Preserving Will

by Alex Albrinck

  Angel winked at both of them before she turned and moved back to the time machine, sliding into the backseat with her father, who was barely conscious. Adam affixed a small device high on the wall nearest the time machine, and then turned toward the invisible mother and child. “It will go off five minutes after we leave. You should be certain you’ve left this place before the timer hits zero.” He climbed into the front seat.

  The elder Josh moved down the stairs once more, with no less speed but with far greater care than before. He cradled Smokey in his arms. She felt the tears rising again, and whispered to both versions of the son she loved. “Thank you.”

  The younger Josh didn’t seem to notice the gesture. He tugged on Hope’s sleeve once more. “Mommy! Smokey said she’s getting better!”

  Hope watched Smokey as the elder Josh climbed into the time machine. The dog didn’t seem to be breathing. But if Josh said the dog had told him she was getting better… well, who was she to argue? “Those people will take good care of her, sweetie.”

  She hoped that was true.

  The top of the time machine started to materialize, but they were able to hear a brief snippet of conversation.

  “You… you saved Smokey,” Will said. His voice was barely a whisper, but they could hear him clearly. “Thank you. My wife, my son… were you able to save them as well?”

  The older Josh turned around to face the man in the seat behind him, but Hope could feel his eyes on his younger self, for the words were meant for the invisible boy, not the beaten man who’d asked the question. Or perhaps they were meant for his father, hidden from all of them. “They were already gone when I got there.”

  The lid snapped opaque, cutting off the view of the people in the cabin of the time machine. Seconds later, the craft vanished.

  “Will they bring Smokey back?” Josh asked.

  “If they’re able to,” Hope said. “They have to help her get better. But you’ll see her again. I’m sure of it.”

  “What about Daddy?”

  She sighed. “Daddy will have to hide a lot, to get the men who did this to stay away from us.”

  On cue, Porthos bounded down the stairs, followed seconds later by Athos and Aramis. The Hunters stared at the sight of the dirt and rock flowing back into the hole in the basement wall.

  “Who are they?” Josh asked Hope. “I… I don’t like them.”

  “I don’t, either,” Hope replied, as memories of the trio worked their way back into her consciousness. “Those men… they’re the one who hurt Daddy, and their… friend is the one who tried to hurt us. The men you see are called the Hunters. Their job is to find Daddy and our friends, to Hunt them, and to capture them. Tonight was the closest they’ve gotten to succeeding.”

  “Their friend, the bad man with the ugly face… he was supposed to kill us, wasn’t he?”

  She was amazed at his perceptiveness at six years of age… but realized he’d been born with Energy potential she could barely fathom. Hiding anything from him, including the fact that there were people in the world who wanted him dead, would be impossible. “You’re right, sweetie. He was supposed to kill us. But he didn’t succeed. That’s what Daddy is going to focus on now. The men here, the Hunters—” she gestured at the three in the basement “—they’ll assume the Assassin was successful, and that we’re dead. They’ll continue to try to find Daddy, though. If they find him with us, they’ll know we survived and will try to find us again and try again to kill us. To give us a chance to live, to give you a chance to grow up without being chased like that, to live without having to move around all the time… Daddy will stay in hiding, making sure they don’t know where we are, or even that we’re alive at all. It will be difficult for all of us, Josh. But the time will come when we’ll all be together again.”

  She said those last words with far more conviction than she actually felt. And she hoped that Josh believed her words.

  One of the Hunters had noticed the countdown timer on the device Adam had planted earlier. The three men exchanged worried glances.

  Go now, Hope. Go to the bunker. You know how to do it. And I know you can do it.

  She remembered her skill and the location at his prompting. Her Energy was fully awakened once more, and she surrounded herself and her son within its warmth, picturing in her mind the two of them being inside the bunker dozens of feet underground. It was the place she’d spent years building, knowing they’d need it for just this point in time.

  An instant later, they were there.

  Hope was exhausted. The emotional toll of the past twenty minutes—seeing Will’s injuries, seeing her grown children, the strange warnings to take care of herself issued to both her and the younger Josh—overwhelmed her. She moved to one of the beds and climbed under the covers. Josh climbed in with her, snuggled up next to her, and was soon asleep.

  As she dozed off, Hope felt a sense of triumph that she couldn’t quite define. The memories would return with time. But she knew that the fact that she was sleeping in this bunker with her son meant they’d succeeded in completing something that had been in the works for a very long time.

  Lifetimes, in fact.

  It was no wonder she was so tired.

  XXIV

  Chances

  January 10, 2030

  Gena woke, unaware of what day it was, where she was, or even who she was. The entirety of the events she’d gone through since Adam had abducted her—there was no other way to describe it—was overwhelming, and her mind and body demanded sleep as the only way to allow her to process and internalize everything.

  She’d known she was adopted, abandoned at the orphanage in Pleasanton when she was only a few months old. There were no clues to the identity of her birth parents. She’d long since given up wondering about them. They’d made the decision they’d felt was right, and without knowing their circumstances, she had no way to judge if their choice had been best for her. It wasn’t as if she’d suffered from their decision. The Adamses had been stellar parents, and never once had she doubted that they loved her as their own. Any mention that she wasn’t their flesh and blood brought looks of such sadness to them that she’d stopped mentioning it, even during her teen years when she’d sometimes wanted to hurt them. Some blows were too cruel, even when delivered in anger.

  And in time, she’d stopped wondering about the people who’d given her life and started being thankful for those who’d given her life meaning. They were her parents. They wanted her to be their daughter, and they’d filled out massive volumes of forms and endured countless interviews and waiting to get her. They were, in a word, heroes. And she got to call her heroes Mom and Dad.

  Now, though, everything she’d thought she’d known—or, more to the point, not known—about her past had been resurrected by the man who’d abducted her.

  Her birth parents hadn’t abandoned her.

  They’d thought her dead, listened to the medical professionals who’d said their daughter was stillborn. The couple had accepted those proclamations as fact, had grieved, and in some fashion had moved on to the rest of their lives. They’d never known that their daughter lived.

  Adam had been there, had realized after the proclamations of death that she lived, and realized that she’d never survive with the medical technology available to those he called “humans.” With his skills, with his technology, though, she had a chance, and he’d spent months—perhaps years—working to fix what ailed her.

  She owed him her life. She had complete confidence that what he’d told her of her birth—and her rebirth—were completely true. But she also knew that he wasn’t telling her everything.

  He hadn’t mentioned why he’d never gone back to her birth parents and told them she’d lived. Why? Why had he and his “friend” elected to place her in an orphanage when they knew who her birth parents were? Was it possible it had taken so long that he’d figured that her parents wouldn’t have recognized her, would not have been able to accept the infant as their
own child? Were her birth parents even alive by the time she was restored to health?

  He hadn’t mentioned if she had any siblings. If he’d met the family in the delivery room, surely he’d know if she had any older brothers or sisters. That, she decided, was the worst part of the whole thing. She’d grown up thinking of herself as an only child; the Adamses had turned to adoption, and to her, when they found themselves unable to have children of their own. The new information about her origin shared by Adam brought that old question back to her mind, one she’d stopped thinking about years earlier. What if her birth parents did have other children? Were they still alive? Would those potential siblings want to know about her, want to get to know her? Would they welcome her as family, or treat her as a stranger?

  Adam knew the answers to those questions; of that, she was quite certain. But she was also certain that, for reasons she couldn’t fathom, he wouldn’t tell her the answers.

  He’d also been evasive when she’d asked him how it was he’d been in that specific hospital on the day she was born. He’d told her that he’d been interested in medicine, and as it turned out, he was on duty at the time. But that hardly explained things. One didn’t simply walk into a hospital, don medical scrubs, and participate in the delivery of a baby. Well, someone like Adam probably could, because she’d no doubt he could convince anyone that he belonged there. But why would he bother?

  How was he old enough to do this? He looked to be around forty. She’d just turned twenty. How would a twenty-year-old have enough interest in medicine, and enough skill with this Energy stuff, to decide to walk into a hospital delivery room? She had the feeling he was older than he looked, but the math still didn’t work well.

  And why had he asked her not to tell anyone about the circumstances of her birth, and of his involvement? She’d given her word, but now wished she hadn’t. The others didn’t act like there was anything unusual about her, but she wondered what they’d say if she related the story Adam had given her. He’d alluded to one other person knowing the truth. Perhaps that person, if identified, might tell her what secret Adam was hiding from her and the others.

  Perhaps the secrets he kept might explain why she was able to “hear” this stuff he called Energy, and do so in a far more convincing manner than her own theory about the effects of living an extended period of time inside an Energy cocoon. It was something she’d be able to study in more depth after the journey she was about to take, another means to understand her own origin and to take her mind off Mark and the burning anger she felt toward the man who’d murdered her love.

  She’d be leaving on a journey to their primary facility to begin her initiation process, which sounded ominous. She wasn’t sure she had reason to doubt them. In her time here, they’d never hurt her. Outside the original abduction, she’d never been restricted in her movements, except during her brief attempt to run to Mark’s aid three days earlier. And even then, Ashley had only slowed her down, given her something to think about, and then set her free to make her own decision about what to do next. She’d asked about leaving yesterday, told them that she’d like to return to her apartment, but they’d showed her the stories of her murder on the local news. The note someone had left behind—probably one of the evil Aliomenti they spoke about—said she’d killed herself after learning of Mark’s violent death.

  It had nearly been the truth. But she’d been given a choice, had made her decision, and now she’d make the most of her remaining time on this planet.

  She didn’t like the idea that her friends would think she’d taken her own life, though they’d know that nothing short of Mark’s death would ever push her to such a decision. But the only way to tell them it wasn’t true was to show that she was still alive. The Alliance—Adam, Judith, Aaron, Peter, Eva, Ashley, and Archie—asked her what would happen if she did reveal, even to a single best friend, that she’d lived. She considered and realized the awful truth, the reality of the world she now lived in. They would find out. They would come looking for her. And she had no idea if the Alliance people would be able to defend her. They’d considered Mark and Deron expendable—in fairness, they’d given both men a chance to live, but refused to prevent the public murders from occurring—so she held out little hope she’d get much protection from them after revealing she’d survived having her throat slashed. The Alliance had no interest in any type of exposure; it was the one thing they seemed to have in common with their Aliomenti foes.

  Leaving the old life behind was as practical as it was therapeutic. It gave her the chance to make a clean break from her past and from Mark, letting the dead sleep in peace. And he’d want her to move along, to take advantage of the opportunity she now had.

  Gena left her room and went to locate the others. The kitchen upstairs was empty, which was unusual. Typically, she’d find them there, congregating, planning their days—both their public, elderly, and wealthy human lives, and their secret, younger, Alliance lives—and she’d be able to develop a deeper understanding of each of them and their culture just by listening to the conversation. They never asked her to leave the room, which helped her feel more at home and welcome.

  She vaguely remembered conversations from the previous day, about what each of them would be doing. Adam was going to settle in a house several hours away, waiting for Will Stark’s lawyer to arrive. They had apparently set in motion a plan to recover the Starks’ fortune for use by Hope and Josh without giving any hint of their whereabouts to the Aliomenti, who had a deep presence in matters of international banking. The process would start when the lawyer met Adam. Eva and Aaron—back in their elderly human disguises—were off to take a trip to Oregon to check on a rental property they’d purchased a few months earlier. Archie and Ashley were pretending to leave on an extended trip out of the country; in reality, they’d be escorting Gena and the MacLeans to the Alliance headquarters.

  That accounted for most of them, but she couldn’t remember what the homeowners, Peter and Judith, were planning to do today. Were they still sleeping?

  She walked back down to the deserted basement. The door to the media room was open. Gena tentatively moved inside and glanced around. The video screens they’d positioned three days earlier were gone; only the single large projection screen remained. The screen was powered down, the audio was silent, and there were no signs that, only days earlier, she’d witnessed things she’d like to forget, and others she hoped she’d one day understand.

  Gena walked back to the main congregating area in the lower level, her footfalls silent in the thick carpeting on the floor. She saw the life-sized images of Peter and Judith on the wall and she walked forward, frowning. She’d watched as they’d walked through that painting to get into a secret section of the house, and she suspected that’s where she’d find the homeowners. She moved closer to the portrait, suspecting that it was a mirage and she’d go through into the secret rooms.

  She slammed into the wall and bounced back, and her hand moved to rub the pain out of nose. Why wasn’t she able to get in?

  An odd thought came to her. Adam had spoken broadly of Energy, the substance they used to perform their miraculous feats, the force of nature she could hear in her mind. He’d vaguely described it, in one of their conversations, as a warmth or tingling sensation. Was it possible that the wall could only be penetrated by someone who wielded that power?

  Could she do that?

  With no guidance, she focused on trying to sense the warmth or tingling in her body. After several minutes of effort, she still felt nothing. That angered her, because if she was right, they could use that lack of ability, that humanness, against her, to keep her out of the more important rooms in the house here and elsewhere. She concentrated, achieving a level of focus deeper than she’d ever achieved before.

  In those depths of focus and concentration, she found the spark.

  It was tiny, faint, and something she’d probably missed in her life until now. But it was there, a feeling of warmth th
at seemed alive, a sensation that moved through and around her body as she focused on it. Enthralled, she focused more on that spark, spreading that tingling sensation throughout her body, feeling lighter and more alive than she’d ever felt before.

  She hadn’t realized her eyes were closed until that moment, and when she opened them once more she saw the wall with the portrait in front of her. Feeling emboldened by the sensations she now experienced, Gena moved to the wall once more, with caution, her body tingling with Energy.

  This time, she fell through into the room behind the wall.

  The tumble took her to the ground, and she quickly stood. She descended the circular staircase before her to the hidden sub-basement. The fall had also ended her deep focus, jarring her concentration and ending the euphoria brought on by the tingling sensation. It didn’t worry her; she knew she could find that spark again, and she would. The experience provided an incredible rush, and if the people she’d been working with for the past few days had tapped into this ability…

  “Gena?”

  She turned toward the voice, saw the speaker, and screamed, falling to the ground.

  “Gena? Are you okay?” Mark’s voice was tinged with concern. He moved to her and held out his hand to her, offering to help her stand. “It seems like it’s been forever since I’ve seen you.”

  But Gena couldn’t speak. Her eyes were wide, and her face was as pale as the ghost she felt she was seeing.

  Alerted by the scream, Peter raced out of a room toward both of them, taking in the situation in mere seconds. “Mark, can you give me a quick moment with Gena?”

  Mark looked as if leaving Gena was the last thing he wanted to do, especially with her in such an obvious state of distress. But he finally relented, rose to his feet, and walked slowly back into the room Peter had just exited. He glanced back at Gena, concern etched on his face, before shutting the door behind him.