Jessie Fifty-Fifty Complete Series

by Natalie Reid

  “Because I know something you don’t. And because this seemed to best way to tell you.”

  His face scrunched in confusion. “What’s that?”

  “There is something special about you,” she said, keeping her expression serious. “I thought it was a shame that you might not realize it.”

  Ben didn’t ask why he was special, or how she knew he was special, or even why she had chosen to say this to him at one in the morning. In fact, he seemed incapable of saying anything. He looked as if he might cry, so Jessie got up and went over to his bed. She stayed far enough away from him, afraid she might startle him, and asked if he’d like her to show him how to fold paper into a fish.

  It felt strange, instructing him on how to fold the paper and which way to bend the edges. It was the first time she had taught anyone anything, and it left her with a strangely satisfying yet heavy feeling.

  Later that night, when she finally trudged out of the Desolar Complex after promising Ben to visit again sometime soon, she was so caught up in her thoughts that she didn’t even register that someone was coming down the hallway. When the footsteps were loud enough, she finally looked up. Quickly the information of what had happened processed in her mind. She had forgotten to go back down to the seventh floor when leaving the complex, so now she was stuck on the tenth. However, the tenth floor was also the level that housed Tom’s laboratory, and that was exactly who was walking down the hall towards her.

  Jessie thought for a moment about shooting back inside the Desolar Complex, but then there were the cameras in the hallway to deal with, and the fact that Tom might be headed there too. So she forced a yawn and started forward down the hallway as if she were half asleep. She hadn’t even realized she had forgotten to put her shoes on until she compared the soft slap of her bare feet with the determined click of his shoes.

  Then, suddenly the clicking stopped, and she looked up to see a stunned Tom staring at her.

  “W-what are you doing here?” he asked, looking around for any escort that might be hiding.

  She gave him a sheepish smile and scratched at the back of her head, ruffling her hair and the pony-tail that it was forever tied in. “Ah, I couldn’t sleep,” she said. Then she gave a small sweep of her hand, saying, “They let me out so I could walk around.”

  Tom blinked from behind his glasses. It didn’t look as if he bought her story. “How’d you get up to the tenth floor without a key?” he asked.

  She placed the back of her hand to her mouth and yawned, saying the word, “climbed.”

  He took a step closer to her and shook his head. “You climbed up? Over the railing?” he asked, pausing between each question.

  She nodded sleepily to him, and went over to the side of the railing as if she was about to demonstrate for him, when he stopped her, saying, “You don’t have to do that.”

  She turned around to look back at him, and his eyes fell to his shoes. He placed a hand on his head, and his fingers disappeared into his light brown hair. It was a habit of his that Jessie had come to characterize him with.

  “What are you doing up so late?” she asked, hoping to draw attention away from herself so he wouldn’t ask any more questions.

  “Uh…” he stuttered, still avoiding eye-contact with her. “Just some tests.”

  She nodded and hopped up on the ledge to take a seat. He flinched when she did this, as if thinking she was going to jump off the ledge.

  “You never told me what you found on the test you ran on me,” she reminded him casually.

  “No, no, it was all good.” He nodded his head. “Everything was in order.”

  His voice sounded nervous, and his eyes turned in every direction but towards her. Before, Jessie had ignored it when he got like this. But now she was coming to terms with the fact that she would need to spend more time here than she wanted to, and having a doctor that didn’t even want to look at her would make her stay even tougher.

  “Tom?” she asked tentatively. “Are you still scared around me?”

  His eyes shot up to hers at that. “I’m not scared,” he defended.

  She stifled a smile, seeing that Tom reacted as strongly as any other guy when his manhood was tested. Then she flicked her head to the ledge of the railing beside her.

  “Then take a seat,” she challenged, hoping she didn’t sound too confrontational.

  Tom let out a breath through his nose and took his glasses from his eyes. He stashed them on top of his head and walked over to her. Taking a firm grip on the edge with both hands, he hoisted himself up and sat a few feet away from her.

  “I never thanked you,” she said once he had taken a seat. She didn’t face him as she said this, not wanting to make him feel more uncomfortable.

  “For bringing you back?” His voice was quiet, but it wasn’t fearful. “No, no you did. Right when you woke up, actually.”

  “I meant for taking care of me afterwards.”

  If Tom had been Aaron or Trid, she would have bumped him on the arm with her elbow, but she did not feel they were friends enough to do that. So instead she added in a light voice, “It takes a strong person to put up with me for as long as you have.”

  “Are… are you…” he started to say in mild disbelief. “Are you trying to make friends with me?”

  She let her shoulders sag and gave out a sigh. “Apparently I’m not doing so great, huh?”

  He turned to her and studied her face. “Why would you need to make friends with me? I’m just your doctor?”

  “Assistant to my doctor, actually,” she reminded him with a smile.

  A few moments of painful silence passed. She decided to approach this whole friendship thing from a different angle.

  “You know that picture in your lab?” she asked, silently flinching and hoping that she wouldn’t upset him by mentioning it. There was just more silence, so she continued. “The way you looked with your Protector, with your mom… it reminded me so much of me and my mom.” She brought her hands together and tapped them on her lap in nervous energy. “And I haven’t… I haven’t seen her in over nine years. I don’t even have a picture of her. So, when your picture reminded me of her, I guess I just wanted to…” She stopped herself with a sigh and shook her head. “If that makes any sense.”

  “Not really,” he said, actually giving her a small chuckle.

  Jessie smiled down at her lap. “I want to be your friend, Tom, because I just do. It shouldn’t be neuroscience.”

  He gave a short laugh again. It was quiet and hidden under his breath like the first one, but she could hear it enough to realize that he was growing more comfortable around her.

  After a few minutes of broken conversation, Tom offered to escort her back to her room so she wouldn’t have to scale her way back down. As they were in the elevator, riding down to the seventh floor, she caught him studying her from the corner of his eye. Perhaps, she hoped, he was finally starting to see her in a new light—one that wasn’t blocked by the black smoke of the Bandit in the sky. Or maybe it was just her imagination. Maybe he still saw her as the science experiment that had accidentally gone right.

  Chapter 7

  Feathers of Truth

  It was late when Griffin left the repair shop one Tuesday night after a long and arduous battle with a malfunctioning tablet. But, much to his delight, it was not so late that the Ancient Ramen restaurant down the street from his work had closed its doors to customers yet.

  He buttoned his jacket up close to his neck, trying to fend off the autumn cold. Autumn was much too brutal in Aero City than most people liked to acknowledge. They ignored the single-digit temperatures because they knew why it was they stayed. The higher the elevation, the cleaner the air, the greater their chance of survival. People could suffer through just about any temperature when it came to their will to live.

  As Griffin walked across the street, he wondered what this exact spot would have looked like if the forest had not been cleared away. He dug back in his memor
y to the few times he had stepped outside of the city boarders, and tried to picture an autumn forest in the light of the moon. He looked up, wondering if there was even a moon that night.

  Way up in the skies, small lights zoomed back and forth. The Bandits. It was the only sign reminding him that they were at war. His life was filled with so much else that he was hardly ever affected by the Bandits. He guessed that made him lucky.

  Stepping inside the Ramen restaurant, he shook the cold off his bones and called out, “Hello? Is somebody back there?”

  He stamped his feet on the plastic bamboo mat at the door and tried to rub some warmth back into his hands.

  “Be right there,” a voice shouted from the kitchen.

  A moment later, an older man walked out, throwing a dish towel over his shoulder. “Hello. I’m Kenji,” he introduced himself with a smile.

  Griffin was a little startled by the sudden introduction. He had seen the man a few times before, and he never once offered his name. Griffin cleared his throat, wondering if he was expected to carry on a conversation before he could get his noodles.

  “Uh, Griffin,” he offered weakly with a smile.

  Kenji held out his hand and he shook it a little cautiously. When he asked the man for a bowl of Ramen, Kenji nodded good-naturedly and left for the kitchen.

  Griffin had already seated himself when he came back. Kenji placed a steaming bowl of noodles on the table in front of him, hiding a carving in the wood that had been there for nearly ten years.

  “You know,” Kenji said, taking a seat across from his customer. “The word Griffin comes from a mythological creature.”

  “A what?” Griffin asked between slurps of noodles, not caring if he appeared sloppy and more than a little hungry in front of this casual acquaintance.

  “My grandfather said that, before the Contamination, people used to tell stories about magical creatures.”

  Griffin stopped eating to look up at him. He had heard the word magic before, but it always seemed to be spoken with disdain or mild amusement. He had pieced together that it was some make-believe source that people had created to make life more interesting, but he didn’t know that they had thought up creatures to go along with it as well.

  “What sort of creatures?” he asked.

  Kenji folded his arms on the table. “Well, for one, there’s the Griffin. It was a large magical bird that people said was impossible to lie in front of. As long as the Griffin was close by, not a single lie could be spoken. People even went as far as to snatch the feathers off of the Griffin and use them as truth tellers.”

  “So, you’re saying if I was a real Griffin, I could ask you any question I wanted, and you would have to tell me the truth?”

  “Exactly.”

  He turned his head and looked out the window, out towards the stars. There was one question that he wanted answered. Something that his mom said his dad had become obsessed with just before he died; something he kept asking himself over and over. “Which night?” he muttered under his breath.

  “What was that?” Kenji asked.

  “Oh, it’s nothing.” He was silent and looked down at his bowl and the carving on the wood that poked out from underneath. “So, this thing about having to tell me the truth…” Griffin chipped his thumb against the mark on the wood. “You couldn’t tell me how to win the girl of my dreams, could you?”

  Kenji laughed and shook his head. “You can’t just will information into someone’s head. Especially when it might not exist in the first place.”

  Griffin raised his eyebrows at him. “Oh, thank you! That’s really nice!”

  Kenji took the dish-towel from his shoulder and wiped at some spilt broth on the table. “If you’re really serious about a girl then you should stop asking people for advice and just start talking to her.”

  “That’s the problem,” he muttered, staring down into his bowl. “The last time I tried to talk to her, I gave her my coffee and pretended to work at Barry’s Coffee House. Then I ran out of there before I could say anything else.”

  This made the older man laugh even harder, and caused Griffin to scowl down into the broth swimming in his bowl.

  “You are too much, kid!” Kenji stood up from his seat and started to wipe a nearby table. “You should take a tip from your name and just start with the truth. My grandfather always told me that truth will take you farther than anything else.”

  “Is this the same grandfather that told you about magical giant birds?” he mumbled.

  “Well, with that attitude, maybe you just don’t want to go far,” Kenji shot back.

  The older man excused himself to go back into the kitchen, leaving Griffin alone with his thoughts. He kept thinking about Kenji’s comment about going farther. But farther than what? And where was he going? And what kind of vehicle was truth anyway? It seemed pretty lame.

  He couldn’t get these thoughts out of his head, even when he had finished his dinner and walked back home. When he entered into his apartment, he could see a small crack of light coming from the closed door of Harper’s room. She was still mad at him for passing up the opportunity to repair the Task Force bike, and they hadn’t spoken much in the last several days.

  It wasn’t like her to stay mad at him for long. Harper was someone that was always quick to laugh, and quick to forgive. But with the bike, she seemed to have grown more serious. He didn’t think that she wanted him to win Melissa over that badly. Though she had said she was sick of seeing him pinning over her for the past year.

  Griffin shook his head, thinking maybe he had been a pain to live with. A love-sick puppy that would never get any better because he never did anything about the girl he was in love with.

  Taking a deep breath, he walked up to Harper’s door and knocked lightly. “Mind if I come in?”

  “Whatever,” came the non-committal reply.

  He found Harper, as always, on her main computer at the far end of the room, caught up in some database that she probably shouldn’t be in, but probably wasn’t doing much inside either. Harper was someone that wanted to learn a secret just for the sake of doing so, and never really wanted to do anything with the knowledge that she stumbled upon.

  “You, uh, you got access to Task Force records?” Griffin asked timidly. He cleared his throat and added, “Their, uh, their manuals and protocols?”

  She swung around in her chair and stared at him from the dim light of her computer screen. “What would you be wanting with those?”

  “Well, I realized, if we were going to ride on their bikes, we better know how to act like them.”

  A grin slowly spread on her face. “I might have what you’re looking for.” She turned to her right and shoved an old monitor off of a dusty chair. She swung it around for him, and he slowly took a seat, preparing his mind for the many rules he would need to break in the coming months. But at the end waited the vision of Melissa, laughing and smiling and loving him for the things he gave up for her.

  * * *

  Snow fell lightly through the trees as the transport ship landed smoothly on the ground and opened its doors. The sting of the cold was bracing on Jessie’s skin, and she realized that the last time she had been outside, she had been dying.

  When the doors opened up all the way and the ramp extended to the forest floor, the six passengers on board filed out. The first out was the man that had orchestrated the outing, Lieutenant Carver. He had told Jessie that he needed to see her combat skills again to ensure that she could return to the military and wouldn’t just be a “dead weight,” as he put it. The second out was another officer in the military, a man named Sergeant Jeddick. Next came Jessie, and following close behind her was her own sergeant, Denneck. The last two out, looking a bit like fishes out of water, were Doctor Tag and Tom. They were bundled up in thick coats that made their bodies look like formless blobs, and their faces stuck out like a baby’s would, swaddled in a blanket.

  Jessie had been given her normal military jacket, and
despite the fact that it didn’t keep out much of the cold, it still felt incredibly good back on her shoulders.

  When they were all on the forest floor, snow falling lightly on their hair and in their eyes, Tag took something from a bag and walked over to Jessie. He took her hand, pushed up her sleeve, and taped a device to the inside of her wrist, explaining that it would monitor her heart-rate. Then Carver took out his tablet, pulled up a screen that was already showing her steady heart-beat, and nodded to the doctor.

  “Jessie,” Carver said. “I want you to run a half mile straight in that direction as fast as you can, and then run right back.”

  “Yes sir,” she said with a nod.

  In military training, they had been taught to understand distances with a high level of accuracy. Jessie could gage exactly how far one point was from another as easily as breathing.

  When Carver gave the signal to start, she took off at a full sprint, judging the best way to swerve through the trees without adding any extra distance. She kept her breathing calm and measured, and found that sprinting actually had a calming effect on her. The exercise made her body feel warm, and the crisp cool air invigorated her. Before she could begin to feel tired, she reached the half-mile mark, and turned back around to the starting point.

  When she returned, she was barely out of breath. Carver simply gave her a nod, but Tag and Tom seemed surprised that she had finished so quickly. Tag immediately pulled out his tablet and began feverishly searching for something on it.

  “Still as fast as ever, Chance,” Jeddick commented, ruffling her hair as he said this.

  She looked up at him with a goofy grin. Jeddick was like the reliable uncle to many of the soldiers on the air-base, and he could always make Jessie feel like a kid again.

  Carver didn’t allow her much time to rest before ordering her to run the same course again. She did so without arguing, and managed to keep much the same pace as her first run. When she got back, Denneck gave her a bright smile. However, Carver didn’t even look up from his tablet as he ordered her to run it a third time.