by Natalie Reid
She ignored them as she lowered her arms and stared down at Ben’s motionless body and knew that she had been left completely alone. Tears continued to fall from her eyes and drop in small pools on his shirt, but she felt as if the water falling from her face was not really coming from her. Her body was moving and functioning, but she was not her body. She was something else; something frozen and irrevocably damaged that could no longer be tempted or urged into motion.
One of the agents in the doorway pointed a gun at her, saying, “Jessie Fifty-Fifty, you have been found guilty of giving into the Bandit. You will come with us to the place of your execution.”
She had dreamt those words so many times. The fear that they brought had gripped her heart and pulled her from sleep on countless occasions. And now here they were, presented to her in much the same way as they had been in all her nightmares, yet she wasn’t running. Her mind wasn’t racing to come up with a plan, reverting to the survival mode that had worked so well on a number of occasions to keep her alive. She wasn’t figuring odds and calculating how to get past the guards and into the hallway. She wasn’t even moved to fear as the men circled around her and kept their guns pointed at her head.
Jessie let Ben’s body fall from her hands in utter defeat and allowed herself to be blindly led out of the room. Her mind fell into an eerie state of numbness. One moment she was walking in the hall, and the next she was being shoved into a blinding white room with no windows or furniture, no indication that this was a room or even any space here on earth except for the door leading out and the circle of buzzing humanity that spread around her.
She didn’t hear when the guns fired. She didn’t remember if she felt pain. All she could wrap her head around was the vision of a white mist, spreading up from her feet and circling her body until it erased all sight, sound and consciousness, and left her in the dark.
Chapter 16
The Aftermath
Aaron stared in terror and disbelieving shock as he was made to watch the footage of the girl he loved tearing through BLES headquarters on a stolen hover bike. Blood stained her hands and a wild look overtook her eyes.
“I don’t believe this,” he said, shoving the tablet back into the Task Force agent’s hands.
“Aaron,” Ritter said, angling the words down at him so that they stung with the patronization of false sympathy. “I know it’s hard to take in, but there are countless witnesses at BLES that can verify this. Even your own Lieutenant can confirm that she left the home of a government employee with blood on her hands and stole a Task Force bike to get away. And if the man ever recovers from his wounds, he will tell you, without a doubt, that Jessie was the girl that stabbed him. I’m sorry, but she’s been fooling us all.” He put a hand on Aaron’s shoulder, saying, “She is a Bandit.” He spoke each word individually as if they would do less damage if they were separated from each other.
Aaron turned away from Ritter’s grasp and looked around the room. They were in an empty holding room on the air-base, with no sink, no trash can, and nothing to hold onto for support.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” he strained out.
He doubled over, but nothing would come out. No bile, scream, or tears. Nothing.
Ritter bent over beside him and whispered into his ear. “I know you noticed it, Aaron. The little things that made her different. Her anger at not being let back into the field. Those un-accounted hours where she would slip away and offer no explanation as to where she was or what she was doing. Just those inkling suspicions that nagged on the back of your mind that you forced yourself to ignore because, this was your friend after all.”
Aaron turned his head to look at the contempt agent, and then shoved him away in anger. Ritter let a mild look of amusement cross over his features as he steadied himself and held his hands up in casual defense.
“Now that’s no way to treat the man that saved your life.”
Aaron pointed his finger at him. “Don’t you dare! I was a boy when that happened!”
“And if I hadn’t come, you would have been killed by your own mother. I know.” Ritter shook his head apologetically. “It’s a cruel way to go, and it would have happened if I hadn’t gotten there in time. But now there’s another Bandit out there on the loose. She could be committing the same types of horrors that your mother almost inflicted on you. The only way I can stop it is if you help me.”
Aaron gripped his head in his hands and looked up to the ceiling. “I don’t see what you could possibly want from me.”
“Just tell me where she might go in a time of crisis. You know how she thinks. You know the places she does.”
The pilot shook his head in frustration. “No, that’s the whole point! I don’t know! I don’t know her like I thought I did. That…” he pointed down to the fallen tablet on the floor. “That is not her.”
Aaron nearly choked on the words as they left his mouth, but they seemed to have the opposite effect on Ritter. He smiled politely and nodded his head. Retrieving his tablet from the ground, he pocketed it and then placed a comforting hand on Aaron’s shoulder.
“I understand how difficult this is for you. I’ll leave you in peace.”
Ritter left Aaron and stepped out into the air-base hallway. There had been a soldier assigned to guard their door, but when he stepped out, he found that the soldier had been replaced with a very angry looking sergeant.
“Is there no line for you?” Denneck demanded, taking a step towards Ritter. “Is there no point where you stop and realize that what you’re doing is just wrong by all accounts?”
Ritter tweaked his mouth into a smile. “I’m just trying to save innocent people from being killed by a Bandit.”
“You and I both know that’s not true.”
“You’re the one that trained the Bandit that’s running around Aero City right now. I wouldn’t try to take the moral high ground with me, sergeant.”
Denneck bunched his hands into fists and took in a deep breath. Before he could say anything more, several pairs of footsteps echoed through the hallway. The two men looked over to see Lieutenant Carver and Sergeant Jeddick hurrying down the hall to stop whatever it was that might have been brewing between them.
“Sergeant Denneck,” Carver called out. “You will follow me to my office now. Sergeant Jeddick, escort this man to the hangar and off this base.”
Ritter tipped a hand to his head in mock salute as he sauntered off down the hall, leaving Jeddick to follow up the rear.
Carver said nothing to his sergeant as he led him to his office and closed the door behind them. Denneck, however, was just past breaking point and seemed to explode whenever the door finally closed. He walked straight to the wall of Carver’s office and rammed his fist into it. When he drew away from it, he ran a hand through his hair and began pacing around the room.
“Sergeant,” Carver said sternly. “I suggest you compose yourself before I do it for you.”
Denneck glanced over at him and stopped pacing. He placed his hands behind his back in respect and nodded his head with extreme self-restraint.
“I trust you’ve seen the footage inside BLES,” Carver said.
He nodded.
“It all looks very convincing doesn’t it?” Carver asked.
Denneck’s restraint slipped, and he blurted out, “She’s my best soldier. I can’t believe her of…” He balled his fists and growled in frustration. “Lieutenant I know you don’t believe me. I know you didn’t even want her to go back in the field in the first place because you suspected… but I know this isn’t right!”
Carver held up a hand to silence him. “I was going to say that it all looks very convenient.”
Denneck stared in silent confusion, wondering what was going through the Lieutenant’s mind.
“If word got around that there was a cure for the Bandit, then I’d imagine that Task Force would be pretty keen on discrediting those accounts,” Carver mused. “What better way to do that than to make it se
em like the survivor was really a Bandit this whole time?”
Denneck shook his head. “What are you saying? Do you mean you—”
“Think this whole thing reeks of a conspiracy? You bet I do. All I need to know is if I can count on you to help get her out of it.”
A mixture of shock and subdued elation flashed on the younger man’s face. “I don’t understand. You’re actually going to break the law to help her? Forgive me, but I didn’t think you even liked her!”
“You weren’t supposed to think that. The world had to believe that I thought of Jessie as nothing more than a soldier. If they knew the truth, we would have both been taken care of a long time ago.”
“The truth about what sir?”
Instead of answering, Carver put out his hand for Denneck to shake, saying, “If I had to go down with one of my officers, I’m glad it was you.”
As Denneck shook his hand and saw the determination in the Lieutenant’s eyes, he began to piece together what he had meant by his secret.
“I can’t believe it,” he whispered with a shake of his head. “It was you this whole time.”
* * *
The first thing that Jessie noticed when she stirred into consciousness was that she was in pain. For the second time in her life, she thought that she was up in the Black, up in that dark cloud that took so many lives and turned them into hungry destruction. But then, much like after her crash, a pair of hands rested on her shoulders.
She was too tired, too defeated to open her eyes to see who was holding onto her. Ben was dead, her mind told her. It was a fact, not a reminder. It was something that wouldn’t be momentarily forgotten in between the waning moments of sleep and consciousness. This was something that had been burned into her. Like the promise she had made to her mother, this painful understanding followed her through each second.
Her mind had turned to haze, trying to take her away from reality, but she was still present enough to feel something being pressed against her mouth. Moisture tickled at her lips, and she found them opening as if on their own will, letting in the water that would wake her up, keep her alive, stop her from slipping away completely. When the pressure on her lips was taken away and the water disappeared from her throat, she forced herself to open her eyes.
The room she was in was dark, but there was enough moonlight coming in through the window to her left that it allowed her to see the worried face of the man before her.
“What have you done?” she whispered out.
Her body swayed in weakness as she said this, and Tom’s hands flew to her shoulders once more to keep her sitting upright.
“I couldn’t let them kill you,” he whispered out softly.
She shook her head. Her mouth remained slightly open as she took in tired breaths of air.
“They’ll just kill you now too. You shouldn’t have saved me.”
His hands tightened on her shoulders in anger. “I believed that once, but not now. You’re still here with us for a reason.” He took in a shaky breath. “I need you to be here with me.”
Jessie let her head slump down to her chest. Tom was kneeling in front of her, but she drew away so that she could pull her legs in front of her and hide her face in her knees. She made no noise of crying or tears, but her back shook in waves of despair.
From outside the apartment, she could hear the sound of Ward’s voice as it blasted through the speakers that were placed all throughout Aero City. This happened every night at eleven. Ward would speak to his city, listing off the names of every wanted fugitive and urging his people to remain vigilant in the face of the Bandit. Every night he signed off with the phrase: Fight pain with pleasure.
When his voice finally stopped, leaving the apartment in the dull sound of distant engines and sirens, she asked, “What does the world still want with me? I couldn’t even save a little b…” She choked on the last word and finally gave in to the tears that she had kept silent.
Tom didn’t put his arms around her as she cried. He didn’t touch her or even reach his hand out. Instead, he whispered out in shameful admission, “I’m afraid I lied to you Jessie.”
Her back stopped shaking, and she opened her red and swollen eyes just enough to look out at him.
“When you asked me about a Protector taking their Potentian back.” He shook his head and looked to her in despair. “I couldn’t tell you the truth. So I said that it might be possible. I lied to give you hope. I thought it might make things easier. But, the truth was, I knew that it wasn’t possible. It had been tried before, countless times. No matter how much a Protector wanted to take their child back, they couldn’t. Once the bond was broken, it could never be put back together.”
Jessie turned away after he admitted this. She swallowed down hard and her throat felt hot and salty. She didn’t know how to process this information. She didn’t have the energy to feel anger at having been lied to; didn’t have the courage to take comfort in the fact that his death wasn’t on her hands.
“I was trying to save him just as much as you were,” he whispered. “I even thought I could save him the same way I saved you. That’s why I was so interested in how your lungs were doing. I thought, if I could give him a stronger set of lungs, that he would be able to survive on his own.” He sniffed loudly, and when he spoke next, his voice was muffled by his hands. “But it didn’t work. Nothing I tried ever worked.”
As he buried his head in his hands, she imagined what it must have been like for Ben, going through surgery after surgery, waking up with that alien feeling in his chest and hoping that this new experiment would have the power to save him. She imagined going through that pain just to have it all end in that empty room.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. The sound of her voice surprised her, for she had not meant to form those words.
Suddenly a warm pressure hit her back, and she felt a strong pair of arms circling around her and gently rocking her back and forth.
“You don’t have to do anything Jessie,” he whispered out. “Just stay here with me.”
Somehow, by some chance, the warmth from Tom’s chest leaked past the numbness that had surrounded hers, and caused something to ignite in consciousness. Jessie felt it—she felt the pain and energy it required to keep it going, and for the first time since Ben died, she even felt fear.
Ben hadn’t been the only one at BLES she had grown to care for. Now it was her fault that he was in danger. She couldn’t let him die too.
Her crying stopped and she grew stiff in his arms.
Tom pulled away. “Jessie?” he asked, concerned.
Slowly she got up to her feet. The room swayed for a second, but it was hard to tell darkness apart from darkness.
“Where are we?” she asked quietly.
“In a vacant apartment near the north side of the city.”
She stared out the window. She had no idea how he got her out of BLES and carried her all the way over here without being caught. Taking in the room, she saw the walls were a combination of brick and dry wall. Parts of it were crumbling with rot and scattering white dust on the floor. It looked as if this apartment might have had promise at one point, but had now fallen into despair.
The only objects in the room were a wheelchair folded up in the corner, and a small tank with a mask connected to it by a thin tube. Slowly she began to piece together what had probably happened. The white mist she had seen had been from Tom, and had knocked everyone out, including her. He must have been the only person awake on the entire ground floor of BLES. Then it would have been a matter of getting her in the wheel chair and wheeling her out of there and into the city before anyone woke up.
It all sounded so simple in her mind, but she knew it couldn’t have been. There should have been no way that a scientist, no matter how brilliant, was able to outsmart a whole squadron of Task Force agents and slip into the city without being detected. Either someone let them go, or they already knew where they were, and were just waiting.
“I noticed it one time when I came to this part of the city to pick up supplies. It seemed the best place to bring you.”
His voice sounded stiff and tense. She wondered if he was hiding something from her, something about this place that he didn’t want her to know. She heard him take a few steps closer to her so he was standing right behind her, looking out the window.
Outside, a helicopter with a search light flew by, casting its beam to the dark corners of the street and pushing it forward as if it had captured the light by a chain. Jessie suddenly felt a wave of tears trying to escape. She bit the bottom of her lip to keep it back, but Tom could still sense the battle she was fighting. He stood in front of her now, and she couldn’t stop her arms from reaching out and wrapping around his shoulders. She needed something solid, at least for a moment. She needed to be near Tom and have this one bit of comfort before she went back into the dark world she knew was waiting for her.
His hands were pressed firmly on her back, but they reluctantly let her go as she stepped away. She turned her head from him as she wiped her eyes. She didn’t like feeling vulnerable, and it seemed like that’s all she felt when she was around Tom. But he didn’t need her like that right now. He needed Jessie the soldier. He needed Chance. He had saved her life for the second time. Now it was up to her to keep them alive. She had to rise above her grief to at least do that.
“When we get out there,” she told him calmly, “I want you to do as I say. The second I tell you to run, you run. If I tell you to take something, even if it isn’t yours, you steal it anyway.”
He nodded blankly. Though he said nothing, she could tell the impact her words had on him. He had saved her life, and now he had to deal with the consequences.
“First chance we get, we’ll get new clothes,” she said.
He flicked his head in understanding. This would be hard on him, but she didn’t have time to ease him into it. They needed to move.
