he weighed telling the truth against letting the alien believe he had learned it through a more scholarly endeavor. “It may have been mentioned in The Matrix,” he said. “My roommate had to pause the movie, went on this long rant about how it’s originally some Greek…”
As Heyer’s eyebrow raised, Jonathan trailed off. I am officially spending too much time with Hayden, he thought.
“It’s not important. What does knowing yourself have to do with Rylee?”
“I never told her to come here, Jonathan,” Heyer said. “It just so happens that if there is anywhere on Earth I would not send her, it would be here… especially right now.” Heyer turned his palms up and spread his hands. “Yet, where does she show up?”
Jonathan’s features became heavy then, realizing his own poor judgment. Obviously, there was a lot he hadn’t thought to ask Rylee, but, what are you doing here? That was a question that should have occurred to him. Being honest with himself, he knew why he hadn’t thought to ask. He hadn’t cared. Rylee’s presence had suddenly meant he was no longer isolated and alone. Despite the challenges, the relief of having someone around who knew what he went through had been blinding. But Heyer wasn’t questioning Jonathan’s self-knowledge—he was questioning his own.
Understanding this, Jonathan finally saw what Heyer had been pushing him toward. There had been a time, back when the alien first entered his life, that their relationship had been ‘flawed’ as well. Jonathan, seeing Heyer as his enemy, had put his focus on finding a way out. The obstacle was that the alien himself was the gatekeeper of any information that might have helped him manage it.
Rylee, it seemed, had chosen to stay the course, escape above all else, and it had led her here. He saw, now, how it was that she had managed it. Heyer had always had a weakness. The alien had made no effort to conceal it those months ago while he sat with Jonathan on that park bench.
Rylee hadn’t overlooked his weakness—and she’d used it to deliver a solid kick to the alien’s proverbial balls.
“Ahhh,” Jonathan said, half laugh and half exhalation, making no effort to hide how impressed he was with Rylee’s maneuver.
It was a reaction Heyer clearly didn’t appreciate.
“So, in her last confrontation, you visited her, and she got your shadow to say something he shouldn’t have before she closed the gates,” Jonathan said. “Something that led her to me.”
Heyer nodded.
“And you don’t have a clue what you said.” Jonathan was failing to keep the amusement off his face.
“You are taking this far less seriously than you should,” Heyer said.
“What happened to appreciating my sense of humor?”
Heyer’s look of disapproval dropped away momentarily. “If you appreciate humor, perhaps you’ll enjoy irony,” he said, a smile of his own breaking the tension. “I would invite you to ask yourself what Rylee knows about you that you don’t know yourself. For instance, what you may have said or done in her presence within The Never during the overlap you cannot remember.”
Jonathan’s smile dropped as he saw Heyer’s point. “Dammit.”
“Precisely. Now, you have to ask yourself—what state were you in before the breach opened that day? Being who you were in that moment, could your actions or words have been compromising? What did the two of you experience within The Never, and how may that have affected what played out? But, all you can do is guess. Only Rylee knows the truth of it.
“For my part, I at least, have an idea of what I must have said to her to lead her here. But no idea what degree of detail my shadow went into, or how he could have possibly believed it wise to do so. Whatever it was, I can only hope that my knowing that she has managed it before will keep me wary of any interactions with her moving forward. However, we need to find out precisely what she knows, and how she managed to get that information from me.” Heyer shook his head.
Jonathan found himself pressing his palm to his forehead. He had been careful in his interactions with Rylee, on guard with his words. Hadn’t he? At least, the interactions he remembered. It occurred to him, then, as he found himself growing paranoid, that he still didn’t really buy into Heyer’s thinking. He didn’t believe that Rylee had orchestrated all this with some malicious plan in mind. Frankly, Heyer’s behavior had a familiar feel—like that of a worried parent trying to control a rebellious teenager.
“Heyer,” Jonathan said carefully. “Is it possible that you’ve played these games so long, that you are assuming Rylee is playing against you? Don’t you think you should give her the benefit of the doubt?”
To this, Heyer raised a curious eyebrow, a look that was quickly followed by a glance to Mr. Clean. The alien drew in a pensive breath before his eyes went back to Jonathan. “I’m listening,” Heyer said. “What is it you’re getting at?”
Jonathan tensed, given he clearly didn’t know all the specifics, but he spoke his mind. “I didn’t trust you when we met, for obvious reasons. Trust is hard to give when you know someone isn’t telling you everything—when you know you only have half the picture. You can’t help but try and protect yourself from being manipulated.”
“Fair enough, but what is it you are proposing?”
“Why don’t we just tell her the truth, all of it?” Jonathan said. “Then, and only then, do we ask her for the same.”
Heyer, much to Jonathan’s growing annoyance, exchanged another unexplained look with Mr. Clean.
“Sir, for the sake of playing Devil’s advocate,” Mr. Clean said, “he is not wrong.”
Jonathan hadn’t expected the computer to take his side, and hearing that he wasn’t dismissed out of hand brought some relief.
“Still,” Mr. Clean said. “The fact that Jonathan’s emotional state has been compromised calls his judgment into question.”
Jonathan looked up, his temporary relief vanishing as he narrowed his eyes at Mr. Clean’s monitor. “Wait, my what now?”
“This may all be rather moot,” Heyer said. “The consequences of Rylee’s actions could already be irreversible regardless of what her intentions may have been.”
“What is irreversible?” Jonathan asked. “What do you mean I’m comprom—”
“Still, perhaps Jonathan’s approach will sway her to fall in line,” Heyer said.
“We need to establish if she can be trusted, and we must do it quickly,” Mr. Clean replied. “Given the compatibility deficiencies with the alternate candidates for Rylee’s device, we should not delay retrieving her implant for relocation. We may need to test the device in multiple women to find a replacement that can survive the implant—”
Having his questions ignored had been irritating, but the conversation they were having without him had just taken a disturbing turn. Jonathan was well aware of what happened to someone when their device was retrieved. Mr. Clean was talking about executing Rylee in order to take back the implant.
The second Jonathan understood that much, breakers blew inside of him. “Replaced?” He was yelling, suddenly on his feet, fury in his eyes as he headed toward the monitor. “What do you mean replaced?” Jonathan reached for Mr. Clean’s face.
He felt a powerful grip on his shoulder stop him before he got his hands on the monitor. �
�Jonathan,” Heyer said. “Look at me.”
Jonathan’s gaze shifted to the alien’s hand on his shoulder, his anger beginning to re-target itself on the obstruction keeping him from tearing Mr. Clean’s face off the wall. “Get your hand off of me,” he said, his voice deadly serious.
“Jonathan, you need to get control. You aren’t yourself right now.”
“No one,” Jonathan said, his voice an icy whisper, “is getting replaced.”
“Breathe, Jonathan. Please.”
“What aren’t you telling me?” Jonathan asked through clenched teeth. “What the hell is he talking about? How am I emotionally compromised…?”
Jonathan trailed off as he put voice to the question. Despite his rage, he was suddenly well aware that something was very wrong. He felt out of control—the only thing giving him a moment’s reprieve was recognizing it. Jonathan hadn’t ever gotten this angry this quickly, not since…
Bleeds the Stone.
Jonathan shut his eyes and managed to take a step back. He tried to breathe as Heyer had asked him, but the distance between him and calm seemed too far—too much of him didn’t want control back.
“Rylee is perfectly safe, Jonathan. No one will harm her,” Heyer said. “Mr. Clean has poor etiquette when he voices every possible option—it is one of the many reasons I did not want him to be the one to explain this to you.”
Jonathan heard the alien, but his hands were still shaking with the desire to rip the monitor from the wall.
“You have my word, Jonathan,” Heyer said.
Jonathan didn’t open his eyes, but nodded.
“I am very sorry, Jonathan,” Mr. Clean said, his voice truly sounding like he bore a guilty conscience.
Heyer sighed. “Take a moment to calm yourself. You will get your answers.”
He managed to force himself to comply, against the wishes of the clouding anger. As it began to fade, a part of him surfaced, his intuition screaming in alarm the same way it had when he first felt Rylee’s emotions within him. Alarms screaming that strings were being pulled inside him—unnatural strings.
Jonathan slowly returned to his chair in a perplexed shamble, took his seat, and stared at the rug. “I was ready to tear this place apart. Why?”
“I need you to finish your story, Jonathan,” Heyer said. “I promise I will explain. But I need to hear the rest if I am going to truly gauge the degree of the side-effects you may experience.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“BEFORE YOU CAME into contact with Rylee inside The Never,” Heyer said, “when you were activated and realized that two Ferox were present, was there anything that seemed abnormal?”
Jonathan raised his eyebrows and nodded. “The activation itself. I remember feeling the transition came on me faster. When it finished, it seemed more whole somehow. The thing is, I had never felt incomplete prior to that—only now that I’ve felt the difference could I tell you that the device had been holding back.”
Heyer nodded. “Go on. What else was different?”
Jonathan sighed. “Since we last spoke, I’ve felt stronger with every activation. I didn’t think about this much because it wasn’t unexpected—you had already told me that the more I train in my natural state, the stronger I would be when I was activated. But with Rylee, there was something else, something far more. When I fought Bleeds the Stone, it was almost…”
Heyer’s eyes had narrowed in recognition of the Ferox’s name, causing Jonathan to pause. “I knew of him,” Heyer explained. “But continue.”
Jonathan’s face contorted with effort. “It’s a bit like trying to see a memory through a fog of rage. Bleeds the Stone—he was probably weakened, having been at the center of that explosion. Still, he was easily the biggest Red I have encountered.”
Heyer nodded his agreement. “You are not mistaken. Bleeds the Stone was on the cusp of full maturity. He has killed many.”
“Thing is, it didn’t make any difference. I punched holes in him with every strike, bent his arm back like I was wrestling a child.” Jonathan swallowed. “Look, there might be nothing to gain in dissecting this, because I don’t want to let over-confidence lower my guard. But—”
“He was no match for you,” Heyer finished for him.
Cautiously, Jonathan nodded, and Heyer sat back into the chair, his knuckle brushing against his lips as he thought.
“Jonathan, I understand the difficulty of staying centered in a fight. It’s often difficult to recall exactly what caused you to react as you did. Still, do you remember if that strength had a trigger—what was it that brought on this ‘fog of rage’?”
Jonathan grimaced, finding that the memory still disturbed him. “I couldn’t feel Rylee moving. I thought she was dead. Heyer, I don’t remember thinking much afterward. I went somewhere….” Jonathan hesitated, seeming to lack the words to explain, and closed his eyes before he tried. “It was dark, Heyer. I’ve been angry before, but Bleeds the Stone was the first time I ever made one of them suffer any longer than he had to.”
The alien nodded sympathetically. If Heyer was judging him for what he’d confessed, Jonathan didn’t see it on his face. “Afterward, Jonathan. Specifically, the moment you returned from The Never and found your memory intact,” Heyer said. “Was there nothing you’ve not yet told me?”
Jonathan frowned—he’d neglected to recount that moment in his story. It surprised him. He seemed to have unconsciously passed over the intrusion of Rylee’s emotions inside of him when he had returned. Admittedly, he’d been more concerned with lost memories, keeping her from The Cell’s ears, and the news that a man—a shadow from within The Never—had entered into the sphere before the gates were closed. How odd a thing for him to have left out.
No, Jonathan thought.
A moment’s reflection and he understood why he’d done it; that this was hardly the first time he had glazed over certain details of his life when speaking to Heyer. He had never mentioned Leah, or his roommates, his job, or his family either. They were separate—he’d had to keep a wall between all things alien and everyone he cared about.
Intimate moments—what he had been sharing with Leah before he was activated, or what he knew to be Rylee’s worst moment of weakness—they weren’t his to share, didn’t belong to him alone, and were the last thing Heyer should need to know about. So, in a manner of speaking, he had misfiled that moment with Rylee to the off-limits bin. Realistically, he saw the necessity of telling Heyer the truth now. They had reached a need-to-know moment, but he wasn’t going to share any more than was necessary unless he saw a damn good reason.
More curious to him now, was that Heyer had known to ask.
“Yes,” Jonathan said, and Heyer’s head tilted forward in interest. “I can’t really do it justice with words. More like a hallucination, or an emotional acid trip. Rylee was there, somehow, in my head—or for a moment I was inside her’s. It was brief, temporary, but I knew who she was. Not her memories, not even her thoughts exactly. More like I understood what it felt like to be her. But it was only a snapshot, too cluttered and confusing in my head. Like I’d lost track of myself, couldn’t tell what was her or me. I saw images, things that seemed to have meaning for her, but I didn’t know why, couldn’t be sure I knew the story behind their significance.”
Heyer leaned back slowly in his chair, watching Jonathan as he absorbed what he had said.
“It put me on the floor. It was very… ” Jonathan swallowed. “Intimate.”
“Well,” Mr. Clean said. “That does sound like a form that the experience might take.”
Heyer nodded, his gaze coming to rest on the floor.
“Anyone want to let me know why this is what we’re focused on?” Jonathan asked.
Heyer looked to the computer and nodded. “Yes. It’s why we are here, after all. Excuse me a moment. I need to retrieve something.”
Heyer rose from his chair, walking over to the large vault-like door Jonathan had noticed when they had first ent
ered. Taking a better look at it now, Jonathan thought it belonged in a museum next to a steam engine. It looked like it had been taken off the front of an antique gun safe and mounted into the wall.
As with everything else inside Mr. Clean, the vault door was a functional facade, and the door opened for Heyer as he approached. The safe’s interior betrayed no neglect as far as the illusion went, though it was a far more expansive chamber than he had expected from the outside. When Heyer stepped inside Jonathan was forced to lean forward in his chair, only able to see one of the side walls. There were rows upon rows of strange stones, each about the size of his palm, nestled equidistantly from one another within the flat iron surface of the walls.
What purpose could a safe door have in here? Jonathan wondered as he took in the illusion. Why make it stand out as something he wanted locked away when the contents were already as safe as they could have been inside Mr. Clean?
“Any standard device will suffice, Mr. Clean,” Heyer said.
One of the stones nearest the alien came forward from the wall, pushed toward Heyer on a small metal rod until he reached up to free it. The rod then retracted back into the wall, leaving an empty socket in place of the stone. Jonathan noticed that there were a number of absent spaces like this one, the empty slots spaced seemingly at random along the portion of the wall he could see. As Heyer left the chamber, the heavy door began to close slowly behind him.
The alien held the stone out to him then. Close up, he saw it had a trilliant cut shape, though the edges were curved and smooth. It was made mostly of a polished, black material, but had thick metallic lines embedded on the outer surface. With the device so close, he could see that the silvery shine could not be attributed completely to metal catching the light, but also a faint white glow emanating off the lines. Jonathan knew what he was looking at, having seen a similar symbol glowing on his chest every time he was activated. This design was almost the same, but lacked the middle line that crossed over his chest.
The Never Paradox (Chronicles Of Jonathan Tibbs Book 2) Page 24