Paige shook her head. “No, that won’t be necessary. He knows where to find us.”
The woman shrugged again. “You two look like a nice couple,” she said after a moment. “We have a vacancy if you’re in the market?”
Jonathan opened his eyes and found himself in the dark. He didn’t remember falling asleep, nor stepping into this ocean bereft of light, but that had always been the case before when he came to this place. Much like those times, he knew the light was coming before it was there. Like an ember at first, illuminating shapes around him—just enough for him to know he wasn’t adrift in a formless void. The light grew, and as it did, he could make out dust covers hanging over furniture, stacks of cardboard boxes—each with writing in thick black marker identifying their contents—and a polished cement floor.
He knew now to ignore the clutter—those shapes were not why he had come. He found the path, the exposed floor between the boxes, and he followed it. He couldn’t see the work bench, not yet, but knew it was back there, waiting for him.
Someone had hidden the truth in the dark. The shadows, the uncertainty—they disguised the room in an abstract notion of evil, played on fears both natural and learned. Yet Jonathan knew there were no monsters here, that the only person in this place was him. When you want to keep a secret, you hide it somewhere you think is hard to find—then, you don’t tell anyone you hid it. When you want to hide a truth, you put it somewhere dark and call it evil, because only the smart or the brave will find it there. In general, this works well for everyone, because the truth is only a threat to the stupid and the cowardly.
As Jonathan neared the table, he heard a noise from the dark—and he suddenly no longer felt brave nor smart. He froze to listen, then shivered as he heard damp cloth dragging across the cement floor behind him. A grim expression of guilt cast itself over his face as he turned, and slowly, at the edge of the darkness, the face of the little girl’s mangled corpse crawled forward into the light—her pink coat, her dead white eyes, her broken fingers reaching for him. He knew he couldn’t run, couldn’t ignore her. If he did, he would wake.
Slowly, he went to her, and even slower, he knelt down beside her. He didn’t look her in the eye, but shivered when she reached for him—his heart broke to see her straining on broken bones. If touching him was what she was here to do, he wouldn’t run any longer. He would have to let the child have whatever it was she needed from him. Jonathan drew in a deep breath and held the child’s gaze. The blond child’s eyes focused on him, confused at first, having been ignored or fled for so long. Her hand drew closer to him, a wet finger making contact with his cheek. He felt a line of blood drawn down to his chin.
“I’m sorry,” Jonathan said closing his eyes. “I can’t save everyone. People are going to get hurt. They’re going to die. I can’t … I can’t change it.” He slumped further down until he finally came to rest on the back of his heels with his hands in his lap.
“You didn’t run away,” a voice said from the darkness behind him.
His eyes opened, and the corpse of the blond girl was gone.
When he turned, he saw Jess, the little girl he had recognized at the gym. She was alive, her pupils present in her eyes, looking back at him. A spark was there, in that gaze, somehow managing to catch what little light had followed him into the room. Jess stepped up to him, pulling her sleeve out from under her coat and wiped the blood off his cheek.
“There’s no one here but me,” Jess said. “So who are you apologizing to?”
He stared at the little girl, and the feeling he’d had, seeing her alive in the gym, resurfaced. Jonathan felt himself smile. “A memory, I suppose,” he said. “A shadow.”
She frowned at him. “That doesn’t make sense. A memory can’t forgive you.”
“It was the best I could do,” Jonathan said.
She studied him, her childish expression confused. “Seems silly. Feeling sorry for a shadow when I’m right here. What am I supposed to forgive you for?”
“Something that never really happened, I suppose,” Jonathan said. “At least, not to anyone but me.”
She pondered him for a moment. “So you’re the one who got hurt, then?” she asked.
He smiled. “I wish guilt thought like you do.”
Jess studied him. “I wish you’d worry about the real me,” she said.
Jonathan’s smile faded. “I do,” he whispered.
He saw sympathy on her face, so close to his while he was kneeling at her height.
“Do you know what you’re doing here?” she asked. “In this place?
He blinked, remembering he’d been headed further into the dark before the girl’s memory had distracted him. He rose to his feet, walking past her through the clutter. Finally, he saw the footlocker on top of the work bench. His eyes lingered on the padlock a moment before he reached out to test its strength.
“You know, sometimes I don’t know how I’m supposed to help you,” Jess said. “That can’t be why you are here—it’s just another distraction.”
Jonathan’s hand stopped mid reach, his face turning to the girl as she came to stand beside him. “I don’t understand,” he said.
He saw a shiver of indecision run through her before she tilted her head to draw his attention to a tall, thin object cloaked in a dust cover. He noticed that Jess had taken care to place herself between him and whatever was beneath the cover. If this was what he’d come here for, he’d never have known. It hid in plain sight; nothing about the shape would have made it stand out to him.
“How would I have known to look there?” Jonathan asked.
Jess bit her lip as she looked up at him. “You wouldn’t,” she said. “You were supposed to be afraid.”
He stepped toward it, and Jess took a step back to make sure she stayed between. He saw her quivering, a child afraid but trying to hold on to a facade of courage.
“You should be afraid,” she said.
“Why?”
“It doesn’t belong here.”
Gently, he reached past her, and her face gave him one last look of foreboding. She did not stop him, but made him reach over and behind her, unwilling to step out of the way.
When he pulled the dust cover away, he saw a standing mirror. The room brightened as the mirror caught the dim light and reflected it back at them. It was odd that while his eyes crawled up the man in the mirror, he didn’t see Jess’s reflection. He recognized the clothing, but it didn’t belong to him. Tan hiking boots, jeans. When his eyes reached the reflection’s chest, he understood. It glowed, radiating the sunset colors of his active implant.
His father stared back at him.
“You should know by now,” Jess said. “It’s never as simple as you think.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
THURSDAY| OCTOBER 14, 2005 | 1:00 AM | PORTLAND
HE FELT THE car stop briefly, and Jonathan roused from sleep before his mother put the car back into motion again. They were off the freeway—must have been getting close to wherever it was she was taking him.
As he rubbed at his eyes, he felt the pressure immediately, a powerful sense that a part of him had slipped away as he slept—as though a reservoir had slowly drained out of him. The hollowness was familiar, but after having experienced its absence, he felt the need to mourn its return. He missed Rylee’s face, her voice—felt he needed to see her eyes seeing his. The bond, it seemed, was quite capable of hurting him. It made his body tell him a lie that facts seemed unable to argue against—told him she was in danger even though he knew she was safe.
The longer he roused from sleep, the more he felt the need to question what he knew. He worried for no reason, and that worry always came to the same conclusion—she needed him and he wasn’t there. He checked his phone, and Rylee hadn’t called—his phone hadn’t rung the entire drive.
It felt as though he were being pushed toward the edge of a cliff. He found he could push back, resist it by keeping the contradiction at the forefront. The
fear was false; the part of him that missed her was a matter of distance and illusion—not of substance. Knowing this did nothing to keep him from feeling it, but for the time being, it appeared that reason still had its say.
Yet, reason itself also told him to hurry. He could stoically endure what he was feeling because he knew what caused it. He had left Rylee with no such defense—no contradictions to hold on to. He hoped she had fallen asleep before the distance between them had started forcing her to feel this, that he could return to her before she woke. He saw how easy it would be to become unhinged and wondered if what he now endured was anything compared to what Rylee had faced before his device had completed its half of the bond.
If this grew worse, and he suspected it would, there would eventually come a point where reason would no longer give him any resistance to it. Emotions had a threshold. Once crossed, thought had little sway. Normally, reason restrained the buildup, policed the mob before chaos broke out inside the mind. If what Heyer told him was true, then there was no way to stop this pain from building—it could only be slowed. When the pair was forced to part, only time and endurance would break the bond’s hold.
Feeling it, his confidence shook. When the time came, he wasn’t sure he could bear it. That was when the truth would turn on him, and he would know the problem could be solved by seeing her. In understanding the addiction, he would know how to put an end to the withdrawals. Each thought told him he couldn’t keep this from her, but if he told her, she too would know the pain had a fix. She too would have to endure until they were clean—out of each other’s systems.
The car stopped. “We’re here,” his mother said.
Jonathan blinked the remaining sleep from his eyes.
He looked out through the windshield and saw the sun had set behind the clouds, but that the rain had not let up while they drove. They were parked in a paid storage facility, a large, orange metal door in front of them. It was one of a number of identical units. Foggy memories began to return to him. After the funeral, he had helped his mother load up the contents of his father’s garage. They had boxed up all of the stuff and moved it to this facility. At the time, they had been empty, exhausted people, grimly going about a necessary but uncomfortable task in the middle of their grief. He remembered how he had known that it needed to be done, but that didn’t stop it from feeling like a betrayal, as though he were cleaning parts of his father out of his life so that it would be easier to avoid painful memories.
Now, Jonathan only wondered how he could have forgotten.
He opened his door and stepped out of the car, ignoring the rain despite how quickly he felt it soaking into his clothes. He approached the door and found a padlock. He lifted it and saw it required a code.
Evelyn stepped out of the vehicle a moment later, pulling an umbrella from the side panel of the car door and shielding herself before stepping up to the lock beside him. “The code is eleven twenty-seven,” she said as she tried to hold the umbrella over both of them. Their difference in height made it more a polite gesture than a practical one.
He felt streaks of water running down from his wet hair as he pondered his mother. He assumed that, like him, she hadn’t been here in years, but wondered how she remembered the code so quickly. She must have read the speculation on his face.
“It was the day he died,” she said.
Jonathan nodded. He’d forgotten the date himself, but felt sorry for his mother, who couldn’t help remembering it every year since. He turned away from her and moved the dials into place, feeling the lock release as he finished. He paused before reaching down to lift the door. There was a sentimental notion that he was entering a mausoleum instead of a storage facility—that perhaps he should do so with the same respect he had when he visited his father’s gravestone. Evelyn’s face conveyed the same hesitation as he reached down and pulled the door up.
He stood before the vague and yet familiar objects he had seen in his dreams. Dust covers and cardboard boxes. Night had come, and the only light coming in was from the few security lamps placed at regular intervals along the facility’s external walls. Shadows seemed to swallow everything as he looked inside. It gave him the sense that these storage units stretched further back into the building than he’d have imagined from the outside.
He took a step in out of the rain, starting to feel his way using his fingertips to guide him along the walls made of cardboard boxes. His mother didn’t follow him—she turned back to the car as he stepped into the dark. Jonathan’s fingers hit something beneath a tarp. He could feel a long piece of metal underneath as he walked along.
Light filled the room as he took his next step, his mother having turned on the car’s headlights. He saw then, that the tarp under his fingers wasn’t a dust cover like the rest, but what looked like the type of canvas one used when painting a room. He saw shiny patches of grey paint, and remembered where he’d seen this before. A long time ago, when he and his father had repainted the hallways of their home. When Douglas had let Jonathan pick the colors. He smiled at the memory, and realized he knew what his fingers had found in the dark.
A rusted old truck with a broken engine. He stood, remembering that moment so long ago when he thought he would fix the vehicle. He remembered, too, how he had given up on the idea almost immediately, as it felt like such an empty gesture—a thing he would do in the hopes of pleasing a ghost. Seeing it now, he realized the choice hadn’t been taken away. He could still try. If the future saw fit to leave him the time.
He heard his mother’s footsteps approaching behind him and pulled himself out of reflection. He remembered what they had come here for, and his eyes searched the back of the room. There, exactly as it had been in his dreams, sat a table and footlocker—his eyes lingered on yet another lock.
“I don’t have the key to that,” Evelyn said.
“It’s okay, we’re taking it with us,” he said. “I have bolt cutters at home.”
He approached the box, but something felt off. Unsure why, he looked about the room, and at first it appeared so similar to the memory in his dream. When he realized what was bothering him, he stiffened. It came upon him as though he’d caught sight of a ghost at the edge of his vision—a feeling warning him that once he looked to be sure of what he had seen, he would no longer be able to tell himself that he didn’t believe in such things.
Slowly, Jonathan turned his head, but he was disappointed. He found nothing where the mirror had been standing in his dream. The ghost of his father did not look back at him.
“What is it, Jonathan?” Evelyn asked.
His brow furrowed. The dreams—they had to be more. His subconscious had to be telling him something. He couldn’t stomach the idea that it could all turn out to be no more than his mind trying to make sense of meaningless dreams.
“Mom,” Jonathan said, turning back to her. “Dad’s car accident. Is there any chance that…”
He didn’t know how to ask, he wasn’t sure what the question was.
“At the funeral, there was a closed casket,” Jonathan said. “Did you see Dad’s body?
His mother’s expression grew cautious as he looked at her. “Yes,” she said.
He grimaced and slouched a bit as he exhaled. “Are you positive?”
Evelyn stared at him. “He’s gone, Jonathan.”
“Mom, did you see his face? Did you see his body? I need to know.”
She looked away from him. “He was horribly burned, Jonathan,” she said. “Yes, I saw the body, and I wish I hadn’t. There was nothing left of him to recognize.”
Jonathan looked away from her. His eyes fell on the box.
You only think that is what you’re here for, Jess had said. It’s not.
He put his fists on the table and felt them clenching. Possibilities crept into his mind, and the inability to be certain of any of them began to transform into frustration. He had not realized how painful this mystery had become to him—he kept pushing it down as he felt closer an
d closer to the truth.
He closed his eyes, trying to contain a mounting tantrum. Now, hearing his mother’s words, restraints failed. Black smoke broke through fissures in his brick wall.
Growling, the desire to break something, anything, overtook him. His fist came down on the table top. Then again, harder. His hand screamed in pain and it fueled his anger as he struck the table top again and again. He pulled away and kicked the table’s legs, stomped on its lower tier trying to exhaust the emotion.
Evelyn stepped away from him in confusion.
The table absorbed his anger as though it were mocking him, refusing to shatter—a damn inanimate object laughing at his irrelevant frustrations. Stepping back, one last surge came over him, and he kicked the table as hard as he could before his hands came up to grip the back of his head. A moment later, he found himself bent over the paint-splotched canvas on the hood of the old truck.
It’s never as simple as you think, his dream whispered to him.
He waited for control. Breathed.
A few moments passed, and as he calmed, he knew he had far less control over himself than he had imagined. He didn’t know if the bond had amplified his anger, or if that anger had been enough to set him off because it had piled onto its effects. He didn’t know if that was all rationalization. Perhaps he had simply let himself go.
Finally, he looked apologetically at his mother. He could see that she was concerned—that she was desperate for anything she could do to help.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said, sighing. “It isn’t you. It has just been a long time since I got any straight answers to my questions.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
DATE | TIME: UNKNOWN | FEROXIAN PLANE
“NO GAMES, MALKIER,” Heyer said. “Do not risk this.”
His brother watched him from the corner of his eye. The honesty in Heyer’s warning took the haste out of his exit and left him stilled before the doorway.
The Never Paradox (Chronicles Of Jonathan Tibbs Book 2) Page 45