Jude hangs thinly onto consciousness, one arm slung around the balustrade, another around Kala, who lowers him onto the cushions that Wolfgang has grabbed from the other end of the foyer. Wolfgang relieves her of the duffel bag that still hangs from her shoulder, places both his and hers by the other side of the stairs, and moves to stand against a metal hallway table, out of their way. He arches an eyebrow and exchanges glances with Kala, both noting the same thing.
Jude refuses to lie down: His arms prop him up to a sitting position, but they tremble under his weight, head lolling to his chest. He leans a little against the staircase. Kala puts fingers to the vein visibly throbbing on his neck; watches the secondhand tick by on an 80's-looking plastic clock mounted on a far wall as she counts his heartbeats. Jude's breathing is labored and there's a sheen of sweat that films his neck and torso. But as quickly as it happens, Kala watches Jude's face regain some color, losing some of its unnatural pallor, and feels his pulse returning to normal.
Riley hovers behind Kala, anxious. "He's been clean for over a year," she says, knowing immediately what Kala thinks, what Wolfgang suspects: Neither Kala nor Wolfgang miss the track marks that run along the veins on both of Jude's arms. "The people here were all users who finally got clean and support each other. I tried…" Her voice trails and finally silences, and Kala has fleeting, painful memories of Riley and Jude and choices made that bring her to London and keep him in India. It is intensely private and intimate and Kala's eyes drop momentarily from Jude's.
"I'd imagine that's especially hard in Goa," Kala says gently.
"He tried to help me." Riley reaches to cup his face, and it's Kala's hand that does so, traces his cheek and his bristled jaw. Jude looks up at her familiar touch in some confusion before his eyes - a vivid green that springs to life from Riley's memories - widen, lock with hers.
Kala's breath hitches and her mouth opens, but no sound comes. Her hand still cups his face, frozen, even as she hears Wolfgang asking what's wrong. Jude shifts his gaze, and she hears Wolfgang give a muttered curse. She almost laughs.
"Jude," she says quietly, awe and wonder in her voice, "you're one of us."
...
Most of them are uneasy. The Cluster, minus Will, converge on the foyer in the apartment in Anjuna, unsure of what it means, how to react, to encounter someone who's just been birthed. Capheus and Sun, Nomi and Lito, crowd the foyer, staring at Jude curiously. Riley sits on the stairs, her hand reaching between the wood spindles to touch Jude's hair. There's a wisp of a smile as she notices the difference since she'd last seen him.
Kala sits cross-legged on the floor, facing Jude; she looks up at Wolfgang, and the expression on his face is grim, wary, cautious. For him, making eye contact with someone of another cluster brings with it the threat of vulnerability, not a surge of curiosity, of camaraderie. Jude's eyes are closed as he tries to regain his equilibrium.
Nomi openly shares Wolfgang's worry.
"Well now you can visit with each other," she says tightly, almost sarcastically. She was never very sure of Jonas, and now Jonas is eerily silent, in an unknown BPO location, no longer in Iceland. His usefulness had proven inadequate to Whispers; and Nomi can't tell whether he's dead or alive, only that she can't reach him, and he hasn't tried to reach her.
And now, there's Jude. "If they know about him," she says, and no one asks who she means by "they", "he's not safe here either, and you guys certainly aren't. We need another safe house."
"His birth wasn't drug-induced," Riley insists. "I'm sure of it. They won't know about him."
"Unless he's had a parent already identified by BPO." Nomi looks over at Kala, who slumps a little, self conscious of her decision not to immediately tell everyone of her finding. "Kala came across a spreadsheet of test subjects from what's probably BPO files: Wolfgang's mother, Riley's mother were on that spreadsheet; Sara Patrell; Capheus's father. We don't know what the purpose of the data was for, but it goes back decades."
Capheus lets out an involuntary huff, his face still taut with emotion. There are circles under his eyes, and an edginess about his mouth. Riley glances at Kala, but says nothing: She had suspected the truth, given the questions Kala had asked her earlier, but she is oddly still, seemingly unmoved. Only her expressive hazel eyes let on that the news is painful; one more burden to carry with the others.
Lito and Sun react in surprise, ask to see the spreadsheet and look for names of other relatives. They both wonder if a generation was skipped, as neither had a parent pass away under suspicious circumstances. Well...Sun amends the statement, face like marble. They all know about her brother,Joon-ki.
Nomi hasn't had the time to hack into company computers, let alone dig into the information behind the spreadsheets and any connection to BPO: She's pressed to get Kala and Wolfgang out of India first. "As soon as we get them out of here, I'll get access to the data and keep digging for a connection between the companies: Find what they're trying to do."
"Kala thinks the information sent to Rajan's company is stolen," adds Wolfgang, and Jude looks up, his expression perplexed. "What?" he asks Kala, his voice hoarse.
It takes her a moment to realize he thinks Wolfgang is speaking to him: "There are people here, like us," says Kala quietly. "They're talking to us, and Wolfgang is talking to them"
Jude sits straighter as he looks around. He can sense the others' presence, even if he can't see them. He's not quite sure what's happening -or already happened. He only recognizes that something profound has occurred; that when he looked at Kala and Wolfgang, he could feel something- an innate sense of recognition. "What's going on?" he asks, anxious.
Kala looks at the others. "He needs to know," says Riley. Wolfgang gives a shrug of ambivalence.
"He needs to know," agrees Sun, watching Riley, "but not about us; not about who make up this Cluster. Even you, Riley."
"What difference does it make?" Riley asks. "We're not in any more danger if he knows that he can reach out to others like him. To me. This -" She gestures at all of them. "What we are isn't so scary if he knows I'm like him, too. BPO already knows about me."
"They know about you: If they get Jude, they will know for certain about Kala; they'll learn that Wolfgang is alive." Sun is implacable.
Nomi rubs her temples in weariness. "Let's just leave it for now. Please. We can always say something later. We can't unsay something."
There's agreement among the others.
Kala takes a breath, and for the second time in three days, she explains what they are: about the psycellium that connect each cluster or clan; about visiting and sharing and the differences between them; about BPO and DMT and the danger they all face. Kala keeps her explanations general.
She isn't met with any skepticism or doubt: Jude is full of questions, accepting her answers as if her words are scientific law: How soon before he meets his cluster? How many people make up his? Will they appear only if they're needed? How do you control that? She answers as best as she can, but admits she's new to this herself.
"Ask him about the drugs," says Nomi evenly. "We need to know if the DMT was sold out here."
Kala asks if he'd taken any drugs recently. Jude shakes his head, emphatic: No. Not even for the migraine. Not in years. Has he ever heard of DMT? Yes. Is it sold here? In Goa? He looks at Kala with faint amusement. You can get anything here. There's a groan from Nomi and Riley. Who sells it? Jude shrugs. He expects the usual crowd. The Russians have been around for the last 10 years. The Cluster look at Wolfgang who shrugs again; the Bogdanows never moved operations farther east than Poland, to his knowledge. But he doesn't deny it could be associates of theirs- or of Viktor's.
But if Jude didn't take any DMT, did he have a vision, yesterday? Today? Just before the migraine came? He hesitates, looks at Kala with a mixture of relief and suspicion: Yes. A woman. Young. Black. He saw her yesterday afternoon, just as he was coming back from the beach with friends. She was very pretty, and he noticed her watching him, but his friends didn't see her, and when he looked back, she was gone. Did she look hurt? He's puzzled by the question, but shakes his head. No. She looked fine, very much unharmed;curious, real. Alive.
This last draws a collective ripple of surprise: No one knows how a sensate birth, not arising from a suicide, is supposed to work.
But it's one in the morning, and Kala looks on the verge of collapse.
"We need rest," Wolfgang announces abruptly. She blinks back at him as if trying to focus.
"Jaaneman," she protests, "I'm fine. We need to know, while everything is fresh in his memory-"
"He can do with some rest, too."
Kala looks at Jude, notices the shadows under his eyes, the trace of residual pain and weakness; it's clear he's tired as well. Kala gives a reluctant nod. "Yes. We can continue this tomorrow." She looks at the others, and there's mutual agreement. They're all gone, even Riley, before she even finishes her sentence.
Kala gets up stiffly but offers her hand to Jude; he takes it gratefully, releases it once he's standing. "All the bedrooms are upstairs," he says. "I'll show you yours." He pauses for a moment, looks from one to the other. "I'm sorry: One room, yes?"
"Yes." Wolfgang grabs both their bags and trails behind Kala and Jude.
They're shown to the first of four bedrooms. The room is average size, empty, except for a chest of drawers along one wall, a small nightstand with an iron lamp on top, and a simple bed just big enough to accommodate both Kala and himself. Wolfgang puts the duffels beside the nightstand. Jude gestures to the drawers: "There's clean sheets in there, somewhere," he says before excusing himself, wishing them a good evening and closing the door behind him
Wolfgang takes his smartphone and charger from his duffle, sets them up on the nightstand. He's already taken off his shirt and unbuttoning his jeans before he realizes that Kala is opening and closing the drawers, looking for the clean sheets, finally finding them in the bottom. He gives a resigned sigh before he strips the bed, helps her put the new sheets on. She smiles gratefully at him; he smiles ruefully back.
They're asleep less than 10 minutes later.
...
They wake up from the unfiltered brilliance of the sun streaming through their window at precisely 7 in the morning, the humidity already making their skin tacky. Wolfgang presses a kiss against Kala's nape. She gives a small yawn, turns in his arms to face him. They kiss languidly, deeply, as they always do on the rare occasion when they wake together, since Kala favors the early morning and Wolfgang does not. But this morning, they both slow down, pull away from each other with mutual reluctance. There's much to do if it turns out that Goa isn't safe for Jude, either.
They find him in the kitchen, eating what looks to be smoked salmon on a piece of bread. There's a plate with more that he gestures is for them as he finishes chewing. Wolfgang helps himself; Kala declines but takes a proffered bowl of sliced mangos.
"Good morning," he says. Jude doesn't look like he bothered changing after yesterday's ordeal: He's still shirtless, wearing the white dhoti, but in the daylight Kala notices a thin pale line of recently stitched skin along his lower rib cage. Her eyes glide over his well-defined torso, tanned by years under the blistering Indian sun, making the pale scar along his abs more visible. She catches Wolfgang's eyes, and he's looking singularly unamused by what she thought had been a discreet observation.
She can't bring herself to even smile at Wolfgang's reaction.
"Were you recently at a hospital to treat that?" she asks, pointing to the scar.
He glances down, fingers the stitching. "No," he says. "I got jumped a little over a week ago coming from a party I was working. My flatmate took care of it. She's handy with wounds." Jude grimaces.
Kala breathes a sigh of relief. "You can never go to a hospital for treatment," she says. "They'll find you."
They spend the next half hour talking about the other way BPO finds sensates: monitoring and tracking patient intake records, looking for signs of psycellium. The sheer logistics of that method are overwhelming, yet BPO manage to find target patients within days of reporting. Kala can still feel Nomi and Riley's panic.
Wolfgang asks if Jude's parents are both alive, and he shakes his head: Jude was raised by an aunt and his grandmother. Both parents died when Jude was much younger.
They talk for several minutes, maybe an hour, learning more of Jude's background, recognizing certain patterns common to all of them, when Wolfgang's phone vibrates. Wolfgang retrieves it from the pocket of his shorts.
"Dobroye utro." Good morning.
"Dobroye utro."
Jude stiffens, suddenly on edge, shakes his head. Kala puts a hand to his forearm, frowns. "It's ok," she assures him, as Wolfgang carries on a conversation in Russian with Yeruslan. She hopes Jude understands nothing of the language: Wolfgang mentions Felix's pistol. But even as she feels her own anxiety rise, Jude looks past Wolfgang and then back to Kala.
"Who's that?" he whispers.
Kala turns and sees no one. "Is someone there?" she asks calmly. Jude nods. "Is it the woman you saw a few days ago?" He shakes his head, eyes widening. "Then...that person is probably a member of your clan, one of your cluster."
A/N: Updates are more sporadic as Real Life gets a little busier. (Although tbh, the awesome pics posted from Season 2 filming have been a welcome distraction! ) Thank you for your patience.
Thanks for reading, and as always, reviews are much appreciated!
