Chapter 6
The ship seemed foreboding this time, dark and silent, as if warning them
from what they were about to undertake.
A short time ago she had stated her resolve to do what it took to stop a
return visit from Sara; now she wished she had stuck with her first
impression. She should have stayed out. "Adam?" Lisa began, nervous.
In response to her unasked question, Adam grabbed her hand and gave it a
light squeeze. "It's okay," he said. "You're not alone."
No, Lisa thought, that was the whole problem. She gripped Adam's hand
harder. "What do I do?"
He led her to one of the seats suspended like a see-saw from the central
column. She touched it, letting her fingers drift over the cool metal, feeling
the force that flowed within in. This chair, as did the ship and everything
that belonged to it, pulsed. Its energy source was something more than
electricity. It had life. Just sitting in that seat would further connect her to
the ship than she had ever been before. Even those many years ago when
the ship had reached into her mind and body and brought her back from
the brink of a drowning death -- even then she hadn't had to surrender
herself as she was about to do.
She looked to Adam again, trusting him to guide her. His brown eyes held
only understanding as he waited for her to finish her explorations, to make
her own peace with the ship. "It's okay," he repeated.
Lisa believed him, even though a part of her was busy informing her that it
was way too late for okay. She lowered herself into the seat, on guard
against the moment when the ship would creep into her mind and take it
from her.
"Relax." she heard Adam whisper. Then she was flying towards the
ceiling, stomach dropping away behind her. She opened her eyes and
looked down. Her feet were dangling in the air meters off the floor, where
she could see footprints echoed in the sand. Adam wasn't there.
She fought down a moment of panic and twisted around, scanning the
interior of the ship. There, on the other side of the column, Adam was
climbing into the counter-balance seat. He settled himself, his body
looking relaxed and comfortable. Of course, Lisa realized, he'd done this
many times before. Sharing his thoughts with the ship was something he'd
done more freely than sharing them with his human companions.
Just as suddenly as her seat had raised, it began to lower. She straightened
herself up, conscious of the lack of seat belts or other safety restraints.
Soon the seats settled into a gentle see-saw motion, up and down. It was
impossible not to give herself up to the slow swinging, especially since she
hadn't been sleeping well. She let her eyes close, felt her breathing slow.
Lisa became aware of a presence in her mind which she recognized as the
ship. All predictions to the contrary, there was nothing cold or alien about
it. She pushed and felt it give. It understood her concerns, would stay only
as long as she allowed it. She pushed harder, looking for the part that
belonged to Adam.
[I'm here.] She heard.
[Good,] she answered sincerely, before looking around.
The ship had taken the two past mind merge to another place entirely: the
place Lisa had been in her dreams the previous nights. It was as gray and
ill-defined as before, lacking even the door. Adam was nowhere to be
seen, although she could still feel him in the back of her mind. Knowing
he was there lent her confidence.
The breath she meant to spend in a sigh of relief caught in her throat as
Sara materialized inches away.
"Are you going to make it stop, Lisa?" Sara asked. She stood stiffly, drawn
in on herself.
"I don't know," Lisa answered, honestly. She had no idea what they were
here to do. If Adam knew, as she suspected he did, he wasn't telling. They
had worked out that they needed to do a mind-trawl -- although how that
was different from a mind merge, she also didn't know. The rest was still
to be seen. "We're going to try."
"You came back," Sara said, with a nod of finality. "You can make it
stop."
"Lisa," came Adam's voice. The girls turned as a unit towards the door. It
was open, Adam framed in the doorway. There was a tenseness in his
stance that Lisa could only attribute to anger, an emotion she couldn't
recall seeing on Adam before.
"What is it?" Lisa asked. She felt awareness of the ship's presence awaken
in her mind; with it, a stronger awareness of Adam. Her judgement had
been sound, as had his. She should have stayed out, and the ship hadn't
wanted them to leave this alone. With its help, they would be able to safely
cross that threshold, as Adam had just demonstrated by coming through
the other side.
"You can't," Sara whispered, crossing her arms over her chest. "That's not
an exit." Then, true to form, she flashed out of existence.
Adam didn't even blink. "I think you should see this," he said.
****
Grimm found his daughter staring in the full length mirror mounted inside
his closet door. It was a relic of a time when he'd had the storybook family.
Before his wife left for greener pastures, and his daughters went missing,
each in their own way. There were as many memories associated with that
piece of glass as with the wedding band he still wore, and it was one of the
few things that still interested Sara. She returned to it time and again, with
an uncanny stubbornness. He could usually find her eyeing her reflection
for what he could only imagine were signs of betrayal.
He set a loose pile of ungraded research papers on his bed and sat down
next to it to wait. Although he seemed to be doing a lot of waiting
recently, it never seemed anything other than natural. She was all he had.
Sara's hands were pressed against the glass, the weight of her body
pushing the door against the bedroom wall. He couldn't tell if she was
looking at her reflection, the reflection of the room, or something else
entirely.
"What do you see?" he asked her. He knew that her answer, if she
answered, wouldn't clarify anything. In his imagination, he could hear her
aimless comment about the ocean that he'd already heard so many times.
He was still watching her some while later, with the same fascination with
which a parent watches a sleeping child, when she stiffened suddenly, her
fingers clenching against the mirror as though seeking to claw through it.
Rising to his feet, Grimm stepped towards her, ready to catch her and pin
her arms if necessary to keep her from causing damage to herself.
Although he knew she'd struggle against him, fighting him for every
moment of contact he forced upon her, he knew there was nothing else he
could do. There was no compromising about his child's safety, even if she
wouldn't recognize the efforts for what they were.
"You can't," he heard her say, as if she knew what he was prepared to do.
"That's not . . . ." her voice trailed off and the last part came out
unintelligible. Grimm's breath caught in this throat, and he found himself
unable to move; for a few seconds, his daughter had sounded like her old
self.
It was enough for him to ask, "That's not what?" before it occurred to him
that she'd no more answer that question than any of the hundreds of others
he'd asked over the last few months.
"Lisa? Adam?" she called into the mirror.
Who? he thought, checking his knowledge of his daughters' former friends
for anyone with either of those names. Despite their commonality, he
could come up with no matches. The twins had always been gregarious
children, counting friends in numbers he couldn't comprehend. But he was
confident that he knew, or at least knew of, all the ones who were more
than classroom acquaintances. Since Clara's disappearance, the friend's
numbers had dwindled to nothing. He couldn't blame them. Still, it made
him wonder all the more to who those two names she was calling
belonged.
"Lisa?" she said again, continuing to claw at the glass. Her efforts were
having no effect except to leave finger streaks on the surface.
Nevertheless, Grimm found himself wanting to help her tear through the
reflection, actually believing it possible for a moment. Just when he was
about to break his immobility to help her, she released a shuddering
breath, sank to the floor, and curled into a tight ball.
Any moment of lucidity she'd found slipped away and she started to rock.
****
Lisa hesitated for a moment. She had come this far already against her
better judgment; her curiosity wouldn't allow her to turn away now. She
stepped towards the door.
Although nothing moved, while she had been standing some distance
away, now she was crossing that threshold that had so occupied her
thoughts for the past forty-eight hours.
She wasn't even granted a chance to gain her bearings.
"What would be enough?" a boy shouted. "Tell me."
In front of their eyes, Lisa and Adam watched a scene unfold; the
participants coalescing out of the gray in the same way as Sara had
appeared and disappeared. The one shouting was the Hispanic youth
whom Lisa had seen before. He held a glossy booklet of some sort in his
hand, brandishing it at an unseen audience.
"I get good grades. I stay out of trouble. Ay, but that's not enough for mis
padres." He paused as though listening to a response, then shook his head
vehemently. "Si, this es my son the doctor," he said, mocking. He spoke
with a Mexican accent, his words seeming to be a random mix of Spanish
and English. "This," he added, jabbing himself in the chest, "es your son
the actor. That will have to be enough."
"I dunno," another male voice said, the words overlapping but independent
of the first speaker. "Just . . . don't feel like it." Lisa turned to see a young
red-head leaning bonelessly against the air, as if against an invisible wall.
He had the kind of round, open face about which one always seemed to
assume perpetual happiness. Except he was looking at his non-present
conversation partner through half-lidded eyes, his mouth sculpted in
frown, his shoulders slumped, hands shoved in the pockets of his high
school letter jacket. Stitched across the right breast was the name 'Eric'.
"Yeah, I know that," the youth continued. His words sounded like a
protest, but his tone didn't change. "Why can't you just leave me alone?"
Despite his countenance, there was nothing happy about this youth, and
Lisa sensed that everyone except him knew it.
She turned again towards a touch on her arm, and saw Adam pointing at
another scene, already in progress. A young girl, just entering the peak of
her adolescence, sat on the air, in the same way as the redhead had leaned
against an invisible wall. A black seat belt strap contrasted against the
light blue baby-doll shirt the girl wore; the strap began in nothing and
buckled into nothing, and was visible only where it touched her.
"That looks like Sara," Lisa whispered to Adam. He put a finger to his lips
and gestured for her to keep watching.
"Dad, I'm not making it up," she protested. She twisted in her seat to look
at someone to her left. "She just disappeared. She just broke the seal on
her test with her pencil, which is silly if you think about it cuz what if the
pencil breaks while you're doing that, and then you have to use your
second pencil and that breaks right away, and then what are you supposed
to do? So she broke the seal and opened the test booklet like we were
instructed, then poof! All gone. The sound wasn't a poof, really, but I don't
know how to make it. It was cool."
She listened to the silence respond, then shook her head to the negative.
"Nuh-uh. How am I supposed to know where she is?" Another pause while
the occupant of the driver's seat spoke back. Sara started to lean back in
the seat, then stiffened, sitting bolt upright. She turned again to the driver
and spoke. Her voice was clear and high; her words were enunciated and
happy. "I can hear the ocean," she said.
Then she collapsed, as if gravity had just become too much of a challenge.
The muscles in her face slackened, her eyes dulled and lost focus, her body
seemed to shrink. She sank against the seat, propped into place by the car
door and the seat-belt.
"That was . . . interesting," Lisa said. She found herself leaning towards
the scene, like trying to watch a show on television with bad reception.
With conscious effort she pulled back, putting distance between herself
and the scenario that was playing again from the beginning. "'I can hear the
ocean'," she quoted. "I wonder what that was all about."
"The ocean?" Adam repeated. "That's Sara?" He sounded as though he
were struggling to remember something very important. "She was . . .
there was . . . something . . . ." He shook his head.
"There was what?" Lisa asked. "You knew this was big; that's why you
made me come here. Why? What's so important about these three people?"
Adam shook his head again. "I don't know. I --"
"I have to leave," Adam was saying, but it was a different Adam. He
looked several years younger, several years less mature. His hair was long,
like it had been when Lisa first met the Australian, pulled back in a pony
tail. "I . . ." he closed his eyes, an internal struggle visible on the lines of
his face. "I'm sorry . . . I didn't want things to end like this."
There was that interminable silence; the one of the other person or persons
responding. The silence was almost palpable; even the other voices had
ceased as if out of respect for this moment. The response was brief, though
it seemed too long.
The other Adam's voice dropped to a hoarse whisper, heavy with emotion.
"I didn't want things to end."
More of that silence, except it wasn't. In the background was a sound, too
far away to hear. Lisa felt it in the very back of her head, where sounds on
the cusp of human hearing could sometimes be sensed. The other person
was responding. If only she could hear them.
Lisa turned to look at her Adam just as the younger one started to speak. If
she had had any doubts about the vision, they disappeared as she watched
the elder mouthe the words along with the younger, "I didn't understand. I
know it's too late to apologize, but I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
"So you did exist before you broke out." The words were out of Lisa's
mouth before she could stop them. She spoke while looking back and forth
between the two Adams, comparing them. The weight of leadership wasn't
evident on the younger, but he wasn't without responsibility, as evidenced
by the scene playing out.
Only when the elder tore his eyes from his younger-self and looked at her
did she realize how callous she had sounded. "Oh, I didn't mean --"
"It's okay," Adam said, though he clearly wasn't okay with a piece of his
past being laid bare. "Let's get out of here."
"Who were you saying good bye to?" Lisa asked, not moving from her
spot.
Adam didn't respond, instead oddly mimicking his younger self, eyes
closed, hands locked together. His throat worked in a swallow, then
another, as if he were fighting back tears.
"Did you love her?" she continued, taking a wild guess at the missing
person.
"It doesn't matter anymore," Adam finally said.
"Adam," Lisa said, putting a hand on his shoulder, for the first time
initiating physical contact with him. "I know it's a lot, being a Tomorrow
Person. I do know, and I think I'm starting to understand what you mean
about not being able to go back. But I learned something important when I
busy ignoring you." It was her turn to find strength behind closed eyes, and
when she met his sable gaze with her own, she couldn't help smiling as she
gave advice to the advisor. "Sometimes, you have to be human too."
"I am human."
"No," she contradicted. "You're the leader of the Tomorrow People. You're
the first of a potential next stage in human evolution. You're a shoulder to
cry on and the person we turn to when we need help. You live in a tent on
an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, for crying out loud.
"But when was the last time you were Adam Newman? *Just* Adam
Newman?"
Adam broke their tenuous contact to look again at his younger self, still
caught in the act of saying good bye. Like the others, the Hispanic, the red
head, and the girl, Adam's scene was playing continuously, all of them
overlapping one another.
"That's what I thought," Lisa continued. "You expect us to trust you
implicitly, and we do. But you don't have to be strong all the time. We
need to be able to confide in you, but we also need you to be able to
confide in us. We're a team."
"You left the team, Lisa," Adam quietly reminded her.
Lisa sighed. "That's what I thought, too."
The ship seemed foreboding this time, dark and silent, as if warning them
from what they were about to undertake.
A short time ago she had stated her resolve to do what it took to stop a
return visit from Sara; now she wished she had stuck with her first
impression. She should have stayed out. "Adam?" Lisa began, nervous.
In response to her unasked question, Adam grabbed her hand and gave it a
light squeeze. "It's okay," he said. "You're not alone."
No, Lisa thought, that was the whole problem. She gripped Adam's hand
harder. "What do I do?"
He led her to one of the seats suspended like a see-saw from the central
column. She touched it, letting her fingers drift over the cool metal, feeling
the force that flowed within in. This chair, as did the ship and everything
that belonged to it, pulsed. Its energy source was something more than
electricity. It had life. Just sitting in that seat would further connect her to
the ship than she had ever been before. Even those many years ago when
the ship had reached into her mind and body and brought her back from
the brink of a drowning death -- even then she hadn't had to surrender
herself as she was about to do.
She looked to Adam again, trusting him to guide her. His brown eyes held
only understanding as he waited for her to finish her explorations, to make
her own peace with the ship. "It's okay," he repeated.
Lisa believed him, even though a part of her was busy informing her that it
was way too late for okay. She lowered herself into the seat, on guard
against the moment when the ship would creep into her mind and take it
from her.
"Relax." she heard Adam whisper. Then she was flying towards the
ceiling, stomach dropping away behind her. She opened her eyes and
looked down. Her feet were dangling in the air meters off the floor, where
she could see footprints echoed in the sand. Adam wasn't there.
She fought down a moment of panic and twisted around, scanning the
interior of the ship. There, on the other side of the column, Adam was
climbing into the counter-balance seat. He settled himself, his body
looking relaxed and comfortable. Of course, Lisa realized, he'd done this
many times before. Sharing his thoughts with the ship was something he'd
done more freely than sharing them with his human companions.
Just as suddenly as her seat had raised, it began to lower. She straightened
herself up, conscious of the lack of seat belts or other safety restraints.
Soon the seats settled into a gentle see-saw motion, up and down. It was
impossible not to give herself up to the slow swinging, especially since she
hadn't been sleeping well. She let her eyes close, felt her breathing slow.
Lisa became aware of a presence in her mind which she recognized as the
ship. All predictions to the contrary, there was nothing cold or alien about
it. She pushed and felt it give. It understood her concerns, would stay only
as long as she allowed it. She pushed harder, looking for the part that
belonged to Adam.
[I'm here.] She heard.
[Good,] she answered sincerely, before looking around.
The ship had taken the two past mind merge to another place entirely: the
place Lisa had been in her dreams the previous nights. It was as gray and
ill-defined as before, lacking even the door. Adam was nowhere to be
seen, although she could still feel him in the back of her mind. Knowing
he was there lent her confidence.
The breath she meant to spend in a sigh of relief caught in her throat as
Sara materialized inches away.
"Are you going to make it stop, Lisa?" Sara asked. She stood stiffly, drawn
in on herself.
"I don't know," Lisa answered, honestly. She had no idea what they were
here to do. If Adam knew, as she suspected he did, he wasn't telling. They
had worked out that they needed to do a mind-trawl -- although how that
was different from a mind merge, she also didn't know. The rest was still
to be seen. "We're going to try."
"You came back," Sara said, with a nod of finality. "You can make it
stop."
"Lisa," came Adam's voice. The girls turned as a unit towards the door. It
was open, Adam framed in the doorway. There was a tenseness in his
stance that Lisa could only attribute to anger, an emotion she couldn't
recall seeing on Adam before.
"What is it?" Lisa asked. She felt awareness of the ship's presence awaken
in her mind; with it, a stronger awareness of Adam. Her judgement had
been sound, as had his. She should have stayed out, and the ship hadn't
wanted them to leave this alone. With its help, they would be able to safely
cross that threshold, as Adam had just demonstrated by coming through
the other side.
"You can't," Sara whispered, crossing her arms over her chest. "That's not
an exit." Then, true to form, she flashed out of existence.
Adam didn't even blink. "I think you should see this," he said.
****
Grimm found his daughter staring in the full length mirror mounted inside
his closet door. It was a relic of a time when he'd had the storybook family.
Before his wife left for greener pastures, and his daughters went missing,
each in their own way. There were as many memories associated with that
piece of glass as with the wedding band he still wore, and it was one of the
few things that still interested Sara. She returned to it time and again, with
an uncanny stubbornness. He could usually find her eyeing her reflection
for what he could only imagine were signs of betrayal.
He set a loose pile of ungraded research papers on his bed and sat down
next to it to wait. Although he seemed to be doing a lot of waiting
recently, it never seemed anything other than natural. She was all he had.
Sara's hands were pressed against the glass, the weight of her body
pushing the door against the bedroom wall. He couldn't tell if she was
looking at her reflection, the reflection of the room, or something else
entirely.
"What do you see?" he asked her. He knew that her answer, if she
answered, wouldn't clarify anything. In his imagination, he could hear her
aimless comment about the ocean that he'd already heard so many times.
He was still watching her some while later, with the same fascination with
which a parent watches a sleeping child, when she stiffened suddenly, her
fingers clenching against the mirror as though seeking to claw through it.
Rising to his feet, Grimm stepped towards her, ready to catch her and pin
her arms if necessary to keep her from causing damage to herself.
Although he knew she'd struggle against him, fighting him for every
moment of contact he forced upon her, he knew there was nothing else he
could do. There was no compromising about his child's safety, even if she
wouldn't recognize the efforts for what they were.
"You can't," he heard her say, as if she knew what he was prepared to do.
"That's not . . . ." her voice trailed off and the last part came out
unintelligible. Grimm's breath caught in this throat, and he found himself
unable to move; for a few seconds, his daughter had sounded like her old
self.
It was enough for him to ask, "That's not what?" before it occurred to him
that she'd no more answer that question than any of the hundreds of others
he'd asked over the last few months.
"Lisa? Adam?" she called into the mirror.
Who? he thought, checking his knowledge of his daughters' former friends
for anyone with either of those names. Despite their commonality, he
could come up with no matches. The twins had always been gregarious
children, counting friends in numbers he couldn't comprehend. But he was
confident that he knew, or at least knew of, all the ones who were more
than classroom acquaintances. Since Clara's disappearance, the friend's
numbers had dwindled to nothing. He couldn't blame them. Still, it made
him wonder all the more to who those two names she was calling
belonged.
"Lisa?" she said again, continuing to claw at the glass. Her efforts were
having no effect except to leave finger streaks on the surface.
Nevertheless, Grimm found himself wanting to help her tear through the
reflection, actually believing it possible for a moment. Just when he was
about to break his immobility to help her, she released a shuddering
breath, sank to the floor, and curled into a tight ball.
Any moment of lucidity she'd found slipped away and she started to rock.
****
Lisa hesitated for a moment. She had come this far already against her
better judgment; her curiosity wouldn't allow her to turn away now. She
stepped towards the door.
Although nothing moved, while she had been standing some distance
away, now she was crossing that threshold that had so occupied her
thoughts for the past forty-eight hours.
She wasn't even granted a chance to gain her bearings.
"What would be enough?" a boy shouted. "Tell me."
In front of their eyes, Lisa and Adam watched a scene unfold; the
participants coalescing out of the gray in the same way as Sara had
appeared and disappeared. The one shouting was the Hispanic youth
whom Lisa had seen before. He held a glossy booklet of some sort in his
hand, brandishing it at an unseen audience.
"I get good grades. I stay out of trouble. Ay, but that's not enough for mis
padres." He paused as though listening to a response, then shook his head
vehemently. "Si, this es my son the doctor," he said, mocking. He spoke
with a Mexican accent, his words seeming to be a random mix of Spanish
and English. "This," he added, jabbing himself in the chest, "es your son
the actor. That will have to be enough."
"I dunno," another male voice said, the words overlapping but independent
of the first speaker. "Just . . . don't feel like it." Lisa turned to see a young
red-head leaning bonelessly against the air, as if against an invisible wall.
He had the kind of round, open face about which one always seemed to
assume perpetual happiness. Except he was looking at his non-present
conversation partner through half-lidded eyes, his mouth sculpted in
frown, his shoulders slumped, hands shoved in the pockets of his high
school letter jacket. Stitched across the right breast was the name 'Eric'.
"Yeah, I know that," the youth continued. His words sounded like a
protest, but his tone didn't change. "Why can't you just leave me alone?"
Despite his countenance, there was nothing happy about this youth, and
Lisa sensed that everyone except him knew it.
She turned again towards a touch on her arm, and saw Adam pointing at
another scene, already in progress. A young girl, just entering the peak of
her adolescence, sat on the air, in the same way as the redhead had leaned
against an invisible wall. A black seat belt strap contrasted against the
light blue baby-doll shirt the girl wore; the strap began in nothing and
buckled into nothing, and was visible only where it touched her.
"That looks like Sara," Lisa whispered to Adam. He put a finger to his lips
and gestured for her to keep watching.
"Dad, I'm not making it up," she protested. She twisted in her seat to look
at someone to her left. "She just disappeared. She just broke the seal on
her test with her pencil, which is silly if you think about it cuz what if the
pencil breaks while you're doing that, and then you have to use your
second pencil and that breaks right away, and then what are you supposed
to do? So she broke the seal and opened the test booklet like we were
instructed, then poof! All gone. The sound wasn't a poof, really, but I don't
know how to make it. It was cool."
She listened to the silence respond, then shook her head to the negative.
"Nuh-uh. How am I supposed to know where she is?" Another pause while
the occupant of the driver's seat spoke back. Sara started to lean back in
the seat, then stiffened, sitting bolt upright. She turned again to the driver
and spoke. Her voice was clear and high; her words were enunciated and
happy. "I can hear the ocean," she said.
Then she collapsed, as if gravity had just become too much of a challenge.
The muscles in her face slackened, her eyes dulled and lost focus, her body
seemed to shrink. She sank against the seat, propped into place by the car
door and the seat-belt.
"That was . . . interesting," Lisa said. She found herself leaning towards
the scene, like trying to watch a show on television with bad reception.
With conscious effort she pulled back, putting distance between herself
and the scenario that was playing again from the beginning. "'I can hear the
ocean'," she quoted. "I wonder what that was all about."
"The ocean?" Adam repeated. "That's Sara?" He sounded as though he
were struggling to remember something very important. "She was . . .
there was . . . something . . . ." He shook his head.
"There was what?" Lisa asked. "You knew this was big; that's why you
made me come here. Why? What's so important about these three people?"
Adam shook his head again. "I don't know. I --"
"I have to leave," Adam was saying, but it was a different Adam. He
looked several years younger, several years less mature. His hair was long,
like it had been when Lisa first met the Australian, pulled back in a pony
tail. "I . . ." he closed his eyes, an internal struggle visible on the lines of
his face. "I'm sorry . . . I didn't want things to end like this."
There was that interminable silence; the one of the other person or persons
responding. The silence was almost palpable; even the other voices had
ceased as if out of respect for this moment. The response was brief, though
it seemed too long.
The other Adam's voice dropped to a hoarse whisper, heavy with emotion.
"I didn't want things to end."
More of that silence, except it wasn't. In the background was a sound, too
far away to hear. Lisa felt it in the very back of her head, where sounds on
the cusp of human hearing could sometimes be sensed. The other person
was responding. If only she could hear them.
Lisa turned to look at her Adam just as the younger one started to speak. If
she had had any doubts about the vision, they disappeared as she watched
the elder mouthe the words along with the younger, "I didn't understand. I
know it's too late to apologize, but I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
"So you did exist before you broke out." The words were out of Lisa's
mouth before she could stop them. She spoke while looking back and forth
between the two Adams, comparing them. The weight of leadership wasn't
evident on the younger, but he wasn't without responsibility, as evidenced
by the scene playing out.
Only when the elder tore his eyes from his younger-self and looked at her
did she realize how callous she had sounded. "Oh, I didn't mean --"
"It's okay," Adam said, though he clearly wasn't okay with a piece of his
past being laid bare. "Let's get out of here."
"Who were you saying good bye to?" Lisa asked, not moving from her
spot.
Adam didn't respond, instead oddly mimicking his younger self, eyes
closed, hands locked together. His throat worked in a swallow, then
another, as if he were fighting back tears.
"Did you love her?" she continued, taking a wild guess at the missing
person.
"It doesn't matter anymore," Adam finally said.
"Adam," Lisa said, putting a hand on his shoulder, for the first time
initiating physical contact with him. "I know it's a lot, being a Tomorrow
Person. I do know, and I think I'm starting to understand what you mean
about not being able to go back. But I learned something important when I
busy ignoring you." It was her turn to find strength behind closed eyes, and
when she met his sable gaze with her own, she couldn't help smiling as she
gave advice to the advisor. "Sometimes, you have to be human too."
"I am human."
"No," she contradicted. "You're the leader of the Tomorrow People. You're
the first of a potential next stage in human evolution. You're a shoulder to
cry on and the person we turn to when we need help. You live in a tent on
an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, for crying out loud.
"But when was the last time you were Adam Newman? *Just* Adam
Newman?"
Adam broke their tenuous contact to look again at his younger self, still
caught in the act of saying good bye. Like the others, the Hispanic, the red
head, and the girl, Adam's scene was playing continuously, all of them
overlapping one another.
"That's what I thought," Lisa continued. "You expect us to trust you
implicitly, and we do. But you don't have to be strong all the time. We
need to be able to confide in you, but we also need you to be able to
confide in us. We're a team."
"You left the team, Lisa," Adam quietly reminded her.
Lisa sighed. "That's what I thought, too."
