by Kailin Gow
Jack sighs, and then kisses me. It’s a sweet kiss, a gentle kiss. It’s not about passion, or somehow claiming me back as his. It’s about showing me that he loves me every bit as much as I love him, and that moment makes me glow. Literally. Light spreads around us as our powers combine, and it’s an effort to pull back from him. I rub my wrists, trying to ignore the marks of the cuffs there.
“You need to go now, Celes,” Jack says. “I want you to know that I love you, though, and I’m not giving up on you.” He looks down at the ruins of the handcuffs. “I think it’s pretty obvious we have far too much chemistry for that. I’ll see you once we get out of here.”
I shake my head. “I’m coming with you. Johnny knows me better than you, and I’ve spent more time in this place. You’ll need my help if you’re going to get him out, Jack. You know that you will.”
Jack looks like he wants to argue about that, but I cut him off before he can.
“Where would you prefer I was?” I ask. “Out there somewhere with Grayson, or right by your side helping you?”
Jack pauses, but it’s obvious that he knows I’m right. After several seconds of hesitation he nods.
“I shouldn’t do this,” he says. “The priority is your safety.”
“Ignore the priorities,” I say. “Let’s concentrate on what’s right. Do you want to leave a little boy able to see the future with a father who’s so determined to stop him doing it he wants to fade his memory?”
Jack shakes his head.
“Then come on,” I say, and step out of the room.
TEN
We leave the room where Senator Hammond has been holding us and head out through the hallway outside. There are rooms on either side, all with the kind of sliding security doors on the cells. Those don’t appear to have locks, just buttons to open them. I guess Senator Hammond isn’t too worried about people being let out, and I know from having spent the night in one of them that there aren’t any controls on the inside.
Jack presses one of the buttons and a door opens. We don’t step inside, because after the way Grayson got trapped with us it doesn’t seem like a good idea, but we do glance around. It’s another apartment, similar to the one that they’ve been keeping me in. It’s large, well furnished, and empty. Is it intended purely as a comfortable prison? It seems unlikely that anyone would go to that much trouble. So maybe there is a way to get the doors open without help, and this is just a place for Hammond’s employees to stay.
That seems to make more sense, especially once Jack starts opening more doors. There are more apartments behind each one, and they’re mostly empty. A whole block of empty apartments. The one time we do run into someone, it’s the woman who brought food for me and Grayson. Jack spins her to the ground and clamps a hand over her mouth, extracting a zip tie from inside his jacket and using it to tie her hands.
“Now,” he says, “I’m not planning on hurting you, but I need to know where Senator Hammond and his son Johnny are.”
“Why?” she asks. “What are you going to do to them?”
“We’re not going to do anything,” I say. “We’re trying to help Johnny, here.”
“He’s such a sweet boy,” the woman says. She swallows. “The senator will be angry I spoke to you.”
“You don’t have much of a choice,” Jack points out, in a cold voice that I know he’s putting on deliberately to scare her. At least, I hope he is.
“Please,” I say, partly because I’ve watched too many cop shows, and I know how the good cop bad cop thing goes, but mostly because it seems like the right thing to say. The woman looks over at me.
“They’ll be on the top floor. The senator keeps an apartment in the penthouse, and Johnny’s always nearby.”
“Thank you,” Jack says, and then gags her with a length of duct tape also taken from inside his jacket, leaving her there as we go. I know it’s probably the best thing, because we don’t want her raising the alarm, but I guess I’ll never get used to the clinical, efficient way Jack can be when he’s on a mission. I guess that’s because I haven’t been brought up to be a Fader.
Then again, if everything in the last few weeks is anything to go by, my life is a lot more complicated than I ever thought it could be.
Jack and I look around some more. Now that I know we’re looking for a penthouse, the layout of the place makes a lot more sense. It’s a skyscraper. It’s obvious once I get the chance to see it all. It’s just that I’ve been blindfolded for so much of my time here.
“Did you see this place from the outside?” I ask.
Jack nods. “It’s right at the edge of a town, with ‘Hammond Industries’ down the side in big letters. I guess the senator doesn’t believe in secret bases.”
“He probably thinks that he doesn’t need to hide that much,” I point out. “If you’re keeping industrial secrets anyway, then adding in a few cells to keep troublesome kids in isn’t going to be too difficult.”
“No,” Jack says. “I guess not.”
“Was it hard getting your dad’s help for this mission?” I ask.
“He wasn’t there,” Jack says, “and I couldn’t take the risk of him saying no. It was easier just to find a few Faders from the old Locations and put the mission together myself. Quicker too, and I knew that we couldn’t afford to waste any time. With a man like the senator, I didn’t know what he’d do.”
I can’t help thinking back to the images on that video file. “Well, I guess we both know now. Let’s get Johnny and get out of here.”
Jack nods. “You realize he might not want to go?”
I hadn’t thought of that. To me, it seemed obvious that anyone would want to get away from a guy like the senator. That anyone would want to get out of a place where they’re trying to wipe your memory, but Jack’s right. Senator Hammond is Johnny’s father, and he obviously cares about him even if he has a seriously weird way of showing it. So even if I know Johnny doesn’t want to be faded, there’s still a chance that he won’t want to come with us.
“What do we do then?” I ask.
Jack pauses for a moment, and then he says what I think we’re both thinking. “If he won’t come willingly, then we might have to take him anyway. He’s not old enough to understand the implications, and I’m not letting the kid be faded.”
“So we kidnap him?” I ask. I want to be clear about it.
“We can’t leave him here, Celes.” Jack moves along the hallway, trying more doors. “Not when they’re going to do that to him. And if you’re right about what he can see…”
I want to ask if this is about Johnny or about how useful he could be to the Faders, but I don’t. I don’t need to, with Jack. After what his dad did to him after his mother’s death, this is always going to be about Johnny.
We find a stairwell and head up. It’s a long climb, but we’re both running by then, at the kind of speed only we can. We cover the stairs faster than an elevator would have, quickly reaching the top floor. There’s a hall there, with two doors for suites. We stop at the first of them, mostly because Jack puts his hand out to make sure I don’t go in. It’s then that I hear the people talking in the room beyond. One of them is Senator Hammond, while the other… I know that voice, because it has threatened to kill me more than once. What is Richard, Grayson’s father, doing there?
“Scott, take Johnny through to the lounge so that I can finish talking to the doctor here,” Senator Hammond says.
“Will I get to see Celes and her friend again?” I hear Johnny ask.
“Maybe if their other friend brings what I need. Go with Scott now, Johnny.”
I start to panic, because it seems obvious that someone is going to be coming out of the door in front of us any second, but Jack just pulls me back against the wall beside the door, holding me flat. The door opens, and one of the senator’s bodyguards, the one who knocked me unconscious, leads Johnny from the room. He doesn’t even glance our way, though Johnny does. Thankfully, the small boy doesn’t sa
y anything. He just smiles.
On the other side of the door, the conversation continues.
“It is vital that we get hold of the machine, Richard,” Senator Hammond says.
“So you’ve said.”
“Because it’s true, and it’s time your organization recognized that. Unless Doctor Cook can rebuild the machine for us, or supply us with another, the world, and our future, is in grave danger.”
I press closer to the doorway, trying to hear more of what’s going on.
“I tried to recover the machine at Location Six,” Richard says. “Then I tried to capture Sebastian Cook, and I believe he would have been able to replace the machine had he not escaped with the aid of his son, the girl, and the other Faders.”
“And your son, Richard,” Hammond points out.
“Yes.” There seems to be extra tension in Richard’s voice then. “Tell me, Senator, why exactly do you want the machine? It can’t be just for fading that boy of yours.”
“You don’t think I care enough about my son for that?”
“I don’t think that the fate of the world hangs on it,” Richard points out.
There’s a pause. “Clever, Richard. All right. It doesn’t make that much difference now, and I guess it at least lets me point out that you and your group have been working on the wrong assumptions about the machine all along.”
“You’d better have an explanation for that,” Richard says. I know that tone. The last time he used it around me, he was promising that he’d kill me.
“Don’t make threats you can’t back up,” Senator Hammond says. He’s obviously less worried about Richard than I am. “As for the machine, the fading is just part of what it does; a feature designed to allow travelers to adopt appropriate identities when they arrive.”
“What do you mean, ‘when they arrive’?”
Senator Hammond laughs. “I’ll be surprised if you believe this, but I’m convinced the device allows for travel through time. As much as I wish things were different, it is how my son came to me. How yours came to you too.”
Jack pulls me gently away from the door. “We have to go,” he whispers.
I know we do, so even though I want to hear what the senator knows about the future, I follow him across the hall to the room Johnny and Scott the bodyguard went into. We pause by the door, then Jack hits the button to open it. The room on the other side is the entertainment lounge Grayson and I spent so much time in. Johnny is there playing a video game, while the bodyguard is standing there watching the door.
Jack steps forward and hits him before he can even begin to respond, using the same speed that got us up the stairs. Because he isn’t set for the blow, Scott can’t roll with it, and his head snaps back, his eyes rolling back in his head as he crumples to the floor like a falling tree. After the beating he gave me and Grayson, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for him.
Johnny turns around, faces us, and slowly smiles. “Jack, finally. I was wondering when you’d get here.”
That is not something I’d expect a seven year old kid to say. The shock must show on my face, because Johnny jumps down confidently from his chair and hurries over. “I’ll tell you, the accuracy of that device of ours is all over the place. Finding you has been almost impossible.”
Again, that sounds strange. The voice is a seven year old’s, but the words just aren’t.
“You’re probably wondering what’s going on,” Johnny says. “Well, let’s start with the obvious. The last time I saw you both in the same place, it was thousands of years in the future. Or possibly will be.”
I look at him for a long time. “You aren’t an ordinary seven year old boy, are you?”
Johnny smiles. “That’s the best part. I am seven. I’m also as old as either of you. Probably older, in terms of my memories, because I haven’t had them taken from me.” He looks back and forth between us. “Maybe I should explain.”
ELEVEN
“It’s kind of hard to explain,” Johnny says. He looks at us, and it isn’t the look of a little kid. There’s too much intelligence in it, or at least too much knowledge about the world. It’s subtly wrong, like seeing someone in clothes that are obviously designed with someone else in mind.
“You saw Jack in your dreams?” I ask. I know we might not have much time right then, but I have to ask. We have to know what is going on here. Especially if it might mean that I finally get an explanation about why so many people seem to want me dead.
Johnny shakes his head. “I did, but it’s not that simple. My dad thinks I see visions of the future, but it isn’t like that.”
“Then what is it like?” Jack asks. He sounds slightly disappointed. Maybe that’s just because he was hoping to meet someone else who can do what he does. At the same time though, he sounds just as curious as I am about what Johnny has to say. He can obviously see just as well as I can that there’s something very different about the young boy.
Johnny goes to sit on the big armchair in the center of the room. It’s far too large for him, but at the same time, it kind of seems right for him. “Do you know me, Jack?”
He says that like they’re old friends, even though Johnny isn’t old enough to have old friends. Jack looks at him, and I want to ask how Jack could possibly know the young son of a presidential candidate, because that doesn’t make sense, but Jack nods.
“You… there’s something familiar about you.”
“Just like there was something familiar about Celes? About Grayson?”
Jack nods. How could Johnny have known that?
“I don’t get this,” I say. “I mean, you’re just a kid. But you don’t sound like a kid.”
“I’m a kid,” Johnny says. “I’m seven years old. At the same time, I’m also a lot older.”
“So how does that work?” I ask. Nothing about this makes sense, yet it sounds like I’m finally about to get some answers about what’s going on.
Johnny looks over at me. “I don’t see visions of the future, Celes. I just remember it. It’s all jumbled up, so sometimes it’s like I’m just a kid, and sometimes I have decades of memories, and sometimes I’m both. That’s hard.”
“So what do you remember, Johnny?” I ask, moving to crouch beside the chair to bring myself down to eye level. Then I stop myself. I’m treating him the way I would a small child, but if what he’s just said is true, then he isn’t. Or at least, it’s far more complicated than that.
“I remember you, Jack, Gray, and me. Only we’re all about the same age, and none of us are kids. We… work together, I think.”
That sounds familiar. I find myself thinking of my own dreams. I’ve never been sure what they meant, or how they could be true. “Where do we work together?”
Johnny doesn’t look sure, and for a moment, he sounds more like a kid again. “There’s an office. A big office, like my dad’s. Not the one here, the other one, up in Washington.”
“You mean that you remember us being something to do with the government?” Jack asks, and Johnny nods. That’s a strange thought. What would we have had to do with the government?
“I’ve been seeing a lot of the same things,” I say. “But if it’s true… how can it be true?”
“We travelled through time,” Johnny says, briefly sounding older and more confident again. “We travelled back, one by one, using the machine.”
“We travelled through time?” Jack repeats. He doesn’t sound convinced. “Are you sure that you didn’t just dream all this, Johnny?”
“Why would you remember me then?” Johnny asks in return.
I nod. “It fits with my dreams, Jack. I remember… I remember one where I was insisting on being sent back somewhere. On going after someone who’d left.”
“What do you mean?” Jack asks.
I try to think back to the dream. It seems like so long ago now, except that if Johnny is right, then it isn’t. It’s something that hasn’t happened yet. “Someone I loved was lost. They’d used a… a machine,
and they were gone for a while. People were trying to talk me out of going after them. They said it was too risky, but I went anyway. I loved them too much.”
I look at Jack, meeting his eyes. I know that we’re both thinking the same thing in that moment. I reach out to take his hand, and for a moment there’s no power leaping between us. It’s enough that I’m holding onto him, and he’s holding onto me.
“You, Jack,” I say. “It must have been you.”
“I want to believe that,” Jack says. “I do believe that there’s something special between us. I felt it from the moment I was assigned to protect you. I knew that you were always going to be more than just someone to keep safe, Celes. It was like I’d already known you for a lifetime.”
“Maybe you had,” I suggest. That’s a thought it’s hard to wrap my head around. What if Jack and I have already known one another for years? What if… no, there are so many ‘what if’s that if I start to think about them all, I’ll never stop.
“Jack went first,” Johnny says. “He went first, and he landed first, which is probably why he’s the oldest of us here in this time.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” I admit. It feels strange, asking such a small child for an explanation. “Why would that make Jack older? Why are you so young? Why are any of us younger than the ages I keep seeing in my dreams… I mean when I remember?”
“It’s the way the machine works,” Johnny explains from his armchair. “At least, I think it is. Living people can’t survive the journey back, so the machine kind of just takes them apart. It stores everything about them, and then it rebuilds them.”
“You mean like one of those teleport devices on sci-fi shows?” I say.
“Except that this would be real,” Jack says thoughtfully. “That would explain why the fading machine can rewrite memories.”
