Soul and Blade (14 page)

“I went back into Rory’s mind to end it, to find closure and see the end of the line.” How does he not know this? Being part of the team, he should have known I was back in Rory’s mind.

He pauses and his tone changes. “What?” He’s alert and has paused the game. “I didn’t hear you were doing that. How come no one told me? What did you find in there?” He sounds worried or angry.

“My family.”

“Oh shit. Rory showed you them? How? I didn’t think he could.”

My stomach tightens. “Yup, he did.” Wait. What?
Didn’t think he could?
What does he mean by that? I want to ask, but he might clam up if thinks I don’t know what I am pretending to know. He’s big on need to know.

“And you want to go to Dash, even after all that?” He sounds worried.

“Yup. I need to talk to him.”
What the hell is he talking about?

“Are you going to kill him?”

I sigh. “No. Jeez. I want to ask him questions. It’s going to be civil, I swear.”

He returns my sigh. “The last time you said the word
civil
, I ended up bombing a building to cover your tracks.”

“That was human trafficking.” And, in my defense, it was Iraq, not the suburbs of DC.

“It was gruesome and you should be ashamed.”

I roll my eyes. “And yet, I’m not. The address.” I have one small problem with remorse. When I see someone has taken away another person’s rights, through war or trafficking or slavery, I have no problem taking theirs. If someone ends up on my list of names, marks, or targets, then I assume they deserve to be there. It’s a flaw. “I want his address.” What hasn’t Dash told me? My brain screams this is a mind run and I am unconscious somewhere right now.

“It’s not close to the city. It’s a bit of a commute.”

“Then I want a helicopter and his address.” I hope my tone suggests I am annoyed.

“Give me five minutes.” He sighs and hangs up as I exit, locking the door. Binx gives me a look. I nod, sitting on the steps. “I know, buddy, but you have to stay in the carrier so you don’t try to kill the pilot. Remember last time?”

He growls low. I’m sure the growling and hissing are entirely because he remembers the last time he flew.

I ignore the cat and rack my brain for the missing pieces Rory might have showed me.

What do I know?

I know I saw my family.

I know I didn’t find any memories in there. They were Rory’s invention, and I don’t remember them the way I should with my own life memories.

I remember the run and that is all. Nothing new is there. Just as he taunted me there wouldn’t be. I wouldn’t remember anything new from inside his head; it was all his memories or ideas he forced on me. I didn’t find anything in there.

But Antoine is the least dishonest person I know. If he says there are secrets in my head, there are. And Rory must have known about them. There must have been pieces of the puzzle I am interpreting as his, but they were mine. Details I gave Rory, not the other way around.

A car pulls up in front of the house after about a minute of my mind scrambling to make sense of the concept of new secrets. A man in a suit opens the passenger door and then the back door for me. I walk to it, noting the cut of his hair. He’s military.

Am I in a mind run?

My cat, my pissed-off cat, uses his claws to tell me I am not. So I get in, putting Binx next to me on the seat. There’s no trust left—I am scarred for life from the mind runs. I assume the military driver and passenger are a trap. Everything is.

“Evening, ma’am,” the driver says.

I offer a nod and turn my head to the window. I watch them the entire time in my peripheral vision. Neither even looks at the other. One drives and the other one looks out the window, maybe watching me in his periphery too.

It’s dark, and DC is almost still—it’s not as bad as New York for some reason. To me, it’s far quieter and more civil.

When the car stops and I see the chopper, I breathe a little better. I had planned out both their deaths, but I knew I would have been injured, to say the least.

I carry Binx to the helicopter, keeping in my line of sight the escort I had in the car who is now following me, all while maintaining one eye on the lone pilot.

He nods at me and the escort just behind me. I open the door and climb in, receiving a piece of paper the moment I sit. The escort gets into the passenger seat up front.

Binx looks terrified. I feel like an ass for bringing him, seeing his eyes so wide, but I didn’t think it out at the moment I decided to come. My plate of half-eaten food is even still back home on the table.

We lift off after a moment and my eyes lower to the piece of paper. I frown seeing the address. I know the area, not well, but it’s not what I expected at all. It’s not far from here by helicopter.

I figured I’d be flying farther away from his parents’ house, not closer to it. McLean is on the way to Middleburg. Not that I ever knew where Middleburg was before I met Dash.

The man who was in the car with me turns and shouts, “Do you need a weapon, Master Sergeant?”

I part my lips to say no, but I nod, not speaking. In that moment of noise and worry, I remember the words Rory said about the tour we would be taking. The one that showed me the lies inside my head—when he showed me my family.

I take the nine mil and stuff it into the back of my jeans like I’m Dirty Harry and not a trained assassin who knows not to stick guns in her pants. I have seen an ass cheek or two shot off by careless handlers.

“Thanks.” By the weight of the gun against my waistband, I assume it’s fully loaded.

“Ma’am.”

We fly over DC, leaving the city and all its lights behind us. But we are heading in the direction of McLean, so we still see heaps of residential lights down below. I now know exactly where the house is, but I cannot imagine what it looks like. I pull my phone out, putting the address into Google. Nothing comes up. Google Maps refuses to be directed to the area, and the aerial is completely fuzzy. I can’t help but wonder how much that costs.

I leave Google Maps and look at the “call” button. I touch it, staring at the number that called me the night of the dinner party. I press it, swallowing and wondering what I am up against.

“Jane?” Henry answers directly.

“Who is your brother?”

He pauses. “What did you find out?”

My insides tighten and I feel like I’m in a mind run again. “Who is your brother?”

“Get my father on my side and I will tell you anything you want to know.”

“Why do you think your father would listen to a word I said?”

“I wasn’t the only member of our family there, I was just the one who was dumb enough to not pay attention to the cameras.”

I close my eyes, wondering if Dash was the other one. I am still scared the blow job from hell was real after a fashion.

“Tell my father I need him and he has to answer me, or I will out him and Dash.”

I nod, even though Henry cannot see me. “Okay.”

“My brother isn’t just the dashing UN doctor you know so well. He’s a memory specialist all right, but you were someone to him before you were ever in this program.”

I bite my lip, trying to remember anything or piece together the puzzle. “Did he take my memories away from me?”

“I don’t know that, Jane. But I know he knew you long before you knew him. He has spoken of you for several years, like a decade or more. He is a liar, Jane. A very good one.”

I hang up the phone, not wanting to hear any more. I’m sitting next to the only person I trust and he’s a cat.

The helicopter lands on the pad of what I can only call a castle. It’s gray brick and completely castle-like. It must be more than ten thousand square feet, with a pool and a guesthouse. It’s ridiculous and there’s no way I know the man inside. The man who loves me and lives in my three-bedroom townhouse in downtown DC. They cannot be the same man.

The lighting around the outside is meant to mimic torches; it’s perfect and yet frightening.

The man who gave me the gun looks back. “We will wait here.”

I should tell them I’m fine and that they can go. But I have a feeling I might need a getaway vehicle in about eight minutes. I might also then need an alibi.

I grab my cat, my poor, traumatized cat, and climb from the chopper, ducking and running for the back door to the house. I don’t knock. I just walk in, closing the door and placing Binx on the counter. He growls at me through the little slats. I swallow hard and leave him there, entering the dark butler’s pantry. It leads directly into the kitchen, the main one—marble and ornate, of course. They always are in houses like this one.

Everything looks like an older lady lives here. I almost worry I don’t have the right house as I creep through the shadows and round the massive circular staircase.

“I didn’t expect you like this.” His voice comes from a shadow in the corner, across a great room.

“Yes, you did,” I say. We both know it.

“I expected I wouldn’t know you were here. I planned on a knife to my throat in my sleep.”

I want to die and I don’t even know why yet. “I want to hear it from your lips.”

“Which part?”

“All of it.” My words are nearly a whisper. I drop to my knees on the hard tile floor and stare at the shadow he has become to me.

He doesn’t move, just speaks like a villain in a movie. “We met a long time ago. I was an intern and you, the girl in a coma. You were in your late teens, we thought—me with all the knowledge of my early twenties.”

Tears stream down my face. I refuse to give him the satisfaction of knowing he has broken my heart completely by lying to me.

“You had been in the coma for weeks when I met you—almost Christmastime. You were a runaway. No family, no one looking for you. No one. Just the doctors and nurses in the ward. A Jane Doe.”

These are lies. I want to tell him that, but I sit on my heels and listen.

“I had worked there for a summer as an intern and then stayed on doing evening shifts for the fall and winter. I spent months that winter wondering what was going on in that pretty little head of yours. Through a family connection, I’d heard of a project for coma patients. I volunteered you and me for the program. When I arrived, I was stunned to discover the art of mind running. It was in its early stages.”

I shake my head a little. It’s my twitch in interrogations like these. I don’t understand why he’s lying to me. He certainly doesn’t recognize this as an interrogation.

“The first few times we tried to get into your mind we realized whatever was in there was bad. Your world was dark and dank. There was no color, no stories, no life. We had been in the minds of a couple people each as test runs. You were the first person with nothing but a cell and dark hallways and doors that led nowhere. You never let anyone in but me. So we created a program to help you see nothing while I was there, just me and you. I have actually walked the halls of your silent mind. You were always a little girl in your head, crying in the corner. I couldn’t see why you cried. The pictures were blank. Needless to say, I felt an affinity with you. Always. Sitting in the dark, speaking about nothing. I read to you, from books I had memorized. I spent my entire winter trying to coax you out of the coma—mind run after mind run—until it became dangerous. Yet one day it worked, and you woke.” He pauses. He might be lying. I don’t know what to believe.

He sighs after a couple of seconds and then continues. “Your head had been filled with things that were much worse than any of us wanted to know about. A girl on the streets living as a runaway always has the very worst memories. So we inserted a nanite, the very first of those memory bots we created. We made it wipe your memory, including your long-term memory, completely. We made you new memories. We created a past. Loving nuns and a fabulous childhood. A twin sister and loving parents stolen from you by a tragedy.”

I look at the shadow he is and tilt my head. Can I see through the lies? Do I know him at all? Is everything a lie?

“You joined the military a year later—fully healed and ready to be part of the world. Being a blank slate made you an easy fit. And you were a natural at shooting and combat, I suspect from years of fighting for your life on the streets.”

I look down at the light from outside sending shadows in the bands of light across the marble floor. I don’t say anything. It’s the best tactic a person wanting the truth has against a person wishing to lie. Human beings hate silence. Especially humans who lie.

After a few moments he speaks. “I finished my internship and I moved on to a degree in robotics engineering. The internship with the nanites had intrigued me enough. When I finished it all, Angela and I were placed in the program I had interned at. This type of neuroscience was still so young and fresh as far as the rest of the world was concerned. This lab had the technology and the secrecy and the funding to explore that little bit extra.”

There is nothing but silence when he pauses. I can hear both our breaths gently caressing the air.

By the time he starts talking again, I have decided it is all lies. “When you signed up for the program, at the urging of your superiors, I was not part of that decision. I had begged them not to allow you in, knowing your old memories were a carefully built ladder. It could all come crashing down if they messed with it. Even so, they knew you were very susceptible to the bots and memory manipulation. They felt it was the best place for someone like you. I would not have chosen that for you. But you proved them all right. You really were the best at it.”

I remember the urging of my superiors. I remember signing up and thinking I was on to the next adventure. But I don’t remember him at all. “Why don’t I remember the hospital or you?” I ask before I can stop myself.

“The chip was designed so that you believed you were at a military training facility for the first six months. It was actually a brain-injury rehab clinic. Then at the very end we tweaked your memories again, reinserting the new life we had made up for you. As far as you knew, you left the orphanage and joined the military.”