Vortex

by Julie Cross

  “Of course … but I’m sure you have doubts.” Thomas’s gaze fell on me. “I know some of you must feel trapped in this position. Obligated to sacrifice everything, and for what, exactly?”

  Now it was my turn to shift uncomfortably. Of course I had doubts. Lots of doubts. And this was the ultimate intimidation, because none of us had expected it.

  “I think it’s time we join forces,” Thomas said. “It’s inevitable, actually, and things will be much better if we can make this truce sooner.”

  “I’m sorry,” Freeman said. “Even I’m not authorized to make those kinds of decisions.”

  No one was authorized for that because it was never an option … ever. You could hear the fear and confusion leaking into Freeman’s voice.

  “All right … I understand, and I’m sorry to hear that free will isn’t something any of you practice,” Thomas said.

  Free will. There was that term again invading my thoughts for the second time tonight. And what did Thomas mean when he said we’d join forces eventually?

  There was no time to think about it. Suddenly EOTs vanished from down the hall and jumped between us. Everywhere.

  I knew I couldn’t force them in or out of a jump. I was too beaten up already. Too weak. Bodies flew all around me, like a video in high-speed motion. I tossed someone over my back, then kicked another EOT in the face. My only goal at the moment was to keep them from jumping with me.

  A foot came at me, hitting me hard in the side, slamming me against the wall. My vision blurred, but through the haze I saw a slight figure tearing away from the fight, diving under people, hurdling over them.

  Once I realized it was Mason, I felt relieved at first, thinking he was running away … then I saw where he was headed and the EOT running after him, a tube of pink liquid sloshing in the EOT’s right hand.

  “Mason, no!” Stewart shouted. “Forget about the bomb!”

  Both of us fought our way around the crowd and Thomas called out to the EOT trailing Mason. “Don’t let him get to the weapon!”

  “Mason! Get the hell out of there!” I yelled.

  The EOT behind him glanced at Thomas and then tossed the pink tube into the utility room Mason had just entered.

  “No!” I shouted at the same time Stewart shouted, “Mason!”

  Simultaneously, we both drew our guns and fired a shot right at the EOTs back. He fell to the floor in a slump. The sound of shattering glass rang through the hallway just after the gunshot. My eyes zoomed in on Thomas, who was running from the utility room that held the remaining bomb fragments, and then on Stewart, who was running toward the utility room, hurdling over the fallen EOT.

  I grabbed her around the waist and tackled her to the floor. She only had about half a second to fight me, and then the loudest explosion I’d ever heard in my life filled the small space.

  The sound echoed in my ears and I couldn’t hear anything else. Instinctively, I threw an arm over my head and one over Stewart’s. Tiny pieces of wood and plaster flew at us from every direction. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to jump, but my mind couldn’t focus on anything but here … right now.

  The ringing in my ears quieted and voices shouted all around me.

  “Oh, God … Mason,” Kendrick said.

  “Jackson!” Freeman called.

  I rolled off Stewart, who sat up, looking stunned. We were both covered in dust and debris from the explosion. She glanced at me wide-eyed and then sprang to her feet. I watched as she ran in the direction of the explosion and then screeched to a stop, staring at the hole in the wall that used to be the utility room.

  The reality must have hit me at the same time as it hit Stewart.

  Mason is in there … was in there.

  I peeled myself off the floor and walked up next to Stewart. She was shaking her head … eyes still huge.

  “No … no way. He got out. I know he did. There’s got to be some escape or…” My voice trailed off and both of us continued to stare.

  “Jackson!” I heard Dr. Melvin shout.

  I spun around and saw him and Senator Healy sifting through the mess to get to us. But it was Healy who reached me first and placed both his hands on my shoulders. “Are you okay, son?”

  His tone was completely different than earlier. This was genuine concern.

  “Mason … he’s…” I couldn’t say it out loud.

  Stewart swallowed hard and then spun around to face Healy. “He’s dead … blown up into tiny bits.”

  The anger in her voice was so thick it hit me like a punch in the stomach. This was the most emotion I’d ever seen her show. I reached out and touched her shoulder. “Stewart…”

  She slid away from me, holding both hands up in front of my face. “Don’t … just shut the hell up—all of you.”

  Freeman tried to stop her from walking away, but she shoved him against the wall and took off running. I was still weak and frozen to my spot, but I didn’t miss the complete devastation on Dr. Melvin’s face and the long look he gave me, and maybe I was imagining it, but it seemed like he was asking me to fix it. Or just wishing I could.

  But it didn’t work like that, did it?

  Kendrick stared at me for a second, her eyes filling with tears, and then she ran after Stewart, but I knew she’d be right back. If Stewart wanted to be alone, she would be alone.

  I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes, hoping everything would be different when I opened them.

  “Get him some water,” I heard Healy shout to someone. Then cold fingers touched a tender spot on my cheek. “What happened, Jackson? Did someone take you with them? It’s okay to tell me. All the EOTs are gone,” Healy said.

  I opened my eyes again and glanced past Healy to see Dr. Melvin still staring at me. “I’m sorry,” I said to him. “We tried to stop him, I swear.”

  He nodded his head slowly and then walked closer, jumping into doctor mode. “Let me check your pulse. And yes, you should have some water, Jackson.”

  Healy backed away and let Dr. Melvin take my wrist.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again to Dr. Melvin. “He just went in there and … I don’t know…”

  “I know … I know,” he said, but his voice cracked.

  The nausea from my earlier jumps, and from all the drinking, hit me at once, and next thing I knew, my head was hanging over a white porcelain sink and I was staring down at my own vomit. I barely noticed Senator Healy handing me a bottle of water in the bathroom or him asking me if I was all right. All I could manage to do was try and shake the blurriness from my head and stay on my feet. Nothing else mattered at the moment.

  * * *

  An hour later, the mission group was in the underground classrooms. Stewart was nowhere to be found and none of us wanted to talk about it. Most of us were sure that Freeman would have us on a flight back to France within the hour, and honestly, I couldn’t wait to get out of here.

  I slumped farther down in the chair I had fallen into the second we entered the room. Freeman and Parker sat on either side of me, upright and alert, instead of leaning on their desks for support like I was.

  “Though many of you may have just learned this information in the past week,” Senator Healy said, pacing in front of the fourteen Tempest agents, “my position in this agency is meant to be a silent one. However, in both Chief Marshall and Agent Meyer Senior’s absence, I’m left with no choice but to take over as your commanding officer.”

  “What the hell happened tonight? Obviously someone wanted to lock us all up together so we couldn’t do a damn thing about the EOT attack,” Parker blurted out. “Who infiltrated our alert system? I didn’t think that was possible.”

  Senator Healy glanced at Dr. Melvin, who sat at the desk in the front of the room, leaning on his elbows. He pulled himself up straighter and nodded before saying, “There are always ways around our security. The Tech Support Team is already working on identifying the source.”

  “Tonight’s event … the loss of a very valu
able agent … is going to be difficult for all of us to deal with,” Healy said. “I encourage each and every one of you to offer support to your teammates and take some time to rest and recover so we can be strong and prepared for next time.”

  This speech was already the complete opposite of Chief Marshall’s usual suck-it-up-and-move-on lectures.

  “Where is Marshall, anyway?” an agent from across the room asked. “And Agent Meyer? Why did we do this mission without them if it was going to be so difficult?”

  More sounds of frustration followed his question, as if everyone were thinking the same thing. Including me.

  “Unfortunately, I have some more bad news.” Healy shook his head, looking grim. I held my breath, feeling my heart thud with renewed fear despite my exhaustion. “We lost contact with Agent Meyer and Chief Marshall three days ago.”

  Silence fell over the entire room. After several long seconds, I found my voice and managed to croak out a couple words. “Three days?”

  Healy and Dr. Melvin exchanged a look, and then Healy said with a sigh, “I think all of us are going to have to accept the possibility, given certain evidence, that Agent Meyer may have accepted a bribe from Eyewall—not the group you all were hunting tonight, but the people responsible for that group’s presence in this year.”

  Future Eyewall. The clone makers.

  But Healy was wrong. Dad would never take a bribe from them … ever. He’d never leave me alone unless he absolutely had to.

  “What about Chief Marshall?” someone asked. “Did he take a bribe, too? Maybe he handed them Agent Meyer to get himself out of a bind.”

  Okay, another Dad fan. Good to know.

  “Agent Meyer has a very specific motive for accepting help from the EOTs,” Healy said immediately. “One I can’t share with any of you at this time, but it makes the evidence a bit more concrete.”

  I could feel all eyes on me, as if I had the answer to this unspoken question. As if I knew what would be more important to Dad than staying with me. I didn’t know. I had no idea. And I really needed to find him and to tell him that I’d done a Thomas-jump. I needed his help more than ever right now.

  “But he’s alive?” I blurted out.

  Healy’s face tightened. “We believe so.”

  “Are we going back to France or what?” Agent Parker asked.

  It was Freeman who spoke this time. “We did manage to gain some insight into Eyewall during tonight’s mission. There’s a lot of data to review and it’s worth sticking around for at least forty-eight hours.”

  I sighed and forced my heart to slow back down to a normal pace. It’s only two more days. I just needed to focus on finding a way to contact Dad. This would be considered a situation of great need and might call for a time jump … assuming I could even manage it.

  It was nearly two in the morning by the time everyone started to file out, slowly, like stepping back into the real world would force us to think about Thomas’s speech … about Mason.

  “Jackson?” Senator Healy called to me before I stepped out the door. “Can I have a word with you?”

  I glanced at Kendrick, who I assumed would want to ride home together.

  “Dr. Melvin wants me to help him with something in the lab,” she said, exhaustion filling her voice. “It’s just down the hall. I’ll wait for you.”

  I nodded to her and Healy closed the door after the last agent walked out. He gestured for me to sit down again and I did, mostly because standing was difficult. The old man slid behind the desk across from me, angling his chair slightly so we were facing each other.

  “I just wanted to see how you were doing,” he said gently. “You can’t let yourself feel responsible for what’s happened tonight. No one expects you to be able to fix this. I hope you know that…?”

  I shrugged but didn’t say anything. It wasn’t that simple. And it never will be.

  He sighed like he could read my thoughts. “We aren’t going to give up trying to contact your dad. No matter what the protocol tells us, I won’t stop searching. He’s a good man. No matter what any of the other agents tell you, don’t doubt what you know to be true.”

  I didn’t want Healy to know how close Dad and I were, so I shifted the subject. “I’m having trouble thinking about anything except all those EOTs. Do they have, like, a dozen cloning machines in the future or something?”

  Healy scrutinized my face, maybe checking to see if I had gone into shock yet, but shock seemed to come a lot slower for me these days. “Dr. Melvin is very ashamed of his years spent trying to make cloning a real process, attempting to get government funding for such projects. Without his research, we might not have many enemies to battle. It was a foolish boy’s dream. But it takes age and experience to fully comprehend the weight of one’s actions.”

  Poor Dr. Melvin. And I thought I was living with guilt. “Why did you tell me that Kendrick was important to this division? Are you related or something?”

  “No, nothing like that, Jackson,” he said with a slight smile. “I don’t know all the details, Marshall told me as little as possible, but she is supposed to discover a cure for a deadly epidemic that will plague the future. I believe that’s one reason the EOTs may spare her life.”

  “Seriously? Does Dr. Melvin know this? And won’t the EOTs know whatever magic medicine she’s destined to make and they can just make it themselves?”

  He shrugged. “Apparently they prefer not to adjust events that don’t need adjusting. Mess with as little as possible and hope to shape everything perfectly. And Dr. Melvin doesn’t know any of this and you aren’t going to tell him. He’d spend the rest of his life trying to discover something he was never meant to find … He’d kill himself trying.”

  I let out a frustrated breath. “Okay, but why does she have to be in Tempest? Can’t she just work in some lab and keep out of the way of explosions and whatever else we have to put up with?”

  “First of all, she wants to be here. For reasons I don’t understand.” His face turned more serious. “But your idea was the exact option I presented to Chief Marshall. However, he felt her skills were too valuable to not use her as an agent … and now she’ll never be allowed out. Not alive, anyway. But if she continues to study medicine and stays free of distraction, she can still make her discovery.”

  The not-allowed-out part wasn’t a surprise. I had already assumed that for all of us, but it didn’t make it any easier to swallow. I leaned my head against my hands and rubbed the blurriness from my eyes.

  I felt Healy rest a hand on my shoulder. “Jackson, you should go and get some rest. I’ve already said too much. I’m truly sorry for everything you’ve been through tonight.”

  “It’s all part of the job, right?” I slowly stood up before retreating down the hall to find the lab Kendrick had mentioned.

  Kendrick was already slipping out the door as I walked up. We both looked at each other for a long moment. Neither of us knew what to say. Her hair had slipped out of the careful updo from earlier tonight and her hands and face had traces of blood and dirt. She looked like hell and I’m sure I did, too.

  “Ready to go?” I asked her.

  She nodded, and both of us headed out in silence. There was nothing to say. Not tonight.

  * * *

  Kendrick’s hands shook so badly, she couldn’t get the key into the lock of her apartment door. I slowly took it from her hand and opened the door. The gust of air-conditioning hit us and her eyes lifted to meet mine.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Lily!”

  We both stepped through the door, surprised to see Michael up and dressed, the TV blaring. He was supposed to be out of town. “Thank God! I’ve been watching the news for hours. I came back from Long Island as soon as I heard about the accident at the Plaza. I’ve been calling your cell all night … I was sure…” His voice cracked and he stopped talking and looked at me, then at Kendrick. “What happened to you? Is that … blood?”

  Senator He
aly had told us there was no hiding the explosion from the media, but to the public, the EOTs’ weird bomb was actually an electrical explosion in the boiler room. I had no clue how many memories had been modified tonight and I couldn’t think about it now.

  Kendrick glanced at me and her eyes widened like it had just occurred to her that she couldn’t be the shocked agent in the presence of her unsuspecting fiancé. “Well … it’s just … well … first we went…”

  I jumped in to help her because the stuttering was too much to handle. “Luckily, we weren’t anywhere near the explosion, but this little kid and his mom were hurt and Kendrick … I mean, Lily tried to … you know—”

  “Stop the bleeding,” she finished for me.

  Michael flopped down onto the couch with a huge sigh of relief. “God, Lil, that must have been awful. I don’t think I’ve ever been so worried in my entire life. What happened with the kid?”

  She looked at me again for a second, tears already falling, then she walked across the room and curled up next to Michael, hiding her face in his shirt. He wrapped an arm around her and reached his other hand down to pull off her shoes.

  I knew she was thinking about Mason right now and that she didn’t want to fall apart in front of me. But Michael didn’t expect her to be tough. He was okay with this softer, less confident version of Kendrick. I turned around and left them alone, heading toward my still-nearly-empty apartment.

  The first thing I did was take a long hot shower and wash the grime and guilt off of me. Then I lay in bed and dialed Stewart’s number half a dozen times but got no answer. It wasn’t that I really wanted to be around her, but everything basically sucked for her tonight and I was afraid she might get a little crazy or something …

  After only a few minutes, the weight of Mason being gone and Stewart’s reaction overwhelmed me so much that I time-jumped out of instinct … The need to do something was too strong to ignore. I had to try, knowing Thomas-jumps might not be out of my ability range. Could I save Mason? Could I change what happened? Just a few hours. That was all I’d need. And then after this, whether it worked or not, I’d have to shut down again. Turn off that part of me that was becoming attached to people I’d never wanted to let in.