The Way Out

by Armond Boudreaux

  “He deserved it,” whispered Theresa, her voice barely audible. She rested her chin on her knees, her wild green eyes fixed on the doctor’s body.

  “She’s not coming,” said Celina.

  “Okay,” said Val. “Let’s move, then.”

  She took Braden’s hand and nodded at Kim.

  “They all deserved it,” said Theresa.

  “Nobody deserves what you just did,” said Jessica.

  “Oh, girl,” said Celina. She gave Jessica a patronizing look. “If you only knew all the secrets that people carry around in their heads. We all deserve it.” She smiled. “Except for me, of course.” She bit her lip. “I’m an angel.”

  51

  When they had all boarded the Dragonfly, Jessica and Merida sat in the seats closest to the cockpit. Braden and Kim sat opposite them, father holding son with his left arm. Celina took the co-pilot’s chair. Nobody spoke, and after they were in the air, the lights inside the Dragonfly’s cargo area dimmed to a faint yellow so that Jessica could barely see Braden or Kim anymore. In the dark, Jessica finally started feeling drowsy. It had been well over thirty-six hours since she’d slept.

  “Why didn’t you sit up there?” said Merida, who yawned and rested her head on Jessica’s shoulder. “I know you want to talk to her.”

  Jessica looked through the door into the cockpit at her sister, who flipped a couple of switches on the dashboard. Val’s hair was short, like Meg Ryan and Demi Moore in the old movies Jessica liked to watch. There were streaks of gray in it. Her face was lean and tanned, the face of someone who spent her time working outside, the face of a woman who had lived a life completely different from Jessica’s. What should she say to her now? It had been almost sixteen years since they had last spoken. Longer since they’d seen each other. And a gulf of experience lay between them. Looking at her flying the Dragonfly, Jessica felt soft and inadequate. Val was born to sit in a pilot’s seat. Born to be a fighter. Born to stand up to a world gone wrong.

  Jessica looked across the cargo bay at Braden with Kim.

  And she was born to have someone to fight for, she thought.

  When they were kids, Jessica had been awkward and very uncool, and Val had always been the one to stand up to the bullies and mean girls who had picked on her. Once, Val had punched a guy who tried to pull Jessica into the locker room at school. She might have been raped that day had it not been for her sister.

  “I’m not ready to talk yet,” she said. “We’ll get there.”

  It had been her fault that she and Val had fallen out of touch with each other. For a few years, she had sent an occasional text message—Happy Birthday. Merry Christmas. I found a picture of you and Mom. Do you want me to mail it to you?—and then she had stopped. What had been the point? She and Val had taken different paths in life, and Jessica hadn’t understood the person that her sister had become.

  “Can you imagine?” said Merida, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Being able to do what they can do? I mean, that would solve all my problems, right? The fight we had last night?”

  Jessica thought it was probably futile to whisper in front of someone like Braden. “That wasn’t a fight,” she said, lowering her voice anyway. “That was you, uh, going ballistic on me.”

  Merida back-handed her knee.

  “You know what I mean,” she said, but she smiled. “If I could do what they can do, I wouldn’t ever have to feel that way again, would I?” She grinned. “And you know, I could think of other benefits of being able to see into your head. Imagine being able to know exactly what someone wants, when they want it, how they want it.”

  Jessica put on a smile, but Merida frowned suddenly.

  “But then, if I could see into your head, I’d be able to see all the things that I don’t want to know.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, don’t pretend,” said Merida. “You know what I mean. Everybody has things in their head that they don’t want other people to know.”

  Now that she thought about it, Jessica supposed this was true, though she doubted it was true in the way Merida meant. Merida thought if she could see into Jessica’s head, she’d see things that would make her jealous. But there wasn’t anything like that there. Instead, she might see something worse—that as much as Jessica loved Merida, it wasn’t as much as Merida loved her.

  “I guess if I had a choice,” Merida whispered, “I’d choose not to be able to see into your head. If I could do what Braden and Celina do, then I’d know every time you saw someone else and wondered what they looked like naked, or what their lips tasted like.”

  “That’s pretty specific,” said Jessica. “Are you telling me that’s what you think about when you see someone good-looking? Should I be jealous, too?”

  Merida gave her a wry smile. “Don’t you try to turn this around on me,” she said. “This is about those dirty thoughts you have in your head.”

  “I wish you could read my mind,” Jessica said, hoping that Braden wasn’t listening to them or their thoughts right now. “Then you wouldn’t have to worry.”

  Liar, liar, pants on fire, said a voice in her head, and Jessica started. Celina’s voice. Even if she had to live with one of them for the rest of her life, Jessica would never be able to get used to hearing someone else’s voice speaking in her mind.

  “What is it?” said Merida, frowning.

  “Muscle spasm,” Jessica said.

  Liar.

  “What are we going to do now?” said Merida, raising her voice to its normal volume again. “It’s not like we can just go home and pretend none of this happened.”

  Jessica had been trying not to think about that question since Connie had broken them out of their room at the Institute. Was it possible that everyone who knew about the computer had died back at the Institute? No, she wouldn’t be that lucky.

  “I guess we’ve got two options,” Jessica said finally. “We can leave the country with Val and her family—I’m guessing that’s what she plans to do—or we can get to that computer and tell the whole world why they can’t conceive and carry their own fucking babies.”

  At the word “babies,” a cold hand grasped her heart. She gasped.

  Merida put a hand on Jessica’s knee. “What?”

  Jessica looked at her. “Taylor.”

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  52

  She was lying awake in the hayloft, listening to Merida’s soft breathing. Though her eyes burned from lack of sleep, she couldn’t drift off. Her mind wouldn’t stop spinning with fragmented images. Antonio floating in his artificial uterus. Mel, the proud mother, smiling at him through the glass bubble that mimicked her womb. Little Taylor nursing at Beck’s breast. Dr. Hayden’s earnest eyes.

  Had he been the one to start all of this? Had he been the one to give the computer to Havana and Beck? Ask them to give it to Jessica? Havana had mentioned Jessica’s sister, after all.

  In the barn below, a cot creaked. A pair of voices murmured. Jessica rolled onto her side and saw a figure step through the barn door and disappear into the pecan grove. She glanced at Merida, who had one arm thrown across her face and the other hanging from the side of her cot. Satisfied that Merida wouldn’t wake, she got to her feet slowly and then descended the rickety ladder to the ground bel
ow.

  Celina, who had agreed to take the first watch, sat on the ground, leaning against the frame of the barn door. As Jessica approached, Celina spoke in her head.

  Going to have that talk?

  “Maybe,” said Jessica. “I don’t know.”

  Jessica strolled into the pecan grove that spread out for several acres around the barn. Thirty years ago, this land had belonged to their grandparents. Now it belonged to a distant cousin named Evan, who had apparently let this part of the land go untended for years. Kudzu had nearly swallowed the barn, and the grass was taller than Braden in most places.

  The barn was on the back field of a seven-hundred-acre plot. Val had flown the Dragonfly in from the north, a long way from Evan’s house in the south. Neither Jessica nor Val had spoken to Evan in years, and Val had rejected the idea of asking him for help. So she had parked the Dragonfly in an empty tractor shed. A damn impressive bit of piloting, and it meant that for now, they were safe from satellites.

  Jessica found Val exactly where she had expected to find her—leaning against her favorite tree in the pecan grove, settled into the space between two large roots. When they were girls, Val had called that spot her “chair.” She had her arms draped over the roots. The long, black shape of a rifle stood beside her with its muzzle leaning on the tree.

  “Can’t sleep?” Val said.

  “No,” said Jessica. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Jessica settled into the spot next to Val and rested her head against the hard trunk of the tree. Up above, the stars scattered across the sky like pebbles shone through the branches of the pecans. She hadn’t realized this until recently, but having lived in Atlanta for all of her adult life, she hadn’t seen stars in years—not like this.

  “You?” she said.

  After a moment, Val said, “What?”

  “Can’t sleep?”

  Val took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Not really,” she said.

  “How are you?”

  “Other than my back hurting from laying on that cot, pretty good,” said Val. “Just trying to decide when the best time to head out is going to be. We can’t stay here too long.”

  She reached across the root and took Jessica’s hand. Jessica squeezed back, unsure how else to respond. Even with Merida she wasn’t normally one for affectionate gestures. She didn’t remember Val being very affectionate, either. How else had her sister changed?

  They sat that way for a few minutes. The moon had risen low in the sky, and by its light Jessica could make out the shapes of the tree trunks running in uniform rows in each direction. After a while, Val let go of her hand.

  “Sorry. Just making sure you’re real. It’s hard to believe...” But she trailed off.

  Jessica laughed. “Yeah, I’m the real thing.”

  Val let out a laugh, too—the soft, breathy, controlled laugh that Jessica remembered from childhood. The laugh of a person who could feel joy, but who wasn’t willing to let go. Not too much. In that way, Val hadn’t changed.

  “Hey,” Val said, “do you remember when I fell out of one of these trees and sprained my ankle?”

  Of course Jessica remembered. She’d almost felt glad that Val had hurt herself because it proved she wasn’t invincible and because it gave Jessica the chance to do something heroic. “You tried to act like you weren’t hurt, but you couldn’t walk home, so I had to help you.”

  “You didn’t just help,” said Val. “You carried me.”

  Val had cried that night from the pain, and Jessica had stayed up with her until exhaustion finally overcame the aching in her ankle. For the next several nights, Jessica had slept in the room with her, keeping her entertained with stories from school.

  “Val,” said Jessica, rubbing her face. Steeling herself. She hesitated, willing herself to say what she had been thinking since the Institute.

  “What?”

  Here goes.

  “I need you to take me to Atlanta,” she said.

  Val leaned forward and looked at Jessica, her face shadowed by a tree branch. “What? That’s crazy. If you don’t want to leg it across Central America with us, I can drop you off somewhere north—”

  “No, we have to go to Atlanta,” said Jessica. “To Artemis Reproduction Center. Both of us. And maybe Celina.”

  Val rubbed her forehead and stood. “I don’t understand,” she said, her face straining so that lines appeared around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. “Why do we—”

  Jessica stood, too. “There’s a baby there. A girl. The senator told Marcus to go and take her.”

  “Marcus and his goons are dead, Jess,” Val said. “None of them are going anywhere.”

  “You don’t know that,” she said. “I never saw Marcus among the bodies. Did you? For all we know, he got away. And who knows what they told their bosses in Washington before the shit hit the fan.”

  Val shook her head. “Look, I’m sorry about the girl,” she said. “But with the fuel in the Dragonfly, we’re barely going to make it out of the country, and—”

  “She’s like your son,” said Jessica. “She’s like Braden.”

  Val paced in front of the tree.

  “Celina can help,” Jessica said.

  Val shook her head. “I don’t trust her. And you don’t understand. If we go too far out of the way, we’ll use up all the fuel for the propulsion engines, and then we’ll be stuck traveling at slow speeds, using the batteries and the lift engines. We won’t make it. Even if we can make it on the batteries, they’ll catch us. We have to be able to travel fast.”

  “Val,” said Jessica. “What are you protecting if you don’t do what you can to help somebody else?”

  “I’m protecting my son,” Val said, pointing in the direction of the barn. “I’m protecting Kim. Hell, I’m protecting you and Merida and Celina. If we go there, we could get caught. What happens to the people we love then?”

  “I know,” said Jessica. “And I know your first job is protecting Braden.”

  Val shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut as if gnats were swarming around her. “We just risked Braden’s life,” she said. “I just got Kim back. And now you want me to risk them both again? For a child I’ve never met?”

  “How can you...?” Jessica said. She thought of the nurse, Havana. Not your girlfriend, not your sister, she had said. “Wait. Do you or Kim know a doctor named Taylor Hayden?”

  Val looked at her, eyes narrowing. “Who?” she whispered, but recognition spread across her face.

  “I had a feeling,” said Jessica. “The baby is his. Her name is Taylor, too. She was born illegally, and she’s a telepath like Braden. A woman at Artemis gave me information about all of this—SRP, the telepaths, everything. I think Hayden had her leak it to me so I could tell the world. I think.”

  She looked away from Val. Would her sister think she was crazy? Did this even make sense? Hayden had defended SRP in the interview. He’d seemed like a true believer. But he also had a telepathic daughter. An illegal daughter.

  “I think he chose to give that information to me because he knew you were my sister.”

  Val shook her head and walked toward the barn.

  “Am I wrong?” said Jessica.

  Val held up her hands as if in surrender. “Yes, I knew Hayden. A while back, he helped us. And others like us.”

  She turned, her eyes wild. Jessica could see this woman in a burning city with a rifle in her hand. This was the woman who had once been willing to do anything for America. Now her loyalties had shifted. Now she was the woman who would burn America down to protect her husband and son if she had to.

  “You’re asking me to risk everything,” she said. “Not just what’s mine. You’re asking me to risk them.”

  Her eyes had gone cold, and Jessica struggled not to want to pick up a fallen tree branch and beat her with it.

  “I wish you could see into my mi
nd like Braden,” Jessica said. “That baby. The fear in those women’s eyes when they took me to see her. The men who came after me to keep me from releasing that information. They tried to kill me and Merida to stop us from...”

  That was it.

  “Look,” she said, taking a step toward Val. “What if there’s a way... What if I have something that can make all of this right?”

  “We can’t stand up to—”

  ”Wouldn’t you do anything to make it so Braden can be proud of who he is?” said Jessica. She closed the distance between them and put her hands on Val’s hard, muscular shoulders. “What if he didn’t have to run and hide anymore? What if he could have this?” She gestured at the trees around them. “What if he could run free in a place like this, just like we did when we were girls? Wouldn’t you do anything to make that happen?”

  Her sister’s expression... hard, cold, fixed.

  “No,” said Val. “Not ‘anything.’”

  Jessica let out a groan. “What did you even do this for, then? Why did you even have him if you knew he’d spend all his life running and hiding?”

  Val continued to stare. Instead of the anger that Jessica wanted to goad out of her, an icy calm had settled over her face.

  “You think that everything is okay as long as you get to hang on to him and keep him safe?” Jessica said, fighting to keep her voice from rising to a shout. “Is that all you care about?”

  Nothing. Not even the twitch that Val’s mouth always made when she was struggling to control her anger.

  Damn you, thought Jessica. Damn you and your fucking self-righteousness... She wanted to scream. To punch Val and bloody her damn nose. But who was she kidding? Val could beat Jessica’s ass with both her arms broken.

  “Fine,” she said, turning away and starting back toward the barn. “If they take that girl, if they turn her into another Celina or Theresa, it will be your fault. I guess you can live with that, though.”