Sorrows of Adoration (76 page)

“I’m in,” she
whispered. An impressively short time later she said, “Okay, their
front desk security monitors are now looping on yesterday’s data
from this time.”

“Hopefully there wasn’t
anything exciting going on yesterday.”

Trish gave Jason a
dirty look. “I did check, you know. You don’t keep me around to be
stupid.”

“True. It’s fortunate
your nefarious skills can finally be used for good.”

“Aren’t you glad you
didn’t send me to reform school when you had the chance?” She
tapped the phone again. “Back door is now unlocked as if it’s been
legitimately card-swiped. Yay for technology over needing actual
keys! Let’s go.”

Trish reached into the
pocket of her lab coat, took out rubber gloves, and slipped them
on. As they went up the steps, Jason closed his eyes.

“Anyone on the other
side?” Trish asked.

“I don’t think so,
no.”

They opened it and went
in, trying not to look at the camera pointed at the door, just in
case.

Using the floor plans
they’d committed to memory, they were able to walk through the
office unnoticed to the door to the mysterious central corridor.
They had to go past Dr. Steele’s office, but since she was away
with her assistant, nobody was there to see them. Trish tapped on
her phone again, and the red light on the door’s panel turned
green.

Inside the corridor was
a desk with a man sitting at a computer. Trish closed the door
behind them as Jason stepped forward with a smile. They weren’t
sure if he was a researcher or a security guard, but it didn’t
matter.

“Who are you?” the man
asked, rising from his chair.

“Hi! I’m Dr. Somebody!”
Jason said with a grin as he stepped forward and extended a hand to
shake.

“Who?” the man asked
but automatically put out his hand anyway.

Jason grabbed it,
pulled enough of the man’s consciousness out of him to send him
into a deep sleep, and caught him as he fell, propping him up at
his desk in such a way that it looked like he was napping on the
job.

“I’ve got this lock
scrambled so only I can open it,” Trish said, and then pointed
behind Jason. “That’ll be the cleaning area.” A sign instructed all
persons entering the “Project Zone” to remove their shoes, so they
did, placing them on a tray to the side.

They passed through a
curtain of thick strips of plastic into a small enclosure. Trish
pressed a red button familiar to them both from other laboratories
with sensitive equipment. A sudden rush of air swirled around them.
Trish temporarily took off her wig and shook it in the air stream,
and Jason ran his hands roughly through his hair. But instead of
the air stream ending as they were used to, in the last moments a
foul-smelling fog accompanied it.

Trish coughed and then
wheezed, “Did I just increase my cancer risk?”

“Quite possibly, sorry.
Shit,” he said with a worried expression.

She shrugged it off. “I
guess it’s better than death in the next few minutes.”

They passed through a
second curtain and gave each other a thorough inspection for any
stray plant material. Then each took a set of blue paper boots with
white rubber soles from a tub on a table by the elevator door.

Trish pressed the
elevator button, and the door opened. Inside, they kept their heads
down in case the lift car was equipped with a camera she hadn’t
been able to locate on the network.

The descent was slow
and eerie. Jason whispered, “You okay?”

“Too late if I’m
not.”

He started to react,
but she waved him off. “What about you? With the draining? You’re
not going to go all crazy-addict on me, are you?”

Jason muttered, “Takes
more than a little knock-out for me to get a noticeable jolt. I’ll
be fine.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Don’t, Trish. Just
leave it be.”

When the elevator
stopped and didn’t immediately open, they exchanged a look of
panic, but then they heard a rattle from the other side and the
doors slid apart.

A man in a lab coat
with a nametag labelled Steve Bertille said, “What are you doing
here? I thought you were—hey?” He stopped speaking and stared at
them in confusion.

Jason once more smiled
and stuck out a hand to shake. “Hi, Steve! Glad to meet you! I’m
Dr. So-and-so from …” His voice trailed off as the man fell to
floor, unconscious.

“Nice names,” Trish
muttered. “Couldn’t you come up with something better?”

“Why? Most people I
drain don’t remember the five minutes prior, let alone five
seconds.”

They found themselves
in a room reminiscent of a hospital on their left, with shelves
full of medical items ranging from scrubs to a phlebotomist’s tray.
The wall on that side featured a door beside a wide, curtained
window above a long desk sporting a computer and several stacks of
miscellaneous papers and surgical paraphernalia. The right side was
set up as a research laboratory.

Trish pointed a photo
on the desk of an elderly lady holding a gaudy pink cake with the
name “Ethel” scrawled in blue frosting. “Seriously, what the fuck
is wrong with someone that they can be a creepy-ass evil lab tech
but have a picture of their grandma staring at them all damned
day?” Shuddering, she peered at the monitor and said, “There’s a
schedule on here, but it looks like they don’t have anything going
on this week except routine stuff like food and linen changes.” She
turned to Jason and added in a pained voice, “For someone named
Anna.”

“Just get us in,” he
whispered.

Trish tested access
codes on the computer while Jason stepped forward slowly, his legs
suddenly feeling as if they were surrounded by cold water, making
him fear it was all a dream and he was about to wake to discover
that the past few days hadn’t happened. But he did not wake; he
reached the window and lifted the edge of the curtain with the back
of his hand.

Beyond it was a
brightly lit room, tiled on all surfaces, with a hospital bed in
the far right corner and a toilet in an alcove in the middle of the
far wall. Rails on the ceiling indicated that privacy curtains
could have been available for both the bed and toilet, but the
rails were empty, meaning anyone at the window had a full view of
the room. The bed was unmade, and padded restraints with well-worn
edges dangled from its frame.

In the far left corner
was a woman sitting on the floor. She was dressed in pale blue
hospital scrubs and beige rubberized socks, her head hidden behind
her knees with long, dark hair draped over her arms and her hands
locked around her shins. She was rocking slowly, lightly bumping
the wall to her left repeatedly, her shoulders tilted slightly away
from the door as if shielding herself against anything that might
enter.

Jason almost touched
the window with the fingertips of his right hand, but then he
remembered he wasn’t gloved and pulled them back just in time. “Oh
shit,” he whispered. “That’s not good.”

Trish leaned to look
through the window. “No, it isn’t. You sure about this?”

Jason nodded.

Trish removed Steve’s
lanyard with his photo ID and security card, slid the card through
a reader by the computer, and entered a code on the keyboard. The
light beside the door’s handle changed from red to green, and they
heard a soft click.

Jason suddenly thought
better of wearing a lab coat for his first conversation with the
woman he’d sought for more than a century, so he took it off and
tossed it on the chair as Trish opened the door and stood aside to
let him enter first.

As he went inside, the
woman lifted her head to look at him but otherwise retained her
defensive posture. He was stunned motionless for a moment when he
saw the green eyes he knew so well and could now confirm had not
been enhanced for aesthetics in the portrait. They were as bright
as depicted but fixed on him with a baleful stare instead of the
far-away sadness to which he’d grown accustomed.

“Hello,” he said as
gently as he could. “You must be Anna.”

“You must be stupid,”
she snapped back.

“Uh—”

“You lot ought to know
by now that I can hear everything out there once the door is
opened. I heard you take off your lab coat. Did you think that’d
fool me because you’re new? Did you think I would imagine you a
friend come for tea?” She sneered. Her fury was palpable, her upper
lip on the edge of snarl.

Despite the years he’d
longed for this meeting, Jason suddenly felt a desperate urge to
flee. He had no words to counter such wrath.

Anna’s eyes darted back
and forth between Trish and Jason as if she were performing a scan.
Then she closed her eyes and put her head back down, muttering, “At
least you know enough not to have brought me fresh gifts. Do what
you will, then, as I have no means to stop you. Get it over
with.”

The abatement of her
rage allowed him to recover his breath. He tried to explain. “You
misunderstand. I’m not here to—”

“Don’t insult me by
pretending to care,” came her muffled voice. “Nobody who comes down
that lift cares.”

“We do,” replied Trish
meekly.

Jason stepped a little
closer to her and then crouched down to be at her eye level but
still ready to react if necessary. He wanted so badly to reach out
to her, both as a gesture of friendly comfort and for his own need
to test the reality of her presence. However, he knew he wasn’t
welcome to do so and did not wish to risk reigniting her anger or,
worse, frightening her. He put one hand on his knee and held the
other open before her so she could see that he held no weapon or
medical instrument.

“Anna,” he said in the
softest tone he could muster given his shaking stomach, “my name is
Jason Truitt. Well, that’s not my original name. I was born Jason
Moore.” He leaned in closer and added in a whisper he hoped was too
low to be heard by any recording device Trish might not have
disabled, “In the year 1620, in London.”

Anna looked at him in
shock, but her expression returned to fury as she spat, “Liar!”

“I wish it weren’t
true,” he said earnestly. “I’m like you. I don’t ever get sick. Any
wound I receive heals quickly. I don’t appear to be able to
die.”

“I don’t believe you.
You’re playing a trick. I won’t fall for any more tricks!”

“I can only imagine
what they’ve done to you down here, but I honestly am here to get
you out.” He smiled at her as best as he could given the bevy of
painful emotions raining down upon him. “I’ve been looking for you
for over a century, since Ebenezer Howard’s book reading at a
fund-raiser for his new Garden City Association in 1899. June, I
think it was. I usually know the date, but forgive me—it’s such a
dream come true to finally meet you that I can’t quite think
straight.

“But the memory of you
on that day is very clear to me: when the Crooke’s tube on display
overheated, you put yourself between it and a group of ladies
sitting nearby. I saw what was about to happen and tried to
intervene, but there were too many people in the way. You raised
your arm just as the tube exploded. I saw the burn and the glass in
your arm. But in the ensuing mayhem you hid it all and shortly
thereafter revealed a perfectly healthy arm, insisting that your
dress had taken the brunt and that the blood upon it was that of
one the slightly injured women you so bravely protected. Everyone
declared it a miracle, but I knew it wasn’t true. I’ve had a piece
of that glass in my home all these years, and I’ve been searching
for you ever since.”

She stared blankly at
him for a moment, and then she closed her eyes and whispered, “This
is a particularly cruel trick.”

“It isn’t a trick,”
Trish said. “Jason, show her. We don’t have much time.”

Anna opened her eyes to
fix Trish with a cold stare and then looked back and forth several
times between them again. Next she stared at the open door, and
Jason could tell by the slight shift in her posture what she was
considering, so he said, “Trish, move back a bit. Don’t block the
door. We’re not keeping anybody in here, are we?”

Trish stepped to the
side as she said, “Nope.”

“You can run right out
if you wish. We are setting you free, not abducting you. We would
never take you anywhere or hold you against your will. However, as
I said I’ve been looking for you for a long time, and if you were
to afford me the pleasure of at least one conversation, I would be
most grateful.” He shifted sideways to make it clear that she could
go.

She narrowed her eyes
at them suspiciously. “What have you got out there waiting for
me?”

“Freedom,” said
Trish.

“I’ll prove to you what
I said before,” Jason offered. He leaned back and, with one hand in
the air in placation, slowly withdrew his pocketknife with the
other. Anna nonetheless hunched defensively back into the corner,
so he said, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” He offered her the knife’s
handle, but she only stared at it. “Cut me with this, anywhere you
like, although I find it quite unpleasant to be stuck in the face
so if you wouldn’t mind avoiding that, I’d appreciate it.”

Anna kept staring at
the knife.

Trish rolled her eyes.
“Do it yourself. I wouldn’t want to cut you. That’s kind of gross,
actually.”

“Forgive me,” Jason
said quickly. “I thought it would seem like less of a trick if I
gave you control of it.”

Anna shook her head
slowly.

He opened the knife and
drew it across the palm of his hand right before her, wincing
slightly as he went. He folded the knife and put it back in his
pocket while keeping his bleeding hand in front of her.

She lurched forward so
suddenly he almost fell backward, but her grip on his hand kept him
upright. She pulled the deep cut open to inspect it, which hurt,
but he did all he could to prevent her from noticing his pain. It
began to heal right away; her jaw dropped. She poked at the blood
that remained as the wound closed and examined it on her fingertip,
then sniffed it. He felt her hand begin to tremble as her breath
quickened and she started whispering several staccato, incoherent
phrases, the clearest of which he heard as, “Can’t be!” and “No,
no, no, not ever!”