by V. St. Clair
He wondered if she’d given it to Darius yet, or if she was planning to.
“Major Topher?” Hanna poked her head around the corner from Jessamine’s bedroom, frowning at the sight of him in the sitting room in his full armor. “What’s going on? What are you doing in Jessamine’s private rooms without her?”
“Hanna, where is Jessamine?” Topher shut the door behind him, nerves twitching as he began searching the sitting room to make sure they were alone, checking behind the furniture and opening the closet and glancing inside. He didn’t even know what he was looking for, but if the voice in his head was counting down to something real, his time was up.
“She’s at dinner, and I’ll ask you again what you are doing searching her rooms without her present, and why you are wearing your battle armor while doing so.”
Hanna was in her fifties, but the steeliness in her tone reminded him of his mother when she was getting ready to slap him on the side of the head for being obnoxious. He stopped rummaging around and turned to face the woman, unsure of how to properly explain.
“I don’t know. Something is wrong, and I can’t figure out what it is, but I’ve been on edge for weeks and it’s getting worse. I need to speak with her.” Mentioning the cryptic warnings in his head seemed like a bad idea right now.
Hanna’s eyebrows went up in surprise, but she didn’t laugh at this unfounded assertion on his part. Instead, she said, “Do you think she’s in danger?”
“We know someone is trying to kill her—those razor spikes didn’t happen by accident.” Topher began rummaging around again, stepping past Hanna and into Jessamine’s bedroom. “I just have a bad feeling about tonight. Maybe I’m wrong, but I can’t afford to ignore my intuition if I’m right.”
Hanna busted into the bedroom behind him and tried to shoo him out, but Topher insisted on searching under the bed and in the closets before allowing himself to be chivvied back into the sitting room.
“I’ll go and get her from dinner,” Hanna volunteered after a minute of silence between them. “Heaven knows that girl needs to stop forgetting meals, but this seems more important.”
“I don’t want to raise any alarms, in case I’m wrong. I’m probably wrong.” He was trying to convince himself as much as her, wishing he didn’t have to worry about strange voices in his head that may or may not be real and kept making him doubt himself.
“I’ll be discreet.” Hanna pursed her lips at him, perhaps disapproving of his self-doubt, and then she slipped out of the room and was gone.
Alone and with his nerves on edge, Topher removed his earpieces and set them on the coffee table in front of him, rubbing his ears in discomfort. He forced himself to take a seat on the couch and try to relax. The cushions sank beneath his armor, and he wasn’t terribly comfortable, but it hardly mattered.
It only took about five minutes for Hanna to return, this time with Jessamine. Topher was so glad to see her he leapt to his feet and barely stopped short of running and throwing his arms around her. In his heavies he would have probably injured her by accident.
“Topher, what’s going on?” Jessamine assessed him at a glance, genuinely concerned. She was wearing her light armor and had her hair pulled back in a knot, as ready for business as ever.
“Did you strip me of my access to your rooms?” he blurted out, stunning both ladies.
“What? No—why would I do that?” Jessamine stepped towards him, face alight with worry. “Topher, are you alright? You look—weird. And why are you in your heavies?”
“My chip isn’t working on your door anymore. It says my access is denied. I got in with the emergency code.”
Jessamine frowned and said, “Maybe the reader is dirty, or maybe it’s getting a bad reading through your gauntlet. The scanner gets routine maintenance, but it’s possible some dust got underneath the scanner cell, even so.”
“The scanners were designed to be able to read a biochip through full armor,” Topher brushed this off. “Does yours still work?”
“Well, of course, since I just used it to get into the room…” she reconsidered, concerned.
“Hanna? Does yours work?”
Hanna looked doubtful, but stepped outside and allowed the door to close behind her. They heard the beep signaling she had scanned her wrist, and the doors unlocked to allow her in.
“Try yours again,” Jessamine commanded, and Topher removed his gloves this time before stepping outside with her and scanning his wrist across the reader.
Access denied.
Jessamine looked worried now, as they reentered her room and locked the door behind them.
“What does it mean?” she asked him quietly. “Do you think someone in Tech accidentally removed your clearance to my room? Are you able to get everywhere else with your credentials?”
“I was still able to work the elevator to get up here, and the door for the training room,” he admitted. “I somehow doubt it’s an accident that I’ve lost access to your room.”
Jessamine said, “Topher, you know something you aren’t telling me. Why did you come here in your heavies tonight, and why were you trying to get in my room without me here in the first place?”
“I think that’s the part they didn’t plan on,” he continued, barely listening to her as his mind worked through everything. “I—damn it, I’ll have to go back to the beginning if I’m going to explain it properly.” He felt tortured as he faced her now. He couldn’t help but wonder if he was about to make a colossal mistake, and wished he had more time to think this through properly. “Please try not to declare me insane until I’ve finished explaining.”
“Okay…” Jessamine said slowly, easing herself onto the couch beside Hanna and looking terrified.
Well, here goes nothing.
He took a deep breath to steady himself.
“Ever since I got my enhancers installed, I’ve been hearing this strange voice in my head,” Topher blurted out, trying not to focus on the stunned expressions on the two women’s faces in front of him. “It’s not in my head all the time, mind you, but occasionally when I’m sleeping it will interfere with my dreams, or whisper strange fragments of sentences at me even when I’m awake. Recently, I’ve been hearing it every few hours.”
“This has been going on for eight years and you’re just now telling me?” Jessamine asked indignantly.
“I thought it was a side-effect of the enhancers and the Talent circuitry, maybe some kind of tech-induced schizophrenia that doesn’t show up on the physicals. I was going to tell your father if it got worse or if it was interfering with my work, but it never really progressed from its initial onset.” He was pacing back and forth across the room while he spoke. “There’s also the possibility that my neural network is being hacked by some outside party, but none of my peers seem to be affected by it so I find it unlikely. It doesn’t seem to affect me when I’m wearing Talents, so I usually try to keep one in during the day when I’m on duty, but of course I can’t sleep with them modifying my neural network.”
“Are you sure this isn’t happening to the other Majors too?” Hanna asked hopefully, looking concerned for Jessamine and patting her hand for some reason.
“I don’t know, but I don’t think so. Why wouldn’t we all be talking about it?” Topher frowned. “Like I said, it didn’t seem to be hurting anything, so I just learned to live with it, but recently I’ve been getting more and more intrusions from it. It’s been counting down to something—it keeps saying that time is running out, that I have to remember something important, and that it’s going to fall.”
“What’s going to fall?” Jessamine’s expression was unusually vulnerable as she watched him.
She’s not used to seeing me like this. It’s probably scaring her. But it was too late to turn back now, so he continued on.
“I don’t know. The messages are always incomplete or garbled, and no matter how I try asking questions it never answers me—it just barges into my thoughts at random to give me c
ryptic warnings. Just today, the countdown reached zero, and I have a horrible feeling that something bad is coming, but I have no idea what.”
He couldn’t tell what Jessamine was thinking from the look on her face, but at least she hadn’t run out of the room screaming yet. Hanna still seemed concerned for her, as though this suffering of Topher’s was somehow impacting Jessamine negatively as well.
“Could it be because I was attacked recently, and you’re just stressed and on edge now?” she offered gently. “If the voice is really caused by your enhancers messing with your neural network, then stress would likely make it worse.”
“I thought that too, but it doesn’t feel right. We can’t overlook the fact that someone recently tried to murder you and your father has been aware of an issue for some time now.”
“That’s true…” Jessamine allowed, still looking worried and uncertain.
“We both know the ones who attacked you have access to military-grade equipment, and your father is trying to quietly interrogate every Minor in the entire organization, which will take an eternity. I was thinking about leaving the Augenspire on my last day off, and I got a very sharp warning from the voice not to leave—it was the clearest message it’s ever sent me. I listened to it and stayed here, and nothing happened. I haven’t had the warning ever since then, but I’ve also been on duty since the last time…”
He was trying to think through it all as he spoke. For some reason, unloading his burden onto Jessamine and Hanna was actually helping him make sense of it, though there was no telling whether the two women thought he was completely insane now.
“But I’m off tonight, and once again I think something bad will happen if I leave. Does the person working against you know when I’m off work? Do they want me out of the way so I can’t be there to help you a second time? Is that why they killed my biochip access to your room?” he was pacing again. “Is Lorna in on it?”
“Lorna?” Jessamine asked in surprise. “You think she’s trying to kill me?”
“I don’t know,” Topher shook his head in frustration. “She asked me to go with her to the Tetra tonight, which is very unusual, but I would swear she is loyal to you. But why else try and get me out of the Augenspire all of a sudden? She said she got the tickets from your sister, and Andro—who I trust as much as a snake—took the rare initiative to tell me to go have fun, and suggested I stay out even later afterwards. Maybe they all really do think I just need a night off.”
He looked back at Jessamine and Hanna, who both seemed worried but determined not to show it.
“After I talked to Andro, I got a bad feeling about tonight, and whatever the hell is in my head was pushing me towards my heavies, so I put them on and came to see you, only to find that my access to your room has been conspicuously removed.”
“So if someone attacks me in my room, you won’t be able to get in to save me,” Jessamine supplied gravely.
“This might all just be a big misunderstanding…” Hanna began, but Jessamine interrupted her by asking, “Not many people know you have access to my room in the first place, though they might speculate based on how much I rely on your insights,” she admitted. “They must have hoped you didn’t have or remember the manual override code, since they couldn’t change it without locking me out as well, which would immediately raise a red flag.”
“Who knows about my access to your room?” Topher pressed.
“My father, Shellina, Hanna…all of them have access too, by the way. I suppose the Techs who maintain the servers could figure it out if they were so inclined, but those are the only three people I told.”
Topher drummed his gauntleted fingers against his armor. “Your father would never have told anyone else, and I doubt Hanna would leak something like that…which leaves Tech, and your sister.”
Jessamine winced and said, “Shellina has a good heart and she would never do anything to hurt me on purpose, but it’s…possible…she may have said the wrong thing without understanding it. I could call Tech right now and have them reinstate your access.”
“No,” Topher said sharply. “If someone is planning to move against you, it will alert them that we know there is a problem. No one but the two of you know what’s going on in my head, so no one else would expect me to come up to your room to wait for you while you’re at dinner, thus realizing there’s a problem with my access. That suggests whoever is planning…whatever they’re planning…is going to move soon, before I would have a reasonable amount of time to figure out there was a problem.”
“So your plan is…”
“Gossip spreads through our ranks like wildfire. Everyone thinks I’m going to be out of pocket tonight, at the Tetra with Lorna. The only way I can surprise them is by not going out after all.”
Hanna raised an eyebrow skeptically and said, “But when they see you waltzing around in your fighting gear, they’re going to know you didn’t actually leave the building.”
“I’m not going anywhere in this gear. I’m staying here tonight.”
Jessamine and Hanna looked surprised for completely different reasons.
“Do you have any idea what people will think of you staying in the Vicerina’s rooms all night?” Hanna blurted out at the same time that Jessamine said, “But where will you sleep?”
Topher addressed their concerns in no particular order.
“I don’t plan on anyone knowing I’m here other than the two of you, and I don’t intend to do much sleeping. I just want to concentrate on making it through the night with no issues, and then tomorrow I’ll be back on duty and meeting with a Gifted contact who might have some important information for us.”
Jessamine was diverted by this announcement and asked, “That girl you’ve run into a few times now? Ana?”
Topher was surprised the Vicerina remembered her name, but Jessamine had always had a mind for details.
“I’ve been trying to develop her as a contact, and she called me out of the blue to say she had some intel for me and wanted to meet in person because she didn’t want to be monitored by the government. It might be relevant to the problem we’re having here.”
“Good, then I’ll go with you to meet with her.”
Topher hadn’t planned on that at all, and took a step back in surprise as Hanna said, “Now hold on a minute, Jessamine. The last time you went gallivanting off into the city with him you got shot in the back.”
Thanks for reminding me of that failure.
“I’ll armor up this time if I need to, and so will Topher,” Jessamine waved a dismissive hand at this. “If there’s a real danger within the upper-echelons of the Augenspire itself, then I can hardly be in more danger out there with Topher trying to figure out what it is.”
I don’t think Ana is exactly comfortable talking to me yet, so I don’t really want to spring a Vicerina on her.
There was no good way to tell her this that didn’t sound cagey, and besides, it would be reassuring to be able to keep his eye on her tomorrow.
“We’ll work out those details later. For now, make whatever excuses you need to make so you can call it a night, and get back in here.”
Hanna raised an eyebrow at him ordering the Vicerina around, but Jessamine didn’t argue with him and retreated to her room to begin making calls on her communicator.
“And where exactly are you going to stay while Jessamine is sleeping?” Hanna asked when they were alone.
“I’ll just pull up a chair in her room so I can make sure no one gets in without me knowing about it. It obviously won’t work as a long-term arrangement, but we can figure out a new plan tomorrow.”
“You think she’s going to be able to sleep with you sitting there in your armor staring at her?” Hanna looked aghast. “You have no subtlety,” she muttered under her breath.
“Well I’m hardly going to be useful to her if I’m out in the hall,” Topher retorted with a bite of annoyance.
“You can stay out here in the sitting room,” Hanna of
fered as a compromise. “No one can get to her bedroom without coming through here first, unless you think they’re going to launch a high-impact missile at her window from space?”
Topher rolled his eyes at her sarcasm.
“Fine, I’ll stay here, but you should steer clear until tomorrow morning in case something does happen. Jessamine won’t want you getting caught up in it.”
Hanna looked slightly dubious at this and said, “I don’t like the thought of leaving you alone with her when you just admitted you’re having mental problems and she’s feeling vulnerable after her recent attack.”
“What do you think I’m going to do to her, Hanna?” Topher snapped in annoyance. “How long have we known each other and how many times have I proven that I’m only trying to act in the best interest of Jessa and her family?”
“Oh I know your heart is in the right place…”
“Hanna, that’s enough,” Jessamine said from the doorway of her room. “Topher is one of our most trusted people, and you do him a disservice by suggesting anything otherwise.” She frowned. “Hopefully his worries are misplaced, but we’ll resolve all of that in the morning. Now please, leave us.”
Hanna shot a look at her that Topher couldn’t interpret, but then left them alone together. When the door shut and locked behind her Jessamine said, “Do you think the voice in your head is real, or do you think you’re cracking under stress?”
It was a mark of her worry that she waited to ask him this until they were alone.
“It’s hard to be sure, since if I am having a cognitive problem I’m going to have a hard time diagnosing it due to my cognitive problem,” he admitted. “But whatever it is, I trust the feeling it’s giving me that something is wrong. I can’t risk your safety just because I don’t understand it yet, or because I’m worried about the repercussions of admitting it to you.”
She nodded and said, “Thank you for caring enough and trusting me enough to tell me about it. I won’t betray your loyalty by reporting you to my father, unless you seem to lose control of yourself.”