Falling
Disclaimer The characters and concepts of The Sentinel belong to Pet Fly productions, and the characters and concepts of The Tomorrow People belong to various persons and bodies such as Thames, Tetra, Nickelodeon and particularly Mr. Roger Damon Price, who wouldn't let a good idea die. They ain't mine. I'm just borrowing them for a while.
Spoilers Sentinel - Blind Man's Bluff, references to Cypher, Rogue, Secret, Dead Drop, Warriors, Vendetta.
Tomorrow People (new series) - origin story, reference to Monsoon Man.
Summary When Blair sees a girl vanish in golden light, he's sure he's had a Golden flashback. When he goes missing the next day, Jim is sure it happened again. They shouldn't have been so sure.
Note though this is a crossover, no knowledge of The Tomorrow People is required to understand this story. It is told from the Sentinel point of view. The guest-stars happen to be from elsewhere.
This is my first Sentinel fanfic, though not my first fanfic.
I love feedback! If you like it, and don't tell me, then I won't know. If you dislike it, and don't tell me why, then I will continue to do the silly/irritating/whatever things, in my stories, that you didn't like. Flames will be given all the attention they deserve.
March 2000.
Falling
(a Sentinel/new Tomorrow People crossover)
by Kathryn Andersen
Two are better than one,
because they have good reward for their toil.
For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow;
but woe to him who is alone when he falls
and has not another to lift him up.
-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-
Do I sleep?
Do I wake, dreaming?
Or have I fallen
into madness?
-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-
TUESDAY
It happened in the stairwell.
If Blair Sandburg had known what was going to take place, then perhaps he would not have bothered getting out of bed that morning. Even if he had, in all improbability, had an inkling of what lay in store, the sheer routine of the day would have lulled him into a false sense of security. In the morning he'd risen, breakfasted, and gone to the police station with Jim Ellison, in his role of police observer, where he had "observed" a bunch of paperwork about their most recent case. In the afternoon, he'd gone to Rainier University, taught a class, attended a meeting, marked some papers, kept his office hours talking to troubled, lazy or difficult students, and run a tutorial for Anthropology 304. The students had rushed off, he'd locked up the room, picked up his ever-present backpack, and decided to take the stairs.
That's when fate hit him with a two-by-four.
He opened the door to the stairs, stepped through, and glanced down. On the landing below stood a dark-haired, dark-skinned woman. It was one of his students from the tutorial. She looked up, startled by the noise he'd made opening the door. Before he could say anything, toss her a friendly greeting, he noticed something else.
She had a golden aura about her.
As he stood, transfixed, the aura shaded into tongues of golden lightning all over her, crackling like fire, seeming to dissolve her into tiny motes of light, which then contracted to a line, a point, brightened, and vanished with a pop and a crackle of electricity. Like a television set being switched off.
Then nothing. There was nobody there at all.
Blair's mouth hung open. Then he started shaking.
"Oh man, oh man, oh man, oh man," he muttered, clutching the stair rail. "Not now!" he protested to himself. And what makes now any worse than any other time? Any time at all would be bad. He had hoped that it would never happen at all; that the doctors were being pessimistic. But he was obviously wrong.
He sat down on the stairs and scrabbled through his backpack for his cell phone. Holding it in his hand, he stopped. Maybe he was over-reacting. "Yeah, right," he muttered darkly. "And maybe you'll start screaming about Golden Fire People in the middle of traffic, cause an accident and die. That will thrill Jim no end." Not to mention his mother, Naomi. "Besides, a promise is a promise."
Blair brushed back an errant strand of his long curly brown hair, and dialled the phone.
"Ellison." The usual brusque answer.
"Jim. It's Blair."
"What's happened?"
"It was completely out of the blue, man. I had no warning at all. You'd think there'd be something, like spots before the eyes. Except that they were, of course. Before the eyes, I mean. Spots."
"Sandburg! What's happened? Are you okay?"
"I don't really know," Blair admitted. "I - I had a flashback." There. He'd said it.
"Golden."
"Yes."
"I'll pick you up in twenty minutes."
"You don't have to-"
"I have to. For my peace of mind, okay? I don't want to be worrying about you."
"I don't want to be worrying about me either."
"See you outside Hargrove Hall in twenty."
"Okay, Jim."
###
"Damn!" Jim said after he hung up the phone. Then he said it again for good measure. "Damn!"
Jim Ellison looked the part for an Army recruiting poster - cropped hair, square jaw, blue eyes, and muscles. Which was no surprise, since he was actually ex-army himself. But right now, the worry on his face belied his tough exterior. Blair Sandburg was many things - grad student, teaching assistant, anthropologist, police observer and sentinel's guide - not to mention a trouble-magnet. But the most important thing to Jim at the moment was that Blair was his friend, a friend in need. He checked his pockets for his car keys, and then crossed the bull-pen to the frosted glass door of Captain Simon Banks's office. He knocked, but didn't wait to enter.
Simon was scowling at paperwork, his dark hand clutching a pen as if he wanted to stab the page instead of write on it. He looked up. "Ellison? What is it?"
"I just got a call from Sandburg, Simon." Not 'sir', but 'Simon'. Put this on a personal footing. "He had a flashback."
"A flashb-" Simon frowned. "Oh. Was anyone hurt? Is the kid okay?"
"Scared. I need to take him to get checked out."
"Of course. Go ahead." Simon waved Jim to the door. "Let me know how it goes."
###
"You know what freaks me out, man?" Blair said in the truck on the way to the hospital. "It wasn't what I saw, it was the fact that I saw anything."
"What did you see?"
For a minute, the only sound was the traffic noise, the whir of the windshield wipers and the swish of the rain in the gutters. Jim wondered if he should have asked. But Blair was just collecting his thoughts. "She glowed, man. Outlined in gold. There I was at the top of the stairs, and there she was on the landing..."
"She glowed," Jim said. "Is that all?" Was it just a trick of the light?
"No, no that wasn't the freaky part of it, man," Blair said. "It was when she disappeared that I knew I was really seeing things."
"She disappeared?"
Blair waved his hand in front of his face, like a magician assuring his audience that there is, indeed, nothing holding his floating assistant in the air. "She turned into light, and vanished. Poof! People don't just disappear into thin air, Jim. It had to be a hallucination." Blair rubbed his eyes, then opened them again. He turned to Jim. "You know the other odd thing?" he said.
"What?"
Blair shrugged. "Maybe it isn't odd. I just wonder why it should be Lisa Montgomery that I would be hallucinating about."
"One of your ex-girlfriends? Maybe it's symbolic," Jim said with a smile.
Blair rolled his eyes. "No, no, I have never dated her. She's just one of my students. Rogers Scholarship. Doesn't seem to hang with a crowd." Blair frowned and shook his head. "Why Lisa Montgomery?" Blair put his hands on both sides of his head. "Man, this sucks."
Jim didn't know what to say. "Let's just get you to the doctor, Sandburg, and see what he has to say." A delaying tactic, of course, but he couldn't offer Blair a stupid platitude like 'everything's going to be fine' or 'it's probably nothing to worry about'. Because they didn't know. Yet.
But Doctor Mendez didn't find anything, only a slightly elevated blood pressure, no doubt due to stress. Reflexes, normal. Pupil-response, normal. No slurring of speech, no loss of balance. Blood and urine samples were taken, but they would take a while to process. In the meantime, "Don't drive, don't operate any heavy machinery, and get a good night's rest." Standard phrases when there isn't really anything else to say. But it was all they had.
###
WEDNESDAY MORNING
The breath of the jungle was heavy and warm in his face. It smelled of green and growing things, rotting leaves, flowers, and beasts, both feathered and furred. The canopy of leaves, its verdant hair, filtered the light to greenness. The trees clustered around him like rooted dancers, whispering tales to each other. Over that sound, he heard a rustle, crackling against the dead leaves. A creature, something moving nearby. His eyes followed the sound like a zoom lens. Something white and black. Something small. Something moving. He followed it.
He wove through the trees, getting closer. He could see it. A bird, trailing a wing, a very long black wing. An albatross.
"You don't belong here," he said. "You should be flying."
But the albatross crept away from him, into the darkness.
Jim woke up with a start. That was weird. The aroma of ground coffee beans tantalised his nostrils. Sandburg must be up. He got up, showered, shaved, dressed, and wandered into the kitchen, where Sandburg was sipping his coffee and hovering over the toaster, waiting for his toast to brown.
Jim poured himself a cup of coffee, and took a sip. "Just what I needed -- thanks."
Sandburg turned and smiled. "And good morning to you too, Jim."
"Are you feeling okay this morning, Chief?"
Sandburg shrugged. "I'm fine. No disappearing girls. Not even a bad dream."
Bad dream. No, he wasn't going to talk about it. Sandburg would be all over him, wanting details, rattling on about albatrosses in tribal lore, no doubt. Asking if it was one of those dreams. Not now.
But those blue eyes had missed nothing. "Okay, Jim, give."
Jim raised an eyebrow. "Give?"
"You clenched your jaw when I said 'bad dream'."
Jim shook his head. "It's nothing, Sandburg. Not a nightmare or anything."
"But?"
"It was just odd, that's all."
Blair gestured at him to go on, his eyes wide, his eyebrows raised.
Maybe he'd better. At least it would get Blair's mind away from Golden flashbacks. The dream probably didn't mean anything anyway. "Okay, so I was following a crippled albatross through the jungle, and it got away from me. That's all. That's the whole thing."
"An albatross? In the jungle? But albatrosses are sea birds."
Jim shrugged. "Told you it was odd."
Blair's toast popped up and he started buttering it. "Maybe its very oddness is significant."
Jim went to the refrigerator and took out a couple of eggs. "You want some eggs with that toast?" He grabbed a pan from the cupboard.
"No thanks, Jim." Blair took out some cottage cheese and alfalfa sprouts and put them on his toast, cut the pieces in half, and took a big bite out of one of them.
"So, you know what the dream means?" Jim popped a slice of bread into the toaster, and cracked his eggs into the pan.
Blair shrugged. "Well, the albatross is considered a sign of good fortune amongst sailors. You know, like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner...
At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name."
He took another bite of his breakfast. "But a crippled albatross in the jungle... Maybe it's a warning of some kind. I'll have to do some research." Jim could see his eyes brighten at the prospect of hitting the books, finding out more, more, more. The kid was insatiable.
"Are you coming to the station this morning, Chief?"
"I need to do some things at Rainier this morning, actually, but I'll be free this afternoon."
"I'll drop you off, and we can meet for lunch."
"I -" Blair began to protest.
"You get to pick the place."
Blair's eyes gleamed. "There's this new Turkish place I've been wanting to try..."
"Just don't ask me to identify all the spices."
Blair turned blue puppy-dog eyes on him. "Aw, why not?"
"Because I want to eat my food, not analyse it."
###
WEDNESDAY LUNCHTIME
Jim let the phone ring as he waited at the lights. "Answer the phone, Sandburg. Don't you know the meaning of 'meet me for lunch'?" When the light went green, Jim turned into the university grounds, barely avoiding a huge puddle in a dip in the road. The rain pelted down as if the sky were leaking.
Okay, so Sandburg wasn't in his office, but the 'just stepped out for five minutes' argument had worn thin after half an hour. Besides, he wasn't answering his cell phone either. Jim's fingers beat a tattoo on the edge of his steering wheel, and his jaw clenched. Had Sandburg had another flashback?
He pulled up in front of Hargrove Hall. No sign of Sandburg, no long-haired young man waiting by the steps. Should he leave the truck here in the loading zone, or try to find a parking spot? Something told him there just wasn't the time to waste. He turned off the ignition, got out, locked the car, and ran through the rain into the building. He went straight for the stairs.
Instincts passed to him from his ancestors came to the fore: a Sentinel protects the tribe, a Sentinel protects his guide. The sinking feeling in his gut spoke to his instincts, shouting that Blair Sandburg, his guide, was in definite need of protection.
As Jim approached Sandburg's floor, he extended his hearing, listening for Sandburg's voice, his breathing, his heartbeat. Voices there were, discussions and phone conversations, the humming of computers, the clacking of keyboards, the thumping burble of the refrigerator in the staff kitchen at the end of the hall, the breathing, the heartbeats, the...
Stop. Filter out what you don't want. Listen. Sandburg's words, echoing through his memory.
Jim stopped at exit of the stairs. Stopped, listened, filtered.
No Sandburg.
Jim walked as quickly as he could without running, to Sandburg's office. He knocked on the door. It swung open. His heart clenched. Not locked. He stepped inside, though he knew that nobody was there.
No scene of wreckage or chaos met his eyes. No broken lamps or scattered books, no telltale spots of blood on the floor. Sandburg's backpack sat undisturbed next to his desk, as if he had, indeed, just stepped out. Except that he wouldn't have left his door unlocked. Had Sandburg stepped out of his door, in the pursuit of some vision that only he could see? Wandered off to God knows where? Stepped under a bus?
But there was something... something in the air, something out of place. He could almost taste it, feel it, smell it. He concentrated.
"Ozone," he said to himself, and frowned. "Ozone?" As if someone had been doing some heavy-duty arc welding. He shook his head and put the thought aside.
Something glittered on the floor. He focused on it. Something metallic. He bent down and picked it up. It was silver, in the shape of a crescent moon, with a smiling face and one glittering eye. At the top there was a small loop - it was a pendant, or an earring, or a charm, fallen from its chain. Not the kind of thing that Sandburg would wear. He pocketed it.
He left Sandburg's office and questioned the other occupants of the floor. Had they noticed anything unusual? Had they seen Mr. Sandburg? When had they last seen him?
"Well, there was a student here early," one of the secretaries said, "looking for him. I told her to wait by his door, that he would probably come soon. He did, we said good morning, but he went past too fast for me to tell him about the student."
"Did he seem fine to you?"
She smiled. "Very fine."
"What did the student look like?"
"African American, straight dark hair, shoulder-length, usual student clothing, jeans, white blouse."
"Height?"
"Average."
"Was she wearing any jewelry?" Jim fetched the silver moon out of his pocket. "Like this?"
She shook her head. "I don't know. Maybe. I'm not sure."
"You don't happen to know the student's name, do you?"
The secretary frowned in thought. "Louise? Lisa?"
"Last name?"
She shook her head. "Sorry."
"Thank you, anyway," Jim said.
The secretary smiled. "Any time."
###
Jim slammed the phone down. "Nothing!" he said. "Nobody fitting Sandburg's description has been admitted to any of the local hospitals, nor picked up by the police - and he isn't in the morgue either."
"Well, that's a good sign," Simon said. "He isn't dead."
"Maybe they just haven't found his body yet."
"Jim! Pull yourself together. So he missed lunch. Maybe he just went to an unexpected meeting."
"And left his backpack behind?"
"Why not? If it was nearby, he wouldn't need to take it, would he?"
"All right, all right. Maybe I am over-reacting. I just feel responsible."
"Jim! This is not your fault. The blame is firmly in the laps of Jacobs and Kaminski, the ones that made the Golden in the first place, the ones that sent those doped pizzas to this department."
"But if Sandburg hadn't been here, he wouldn't have eaten that slice of pizza."
"Yes, and he might not have eaten the pizza anyway. It might have been me. Or anyone. You can't second-guess yourself like that, Jim."
Jim sighed. "You're right. But if Sandburg doesn't turn up tonight, then..."
###
Jim Ellison stared sightlessly at the computer screen on his desk. The grey clouds that had been weeping all day made sunset invisible, and the fluorescent lights made the dimming of daylight unnoticable. But the time had gone, with no sign of Sandburg. No unexpected meetings. No reports of a long-haired wild-eyed amnesiac found wandering the city streets. It was as if he'd vanished off the face of the earth. Jim rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to ward off the threatening headache. I should be doing something. What? I've done everything I can think of. Nobody has seen him. What kind of a flashback could he have had that would cause him to sneak off? Surely he would have been yelling and carrying on like he did the first time? Unless he saw something that frightened him. But then he would have run off, which somebody would have noticed.
Where the hell are you, Sandburg?
He's not dead. I'd know it if he was dead.
Why hadn't anybody seen anything? Wait a minute. Somebody might have seen something. The student. "God, you are an idiot, Ellison!" How many African-Americans of average height, with dark straight hair, named Louise or Lisa could there be at the university? At least it was something he could do.
He was on the phone five seconds later. Forty-five minutes later, he had a list of thirty names. Two hours after that he had crossed off all but two of them.
Then Simon insisted he go home.
###
The loft was cold and empty. But Jim had known that before he'd opened the door. No sound of breathing nor beat of heart. No pen scratching on rustling pages. Nobody home. His steps echoed hollowly as he stepped through the door. Sheer habit made him hang up his damp coat. He checked the answering machine. The message light was blinking. He pressed play. His own voice emerged from the tinny speaker.
"Sandburg, if you're there, answer the phone. We were supposed to have lunch, remember? If you aren't there now, call me back when you get this message."
Another message. "Sandburg, where are you? It's Jim. If this is a joke, it's not funny."
And another. "Sandburg, if you're there, please pick up the phone. Call me. You've got me worried, Chief. If there isn't anything wrong, I'll wring your neck. Just call, okay?"
And another. "Sandburg, this is your hourly wake-up call. Call me on my cell phone."
Jim sat on the couch in the dark and stared at nothing. The rain beating against the balcony doors was a counterpoint to his thoughts. What had happened to Sandburg?
-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-
O! what a fall was there, my countrymen;
Then I, and you, and all of us fell down,
Whilst bloody treason flourished over us.
-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-
WEDNESDAY MORNING
She was waiting outside Blair's office. Lisa Montgomery. Okay, just because the last time he'd seen her, she'd vanished in a puff of light, didn't mean he had to be afraid of her. It wasn't her fault there was the aftermath of a drug playing havoc with his brain cells. Then she turned around and saw him. Too late to back off now.
She practically ran up to him. "Mr. Sandburg, I know this isn't office hours, but I have to see you," she said.
His worries suddenly seemed trivial. "It's Blair," he said. "Just let me get the door, and we can talk." He opened the door and dumped his backpack beside his desk. She entered behind him, eyes jumping from the shelves of books to the odd tribal mask, the ornaments, and his prized fishing spear, almost as if she expected them to jump off the shelves and attack her. He closed the door behind her, and sat on the edge of the desk. "What's the problem, Lisa?"
She stared at him, as if she didn't know how to begin. "Please," she said, "please don't tell anyone. About yesterday." Then the words came tumbling out, "I'd have to leave, and I don't want to leave, not again, I like Cascade, I like Rainier, I like Anthropology, I don't want to have to start over again, please don't tell anyone what you saw."
Baffled, Blair echoed, "What I saw?" What did his hallucinations have to do with anything but himself? Unless it was something else he was supposed to have seen when he was actually hallucinating.
"I know you saw me, you were at the top of the stairs, but I was already going, I couldn't stop. I know I shouldn't have done it, but I was running so late, I took a chance and you saw me."
Right. Okay. Tread carefully here, Blair, you don't want her to know that you have no idea what she is talking about. What had she been doing in the stairwell that she thought he'd seen? Taking drugs or something? Was it safe to ask - oh what the hell - "What exactly were you doing, yesterday?"
"I teleported." She stared intently at him, as if to gauge his reaction to her bald statement.
Whoa, Blair. Is she saying what I think she's saying? "You teleported." Is this some kind of joke? Is she putting me on? Some elaborate practical joke? On the other hand, if it wasn't... a little ember of hope glowed in his chest. Maybe it wasn't Golden. Maybe he wasn't seeing things. "Teleported. As in vanished, vamoosed, disappeared into thin air, in a flash of light." Or maybe she's just trying to drive me crazy. Mind games. Psychological torture.
"Psychological torture?! Why would I do that?" Lisa exclaimed.
"What?!" Blair yelped, standing up. "You can read minds too?"
Lisa looked stricken. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to." She put her face in her hands, and said despairingly, "I try so hard to fit in, try not to do it, but it just happens."
"Whoa," Blair said, gently pulling her hands away from her face. Her eyes were swimming with unshed tears. Any last thoughts he had that she was lying or joking or playing games died at the sight, as a single tear trickled down the side of her face. His heart went out to her. "Don't cry," he said. Oh man, I wasn't seeing things. I wasn't. It wasn't Golden. What a relief. It wasn't a flashback.
"A flashback?"
Blair smiled ruefully. "Man, you really are good."
Lisa's eyes widened. "I did it again? Are you sure you aren't - no of course you aren't - but I haven't picked up on a stranger so easily since -" She stopped.
"Since when?"
"Since Adam. When I was sixteen." She shook her head, briefly. "But that's why nobody can know. Nobody." She clenched her fists. "I was stupid. I shouldn't have come." She stepped backwards. "Goodbye, Mr. Sandburg. I enjoyed your classes."
"Lisa! Wait a minute!" Blair said. "Why on earth do you have to leave? Why is my knowing what you can do, such a terrible thing?"
"But you aren't the only one, are you?" she said. "You tell a friend, and they tell a friend, and soon enough they will find out, and we won't be safe any more."
Is she paranoid, or what? "Lisa -"
"I am not paranoid!" Lisa exclaimed. "But I should have known you wouldn't understand."
"No!" Blair said, stepping between her and the door. Then he snorted, and said ruefully, "But then, I can't stop you leaving, can I? Not even if I locked the door and swallowed the key." He held up his hands. "Please, Lisa, hear me out."
She folded her arms and looked at him.
"First, I only told two people what I saw yesterday; my friend Jim, and Doctor Mendez at Cascade General. And both of them are positive that I was - that I didn't see what I thought I saw. You see, last year -" Do I really have to tell her about that? Yes, I guess I do. "Last year, I ate - by accident - some pizza laced with Golden - a designer drug that causes hallucinations. When I saw you yesterday, I thought I was having a flashback. That I was seeing things. That it wasn't real. So nobody is going to think that it was real, okay?" Blair took another breath, encouraged by the fact that she hadn't gone anywhere.
"Second," he continued, "a question: who are they, and why do you have to hide?"
"They kidnapped my mother," she answered, chin in the air. "When I was sixteen. Men from Scientific Intelligence - like the CIA only more technological. They threatened to kill her if I didn't do what they wanted. Yes, they were rogues, they went to prison, but power like mine, well, it's an irresistible temptation, isn't it? Some people would do anything to get it, to use it."
"I hear you," Blair said. "I know exactly what you mean."
"How could you?"
"I have a friend," Blair said quietly, "who has certain extraordinary gifts... and we've run into men like that." Okay, one man, Lee Brackett. Col. Oliver didn't count, really - though he probably would have tried to use Jim if he'd known. "Believe me, I understand."
"So you see why I have to leave."
Blair shook his head. "You can't spend your life running, Lisa. That isn't a life at all."
"But it isn't my life that depends on this!"
"Your mother -"
"Not just my mother," Lisa said.
"You're protecting someone." Was it the "Adam" she'd mentioned earlier? Or had Adam been a victim?
"Of cour-"
At that moment, the door behind Blair opened. He didn't usually lock the office when he was in; it was taken for granted that people didn't just barge into an office if the door was shut. He turned to see who it was. "I'm sorry but -"
The jolt took him completely by surprise. He caught a brief glimpse of blonde hair, dark glasses, red lips and black clothing, before his legs turned to jelly and his sight to grey. Lisa! What about Lisa? The world went dark.
###
Awareness. Headache. Ache. Which way was up? Back. On back. What? Lisa! Blair opened his eyes and sat bolt upright - or tried to. Spots danced before his eyes. His body didn't want to move. He shut his eyes and pushed himself up with his arms supporting him behind his back. Whatever he was lying on gave underneath his fingers, like a sponge. His arms trembled. He felt as weak as water, as if his body was made out of boiled spaghetti. What had that - woman? - hit him with? Where was he?
He opened his eyes, carefully. White walls. Dull light. Double doors. Beneath him was a bright garish mattress - a cheap foam thing, with cloth cover in stripes, spots and diamonds, in clashing colours. In the opposite corner, there was another mattress of the same kind, with someone on it. Lisa! She lay on her back, black hair spilled out around her, wearing the same jeans and blouse she had on in his office. She was unconscious.
He tried to get up, but was too weak. He lay back down, rolled over, off his mattress onto the salmon-pink carpet, got up on his hands and knees, and crawled over to her.
"Lisa!" He shook her. No response. She seemed to be breathing okay, though, and she didn't appear to be injured. She was just out cold. Maybe whatever-it-was had affected her more than him. "Lisa! Wake up!" Her head lolled, but her eyes remained closed.
Damn. They had to get out of there. He didn't know why the hell they'd been knocked out and kidnapped, but it surely wasn't for any good reason. But until Lisa woke up, they weren't going anywhere. He had to think.
He sat himself down on the end of Lisa's mattress, and pushed himself back so that he was leaning against the wall. How long had he been out? He checked his watch but it was dead. The digital display was completely blank. Great. So much for lifetime guarantees.
From where he was sitting, he could see the rain beating against the room's one window, but nothing outside but dull grey. In the wall to his left, double doors. In the wall behind him, to his right, a door. He crawled over to it, and pushed himself to his feet by leaning against the wall. He tried the handle. It turned, but the door didn't give. Bolted from the outside, perhaps. Figured.
He then staggered over to the window, using the wall for support, nearly tripping over the edge of his own mattress to get there. The rain trickled down in ant-crazy paths as he looked past the raindrops to see the blank wall of another building. Grey concrete. So it hadn't been the clouds he'd seen after all. He looked down. It seemed like they were several stories up. Okay, so this was either an apartment block or an office block. Hopefully they were still in Cascade. But maybe they weren't. Maybe it was the next day and they'd been moved hours away, to Seattle or even further. Just a city building, in some city, somewhere.
Blair shuffled over to the double doors and pulled on the handle of one of them. A built-in wardrobe. Empty. Not even coat-hangers hanging from the rod. On the top there was a large shelf, and deep shelves on one side, to about half-way down. Then there was a panel, covering something up. He peered through a crack in the join. Oh. A hot-water tank. Definitely an apartment.
He slapped at the panel in frustration, and noticed what was on his right wrist: a large clunky bracelet made of metal and plastic, fitting snugly to his wrist. Though there were lumps and bumps, none of them seemed to be a clasp - at least, there was nothing he could clip or move or push. It all stayed firmly in place. He glanced over at Lisa. Yes, she had a bracelet too. The non-coincidence seemed suddenly sinister. Was there a reason their captors hadn't tied them up? Like they felt as if they didn't need to?
Blair sagged down against the wall until he was sitting down. He clasped his arms around his knees and rested his head on his arms. His headache felt slightly better that way.
Who had kidnapped them? If this had happened to himself alone, then he would have assumed it had something to do with one of Jim's cases; or to do with Jim, some psycho seeking revenge or leverage against Jim. It's not as if that hadn't happened before. Don't go there, Blair. Don't even think about it.
But then, maybe it wasn't Blair they were after. Considering what he and Lisa had been talking about just before it happened, maybe the target was Lisa. In which case, these would be highly organised professionals - and those bracelets probably weren't ornamental. What? Tracking devices? Or what?
The problem was, that whatever the case, he had no assurance that these people wouldn't just kill both of them as soon as they had what they wanted. Or kill one of them sooner, if that one was considered expendable. Shit.
"Jim," he muttered to himself, heart pounding, "I hope you're looking. Just keep on looking, man."
###
Blair heard a rustle, and lifted his head. Lisa was stirring. He leaped to her side. "Lisa!" he hissed. "Get out of here. Get help."
She stared at him blankly.
Oh man, was I dreaming all that? Can she teleport or not?
"Can't," she whispered, her dark face blanched to a browny-grey. "Dizzy. So dizzy." She shut her eyes, and then opened them, as if shutting them made it worse. "Think I'm going to be sick."
Blair massaged her temples. "Take deep breaths - through your nose. Let it out slowly. That's right."
"Drugged me."
"Why you and not me?"
"Disor-" She took more deep breaths. "So I can't teleport."
He sat down on the end of her mattress, positioning himself so that her head rested against his legs, and massaged her scalp.
"Thank you," Lisa whispered.
The bolt on the door slid back, and the door opened. Two people entered. The first was a woman, the same woman Blair had glimpsed in his office. Her blonde hair was as smooth as if it had been glued into place. Her face was not so much cold as neutral. Her eyes were hidden behind the armour of dark glasses. She wore a suit-jacket, a short skirt, and long black stockings, and in her gloved hands she held something like a gun. Solid and heavy-looking, yet what it shot obviously wasn't bullets. In anyone else's hands it would have looked like a toy. But with the business end pointed their way, it seemed anything but laughable.
The second person was an older man, with grey streaks in his dark hair. His black trenchcoat was damp with the rain.
"Well, how touching," he said sarcastically.
Lisa gasped. "Colonel Masters!"
"How nice of you to recognise me," he said. "How long has it been? Six years?" He scowled. "Six stinking long years, because of you, and your friends, and frigging boy-scout General Damon."
"You got what you deserved," Lisa said, attempting to sit up. She paled, turned, and threw up on the carpet.
"Hasty, hasty," Masters said. "The drug will wear off soon enough, and then you'll do exactly as I say."
"Never!" Lisa choked out.
Blair glared at Masters. "You'll never get away with this!"
"Ah, but I will, Mr. Sandburg. If I don't, you're both dead. Along with Lisa's mother." Col. Masters took a device from the breast pocket of his coat. It looked something like a walkie-talkie. "See those fine bracelets you're wearing? On the right signal, they will inject the wearer with a lethal dose of poison. Any attempt to tamper with them will do the same. They are also locator beacons. Any loss of signal, say, from teleporting to the other side of the world, and the remaining hostages will be killed."
"I want to see my mother!"
"You know I can't allow that. Get you two in the same room together and you would teleport her away with you."
"At least let Mr. Sandburg go," Lisa said. "He hasn't done anything to you."
"That is immaterial," Masters said. "I need two hostages. One here, one in reserve. So you don't get any ideas about teleporting anyone away. If you try, the other hostage will forfeit. Your mother is one hostage, Mr. Sandburg happens to be the other. Having him here in front of you will remind you what is at stake." He smiled at the woman standing next to him. "And don't think that anyone will rescue you. Gloria is the best there is. Nobody saw her. Nobody heard her." He indicated the gun Gloria was carrying. "It's a marvellous weapon; silent, and adjustable. The lower settings stun. The higher settings kill. All thanks to Mr. Benjamin Franklin." He leaned over them. "Nobody knows where you are."
It wasn't until after their captors had left that Lisa started crying.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I can't help it. I'm sorry. This is all my fault. I should never have gotten you into this."
"Hold up there, Lisa, you didn't get me into this, they did," Blair said. "Who are they, anyway?"
"That's Colonel Masters. He's the one that kidnapped my mother. He's supposed to be in jail. From Megabyte's description, I think this is the same Gloria who was working with him then. Heart of ice, muscles of steel." The tears came again. "I should have just left."
"They would have just kidnapped someone else," Blair said, pasting on a smile for her benefit. "We've got one advantage, though."
"Really?" Lisa said sarcastically. "And what's that?"
"I have a really gifted friend."
"That will do us a great deal of good, locked up here."
"He's really gifted in the bloodhound department," Blair said. "No matter how silent Gloria was, she must have left something. What's more, he's a cop, he's my roommate - and I was supposed to meet him for lunch."
###
An hour later, Masters and Gloria came back.
"You and Gloria are going on a little trip," Masters said to Lisa. "If I recall correctly, you can't teleport to places you aren't familiar with. Gloria is going to help you get familiar with them. Fine institutions, banks. If you get strategically lost you can look right into the vaults. Teleport in later and bypass all the security."
"You want me to rob banks for you?"
"It's a start," Masters said. "Money is useful for so many things." He pointed at Blair. "You're coming too. We're relocating this operation."
At least he let them use the bathroom before they left.
Blair almost laughed at their transportation. "A VW bus? I thought your type always used black vans." The windows, however, were tinted. The back windows were covered on the inside with dark curtains that were completely fastened down.
"Shut up and get inside."
They shut up and got. Masters drove. Gloria kept an eye on them. They said nothing. They drove around the busy streets. From what little Blair could see when they stopped, they were still in Cascade, and it was still raining. Three times they stopped and parked, and twice Gloria took Lisa out with her. The third time, Gloria went alone. From the bags she brought back, she had obviously been buying supplies.
They drove on. A back street. A parking garage. An elevator. Another apartment. Another room, with two beds on opposite sides of the room, and actual furnishings.
"Behave. You know what will happen if you don't," Masters said.
Blair sat down on one of the two beds. "I guess we wait."
Lisa sat on the other. "It's hopeless."
He, of course, had to be contrary. "Nothing is ever hopeless."
"There is no way your friend could find us."
"Well, we'll have to give him some clues, then, won't we?" Blair then sat cross-legged on the bed, and pulled out one of his hairs. "Ouch!"
"What are you doing?"
Blair looked up, and then noticed Gloria standing in the doorway. The most unnerving thing about her was the way she never spoke, and the fact that you could never see her eyes. "Just filling in the time," he said, and started carefully tying knots in the strand of hair. He turned his eyes back to Lisa. "Did I ever tell you about the Indian flood epic of Manu?"
Gloria turned away.
###
"Did I ever tell you about the Indian flood epic of Manu?"
Lisa stared at him. "You want to discuss anthropology at a time like this?" She couldn't believe it. They'd been kidnapped. There was nothing they could do about it without endangering themselves and her mother, and he was just sitting there tying knots in a strand of his hair.
"What better time?" he said, seemingly cheerfully, eyes darting to the doorway that Lisa couldn't see.
Then she realized he was trying to change the subject with creepy Gloria possibly listening to them. Listening to them? God, how could she be so stupid? The bracelets were probably bugged, too. With all that, here was Blair Sandburg, trying to cheer her up. What did she think she was doing? She'd dragged him into this, into her life, when he should have been safely teaching. He was one of the best lecturers she had - he made it come alive. And here she was, complaining. "I'm sorry," she said.
"Don't be," he said. "The Manu flood epic is probably a bad topic when it's raining like this."
She couldn't help but smile.
"Of course, the number of flood epics across many different cultures is used by some to support the Biblical idea of a universal, world-wide flood," Blair continued, moving into full lecture mode. "On the other hand, it could simply mean that floods are worthwhile things to keep stories about. Natural - or supernatural - disasters, and the heroism that inevitably results... they are remembered, and mythologized."
"But you've got to wonder..."
"Wonder what?" Blair's bright eyes overcame her hesitation, and she forgot, for a moment, where she was.
"Wonder if Jung wasn't right - I mean - the collective unconscious. So many of the same stories turn up all over the world, in tribes that could never have met."
"Except, perhaps, in dreams," Blair murmured. Blair put the hair he had knotted carefully to one side, and winced as he pulled another from his head.
"You believe in dreams?"
"Some of them." He gave a wry smile. "Of course, even if you do get a warning in a dream, it doesn't do you any good if you don't understand it until it's too late."
"You were warned about this?"
He shook his head. "Not me."
Lisa flashed on the image of a man, Caucasian, with cropped hair and cool blue eyes, a square jaw and a sense of towering strength. What she felt from Blair was almost an ache, wishing he was with... "Jim?" she asked.
Blair blinked at her. "You're doing it again," he said.
She was glad her dark skin hid the fire in her cheeks. "Sorry."
"Don't be," he said again. He added, with a teasing smile. "I just wonder about your exam results..."
"Mind-reading doesn't help write essays," Lisa said. "Megabyte used to think that if he was telepathic, he'd never fail an exam again, but he was wrong."
"He became telepathic and failed exams?"
"Well, he would have failed exams if he'd tried to use telepathy," Lisa said. "It's much harder work trying to read someone's mind than it would be to just study the old-fashioned way. With another telepath, it's different."
"So you think that I-"
"No," she interrupted. "You're just more open than usual. Like..." Comparing him to Adam had been wrong. Adam had been sharp and clear, like crystal. Blair was like water, rippling, sometimes still; open to the wind, the earth, the sky. A face came to her mind, brown against dappling leaves, sharp smile flashing white against weathered skin - Speaks-to-Trees. Would Blair be insulted, to be compared to someone primitive, uncivilised? Of course not. Blair Sandburg was an anthropologist. He would understand. "Like a shaman," she said.
The blood drained from Blair's face. "Like a shaman?" he choked out.
Another flash. A face, a man, dark-skinned like an Indian, dark haired, painted, with feathers. Dying.
She was almost as shaken as Blair. "What-?" she breathed. You don't want to know, Lisa. You don't want to know. It's none of your business. "It's a mercy," she said to herself.
"What's a mercy?" Blair said, as if desperate to change the subject.
She looked at him, startled. She hadn't realized she'd said it aloud. She decided to answer his question anyway. "That most people aren't easy to read. That I can't hear what they don't say." She thought of Speaks-to-Trees and smiled, ignoring the ache in her heart. "I'm glad I can always hear what they do say, though."
"You're glad that you're not deaf?" Blair said with puzzlement. He looked back down at the strand of hair he was knotting, sighed, threw it on the floor, and plucked another one from his head. He started tying knots again.
"No, I mean, they don't have to be speaking English."
Blair's eyes widened. "You can understand any language? That's amazing! What a boon for fieldwork!"
Lisa smiled at his enthusiasm. "Yes, it is." Her smile turned wry. "When they don't take me for an evil spirit, that is."
-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-
Falling, yes I am falling
And she keeps calling
Me back again.
-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-