Day's End (23 page)

“Never,” he said loudly, his eyes flashing. “Never. The first time he brought you out in public, I knew better. Everyone did.”

“Thank you. You had more faith in me than I did.”

“You’re the one thing I believe in. I told you that already.”

“It goes both ways. I’m so glad she said your name. I was trying to figure out why that worked when just hearing your code name just kind of made me feel unsure at most. His brainwash people messed with my memories. Rearranged shit. Erased just about everything else. He told me that StrikeForce killed Mama. That StrikeForce was crooked, evil. He had newspaper articles, real ones, you know? Because the media loves us so much,” I said with a small laugh. “It all seemed to make sense. He told me that I’d been undercover with SF and you guys had done things to my head. The injections and his ‘therapy’ were supposed to help me get my mind back. And it all made sense! I knew I was a thief before. I remembered being in jail here. But everything after that got kind of fuzzy. He said Mayhem broke me out and I joined him. And I wondered why, because I felt sick a lot of the time, just being near him, but I couldn’t concentrate on much of anything for long. I hated that.” I paused. “But then your grandma said your name, and things came back. I wish I knew why.”

“It must have been part of your core memories,” a voice said, and I looked to the side to see Lorne heading toward my cell. I immediately looked at his hand, hoping to see a syringe there. I nearly cried in disappointment when I realized that his hand was empty.

“Do you remember what I told you about how erasure works?”

I shook my head.

“Damn it. I was hoping that breaking the conditioning had brought your short-term memory back.”

“I’m already forgetting things that happened since I got back here,” I told him.

He shook his head. “You saved my wife. My girls. Thank you for that.”

“I did?”

Ryan sighed and thumped his head against the door again.

“Yeah, kid. You did,” Lorne said.

“Okay. So what about the erasure thing?”

“When he had me erase your memories, we had to keep your kind of core, basic memories intact, otherwise we would have had to, for example, teach you how to walk and use a toilet and things like that all over again. So we erased everything but the core.” He paused. “My theory is that whatever Caine’s grandmother said to you, whatever words she used, they were part of your core, part of the things that were so deep, erasing them would mean erasing some of your basic functioning. I don’t know if you remember, but the first time Killjoy tried to touch you, you vomited on him.”

Ryan laughed a little, and I loved the sound of it.

“Really?”

“Yeah. So your distaste or hatred or whatever you had of Killjoy never left you. And certain details about Caine apparently never left you. They’re the type of soul-deep or bone-deep or whatever you want to say, things that you just can’t get rid of. That’s my best guess, anyway.”

We were all silent.

“Can you get her back to where she should be? Her memories and that?” Ryan asked him. His voice was cool, hard. It was clear that he didn’t have a whole lot of love for Lorne, and I could completely relate.

Lorne shook her head. “Likely not. We can work on trying to improve your short term memory, but the things he had me do… there’s just too much trauma. Too much erasure. I’m sorry.”

I nodded.

“Did you implant something in me?”

Now it was his turn to nod. “It was what made the control phrase work. We can surgically remove that. It will take some time for the effects to wear off, but we’ll get rid of that, at least.”

“Control phrase?” Ryan asked.

I closed my eyes, thinking that I never wanted to hear that particular phrase again.

“You can tell him,” I said to Lorne. “Just not here. I don’t want to hear it.”

“Okay,” Lorne said, and he and Ryan exchanged a look. After a few moments, Lorne said goodbye and walked away, promising to check on me again. Ryan stood there, and we were silent for a long time.

“He fucked with your powers,” he said after a while.

“Yeah. He left my strength and flight the way it was, except that he augmented the strength a little, I guess. I’m even more clumsy on my feet than I was before. I think that was for him, so he had a chance against me.”

Ryan snarled, ran his hands over his face.

“But he added augmented senses, like yours, and invisibility. Teleportation. It was how I was able to get in and kill people so easily.”

“Jolene—”

“Don’t try to make me feel less guilty. I need to be better. I need to be smarter. I need to know that my mind’s my own. And then I need to figure out what’s next for me.”

“Me. I’m next for you,” he said with a small smile, and I let out a small laugh.

“Other than you. Because of course, the second I feel okay with being out among normal people, I’m going to trap you in my room with me for a few weeks, at least.”

“Promises, promises,” he murmured, the corner of his mouth still lifted slightly, his gaze locked onto mine through the window.

“Someday, I’ll make good on them,” I said.

“I’ll be here.”

I smiled. “Get some sleep.”

He nodded. He gave me one more lingering glance, and then he walked away, and I took a deep breath.

God, I would give just about anything for an injection. All of this feeling, all of these emotions, had me feeling raw and at odds with myself.

One more thing to work through, apparently. I felt impatient. There were things I still needed to do, but hell if I could remember what they were.

The next day was a day of people coming in to visit me, and then me forgetting most of what we’d talked about. But the sense that I was among people who cared stayed with me and helped counter some of the withdrawals I was feeling for the lovely numbness that Lorne had once delivered via his needles. Other than the trembling and nausea, sometimes I felt downright normal. Ryan had come to see me first thing in the morning, and I’d told Sam to let him into the cell. He sat in a chair nearby while people came to see me. Jenson had been a weepy mess, and it made me cry, too.

“I don’t think Jenson was whole the entire time you were gone,” Ryan said. “Jensons were running all over the damn place, looking for you or for leads on you.”

She laughed a little, and a flash of something, of me cutting down a woman in black and gray, and then another, flashed before my eyes.

I looked at her closely.

“Oh, god,” I gasped, nearly unable to breathe through the guilt. “Jenson. Oh my god. I’m so sorry, Jenson. I killed two of your multiples.” She’d told me before what it was like to lose one of her copies, that she felt their deaths, that there was an emptiness there, a void that just stayed with her.

And I’d killed two of them.

“I’m so sorry,” I repeated, and she shook her head.

“It’s not your fault,” she said forcefully. “None of the things you did while you were under his control were your fault. None of the deaths, none of the damage, none of the thefts. Getting taken by him wasn’t your fault. You trusted a teammate, and she had every single one of us duped.”

“Chance.”

“Chance,” Jenson spat.

“Can you hand me those pieces of paper?” I asked her. She picked up my notes with my scrawled handwriting on them. “I’m trying to remember. There’s something about Chance on those.”

Jenson held the paper up as I read through them. “What’s the deal with this?” she asked quietly.

“I got tired of having to relearn everything. So every time I was told something that might have been important, I wrote it down.”

“But you remembered you had the notes?” she asked.

“Not usually,” I said. “I slept with them under my pillow or in my pockets. It would be like a little surprise every time I found them. I remember that much,” I said, and she shook her head.

I scanned one more piece of paper and found what I was looking for. “Oh, there it is. Chance is Dr. Death’s daughter.”

“What?” Jenson and Ryan said in unison. I shrugged.

“She must have still been under the impression that you killed Dr. Death,” Ryan said quietly.

“Did I?” I asked, and he shook his head.

“No, that was Killjoy.”

“Hm.”

“She’s still out there somewhere,” Jenson said quietly.

“We’ll find her.”

“And Eve,” I said. “She was there a lot. At first, anyway,” I said as I read through more of my notes.

“Yeah, she’s gone into hiding since one of the security cameras at those banks you robbed picked her up. We’re working nonstop to find her.”

I kept looking through my notes. “There were heroes with other uniforms here that day he brought me here,” I said, reading what I remembered from that day.

“Yeah. You probably don’t remember, but before you went missing, Mayhem was already hitting the hero teams pretty hard. And you suggested maybe calling in whoever was left from those teams, to get them to all start working with us and forming a more central, more united team,” Jenson said. “After he used you to demolish so many of the remaining teams, we realized we didn’t have much of a choice. We have members now from all over the country and around the world. They wear their team uniforms, mostly out of respect for those who have fallen. But they’re with us.”

“Wow. They must hate me.”

“They know you were under his control,” Jenson argued.

“Still. There’s something about seeing someone killing your friends and colleagues that one doesn’t forget, I would guess,” I said. Then I shook my head. “How the hell do I even move forward from this? How does anyone look at me as anything other than a killer now, even if they believe I didn’t do it of my own accord?”

Nobody had an answer for that. We talked about food, instead.

Later in the day, Dr. Ali and Lorne came to see me. She looked me over and he explained what he’d done. I was taken up to the hospital wing and put under, and when I woke, the back of my head and neck was bandaged and I had the kind of headache that makes you want to curl in on yourself and die.

“After effects of removing his control device,” Dr. Ali said softly, patting my shoulder. “It will get better in time.”

I nodded, unable to speak.

“It’s good to have you back, Jolene,” she said.

The next few days were more of the same. Visits from friends and teammates, updates on what was going on. Portia was trying to get Killjoy to admit to mind controlling me, so they’d have him on record saying it, but he wasn’t saying a word. According to her, he was mostly just sitting there with a smug smile on his face and creeping everybody the fuck out. Lorne spent time every day, under Ryan’s watchful eye, using his powers to try to uncover any other memories I may still have had somewhere deep in my mind, seeing if he could finesse things enough to improve my short term memory. It seemed like I was maybe remembering things a little longer, but, like before, I’d lose things eventually. He kept trying, and, according to Ryan, he thanked me at least three or four times a day for saving his family. They were still at Damian’s house, staying where I’d asked them to, but they’d spoken with him on the phone. I’d told him they didn’t have to stay there unless they wanted to be there, but Lorne and his family seemed to be of the same mind, that as long as I needed them, they were there.

Apparently, Damian’s house was currently being cleaned from top to bottom, the lawn mowed, stuff like that.

After another slow but still frustrating session with Lorne, I glanced over at Ryan.

“Can you hand me the notes again?”

He stood up and handed the stack of notes to me. I’d allowed them to free one of my hands, mostly so I could read my notes without someone having to stand there holding them up for me. I found the notes I was looking for.

“Daemon,” I said quietly. “Mental manipulation?”

Ryan nodded.

“Do we know where he is?”

“He’s here. He and his ex girlfriend and their daughter live here under our protection because he pissed Killjoy off. He’s also in our custody because he’s done some awful shit in his life.”

I glanced at my notes again. “Can someone bring him here?”

He studied me for a moment, then nodded and walked out. A few minutes later, he came back with Portia, Jenson, and a tall, dark-haired man. The man had a dampener around his neck. He gave me a respectful nod when he walked into the room.

“Daystar. It’s good to have you back.”

“Tell me what your relationship is like with me. I don’t remember.”

He smiled. “Back in the day, you hunted me just like you hunted everyone on Mayhem. I was Mayhem,” he repeated. “I worked for Killjoy.”

“Okay.”

“I’m also a member of the Giannotti crime family,” he said. I gestured for a pen, and Portia handed it to me. I added that tidbit to my notes.

“Okay, what else?” I asked him.

“Killjoy threatened my daughter and my ex. Tried to use them to ensure I’d be compliant. He was really big on the whole control thing. Which I guess you probably know now better than anyone.”

I nodded, and he continued.

“So I hid my family, and then I tried to disappear. When I did that, both Mayhem and my family, who were allied with Mayhem, wanted my head. I hid, and I ran, and I gathered evidence to implicate Killjoy and my family in the crimes they’ve committed. I turned myself in to you and negotiated to have my daughter and her mom live here so they’d be safe. And here we are.”

I bit the inside of my lip. “What are your feelings toward me?”

“Toward you? You saved and protected the only two people in this world I give a damn about. I’ve never done the whole loyalty thing. Too concerned with my own selfish desires. But you? You, I have nothing but respect and loyalty for.”

I took a breath. “I was mind controlled by Killjoy.”

“I know.”

“He had his doctor/mind control expert erase my memories, but there are still things in there, echoes of things I swear I can almost remember, but then they drift away.”

“That must be incredibly frustrating.”

“It is. Which is why I want you to use your powers to help me.”