by A. L. Knorr
They were actors.
"All of you?" I spoke from between my fingers, tears in my voice. "TNC hired all of you? Staged the whole dig?"
"Yes," Jesse answered miserably. “The site was real, your finds were genuine. But all the rest…” He swallowed and didn’t go on.
My face burned with shame and my eyes wouldn't stop streaming. But the anger, oh the anger, the deep and utter betrayal—it was all-encompassing. I pulled my hands away from my face and let the tears flow.
I looked at Jesse. "Are you even an archaeologist? Is your name even Jesse?"
"I'm not an archeologist, I'm a hacker. I worked for TNC until…" He reached for my face, but I pulled away from his touch. "Until you, Petra. My name is Jesse, and I can't even tell you how sorry I am, how much I want to make things right."
"You can't," I whispered, staring at him through vision blurred by moisture. I brushed at my eyes angrily. "How do you make this right? Why did you even agree to it?" My voice grew harder.
"TNC was my employer. I never questioned my projects until yours came along." Jesse went to his knees and reached for me, his warm fingers encircling mine. "I met you, and…I fell in love with you, Petra."
His admission of love may well have fallen on deaf ears. My mind was whirling. “What about the kidnapping? The fight? That was all TNC, too?”
Jesse shook his head. “That’s where TNC lost control and got scared. It’s why they ended up calling the whole thing off the day of the fight. The locals knew what you were and interfered. I heard that Miss Marks destroyed her hotel room in anger when she learned you were taken. If it weren’t for Molly, you’d probably have been executed.”
I felt myself tense up with the memory of being held captive.
Jesse continued, “They sent a team out from Ghat but they arrived too late to rescue you, arriving instead just after you stopped the militants.” He shook his head. “Miss Marks played it so cool, but trust me, she was freaking out. Why do you think they shoved you into a vehicle and got you out of there so fast?”
"Why didn't you tell me?" I choked out.
"I couldn't, Petra." Jesse's voice cracked. "I was sworn to secrecy. You know how TNC is. They wouldn't allow me to talk to you afterward, and they ordered me to cut off all communication. I hated it, I hated them for that. That's why I started digging and why I’ve been digging ever since."
I put a hand up and he stopped talking. Silently, and with angry tears still burning tracks down my cheeks, I got up.
"Where are you going?" Jesse got up and followed me. "Petra, please don't leave."
I headed down the stairs, pulled on my boots and jacket, and put my hand on the doorknob.
Jesse sounded stricken. "I know you're angry. I would be, too."
"Jesse," I whirled to face him, my hand twisting the door knob. "Just stop talking."
"Petra…"
I opened the door and left the storm inside the house for the one outside.
The wind-driven rain pummeled me as I took the steps down to the sidewalk. I ignored Jesse yelling my name from the house, until he came out behind me while pulling on his jacket.
"Come back inside, Petra. There's more to explain. I know you're upset, you should be, but I've risked my life to find you–"
I turned back to him, my mouth an angry snarl. "Jesse."
The look on my face was enough. Jesse's own face changed from desperate to fearful. He staggered backward, one arm half coming up to shield his body. It was as though he'd never believed I could lash out at him but suddenly realized he was wrong in one earth-shaking moment.
Shame flooded me. He genuinely thought I was going to hurt him. I closed my eyes and took a breath. When I opened them, Jesse was watching me, eyes darting over my features.
"Just, give me a minute," I said.
"Of course." He nodded and held out my umbrella. "Take this."
I ignored the umbrella and marched down the walk into the black rainy night.
As I walked, unheedful of where I was headed and feeling like it didn't matter anyway, memories came at me like bats swooping out of the dark. They battered my brain and shook my emotions. I remembered the way Jesse, Ethan, and Ibby had all reacted when I'd told them the vision of my father who was telling me to run. The way I had caught Ibby and Jesse repeatedly watching me, their expressions full of guilt. Noel's reaction as I pushed the glass across the table at him—he'd not known why TNC was keeping an eye on me until that moment, I was sure of that now. Jesse and me, kissing passionately in my tent. Being grabbed in the middle of the night by a people who were so terrified of me they may well have murdered me.
I barely registered the cold water trickling down my face. Rage and humiliation made my head feel hot and my fists clench. I had been played for a fool by the corporation I was now bound to. They'd murdered my father, and as far as I was concerned, they'd killed my mother, too. They'd destroyed my family and then hid it from me. They'd exploited people in my life to keep me under their thumb. They'd been manipulating me since birth, all so they could position themselves as trustworthy and earn my loyalty.
I wondered if they'd ever controlled my foster mom, Beverly, or even had a hand in her death. TNC had manipulated me on a scale that was almost impossible to comprehend. How much had they spent to secure me? What was I worth to them now?
A growl of frustration escaped my throat when I thought about the Elemental girls. What had I done getting them involved with TNC? It was crystal clear to me now that my father had been telling me to run from this corporation, and I'd been too blind to see it; their ruse had been too thorough.
I stopped walking and looked up, realizing that I had come down to the harbor where the water churned and washed over the docks. Thoughts and emotions were so stormy and tangled I could hardly tell which was which, but one thing I did know, as clear as a cloudless day: I had to get out of TNC and keep the Elemental girls from falling into their hands, too.
I turned to look back toward Jesse’s neighborhood. What else did he know? Could I trust him? Was he still working for TNC and this was some elaborate new plot?
There was only one way to know for sure.
I glowered and put the harbor to my back. When I knocked on Jesse’s door, he opened it immediately. The look on his face was pure relief.
"Oh, thank God. Get in here." He reached out and pulled me inside. "I'll get you some dry clothes."
"Jesse."
He walked down the hall and opened a door under the stairs. His head and shoulders disappeared inside. "I just did some laundry. I made a bad choice with the soap and they smell like they just came out of a dishwasher, but at least they're clean."
There was the click of a dryer door closing.
"Jesse."
He backed out of the laundry room with his hands full of wrinkled clothes, which he held out to me. "They'll be too big, but–"
"Jesse."
"What?"
"Why can't I read your mind?"
His face froze for a moment in an expression of surprise. "You tried?"
I gave him a withering look. "I don't like using telepathy. It hurts my head and it feels like an invasion of privacy. Turns out I should have been using it all along. I'm such a fool. Only a fool would have powers this strong and not use them to make sure she could trust people. I wouldn't have been caught up in TNC's schemes like the world's biggest sucker. Except that when I try to read yours, I get nothing. Dead air."
I put a hand on the dry clothes he was still holding out at me and pushed them back toward him.
"I'll only stay under one condition,” I said. “That you let me read your mind."
Petra
"It wouldn't have mattered if you had tried to read everyone's minds, anyway," Jesse said, setting the clothes on the step behind him. "Don't you think TNC accounted for that?"
"Why wouldn't it have mattered?"
He reached into his pocket. "Because you can't get past this." He pulled a pendant out and held it on hi
s open palm. "This is part of what else there is to tell you. Perhaps I should have started with this. My mistake. I'm just happy you came back."
On his palm lay a plain cylinder of a dull gray metal, darker than silver and about the size of a pen's cap. He held it up for me and it swayed before my eyes.
"I've seen this metal before." I reached for it and held it against my palm. It was extremely heavy for its size. Unlike everything else I ever touched, I could not detect its signature against my skin. It was dead to me.
"It's wolfram," Jesse said, watching me. "Also known as tungsten."
"Ibby had some of this." Another memory came back to me, another bat swooping at me from my past.
Jesse looked shocked. "She showed it to you?"
"I don't think she meant to. It fell out of her pocket along with a few other stones. She told me she collects rocks and metals." I'd had no reason to question it, even after I'd discovered she was supernatural. She was a Metal Elemental, an Inconquo, so why wouldn't she have an affinity for rocks? She'd gone to great length on wolfram, talking about its rare density and value. I hadn't suspected a thing. The girl was a good actress, I had to give her that.
"Clever woman to keep it in with a bunch of other random bits," Jesse said. "TNC gave us all a piece, which we were to wear at all times during the dig. As long as we had it on our person, it would block any efforts at telepathy. They must have known about the effects of wolfram on an Euroklydon since your father's day, if not before."
“Ibby must have forgotten to wear it the day of the briefing, when I first met you.”
“You read her mind that day?” Jesse asked.
I nodded. “What she was thinking that day didn’t make sense at the time, but now it does.”
“Dare I ask?”
I looked up at him. “She thought I was a nice girl, and she wondered why you guys were all doing this to me.”
“Oh.” Jesse’s eyes softened as he gazed at me. He took the metal cylinder and threw it down the hall, past the laundry room door. It hit the floor in the kitchen beyond it. "Go ahead. Read away. I want you to know you can trust me."
I stared at where the innocuous little stone lay in the shadows beyond Jesse. "All the trouble they went to, just for me."
"You are the Euroklydon," Jesse said quietly. "You're one of a kind, worth more trouble to them than any other supernatural on their staff."
My eyes narrowed. "Are you also supernatural?"
Jesse laughed. "Only if you consider mad hacking skills to be magical." He reached his hands out to me. "Here. Everything I have seen and know is yours."
I took his hands and lifted the gates between our minds.
A flood of images and emotions and desperate thoughts pelted me.
Jesse was terrified, but it wasn't of me, it was of TNC. A dull ache began to spread across the back of my skull. I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth against it as I sifted through his thoughts and memories like a playing deck of 3-D cards. Snapshots and moments in time fluttered through his conscious thoughts like he wanted me to see everything all at once.
He'd been working as a hacker for a branch of TNC in Australia called Compulox. He was handsomely paid for projects that came his way as infrequently as once a month. He'd receive an envelope in the mail detailing assignments with clear objectives. There was never any explanation as to why he was doing what he was doing, just a straightforward command. Hack into some company's mainframe and insert a virus, deliver a list of private email addresses to this safety deposit box, insert a photograph into a gallery of photographs on this website. They were simple requests which were not simple to execute, unless you were a hacker.
One day he'd received a fatter envelope than usual, detailing how they wanted him to pose as an archaeologist on an excavation in Libya. He'd never been asked to act before, and they gave him a choice to say yes or no depending on whether he thought he could be convincing.
My eyes flew open. "They paid you four million US dollars to go to Libya?"
He didn't have to answer—I could see the truth plainly. Who would say no to such an assignment?
I closed my eyes again, wincing at the pulsing pain in my head. I homed in on the details of the assignment in his thoughts. He was to pose as an archaeologist with a group of other actors hired by TNC. They were told a young woman named Petra Kara, a valuable asset to TNC, was the beneficiary of all this dramatic effort and under no circumstances was she to be let in on the scheme. They were required to study up on archaeology well enough to pass at a glance. They were required to wear the enclosed metal on their person at all times, even while sleeping. If the target (me) were to display unusual powers, this was to be received as any normal human being might react to it—with shock and awe.
I saw myself through Jesse's eyes, how he tried to distance his heart at first and how, as the dig went on, guilt began to eat away at him. How he finally fell in love with me. I saw his anguish as they told him he couldn’t respond to any efforts I made to keep in touch, and I saw him throw a laptop off a desk in anger. I saw him purchasing more computers, moving away and leaving everything in his apartment just the way it was, taking pains not to leave a trail, getting on a small plane headed to Berlin where he hid behind the alias Tayler Jasper.
He spent days and nights hacking into TNC's systems, looking for me, for clues to who I was and what they wanted with me. He'd hacked into Jody Marks’s private schedule and found notes about when she would ask me to recruit the Elemental girls, when the prototype would be built. It was when Jesse found this that he got on a plane to Halifax, rented a car, drove to Saltford, and hid out in this duplex.
He couldn't call my cell and he was afraid my apartment was being watched, so he'd hacked into Saltford's telecom system and began to call telephone booths positioned near where he thought I might be. He'd been making phones ring near the fire department, since he knew that was the helipad TNC used to transfer me to FS11, and near my apartment, hoping against hope that I would pick it up if I heard them ringing often enough. When I hadn't picked up, he began to form a plan to break into my apartment and wait there for me.
It was enough.
I slammed the gates down and squeezed my eyes shut against the pain.
"Petra?" There was alarm in Jesse's voice and I felt his hands squeeze my biceps.
"I'll be okay in a minute," I said through a tight jaw. Already, the ache had lessened. I looked up at him. I understood, now. Not only could I trust him, but he'd risked everything to help me see the truth. If TNC found him, they'd terminate him.
Rogue, indeed.
Words hovered on my lips, but instead I pulled his face down to mine and kissed him. Not only had I seen his deep desire to bring TNC down, I'd read his sour regret at having ever gotten involved with them in the first place, and his sorrow for taking part in my deception. But shining red and bright amidst all of his thoughts and memories was his love for me.
"Am I forgiven?" he asked quietly when I pulled back, as he gazed down at me through hooded eyes.
"How can I not forgive you after seeing all of that?"
He smiled. "I should have just let you read my mind first thing. We would have avoided you storming out in the rain and almost giving me a heart attack."
"Sorry about that."
"I'll take another kiss for my troubles, please," he said with a cheeky smile.
I obliged him.
When we finally pulled away, he took my hand. "There's more I have to tell you, and it's time sensitive."
"Has to do with the project they want the Elemental girls for?"
He nodded. "Can you handle it?"
"Bring it on, Donkey Kong." I pulled my wet pants away from my thighs. "About those dry clothes?"
Once I had dried off and changed, I joined Jesse again in the large loft where his research was spread across the carpet in folders.
"There is too much to take you through in the time we have," Jesse said, eyes scanning the folders thoughtfully. "
So, I'm going to cherry pick to give an idea of TNC's past behavior."
"The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior," I murmured, kneeling on the floor again.
Jesse nodded and selected one of the folders, which he slid across the carpet to me. "Exactly. This is the earliest incident I've found. It contains articles about a pesticide plant they developed with another company shortly after World War II. An accident in the loading dock released sixty tons of toxic gas in India. In one night, over four hundred thousand people in nearby towns were affected with illness, burning throats and eyes. Tens of thousands died."
I picked up the file folder and thumbed through its contents which included pictures that made my blood run cold, as well as maps with hand drawn circles and X's laying out the location of the towns, the plant, and the perimeter of the pollution. Numbers were written above surrounding towns with dashes linking the numbers to things like 'birth defects,' 'deaths,' and 'blindness.'
"Even decades after the accident, birth defects and health issues still plague the area. A human rights group has done studies on their ground water, and they have video of tons of hazardous waste being buried illegally. That human rights group tried to bring all this to international court and were squashed overnight—their founders were killed in a road accident and their website was hacked. They were obliterated." Jesse frowned. "Probably by someone like me."
"You found all this in the TNC records?"
Jesse nodded, his face grim. "I actually found it by accident. But once I started hunting, more buried evidence turned up. It's hard to find, but it’s there. It's easy to make something disappear from the mainstream online world, but it's not actually gone forever and can be found by people who know where to look."
"It's horrible," I shuddered, closing the file and handing it back.
"It's just the tip of the iceberg." Jesse picked up another file folder. "This one is full of buried evidence that a radiation therapy device developed by a TNC lab and used to track dosage had a bug which resulted in hundreds of patients receiving overdoses that killed them." He grabbed another file, opened it, and slid it over the carpet toward me. "This one is about a software-induced plane crash in ’97. The pilot was blamed for the crash, even though many experts knew it was a systems error. Guess who built the software?"
