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Chapter or Story 
Chapter or Story
Part 7
Shannon
The car stopped with a squeal of brakes and Shannon heard the door thrown open and feet land on the asphalt with a loud crunch. In terror, she forced herself to go faster, looking ahead to see if anywhere could lend her a form of escape, but there was nothing except the bushes, which could offer no real protection from the driver, who must have seen her, or else why had he stopped?
She could hear him searching, the snapping of twigs as he brushed aside the thick hedges, and the crunch of his feet on the gravel. Knowing that she could never escape, Shannon pushed her body back into the hedge, ignoring the twigs that scratched her and dug into her back, and took her gun out of its holster. It seemed heavy in her hand and she stared blankly at it for a moment, before releasing the safety.
“Shannon!”
A man’s voice called her, and she stiffened, leaning back into the hedge, her breath stuck in her throat. She felt suddenly sick, and idly wondered what operations Raines would perform on her when she was dragged back into the Centre. She wasn’t even sure whether she should fight or not. Mightn’t things go better for her if she just gave in? Logic seemed to suggest so, but logic was useless at the Centre.
“Prodge!” the same voice called, and she gasped aloud, wondering which of the people in her team was a spy, working for the Centre, and had given away her nickname to them.
Then a large, familiar form loomed into her line of vision. Dan hesitated for a moment, before he lowered himself to the ground beside her and gently reached out to slide the gun from between her unresisting fingers, flicking the safety back on and pocketing the weapon.
“Oh, Prodge,” he said in tones that revealed his relief. “Thank God I’ve found you. Everyone’s been worried sick about you. I’ve spent half the night on the phone to the Boss trying to organize a team to find you without the Centre finding out.”
Her eyes rolled up to look at him, but he was evidently concerned about her silence, because he leaned forward to look more closely at her.
“Shannon? Can you hear me, honey?”
She managed a jerky nod, and he moved closer, sliding an arm around her shoulders.
“I can imagine,” he said softly. “You must have walking all night to get this far, and you’ve been in that place for so long, it’s enough to have anyone on edge.” He moved his arm down so that his hand tucked in under her armpit, providing support to lift her. “Come on, Prodigy. Let’s get out of here and get you somewhere safe.”
Suddenly, she clung to him, too overwhelmed, for a moment, to do anything. Dan gently stroked her short hair, then slid a finger under her chin and raised her face so that he could look into her eyes.
“I know, Shannon,” he said, with sudden determination in his voice. “But my cell phone is dead and I can’t recharge it, so I can’t tell anyone I’ve found you. The only thing I can do is take you there as quickly as possible. That means we need to get going.”
“Yes,” she said, surprising herself as much as Dan, her voice cracking as she managed to get to her feet, swaying slightly as the man slipped his arm around her waist for support.
The car was only forty feet away, but to Shannon, that short distance felt like a lifetime and more before she was being helped into the passenger seat. Almost as soon as she sat down, her feet and legs began to throb so painfully that she gasped. Looking down, she saw that her shoes were caked in dirt. Grass, moss and dry leaves were caught in her black socks, and she could now feel pebbles in her shoes, pressing against agonizing places on her feet that would later prove to be massive blisters.
An instant later, Dan was in the driver’s seat and the car was speeding down the road.
“I don’t know how you did it, Prodge,” he told her, shaking his head in amazement. The state line is twenty miles behind us, and we’re about to come up to Helen’s house on the right there.” He pointed out a somewhat ramshackle building as they drove past. “You must have been walking the soles off of your shoes to get this far!”
“I had to get away,” she explained, running a swollen tongue over her cracked lips and wincing at the pain it caused.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “You did.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked slowly, only just now becoming aware of things outside of herself. “You were supposed to get away in the raid.”
“Bob took my place,” the man explained. “The Boss has decided to swap people instead of taking one out and replacing them later. It makes it easier for our resident techno genius this way. So I went back to my house to get the last of my stuff. I got a call from him just as I was leaving, and I said I’d keep an eye out for you. Because I was nearby, he asked me to arrange things. I was in my car, close to the main exit, when the alarms went off. I got out of there like a shot.” He cast a sideways glance in her direction. “What’d you do, Prodge?”
“I knocked one of their people out,” she admitted. “It was the only way I could get out. I think I saw your car,” she added, suddenly remembering the vehicle from which she had fled at the beginning of the nightmarish evening. “I thought it was Raines, waiting for me.”
“We figured that,” Dan said. “That’s why we organized people to drive the roads in Blue Cove and the surrounds. I’d just given up and was heading for safety when I saw you.”
“And… where are we going now?” she asked hesitantly, almost able to believe that she recognized their surroundings.
“Lucy’s place,” came the reply. “They’re still there. The Boss was hoping you’d think to come there when you got close.”
“I thought I’d go home,” she offered tentatively.
The man cast a stern glance in her direction, and Shannon felt her resentment rise immediately. She had a childish tendency to dislike being told off, perhaps because verbal scoldings had so rarely happened during her first twenty-two years of life, and her face took on a mulish expression as Dan spoke grimly.
“They’ve all been going crazy about the fact that you just up and vanished like that, Shannon. If only for that reason, they deserve to see that you’re okay. After all, it was a pretty selfish stunt to just go like that for your own private reasons, not taking into consideration the way everyone else might have felt. I wouldn’t have expected it of you.”
She turned to stare out of the window, sulkily refusing to respond, but then common sense reasserted itself and she remembered that, as the person who found her, Dan had earned the right to tell her off. Turning back to the windscreen, she cast a glance at him out of the corner of her eye.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured.
He reached across and put his hand on hers. “It’s okay, Prodge. Just, next time, think before you jump in, okay? It’ll save a lot of hassle.”
She nodded, placing her free hand on top of his and watching silently as the buildings that made up the outskirts of the city in which Lucy lived flew past. The car turned several corners, and then Dan pulled up in front of the familiar house. He sighed, a combination of relief and tiredness, and then turned to her.
“Come on, Prodge. Let’s get this over with. You’re not the only one who needs to get to bed.”
He walked ahead of her up the path, and she was glad to let him lead the way, having glimpsed the Boss through the large living room windows. The man was pacing, his hands clasped behind his back, his expression a combination of fear and anxiety. Her heart dropped into her stomach, and it was with an effort that she stopped herself from wheeling around and making a dash for the relative safety car.
Dan rapped on the door, and Shannon heard it open almost immediately, before Lucy’s voice spoke, revealing her disappointment.
“Oh, Dan. Come in.”
“I won’t stay long,” the man said apologetically. “I know you’re busy.”
Shannon, suddenly unable to speak, followed Dan down the short hallway and into the living room. She heard the conversation stop, and she guessed that all eyes had turned to the tall man, who was shielding her completely.
“Well, Dan?” The Boss’s voice was sharp. “Any news? I’ve been trying to call you for over an hour.”
Without uttering a word, Dan simply stepped aside to reveal the dirty miserable figure behind him. Shannon found herself unable to lift her eyes from the study she had begun of her shoes, unable to utter the apologies she knew were deserved.
There was a moment of silence, and Shannon was at the point of feeling that she must scream if it went on for much longer, when Joshua threw himself at her, sobbing almost hysterically. She was almost knocked off her feet, saved only by Dan’s arm, which grabbed her shoulder just in time to hold her up. Then the others came swarming around her, all wanting to touch her and speak to her.
After a moment of pandemonium, Charles stepped back from the group. Shannon looked up in time to catch his eye, and whatever he saw there made him take charge.
“All right, people, give her some space,” he ordered, with the devastating common sense that was one of his most valuable attributes. Then, as the group gradually backed off, “Cici, will you give her a checkup while I call off the hunt? Lucy, have you got any spare nightthings floating around? She’ll probably need something more comfortable to sleep in.”
“Meg, heat up that soup I saved,” Cici ordered as she eased off the black jacket, letting Nat unlace and slide off the black shoes and socks to reveal Shannon’s red, swollen, bleeding feet. “And,” the doctor added, “get a glass of water. No ice. Nat, a cool, damp cloth.”
Shannon let herself be put back against the sofa cushions, letting out an almost hysterical giggle as the paper tied around her waist crackled and she saw the expression on Cici’s face at the sound.
“You brought them back?” Nat asked eagerly, his face lightly up at the sound as he returned with the cloth Cici had requested. “Prodge, you’re just amazing!”
“Turn around, Nat,” the doctor ordered sternly, although she couldn’t suppress a grin. “I’ll give them to you just as soon as I get them from Shannon, but you’re going to avert your eyes until we get them off her.” She shot a look at the other man in the room. “You, too, Jarod. And Josh.”
Shannon’s fingers began fumbling with the buttons on her shirt as Lucy reappeared with a warm nightgown, but Cici gently moved her hands away
“I’ll do it, honey,” she murmured gently. “Give yourself a break. You must have been walking all night.”
“Uh huh.” Shannon couldn’t stifle a yawn as she let her hands fall to her sides and Cici undid her shirt, pulling it back to reveal the papers and makeshift tie.
With gentle fingers, the woman unbound the sheet strip and lifted off the pages. Shannon leaned forward so that those against her back could be removed, and her shirt and bra taken off. Then the soft material was gently pulled down over her head and down to her hips, before the two older women supported her back against the sofa cushions. It was less easy to remove her pants and pull the cotton nightgown down to cover her decently, moving having suddenly become so much of an effort, but it was done at last.
As Cici handed the pages over to Nat, who was waiting eagerly for them, his laptop already open, Lucy spooned some of the hot soup into Shannon’s mouth. She accepted it thankfully, having had no idea how hungry she was until she smelt the rich vegetable scent. After the first mouthful, however, her stomach clenched, and she thought briefly that she was going to be sick, but Lucy was ready with the water, and would only let her sip it. The nausea faded, and Shannon willingly accepted more of the soup.
She was going to lift a hand to take the bowl when, for the first time, she felt the fingers entwined with hers, and looked down to see Joshua on the floor beside the sofa, clutching her right hand in both of his. His eyes were still red and swollen, and even as she watched, he laid his face down on her hand, his lips lightly kissing her fingers, as if unable to believe that she was really there.
At this juncture, Charles came back into the room, the worried expression having vanished from his face, and his brow was now smooth, the frown lines gone.
“Dan’s gone home,” he announced. “He wanted to take a nap. And we’ve called off the search.”
“Nobody seems to have thought to look further than the gates,” Nat put in from his seat in front of his laptop. “Raines is just getting out of his T-Board now, and most people were too busy with their own concerns to notice anything out of the ordinary except for the teams that were called out when the alarms went off. But they’re still all within the limits of the property, searching every inch.”
“Thank God for that,” the Boss sighed, running a hand through his hair. Then he turned to the doctor. “Cici, I think Freya could be coming around again. Do you want to see what you can do?”
“Sure.” The doctor rose to her feet. “Shannon needs some sleep, though, and she’d do better in a bed than on the sofa.”
“I just made up the bed in my room,” Meg announced. “Prodge can sleep there. I’ll nap out here if I need to.”
“Thanks.” Charles cast a grateful smile in her direction and then turned to his son. “Jarod, will you carry her in?”
“Sure.” Jarod got up from his seat beside Nat and approached the sofa.
The words were blurry and unclear to Shannon, who was finding that things were rapidly taking on a dreamy appearance. She felt arms slide in under her shoulders and knees, and her head rolled onto Jarod's shoulder before she could prevent it. Then she felt Joshua release his hold on her hand as Jarod carried her through the doorway. Shannon’s eyes closed, but, just as she began to fall into the darkness, she felt the small fingers once more entwine with hers, as if he was determined never to let her go again.
Cecilia
Charles was waiting when Cici came out of the room in which Freya was still sedated, raising an eyebrow as the doctor closed the door behind her.
“Well?”
“She’s still almost hysterical,” Cici replied. “I don’t know what we’re going to do. She’s too upset to listen to a word, and gets upset as soon as she starts to wake up. We’re going to have to do something, but I have no idea what.”
He nodded, obviously unsurprised. “We’ll work something out as soon as we can,” he said, before glancing into the other bedroom, smiling at the sight of Joshua lying across the foot of the bed in which Shannon lay. Then the smile faded, and he looked back at the woman. “I’d like you to run the same tests on Prodge that you did on Emily. Although, as far as we know, she didn’t eat or drink anything, we don’t know what else she might have been exposed to.”
“Of course.” Cici fetched her bag from the other room, checking on Freya once more, and then took it into the other room.
Joshua looked up as she came in, and she smiled at him.
“Glad she’s back, Josh?”
Seemingly speechless, the boy only nodded and squeezed the hand he still held, his head resting against the sleeping woman’s knee. Cici smiled at him again and then opened her bag, taking out a syringe and a sample tube. Feeling eyes on her, she looked up to see Josh watching her warily, and felt obliged to explain.
“We have to make sure that she didn’t pick up anything while she was at the Centre. I’m sure you can imagine the implications if she’s caught one of the diseases they were testing.”
It wasn’t the complete truth, but she couldn’t bear to suggest to this child that anything serious could have happened to the woman he loved so much. Cici placed a hand on Shannon’s shoulder and gently shook her. She couldn’t just insert the syringe, in case Shannon moved suddenly and broke it or caused serious damage. It took some prompting, but finally Shannon woke, her eyes still drowsy as they opened.
“I need to take some blood for a test, Prodge,” the doctor said immediately. “Just hold still for me, and I’ll make it quick.”
Cici went to work, finding a vein immediately and attaching the vacuum test tube, which would extract the blood sample as rapidly as possible. After removing the needle and covering the tiny wound with cotton and tape, she looked up to see that Shannon was already asleep again and capped the tube, before putting the needle into the sharps container she carried with her for just such occurrences.
Joshua grudgingly agreed to wait on the other side of the room while Cici performed a quick physical examination, as if afraid that someone was going to whisk Shannon away while he was out of the room. Sympathetic to his feelings, Cici ensured that her examination was quick, and called him back as soon as she had covered the sleeping woman again.
Taking the samples out of the room, she carried them into the living room and over to the corner in which she had earlier set up her microscope to test Emily’s blood. Now she once more took out the various chemicals that would, by changing the color or consistency of the samples, reveal any drugs that might be in Shannon’s system.
A few moments later, she had finished measuring the drops into the last small vial, and placed it into the rack. This was a standard thing they did for every person who had been in the Centre for longer than a few hours, and Cici carried the kit around with her, now quite expert at carrying out the various tests.
She replaced the lid on the last bottle and put it into the rack, letting her eyes wander over the neat row of small vials. About to pack the testing liquids away, the doctor suddenly took a second look at the first vial, eventually picking it up and holding it up to the light. The contents had turned a faint lilac, which, even as she watched, strengthened to violet. Staring in disbelief, Cici capped the vial and shook it vigorously, before replacing it. The color darkened still more.
Had she made a mistake? Confused her chemicals? Was there something in the vial that had somehow reacted with the blood and test drug? Please, anything but what she dreaded…
Feeling her tension rising, Cici took out one of her brand new vials, removed the plastic wrapping, and used a clean pipette to put a small amount of blood into it. Then, checking the label on the bottle, she put in the required amount of chemical, put the vial into the stand and capped it before replacing the top on the bottle. She did everything with almost painstaking slowness, even looking at the other vials and thankfully recording a negative reaction. Then she looked at the repeated test again.
The vial’s contents were dark violent.
Sunlight shone through the window onto the vials, and a faint purple light was refracted through the specimens onto the table behind it. There could be no doubting the accuracy of the test now.
“Cici?” asked a voice in her ear, and she turned to find the Boss standing behind her. “What is it?”
She glanced around the room in a hunted manner and then slipped out of the closest door, which led into the kitchen. Charles followed immediately, his eyes expectant as he faced her.
“What is it? What did you find? Did any of the results come back positive?”
“Not exactly,” she admitted reluctantly. Then she looked up at him frankly. “Boss, it’s a personal matter. I’d probably need to talk about it with Shannon first.”
Charles’ hands suddenly curled around her biceps, his grip surprisingly strong. “Cici,” he said in a firm tone that was clearly not going to allow for any argument, “I’m as close to a father as that girl has. You know I’m not going to tell anyone else about it if it’s really that personal, but if it’s really as serious as your expression is telling me it is, I think it’s very important that I know what’s wrong with her.”
The doctor sighed and, knowing that he was right, yielded. “All right,” she admitted. “Shannon’s pregnant.”
For a moment, the man was silent, staring at her in shock. “Pregnant?” he finally whispered.
“Probably more than eight months along,” she said crisply. “But I don’t know whether she knows it yet.”
“But… how?”
She arched an eyebrow. “Don’t make me have to answer that.”
“Are you sure?” he demanded.
“One hundred per cent sure,” she replied, leaning against a nearby bench and meeting his gaze. “When I was working with those chemicals at the Centre to create that detector kit, one of the samples we tested that drug on went a very pale purple. When we questioned the subject, she admitted that she had just fallen pregnant. We did more tests and found that, the further along a woman was, the darker the color. Shannon’s sample is the darkest I’ve ever seen, which gives me an idea of how far along she is. And yes,” she added, answering the question she could see in his eyes, “it’s proved to be infallible.”
“Would she know?” Charles asked.
“I doubt it,” Cici responded thoughtfully. “Even if she ever did a sim on reproduction, I doubt if she was told the details about what pregnancy would be like. She probably has no idea. She certainly hasn’t shown any outward signs of it, so my guess is that she has no idea.”
Charles exhaled slowly, his eyes fixed on the floor. “Are we going to tell her?” he asked, not lifting his eyes.
“How on earth can we not?” Cici asked impatiently. “For God’s sake, Charles, in a few weeks, at most, she’s going to have a baby! What would you rather we did: act all surprised when she goes into labor?”
“I’m sorry, Cecilia,” he apologized immediately. “I wasn’t really thinking.” He sighed. “So who’s the father?”
“There’s really only one person it could be,” the doctor replied knowingly. “Peter.”
“Oh, Christ, I was afraid you’d say that,” Charles muttered, sinking his face into his hands.
“We don’t know what Shannon found out when she was inside the Centre.” Cici tried to put an optimistic spin on things. “He could still be alive.”
“Well, we won’t know anything until she’s able to tell us,” the man said. “And from the way she looks, that could be some time away.”
“A few hours, at the very least,” the doctor agreed. “And even then, I don’t think she’ll be ready to be told this.” She placed her hand on the man’s arm. “Let me handle it, Boss, okay? I’ll tell her.”
He studied her for a moment, before nodded. “All right, Cici. And I suppose we’re also keeping this from everyone else, huh?”
“I think it’d be best,” she agreed. “I don’t really know how Shannon will take it, but I don’t think she’d want everyone to know before she did.”
“Probably not.” He nodded again. Then, as Nat’s voice called him from the living room, he turned and went through the door, leaving Cici in the kitchen, trying to work out how to tell Shannon that, in a few weeks’ time, she would be giving birth.
Jarod
Jarod quietly entered the room in which Shannon slept, holding the door for Nat, who had been there for the previous few hours. The sun was setting, and the room was tinted pink as a result. Joshua was still lying across Shannon’s feet, asleep again, having spent much of the day there. He woke at the sound of the door closing behind Nat, and Jarod came over to hug him. The boy returned the embrace and then slid gently off the bed, padding over to the bathroom that led off the bedroom.
A chair and table stood on the opposite side of the room from the bed, and Jarod looked at them for a moment before walking over to the bed and looking down at its occupant.
So far, he had had no real chance to look at Shannon. Every time he had turned his eyes in her direction, he had found her visually studying him, and he hadn’t felt comfortable about returning that direct look. He had always been punished in the Centre for meeting someone’s gaze, and it was taking time for him to shake those habits.
He looked down at the young woman lying against the pillow, her dark eyelashes forming two half-circles against her cheeks. The black shadows he had noticed when she had first appeared had faded to faint discoloration, and the lines around her mouth had smoothed themselves out so that she looked much younger.
Even as he watched, she stirred, a stifled yawn parting her lips, before her eyelids fluttered and she looked up at him, smiling drowsily as she focused on his face.
“Morning.”
Remembering the discussion they had had about polite conversation, he grinned. “Not quite. It’s actually almost eight o’clock this evening.”
She stretched lazily, yawning again, and wincing as she settled back into place. “I guess it wasn’t all a really bad dream?” she asked hopefully.
“No,” a new voice said from the doorway, and Jarod looked over his shoulder to see his father standing there, one hand still on the doorknob. “I’m afraid not, Prodge.”
At this point, Joshua came out of the bathroom and hurled himself onto the bed, flinging his arms around Shannon’s neck. The woman returned the embrace, and Jarod could hear Joshua’s voice, despite the boy’s face being buried in Shannon’s neck.
“Never, ever, ever go anywhere without me ever again!”
Shannon pulled back slightly to kiss Josh’s forehead. “I promise,” she vowed softly.
He snuffled and wiped his sleeve across his nose as he sat up, clutching her hand in both of his, his back against the wall.
“Josh,” Charles said softly. “I need to talk to Shannon for a few minutes.”
The boy looked up at once, his expression pleading, and Jarod saw his father raise an eyebrow expectantly. After a moment, Shannon squeezed Josh’s hand and spoke.
“Go on, honey. I promise I’m not going anywhere for a while yet. You go get something to eat and then you can come back. Okay?”
Joshua nodded with visible reluctance, planted a kiss on her cheek and scrambled off the bed. At the doorway, he looked back briefly, before leaving the room. Jarod moved back from the bedside as his father approached it, and wondered whether he, too, should go, but Charles hadn’t said anything that seemed to suggest he ought to.
Charles, meanwhile, pulled a chair up beside the bed and sat in it, taking Shannon’s hand and gently stroking the back of it.
“Shannon,” he began softly, but with a tone in his voice that Jarod couldn’t remember ever having heard before, “I’m not going to lecture you about this, but I do want you to know that every one of us here have been worried sick about you since we first realized you were missing.”
Jarod saw the woman tense, her eyes flashing. Then she wilted visibly, and tears filled her eyes.
“I didn’t think you’d care,” she whispered in a harsh tone.
Charles moved forward on the seat and gently stroked the backs of his fingers down her cheek. “Why, Prodge?” he asked gently.
“Well…” She muffled a sob, her breath shaky, before trying again. “You have Jarod now, and Emily, too. I’m sure she’s your daughter. She has to be. I thought that maybe, when you had them, you wouldn’t need us anymore. That you’d go off with them and make a home for your f… family somewhere safe and f… forget about us.”
Shannon visibly struggled over the word ‘family’, and it came out in strangled tones. The tears in her eyes escaped and began to flow down her cheeks in steady streams, which, as she was reclining against a pile of pillows, dripped onto the borrowed nightdress. Charles moved to sit on the edge of the bed, drawing Shannon gently into his arms and rocking her, much as Jarod had held his sister during the journey back from the ambush site to this house.
“No, honey,” he murmured soothingly, as she began to sob. “No, Shannon, never, I promise. That will never, ever happen.”
“They… they are your family?” she asked, gulping audibly.
“Yes,” he agreed softly. “They are my children. But that doesn’t mean I’d abandon all of you, just because I’ve found them. If it wasn’t for you all, I would never have managed to find them, so how fair would it be if I did that?”
“Since when does… fair matter?” she demanded brokenly.
“Since you left the Centre and came out into the real world,” Charles replied. “I know the Centre’s not fair, and life there is anything but fair, but here, fairness is important, and I would always try to be as fair to all of you as I could.”
She clung to his shirt, sobbing bitterly, and Charles stroked the short ends of her hair, murmuring in her ear. Several minutes passed in this way before he pulled back to look down into her face, gently wiping the tears from her cheeks.
“Better?” he asked gently, and she nodded, her head still resting against his chest. Then he bent his head to murmur words in her ear that Jarod was unable to hear, although, from the way the last lines smoothed away from her face, Jarod guessed that Shannon found them comforting.
Charles drew back, his hands gently lowering Shannon to the pile of pillows behind her. Again, he brushed the backs of his fingers down her cheek and then leaned over the bed to lightly kiss her forehead.
“Take another nap,” he advised softly. “We can talk more when you’re feeling better. Okay?”
Shannon nodded, her eyes still fixed on his face. Jarod sought to find the word for the expression in her eyes from his limited knowledge of such things, and suddenly found something he thought would fit. Happy. He had only a vague memory of this, having never felt it or heard about it during his many years at the Centre. He thought that, even after finding his father, he hadn’t felt that way himself, being too confused to feel anything clearly. But happiness, and even peace, seemed to shine from Shannon’s eyes as she nestled slightly against the pillow.
Charles turned away from the bed, ushering his son out of the room. Joshua was waiting out in the hallway and dodged past them into the room, climbing onto the bed again and settled down in his usual spot on Shannon’s feet. After closing the door, Charles put his hand on his son’s arm and turned to face him.
“Don’t tell anyone about that,” he said quietly. “I know Shannon wouldn’t want people to know. She doesn’t like showing too much emotion.”
“Sure,” Jarod agreed, before following his father into the living room.
The coffee table was covered with pizza boxes and half-empty bottles of drink. People were sitting around on the sofa, the armchairs and even the floor, chatting in a way that Jarod guessed was normal, and which he somehow found incredibly relaxing. Then he saw Nat in the corner, looking at the papers that Jarod guessed were those Shannon had brought back with her, and the Pretender crossed the room, pulling up a stool to sit next to him to read them over his shoulder.
Even in only the few days they had known each other, Jarod found Nat to be someone with whom he got on well. They had many similarities that seemed to allow them to understand each other with only the minimal use of words. Jarod could also comprehend even Nat’s most technological discussions, and that was more than most people had so far managed. Although neither had yet come across the term ‘friend’, the definition seemed almost to have been made for their situation.
Now, Nat moved over slightly so that Jarod could see the screen and showed him the paper that he was looking over.
“Passwords,” he groaned, and Jarod grinned understandingly.
“How far have you got?”
Nat opened several screens that he had minimized and allowed Jarod the seconds he needed to skim through the information they contained.
“Dad!” Jarod exclaimed in surprise, his eyebrows shooting up. “Why were they testing him? Still testing him, I mean. This was five years after I was taken. What did they want?”
“I don’t know,” Nat admitted. “I’m hoping these other files might help, but I can’t get into them yet. I will,” he added, his tones full of determination. “But it’ll take time.”
Jarod nodded, not offering to help, as he had already realized that Nat preferred to do those sorts of things himself. Instead, he looked through the pile of paper, picking it up to move it onto his lap. As he did so, a torn sheet, encased in a clear plastic envelope, fluttered out of the pile to land on his shoe. Jarod replaced the other pages on the table and seized the envelope, looking at the contents closely.
“What’s this?”
Nat glanced carelessly at it. “Haven’t got that far yet. I’m still working down to it.” He looked back at the computer screen for a moment before shooting another look at the page. “What is it?”
“Maybe project numbers,” Jarod suggested, handing it over. “But they seem to be too long for the archives.”
“Two digits to many,” Nat agreed. “But they could be store files.”
Jarod raised an eyebrow. “What’s the difference?”
Nat leaned back in his chair. “Archives are records of sims, projects, researched data, even stuff about people and projects. Store files are records of phone calls, emails, internal memos, letters – communication, basically. I haven’t had much reason to look through there, but I think the codes are ten digits, like these, not eight, like archives.”
“Could you look?” Jarod asked.
“Why?”
The older man shrugged. “Instinct.”
“Sure, why not?”
Nat opened up a new screen on the computer and activated the Centre store records. Not being password-protected, it only took him a moment to bring up the requested files, and by that time, Charles had become interested enough to wander over and find out what they were looking at.
“Letters,” Nat announced as he opened the first file. “A whole series of them from more than forty years ago. Between Mr. Parker and someone at the Centre in Africa.” He eyed the man beside him. “What does your instinct say now?”
“That we should read them,” Jarod said seriously, although he had realized that Nat was teasing him.
There was silence while the three men read through the dozen letters, and the fact that the silence continued for several minutes afterwards drew the attention of the others in the room.
“What is it?” Cici called.
Charles sighed and then looked up. “When you were at the Centre, did you ever hear anyone say anything about scrolls?”
The various people shook their heads, and then Charles stood up. “It seems,” he began, “that the Centre has had, or may still have, scrolls in their possession that spell out the whole history of the place in detail – past and future.”
“How could they?” Lucy asked skeptically.
“I don’t know,” the Boss admitted. “But there are documents here from Mr. Parker, written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, that talk about the future of the Centre, as determined by what the scrolls say. But I’ve never heard of them before.”
There was a brief moment of silence, while people considered this. Then Meg looked up. “What else does it say?”
Charles glanced down at the screen again. “The messages mention a boy, specifically that the boy and the scrolls can’t be at the Centre at the same time.”
“Why?” Tom asked curiously.
“Apparently it will be too dangerous,” Nat offered, running his gray eyes over the lines.
“And that’s all it says? That’d be right,” Emily put in dismissively. “Typical of the Centre not to give us anything really useful to work with.”
“There’s nothing we can use to work out who this boy is?” Lucy asked, glancing at her son. “Not even any dates or anything?”
“Well,” Cici mused from her seat on the sofa, “if we’re going by dates and assume that the letters won’t have been written too far into the future, we’re looking at someone in their forties.”
Nat pulled up the last letter. “The final communication is about the scrolls having left the Centre. It says that it’s just in time, as the boy will arrive in the morning. It’s dated the first of February, 1963.”
Even while the others were making mental calculations about who it might be, Charles turned to his son with a gasp. “Jarod,” he exclaimed. “It’s you!”
Jarod looked up instantly, seeing that everyone in the room was staring at him. “You don’t know that for sure,” he protested immediately.
“No,” Charles agreed, his face falling somewhat. “Not for sure.”
“Pretty likely to be, though,” Nat put in. “We already know Jarod was the first child that the Centre actually kidnapped, and these letters suggest that they were going to the trouble of doing that because of these scrolls.”
“But if Jarod's the important person,” Cici asked, “then why go on doing it? Why not just stop with him?”
“Maybe,” Charles said, “when we find those scrolls, we’ll find out.”
