On his way back to Asher, Jack wasn’t sure how he was supposed to feel anymore. First he’d lost Kid, then Celia, and now Celia was back, but something was wrong with her. Did he ruin everything he touched?
Asher was waiting right where Jack had left him. Jack had the feeling he could tell this kid just about anything and he would believe him. Not that Jack would, but sometimes he couldn’t resist fucking with people. Especially when they were practically asking for it.
“How you holding up, Ash?” Jack asked, leaning in the doorway.
“Not too bad, I suppose. With the world as I know it changing every few days, I guess it’s just a matter of time before it all catches up to me.”
“I hear ya. I’m still trying to get my head wrapped around this place, and the world I come from is light years ahead of yours,” Jack said. “Come on, let’s go get something to eat. You’ve gotta be starving.”
It had been a while since Asher’s last meal.
“Lead the way.” Asher got up and followed Jack.
Jack led him down to the cafe where Desmond had taken him for breakfast on his first day in the Sixth. They ordered their food and sat back enjoying their drinks while they waited. It was pleasant outside, warm, and the sky was dotted with clouds.
The food arrived and they made small talk while they ate. Jack explained how he had had to learn to shield his mind, so the surrounding people didn’t hear his every thought.
“It’s as much for their benefit as it is for mine.”
“Why didn’t I have to learn this when I got here?” Asher asked.
“Desmond said that your thoughts were already shielded. In fact, he said that was why he was so suspicious of you at first. It took him a few days to find a way past it so he could see that you were telling the truth about your story.”
“How would my thoughts be shielded already? I haven’t been trained in anything like that.”
“Desmond thought it was probably a characteristic that all humans in your verse shared. And it was most likely because of this trait, and possibly others, that the White lady wanted you and your girlfriend to get Kid for her.”
“She’s not my girlfriend!”
Jack raised his hands defensively. “Alright, take it easy, kid. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Asher calmed quickly. “It’s not your fault. I’m sorry. I overreacted. Guess I’m more angry and upset about it than I realized.”
“No worries, buddy. I’ve been screwed over by women with the best of them.”
Returning back to the conversation, Asher asked, “So there’s something different about the people from my verse?”
“Something like that, Desmond wasn’t too sure about exactly what causes it. He thought it had to do with something physical since he couldn’t find any nanites in you.”
“How would there be nanites in me?” Asher wondered. “My people are primitive compared to this world, or any world that I’ve been to for that matter.”
“What’s it like in your world?” Jack asked, his curiosity peaked.
Asher shifted around in his chair and then answered, “It’s... I don’t know, different. Women are in charge of everything. The best life most men can hope for is to be chosen for breeding. The rest are used as workers.”
“Slaves, you mean.”
Asher stopped, considering Jack’s statement, and concluded that, “Yes, I believe slave might be a better word for it. Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t mistreated or beaten or abused or anything like that, but they aren’t exactly free to come and go as they please either.”
“Seems kinda crazy to me, but, hey, to each their own, I guess,” Jack said. “If you don’t mind my asking, how did you come to hook up with that princess broad?”
“Believe it or not, I’ve been wondering the same thing ever since I left her.” Asher stared off, trying to recall his memories, but fearing what they might bring. “I mean, we met because my father was one of the only men who held any sort of social standing in the queen’s court, and he groomed me to follow him. I guess the queen had a soft spot for him. Me and Ava... We just kinda happened one day.”
Jack nodded, saying nothing, waiting for Asher to go on.
“Looking at it now, I think I was just another plaything for her. Just another toy, but one that could move and think and talk. She said we were in love, but I guess we all have different ideas about what love is, don’t we?”
“You can say that again,” Jack sympathized. “My first marriage was a perfect example of that.”
Grateful for the diversion from his memories, Asher asked Jack about it.
“We were young,” Jack said. “I had just completed my mandatory service in the military on my world. I was twenty, she was eighteen. Her name was Mathilda,” Jack laughed. “That was her given name anyway.
“She hated it. Wouldn’t let anybody call her by it, not even me. She went by Medda. Said it was what her parents called her after she learned to talk. I guess one day they were trying to teach her to say Mathilda, but all she could manage was Medda. Funny how some names stick… God, I haven’t thought about her in years,” Jack said, stopping.
“No, go on, I want to know what happened,” Asher prodded.
Jack continued, “Well, like I said, I’d just gotten done with my mandatory, and she was about to start hers, when we fell in love—or something we thought was love anyway… We ran off and got married in a private ceremony. Didn’t even tell our folks.” He laughed. “It wasn’t until my second marriage that my mom even knew there was a first one.”
“How many times have you been married?” Asher asked.
“Plenty. Or as my dad used to joke, once too many.”
“So what happened?”
“I still don’t really know to be honest. We spent three perfect months together. Still the best time of my life, I’d have to say. Then she shipped out. I got a job in construction and waited for her to get through with basic training.
“It was only six months, but when she got back, she had changed. Maybe it’s something all girls go through at that age, I don’t know. But she told me she didn’t want to be married anymore, she wasn’t in love. I fought her on it. There was no way she could tell me that she didn’t still have feelings for me.
“She said she did, that she would always love me, but she couldn’t be with me anymore. Still to this day, I wonder if that was the biggest bullshit lie, or the most grown up thing I’ve ever heard a person utter. It took me three years before I could say that same thing about her. By that time I was back in the military and halfway through my second marriage, still trying to save the first one in my head. Might have worked too, except Medda wasn’t my second wife. Anyway, what are you gonna do? I guess you live and you learn.” He looked at Asher with humor and pity. “Not exactly the words someone in your position wants to hear, huh?”
“Not really,” Asher said. “Not that any advice could make me feel better about it. It helps though, knowing that someone else has been through what you’re going through.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know, I guess it makes it okay to be where you are. It gives you permission to have screwed life up, and permission to forgive yourself for doing so.” As Asher spoke the words, he realized the truth of them.
“Whoa! I don’t know how you got that from my lousy story, but if it makes you feel better, than I’m happy for it,” Jack said with a smile. This kid’s gonna be alright, he thought. Then he wondered about his other Kid, and what terrors he might be facing.
“Hey, Ash, let me ask you a question. You met this White lady right?”
“You mean Lady White?”
“Yeah, whatever. Anyway, how is she?” Jack asked. “I mean, did she seem like the sort of person that might, I don’t know, hurt Kid?” Jack didn’t know why he was asking questions he was scared to know the answers to, but it was too late to take it back now.
“She seems to be a kind, benevolent leader. But I can say without
a doubt that she is definitely not what she seems. She puts on the exterior of a loving mother, but there’s something dark inside her, I can’t explain it. It’s just a feeling I would get whenever she was around. She would be smiling at me, and I would feel a knot in my stomach. It was like pure dread.”
“Great… thanks,” Jack said, his mood instantly destroyed.
“Wizard’s back,” Jack heard. It was Desmond, doing that thing he did again.
Jack tried to send back, “Should we come back?” He thought it, and then not hearing a reply, he focused harder. His eyes wrinkled at the corners and he began to get a headache from the strain.
“What are you doing?” Asher asked.
Jack stopped. Oh well, he thought, it was worth a try. “Nothing,” he told Asher. “The old man’s back. Let’s go see what he found out.”
Jack discovered that there was no bill to pay. Either they’d put it on Desmond’s tab, or they had some strange system for paying for things. Maybe both, he thought.
The pair made their way back upstairs, both lost in their own thoughts. They each had their private battles to fight, as well as their shared public one.
Jack walked into the Shadow’s office, expecting to see Desmond and Wizard there, but the room was empty. He then went to Celia’s room where he found Wizard bent over her bed. He appeared to be scanning her with some kind of wand. In his other hand he held a data pad that was displaying the findings of the scan.
“Just like he said.” Wizard motioned down at the screen. “Nothing out of the ordinary. He said I wouldn’t find anything in a scan.”
“Who’s he?” Jack asked, his suspicion apparent to all who were gathered.
Wizard looked up, noticing the two new arrivals for the first time. “He, as you put it, is one of my contacts in the Seventh. He holds an entry level position at the compound where Celia was being held.”
“So what’d he say?” Jack asked impatiently.
“I was getting to that when you arrived,” Wizard explained. “He said they had been developing a new kind of weapon, specifically designed for the people of the Sixth.”
“That’s it? Nothing else? How the hell do we make her better then!?” Jack slammed his fist down on the railing at the side of the bed.
Desmond stepped closer. “Right now, there’s nothing we can do for her, Jack.” Desmond’s voice was strong and calm, like a man who has been through terrible loss before. “The best thing we can do is find Kid, and find out what Julia is up to. Whatever it is, I’m sure it won’t be pretty.” He paused and then brushed past Jack. “Excuse me.”
“Where are you going?” Jack demanded.
“To figure out how we’re going to fix this.” And with that Desmond was gone. The three men could hear the door of his office being closed down the hall.
Jack felt his eyes watering as he slid down the wall, sitting on the floor next to Celia’s bed. Angry, frustrated, and hopeless, he tried to blink the tears away.
Weeks Later
“I’ve had just about all I can take of this waiting,” Jack said as he walked into the room where Asher and Wizard were eating breakfast. It had been almost two weeks since anyone had seen or heard from Desmond. He had just vanished without a trace.
“Well, what do you suppose we do, Jack?” Wizard asked, cocking one eyebrow higher than the other.
“I’m working on it,” Jack replied as he paced back and forth.
Asher and Wizard watched him walk back and forth like a caged lion.
“We’ve been over this a hundred times,” Asher said. “Desmond wouldn’t have left us to figure this out on our own.”
“Quite right, my boy,” Wizard said. “So… Either he was planning, or is planning to return and illuminate us with a brilliant solution, or he thought he had a way to solve the situation himself and something went terribly wrong.”
“Okay, let’s start there,” Jack said. “What could keep Desmond, the most powerful being in the MultiVerse, from returning to his only beloved and in-a-coma daughter?”
“Well, aside from a battalion of agents…”
“What about one of those EMF things? The one that Celia had to take out so we could escape from the Third?” Asher asked.
“The only place they have enough of those to stop Desmond would be the Seventh, and he would never be stupid enough to go there alone,” Wizard said.
“Are you sure?” Asher asked. He immediately received dirty looks from the other two. “All I’m saying is, if it was someone I loved, I would do whatever it was that I thought might save them, stupid or not.”
“Well, we’re not talking about you, are we, boy?” Wizard replied.
“But if I…”
“That’s it!” Jack interrupted.
“What’s it?” both Wizard and Asher asked in unison.
“That’s got to be what it is.”
“What on Earth are you talking about, Jack?”
Jack’s face was beaming. “I think I know what’s wrong with Celia.”
Asher and Wizard looked confused. “We were talking about Desmond—”
“I know, I know. Now, just hear me out,” Jack said. He was still pacing as he explained. “Wizard, what do we know about these nanites that the agents in the Seventh use?”
Unsure where Jack was heading with the question, he answered as simply as possible. “Well, they are tiny, microscopic robots that perform a variety of tasks. They regenerate cell damage from within, are self-replicating, and boost mental and physical abilities.”
“So, in short, they make these agents supermen, right?”
“Pretty close to it. The nanites can even form a metal shield over an agent’s skin, acting as armor if it’s needed. Granted, it’s not the strongest armor, but sometimes it can make the difference between a killing blow and a flesh wound.”
“What are the mental benefits?”
“Well, they improve memory, giving the agent perfect recall. They also have built in communications, giving the agent, for all intents and purposes, artificial telepathy. They can talk to any other agent or comm unit without needing a physical device. Provided, of course, that there is a network to connect to. Some of the verses can be a little lacking in that department.”
Jack was almost positive of his assumption now, but he needed to know one more thing. “How do the agents receive the nanites?”
“They can be transmitted any number of ways. Usually it’s by injection, but my son, Dorian, has told me stories about nanites jumping from one body to another and replicating there too. Although such a thing is not supposed to happen. The nanites are coded specifically to their host’s DNA.”
Jack shivered, thinking about little metal bugs replicating inside him. “So, essentially, these things are an infection, right?”
“Well, I’ve never thought about it like that before, but I guess you could say that.”
“What does any of this have to do with Celia?” Asher asked. “She would never have allowed her body to be taken over with nanites.”
“Under normal circumstances, no,” Jack said. “But what’s the only thing that can prevent a Shadow from using their powers?”
“I think I see where you’re headed with this, Jack,” Wizard said, his face lighting up.
“That’s what it’s gotta be, right? I mean, there isn’t any other thing that she couldn’t fight off internally.”
Asher waved his hands wildly. “Anybody want to fill me in here?”
Wizard gladly did so. “I believe Jack has hit it right on the nose. An EM field is the only thing that could prevent a Shadow from healing themselves. But for that to occur, you would need an EMF generator. However, if you were to somehow manipulate the nanites to put off an EM field—well then, you would have a portable Shadow-sized EMF generator.”
“Wouldn’t the electro-magnetic field shut down the nanites as well?” Asher asked.
“You’re thinking of an EM pulse,” Jack said, “something used as a weapon to shut do
wn computers and electrical devices.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t it shut down the nanites?” Asher asked.
“They fixed that problem long ago,” Wizard said. “The technology from the Seventh is shielded from pulses of any kind. And besides, the frequency of the EM field that blocks a Shadow’s powers is nowhere close to the range that would interfere with a computer or nanite.”
“So how do we turn off these EMF nanites?” Asher asked.
Jack turned to Wizard. “Well, you’re the expert here, no?”
“Expert is hardly the word I’d use, but I suppose I do know more than either of you simpletons on the subject.”
“Great! What do we do, old man?” Jack asked.
“There is one device that I can think of that might suit our needs. The problem with it is that it’s ancient by our standards, and it’s too large to move, so we’ll have to take Celia to it.”
“It, being where?” Asher asked.
“The Third.”
Jack clapped Asher on the back. “Ready for a field trip, kiddo?”
“Woo-hoo,” Asher replied flatly.
“Wait a second… How are we going to get all of us to the Third? We only have one key, remember?”
Wizard reached into his left sleeve and pulled out the key. “I thought we might have the need, so I arranged for my contact to get me a spare.” He reached into his other sleeve and produced a jump-watch, which he held up for Jack and Asher to see.
“This is the next-generation version of the key. It’s more functional and easier to reprogram destinations on. I believe you’ve both already seen one?”
“Yeah. As I recall, pretty boy here and his girlfriend tried to blow me up with one,” Jack said.
Asher winced. “Sorry about that. Again.”
Jack shook his head as Wizard continued. “Anyway, I can slave the old key to this and allow all four of us to jump together.”
“Ain’t science neat?” Jack joked. No one laughed.
“Wait a minute,” Asher said. “So, you’re telling me that the key I brought to the Third has to be programmed to change its destination?”
Strangers and Shadows Page 17
