In spite of everything, Huber
had
been good to her. He’d
been a tyrant and intimidating but he’d never raised a hand to her and he’d
never touched her. In return, she’d made him richer than he could ever have
imagined. “I don’t work for glory.”
“Then, how is this. Thirty children in that class, you get me two,
you can smuggle the rest out for your own purposes.” He clicked his tongue.
“Twenty eight strays that you can save.”
He had her. Even more than he realized. Twenty eight kids who
would end up like her sister otherwise. Twenty eight lives. “Give me a week to
build a team.”
Huber hummed his approval. He came from a long line of slave
owners, that was the excuse she’d always given on his behalf. What else did he
know? He’d been good to her, atrocious to others, but good to her. He treated
her like a daughter. A bound, enslaved, and useful pawn of a daughter. Stupid,
but she still felt loyal to him.
“I knew you’d see it my way. Be in touch.”
He cut the line and she stared down at her cell phone. Aeron and
Renee’s problems felt distant now. She had kids to save.
Aeron and Renee . . . Frei tapped her cell to her chin. With their
help, she could pull it off. Renee wouldn’t go for it but Aeron . . .
Frei looked at the medical block.
Aeron . . .
She got to her feet. If this plan worked, it could save lives
and
save the CIG team from imploding. Why not?
Chapter 7
EVERYTHING HURT. I didn’t know where I was when I finally came
around but I felt as if Blackbear Mountain had dropped on top of me and run for
it.
I was pretty sure that I’d been restrained, again, and given
another dose of something, again. One thing guaranteed to make me want to hurl
objects across a room.
I was different. I had some issues, I got that but who were these
people to lock me in some tiny cell and get all defensive when I didn’t like
it? I hated shrinks.
I hated padded cells and I was in one.
I pushed myself up to my knees and glared around at the stupid
place. What was next, stick a straightjacket on me and act like I shouldn’t
have any rights? Why
should
I be happy about getting locked up? I’d been
locked up for most of my life.
The door opened and I braced myself. If they were going to try
hitting me with anything else, I was going to get mad.
“I done my time yet?” It sounded snarling, aggressive even to my
own ears.
Frei appeared in the doorway in running shorts and a tank top.
“Gym.” She turned and strode out.
If she was fazed by my mood, she weren’t giving nothing away.
There was a surprise.
I followed her out of the room, already a million times calmer
than I’d been in there. I hated confined spaces. At my height and build, being
stuck in the “pillow prison,” as I called them, just rubbed me raw.
I hadn’t seen the outside of the room in what felt like a decade.
In Serenity, I’d been through some nasty stuff and some nastier treatments and
gotten through with a smile on my face. I’d smiled most of the time to irritate
the shrinks trying to break me.
A year away from the place and I’d lost that ability to cope. I
was at a breaking point a lot faster than it used to take me to get there.
Right now, I was ready to cry and beg Frei never to let me go near one of those
stupid cells again.
“Who are you mad at?” Frei said as we walked into a well-stocked
gym.
I yanked at my prison wear. The top rose up on my stomach and the
pants had ripped at the seams. They flapped around my calves as they were way
too short and all in orange. I had a thing about orange. I’d spent a decade in
orange. “Institutions thinkin’ they know what’s going on in my head.”
Frei patted the weight bench and I headed to it and racked up in
an automatic motion.
“But they don’t, right?” Frei sat beside me on an identical bench
and racked up the same weight I’d put on. I just stared at her. She was crazy
if she thought she could lift that.
“A degree don’t make you smarter than anybody else. Just means you
planted your butt on a seat and regurgitated something you memorized.” I
shunted the weights up. The t-shirt ripped from my biceps. I knew I looked as
unhinged as I felt but relief in the expulsion of energy flowed through me.
“So what do you think is smart?” Frei used one arm, half the size
of mine, and glided the weights up like they were balloons. I was pretty sure
whatever they’d shot into my system must still be working.
“Being a good person. Being somebody that tries to do the right
thing.” I got into a rhythm, my tension draining out with each push. “Learning
from the dumb mistakes you make.”
“Are you going to be smart?” Frei continued to glide up her weight
like she wasn’t taxed by it. I knew from the sweat dribbling down my chest that
it was not that easy.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Frei’s cool appraisal made me
sigh. “Look, I did what I needed to. Neither of us wanted Renee to live her
life like that. You did what you needed to do and I did what I needed to do.”
“That doesn’t make it smart.”
I slammed out the last few of the reps. “I didn’t ever say I was.
I spent most of my life locked up for some guy who tried to rip all I had left
from me.”
“So trusting people is stupid too.” Frei switched arms as I
started another set. It didn’t sound like a question.
“Trusting the wrong folks is dumb. Trusting a serial killer who
wants to tear your heart to shreds makes me nothing but a fool. A big, stupid,
gullible fool.”
“Nice.” Frei’s tone was cutting. “Add in some self-pity to it,
that’ll help.”
“You want to wind me up?” I slammed the weight up harder, making
the machine ding.
“I’m not afraid of you, Lorelei.” Frei stopped and added more
weight. She started again, still one-handed.
“Why would I want to scare you?” I scowled at her.
“Growing up, I learned there were two ways to survive.” Frei
pushed away with ease. “Make yourself useful and build as big a wall as you
could.”
“Sounds wise.”
Frei finished her reps the same as I did mine. My arms began to
protest at the punishment. “Where I was, yes. Where I am now, it becomes
foolish.” She leaned forward onto her knees. “The rules outside are different.
People don’t understand the loyalty being imprisoned breeds. They also don’t
get why you want to rip something apart when threatened with it.”
She sounded like she knew, like she understood. “I can’t imagine
you being inside.”
“
Should
have been.” She started another set, driving me to
follow. “The prison I lived in was far worse than Serenity.”
“I thought you said you weren’t inside.” I shunted up another set.
My heart started to pump harder. A welcome feeling.
“I was a slave.”
The bench dinged again as I stopped. “You what?”
Frei kept her smooth motion going. I was sure she wasn’t even
sweating.
“People . . . that don’t happen no more . . . does it?”
Frei gave me a look as if she thought I was an idiot. “You saw the
things that went on in Serenity Hills. That isn’t meant to happen anymore
either.”
Good point. “How’d you get out?”
“I didn’t.”
I finished my set and leaned onto my knees to draw in my breaths.
“You’re still a slave?”
“I’ll
always
be one, at least in some ways. Same as you
will always be a locked up mental patient.” She met my eyes with her steely
gaze. “It never leaves you.”
“It don’t?” I had pretty much gathered that. I guess, before now,
I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself.
“That’s what most people, including Renee, will never understand.”
Frei, moved us over to work out our legs. She added my weights for me this time
before doing the same herself. “It isn’t their fault you were locked up and it
isn’t yours either.”
“If I’d told—”
“No.” Frei started her set. Her weights looked more than mine yet
her legs didn’t even wobble. “If you told everyone you ‘saw’ the crash or
didn’t at all, they would still have locked you up.”
I started my set and my legs protested. She was working me. I
gritted my teeth and gave it what I had. “Least you get that.”
“Here’s the thing about Renee.” Frei looked like she was flicking
her feet in a nice cool stream. “She comes from a happy home life. She attended
the best schools. She lost her father who was a national hero but she is close
to her mother now.” She kept her slow, steady rhythm. “Her perspective on life
means that she thinks justice comes through the courts, that injustice doesn’t
happen.” She sighed. “And she has a nasty knack of thinking she’s right, a
lot.”
It sounded like a pretty cutting description considering Frei was
supposed to like her.
“You confuse her,” Frei said.
I frowned. “How?”
“Because you don’t know much about her, yet you’re prepared to do
anything for her. She doesn’t get that it’s part of surviving inside. You bond
or you isolate yourself. Simple.”
“If you’re isolated, you’re prey to the bullies.” That was
something I
did
understand. There was always somebody with bad intent,
somebody who took offense, safety in numbers.
“Yes. Thing is Renee can’t understand that’s where you’re coming
from. Neither does anyone else. Which is why she has the whole freak out when
people like Sally sniff around.” Frei shook her head, a wry smile on her face.
“That was the extent of her biggest problem before Yannick. That is
still
her biggest fear.”
“Why?”
Frei finished her set. More so to give me a breather by the way my
heart was thudding. “She cares what people think. She has a family name to
uphold.”
I didn’t get how somebody as heroic as Renee could think that.
“She gets embarrassed but suffering is relative.” Frei gave me a
“quit judging her” look. “It’s a big deal to her. Now you’ve erased her fear of
what happened with Yannick, her other issues will rear their head.” She sighed.
“And you’ll get to see just how irritating and pig-headed she can be.”
“She made you mad or something?”
Frei gave me a tight smile. “She’s made you mad which is why we’re
in the gym.”
Okay, so some of what she said was getting through. I hadn’t even
realized it myself ’til she did. I was locked up in a pillow prison because I’d
helped her. I didn’t regret helping her, not one iota, but I was mad that I’d
had to. I was mad that she’d lied and I was mad that until she saw me have a
heart attack, she was happy to cut me off.
“Not just her.”
Frei nodded. “No, you’re mad at everything because that’s how you
survive when you don’t know what’s going on.”
Man, she was good. She was better than any shrink. “That why
you’re mad all the time?”
“You don’t want to know.” She got up off the weight bench and
squeezed my shoulder on her way past. “I like you, Lorelei. I get you more than
you realize.”
I turned to see her in the doorway, not a patch of sweat on her
top. I looked like I’d been caught in the sprinklers. “Pick up your violin on
the way out. I want you back on duty tomorrow.”
She liked me?
Frei shook her head at the dumb expression I must have had on my
face. “Doesn’t mean you’ll get flowers, Lorelei.”
She shut the door on her way out and I went over to check the
weight rack she’d been using. I tried to lift it for good measure. I couldn’t
help but smile at the thought in my head. Frei a machine? Nope, a machine had nothing
on her.
Chapter 8
FUNNY HOW WALKING out of the clinic felt as though I was escaping.
Kinda like when I’d left Serenity Hills, I got the feeling somebody was gonna
haul my butt back inside.
Nobody did though.
I shivered without my jacket as I stood there, waiting to be
escorted but no one batted an eyelid at me. They’d returned my clothes at least
so now I was in the clothes I’d been in when running. Black cargos, boots, and
a t-shirt with my name stamped on it, because they must have figured I was dumb
enough to forget my own name.
The main drag was busy. People hurried from building to building.
Frei’s office was opposite and I looked up at the top window, assuming that’s
where a general would be. From a slave to a general, that was some going.
I rubbed my cool arms and decided that the escort wasn’t gonna
turn up. I had to have one
everywhere
before. Maybe I didn’t need one
anymore. It would have been nice if someone would have talked me through
everything but that would take communication. It would be logical. It would
help me know what I was and wasn’t allowed to do. Least if I broke the rules
then, I’d know I’d done it before guards with guns showed up to escort me to
get hollered at.
The wind whipping down from the snowy mountain top stung my cheeks
as I trudged down the gritted sidewalk. Renee must have been on duty as she
weren’t there to meet me. A few folks cast glances at me, either ’cause I was
Lilia’s kid, or the fact I was in a t-shirt.
A few minutes later I stopped outside the door to my quarters. A
concrete slab, next to lots of other concrete slabs. Lorelei was chiseled into
the heavy door. I stared at it half expecting to see the sticky notes that had
been used in Serenity. The ones that told the guards just how unfriendly the
wild animal locked inside was.
Renee’s place looked empty so I took a hot shower, changed into
something that wasn’t military, and opened up my violin case. I’d missed it. It
was sweet that Renee had dropped it off for me.
I picked up the violin and ran my hand over the wood. Perfect time
for revisiting a friend.
Time kinda flew by and before I knew it, the heavens were filled
with a twinkling starry sky. I peered out from my window and smiled up at it.
There was nothing like a canvas of nature’s glory.
A breeze tickled my arms and I shivered and turned to smile at who
I knew was there. “You getting air miles for all this, Nan?”
I heard her chuckle and placed my violin in the case.
“Shorty, I got some things to say to you.”
Knowing I was tensing at her words, I tried my best not to let my
temper rise. “My darlin’ mother has already given me a lecture, Nan. I don’t
need another.”
“What makes you think I’m gonna holler at you?”
The humor in her
voice had vanished.
I could almost see her, five-foot nothing and standing there with
her arms folded and her short white hair bobbing on top of her head.
I missed her. I really missed her.
“Everybody else has, why wouldn’t you?” I closed up the violin
case. “I did what I had to and paid the price for it. I made the right
decision.”
“This about that firecracker of a blonde?”
I could feel the
breeze ripple across the room, as though Nan was strutting over to a rocking
chair in the corner. A second later it moved as if somebody was sitting there.
“Ain’t it?” I took up a seat on the sofa, adjacent to her. I knew
I couldn’t see her but if I tried real hard, I could picture her sitting with
her knitting or maybe fixing this or that. She was always busy.
“In part. Here’s the deal, Shorty. What you did for her was so
brave an’ true that I been beaming with pride ’bout it.”
Felt good to hear. At least someone was proud. Only, it made me
miss her even more.
“Thing is, what you did kinda hurt you. That’s what happens when
you do something somebody ain’t asked for.”
“So it’s a punishment?” Great. Help somebody out and get a ticking
off from . . . well . . . who or whatever controlled things.
“You kiddin’ me? You think love and goodness go punishing folks
for helping?”
She sounded disgusted. Nan had been a real spiritual sort. I was
pretty sure that going wherever she was couldn’t change that.
“That’s what it feels like.”
“
Reason why is when you go fixing folks who haven’t asked, you
end up taking on more than you can handle.”
The rocker moved a little
slower, like it used to when she was thinking.
“If somebody asks you. They
are focused on what it is. That way you only take what is ailing them.”
“An’ when they don’t?”
Nan sighed.
“You do what you did, which is go lookin’ for every
hurt they got.”
The chair moved a little faster.
“You ain’t meant to
carry the weight of the world on them big ol’ shoulders of yours. We had
someone pretty incredible who did all that already.”
“You gonna start throwing Bibles at me again?” I was half-teasing.
All good was a welcome topic in my eyes. If folks were set on salvation, peace,
love, or being kind to everybody else then I was on board.
“I should, maybe you’d find solace in it.”
She clicked her
tongue. I swore I could hear a knitting needle so maybe it was that.
“Come
to think of it. I’m gonna ask your mom to send that priest here and help you
out.”
“Nan, I ain’t sure he would want to hang out with me.”
“The guy you met in that hole,”
Nan said as if dismissing my worries.
“The
guy who helped you think on the armor.”
She stopped rocking.
“If you
ain’t noticed, all your gifts have faded. You need to ground yourself and get
rid of all that negativity.”
I groaned out loud. “Can’t I just stand under the shower or
somethin’?”
“You want to keep on feeling like a bear sat on your hind?”
Odd image but apt. “No.”
“Then try listening, Shorty, ’cause I ain’t foolin’ around. You
nearly got yourself in real trouble.”
She didn’t need to tell me. I’d lived through what happened to
Renee. Not real pleasant.
“If you’d touched somebody after you saw that sheriff, you could
have done a lot of damage.”
He’d had some stomach thing that was killing him. I hadn’t meant
to take it away. I was fixing his knee. “But he asked.”
“No, he didn’t. He didn’t know what you were.”
“And what am I?” I knew I sounded testy but I was trying to help
folks not butcher them and I doubted Sam was dealing with this much crap.
“A good person who don’t want to hurt nobody. I know you were
panicking when you hit Sam. I don’t blame you, but you hurt somebody and that’s
why the decision’s been made.”
I sat forward. It was hard to glare at thin air. “Decision?”
“Yup. You ain’t getting your gifts back until you understand what
it’s like to live without them.”
Now, you’d think I’d be livid at such a thing but I grinned from
ear to ear. “I ain’t burdened with them no more?”
“You smile now but you’ll start understanding why so many folks
struggle.”
She sighed.
“You need to remember that it ain’t a punishment.
Somebody really loves you and they want you to succeed.”
If that was the case, where had they been all my life? “Why do I
need to talk to the priest guy if I ain’t got a problem no more?” To me it
was
a problem. If I didn’t know what was hurting people then I didn’t have to do
nothing about it.
“You still got to live with yourself.”
Nan sounded tired.
“Shorty,
I’ll see you when you figure it out but until then, it ain’t gonna be easy for
us to talk.”
“Why?” That didn’t sound fair. “Nan, you’re the only one I get.”
“An’ I’m not wandering around the place. If you ain’t got gifts,
you won’t know I’m here.”
With that the breeze faded, the chair stopped as if she’d never
sat there, and I felt more alone than I wanted to admit.
Having Nan was the sole thing that gave me courage. It was the
good that came out of feeling stuff I didn’t want to. I rubbed my hand over my
face. She’d sounded tired so maybe it was a good thing she had a break. I
couldn’t be tempted to call on her now.
No burdens.
I grinned.
No ghosts, no visions, no feeling what folks did, no hurting when
they did, no danger of hurting somebody when I didn’t know what I was doing.
Punishment? It was the best news I’d had . . . well . . . ever.