Stitch (18 page)

31. Trust

What was
going on
?  Alessa’s touch had unleashed a vivid flashback, but Isaac couldn’t make sense of any of it.  When had that memory occurred?  What had he and Alessa been doing hiding under that bush in the middle of the night?  And who was this brother, Joe, of whom he had no recollection?

All Isaac knew was that his body recognized the feel of this woman as
familiar
, and he didn’t know how that could be possible.  But whoever Alessa was, it was clear to him now that she was as vital to his existence as oxygen or water or food.  Whatever she asked of him next, he would deliver.  There was no turning back.

Looking down at the mysterious woman still wrapped in his arms, Isaac burned with anticipation. But before he could seal his lips to Alessa’s, the lights flickered once again and finally went out.  She pulled away quickly, the alarm exuding from her palpable.

With the sun still fading in the distance, there was enough light for Isaac to make out her face.  She quickly glanced around the room, her wide eyes settling on his.

“Isaac, we only have a few seconds, so please listen carefully.”

Her expression had changed.  She was afraid now.  And intense, alert.  Her tension had triggered some sort of instinct in Isaac that told him to follow her lead – or else.

Letting their intimate moment pass was an almost physical ache, but he nodded to signal that he was listening, his eyes searching her face.

She continued.  “Once the lights turn back on, they’ll be watching us, so we’ll need to be discreet.”

Isaac was perplexed.  He couldn’t imagine who could be watching them – or how.  “But why?”

Alessa warily skimmed the room again.  Her words spilled out in a rapid tumble.  “I can’t now…”  She took a deep breath.  “You’re in danger – we both are – and I need you to come with me.  I’m here to help you escape.”

“Escape?”  But she’d already warned him of the fire – what other danger could there be?  It didn’t make any sense, and yet – given her behavior – he didn’t doubt the sincerity of her words.  But if there was danger, he couldn’t possibly leave his family behind.  “I can’t leave without my family…”

Alessa hesitated before responding.  “Isaac, they’re not who you think they are…”  Her expression softened.  “They’re not your real family.  They’re just prisoners here, like us.”

Isaac shook his head in disbelief.  This woman was clearly very confused.

Alessa’s eyes bored into him, a pained expression on her face.  “I know it’s a lot to take in.”  The lights flickered once and a wave of panic swept over her expression.  “Just please… trust me.  I’ll explain everything when there’s time.”

Isaac couldn’t think of a single logical reason to trust Alessa.  His family was his
family
.  His parents and Josephine featured in all of his memories, back down to his earliest childhood.  What did she mean that they weren’t his real family?  He didn’t know what to think.

And wherever did she get the gall to make such wild assertions, anyway?  If such a thing were true, how could she even know?  To his knowledge, Alessa knew practically nothing about him; she was a stranger to him.

But somewhere deep inside, he knew that wasn’t true.  Just as his subconscious had known her name, he could feel in his bones that he knew this woman.  Something drew him to her in a way that nothing else ever had.

Despite his better judgment, he decided to trust her.  For now.

Isaac stood frozen, waiting for Alessa to act.

The lights flickered once again and she surveyed the room hastily, an animal look in her eyes.  One of her hands released his and darted for the sheathed knife on the table.  She snatched it up and deftly slid it into her waistband under her shirt, the motion smooth and automatic, as if she’d done it a million times before.  Then she quickly retook his hand, resuming the same position they’d been in when the power first went out.

The lights flicked on once more and held, illuminating the room for a moment.  Isaac looked Alessa in the eyes, unsure of what to do, and found a pure, almost feral determination staring back at him.  With a twinge of fear, he wondered if he’d made the wrong decision.

32. Pursuit

Isaac caught his breath as he waited for a cue from Alessa.  She was unmistakably anxious.  Isaac observed that she was nervously fingering the knife concealed at her waist while eyeing the room.  He didn’t know what to expect next, but he was ready to follow her lead.

When the lights flicked off once again, she wasted no time.  She grabbed Isaac’s hand and sprinted from the room, leading him out of the kitchen and down the hallway in the direction of the parlor.

Thousands of questions tumbled in Isaac’s mind as he wondered about the circumstances that had led her here, but his thoughts were interrupted by Alessa yanking him violently into the foyer closet.  She slammed the door shut behind him and pulled the string overhead to turn on the dim closet light.

“Isaac, quickly, we only have a few minutes before they get here.  Help me barricade the door.”  An expression bordering on panic lined her face as she began frantically searching through the contents of the closet.

“
Who’s
coming?”

Alessa snatched up a sturdy folded chair and wedged it under the doorknob.  “The producers!” she replied with a grunt as she threw her weight at the chair to jam it in tighter.

The producers?  “Who are ‘the producers?’”

“Isaac, there’s no time.  I promise I will explain as soon as I can.”  She was unfolding a crumpled piece of paper from her pocket, her face scrunched with concentration.  “According to the map, there should be a utility tunnel connected to this closet…”

She turned and started knocking lightly on the walls.  Once she reached the back wall, he realized what she was doing – it sounded hollow.  Gritting her teeth, Alessa turned and swung her elbow hard into the plaster.  Isaac cringed, expecting a cry of pain, but when he looked up, he saw that Alessa had punched a large hole at the point of impact.  As she withdrew, Isaac could see thousands of tiny blue and red lights blinking in the darkness beyond.  What in the world…

She began tearing at the hole, ripping chunks of the wall away to reach the dark space behind it.  “Isaac!  Please, there’s no time!”

Isaac put his confusion aside and complied.  As his fingers wrapped around the edge of the hole, he was surprised to find that the wall was thin and light, a dusty composite material that broke readily in his hands.  This was unlike any of the hard, thick plaster he’d ever seen.

Within seconds, they’d opened a hole large enough for Alessa to step through, and she beckoned Isaac to follow.  Still reeling from the surprise of finding a hidden room in his hallway closet, he numbly obeyed.

Isaac stared in disbelief as he emerged from the wall and straightened himself.  He was in a long, narrow corridor that dipped into the earth, with dark metal grating on every side.  Behind the grating, hundreds of glowing blue wires wove together, running through the walls and ceiling with a panel of blinking red lights interjecting every few feet.  The tunnel glowed eerily in a dim blue and red, Isaac and Alessa’s shadows cast in all directions.  Isaac scanned the room in wonder; he’d had no idea that this kind of technology even existed.

Noticing his confusion, Alessa grabbed his hand and drew him deeper into the tunnel.  The passage was only wide enough for one, so Isaac followed behind, holding her tightly.  In a hushed voice, she tried to explain as they felt their way through, shuffling quickly and quietly as they went.  “There are all kinds of tunnels and shafts built into this replica of the house, more so than on my set, which is the original.  If we follow the route on this map, we should eventually end up in a sewer that we can follow to the outside.”

Isaac didn’t understand.  What did she mean that his house was a replica?  Where did these tunnels come from?  What were all these wires and lights and grates?  Where were they going?  “Set?  What do you mean?  How did this passageway get into my house?”

Alessa stopped and faced Isaac, setting her hands on his shoulders.  “Isaac, do you remember anything from Paragon?  Do you remember the compound or the rebellion or Joe?”

The strange dreams he’d been having popped to his mind, and his memory of kissing Alessa, but he still didn’t know how they fit in with what he was seeing.  “I… I’m not sure.  Sometimes I have dreams about a man who looks like me but older… we’re always sneaking about, and I feel afraid but excited.”

Alessa smiled encouragingly.  “That’s Joe.  Joe is your older brother.”

“But I don’t have a brother.  Just my little sister, Josephine.”

Alessa shook her head.  “Josephine's not really your sister, Isaac.  You’re confused, but it’s not your fault – that’s exactly what they want.  It’s really 2114, almost two hundred years later than you’ve been led to believe, and this house and this farm are all part of an elaborate set for a show.  You and I – and Joe – were rebels fighting against a secret government that was exploiting everyone we knew.  We were captured and imprisoned, and they used some kind of mind control to erase our memories and give us new ones.”

Isaac took a step back and just shook his head.  No, this couldn’t be true…

Alessa grasped his hands before he could move out of reach and gripped them tightly.  “Listen to me, Isaac.  You know all of this already.  You just have to remember.”  She stepped closer to him and spoke softly, never dropping his eyes.  “I know what you’re going through.  The same thing happened to me.  I thought I was a college student in the 21st century until my best friend revealed that it was all fake.  She was my
sister
, Isaac, and I didn’t even realize it.”  She paused.  “But Janie managed to infiltrate the show and now she’s working with the rebels to help us escape.”

Isaac stopped backing away, but he still couldn’t process all of this.  It sounded familiar, like the plot of a story he’d read a long time ago and forgotten about, but he just couldn’t seem to remember what had happened.

“Isaac, we have to keep moving.  Just try your best to remember.”

Alessa continued to guide him through the tunnels, checking the map every so often.  Isaac’s head was spinning, but somehow he knew that Alessa was telling the truth.  He willed himself to remember, but to no avail.  It just wasn’t coming back to him.

After a few minutes of trailing Alessa through the corridor, he could hear a commotion back by the entrance.  It sounded like someone was trying to bang down the door, but he and Alessa were too far away to see if they’d been successful yet.  Alessa threw one hurried glance over her shoulder and pressed forward ever faster.

A moment later she stopped abruptly, peering from the map to the wall on her left.  She reached up and began pulling at the grate above her head.  With a ping, it pulled loose and Isaac could see a small chute stretching away from the hole in the wall, barely big enough to crawl through.

Alessa folded the map and shoved it deep into her pocket.  “It’s a ventilation shaft.  We’ll need to follow it to a nearby surveillance room where we can switch to another route that will bring us to the sewer.”  She reached up and shimmied into the hole, bracing her legs against the wall for support.  Isaac followed her lead and climbed in after her.

Once in the shaft, she passed the grate she’d removed from the wall to Isaac and he fit it back in place with a pop.  Then Alessa led the way through a few turns and out through another grate into a small room with hundreds of illuminated panels lining the walls.

She checked the lock on the door and pulled out her map once more.  Glancing at the glowing screens, Isaac saw images of his house – the barn, the kitchen, his study.  At first he thought they were well-lit photographs, until he saw a group of men in dark heavy armor beating down the door to the foyer closet.  Isaac realized they were tiny motion picture screens, somehow showing the current state of the various rooms of his house.  In the parlor, he saw his parents and Josephine lying motionless on the floor.  He peered closer at the screen to confirm what he’d seen and gasped.  “No!”

Alessa dropped the map and jumped to his side.  “Isaac, it’s okay!  I’m sure they’re all right – for some reason the producers have seemed reluctant to kill anyone, so they just use gas to make the actors pass out.  That’s why those guards are wearing masks.”

Isaac’s chest was pounding, but he tried to calm down.  Breathing heavily, he demanded, “Who are those people?  And why did you say my family were actors?”

Alessa sighed wearily.  “Well, they’re not actors by choice.  They’re like us – rebels, or maybe just people who were unlucky enough to come across something they weren’t supposed to see.  Either way, they were taken prisoner and their memories wiped, then they were assigned to this show as your family.”

“This show?”

“It’s all a TV drama, Isaac.  The producers did their best to wipe our minds clean, then whatever they couldn’t get rid of – our feelings for each other, for example – they worked into the plot.”

“I don’t understand…”

“It’s because they needed to keep everyone subdued.  They use the shows and the drugs in our food to keep us oblivious and content so we’ll keep working, thinking that we’re all doing our part to rebuild society together.  But someone else is running the show, and they’re using us without our knowledge.  That’s why we joined the rebellion.  To fight, for ourselves and for everyone in Paragon. Is any of this ringing a bell?”

As Alessa filled in the blanks, Isaac could feel something shifting within him.  A rush of images exploded into his vision and a searing burst of pain zapped from one end of his brain to the other.  He collapsed to the ground in agony as his neurons re-stitched themselves and a flood of memories came rushing back all at once.

He could hear Alessa calling his name, but she sounded distant, her voice merely an echo beyond the cacophony raging in his mind.  Suddenly, everything she’d said made sense.

He remembered the war and the outbreak, sheltering with his brother in the government quarantine zone after their mother and father had succumbed to the virus.  A wave of guilt flooded over him – their deaths had been his fault.  As an unplanned child born to a working class family, Isaac had always carried the burden of taking from the rest of his family, of knowing he was just one more mouth to feed.  And then during the outbreak, he had been their undoing.  Isaac’s father had gone out to find food after their stores ran out, and came back with the virus.  His mother caught it, and within days they were gone.  Then it was just Isaac and Joe.

He and his brother had somehow resisted the virus and made it to the quarantine zone, and after years without contact from the outside world, they’d joined their fellow refugees in deciding to start fresh.  They’d christened their new society Paragon, a name to embody the spirit of equality that would underscore the sharing and mutual commitment that would define their community.  Isaac and Joe had received their daily work assignments, ate their rations, watched the nightly dramas, and finally they had begun to settle in to their new lives.

And then Joe had come home one day babbling about drugs, and everything had changed.  After Joe had restricted Isaac’s diet, Isaac realized that he hadn’t been thinking clearly for months.  Together he and his brother had joined the secret rebellion.  And then a mission had gone wrong – Isaac’s mistake, for which he would never forgive himself – and Joe was gone.

After that, Isaac had resolved that Joe’s loss would not be in vain.  That conviction, and Alessa, were all he’d had left.  As the only person who had loved Joe as much as he had, Alessa had become his rock, his constant companion and an ally in the war against whatever sinister forces were guiding Paragon’s rule.  And then they’d been captured during a crucial mission, separated in jail, subjected to endless torture, and Isaac had prepared himself to leave this life altogether, alone.

But then he’d woken up as a different person, a teenager again, on a pastoral farm in a simpler, more peaceful time.  As Isaac Mason of 1917, he’d never quite felt like he belonged.  He’d always known that something was missing from his life, and had carried a deep sense of guilt that he was, or would be, somehow responsible for his family’s ruin.  At the time, he had thought it was because he’d always yearned to leave the farm, abandoning the family business and leaving his sister behind.  But he now understood that those feelings were a part of him, etched into his bones, and nothing that anyone or any technology could ever erase.

In the real world, a sinking depression had threatened to overtake Isaac as he struggled to accept his family’s fate and his own entrapment in Paragon.  But just as Alessa’s specter had been the only catalyst to help the Isaac of 1917 focus on the present, her supportive presence in Paragon had provided the
real
Isaac with a reason to exist.  And now she’d come back for him, to save him from the awful fate of living a life that was not his own, under the control of the exploitive Ruling Class who saw him and everyone else only as pawns for their manipulation.

Isaac Mason of 1917 was gone now, and in 2114, Isaac was a child no more.  He may only have been a boy of 16 when he passed through what would become Paragon’s gates, but he was a man of 24 now, a soldier.  And with Alessa by his side, he would do everything in his power to avenge his brother, and finally prove his worth to his parents.

Isaac shivered remembering how readily his mind had slipped into 1917 without a single look back.  It must have been months since then; Isaac’s stomach tensed at the thought of all the time they’d lost.  It was time now to finish their mission.