I am blindfolded.
Kent is also blindfolded. I can hear his breathing, shallow and sharp nearby.
Of course he's terrified. One would be quite the idiot not to be; to find themselves sitting cross-legged and blindfolded on top the bed of Supreme Commander Paris Anderson and not panic.
Or, I'm sure there are exceptions. But I've made it a habit to repress such notions as they make me feel nauseous.
We were brought in here after letting Father collect our tests. He barely looked at them. Still, Kent had looked like he wanted the papers to spontaneously combust; which was enough to tell me that he failed at answering the majority of the questions. Just like me.
I suspect we were being monitored during the test, because we had just the right amount of time to finish before Father came knocking. Smile on his face. James interestingly nowhere in sight.
This is a familiar exercise. One of my favorites, actually.
Identify the room. Or, as we kids liked to call it, Make-believe-hostage-situation.
"What am I touching?"
It's a repetitive sound. Short. Hard on hard. Fingernails; on something. What? I try my best to identify it, but something is disturbing my concentration, as well as my ability to hear.
"Could you stop breathing so loud?", I ask.
Kent jumps next to me.
"Huh?!"
"You're breathing is way too loud. I'm surprised you can even hear yourself think."
"What's wrong with my breathing…?", he retorts.
"Boys", Father interrupts us.
We both go quiet.
"Concentrate", he says, overly pleased at our obedience. "What am I touching?"
To my slight relief I can hear Kent gulp a breath.
Use your ears.
A repeated motion. Too precise to be anything but his fingers. Finger, I correct myself. Because the sound is too unrhythmic to include more. Too random.
The surface is flat. Sturdy enough not to echo.
"The wardrobe", I say.
"Wrong."
I bite my lip.
His voice didn't echo, meaning he's facing the room. He's right-handed. What could the position of his arm be? What's in the corner where his voice is coming from? I've only been in here once.
I shouldn't need to have seen the room to figure it out...
Kent shifts next to me. Perhaps, leaning forward to hear better.
"Is it... the wall?", he says after a pause.
"Good, Adam."
Kent relaxes ever so slightly. Allows the springs in the mattress to support his weight more evenly. Father changes position. Walks across the room. I can hear him step on the rug and then again on the floorboards. Stops.
"What am I touching?"
More area of contact now. His palm. Sweeping. The sound is irregular. Not hard. Soft. Fabric.
I startle gently as Kent suddenly runs his hand over the comforter we're both sitting on. The motion is tentative. Unsure if he's allowed to compare like this.
"Your jacket?", he suggests.
"No", Father says. Yet, he's not admonishing. He repeats the motion. But there's another sound now, from above. A sharp sound. Metal on metal. One I've heard before, in this very room.
"The curtain", I say.
"Correct."
It goes on like this. Father moves then taps, knocks, strokes or brushes something. He uses his fingers-tips, his nails, palms and elbows to create different surfaces; different textures. We guess what it is. It's a simple game. Simpler than what I'm used to. This is something I'd do as a five-year-old. By eleven I was supposed to map out entire rooms based on how voices echoed. How I was moved. It's how I understood the layout of Omega point.
But I'm not complaining.
"What am I touching?"
All fingertips. Disturbing the rest of many many small individual parts.
I can imagine what we look like. Straight backed, like dogs. Our ears would have been perked forward if they could. Perhaps I am engaging myself too much. Nothing is actually at stake here.
"You're just scratching yourself!", Kent exclaims.
Father chuckles.
"But where?"
We listen for another moment that stretches too long. As sick as a desire as it is I don't want to be wrong. I enjoy being praised. And so does Kent.
So seeing that we have the same goal...
"He shaves in the morning", I say, turning my head towards my brother, despite not being able to see him, or him see me doing it.
"So it can't be that long", Kent fills in.
"It's also too fine", I continue. "Too soft."
Again my brother moves and another sound joins in. I listen, considerate. It is quite similar, yet...
"Those are your bangs, right?"
"Er… yeah."
"But it's not the same sound", I say.
"Yup."
Father keeps repeating the motion. I can sense interest from him about our conversation. Is he happy we're cooperating?
"So shorter?", Kent proposes.
I hum in agreement, having already made up my mind.
"At the back of your head", I declare.
I can tell by Father's satisfaction of knowing he's responsible for my skills that I'm correct.
"What do you think Adam?", he asks.
Kent has dropped his hand. I can hear and feel him squirm a little.
"Well… it can't be at the top of your head. So that would make sense...", he says.
Father finally stops scratching himself.
"Good job, both of you."
"You won't be able to compare like that with the real deal, though. Or talk", I tell Kent as Father once again moves position.
"Why do we need to know this?", Kent asks.
"It can be helpful to know if the kidnapper has long hair. More to grapple", I tell him before Father can offer an explanation.
"What?!" He takes off his blindfold.
"Am I going to get kidnapped?!"
"Omega Point kidnapped me. There are lots of leverages to pull if you kidnap the child of a Supreme commander. Supposedly...", I say as I follow suit and take off my own blindfold.
Father ignores my subtle accusation of leaving me to the Omega pointers. Sure, I made it out with the tools he molded into me, but I'm not so sure that he wouldn't have sent the planes even if I was still stuck underground.
Instead, he walks up. And to my dismay I realize that I've handed him yet another opportunity to coddle us.
"You're not going to be kidnapped, Addie", he soothes.
"I told you, Daddy will take care of you. All three of you. That means no one will be able to take you away from me..."
He reaches out. Lifts Kent's chin that has dropped to look at the comforter we're sitting on. Smiles. Pretends pretends pretends but I can feel it again. That need to smother and control.
"...ever."
Kent is trembling again. Fingers clutching at the comforter we're sitting on.
"You were right there when they took me, though", I comment. Not only out of spite but to remind my brother our father is in fact not invincible.
"They shot-"
"You both need haircuts", Father interrupts me and straightens again. And once again I'm confused. Where is the violence? Is this some kind of doppelganger pretending to be our father?
"We'll get it done first thing once you've both washed."
Washed. I haven't had a bath in days. Shower, yes. But no enveloping, hot flower smelling bath.
And I must say, a bath would be nice.
"May I go get my soaps?", I ask. Because I want to get out of these quarters before Father makes us do another quiz.
"From the colonel quarters? I don't see why not", Father says.
Then he adds:
"Just bring your brother."
Both Kent and I blink.
"He would have beat the shit out of me if I had said something like that about him. He would have even if I didn't say anything."
We're in my quarters. Or the colonel quarters as Father had called them. I'm in the bathroom collecting what I need for my bath. My brother is still out in my bedroom. My old bedroom.
"He beat you, too?", I call out.
"Only after mom died", he calls back.
"Before he just cuffed me and, like, yanked me. If I ran around in a parking lot or something. It was when mom died that the restraints were gone, I guess. He didn't touch James, though. I hid him..."
"But not now?"
"No, he just… hugs and kisses. It's super weird… What do you think he's doing?"
"Your guess is as good as mine, Kent."
Father practically sent us off with a blessing to plan and scheme against him, along with a guard to unlock the door. The guard is waiting outside, which makes me suspect that my room wasn't as unbugged as I've assumed. Kent doesn't seem to share my concern.
"That thing Dad said… that he won't let anyone take us away. Do you think what he was actually saying was that he won't let us run away?"
"It would be quite strange if he was trying to imply the opposite", I remark.
"...are we going to run away?", Kent asks after a pause.
I don't look up from where I'm putting my soaps in a toiletry bag.
"Where would we run?", I ask him.
"There are no rebel groups left in this area."
When I don't receive a reply I stick my head out the bathroom door. My brother is frowning at me from where he's lying on my mattress. My old mattress. Protest ready to take off from his lips.
Yet he doesn't voice them.
"Or the two of us could probably make it", I continue.
"But we wouldn't be able to take James with us. He can't run for himself. He'd be too heavy. It would be hard enough if we were still adults."
"So we're going to just leave everyone from Omega Point?", he asks.
"How do you suggest we'd break them out?", I say.
"We don't even know where they are."
He gives me a strange look. Sits up.
"Dude", he says.
"It's obviously where they kept Juliette."
Where they kept Juliette.
Juliette. Hours; hours of watching a small dark room. A dark room on video. Video.
"...do you remember where that is?"
He gives me an even more peculiar look. But then I see it. A small frown forming between his eyebrows followed by a series of rapid blinks.
A blank draw.
"You don't…", I say, and he looks up, still trying his best to remember.
And I don't know why, but instead of assured that my intuition has been correct I'm disheartened. I somehow thought that my brother's abilities would mean he'd be immune to whatever that is causing this. I sit down on the stripped bed.
"We're forgetting."
He squints at me. Tilts his head, and for a moment he looks too much like Father for my liking.
"Like when you have Alzheimer's?"
I'm about to call him an idiot because it wouldn't make any sense for us to acquire Alzheimer's if we didn't have it the first time, but then I realize that the simile isn't that bad.
"We don't seem to have any problems with the things we've learned in the last two days", I say.
"How can you tell?"
"Well, I still remember your password from this morning."
"You know my password...?"
"I watched you type it in, it wasn't that hard", I tell him.
"I don't remember mine, though", I say before he can complain about me not respecting his privacy.
"I thought you said Dad disabled it..." And I can hear the offense in his voice as he realizes that I lied.
"We didn't have much time. I didn't want to waste it on the conversation it would turn into", I shrug.
"Okay…", he says. Bites his lip. Thinks. Or what looks like thinking, but I have never and probably never will be sure with Kent. After a few moments he tosses a hand in the air.
"But what difference does it make? It's not like we need your password. I don't need to know how to solve for x when it has a little two above it."
"I'm pretty sure I've forgotten how to make bombs", I flick in, not caring enough to correct his x square. His eyes go comically wide, mouth falls agape ever so slightly.
"Bombs?!"
"Well, not anymore", I remind him.
"Okay, bombs would probably have been good to remember", he admits.
"But anyway, we still remember the important stuff. Dad is evil. We started a revolution, but we failed. The people with superpowers that can help us are locked up. Oh, and we're actually eighteen and nineteen. We don't need anything else to fix this."
I am tempted to give him applause for his little speech. Not an actual applause. More like a slow, demeaning clap.
"Which brings us back to the original problem: we don't know where the omega pointers are", I tell him.
His mouth becomes a line.
"Can't we just look it up? We have your computer", he suggests.
"In case you didn't notice", I say, "the only thing we accessed with your login was a learning platform."
"So it doesn't have internet...?"
"Even if it did, Google maps doesn't exist anymore, Kent."
He goes quiet again, and eventually falls back to lie down. He looks at the ceiling. And after a few seconds I also lie down. I look at the chandelier. At the curved metal and fake crystals made out of glass. We both know we're just prolonging going back to the supreme quarters. But we will have to go back eventually. Father told us to be back for lunch.
"What about Delalieu?", Kent asks suddenly. He rolls over to lay on his side and looks at me.
"Or is he on Dad's side?"
"I don't know actually...", I confess.
"But I already tried. He refused."
"He did?" I nod. He rolls back to look at the ceiling again.
"Wow."
And then we lay there, on opposite ends of my old bed and count the seconds we wait before the guard will come inside and tell us it's time to go back.
"What if we steal a car and just drive around until we find the place?", Kent says after barely a minute.
"I doubt our legs are long enough to step on the pedals."
Kent grimaces. "Right..."