Silent Barriers: Part 2

By Aja

"You got Brennan into the lab this morning?" Shalimar asked, managing to sound both shocked and unsurprised.

"I'm not without my methods." Adam smiled briefly as they joined him at the main hub of communication. Emma returned the smile but Jesse grimaced. His imagination was busy providing twelve different scenarios Adam might have used to get Brennan into the lab, and the additional twelve Adam likely had in reserve to use on the rest of them. Sooner or later Adam would notice Jesse was avoiding, and the subterfuge would be done.

"When did you last hear from him?" asked Emma, leaning over Adam's shoulder to look at the consol. She sounded not-yet-overly-concerned but she had the keen look in her eye Jesse recognized as her searching look. She was reaching out, trying to figure out just how big of a problem Adam believed this to be. Sometimes Jesse wished he had her sensibility.

Adam stood, face neutral. "He checked in at five like I asked him to, but there's been nothing since."

There—Jesse picked up on it, even without Emma's ability—the slight pitch in Adam's voice that subtly belied the genuine nature of his concern. Brennan wasn't normally the person on the team you worried about for a lapse in curfew. He was in the process of trading in habits from his less-than-stellar past and it was a work in progress. Adam understood that. Adam was patient with Brennan through all of it. And if Adam was worried about Brennan having not checked in, there was a real reason to be worried.

Jesse tried to think back, reviewing everything he'd said to Brennan that morning and everything Brennan had said to him, but they hadn't talked much. A few inane comments about defensive form and technique before Brennan left the dojo. That was it.

Jesse remembered lingering on the steps, watching, commenting, and trying to figure out how to ask Brennan what he needed to ask. He'd kept thinking about how to word it, how to explain it, but hadn't come up with anything. By the time he'd figured out the question he could ask, Brennan had been off on Adam's errand.

Jesse had been waiting for his return ever since.

He hated waiting. He hated worrying even more.

Brennan's head felt full of mud, heavy; the sound of his pulse slugging sloppily behind his ears. Under it, Adam's voice echoed, sounding dull and washed out, as though trying to speak to him from behind the shower door with the water running.

Why was Adam in his shower? Why was Adam trying to wake him up?

Five more minutes, Adam, Brennan wanted to say, but his jaw and tongue wouldn't cooperate. It took several tries before he could even open his mouth. When he did, a crash of thunder rolled over whatever he had planned to say.

Thunder?

Rain.

Steger!

Pain pulled at Brennan's brain with the name and bolted him to awareness. With a jolt he remembered where he was—flat in a gritty alley with small pings of rain water dripping over his face and body, making him nervous the way rainstorms always did. And Adam… Adam's voice was real. Adam was actually talking to him, prodding him through the communication link in his ring.

Adam.

Brennan snapped his jaw closed. If he answered—if he said Adam's name—he'd activate the com-link's reverse sound and Adam would know something was wrong. Then Brennan would have to try to explain and wouldn't be able to. This was Steger's game. Steger's rules.

Think, Brennan, Think!

If Adam didn't get an answer, he'd check with the others and then try to reach Brennan again. After that, the team would start searching. Jesse would try to trace the signal and the ring would bring them right to the alley.

Desperately, Brennan pulled his hands onto his chest, clasping his cold fingers awkwardly, working the digits together until the com-ring loosened enough to slide off. Let Adam think the storm is interfering with the signal, he prayed. It was his best bet. He only needed to buy time—time he could use as long as he just moved.

"Adam, are you sure we're not overreacting here? I mean, you said the job you sent him on was no big deal." Jesse was hunched over the computer consol near Adam's lab, trying to see if he could trace the last signals from Brennan's ring. It worried him that it was deactivated. It worried him that he was having trouble tracing it and he needed reassurance.

"It wasn't," confirmed Adam succinctly, ambling in a deliberately casual pace across the hallway, a deliberately calm expression covering his features. Everything deliberate.

The team wasn't fooled. They'd seen him in too many tense situations to misread him. Adam was worried and his deliberate calm was making them uneasy.

Jesse flicked his eyes back to his computer. "It's weird," he said. "I keep thinking I have a fix on his last location before the ring was deactivated, but the signal is bouncing all over the place."

"What would cause that?" asked Shalimar.

"The storm?" Jesse shrugged.

"It is pretty bad out there. Lots of lightning," added Emma. "Brennan doesn't do well with storms. Maybe…" she didn't finish the thought.

"Thing is," said Jesse. "I don't think the ring is on his finger anymore. Even if he'd deactivated the tracer, if it was still on his finger the storm wouldn't interfere as much and we'd get a better read on the last signals it sent out."

"So what does that mean?" Emma pressed, turning to Adam. "Can we still trace it?"

"We can still trace it," assured Jesse. "It's just going to take a little more effort."

"Yeah," agreed Shalimar. "But there's no guarantee we'll find Brennan once we do."

After two stumbling attempts, Brennan got himself propped against the gray brick of the alley wall and nearly had himself convinced that the pain in his head was easing. His muscles were responding—loosening—and he found himself finally able to stay on his feet.

Palming the wall, he achieved movement. Inch my inch he made his way toward the alley's exit, all smooth going until his foot caught the sharp edge of a garbage tin, toppling it with a clanging crash that sent knives through his eyeballs. Shoving his shoulder into the brick, he bent his head low and put hands to his ears, waiting for the echo to die away.

Eventually he let go, easing his shaking hands down cautiously. He rubbed rubbery-feeling fingers over his dizzy eyes and kept going. At the corner "Miguel's Mexican Pizza" blinked at him in neon from across the street. The back door of the restaurant led directly into the hallway with the men's room, he remembered, giving him easy access to an indoor facility and a good temporary haven that wouldn't require him to run into too many people. He could take stock of his situation there—clean himself up and form some sort of plan.

Stumbling as he stepped over the curb and into the street, he fervently started hoping that whatever story he decided to tell Adam was a good one.

"Adam, what exactly did you send Brennan to do?" asked Shalimar, leaning over Jesse's shoulder as he worked.

Adam hesitated. "It was a… delivery… to an old friend," he said.

Emma inwardly slumped. She could feel that somewhere in Adam's mind he was trying to convince himself there was nothing wrong, but tendrils of his fear and his sense of foreboding were slowly slipping out to her. It was as natural as it was irrational, but Emma knew Adam, the intellectual that he was. She'd learned to trust his feelings as well as his mind.

Adam dipped his head away from them, continued his purposefully laconic pace across the floor.

Emma's brow furrowed. "If it's no big deal, what's the big secret?" she asked. Worry was starting to fuel her words. The team's and her own. She spoke carefully to make her voice come out sounding rational but internally she was starting to freak out. Part of her concern was purely for the missing Brennan. The other part was purely selfish. Brennan was hers. In the midst of accepting her powers and joining Mutant X, and everything else she was still trying to come to terms with, he was hers. If she lost him now, she'd have nothing hers to grab onto when things went bad.

Shalimar and Jesse were family—negative blood tests not withstanding—you messed with one you messed with the other. They'd both been with Adam a long time and together the three oozed easy and affectionate familiarity. Emma didn't usually suffer jealousy of their collective relationship, but when she did, Brennan was around to snap her out of it.

They all cared about her, just as much as she cared about them—she could feel it after all—but with Brennan it was different. He'd been protective of her from the start, somehow always keenly attuned to her feelings—going out of his way to make her his partner-in-teasing anytime the blond duo got going. She'd never had a big brother and knew little of functional family dynamics, but with Brennan, none of that mattered because neither did he. And to her, he felt like what a brother should feel like.

An intense wave of outside worry invaded Emma's wandering mind, cutting short her morose thoughts.

She looked up, seeking for the source and saw Jesse standing directly in front of her, his manifested concern shining plainly from his eyes. "Em? Are you okay?"

Her eyes burned abruptly. "Yeah," she said, stumbling over the small word, thinking Jesse suddenly sounded a lot like Brennan. "Just getting a little worried, I guess."

Jesse stepped closer, dropping a strong arm around her shoulder. "Don't worry," he said gently. "We're going to find him, discover he's fine, and spend the rest of the day listening to Adam growl at him for not checking in, okay?"

Emma laughed despite herself, short and brief. She couldn't talk over the sudden lump in her throat so she just nodded instead. Jesse gave her shoulder a squeeze and kissed her forehead before moving back to his consol. He wasn't as tall as Brennan, she thought, but his arm around her felt strong, his words soothing. It was enough.

She composed herself with a smooth breath and moved over to the consol with Jesse. She was aware that behind her Shalimar and Adam were exchanging looks born of sympathy for her and relief that Jesse had been able to bring her around. "Adam, you were about to tell us what Brennan was delivering," she said, cutting into their silence smartly, wanting suddenly to show them she wasn't the one they all had to protect, even though it felt good to feel how they thought of her.

"Alright," Adam conceded. "Jeff Stanton. He's an old friend of mine. Recently he's been helping me on a project, the sensitivity of which dictates that the information exchanged between us no longer be traded by electronic means. We decided to start exchanging our collective progress by personal currier—only using people we trust. There should have been no problems."

"Well, what is this project and who would be interested in it?" asked Shalimar. "Who else knew about it?"

"No one," said Adam adamantly. "No one knew about it. We've been very careful."

"Okay," said Emma, willing to allow Adam his furthered secrecy for now. "But can't you like… call or contact him just to make sure the… 'package' arrived or something?" She felt foolish picturing the conversation, wondering if she'd just found herself as an extra in a spy movie.

"I did," Adam confirmed and stopped pacing. "Stanton said that from his end, everything went fine."

The face that stared back at Brennan from Miguel's grubby bathroom mirror was flawless, devoid of even the slightest bruise or scratch—so unflawed it felt a sickening mock of his body's innumerable aches and protestations. It was a bittersweet revelation.

Steger had kept from damaging his face on purpose—keeping injury to the parts of Brennan's body that could be kept covered. Even the tiny bits of gravel sticking to his chin and forehead left no trace of their existence after washing them away with the water from Miguel's leaky sink tap.

The revelation set Brennan at a crossroads. With no readily visible evidence, he may not have to tell Adam anything. The best cover stories had the least information in them. There were fewer details to trip you up in the telling. If he could get away with saying nothing… If he could just get back to Sanctuary in one piece and come up with a reasonable explanation for not checking in…

Shouldn't be hard, he thought, a little bitterly. Of all the members of the team, he was the unreliable one. The thief. The conman. He'd been working to prove to them otherwise. Now, his past poor character would work in his favor. He groaned and leaned his forehead against the musty mirror, balancing his hands on the counter. What was he thinking? There was no way this would work in his favor.

Face it, Mulwray, anyway you look at this, you lose. He mouthed the words slowly, watching the downward angle of his moving chin.

The best he could hope for was that maybe instead of just kicking him out, Adam would help him find a place in the underground, but even that was doubtful. He pulled back from the mirror, blinked at himself and rubbed a hand roughly over his hair.

Maybe he should just cut and run. The concept wasn't unfamiliar to him. He'd just… cut deeper. Run farther. Find his own way to outrun Eckhart.

He could go.

Just go.

Right now.

Leave before the fall out, before the hurt looks and betrayed stares. Then he could just get on with his life… away from all this… responsibility. This cause. These friends. This home.

He dropped his eyes. He couldn't hold gaze with himself. Yanking the faucet back on, he bent low to cup another palmful of water onto his face, fingers shaking slightly, a storm of anger suddenly hot in his stomach. He'd lose them by the time this was over anyway. He'd lose them, but he couldn't leave yet. If there was even a chance he could fix this…

Maybe there was a way he could tell Adam without really telling him? Maybe…

The vein at the side of his forehead throbbed painfully as he moved through the impossibilities and came up with nothing. He checked his watch. Out of time. He splashed his filled hands over his chin and nose once more, letting the water join the droplets of rain still dribbling down from his hair.

Consciously straightening his stance, he evaluated his appearance. His clothes were drenched, but all traces of blood had been washed away by the storm or melted into the black of his pants. He'd keep his jacket buttoned and pass any stiffness the others saw in his movements off on being cold from the rain.

He straightened his shirt collar, brushed gravel from his jacket, and practiced forcing a chagrined smile. Staring at his hands, he saw that raw scrapes marred both palms—the only injury he couldn't hide with clothing. It was workable, though. Easy. He would tell the others he tripped and then feign embarrassment. They'd harass him, but no way would they suspect the truth.

Rolling his hands one last time through the water, he remembered abruptly that his com-ring was still not on his finger. He had to get it back on. He'd meant only to buy time. Leave it off too long and—nothing would bring the troops faster. He stuffed his hands into his pockets, searching, and brought them out empty.

Oh no, he groaned.

"Adam, I've got it," said Jesse.

Adam leaned over Jesse's shoulder. Shalimar and Emma crowded in on the other side. "Looks to be near Coronado and Beck," said Shalimar.

Adam nodded shortly. "That's where Brennan was supposed to transfer the information."

"We'd better check it out. Adam, are you sure this Stanton guy is a friend?" Jesse turned from the computer consol, wanting to see the answer in Adam's face.

"An old friend. Yes. A good friend. I trust him as much as I've ever trusted anyone," he answered, but the shadows of doubt were cutting in at the corners of his eyes.

"Adam—" Jesse started to say.

"Let's go," said Adam. "Coronado and Beck." He turned, the tail of his black coat fluttering briefly with the motion. Trading looks with the girls, Jesse obeyed. And as the team headed for the Double Helix, Jesse wondered how one day could change so drastically and how it was that when things went wrong, they all seemed to go wrong all at the same time.

He better be okay, Jesse thought.

If he wasn't, Jesse was going to kill him.

tbc