Chapter 9
Anna Carter
I was taken to a room. Not a cell, a room. And it had a real view of the city. As I pressed my fingers over the windowsill, I could tell it wasn’t a hologram.
When the doors closed behind me, and I was alone, I let out the loudest of sighs.
It didn’t change how nervous I felt.
I clamped a hand onto my stomach, and then one onto my chest. Seconds later, my hand moved of its own accord and clamped onto the left side of my face.
Energy was building up behind my eye.
Energy.
This wasn’t paranoia talking, it wasn’t my adrenaline-addled mind making up stories.
I could feel some kind of force building up in my face.
I knew I should turn around, go to the door, and ask for a doctor, but I didn’t.
I stood there, staring at the view, shaking.
That terrorist attack hadn’t been a terrorist attack at all. I was sure – 100% certain – that the so-called hospital I’d been held in for the past week had been destroyed to cover-up my captor’s tracks.
I rocked back and forth on my feet, finding it harder and harder to breathe.
I needed to turn to somebody, but there was no one to turn to.
All I could do was stand here and look at that view.
My eyes, seemingly of their own accord, were drawn to one single tower on the horizon. Tall, and built like a pillar, illuminated with blue and white strips of light down its entire length, it was a commanding sight. But that didn’t account for my attraction to it. My eyes locked onto it as if they had a magnetic connection to the metal monolith.
That tower, or someone or something in it, was the only thing that could help me now.
I jammed a finger into my mouth as I thought that. Because I didn’t know why I had thought it. The notion had entered my mind beyond my conscious control.
The pressure behind my eye built until it felt like there was a hurricane lodged in my skull.
Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. There was something wrong with my chest. It felt like I’d swallowed ice.
I pushed a hand into my sternum, trying to massage away that growing tension.
It wouldn’t work.
My breathing shortened into sharp, frantic pants.
“What’s going on?” I had time to wheeze before a wave of weakness hit me. I stumbled, hand fumbling against the table beside me and knocking everything off as I fell to the floor. I hit my side with a sharp thump.
I couldn’t scream. I tried, but that growing cold spread further and further through my chest until it felt like I’d turned into a frozen wasteland.
Just when I thought I’d lose consciousness, something happened.
Something violent.
My head twitched back as if I’d been struck on the chin, and my temple gashed against the hard metal leg of the table.
Then the darkness swelled in. It flowed into my vision like it was trying to drown me.
Something terrible was happening to me.
I started to see things. I knew I was still frozen on the floor, a bead of blood trickling from my brow, but I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t see the room around me.
I saw a different room instead.
One filled with people. Dressed in regal attire, they all looked important, and they all turned their heads to stare at a raised platform. It had an enormous window behind it, a huge constellation dotted with vibrant, shining stars visible beyond.
Two people stood atop the platform. One was Illuminate Hart. The other person was irrelevant.
All my concentration focused on him.
He smiled, and I saw every movement of his lips and chin and jaw. He stared over adoringly at the person beside him.
But I stared at the view behind.
I watched the star-studded constellation behind him morph. Suddenly, blackness cut across it, dark and violent.
Then something sliced out of space.
An enormous ship appeared.
I didn’t get a chance to recognize it before it started firing.
Hart was thrown to his knees. I watched him turn, I watched his face slacken with fear.
Then blackness.
Blackness overtook me, and it overtook him.
The vision ended.
I tried to scream. I couldn’t. My body was paralyzed, and all I could do was stare at the carpet underneath me, my face pressed against it as the weight of my body pinned me to the ground.
Slowly control returned to my limbs.
But I didn’t move. Not for ages. I lay there on the floor, the blood still trickling down from the cut in my brow. My breath was uneven, my chest heavy.
I couldn’t blink; I didn’t dare close my eyes. Instead, they were riveted open as if someone had stapled them.
I could hear my breath coming in uneven, desperate gasps. It was like listening to a broken engine trying to rev up.
Eventually, I brought up a shaking hand and pressed it into my brow. I could feel a sticky slick of blood collect under my nails.
“… W-what just happened to me?”
There was no one to answer.
I pressed a hand into my chest, took a breath, and pushed myself up.
My hair flopped over my face as I locked my gaze on the view through the window.
It showed the horizon line, with tall buildings jutting toward the sky.
It did not show that enormous purple-green constellation. It did not show Hart’s elegant ship. It did not show a black swathe of energy cutting across space as a vessel sliced its way toward me.
To confirm that, I pushed myself to my feet and stumbled over to the window. I pressed a hand into the tempered force-field enhanced glass and pressed my face against it.
There wasn’t a constellation in sight.
I pushed back from the glass and tried to breathe. It was getting easier, and my heart wasn’t trying to rip its way out of my chest anymore.
I forced a hand over my eyes and closed them briefly. When I wasn’t assaulted by another vision, I winked an eye open.
The room – my room – didn’t change. It was still here around me, though messy from where I’d staggered into the table.
“You… you’re just tired,” I tried to tell myself.
It was the weakest, most pathetic lie I’d ever tried to tell myself.
Something terrible was happening to me.
I had to tell somebody.
I tried to push toward the door, but suddenly my limbs locked as if concrete had been poured into the joints again.
I couldn’t move.
Because… I couldn’t tell anybody.
That thought flashed through my mind as if it had been shot from a gun.
I couldn’t tell anybody.
I was in danger.
I had to get to Hart.
I tried to push that thought back, but I couldn’t. It kept repeating in my mind as if someone was persistently writing it right onto my brain cells.
I rocked back and forth, but nothing – nothing – could assuage my fear.
I had to get to Hart.
I had to warn him.
Yes, that’s it – I had to warn him.
My limbs unlocked, and I jerked toward the door, stumbling, and having to lock a hand onto the table to right myself.
Before I could take another step, I stopped myself.
What the hell was I doing?
What the hell was I thinking?
I didn’t know Hart, and what little I knew of him confirmed I hated the guy.
So why was I turning to him now?
I got another compulsion to move, but I used every ounce of will to stop myself in place.
No.
I wasn’t going to do this. I was going to tell somebody what was happening to me. I was going to request a brain scan or something. I was going to ask for help.
I was not going to lurch my way out of here and find Hart, because that was crazy.
; I couldn’t deny something was happening to me, but if I wanted to find out what it was and stop it, I had to be smart, not reactive.
Gritting my teeth together, I tried to suck a breath through them. It was the hardest thing ever, but I managed to keep myself standing and away from the door, even though the compulsion to rush through it kept surging in my mind.
I took a step away from the door, but my head jerked toward the view instead, my eyes locking on that tower.
I had to warn Hart.
It was imperative I go to his side and warn him.
Of what?
Did I honestly think that vision, or whatever it was, was real?
I tried to tell myself it couldn’t possibly be real, but it didn’t work.
All my other visions – though they hadn’t been as complete and violent – had come true.
Somehow, some crazy how, I could tell the future.
And the future was telling me that Illuminate Hart was in danger.
…
Captain Fargo
There wasn’t much that could be done. The terrorists – whoever they were – had been meticulous.
They had destroyed all evidence.
For a so-called terrorist attack, it was too clean. They also hadn’t taken out a population center or a building that would be missed. Just a single floor on a single block in the lower quarter.
I stood before one of the enormous long sets of stairs that led down into the lower quarter. Both hands were in my pockets as I stared at my security guards and watched them work.
Miranda’s words kept echoing in my mind. She’d said this building was the place they had been holding her for a week.
They.
Who?
What the hell was going on here?
Either she was lying, or she was telling the truth, and I didn’t like either option.
As I stood there, I suddenly got a call on my wrist device. I activated the holo feed and linked it to my neural implant so my conversation could be silent.
It was the Captain of the Corax.
I’d gone to the Academy with her, but she wasn’t calling for a friendly chat.
“I received a request for information on Lieutenant Mark Havelock,” she said before I could greet her.
“Thank you for getting back to me so quickly, but you needn’t have called. I just want confirmation he’s onboard your vessel.”
“And I called you, Francis, to tell you he isn’t.”
“… Excuse me?”
“Lieutenant Mark Havelock was never assigned to my vessel.”
“But the official records—”
“I know. I looked them up myself. They show he was assigned to my ship, but I’m telling you, I okayed that assignment, and he sure as hell isn’t here.”
I frowned, the move etching itself into my lips and chin. “What’s going on?”
“Beats me. What do you want this man for anyway?”
I withdrew into silence.
“You can’t tell me, can you?” She asked perceptively.
“I don’t know what’s going on yet, Bethany, and until I do, I don’t want to speculate.”
“It’s meant to be impossible to fake Foundation Forces assignment records,” she pointed out.
I knew that, and that’s the reason my gut was twisting and contorting as if someone was wrapping it up in chains.
“I heard about the terrorist attack on the ground there, you okay?”
“It wasn’t a terrorist attack,” I said in a quiet tone. So much for not sharing my misgivings. The official report would show it was a damn terrorist attack, and I would be wise to keep my suspicions to myself.
Bethany knew me, though. She paused. “These are strange times.”
“Yes, they are.”
“If you need anything, just let me know.”
“Thank you, I will.”
With that, we signed off.
I jammed my hands back into my pockets and tried to think. Try being the operative word.
Lieutenant Mark Havelock was not in the Scorpion Cluster.
So where was he? And what did all of this have to do with the mysterious Miranda?
One of my security guards marched up to me. “Sir, we don’t have any clues yet, but we have a lead.”
“So do I,” I realized. “Relay any information to my wrist device; I’m going back to central to question a witness.”
It wasn’t wise to put off questioning Miranda any longer.
She could very well be the clue at the heart of this.