Day's End (20 page)

He’d yelled and screamed and then, stupidly, dared to raise a hand to me when we’d gotten back. He’d earned himself a gushing nose in return, and I wondered if he was crazy or just stupid. Or did he maybe like it when I beat the shit out of him, even though he was the one who was supposed to be in control? I mean, really. He could have used his stupid control phrase on me just to make sure I wouldn’t hurt him back.

As long as I had just had an injection, I was numb enough that I really didn’t care about trying to figure out Connor or his motivations or anything else. The thing was, they just seemed less effective now. Sure, they’d make me feel numb and cold for a while, but it wore off much faster, and the numbness wasn’t as strong as it had been. The first night, I’d gone to Lorne and pretty much begged him for another injection. He’d studied me closely, then shook his head.

“Not a good idea. Go back to your room.”

I’d nearly taken his head off, desperate for a hit, desperate for just a little more numbness. Anything to forget those brown eyes, that voice, the stupid, never-ending ache inside me that had started with that first glance and just refused to go away. Just something to make me forget, make me stop feeling at odds with myself. Anything.

“Come on, Lorne… ”

“Nope.”

“I’m about to lose my mind. I can’t do this anymore,” I muttered, putting my head in my hands. I heard Lorne sigh.

“Look, kid—”

“I’m twenty-five years old, Lorne.”

“Yeah, well I’ve got almost twenty years on you, so you’re a kid as far as I’m concerned. Look. I’m in the same boat you are. I do what he says. I don’t make a move without him telling me to. It’s just the way things have to be. So if you want an increased dose, you need to take it up with him. If he tells me to give you more, I’ll give you more.”

“I don’t want to talk to him,” I muttered.

“Yeah, I kinda figured. I’m sorry.”

I looked up at him. “What do you mean you’re in the same boat I’m in? You’re part of his crew, right?”

Lorne laughed, a bitter, dry sound. Then he stopped, glancing around.

“He’s not here. He left like an hour ago,” I said.

Lorne nodded. “I told you this already. Do you really not remember?”

I shook my head, and he stayed silent for several moments. “I’m really sorry, Jolene. I’m sorry.”

I shrugged. “It comes and goes. Every once in a while, I’ll remember stuff. And then other things, I don’t forget. Like, I swear I can remember hearing you say that you guys erased my mind and reprogrammed me. And he wanted to do it again, but you said it would break me, basically.”

Lorne nodded. “That’s true.”

“You erased my mind?”

He nodded again. “The first time, I did selective erasure. We agreed that it would be better to keep as much of you, you, as possible. He told me what he wanted removed. So I kind of painstakingly went in and cut things out of your memories, replaced them with other things.”

I scrunched up my face. “Okay. But then you did it again?”

He nodded. “The results of the first round didn’t please him. You were… not exactly compliant, even if you didn’t know why. Still too much of yourself left.”

I thought about that for a bit. “So he had you erase everything?”

“No. We can’t erase everything,” he said, sitting down. I stayed standing, arms crossed over my body. I was freezing all of a sudden, and I wasn’t sure if it was this stupid building, my addiction sending my system out of whack, or the things Lorne was telling me. “If we erase everything, then it really is everything. You wouldn’t know how to walk. How to feed yourself. How to talk, read, understand language. Okay? So I erased a lot, but those kind of core abilities, that core of things you know, I had to leave that alone. It was as close as we could get to a blank slate before I started adding things back. It’s why, for example, even though I didn’t even try giving you back any memories of your mother, you still remember her. Stuff that’s so ingrained in you, it’s much harder to get at without a complete wipe. But he needed you to be able to fight, as soon as possible, so we just got rid of everything but your core memories.”

I didn’t really know what to say to that. I wanted to hate him. I more than wanted to kill him.

“Was I a killer, Lorne?” I asked quietly. “Was I a villain?”

He didn’t answer, and when I looked up at him, I saw that he was looking down, as if he was unable to look at me. It was pretty much all the answer I needed. And I also understood why he couldn’t say it.

“What does he have on you? Why are you here?”

He kept looking down. “He has my family. My wife. My three daughters. He knows I don’t mean a damn. He could kill me, and I’d greet it, rather than do this crap. But he took my family, and he has his goons guarding them, and all it takes is one wrong move and he’ll hurt them. I shouldn’t even be telling you this,” he whispered, his voice panicked.

“I’m not going to tell anyone. I’ll probably forget everything you said. Just give it five minutes or so,” I joked, and he shook his head.

“It’s not funny.”

“Your situation is not. I agree. Mine, though? Mine is a freaking hoot.”

He gave me a wary look, and I laughed and shook my head. “I have no idea who I am. You all could tell me I’m the fucking queen of England and I’d start looking around for my crown. I can’t remember shit two minutes after someone tells me, and I have entire conversations with the voices in my head.”

“The… voices?”

I shrugged. “At least one. Maybe two. It’s hard to tell sometimes.”

Lorne stared at me, then blew out a long, drawn-out breath that ended on a hissed “shit.”

“I might have been batshit before you got to me.”

“Maybe. I kind of doubt that, though. We never heard anything about you being nuts. Just kind of rash and vulgar.”

“Well, I’m still those things too. When I’m not all numbed out, anyway. Can I have an injection now?”

“What? No!”

“Why not?

“I— did you… did you already forget the answer to this question?”

I shrugged.

“No. I can’t give you another injection.”

“Okay. Where’s he holding your family?”

“You can remember that but not what I said about your injections?”

“My shitty memory is selective and random. So. Where is he holding them?”

Lorne shook his head. “In Detroit.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Probably because that was where we were when he nabbed us and he had people there he could trust to watch them for him.”

“How’d he get you? Why’d he get you?”

He gave me a look.

“Okay. He got you because he planned this for me. Obviously.”

“Uh huh. You’re the centerpiece of his plans,” he said, sounding more than a little miserable.

“Did he just grab you, then?”

“Pretty much. I was at a conference in Detroit. I was giving the keynote, as the premier neuroscientist in the world specializing in memory and knowledge design.”

“Which is just a nice way to say advanced brainwashing.”

He paused. “Yes. Brainwashing.”

“Okay. I just wanted to hear you say it.”

“Believe me, if I’d known it would lead to this mess, I would have gone into proctology the way my father wanted me to.”

I snorted, and even Lorne smiled a little. “But it’s not just school learning, right? There’s a little extra there,” I said.

He studied me. “How’d you guess?”

I shrugged. “You’re really good at what you do. A lot of that is science, but it seems a little far-fetched that science has figured out how to sift through a person’s memories and pick and choose which ones to remove.”

“Yeah.”

“He doesn’t know that, though,” I said, not sure how I knew it, but pretty sure I did, somehow.

“No, he doesn’t,” Lorne said quietly. We went silent for a few moments, and my growing anxiety started to get on my nerves.

“Can I have another injection?”

“I can’t even tell if you’re just messing with me now or not,” Lorne said.

“About what?”

He sighed. “never mind. No, you can’t have another injection. If you want one and it isn’t on the schedule, you have to ask Connor.”

“I don’t want to talk to Connor.”

“I know.”

I glanced around, looking over the items on Lorne’s cluttered desk in the corner of his room/lab. “Can I have a pen and some paper?”

He gave me a dubious look. “I don’t know if I’m —”

“Come on. I just want to be able to draw or something. I’m bored.”

He shook his head a little and walked over to the desk. A moment later, he came back with a few pieces of plain white paper and a black pen. “Just let’s keep this between us, okay?”

“Keep what between us?”

“Now I know you’re messing with me, kid.”

I laughed and accepted the paper and pen, folding the paper until it fit in the pocket of my jeans. “Thanks, Lorne.”

“Sure.”

“We’ll get your family back,” I told him quietly. “Let’s just keep that between us though, okay?”

“If you even remember this,” he said, shaking his head.

I shrugged, shoved the pen in my pocket, then left the lab and headed back to my room.

The second I got there, I pulled the paper and pen out of my pocket and wrote down every single thing I could remember from our conversation, as well as anything else I knew that I didn’t want to forget. By the time I was finished, my hand was cramping and I had three pages, front and back, of tightly-scrawled notes. My brain might not remember a damn thing, but at least now I had a way to stop starting from scratch every time I came out of one of my injection-induced hazes.

Chapter Thirteen

Jolene

I read through my notes several times every day. I made sure to do it when Connor was out. I had no idea where he went, but I was starting to suspect it had something to do with Eve, maybe. He’d pissed her off, and she hadn’t shown up at his base for a while, but she was important, it seemed.

My suspicions were deepened when I heard Connor talking one night, long after I was usually asleep. I didn’t know who he was talking to. All I knew was that he’d clearly been hitting the bottle again, and he was mad at me. He sounded crazy whenever he started talking about me, and eventually he changed the subject after calling me a worthless whore.

I had written down that he called me that a lot, so it didn’t even phase me anymore. After his tirade about me, he’d started going on and on about the ice queen, who, I realized after a while, was Eve.

“Bitch thinks I don’t know what she’s up to. I know what she’s doing. Playing her own goddamn game, thinks she’s so smart. Building her little army. Kids,” he muttered, and I tried to force my pulse to stay normal. “I know her game. She’ll play along now, but when she feels ready, she thinks she’s gonna come after me. It’ll be fun to make Jolene kill her. Hot. Fuck, maybe I’ll get video of it,” he said with a filthy sounding laugh. My stomach turned.

I quietly dug my paper and pen out from under my mattress and wrote:
Eve is building an army. Kids? Will eventually use against Connor, and he knows all about it. She doesn’t know he knows
.

Also wants me to kill her
, I added after a second.

I put the paper in my pajama pants pocket. One day, I’d forgotten about the notes completely and left them under my mattress and had forgotten everything. I only remembered that because I’d written it down in my notes after I’d found them again. My notes were starting to become my own little personal lifeline to sanity, of a sort. I felt like a crazed bird or something, collecting any shiny piece of information I could find, collecting them, hoarding them. Maybe someday, they’d actually mean something, but for now, they made me feel less adrift. I wasn’t re-learning things I thought I knew all the time. Well, I was, I guess. But I was learning them from myself, not waiting for Connor to give me his version of what I needed to know, or for Lorne to let something slip. These were mine, and I was taking control in the only way it felt like I could in my muddled, numb state.

This, too, felt familiar somehow, and I wished I understood why that was. In the end, all I could do was keep collecting the little tidbits of information, writing them down and re-reading them, hoping that someday, at least some of it would make sense.

They were little things, but I had a feeling they mattered. And, either way, I didn’t want to lose them. It felt like I had so little that actually belonged to me. I just didn’t want to lose anything else, even if they were just random bits and pieces of thoughts and memories.

When Connor wasn’t around, I wandered around his compound. Any piece of paper, any computer screen, I made sure to save or write about. Mostly, I had no idea what I was looking at, but I wrote it down anyway. If I was in an injection fog, none of it meant anything. But when I was coming out of one, things made sense, at least for a little while.

That was how I realized, a couple days after I’d come across it, that I’d found where he was hiding Lorne’s family. They were in Detroit, which Lorne had told me, apparently. But now I knew where. A house on Detroit’s East Side. Abandoned, boarded up, from photos and other notes I’d found in Connor’s room. Three guards, for three teenage girls and a forty-something woman. A powered woman. Codename: Jarvis.