P e r f e c t  P l a c e  -  P a r t  5

I'm feeling out of order // I'm beaten and I'm wounded // Like I never was before. . .

          "Out Of Order", Duncan Sheik

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"Authorities are looking for a young woman, in her mid-twenties, going by the name of Kate Jones. Ms. Jones, who is wanted in the investigation into the shooting death of Arvin Sloane, a prominent officer at Credit Dauphine, a downtown Los Angeles bank, escaped custody earlier today…"

The television, which here to fore had been just a vague buzzing background noise became insistently irritating. It was switched off and the remote was tossed across the room. They must be desperate. There was no other reason that they'd go public with Kate Jones.

Sydney stumbled into the bathroom. It was still the hot season in LA. Turning the faucets on cold, she splashed water on her face. Raising her head, she watched the water droplets running down the face of her reflection in the mirror, the harsh lights making worry lines and wrinkles she didn't have leap from her face. She felt old, and she looked it. A hand reached up and tugged at her shorn hair. Images flashed before her. Scissors. Chunks of hair in the sink. Black dye. Her hair, her lovely, shoulder length brown hair was gone. She had loved her hair. But it had to be sacrificed.

Shaking her head she brought herself back to the present: the cheap, dirty motel room, the aches in the wrong places. He head hurt, but it wasn't a headache, and there was a dull pain in her chest as well as the various bruises she'd accumulated while escaping Security Section. She ran fingers through her hair to lift it off her scalp, trying to weave some air into it. She felt other fingers running through her hair. Ghost fingers. Danny's? Noah's? Vaughn's?

Sydney's heart clenched as she remembered the last time she'd seen Vaughn. The walkway by the fountain. Behind a stone pillar. His hands in her hair. One quick kiss.  And then he was gone.

So many conflicting emotions flooded through her body. She wanted to be able to hold him close, and cried because she couldn't. She wanted to yell at him until her voice went hoarse for sacrificing himself for her. She only ended up berating herself for making him think he had to prove his trust to her, the daughter of the woman who killed his father.

Returning to the main room, she pulled a tiny object from her bag. It was no bigger than a pack of gum, the kind you bought at gas stations, five sticks for a quarter. The high-density plastic casing protected the wires and circuits inside. It looked like something Marshall would have created. "Looks like a key chain, right? Well, it's really a micro-drive…perfect for the busy spy on the go. This baby's got 512 megabytes of flash RAM…more than enough for a few secret documents and all your MP3's…"

But the tiny hard drive wasn't one of Marshall's creations. It was something else entirely.

Throwing it back in her bag, Sydney cursed and crossed the room to the window. The lights of the city made it almost impossible to see the stars, but she managed to find a few constellations she recognized.

// I used to look at the night sky all the time when I was a kid. It was…I don't know…comforting, I guess. Nothing ever changed there.//

But things did change. Even the stars. They were old news by the time anyone on earth saw them, their light having traveled thousands of years to get to you, they could be dead now and you would not know.

// I remember being like, six, and my father teaching me how to find the North Star. If you can find that, you can find home. //

Home. Home was a house of lies and a city of sins.

//end part five