When the elevator doors open once more, I know it is.
There’s a corridor that looks almost indistinguishable from the one up top, complete with lights that flicker on as we step out into it, except that there are cameras every few feet, and solid looking doors off to each side. Those have retina and palm print scanners outside them, while stern notices warn against attempting unauthorized entry.
Jack leads me over to one of the doors, where he bends to put his eyes level with the scanner for it, while simultaneously pressing his hand against the palm pad. There’s an electronic beep, and then the click of a heavy lock unfastening. The door in front of us swings open.
I go to step through it and Jack bars my way with an arm. “Careful, Celes. The security isn’t done.”
He takes out his gun and places it on the floor outside before stepping into the room. He then holds his arms out wide. Green light plays across his body, and I realize something in there is scanning him.
“Potential recording device detected,” a computerized voice says, coming from hidden speakers. “State authorization.”
“Jack Alpha Foxtrot Niner,” Jack replies. Nothing happens. I assume that’s a good thing, because Jack turns towards me. “You can come in now, Celes. When you do, stand still while the security systems scan you. Oh, and you’ll need to leave your phone outside.”
I do as he says, leaving my phone alongside his gun then stepping inside for the green light to scan me. The computers running the scan don’t find anything untoward.
“What’s with all the security?” I ask.
“We keep some very important stuff here,” Jack replies. “The scans outside are to stop people getting in without someone with the proper clearance.”
“And the one inside?” I ask.
“That’s to make it harder for someone to force or trick one of us into it,” Jack explains. “No weapons are permitted in here, and recording devices or phones need authorization. There’s even a safe word that an operative can use to activate the system.”
“And when you activate it?”
“The room locks down. No way in or out without the proper codes.”
I look around the room. It doesn’t seem important enough to warrant that level of security. There are shelves around the walls, each one containing old fashioned box files, but that’s it. None of it looks very impressive.
Jack goes over to one of the files. “This is the one we want,” he says, taking it out. “I’ve studied your files, Celes, but I didn’t look through everything, and I think there’s going to be one thing you’re going to want to see.”
The file isn’t easy to open. There’s a thumbprint lock on it, that Jack has to open before we can get in. “So that they know which files we access,” he explains.
“So your father will know all about this?” I ask. “Won’t you get into trouble, Jack?”
Jack grins. “I’ll just say that you led me astray. Besides, I was in trouble the moment I brought you to this level. We might as well get something out of it.” He takes a couple of flash drives out, plugging one into his phone. “My father showed you some of our earliest ‘surveillance’, right? Only it mostly isn’t. Most of it, we take from people’s heads. This is some of the very earliest stuff we have for you, Celes.”
He turns the phone to me, and I see a woman running with a baby in her arms.
“What we saw in the viewing room,” I say.
“Keep watching.”
The woman looks fairly normal. She’s wearing a long coat and a woolen cap, suggesting that it’s cold, but that also means I can’t see much of her. She could be anyone, but I can tell that she’s scared of something.
There’s a dumpster, and the woman goes up to it, placing the baby within. I know this part, because Sebastian played it in the viewing room when I first came in. What I didn’t see then is what happens next. The woman runs. She runs, and dark clothed figures run after her. She runs until she comes to a dead end, then she turns at bay like a cornered animal.
She fights furiously, even viciously. She’s outnumbered, and several of the men chasing her are armed, yet she still manages to resist for almost a minute, kicking and hitting, throwing men about and hurting them. She fights desperately, as if she knows that the consequences of failing just don’t bear thinking about.
Eventually though, she has to lose. There are just too many men for her to fight. One grabs her, and then another, until eventually, they bear her to the ground, finally overpowering her. They pin her quickly and expertly, not giving her a chance to fight anymore. Even then, though, it isn’t done. She looks up, and I see her eyes. They’re glowing.
It happens in a matter of seconds. She flares so brightly, energy pouring out of her in such amounts that even on Jack’s phone, it’s hard to look at. It makes even the brightness of burning up the Others back on the road seem like nothing. It burns like a miniature sun for long seconds, and then there’s nothing. Nothing at all. No sign of the men in the black outfits, no sign of the woman. Nothing.
I feel my mouth open wide in shock, and I almost fall into Jack. For several seconds, I simply don’t know what to say.
“This file is the best record we have of someone doing this,” Jack says. “Sebastian…my father didn’t want me showing you this, but I think you deserve to know. I don’t want to keep secrets from you, Celes.”
And he hasn’t. In fact, he’s broken a lot of rules to make sure that I get to see this. Even so, I need to know more. I can’t leave it at just one image, without any kind of explanation to go with it. I can’t stand not knowing. There are questions I just have to ask.
“So the baby was me?”
Jack nods.
“And the woman…” I can barely bring myself to say it. “Was she my mother?”
Jack hesitates. Apparently, he hadn’t considered that I might say that. “No. Dad… Sebastian thinks she was your nursemaid.”
“A nursemaid?” Obviously, these days we have nannies and baby-sitters, au-pairs and all kinds of other people designed to help look after children, but that choice of term seems an odd one. “That seems… I don’t know, a bit old fashioned.”
“Or just wealthy,” Jack points out. “Rich people, important people have nursemaids. And she did a lot to try to protect you. She obviously thought you were important.”
Important enough to abandon. Important enough to leave in a dumpster, to be brought up by a family that now doesn’t even know that I exist. Sure, she thought that I was important. I know that I’m being petty, though. From the looks of it, this woman gave her life for mine. Certainly, there was no sign of her at the end.
“I don’t feel very important,” I say to Jack. “I feel like a freak. What she did on this tape, it’s what I did to those men back in the field, right? When I killed them.”
“Right.” Jack says it gently. “From what I can see, it’s exactly the same. But that doesn’t mean you’re a freak, Celes.”
“I’m not human, Jack. At least, I assume I’m not. What would you call it?”
Jack shrugs. “You’re different, but you aren’t a freak. That’s part of why I wanted to show you this. To show you that you aren’t alone. That there are others like you. Or there were, at least.”
“People like the woman on that footage.” A woman who was gone at the end of it, probably dead, for all I knew. Yet Jack was right, there was something comforting about knowing that I wasn’t unique. A thought comes to me. “Jack, the underground looks for things like me, right?”
“We look into all kinds of unexplained things,” Jack says. “I think anyone like you probably counts.”
“That really isn’t helping on the ‘not a freak’ front, you know.” I look up at Jack expectantly. “How many more like me has the Underground found?”
Jack bites his lip. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have gotten your hopes up,” he says.
“Jack!”
Jack seems shocked by the force of that, but I have to know. “There are only two instances that we know of before you of someone being able to do what you did to those men,” he says. “One is this recording. The other…”
I don’t need him to say it, because, thinking back to everything I saw in the viewing room, I already know the answer. “Your mother.”
Jack nods. “My mother.”
NINETEEN
“
A
nd your mother can’t explain things, can she?” I say, trying to put it delicately. I saw what happened after all. I saw her die. Saw her vanish.
Jack shakes his head. “No. She can’t.”
And however bad it is for me, knowing that the last person like me is gone, it must be worse for Jack. After all, with his memories unlocking like that, he now knows what happened to his mother. He knows that she died burning up one of the Others, while he was just in the next room.
“I’m sorry, Jack,” I say, reaching out to hold him. It just feels like the right thing to do.
“The worst part,” Jack says, “is what my father did. No, it’s not even that. It’s that I can
understand
what he did.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I mean that I’ve been a part of the Underground so long that if a kid were to come in having seen what I saw, I’d probably want his memories faded too. I’d probably tell myself that it was the best thing for him, the way my father decided it was the best thing for me.”
I hold Jack a little closer. “You’d want it to stop hurting. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Jack shakes his head. “I don’t think it does stop it hurting. It just takes away the reason for it, so you’re left with this aching hole, and no way to ever make it right. Though my dad has obviously been trying.”
I look at him questioningly.
“This place,” Jack says. “Now that I have the memory, it’s easy to see he’s been searching for anyone or anything like my mother for years… and now there’s you.”
“Yes,” I say, holding him closer, “there’s me.”
Is that why I feel some sense of connection to Jack? Is it because he’s at least partly what I am? Or is it more than that? I need to know, and it seems that Jack feels the same need, because his lips move down to meet mine. It’s only a brief kiss, but I don’t move back when we’re done.
“So,” I ask, “do you get any cool special powers to go with what you are?” I’m trying to keep it light, because it’s easier to think about special powers than about signs of being some kind of freak. “Aside from your memories leaking out all over the viewing room, I mean?”
“I guess I’m faster than most people,” Jack says. I can practically see him thinking, looking back over his life and trying to pick out which moments might have been more than he thought at the time. “And my reflexes… it’s sometimes like I know what’s going to happen the instant before it does. Like back at the apartment.”
“Like the way you drive,” I say.
“What’s wrong with the way I drive?” Jack smiles as he says it.
“Do you have… can you…”
He knows what I’m afraid to ask. “I’ve never been able to put out heat and energy.”
It’s a much kinder way of saying it than ‘burn people alive.’ I look up at him. “All this time, and you’ve had no idea?”
Jack shakes his head. “Da… Sebastian changed me a lot. So much that I’m not sure if there’s anything else. I’m just Jack Simple, utterly and completely. He had me trained too. Cars, shooting, fighting. Real fighting, not just martial arts. I used to think that he was just preparing me to be the perfect Fader. Now I’m not sure what to think.”