Authors: Palladian
Lex groaned, thinking of the machines she'd seen on the medical floor, the screens in the conference room, and any individual computers she or the others there had. The list seemed suddenly limitless.
“All right, let's figure out how to do it tomorrow afternoon. I won't be able to work late, but we should be able to put together a plan of action. OK?”
Riss nodded. “Sleep well, Lex.”
The next morning Lex spent mostly buried in her strategy books, along with time for a brief workout. She’d found herself beginning to use the ideas in the books on a daily basis, carefully considering the situations she was presented with, the resources she had available, and the outcomes she wanted to achieve. Lex had started making notes on the paper she eventually planned to present, and one thing she noted that day stated that the team should actually have scheduled practice exercises together instead of just talking about it, and she jotted down a few ideas as to what those might consist of. In the afternoon she and Riss discussed how to best identify all of the computers in use in the building, eventually settling on a several-weeks-long, floor-by-floor inventory with sniffer tools to assist. Lex agreed to put in the request for whatever tools Riss researched and found to be most useful.
On Monday morning, Lex greeted Casey at breakfast and asked how her visit with her cousins had gone. After sipping English breakfast tea while listening to Casey recount how much fun they’d had at local monuments and attractions, Lex waited until Casey fell silent for a few minutes, then tentatively cleared her throat, her fingers silently tapping a nervous tattoo on the rough underside of the kitchen island.
“Casey, what do you think about Riss?”
Casey gave her a look with narrowed eyes, and then tilted her head to the side. “I think she seems like a good person, but I don't know; I think there are a lot of things she feels like she can't talk to any of us about.”
Lex's gaze flashed to catch Casey's, intensely meeting those dark blue eyes for a moment before looking back down at the kitchen island. “Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about that,” she said quietly, knowing they were being listened in on and hoping Casey got her meaning, that they should talk outside these walls at some point.
As she looked back up, Casey nodded almost imperceptibly.
Message received.
“I forgot to ask you, do you want to go out this coming weekend? Just the two of us, to this little place I went to with my cousins. I think you’ll like it.”
“OK,” Lex agreed, nodding, “I think Serena wanted to do something this weekend, too, so we'll have to figure it all out, but I do want to try that place with you.”
Casey nodded in reply, returning Lex's earlier intense eye contact, and the two of them finished the rest of their breakfast in near silence, Lex leaving Casey with a smile to go downstairs and start her morning workout with Mr. Chen.
Between her work with Mr. Chen and the various weird medical tests being run on her, the week flew by. Ever since their discussion the previous week, Lex had felt her study with Mr. Chen settling into a comfortable partnership where she seemed to be learning more and much faster than ever before. Also, as odd as it felt to think of a martial arts instructor this way, Lex felt cared for when they worked together in a way she never had with any other teacher.
One particular thing had worried her that week, however. The doctors had insisted on injecting her with radioactive glucose that they said would help mark different areas of her brain during a set of brain function scans. As they explained it to Lex, she thought it sounded dangerous and probably unnecessary, but they eventually talked her into it. Fortunately it had been an afternoon test, because Lex had ended up feeling headachy and nauseous once the doctors had finished with her. When she’d complained, they’d given her some medication that had made her feel so out of it that she’d simply stumbled upstairs and fallen into bed, nearly waking up late the following day.
Lex and Casey ended up going out on Friday night. Lex felt surprised when they didn't take a cab, but Casey explained, “This
is
a crappy neighborhood, but there are some bars not far from here anyway. We're going to one of the ones that's not too bad and close enough that we can walk. Don't worry, no one will bother us. Some people did before they got to know me, but no one in this neighborhood even approaches me now.”
Lex nodded, keeping her attention on their surroundings, and then asked, “So, am I finally going to be able to meet your mysterious boyfriend tonight?”
Casey looked down at her, a broad grin on her face. “You sure are. I told him to come out and meet us at the place we’re headed for. He should be there in about a half hour, which will give us some time to talk about other stuff beforehand.”
“Yeah, I—” Lex broke off for a moment, looking at the sidewalk to think about how she should put her question, “I was talking with Riss, and she made a comment that the people we work for would probably trust my opinion over hers. When I asked her why, since she’s the computer expert, she told me to ask you. So, I'm asking.”
Casey glanced at Lex with a frown as they both rounded the corner, moving from a block of burnt-out or boarded-up warehouses and vacant lots to a block that at least looked partially inhabited, judging by the window glass and locks on some of the warehouse gates. Lex could even see some bars and shops up ahead in the next block that appeared to be in operation. “I can only tell you what I know because nobody’s mentioned anything else to me about Riss,” Casey finally said. “I'd been with the group several months when Riss joined, though I don’t know if
joined
is the right word.”
Lex looked at her with some confusion. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I don’t think she did it by choice.” The two of them exchanged a glance, then Casey continued. “From what I can tell, she tried to leave several times during her first month here. Finally, she stopped trying, but I’m not sure why. One of the times she attempted to go, I happened to walk in on her slipping out a window. I guess she expected me to stop her, but since I figured it wasn’t any of my business, I didn’t. She never talked about it to anyone that I know of, so I’m not sure what was really going on, but she did say one thing as she was leaving that day. She thanked me and told me, ‘I don’t know if it makes any difference to you, but I didn’t do it. I’ll pay you back for this someday.’”
Lex and Casey just looked at each other for a moment, and then they continued walking to a bar a few doors down. As the two walked inside, the room quieted briefly, then people began talking again, loudly. Glancing around a bit served to remind Lex of the set of a western film, making the unpolished wooden floor, big bar, and plain wooden chairs and tables seem almost familiar. The room looked to be full of mostly working-class people, almost all men. Lex thought it seemed as if they knew Casey, however, because most of them seemed to go out of their way not to look at her. Casey went to an unoccupied corner of the bar and ordered a beer and a tonic water and lime, and then steered Lex to an empty table in the corner before handing her the drink. She bent close to Lex in order to be heard over the general noise.
“It’s not fancy, but it’s somewhere to go where everyone isn’t too nosy, or too cool.”
They both took a sip of their drinks, Lex enjoying the limey fizz that tickled her nose, and then she looked back at Casey after a moment. “So, what do you make of Riss? What do you think is going on?”
Casey shrugged. “I don't know. From the fact that she's tried to get out a number of times, I'd almost say she's being kept here against her will, but I don't even know how anyone could do that for so long, and why she wouldn’t complain to the police. And when she said that she didn't do it…I mean, the whole thing is just too weird. Did she make some kind of mistake? Did someone do something and blame it on her?”
Lex looked back at Casey, knowing her puzzlement showed in her face. “I’m not sure. It seemed like when we talked that she wanted me to know something, but she also seemed to feel she couldn't talk to me. Maybe it's because of all the monitoring or maybe she just feels she can’t trust me.”
The two of them fell silent for a while, Casey taking another drink of beer and Lex looking at the tabletop and thinking about their teammate. After a few minutes she looked back up, realizing they couldn’t solve this puzzle tonight but feeling determined to give it some thought later. To shake off her worry and curiosity, she turned to Casey with a smile.
“All right, enough of that for now. So tell me about this guy before he shows up! What’s his name?”
“It’s Lou, Louis Wingfield,” Casey replied, suddenly looking uncharacteristically shy, but smiling nonetheless.
“Does he have any family? Where does he come from?” Lex settled a little further into her chair, getting comfortable in anticipation of the upcoming story.
“Well, he grew up with his grandmother and younger brother on a reservation in upstate New York, not far from Lake Erie. His grandmother passed on and he doesn’t know where his brother is these days, so I don’t know if he has any family left,” Casey replied, frowning a little.
Lex’s eyes widened. “Did he say what happened to his mom and dad?”
Casey shrugged. “No one seems to know for sure. All he knows is his father and his mother left him and his little brother with their grandmother when Lou was five and his brother was two.”
Sighing, Lex tried to absorb all of that while she thought about how to move on to a happier topic. Finally, she asked, “How did you two meet?”
Casey gave a big, infectious grin that seemed to come spontaneously. “We actually met at headquarters, believe it or not.”
Lex raised her eyebrows in surprise. “How's that?”
Before Casey could answer, a man appeared behind her. Lex's mind categorized him as large rather than tall due to the fact that it looked like a wall had suddenly appeared behind her friend, a wall that seemed muscular and had dressed in blue jeans and worn work boots, a green flannel shirt and a leather jacket. Lex tipped her head straight back until she saw a face at the top with a dark bronze complexion, brown eyes and long, straight black hair pulled back into a braid. He grinned at her, and Casey’s smile had widened by the time Lex turned back to her friend.
“Actually,” the man said, sitting down at the table next to Casey, “I was working there on a construction project, doing some remodeling on the main floors.”
“I'd just arrived a few months before,” continued Casey, linking hands with the stranger, “They’d started building out the main area and creating some more rooms on the second floor around then, I guess because they planned to add more people to the team.”
The man held his free hand out to Lex. “Hi, I'm Lou.”
Lex put her hand forward, noting how it looked like a young child's in his, but his grip was firm as well as gentle. “Lex,” she replied with a grin. “It's nice to meet you.”
Lou nodded before continuing, “We'd been working there a few weeks, and I noticed that every morning she’d come out around eight and then disappear. Whatever she was doing kept her away until after quitting time, so I'd only see her in the mornings.”
“No wonder I felt like I was being watched more than usual!” said Casey with a laugh. “I noticed him right away, of course; he’d be hard to miss. He looked like a teacher among a middle-school class when he was with the rest of the construction crew. I did eventually notice him watching me, which felt good, because a lot of men…well, I guess they don't like me being so big.”
Lou smiled at her. “They’re fools, then. Anyway, after watching Casey start her day for a couple of weeks, I decided that I should try to get her attention. I figured the worst she could do would be to ignore me. But the first time I smiled at her, she smiled back.”
“I was wondering what took you so long!” Casey added with a little laugh. “But, it was nice to know you’d noticed me. I remember I was the first one to say anything, though.”
Lou nodded. “You said 'good morning' to me a week or so after we first smiled at each other.”
“I guess it wasn't very memorable.”
“Hard for me to forget the first words
you
ever said to me,” he replied, looking over at Casey with a quiet smile. Casey leaned into his shoulder and closed her eyes. After a moment, Lou seemed to remember Lex was still there, and smiled at her as well. “Anyway, we started out with just small talk, but after a couple of weeks or so, we were talking for at least five or ten minutes every day.”
He looked at Casey then, who smiled in response. “Of course,” Casey said, “I wanted to talk to him, but I didn't want to make it too obvious to any of our monitors that I was interested because I was worried. Serena had already passed word to me that our sponsors seem to like to discourage us from dating, along with some weird stories she'd heard from some other people. So, I had to figure out a way to make things happen without letting anyone at the facility know.”
“I kind of figured she was shy and that I'd have to take my time so that I didn't scare her off,” Lou said, looking at Casey again, and then back at Lex with amusement in his eyes. “I figured eventually she'd get comfortable enough with me that she'd let me know if she was interested.”
“Well, after a month of this, I figured I'd better do something, because Lou and I still talked every morning for a good amount of time and I figured it would definitely attract attention if things kept going like that. But I couldn't figure out how to communicate with him in a way they wouldn't see or hear. Finally, I settled on writing him a note while pretending to read just before I went to bed, with the book half under the covers so that they hopefully couldn't pick up on it.”
Lex looked at her in horror for a moment, about to blurt out, “You mean they have our bedrooms monitored, too?” But a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach quickly followed that told her that she really should have expected it.
“So,” Casey continued, “I just had to figure out a good time to slip the note to him. Fortunately, the next day gave me my chance. Lou had just come inside from working on something around the outside of the building. It was a cold day, I remember, even for winter, and I was lucky enough to have just finished boiling water for tea.”