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Chapter or Story 
Chapter or Story
Part 13
Jarod
Despite his short night, Jarod was up first, removing the black paper from the windows of the small kitchen and looking out blankly through the glass as the urn on the bench heated up the water inside it. He was musing on the day before, wondering if the take-over was really as easy as it had seemed. Men from the African Centre would arrive that day, to be kept in reserve if there were problems. For some reason, that thought was only mildly comforting.
He was at least thankful that the panic attacks he had had during the previous few days had been milder than the first, and Cici had talked him through them. They had begun shaping a plan of behavioral therapy and relaxation techniques, and the fact he had to now go to the place that had triggered the attack would, Cici assured him, make him confront his fears, and so the attacks would eventually go. He had become so interested in the phenomenon of panic attacks, and had researched them so thoroughly, that he had learned to recognize the first signs and could begin the relaxation that eased them.
A hand on his arm made him start, and he turned in time to see Shannon reach up to lightly kiss his cheek. He slid an around her waist and hugged her, careful not to squash Carrie.
“How’d you sleep?” she asked, handing the baby to him and filling a glass from the tap.
“Better than I thought I would,” he smiled. “And you?”
“Not bad.”
He eyed her as she sipped the water, noting the dark shadows under her eyes and the lines around her mouth, understanding her feelings.
“You know,” he said slowly, “you don’t have to come.”
She looked up, and he saw the tears glistening in her eyes. “I do,” she whispered, and he said no more.
Within half an hour, the rest of the group had come into the kitchen for breakfast, which was mostly taken in silence, except for murmured requests for butter or coffee. Then, once it was over, everyone scattered to dress and prepare for the day.
Four limousines pulled up outside the building, and the group piled in, more than one surprised at the mode of transport. Adama was in the first, and he explained that it had seemed rather inappropriate to expect Jarod and his family and friends to travel in the same mode as sweepers. This was a far more suitable method by which to convey them to the Centre.
Jarod, his father and Nat got into the first car with Adama to plan the day ahead and to get some idea of what might come in the following weeks. Josh, Margaret, Emily and Shannon, with Carrie, got into the second car, and Sofia, Ethan and Cici traveled in the third.
The cars’ first stop was in a small street, only a few blocks from the Centre. It contained a number of attractive houses of varying sizes, and Adama, smiling, announced that these residences were for their use. They could choose whichever houses they preferred.
Jarod saw his mother point at one, and tears glistened in her eyes as she clutched Charles’ arm. Moving closer, he heard her whisper, “Our house, Charles. It’s just like it was when we brought Kyle home.”
Charles slid an arm around her shoulders and kissed her hair, and Adama, smiling, wrote their names down beside the number on a sheet of paper he had attached to a clipboard.
Josh was pulling Shannon in the direction of another house, a few doors away, and she let him tug her up the two steps to the front door. Jarod followed them inside, surprised to see that it was furnished, and heard Josh’s feet running up the stairs. He placed a hand on Shannon’s shoulder and she turned to him.
“Do you want to have Josh live with you?”
She half-smiled, and he saw a hint of sadness in her eyes. “That’s really your decision, Jarod. He belongs more to you than to me. What would you prefer?”
He smiled at her. “Do you suppose there’s a room here for me?”
Her eyes lit up. “Do you mean it? Oh, Jarod, that’d be wonderful!” If her arms hadn’t been full of Carrie, Jarod had the idea she would have hugged him. As it was, her eyes glowed with obvious delight. “I’m sure we can find somewhere,” she promised. “Let’s see.”
They went up the stairs to find three bedrooms, one of which Josh had already claimed for himself. He was bouncing on the bed, and staring out of the window that looked out over the bay nearby.
“Please!” he begged. “Please, can this be mine?”
“I can’t see why not,” Shannon smiled. “But we need to find somewhere for Jarod to sleep, too.”
Josh stared at his progenitor for a moment, then squealed with delight and threw himself at the tall man. “Fantastic!” he cheered. “If there’s nowhere else, you can sleep here with me!”
Shannon laughed. “I think we’ll be able to do better than that. If necessary, Carrie can sleep with me. But we don’t know how many rooms there are downstairs.”
Jarod led the way down the stairs, and it seemed as if things had been arranged for them. In the back part of the house was a large room that would easily work as a bedroom, with a bathroom next door to it. The rest of that level was open-plan, with the kitchen, dining area and living space merging into one. Adama stood in the middle of the space and smiled as they emerged from their inspection of Jarod's bedroom.
“You like this?”
“It’s excellent,” Jarod replied. “May I see the plan, to see what houses the others have chosen?”
Adama offered the clipboard, and Jarod took it, seeing that Emily and Ethan had chosen one of the small houses on one side of their parents, and Nat had selected a single-room house between the one Jarod stood in now and the one in which his siblings would live. Cici and Freya, it seemed, had chosen the house on the other side of Jarod's. Then Jarod noticed a small building at the entrance to the street and tapped it.
“What’s this?”
“A proposed guardhouse,” Adama announced.
Jarod arched an eyebrow, seeing from the plan that houses backed onto those in which his family and friends would live, and then looking up at the Zulu.
“I don’t think that’s unnecessary,” he said quietly, then, tapping those houses with his index finger, “and I hope you had no plans to move those who live in these houses now.”
Adama visibly wilted. “I… we thought…”
“It doesn’t matter,” Jarod interrupted. “Just ensure that they are allowed to go back there. I can’t believe that living here will be any more dangerous than being at the Centre itself. And a sweeper may patrol the street every night.”
The African bowed slightly and accepted the clipboard back before leaving the house. Shannon cast a grin at her brother.
“You tell him, Jarod.”
“Well, did you want to live in a cage?” he asked as they left the house. “I’ve been guarded around the clock for years. I didn’t want that to continue.”
“Me either,” she agreed, before they separated to go to the same cars in which they had traveled earlier for the rest of the journey to the Centre.
The offices level of the Centre had already been reorganized for their arrival, and Jarod thought idly that people must have been working almost constantly to have things ready in only a few hours. Jarod found himself in Mr. Parker’s old office, which was the largest and had a view over the bay and the lazily curving beach, as well as some of the Blue Cove streets. He could almost make out the street in which they were all to live.
His father had Raines’ old office, right next door, and Jarod requested that an adjoining door be put in the shared wall. He asked that the same thing be done for Nat’s office, which was to be on the other side of Jarod's. That way, at least, he thought in relief, he could consult them without it being obvious to anyone else. Ethan’s office was on the other side of his father’s from that of his brother, and Emily had one of the far side of that.
Offices that had been set aside for Sofia and Margaret were refused by those people, who, it was obvious, preferred to have as little to do with the Centre as possible. Cici’s office, next to Nat’s, had a phone that connected it directly to the infirmary. Then, as they reached the end of the hallway and it was obvious to Jarod that Adama had finished with this area and was planning to show them other changes. Jarod saw Josh’s face fall and smiled sympathetically at him, stopping Adama’s flow of explanations with a raised hand.
“Where’s Joshua’s office?”
Adama’s face fell, almost comically, before he quickly pulled himself together. He moved back down the hallway to the rooms that had been assigned to Sofia and Margaret, gesturing to the boy to follow. Jarod could hear Adama offering Josh the choice of rooms, and when the two came back to the group, Josh was beaming.
As they moved down the various levels, being shown things in one place of another, Jarod sidled up to his father.
“I thought there would be more complaints to all this. Us.”
Charles nodded seriously. “I was thinking about that last night. But these people would be used to having new people taking charge all the time. For them, it’s just another regime change. If they weren’t able to be that flexible, they wouldn’t still be here.”
Jarod nodded, realizing that this was probably true, before returning his attention to Adama and the details he was providing.
Shannon
It was the middle of the afternoon before Shannon put Carrie into the bed that had been set up for her in the office Sofia had refused and covered her, pressing the button that lowered the blind over the window. The room was quiet, soundproofed, as most of the offices were, and she hoped that Carrie would sleep for at least a few hours.
Margaret and Sofia had already returned to their homes. Sofia was now comfortable around the entire group, but she seemed better around women than men. Jarod had spent the morning assigning positions to various people, mostly his family, but also to others within the Centre who had shown their abilities at those tasks over the years. Now he was examining the problem of how to change the routine of the subjects inside the building without upsetting them so that they became unable to work.
When she was sure that her daughter wasn’t going to rouse, Shannon slipped out of the room and hurried to the elevator. The hallways were empty and the large doors slid open almost as soon as she pushed the down button.
Inside the car, her finger hesitated over the SL-25 button for a moment as she warred within herself about it, before pressing it. Ever since her return from the Centre, she had hoped that her memory of Peter was a terrible dream, although some part of her told that it wasn’t. But she felt that, the longer she put off going to find him, the longer she could convince herself that he was safe.
Something quavered inside her, a feeling that she had suppressed for so long that she had almost forgotten it had ever existed: the terrible fear she had known for the first six years of her life inside the Centre, before Peter came, while she had still had to face Raines on her own. She knew the feeling was unreasonable. Raines was locked up in the smallest cell the Centre possessed: Adama had proudly shown him to all of them that morning. Willie, Raines’ personal sweeper, and the one who had features in most of Shannon’s worst nightmares, was in the next cell.
And yet she was afraid.
Finally the doors slid open. The hallway was lined with open doors. Nat had come down here that morning to inspect the system and see if any parts had escaped his attention after he had been rescued from the Centre. Nothing had.
Shannon knew which direction Angelo had taken her, in the vent. She followed the hallway, past the numerous rooms. On this level, everything, even the walls, hummed and vibrated. The walls were thickly insulated to protect them from power surges and fires. The walls absorbed her footsteps and she could barely hear herself breathe.
Then she reached the end of the hallway and faced a blank wall.
She reached out to touch it, half-expecting an electric shock through her fingers, but she only felt a smooth, cold wall. It seemed to be the natural end of the hallway, but something was wrong. Shannon banged on it with her fist. The sound of her hand against the wall echoed. There must be something behind this. Peter was behind it.
The idea seemed to spur her into action. She kicked at the wall and beat on it with her fists, trying to find a weaker place where she could break it down. The surface was rough, and soon the sides of her hands were red with pressure. Then the wall was streaked with red; she was too caught up in her actions to realize that it was her blood staining the cream paint.
Anger swelled in her, anger she didn’t even know she could feel, the anger and hatred of twenty-two years: feelings she thought were buried too deep for her to ever have to face them again. Her arms and hands ached and throbbed, but she couldn’t stop. A scream rose in her throat, but she never heard it escape from her mouth. She was breathless, and sweat, intermingled with tears, poured down her face until she couldn’t see, but still she went on wildly attacking that wall.
Then a hand grabbed her shoulder, pulling her away and spinning her around, forcing her arms down to her sides, holding her close. She fought against it, unable to think, having forgotten even why she was down here, but the person restraining her was strong and held her against him. Her breath came in great heaving gasps and she was lightheaded, barely able to keep her feet as she continued to try to lift her arms, but they were held down.
“All right, Shannon, enough,” a voice said gently in her ear, the first sound she heard. “Stop now. Listen to me. Relax. ”
She looked up, but her vision was too blurry to make anything out. A hand stroked her hair, lightly rubbed her back, and then wiped her eyes. This time, when she looked, she could see Jarod’s face looking down at her, concern in his eyes. He smiled faintly, questioningly, clearly waiting for her to acknowledge him, and she burst into loud, noisy sobs, burying her face in his shoulder, clawing at his back with her fingers.
He wrapped his arms around her, rocking her gently, letting her cry. She clutched at the jacket he wore, her fingers buried in the thick material, and could feel his chest rising and falling, his heart beating in her ear. Then she heard his voice, echoing in her head.
“Get some men and get this wall torn down. And get Raines here.”
Footsteps hurried away, and Jarod drew Shannon gently to the side of the hallway, her face still half-hidden in his shoulder. She was calmer now, still trembling and gasping for breath, but she could think again. After a moment, she looked up at him.
“H… how did you know?”
“I saw you go past my room,” he replied softly. “I knew where you were going.”
His thumbs lightly brushed the traces of tears from her face, and then she heard footsteps, seeing over her shoulder as three men bearing various blunt tools, and behind them, two sweepers dragged Raines along the hallway. He was dressed in a black outfit similar to the ones that Jarod and Shannon had worn for years, and the expression on his face was pure and bitter hatred.
“Tear it down,” Jarod ordered, nodding at the wall and ignoring Raines and his guards.
Shannon rested her head against her brother’s shoulder, watching as the crowbars pierced the wall and gouged strips out of it, leaving gaps, through which light shone, brighter than the light in the hallway where they stood.
“Seems like there’s a whole series of rooms here,” one of the men reported, and Jarod nodded.
“Remove the wall.”
The noise of destruction continued, quickly absorbed by the walls around them. As the hole widened, Shannon could see that the passageway continued. Three doors stood ajar along the right-hand side of the hallway and the left-hand side, like the corridor in which she stood now, was blank. It was one of the external walls of the Centre.
For a moment, the sound of voices had been audible. Then there was a thud, followed by silence.
“Get down there,” Jarod ordered, as soon as the gap was big enough for them to pass through.
The men ran down the hall, pulling out guns as they did so, the tools discarded on the floor. The sweepers shoved Raines along the corridor so smartly that he almost fell, and some tiny part of Shannon’s soul rejoiced at the fact that his treatment now was similar to the way he had treated her for so many years.
“Bedroom,” one of the men reported, then, “Kitchen and living room.” He went inside, his gun at the ready, and felt the mug on the bench and the kettle on the small stovetop. “Still hot. They’ve only just left.”
“As we heard,” Jarod said sharply. “Find them.”
“It’s too late, sir,” the other man reported, coming out of the bedroom behind them. “There’s a door here with a ladder that leads up to SL-24 through the old boiler tunnel. They got out that way.”
Jarod glanced at him. “Bring Nat down here. I want his computer, too.”
The man immediately headed back down the hallway at a run. He seemed to have just as much respect for Jarod's orders as he had once had for those of Mr. Parker or even Raines.
Shannon’s eyes were now fixed on the third door, which was almost closed. She opened her mouth to say something, but the words wouldn’t come. Her pulse was pounding in her temples and her hands were kneading each other so that the blood dripped from the sides, where they had been cut on the wall, and pooled on the floor.
Finally, the group moved towards the door. The sound of machines beeping and sighing, as well as the scratching of pen on paper, which had haunted Shannon’s dreams since her escape, were clearly audible, and the man who had reported on the kitchen now moved ahead and shoved the door wide open, a gasp escaping from his mouth at the sight inside that room.
Jarod, his arm still around Shannon’s shoulder, drew her along until they could both see into the room. His eyes falling on the bed, he froze, his fingers convulsively tightening.
Shannon felt her eyes fill. It was the same as she had seen it, and worse, it wasn’t a dream. She hadn’t realized until that moment how much she had longed to be wrong.
Then she saw that the man who had led the way in was hesitating, his eyes following the line of red laser light that surrounded the bed.
“Th… there’s a switch,” she offered hesitantly. “Beside the door. On the right.”
Even as he flicked the switch and the laser light faded with a soft sigh, out of the corner of her eye, Shannon saw Raines try to turn to glare at her, but the sweepers’ grip was too strong and he couldn’t move. His blue eyes, though, burned with undisguised rage.
It was at that moment that Nat reappeared, his laptop in his hand, the man who had been sent to fetch him following several paces behind. Nat hesitated at the hole in the wall, but Jarod waved him on, and he moved to join them.
Raines’ furious gaze, Shannon saw, now swung between the two of them, and she saw the sweepers getting a firmer grip on him. It was then, for the first time, that she noticed the shackles around his wrists and ankles, with a chain joining them. That made her feel marginally safer. At least, even if he broke free, he wouldn’t be able to strike her.
Nat took a moment to recover from his first sight of Peter, and Shannon wondered if he had been told what she had said to Charles about it. But he stepped into the room, and Jarod and Shannon followed.
“Somewhere in this room,” Nat surmised, after carefully looking around “there will be a computer plug. When we plug a computer in to it, we’ll be able to access the information. I’d guess it’s on an independent system from the mainframe.”
It took some searching, but they finally found it, hidden behind the only machine on casters, so that it could be rolled forward. The cable hung out of the wall, and Nat plugged in his laptop. The first screen showed a password cue, and Nat, after a sideways look at Raines, put in eight letters. The screen turned blue, and he was in.
Shannon turned away, edging towards the bed, looking down at Peter’s face. The bruises under his eyes were as black as she remembered them, and the scars just as bright. She couldn’t see any new ones.
“You can touch him,” Nat said softly. “Go ahead, Prodge.”
It took a moment for the words to sink in, and then she inched towards the bed. She stopped only a hair’s breadth from it, her fingers mere inches from Peter’s shaved head and the beads that were attached to wires, which ran to one of the machines. Then she allowed herself to make contact.
His skin was cool, almost cold. She touched the backs of her fingers to his cheek and slid them down to his jaw, remembering the night they had shared together, when his response to that had been to turn his head and kiss her fingers. But now he remained motionless, his eyes still closed, the dark lashes vanishing into the bruises. Stubble could just be felt under the tips of her fingers on his cheeks.
She wanted to tear off the knobs, but she could see the glue that attached them to his head, and guessed that to do so might tear out hair by the roots and cause him pain, which was something she couldn’t bear to think about. Tears filled her eyes and gradually escaped, sliding down her cheeks to drip onto Peter’s face. She wiped them away, letting her index finger lightly touch his lips, feeling that they were dry and cracked.
A sudden sense of urgency pulsed through her, a desire to look into his eyes and to know that he saw her, and she moved her hand to his arm, shaking him and making the bed creak.
“Shannon?” Jarod's hand lightly touched her shoulder. “He’s not going to wake up, honey,” he went on in a soft voice. “Not until we make up a drug that will reverse the one they’ve given him.”
She looked up at her brother, tears once more blurring her vision. “Then do it,” she begged. “Please.”
“We will,” he promised. “But we can’t do it right now. We need to know more about what was being done to him first.”
He had turned her away from the bed, his hands on her shoulders, and suddenly she clung to his arms, drawing herself closer to him. His arms slid around her back, holding her against him, her face pressed against his chest.
“We’ll do everything we can,” he vowed softly. “I promise you that.”
“You won’t be able to do anything,” a mocking voice said suddenly, and Shannon whirled around, breaking out of Jarod's loving hold, to physically face Raines for the first time.
A memory suddenly assailed her. Some time before she had met Peter, another person had been brought in to work with her: Michael. He had been new to the Centre, and had taken umbrage at a criticism Raines directed at him. Michael had spat at Raines. Raines had beaten Michael until he was unconscious, and only stopped kicking and punching him when Michael was a bloody mass on the floor, whereupon sweepers had dragged him away. Shannon had never seen Michael again, and Nat had found records that suggested Raines’ beating had killed him.
She took a step closer and spat into Raines’ face, a lump of spittle landing on the bald ghoul’s cheek and slowly sliding down to eventually drop to the floor. Raines stared at her for a second that felt like an hour, the fury building up in his eyes. But before he could even attempt to let fly, from Shannon’s left, a fist slammed into Raines’ temple, knocking him cold. His body slumped soundlessly to the floor.
Shannon turned to find Nat beside her, his eyes glowing with anger in a way she had never seen before, his right hand still clenched into a fist. As the sweepers picked up the unconscious man, in much the same way that Michael had been dragged from the room so many years earlier, Nat gently slid his arm around her shoulders, tightening it in a hug.
“We will do it,” he promised. “If only to prove to ourselves – and him – that we can.”
Jarod
It was late, and the moon was shining in through the window of Jarod's office at the Centre, but its new occupant was still sitting at the desk, his eyes on the pages in front of him, trying to solve the problem of Peter.
“There has got to be a way,” he groaned, turning the chair to face the ocean.
“You can’t always get it right, Jarod,” a voice stated from the doorway. “Sometimes there isn’t an answer.”
Jarod froze for an instant, before turning the chair back to face the main part of the office. A lamp that stood on a table just inside the doorway illuminated the intruder.
“Sydney,” he sighed, the word hissing from between clenched teeth. “I didn’t think you’d come.”
“I’m unemployed,” the psychiatrist remarked. “I was told to request a new job.”
“I’ll find something for you,” Jarod said brusquely. “As soon as possible.”
“I’m in no hurry.”
“Would you prefer retirement?”
“Not in the sense that Mr. Parker or Raines used to use it,” the older man replied, remaining in the doorway. “The permanent sense.”
Jarod pulled a notepad towards him, scribbling the name ‘Sydney’ under a long list of things that would need attention in the morning.
“Was there anything else?” the Pretender asked sharply, when Sydney made no move to leave.
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Don’t you think you’ve done enough?” came the blunt response. Then, after a long pause, Jarod looked up. “Did you really know, Sydney? The truth, I mean. The truth about the sims, my parents – everything.”
“The sims?” Sydney said thoughtfully, taking a step into the room. “Nothing of their final use. I believed the positive spin they put on them when they were delivered to me. I had nothing to do with them later being manipulated and your results inverted, which I’ve found out since.”
Jarod weighed up whether or not to believe his former teacher, but eventually the long years of trust that had built up over their acquaintance won out and he nodded.
“Your parents?” Sydney went on. “No. I saw no reason to doubt what I was told – that they died on the way to coming to see you.”
“And in your experience,” Jarod replied, with just a hint of sarcasm, “how many other subjects had their parents come to visit?”
“How many asked?” Sydney answered at once, moving further into the room. “Not many. None in my experience.”
A long pause stretched out between the two men; a pause that Sydney finally broke.
“Have you found all your family?”
“Almost, as far as we know. Not Kyle, yet.”
“Kyle was released in 1972.”
“Kyle was put into SL-27 in 1972,” Jarod shot back. “Raines allowed him to start working outside the Centre in 1983. Kyle managed to elude the sweepers that were supposed to be keeping an eye on him. He stalked a woman named Harriet Tashman, believing that she knew the location of our parents, and finally kidnapped her on the third of June that year. She drove the car into a tree in an effort to escape. He was arrested and sent to prison. We’re trying to get permission to visit him.”
Sydney's eyes widened. “I’m surprised Raines trained Kyle for use outside the Centre. I thought he would have seen that Kyle wouldn’t have been controllable out there.”
“Just like I wouldn’t have been, I guess,” Jarod returned wryly.
“Mr. Parker wouldn’t hear of you working outside of the Centre,” Sydney told him. “I tried frequently to let you work outside, but he refused to even entertain the idea. Of course, the real reason had to do with the scrolls. Any subject given permission to work outside the Centre had to get it from the Triumvirate, and he didn’t want to tell them anything about you.”
“Did they give permission for the experiments Raines did on me last October, while you were over in Europe?”
Sydney stared at him in obvious confusion. “What experiments? You weren’t even working with Raines then. As far as I knew, you were working under a man named Mr. Lyle at that time.”
“Oh, Raines was there, too,” Jarod said bitterly. “They were doing cryogenic freezing experiments: an attempt to put a body into stasis and revive it. They’re still trying to keep death away,” he added, his eyes falling on one of the sheets about Peter that still littered his desk. “They’re trying it on a project down in SL-25. The father of my sister’s baby, in fact.”
Sydney's expression was no longer shock; it was now pure horror. “Stasis?” he murmured. “I did hear something about stasis experiments earlier this year. Around February, I think.”
“That was when Peter was dragged in,” Jarod replied.
They had found the report of the person at the front desk that morning and discovered that Peter had walked so sedately into the Centre because a gun had been pointing into his ribs the whole time.
“Raines is keeping him one stage away from death with some drug, and he’s being monitored to see how the body will react over time. I suppose the idea,” Jarod sneered, “was that, if it turned out to be successful, Raines and Mr. Parker could be put into it until a cure for whatever was going to kill them could be found.”
“Is that the problem?” Sydney asked softly, nodding at the pages on the desk. “A problem with the process of reviving him?”
Jarod nodded, forgetting the anger he’d felt towards Sydney since his rescue and remembering only the many small kindnesses that had brought light into his otherwise dark life for so long. He pushed the papers over the desk and waved at a chair.
“Putting him into stasis was the easy part,” he said as Sydney picked up the pages and looked at the notes. “Getting him out alive will be the difficult one.”
Shannon
When Shannon awoke the next morning, it took a moment to remember. After the attack on Raines, she had numbly listened to Jarod and Nat discussing the transfer of information onto the mainframe and had followed them back up to Jarod's office. Then, while the two men worked at the initial stages of accessing the information, she had wandered to the office in which Carrie still slept.
The sight of her baby had driven home to her just what had happened in that room, and what had happened to the father of her child.
Cici had come in before she became fully hysterical, and had eventually been forced to give her a sedative injection to calm her down. Shannon had woken some hours later, and had been more able to deal with it, perhaps because the drug still seemed to numb her emotions.
Now, however, as she saw the sun streaming in through the office window, she could feel the raw pain that seemed to cut so deeply. But she couldn’t let herself be destroyed by it. That would be giving in to everything Raines had wanted to do to her; that would be letting him win.
Raising herself on her elbows, she looked around. A mattress had been put into the corner of the room, and it was on this that she lay. Jarod sat in an armchair in the corner, Carrie in his arms. As she moved, he rose and came over, lowering himself to the floor and sliding his free arm around her shoulders, supporting her into a sitting position and then gently laying Carrie in her arms.
Now that the sedative drug had cleared from her system, she could feed Carrie again, and the girl was clearly hungry for her breakfast. It seemed easier to do that than ask Jarod what he had found, so, for a moment, she tried to pretend that everything was normal and concentrated fully on the task at hand.
But it finally ended, and Jarod took Carrie back, placing her in a bassinette that he moved to the bedside. Shannon reached out to touch the girl’s foot and then looked up at her brother.
“Have you found anything?”
She could see his Adam’s Apple bob as he swallowed hard, but she felt only cold dread in the pit of her stomach at what she feared would come.
“We’ve found a way to reverse the drug that put him into that state,” Jarod said, in a voice so soft that it was barely above a whisper.
The deep sorrow in his eyes prevented her from feeling the exhilaration that should have followed this statement.
“Wh… what is it?” she stammered. “Please, Jarod. Tell me.”
Jarod swallowed again, obviously finding it difficult to speak. “Shannon, when Peter was put into that state, he was close to death. When we reverse the drug, we won’t be able to keep him alive for longer than about an hour. His injuries are just too severe. If we tried to operate, he would die on the table.”
She stared at him uncomprehendingly, feeling as if something in the depths of her heart was very slowly tearing in two.
“No,” she whispered almost noiselessly.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I’m so sorry, but there’s nothing we can do.”
His eyes were sparkling with sympathetic tears, but she found herself suddenly unable to cry.
“When?”
“Whenever you want,” Jarod replied. “He’s not suffering now, and we’ll make sure he doesn’t suffer when we revive him, if we do.”
“Will I… be able to see him?”
“Yes, of course.” He stroked her hair. “That’s why we’re going to do it, Shannon. So that you have a chance to be together, so that you can show him his daughter, and so you get a last chance to say things to him that you need to, to get closure.”
“Today?”
“If that’s when you want it.”
She nodded, feeling as if she still didn’t fully understand the situation, or as if she was somehow distanced from it all. But then something burned into her soul and she sat upright, staring at Jarod in a mixture of horror and devastation.
“So… whenever I ask you to do it… I’ll kill him!”
He quickly gathered her into his arms again, rocking her as the tears flowed. “No, Shannon, no. It won’t be you. Raines is the one to blame for all this – the only one. You mustn’t – you absolutely mustn’t – feel guilty at all about this. You’re an innocent player, like we all are.”
Carrie, perhaps feeling the distress in the room, began to cry, and Shannon reacted immediately, pulling herself away from Jarod's hold and reaching out to her child. Jarod lifted the baby out of the bassinette and placed her in Shannon’s arms, and the act of holding her seemed to calm the worst of the emotions that had been exposed by what she had learned.
“No, my baby,” the now-familiar voice of her mother whispered inside her, as she rocked her child. “No guilt. You have nothing to feel guilty about, I promise you that.”
Jarod
The Venetian blinds on the windows of the infirmary room were tilted at an angle so that those inside couldn’t be distracted by movement outside, but that the anxious party in the hallway could keep an eye on those within.
Those who had known Peter had spent a brief time in the room with him to say goodbye, and now the last few minutes were left for the woman who had given him the love and the child he had so desperately wanted.
Out in the hallway, nobody spoke. Even Kyle, who found the emotional nature of the scene so difficult to understand, was refraining from comment. The previous day, he had been released into the supposed custody of the Centre, but really that of his parents, after the necessary papers had been forged and Sydney had provided the required psychiatric assessment.
Jarod watched Peter lift his hand to touch his baby daughter’s face. The movement was so visibly difficult that it was obvious the end was approaching. Peter moved the hand from Carrie’s face to Shannon’s, and Shannon reached up to hold it against her cheek, kissing the backs of his fingers.
Something about the moment seemed too personal and Jarod turned away. Maybe he could help his sister better later if he kept himself detached from all this. He could never hope to understand what she felt for the man she was slowly losing. The best he could do, as his mother had told him the previous evening when they were preparing to bring Peter out of stasis, was to be there when she needed to talk and just listen. He had considered that piece of advice during the long hours of preparation and felt that it was correct.
Joshua was standing some distance away from the others, and Jarod went over to him, holding him while the boy wept. While Shannon had become such a major figure in Josh’s life, Peter had been not one whit behind in his support, and Joshua was now bitterly regretting the defiance and rebellion that had played such a big part in his early adaptation to the outside world.
Everyone turned as Shannon came out of the room, her baby in her arms. Through the window, Jarod could see that Peter’s eyes were closed and his complexion was already taking on a gray, hue, his lips also quickly losing color. The group gathered around Shannon, Joshua fighting his way through to be closest.
She placed a hand gently on Josh’s shoulder and looked up, a single tear sliding slowly down her cheek.
“Please,” she said, in a voice that was barely a whisper, “let’s go home.”
