Chapter Fifteen
Jack awoke slowly and found herself in her usual sleeping position, curled into a ball with her head under the covers. She inhaled deeply and her nose filled with the homey smell of freshly washed sheets. Wow. That was some kind of freaky nightmare, she thought as she stretched under the covers. Rob is gonna tease me for weeks about being paranoid when he hears this one.
She grabbed the top edge of the sheet and pushed it down, expecting to see her dorm room with Val sleeping across from her. She stopped with the sheet at her chin. This was not her dorm room.
In place of the vid posters with which she and Val had decorated, the walls bore bland floral prints. And the bed wasn't right either. She didn't know why she hadn't noticed it immediately. It felt different from her bed, and the sheets were the wrong color. They should have been dark blue with constellations on them—a gift from Val. Instead, these were stark white.
"Where the hell am I?" Jack asked the empty room as she pulled herself into a sitting position. She craned her neck to take in all the details of the room. There were no windows, but there was a large mirror along one wall. Jack studied her reflection and grimaced at the image. She looked pale and her hair had managed to work its way into a lopsided tangled mess while she slept. She was also wearing a set of pale yellow pajamas that she had never seen before.
I look awful, she thought. She ran her hands through her hair and tried to ease out some of the tangles so that it would lie a little more smoothly. She scrubbed her hands over her face, but the effort did little to restore the color to her skin. While rolling her head around, she elicited a pop from one vertebra. Jack then ran her hands over her neck, massaging away tension.
"Ow," she exclaimed as her fingers moved over a particularly tender spot at the base of her throat. She fingered it experimentally and winced again. Dread rose inside her as she slipped from the bed and walked to the large mirror to examine the spot. It was an injection mark. Jack found a second mark further up and toward the back on her neck. The strange events she had recently experienced came back to her in a rush that made her stomach clench. "Not a dream," she whispered as she sank to the floor and wrapped her arms around her legs with her back resting against the wall beneath the mirror.
She leaned her head against her knees and exhaled in a long shuddering sigh. Tears prickled at the back of her eyelids as she thought of Rob, but she clenched her teeth and deliberately controlled her emotions. No time for a breakdown, Jack, she chided herself. First, I gotta figure out what the hell is going on. Then, I gotta figure out how the hell I can get away from them. Once I'm back home, then I can think of other things and other people.
Jack wasn't sure how long she sat that way, but it couldn't have been very long. She was startled from her reverie by the sound of the door opening. Door. Now why the hell didn't I think to check to see if it was unlocked? Come on, Jack! You're gonna have to do better than that if you wanna get out of here.
The door swung open to reveal a man dressed like a hospital orderly, wheeling in a cart with a covered plate on it. A faint hint of scent from the food underneath drifted to her and her stomach rumbled insistently. Jack ignored it and stood up with her jaw set.
"Hey, where am I? What the hell is this place? Why have I been brought here? What the fuck do you people want from me! " she demanded without preamble her voice rising with each question until she was shouting at the end.
"Um… Listen, I…" the orderly stammered.
"I want some damned answers!" she snapped as she crossed the floor to confront him. He was at least 6 inches taller than she was, but he shrank back from her as if in fear.
"Hey, I just work here. I can't say anything to you," he told her, cringing and backing away. When Jack moved to follow him, he retreated quickly and shut the door with a muttered, "Enjoy your dinner."
Jack heard a telltale click as the door closed, but she checked it anyway. It was locked. Frustration welled up inside her and she side-kicked the door. It didn't budge, but she felt a burst of satisfaction when she noted the small dent her heel had left in its previously pristine surface.
Jack turned back to the wheeled cart. Curiosity forced her to gingerly lift the cover to see what was underneath. She was assaulted by the spicy aroma of spaghetti and glimpsed pale noodles and rich red sauce before she slammed the cover back down on the plate. Her stomach growled in protest as she stepped away, but she pressed her fist into it and deliberately willed the rumbling to stop. It had been a while, but she had been hungry before, frequently in fact, when she was on her own. She knew she could handle a little hunger.
"I don't want your damned food!" she shouted to the empty room assuming that they would have some sort of surveillance system to monitor her. "I. Want. Some. Fucking. ANSWERS!"
She gave the cart an angry shove that sent it careening into a wall. The lid on the plate was dislodged and the tall glass of tea sloshed part of its contents onto the white napkin that was neatly folded beside the plate. Jack grinned fiercely in satisfaction at the minor disarray. The urge to create more destruction hit her and she eyed the now exposed plate of tomato-clad noodles. I wonder if hospital white goes well with Italian red, she thought and felt her smile stretch wider as she stepped toward the plate. She had picked it up and was preparing to hurl it toward the wall, which bore the floral prints, when she heard the click of the door opening. She turned with vicious glee, expecting to see the timid orderly step through the entry and cocked her arm back to give him a just reward for not answering her questions.
To her surprise, the person, who glided through the door, was not the orderly, but rather an elegant older woman in a glittery gown that looked out of place in this institutional setting. Jack was unable to stop the forward momentum of her throw and the plate of food went hurtling through the air toward this new individual. Before the plate reached her, the woman seemed to shimmer into nothingness and flow to the side allowing the missile to impact the wall beside the door. The plate shattered with the force of the collision. Shards of ceramic along with the noodles and sauce cascaded to the floor leaving a long red smear.
"Who the hell are you?" Jack snapped, glaring at the new intruder.
"My name is Aereon. I am one of your… hosts," the woman said as she looked at Jack with a bemused expression. She glanced back at the splattered food, and then quirked an eyebrow at Jack. "I take it you don't like Italian food. Is there something else you would prefer?"
"Like I said, I'm not hungry," Jack bit out. "I just want to know what the hell is going on here."
She glowered at Aereon waiting for her response and taking the opportunity to really study the woman. She had long silvery hair that draped artfully over her shoulders and her form seemed to waver intermittently so that Jack occasionally caught glimpses of the wall behind her. The edges of her gown's sleeves fluttered as though in a gentle breeze even though the air in the room was completely still. The entire effect was rather disconcerting and Jack found herself blinking frequently as her eyes tried to focus on the constantly fluctuating form.
"What is going on?" the woman repeated. Her voice was musical and seemed oddly familiar to Jack, although she had never met the woman before. "Well, my dear, you have information that we require. That is why we had you brought to us."
"Who the fuck is 'we'?"
"Ah… that I cannot tell you. Normally, I would not have introduced myself either. However, we felt that perhaps, after all you have been through, you would be more comfortable with a face-to-face meeting. Believe me, Jack, we would like for this whole process to go smoothly."
"You want things to go 'smoothly'?" Jack asked incredulously. The woman's audacity and cool confidence touched a raw nerve in Jack. Her voice rose as she spoke until she was once again shouting. "You send a bunch of slimy mercs to murder my Robby and grab me from my home, and you, fucking, want things to go 'smoothly'! Look, lady, I don't know your definition of 'smooth', but where I come from, this is about as far from it as you can fucking get!"
Jack's outburst had little affect on Aereon. Other than her lips pressing together slightly, she did not change her expression. "Hmm…yes, the boy. That was unintended, both by us and by the team who retrieved you. It was truly unfortunate."
Jack's breath came in short gasps as rage and grief swelled inside her. Tears threatened once more, but she ground her teeth and deliberately blinked them away. She forced her grief back and instead focused on the anger. "I-it was 'unintended' and 'unfortunate'. We're talking about his life here! About my life! You callous bitch! I wouldn't tell you the time of day!"
Jack grabbed the glass of tea and threw it at Aereon. It missed as she once again phased to the side. Jack then hurled the packet of silverware, which also missed. She shrieked in fury at the impotence of her attempts, then her recent martial arts training kicked in and she rushed at the woman who was still regarding her with a calm, measuring gaze.
Before Jack could reach her, the door opened and a pair of large men dressed in hospital scrubs stepped through. They grabbed Jack and quickly wrestled her into submission, although not without taking a couple of hits themselves. The brief altercation ended with Jack pinned face first to the floor by the knee of one of the men. He held her hands behind her back at an awkward angle. She attempted to kick at him, but he pulled upward on her arms in warning. The motion caused pain to shoot through her shoulders and down her back, making her gasp involuntarily. Because she had little doubt that the behemoth could rip her arms out of their sockets if she continued to struggle, she subsided and lay still on the floor with her face turned away from the insubstantial bitch she had tried to attack.
From her position, she could see the second orderly and was pleased to note that he was awkwardly wrapping a handkerchief around his hand, which was dripping blood. She felt a vicious smile stretch her face and thought: That'll teach you to put your hand over my mouth, asshole!
"Pity," Aereon's voice floated to Jack and she finally wrested her head to look at the woman. "I had truly hoped that you would choose the easier path and simply tell us what we need to know."
"Not on your life."
"Well, then I suppose we will be treading the difficult path." Aereon's eyes focused above and behind Jack. "Take her to the chamber. We'll begin the procedure shortly."
"I don't give a fuck what you do to me! I… Won't… Talk!" Jack snapped at her back as she flowed toward the door.
She paused and looked back at Jack with an enigmatic smile. "Oh, I believe you will, my dear. You will tell us everything. And you can resist all you want, the outcome will be the same."
She exited and a third goon entered with a wheeled chair that had restraints similar to the ones Toombs had used on his ship. She attempted to struggle, but the three men were able to strap her in with a minimum of effort. Finally, one of them placed a dark colored bag over her head so that she could not see anything as they wheeled her from the room.
"I'll scream," she threatened.
"Go for it, kid. Scream your throat out. It won't do you a damn bit of good in this place," one of the men assured her ominously. He then laughed and continued pushing her chair, leaving her to wonder just what they had in store for her.
