Chapter Eight:
Two Steps Behind and Closing
Max watched Milly explore the kitchen as Jondy unpacked her backpack. They had had problems with rodents in the building in the past, and she wondered if the cat might prove useful during her stay, but considering the way that Milly was rubbing her head affectionately against the corner of the kitchen counter, she somehow doubted it. Max leaned over to scratch the cat behind the ears, then turned and watched Jondy unpack.
"Are you sure your roommate won't mind?" Jondy asked again. It wasn't that she didn't trust Original Cindy's word on it, she was just surprised. When she and Max had wandered into Crash earlier that evening, Max had quickly spotted Original Cindy at the bar, leaned over, and asked, "Hey homegirl, you mind if my genetically engineered super soldier sister crashes at our place for a while?" Original Cindy's only response had been, "S'aiight with me, boo, just so long as she don't hog the shower. Original Cindy don't want to have to put a smackdown on anybody's ass that early in the morning." Jondy was still a little amused by the coolness of her response. Most people would have been worried about a little more than the shower schedule if they had a transgenic guest from out of town.
"Not a problem," Max assured her once again as she walked towards her bedroom door.
It was amazing just how much her sister seemed to be able to fit into the backpack, and as Max watched her pull out one thing after another, she had to wonder if she'd managed to fit her entire wardrobe inside the bag. Walking over to the bed, Max picked up a stuffed green parrot that had just emerged from Jondy's backpack. She turned it over in her hands.
"That would be Andy," Jondy explained.
"Andy?"
"Yeah, the nuns gave him to me my first night at the convent. I didn't have a clue what I was supposed to do with him." She smiled at the memory. "Of course, they didn't exactly know what to do with me, either. Not too many transgenic orphans stopped by there, you know."
Max frowned, looking down at the stuffed toy. "Orphans. I guess we were orphans, weren't we?"
"In a manner of speaking." She paused for a moment, then thought aloud, "can you honestly be an orphan if you didn't have parents in the first place? We had family, at least, not that we got to stay together." She looked down at the shirt she held in her hands. Family. Parents. Babies.
Max sat the toy down back down on the bed and was silent for a moment. "So they didn't freak out when they found out what you were?"
"I don't know what they really thought of me. I mean, they had to know something was going on. There I was, a little kid with a buzz cut, a barcode, and a hospital gown." She shook her head. "He told them not to let anyone know I was there. I was obedient to a fault. I never talked back, and then there was the time I tried to salute Sister Mary Catherine. It was a reflex." She shrugged and smiled wistfully at the memory. "I was definitely not a normal little girl. I hardly ever slept. I could see in the dark and hear things long before they could." She sighed. "Then there was the day that I stole a chocolate chip cookie from Sister Sophia. She had just baked them, and I was starting to figure out that little kids weren't supposed to be perfect little soldiers." She laughed. "Manticore is nothing when compared to a pissed off nun brandishing a wooden spoon, let me tell you. I ran like hell, so she never had a chance to catch me, but after that, I'm sure they knew what I was. No normal child could ever run that fast." She walked over and hung the last of her clothes in Max's closet.
Max studied her sister. Jondy looked exhausted, though emotionally moreso than physically. She figured that she probably needed a break. Looking out through the doorway of her bedroom, Max's eyes fell on her motorcycle, and she grinned. "Hey, baby sister, there's something I want to show you. Wanna go for a ride?"
"Beautiful," Jondy murmured as she looked down at the lights of Seattle. "It's amazing. You look down at all of those lights and think that each one of them is a room, or a house, or a car, each one with different people, different lives of their own." She sighed. "It's sort of like the High Place, only all this is real, not just some childhood fantasy."
"I like to come up here and watch them. After a while, you start to feel like you're one of them, just another regular person, with another regular life." Jondy glanced over at her sister. She knew exactly why Max had brought her here, but she wasn't quite ready to talk about it yet.
"So, you and Logan met when you broke into his apartment, eh?" Jondy shook her head. "Of all the ways to meet a guy. Leave it to you to come up with something completely unorthodox." Jondy grinned.
"Yeah, well, I needed some extra cash. I had this private investigator trying to dig up info on what happened to you guys, and he kept raising his price." She shook her head. "That just turned out to be a big mess. Lydecker caught up with him and used him to trail me, and I barely got out of that one."
Jondy sighed, looking back out over the lights of the city. "No matter where you go, and no matter what you do, the past is always following right behind of you." I'm so desperately tired of that feeling. "Mine's even following me to Seattle." Max expected her to say more, but Jondy remained silent. "So how'd he react when he found out the truth about you?" she finally asked.
"Well, he had his suspicions all along. A couple of years ago Eyes Only got an anonymous report from some lab tech about Manticore and our escape in '09, and I think I made quite an impression on him when I broke in. He called me 'Rocky the Flying Squirrel.'" She smiled at the memory. "I guess that makes him Bullwinkle. I don't know. A little fancy maneuvering, and he got a look at the designer label on the back of my neck. It was one of the most terrifying moments of my life." She shook her head. "I didn't know if I could trust him or not, and I didn't feel like running anymore. In the end, he just wanted to cut a deal. I'd help him; he'd help me. He turned out to be a lot more trustworthy than the guy I was paying."
Lab tech . . . Bells jingled in the back of Jondy's mind, something a little too familiar. She was silent for a moment, thinking about it all. She finally spoke. "You love him, don't you?" Deep down, she somehow expected her sister to deny it, but Max didn't say a word, she only stared out over the lights of the broken city that lay below.
"It doesn't matter anyway," Max said quietly. "If there was ever a chance, it's gone now."
"How can it not matter?" Jondy asked, trying to control the sudden sting of tears at the backs of her eyes.
Max took a deep breath. "When I was at Manticore, they--"
"I know, I know," Jondy interrupted. "Logan already told me." She shook her head. "This one little thing, and you just roll over and give up?"
"It's not a little thing." Max felt her anger rising, but she held it in check. Her anger wasn't towards Jondy, so she shouldn't unleash it on her. "We tried once. We found this lab tech that was going to fix it all . . . " she paused and shook the memory from her head. She didn't really want to go into the story full-length. It still hurt too much. "Let's just say it didn't work out, and opportunities like that don't grow on trees." She glanced back down at her hands. She felt helpless and weak, and Max hated feeling that way.
"So that's it? You just roll over and give up and let Manticore win? Is that it?"
"Well, what the hell are we supposed to do?" Max almost yelled it. She wanted to yell, to stand up there on the top of the Space Needle and scream at the top of her lungs about the injustices of the world, but in the end it wouldn't do any good. It wouldn't change anything. She took another deep breath. "We don't have that chance anymore, and now there's Asha . . . " She dropped her forehead into her hands. "God, but I hate her guts . . . but I want him to be happy. Every time I see her, it's all I can do not to bash her face in." She closed her eyes. "I just don't want him to hurt the way that I do when I wake up in the morning." She paused for a moment then sighed. Waking up, yet another reason not to sleep. "I tried too, you know? I tried to move on, to pretend that I could care about someone else. Who the hell was I kidding? That lasted five minutes, and I felt like a fool when it was over."
Jondy loved her sister to death, but she had to say it. "You little idiot." Max's head shot up. "Do you have any idea how he looks at you? Are you possibly that blind? You walk into the room, and his face lights up. Do you know what he went through last night? He was a wreck when I got there. I don't know how he kept from falling into pieces."
"Well there's nothing that we can do about it," she snapped. Oh, but how she wished there were . . . She hung her head down and stared at her hands. "I'm sorry."
Jondy came to a conclusion. She needed to tell Max the truth, and maybe more for Max's sake than for her own. She took a deep breath and looked back out over the city.
"I recognized Logan's name, you know. Brian used to talk about him every now and then. I knew he worked for Eyes Only, but I didn't know that he was Eyes Only. I don't know whether or not Brian did, either." It hurt to look back, but she had to.
"It all started about a year and a half ago," Jondy began. "I was living in Los Angeles at the time. I was walking to this bar where I worked, and a white van started following me. I was a little worried, but it didn't seem like Manticore's style, so I figured it wasn't anything to worry about. The next thing I knew, four guys jumped out, grabbed me, and tried to pull me inside." She rubbed her hands along her arms, using the friction to generate heat. The contact was a comfort, even though she wasn't cold. "Unfortunately for them, I didn't make a very good damsel in distress, and it didn't take me very long to convince them that I wasn't interested in going for a joy ride." She smiled sadly at the memory. "They jumped back in the van and took off. That was the first time I ever saw Donny Perez, and I am happy to say that I thoroughly beat the snot out of the little bastard."
She looked down at her hands, which she had propped on her knees. "It happened about five blocks from the bar where I worked, and once I was sure they had left, I just kept going. About a block down, I noticed this man following me. It was unnerving, considering what had just happened, but he kept his distance, so I didn't bother him. After I got to the bar, he followed me in, and he sat in a corner and watched me for the rest of the evening. When I took my break, he came over and sat on the stool next to mine, but he never said a word. He stayed there until I got off of work. Then he asked if he could talk to me. I don't know why I said 'yes,' but we sat, and we talked." She paused a moment, trying to get beyond the pain that still followed so clearly with the memory. She'd promised herself that she'd get it all out. She had to.
"He had the most incredible brown eyes that I had ever seen, the kind you can just melt right into. He said his name was Brian." She paused, savoring the memory for a moment. "You know what he talked about?" She turned her head to look at her sister. Max shook her head. "His grandmother. His uncle. This collie that he had when he was a little boy. His father's collection of toy trains. We just sat there and talked all night long, and then he took me out, and we watched the sunrise."
She hugged her knees to her chest, careful to keep her balance on the slanting roof of the Space Needle. "He met me there every night for a week, and he'd wait until I got off of work, and then we'd talk until dawn and go watch the sunrise together. Then one morning, right as the sun was coming up, he leaned over, and he kissed me." She smiled sadly at the memory. "I was so giddy that I didn't even realize he'd pulled my hair aside until it was too late."
She shook her head. "I was all prepared to tell him some story about how it was just some stupid tattoo my friends and I had decided to get when we turned sixteen, but he just sat there and stared at it. I couldn't move. Then he just put my hair back like it was, took my face in his hands and said, 'it's okay.' It scared me because I knew that he knew what it meant." She shrugged. "I didn't know what to expect after that, but there he was the next night, waiting for me to get off work. That's the night that he finally told me the truth."
Somewhere in the back of her mind, the memory of the sound of his voice permeated her thoughts. She shook it off and forged on. "He'd been trailing the men in the van, and he'd seen me take them out and gotten curious. He said he had a friend of a friend who knew some guy who claimed to have worked for something called 'Project Manticore' a while back. He said something about passing that information on 'up the ladder,' and since Logan knew about you, I can only guess he meant to Eyes Only. He told me what Perez and his goons were up to, kidnapping young girls and selling them overseas. A friend of his had lost a niece to them, and Brian was trying to stop them. Maybe they couldn't get that little girl back, but if they could stop them from doing it again, then it would at least be some small victory. He told me that he needed my help." She paused, batting back the glimmer of tears as they stung the backs of her eyelids. "And he told me that he loved me."
Max resisted the urge to put a hand on her sister's shoulder. She didn't really know how to react to what her sister was saying, but somehow she knew that comforting her might stop her from getting it all out, which was what Jondy so desperately needed to do. She scooted a little closer to Jondy's side, hoping that being closer might give her sister just a little more strength.
"At the time, I thought it was one of the funniest moments of my life. Most guys use that line to try to get you into bed, and here was a guy using it to try to get me to kick some bad guys' asses? That was a new one on me, but I didn't want any part of it. I just wanted to live my life, to stay under the smokescreen and hope Manticore never came looking for me." She turned and glanced at Max, then turned her head to stare back out into the night. "On the way home that morning, I saw a group of girls walking to school, and all I could think about was the girls that Perez had already grabbed. Had they been walking home from school? Did their parents sit up at night and wonder what had happened to them? Did their classmates sit in the middle of their classes and stare at the empty desks where they used to sit? When Brian showed up at the bar again that night, I told him I'd help. He gave me a list of names and addresses, people he thought were involved with the things that were going on. I spent many an hour hanging upside down outside of apartment windows, and God, but I hate hanging upside down."
"I know the feeling," Max muttered. "Believe me, I know the feeling."
Jondy shrugged. "I didn't really learn a whole lot hanging out around those apartments. I mean, I picked up a few names here and there, but a lot of the leads were dead ends." She swallowed. "But things were . . . getting interesting . . . with Brian . . ." She let her voice trail off, not quite sure how she wanted to complete the thought. "When did you know, Max?" Jondy finally asked, her voice eerily quiet. "When did you know you loved him?"
Max was silent for a moment. "I really don't know." She shook her head sadly. "Long before I admitted it to myself," she finally answered. "With our childhood, with our training, with living on the run and everything, I learned how to hide my emotions pretty well. I guess we all did." She shrugged. "Hell, I even hid them from myself for a while." She smiled sadly. "It took Original Cindy, a bad night, and . . . and a rather ugly experience to make me realize it." She glanced back down at the city below, her thoughts drifting back to that night. Logan's troubled face looking down at her. Trying to find the strength to push the words out of her mouth. Knowing that she was dying, and yet somehow only those three little words seemed to matter. Then the feeling of floating, looking down at herself as Lydecker knocked Logan unconscious and dragged him away. They sat in silence for a moment before Jondy finally continued.
"There was this girl that worked at the bar," she began again. "Her name was Katie. She was only fifteen, and I knew she shouldn't be working there, but her father had skipped out right after the Pulse, and her Mom was too sick to work, so I didn't say anything. I kept an eye out to make sure nobody messed with her, and sometimes I'd slip some of my tip money into her pocket when she wasn't looking." Jondy shrugged. "She needed it more than I did."
"One night she went to take the trash out. I heard tires squealing, her calling for help. No one else could, of course, but when I jumped the counter and went running out the door, Brian knew something was up and followed. Thankfully the street outside was pretty much deserted because I imagine that I would have put on quite a show for anyone who was watching, but I managed to keep them from taking Katie. Unfortunately, they recognized me, and they got a pretty good look at Brian, especially when they realized he was with me." She shook her head. "I should have realized what danger he was in right then, but I didn't, little fool that I was."
She rubbed her aching eyes. "I took Katie home and convinced our boss that she needed a few days off. The next night at the bar was stressful. I kept expecting Perez and his buddies to show up and make trouble, but they never showed." She frowned. "Brian didn't show, either." She hugged her legs tighter against her body.
"He was nowhere to be found the next day. I spent the rest of the day and most of the next night scouring the streets, climbing every tall building I could find to get a better look. After hanging around outside of one of the apartments we'd been keeping an eye on, I finally found a couple of Perez's buddies, and I followed them down to the pier." She sighed. "To make a long story short, I broke up their little party, and we all ended up trapped in a van that was sinking into the Pacific. They had Brian gagged and tied up, but I managed to get him out. I never saw anyone else get out of that van. I figured that they didn't make it out." Careless, she thought. Careless and stupid. Never underestimate the enemy.
"We thought it was over. No more little girls were going to come up missing. No more parents would stay awake at night and wonder if their daughters were even still alive, but I didn't care. I was just too happy to see Brian alive, and well . . . " She shrugged, her voice trailing off sadly. "Let's just say we got really happy that he was still alive and that the whole mess was over. Of course reality set in the next morning. It was my fault. If it hadn't been for me, they would never have even known about Brian. I was the one who had exposed him. I was responsible for what they almost did." Max put a hand on her sister's shoulder.
"It wasn't. It was his fi-- "
"He was safer without me," Jondy insisted, ignoring her sister. "That's what I told him when I left his apartment that morning, that I was too dangerous, that I'd almost gotten him killed. All I could think was, what if Manticore came looking for me and got him instead? I would never have been able to forgive myself, so I turned and walked away from that apartment. He kept begging me to come back, telling me he loved me, that it wasn't my fault. I didn't listen." A tear slid down her cheek. "I hated myself for it. It tore me apart to walk away, but I didn't think I had a choice." Another tear slid along the trail of the first. She hugged her knees more tightly to her chest. "I went and stayed with Zane for a few weeks." She looked back down at the lights below. A few more moments passed in silence.
"Know when I finally admitted that I loved him?" she finally asked. Max reached over and took her sister's hand. "When the pregnancy test came out positive."
"Oh God." Max hadn't meant to say it out loud, but it came out anyway.
"It's funny, the things that you don't let yourself admit to. All of the sudden, I was standing in Zane's bathroom, laughing my ass off. I think Zane thought I was losing my mind. Chessa was running around in circles barking. The old lady that lived upstairs was pounding on the floor, and Milly was hiding under the sofa. She must have thought the world was coming to an end. I thought it was the happiest day of my life." She shook her head in self-disgust. "I went back to find him, but he wasn't at his apartment, so I wandered around the streets for an hour or so, waiting for him to come back, planning how I was going to tell him. I wandered down by the farmer's market, and looked over, and there he was. I'll never forget the look on his face. He looked up and saw me, and it lit up like a light bulb. I wanted to cry, I was so glad to see him." She swallowed back a sob. "And then all hell broke loose." Two more tears slid down her cheeks.
"There were gunshots. People started screaming and diving for cover." The images floated through her mind, Brian's body jerking backwards, two red spots appearing on his shirt front even as he fell, Perez's ugly face appearing in the window across the street, an evil grin on his face and a gun in his hand. Her own screams. "By the time I ran over to him, he was already gone. I tried to get up, to go after him, but everything started going black. The next thing I remember is waking up in Zane's apartment the next day. Zane had gotten another one of those feelings he always got when we were kids and followed me. Perez had shot me when I ran over to Brian, multiple times, actually, but I was so upset that I didn't even feel it. I'd lost a lot of blood, not that that was a problem for me, but the baby . . . . " Another tear, a sob. "I miscarried, and I lost the last part of him that I had left," she whispered.
The tears ran freely down her face now, but she didn't seem to notice. "I left, and he never had the chance to tell me when he found out that Perez was still out there. If I would have stayed just a little longer, just a few more days, I would have known. I could have been there five minutes earlier, and he wouldn't have died." The lights of the city below were nothing more than a blur now. "Zane left me at his apartment, called in sick for the next few days, and searched Los Angeles. He didn't find anything because Perez had already skipped town. I couldn't stand to stay in LA. There were too many memories, so Zane helped me move to San Francisco, and that's where I stayed until February."
Her shoulders shook, another sob. "I've tried to put it all behind me, but no matter where I go or what I do, the memories are still there, and I can't make them go away. The past is always there, just two steps behind, and now it's closing in." Jondy turned sideways to cry on Max's offered shoulder. It could have been seconds, minutes, hours, but she was so lost in her grief that she lost all sense of time. Finally she pulled away, trying to wipe the tears from her face with the back of her hand. She stared back out over the city, trying desperately to regain control, to find a way to make Max understand what she so desperately needed to.
She wiped the remaining tears away with her sleeve and looked her sister straight in the eye. "So how can you not get it, Max?" Jondy asked, her voice almost a whisper. Max gave her a confused look. "Do you have any idea how much I envy the two of you? Logan is alive. He's alive, and you just give up without a fight. Maybe you've got a snowball's chance in hell, but dammit that's a chance. Don't just give up and roll over and die, because one of these days you may wake up and realize just how precious that melting snowball was, and you'll spend the rest of your life hating yourself because you just let it melt."
With that, Jondy stood, turned, and crept back along the roof the way they'd come, leaving a rather astonished Max alone in the darkness.