Chapter Twelve:
Green Eyes
Logan frowned down at Max's sleeping form. "Are you sure she's okay?" he asked Jondy for the fifth time in as many minutes.
"Yeah, she's okay, just tired, that's all." She reached down to push a strand of hair from her sister's face, and Logan experienced an unexpected stab of jealousy. He'd been watching Max sleep, and he wished he could have done that himself. Jondy looked up at him from her place on the sofa. "I know what you're thinking. 'What a time to fall asleep,' huh?" He frowned.
"To be honest, I'm just worried about her." Ten minutes earlier, Max had lay down on the sofa, saying that she was feeling a bit tired. Thirty seconds later she's been out like a light.
"Don't worry. She'll be all right. Look at her. The color's already starting to come back into her cheeks." Glancing down, Logan had to admit that it was true. Max did look a little better. He looked up as a door opened and closed in the distance and Alec entered the room.
"You don't knock either, I see," Jondy observed, glancing over at their newest visitor. "So, what did you come up with?" She watched as he rubbed the back of his neck nervously.
"Well, I followed them around Sector Seven for a while." He paused, as if trying to avoid the subject. "Hey, how's Max?"
"She's fine. Where'd they go?"
"Oh, they wandered around, down a few alleys, cut across a few vacant lots, through a few empty buildings . . . "
"And . . ." Jondy prompted.
"And I sort of . . . lost them . . . near the cutoff by Sector Eleven . . . "
Jondy rolled her eyes. "You lost them? Great." She sighed, glancing over at Logan and then down towards Max again.
"Well, if it's any comfort, I don't think he remembers anything. I overheard him saying that he recognized some things and that he must have been in Seattle before, only he couldn't remember."
Jondy frowned. "I wonder if that'll buy us enough time before he remembers, and what do we do? Get him out of Seattle? Find him and explain? It's all going to come back, no matter what we do, especially now that he's back in town."
"Did you find anything out about the transgenics he was with?" Logan asked.
"Not really. It was weird. They were fast enough and strong enough to be X-series, but I couldn't see any barcodes. They must have had them removed." Jondy's eyes jerked upwards to meet Logan's.
"Asha said there were four others, two men and two women," Jondy thought aloud. Could it be . . . "Do you remember anything about them at all? What did they look like? Were there any details that struck you? Like their clothes? Or their speech? Anything?"
"Well, I didn't get a good look at the one girl, but the other one was cute." He grinned. Jondy rolled her eyes.
"What about the guys?"
"Why would I look at the guys?" he asked. Jondy decided that Max was right. He was the most annoying person on the face of the earth. She glared at him. "Alright, alright. Nothing really struck me as odd, but I did catch one of their names. The girl I couldn't see called one of the men 'Seryozha' . . . or something like that." Jondy glanced over at Logan.
"That's Russian, isn't it? Ever read Anna Karenina? Her son's name is Sergei, but she calls him Seryozha." She took a deep breath as the full implication of what she'd just said kicked in. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" But the expression on Logan's face showed that he was already thinking it.
"They also called Zack by his name."
"Which means that he knows who he is, or at least remembers some things. Do you think they know who he is?" she asked Logan.
"Hold on, hold on, mind filling me in on who 'they' are?" Alec asked, surprised to realize that he was actually keeping his voice down on account of Max, who was still sound asleep. The sound of a toilet flushing in Logan's bathroom reached his ears, but he paid it no mind. Asha must still be around.
"That's what we're trying to find out," Jondy said as her eyes caught Milly making her way from the bathroom. Alec caught sight of the cat too, as well as the direction from which she had come.
"Did that cat just . . . " Jondy couldn't help but laugh as Milly padded across the room to sniff at Alec's shoe.
"She's toilet-trained, don't worry." She chuckled to herself as Milly began to butt her head against Alec's leg. He took a step back, put off guard by the cat's unexpected affection, but Milly merely followed him and began to lavish similar attentions upon his other leg.
"What the hell is its problem?" He looked at the cat as if she were the plague. Jondy couldn't help but burst out laughing at the sight, though she quickly quieted herself for fear of waking Max.
"You're male. Milly loves anything male." She chuckled again as Milly sat back to gaze up at Alec with longing eyes. "From the looks of it, I think she's quite taken with you. You may be the one and only love of her life," she joked. Alec seemed to ponder this for a moment.
"She's not going to try to hump my leg or anything, is she?"
"No, nothing like that. Just pet her, humor her. She'll be fine." Jondy sobered. "But back to the issue at hand. Have you ever heard mention of something called 'Project 44?'"
Outside the penthouse window, thirty stories above the street below, a shadow fell across the windowpane before moving away. No one within the apartment was aware of its existence, but the shadow listened to the conversation within, eavesdropping in secret as Logan retold the story of her own life.
Sighing, Katya looked over the sleeping forms around her. It was Misha's turn to keep watch, but she'd told him to rest. She couldn't sleep anyway, so there was no sense in them both being awake. Glancing down to her left she watched Zack sleep. He looked so peaceful, so innocent. She reached a hand down to brush his cheek, but stopped herself at the last minute. She didn't want to risk waking him.
When she had returned an hour earlier, she'd discovered that her brothers had given Zack a brief explanation of their identities, probably with the hopes of jogging his own memories, but it didn't seem to have helped, and now she knew that she faced a decision. Out there in a penthouse in Sector Nine was part of Zack's group, part of his family, and from what little of the conversation she'd heard, they were looking for him.
So why didn't she want to give him up?
She'd caught a glimpse of 210's barcode. No, she corrected herself, Jondy. There had been another X5 in the room, one who hadn't been part of the original escape, so he must have made it out when Manticore had been destroyed a few months earlier. He was the one who had tried to follow them, but he had ended up being followed himself. And there had been a third, one on the sofa that she couldn't see, but she could smell her easily. X5-452. Max. She hadn't needed to see her to know immediately who she was.
Reaching down to Zack's face, she gave in to the urge to brush a strand of hair away from his forehead. There it was again, that feeling that she got every time she looked at him, the feeling that her insides were being turned inside out, the feeling that she could fly. She wasn't so naïve that she didn't recognize it, but it was a dangerous thing to feel. How long have you known him? she chastised herself, you can't be in love with him, you little fool. But somehow she knew that she was already three-fourths of the way there, and that's why she was afraid. Here, in their own little world, she could keep him by her side and never fear giving him up, but she was afraid of the day that he would remember, because that would be the day she would lose him.
Sighing she looked back towards Sergei and Mikhail, then over toward Tanya. They were his family, just as this was hers, and they loved him. If it were Misha or Seryozha who was missing she would want to know that they had been found, that they were okay, and so there was only one thing to do. Leaning over, she woke Misha, signing quietly to him so as not to wake the others, then, pulling the hood of her jacket up over her head, she disappeared into the night.
It was long past midnight, but Logan couldn't sleep. He didn't know if his life was in danger, and even the fact that he had three transgenic bodyguards hanging around his penthouse didn't ease the worry.
Sighing, he rubbed a hand over his weary face and glanced up at his computer screen. An hour ago he had finally heard from Buddy, who'd been afraid to contact him because there had still been soldiers combing the ranch for every last detail. Now he had the official word. According to Buddy, Zack, who'd still thought of himself as Adam at the time, had left the ranch with two women and two men. At least one of the women had seemed to know who he really was. What's more, Buddy had watched them fight off a group of soldiers with his own eyes, and now it seemed that Zack was in Seattle, and he just didn't know how best to handle the situation.
He could hear Alec and Jondy talking in the next room, and Max was still asleep on the sofa. Is there some way to bring back Zack's memory without the memories of what they did to him at Manticore? he wondered. Can we make him realize that he was brainwashed and convince him that killing Eyes Only isn't what he really wants to do? For the life of him, Logan didn't have a clue, and it wasn't exactly his decision. As soon as Max woke up, he'd be sure to ask her and her sister what was best. He was their brother, after all.
It was at that very moment that he heard it, the sound that he noticed only because he'd become so accustomed to listening for it. Max's soft footsteps tread the floor behind him, and he turned to look at her, glad to know that she was up and about and feeling better, but something wasn't quite right.
Several things ran through Logan's mind as his eyes fell on the woman before him. He knew the outline of her face by heart, but Max hadn't been wearing black when she'd come to his apartment this evening, and her hair hadn't been concealed beneath the hood of a jacket. But the thing that struck him most was the fact that the eyes that stared out at him from Max's face were green.
