Authors: Brian Thompson
Her emotions surrounding her husband’s disappearance were even more disturbing to her. She refused to give voice to them, as they were unnatural and would suggest to the policeman that she may have had something to do with it. And she did love Micah. But the absence of her husband felt natural, like it should have happened. Harper believed in God granting peace in the midst of emotional storms, but she never personally experienced it. Still lying in the chair, she blinked her eyes to keep herself from falling asleep.
Damario touched the reclining chair he dreamed of lying in, hoping something might trigger a memory, a clue, or something. His surroundings were quiet enough to notice Harper’s breathing patterns shift from that of someone awake and vibrant to sound slumber. He let her sleep.
She must need it.
Harper looked peaceful, like a child. Her bottom lip drooped slightly, enough to reveal the crown of a bottom tooth.
The puzzle irritated him; an equation with five factors. It had three unknowns; Quinne, Micah James, and another person
.
The laboratory they discovered had been stripped and would only exist a while longer.
Without a forensic droid or backup collection material, he started snapping pictures with his police issue holophone. Its high resolution and settings provided enough variance for him to capture it from different perspectives. The infrared did not reveal anything he already did not suspect. The pictures would have to stay off-the-record. If his superiors found out he had gone behind them without prior authorization, they would suspend him first, and then have him psychologically evaluated. While not fragile, his psyche certainly would not pass strenuous testing at this point. At a point of stress, he might blurt out information – like he had been dreaming about his partner, too.
“Missus James,” he called out. “Harper, wake up.”
“Hmm? I fell asleep?” She propped herself up and rubbed her eyes. Damario lent her his arm for support and she used it to slide safely to the ground. “Did you find something? Anything?”
Damario’s face fell downcast. “No. I’ll take you home.”
At the room’s entrance, Harper approached the access plate. When the door opened, she and Damario barely had time to react to the young girl in front of them before she dropped to the ground. Damario carried her to a chair and laid her down; Harper followed them. When she came around, she would speak and verify what Harper had already suspected.
Damario studied the quiet face. “Is this who I think it is?”
“Quinne,” Harper responded without hesitation.
They would not understand the significance of her presence until she awakened, but Damario started postulating outcomes. If the pattern held, she would have had some memory or link to this same room and the people within it – Harper did and so had he. This laboratory allegedly belonged to Harper’s husband. Its ventures included equipment for a secret project that might have been off the official books. Micah could have instituted an experiment on all three of them.
The venture could have been of a criminal nature – the likes of which he did not want to even imagine. Experimentation on human beings dated back through the annals of time; the most recent recorded instances to increase adaptability of robotic prostheses. It did not explain why someone, or Micah, would have chosen five random people and why he would have done so in the laboratory of a not-for-profit foundation.
Gradually, after minutes of Harper fanning Quinne’s face with her hands, the girl roused. She opened her eyes and stared at the exact location of the ceiling that she dreamed. Quinne shot up into a sitting position, screaming and thrashing. Damario tried to calm her. Harper did the same.
“Take it easy.” He gently touched her arm. “You fainted.”
“What?” The scenario had all the markings of a dream to Quinne, who only recently stopped breathing heavily. “Who ‘re you?”
“I’m Detective Damario Coley,” he said, “and this is Harper James. You’re in the laboratory of her husband, Micah James, in the Exodus Foundation building.”
Quinne massaged her cramping right quad; the reason why she’d stopped halfway into her four-mile run. While supporting herself on a nearby tree, she noticed Damario and Harper entering the abandoned building. Quinne’s only other recourse was a liquor store a block away. By that time, someone could have attacked her.
“They do not-for-profit work to improve the human condition,” Harper explained, reciting the company’s tagline. “Or, at least they did until a few months ago.”
Quinne stared at the familiar masculine face. “Ain’t you have dreads before?”
“What?” Damario’s brow furrowed. “Haven’t had dreadlocks since college, about 13 or 14 years ago.”
“You that old?” she asked unconvinced. “Guess you got one of them kinda faces.”
Harper moved closer. “How’d you get in here?”
Quinne held up her palm and jumped to the ground. “Like you did, I guess? I ain‘t never been up here, though.”
“You might have,” Harper assured. “How else could you get in here?”
That question remained. “I ain’t do it on purpose.” Quinne cleared the hoarse rasp from her voice. “I called out, at first. You must not’ve heard me. My leg‘s hurtin‘ real bad, so it took me a minute to get to the tubes. Found out you was up on this floor, so I followed and banged on the door.”
“But how did you get in?” Damario tried to extract the details. The door’s metal alloy would not have readily responded to the strength of a 125-pound teenager.
Quinne’s eyes rolled. “You ain’t hear me, so I banged on the door. That ain’t work, either, so I smacked the panel.”
“Why would it read her prints?” Harper turned to Damario. “Any idea?”
He signaled no. “Did you hack it?”
“I look like a hacker to you, man? No, I ain’t hack it! It asked for my name, I said it, and it opened.” When it did, two apparitions from her dreams appeared and dropped her to the ground. “Pain must’ve knocked me out.”
Damario knew different; she likely fainted because she had dreamed of them. “Since you said you’ve never been here before, let’s go back to the events leading up to you getting here. Start with when you woke up and be as specific as you can.”
Like the past six days, Quinne had awoken completely covered in sweat. Sleeping in just a pair of black mesh shorts and a tank top did nothing to cool her off, and Troy, her cool-by-nature boyfriend, insisted on full covers. They lessened the effects of the cooling mechanism at her bedside. She told him her night sweats were from hormones or the apartment’s overactive heating system, but she secretly feared Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
“I woke up ‘bout 7:30. Turned the window tint down to get some light in the bedroom. Washed my face, threw on tights and a hoodie, grabbed my tunes and went for a run. Helps clear out my head.”
Or make sense of what’s in it
.
“Whereabouts?”
“East side – Lowery homes.”
When Quinne mentioned the low-income neighborhood, Harper visibly recoiled. She hated that run-down side of town.
“You always run that early?”
“Not always.” She twiddled her fingers. “Why? Does it matter? I get up early. I run early. Ain’t got no job. Might as well.”
“Rough neighborhood to be running in the dark,” muttered Harper.
“I ain’t scared. You sound like Troy. He thinks I should be scared, too. For what? You gonna stay in the house, scared all the time? Not me. I gotta Ordnance for all that. And yeah, gotta license for it, too.”
Damario mentally dissected the answers. “Right. Continue, please.”
“Ain’t much else to it but that. ‘Bout a half block from here, got a cramp. Thought you and her was better than anyone in the liquor store.”
“Have you been having dreams, Quinne?”
Gunshots fire. Troy lyin’ in black blood. His eyes stickin’ open like a deer crushed in traffic. Blackout. I scream in a hospital bed, pregnant – ‘bout five months or so. Blood. Lots of blood.
“No.”
“Nothing?” Incredulous, Harper pressed. “Seriously? Both of us have.”
“I said, no!” she yelled back.
Damario knew different, but he would not push. “This Troy. . .”
“My boyfriend? Moved outta my momma’s house couple years ago and we moved in together.”
Anibel Ruiz, a Bible-thumping Catholic, did not approve of her teenager’s active sex life, so Quinne moved out. The concept of an afterlife, or a prior life, as it were, was a waste of thought to Quinne. The present – where she lived, breathed, achieved, and failed, held more importance.
“And you’ve never been in a room like this before? Officer Coley and I have, and we both possess these dream-like memories of all three of us being here. . .in a round room.
“You were sitting here,” Harper said, pointing out a specific chair, “between us. Another woman beside you, and, we think, someone else on the end. It could’ve been my husband, Micah. He’s been missing for about a week.”
Damario stepped forward. “My dreams are much less conclusive, but I am in one of these chairs, strapped down, with a tube in my mouth. Had the same dream over and over. Keeps me awake at night. You don’t remember anyone? A name, or anything?”
Quinne put a hand to her lips. Her memories were reminiscent of Damario’s and Harper’s, and while she did not remember encountering them before, she did not completely doubt it. With folded arms, she divulged her dream – from murdered boyfriend to pregnancy gone wrong.
“If what we’re describing are dreams,” Damario said aloud, “it makes sense why we only remember bits and pieces, doesn’t it?”
The women agreed. “But it doesn’t make sense that you were here, totally conscious, or why we all see different versions of the same things. All this started happening for us over the past couple days. What about you Quinne?”
She shook her head. “Four days.”
“Detective?”
“Same.”
“Why ain’t your boys handlin’ all this and figurin’ it out?”
“They’ve been here, Quinne,” he corrected. “The machines are all gone.”
“Great.” Harper sighed.
That technology might have provided a clue to Micah’s whereabouts.
“So, what do we do now?”
“We leave,” he said with certainty.
“Wait, to go where?” She limped in Damario’s direction. “The two of you ain’t gonna just show up, throw my life around, and go about your business. I ain‘t goin’ nowhere ‘til I get some more answers.”
“Nobody’s saying we step out into the hallway and forget.” Damario’s temperature rose. “But sitting around in an empty room, trying to remember isn’t going to help, either. You don‘t solve a puzzle by looking at the shapes of the pieces you don‘t have. You look what you do have and how the missing pieces fit the spaces.” He pointed at the room’s front. “
Five
chairs: you, me, plus Harper then Micah, I’m guessing, that’s four.”
Harper thought the policeman had a valid point. “And the fifth person?”
“Teanna Kirkwood,” Quinne blurted without thinking. “Her name is Teanna Kirkwood.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
January 28, 2050
Harried by the delayed red-eye flight, Teanna ordered alcohol, starting off with a Fuzzy Navel on the rocks. The event called for a celebration. After a month away from the west coast, the trip demanded she let loose. Teanna wore her best business suit, designer heels, and a Zara Hristoff clutch with no practical use.
A tumbler ascended from her first-class armrest. Shaking the ice cubes back and forth until her palm cooled down, Teanna sipped, her lips filtering the liquid from the ice.
Exactly
what I needed
. Soon, her stilettos found their way to the storage area beneath her seat. The passenger sitting next to her – an impeccably-groomed Asian in his mid-30’s, smiled at her. She hoped his warmth originated from mutual attraction and not an alcohol-fueled illusion.
“Hi,” she laughed with a tipsy lilt.
“Hello,” he responded, with a slight Korean drawl. He had been too busy manipulating his computer display to speak. The man rested his chin on his left hand, which bore an expensive-looking band on his ring finger. That did not deter Teanna, who had fooled around with a married man before. The risk of getting caught jumpstarted her heartbeat. She had a thing for Asian men.
“Teanna Kirkwood.” She extended a hand, which he tenderly accepted.
“I know who you are, Teanna.” His throaty baritone plucked her strings. “I saw you at the police precinct, by the tree.”
“Oh yeah?” She volleyed more flirtation his way. “We’ve met? I don’t think so ‘cause I would’ve remembered you.”
He flashed a winsome smile. “You don’t remember me?”
“Really don’t.” She swallowed the last hint of her drink. “You a cop?”
“No, I’m not. Why do you ask?”
“Met this guy, right? Boxes like Pacquiao, but he ain’t a good boyfriend. Go out of town for the real estate conference I just came from, he follows me, makes a scene.” She stifled a belch. “That’s when they got him. They prolly want me to press charges.”
“You're a chatty one, aren’t you?”
Teanna adored the way his lips formed words underneath a trimmed mustache and chin goatee. “Yup. Guess I am, mister. . .?”
“Chu,” he answered. “Miles Chu.”
“Miles Chu. You were at the police precinct? What for?”
“Mistaken identity. You can imagine the amount of problems that can cause.”
“Wow!” Her response rang with fake amazement. “What do you do. . .Mister Chu?”
“I’m a scientist.” He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a vintage red die – the kind used in Vegas gambling – and placed it on her tray table. “I’ve been studying a complex mathematical theory, but I’ll give you the short version, if you like. Pick a number, from one to six.”
Teanna blinked her eyes. “Hol’ up. I need a drink ‘fore all that.” She disposed of her empty glass inside the automated tray table and summoned another Fuzzy Navel. After sipping it, she waved her hand for Chu to start. “Why six?”
“It’s complicated. Pick a number, from one to six.”