Unforgiven (18 page)

“Professor Peterson? Are you sure? Wasn’t she your mentor?” Owen asked, clearly a little shocked.

“It’s her. Find her and destroy the plot against Coda.” It wasn’t a sentence that should’ve been spoken with such a flat tone. There should have been some force behind it, some passion.

Owen noticed, and he took a long look at the betrayer before turning to David. “What do you think? I can go and nip this in the bud today. You won’t even have to send anyone else.”

“Professor Peterson is more dangerous than you might think. You’ll need back up. How do you expect to remove all the Zero by yourself?” the betrayer asked.

David exhaled. “If Zero, as you call it, is on campus, we are not equipped to remove it. We would call in a team of specialists to clean it up.
If
we go today, we go with a small group. Our goal would be to gather enough evidence to get the faculty to cancel the event.”

I couldn’t help but feel hopeful; David was skeptical—I knew him well enough to see it on his face.

“What do you mean, if?” Owen asked.

David turned to the robot. “Mackenzie, would you please excuse us? I know you must be exhausted. Why don’t you go relax for a bit? Owen will join you shortly.”

Owen watched the robot closely for a reaction, but evidently, she showed none. She didn’t address either of them as she stood and left the room. I thought she would keep walking all the way to her room, like a good little robot, but she didn’t. She left the door to David’s office the tiniest bit ajar and stood outside listening.

“She’s still there!” I yelled. “Say nothing!” But there was no way for them to hear me. Nor did they seem to notice her lurking there outside the door. They had too much trust in me, it seemed.

“David, if there’s a chance we can stop this, we need to stop it. We’re wasting time debating it! People’s lives are at stake. We can’t just ignore that to save ourselves.”

“And we can’t just send our people to be slaughtered either.”

“We wouldn’t be! We have a name.” Owen was starting to yell. The robot would probably have been able to overhear his half of the conversation even without the door cracked open.

“Owen, have you considered the possibility that they—” he hesitated, taking care with his words, “—changed Mackenzie?”

“What? No. She’s just a little shell shocked.”

“Maybe. But the fact that she doesn’t remember what happened to her, but she does remember rather detailed information about the plot against Coda is too convenient for my taste. It feels like a trap.”

“Yes!” I shouted to the voice. “They’re not as stupid as you’d like to think.” A very self-satisfied grin spread across my face as I folded my arms over my chest.

“You’re absolutely right. It could be a trap.” Owen sat back in his chair. “But if it’s not, tens of thousands of people will die.”

The projection became jerky, and I didn’t hear any more of the conversation as the robot was grabbed and roughly thrown into one of the training rooms.

After a few blinks, Mitchell came into focus. Mitchell wasn’t normally forward or aggressive like this. Something was up. I got up and moved closer to the screen, as if that would help me understand what he was thinking.

Whirling around, he shut the door behind him and backed the robot up against the nearest wall.

“Tell me something, Mackenzie.” He placed emphasis on my name. “What makes a good sundae?”

I was practically nose to nose with the projection, willing her to defy him, to give him a wrong answer, anything. But all she did was stare at him, seemingly cowed into silence. But I knew better. The puppeteers didn’t
know
the answer.

“I don’t know what’s going on yet,” he said, his voice low and threatening. “But I’m going to get to the bottom of it. Everyone is blinded by their happiness to see you. But they’ve done something to you, and I can tell it ain’t good.” He was right in the robot’s face, bracing himself with one hand on either side of her against the wall he had her backed up against. Under different circumstances, an outsider might think he was about to ravish her.

But the robot was remarkably unaffected by his threats. She didn’t flinch when he got in her face, her breathing never quickened, and I was willing to bet her stone-faced expression had not changed.

“I’m watching you. And when I figure out what’s going on, you better hide.” He pounded the wall near her head, but she still didn’t flinch. Then he left her alone in the room.

After a few moments, she calmly exited the training room and went upstairs to her own bedroom.

Mitchell knew
. Of course he knew. He knew what it was like to be tortured by the Potestas, what it did to a person. But this was different, and he could tell. And thank God for that.

“What now?” I asked the projection, feeling hopeful. Mitchell would figure it out any minute. Then we could fight this together. I wouldn’t be alone.

“Tomorrow, your love will die,” the voice said, very matter of fact.

“You don’t know that. David might not even let him go.”

“We shall see,” the voice said, leaving an ominous feeling to the air that was hard to ignore.

The robot stared at the ceiling of my room. “Get up,” I said to her. I needed to know what Owen was doing, and yet she refused to move. “Get up, you worthless piece of—”

A knock at her door silenced my swearing.

She got up and went to the door rather stiffly. David was on the other side. “Owen isn’t here with you, is he?”

The robot blinked at him, and I saw David push past the robot and search my room. “Damn it,” he whispered, more to himself than to the robot.

“Where is he?” I called to David. “Where is he?”

David sat on my keyboard’s stool and leaned on his knees. “I told him it was too dangerous to go to the university on his own. I didn’t make the decision lightly. He openly disagreed with me, but I remained adamant. It’s become clear that he went anyway, and he apparently took a few people with him. I don’t know if I should send someone after them, or if it would mean I’m just sending more sheep to the slaughter.”

“Go after him! Bring him back before Coda can happen! I’ll do it myself!” I called out to the projection.

“How gallant of you,” the voice said. If it had a face, I knew it would’ve given me a mocking smile. “Unfortunately for you, you’ll do no such thing. Look around you, Mackenzie. You do as I say. And I say you’re going to watch your friends die. Every last one of them, starting with Owen.”

“How am I supposed to watch Owen die if I’m not there? If he dies at Coda, there will be nothing left of his body. Zero will reduce him to ash, and you know it.”

“A valid point. However, I’m willing to live with that small imperfection.”

Well, I’m not
, I thought to myself, knowing I had to find a way out before it was too late.

Looking out across the beautiful mountain lake as I sat on the deck of my nightmare dream home, I came to a resolution. I would fight harder. There was nothing to lose by trying.

I took a deep breath as I sat in a chair I hoped never to see again. Closing my eyes, I emptied my mind of everything. All the grief, anger, guilt, and fear that had been my constant companions for months poured out of me until my mind had nothing inside it, nothing but the sound of my breathing. I didn’t think about Owen, Tracy, or even Maddie. Only breathing. In. Out.

The quiet was rather calming for me, and I hated to abandon it so soon, but there was work to be done. So I stretched out my mind and searched for any sign of Shields. At first, it felt like an odd thing to do, like I was one of those Russian dolls or something—a mind lost within a mind, looking for a mind.

Lacking any tangible experience in this arena, I floundered at first, finding no sign of my captor. But I had nothing but time on my hands, so I kept at it. With my eyes closed, I continued to search the darkness. My paradise hell didn’t exist behind the security of my eyelids. Here, there was only darkness, where there was nowhere and everywhere to hide.

The darkness was peaceful in a way I’d never understood before. While I was lost in grieving for Maddie, I’d allowed it to consume me completely. But this was so much more serene. The quiet wasn’t lonely; it was welcome, offering me time to breathe.

I had no idea how long I searched the darkness with my mind. Without watching the projection, I had no way to keep track of the passage of time. It didn’t matter. Not anymore. I operated in a sort of Schrodinger’s Cat world. Owen existed, and at the same time, he didn’t. I wouldn’t know for sure until I freed myself from the box. So that remained my focus—open the box.

Eventually, I realized I was no longer alone in the darkness. I came across a small block. It looked like a child’s wooden building block, with an uppercase letter T on one side and a picture of a toothbrush on the other. Examining it more closely, I noticed the top had a different image, and as I looked at it, the image started to move. It was Shields, standing at the mirror, brushing his teeth. He wore a towel around his waist and leaned close to the mirror to inspect his face as he brushed. His dark, curly hair dripped a little when he ran his free hand through it. And that was all. The memory played again, looking exactly the same as it had the first time.

I held the memory in my hand and looked at it.
Such a small building block,
I thought as I closed my hand around it and started to squeeze. At first, the corners of the block dug into my hand, but I kept right on squeezing. I could feel the memory starting to give under the pressure, and soon a fine, sawdust-like material started to seep through my fingers and form a small pile at my feet.

“Just what do you think you’re doing?” a familiar voice asked me. I knew it was Shields, but he sounded different… almost desperate. The balance of power had shifted.

I ignored him I settled down beside the pile and blew, forever scattering the first of many memories I hoped to destroy. As I scattered the memory dust, the darkness seemed to press in around me, as if it was imploding on itself.

“I will kill you before you finish whatever it is you hope to accomplish,” the voice threatened. If he killed me, it would be over—they would lose their weapon. If he didn’t, I would kill him. Either way, I won.

Silently, I pressed on and found more and more building blocks to destroy. The blocks formed a nice little pile at my feet. Each time I picked one up, two or three new ones appeared in its place.

His memories were odd, unimportant, and scattered all over the timeline of his life, not linear like other memories I’d seen.

I got very excited about one memory in particular, thinking I’d found what I was looking for, but that feeling waned when I started to watch it.

It had a capital P on one side and a lightning bolt on another.
Power?
I wondered?
Potestas?

The memory showed Shields in front of another man, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. It was too muffled, save for a few words I could make out through their mumbling. Things like “Unseen,” “Coda,” and “Dr. Jeppe.” The image became so hazy, I could barely see the two figures through the fog, and I had no hope of understanding the things they were saying. Something important was in there, but it had been deliberately obscured from me.

Frustrated, I threw the memory to the ground and crushed it beneath my foot, ignoring the surrounding darkness as it closed in around me.

“Stop it!” the voice yelled, but it sounded more muted than it had before.

Whether Shields was scrambling his memories to protect himself, or the Potestas had programmed him to protect their own secrets, I wasn’t sure. What I did know was that the method was effective. But if Shields’ mind was built this way, how did he function? How did he remember anything at all?

I pondered their methods as I crushed memory after memory, the darkness closing in on me each time, the voice becoming little more than a whisper as its protests continued.

The task so consumed me, I barely even noticed. I was intent on stopping the Potestas, on preventing them from learning more about the Unseen. More than that, I had to eliminate the threat to Owen, Mitchell, and David—my family. I had to break free so I could find Owen, and then I could concentrate on the other threats. Destroying Shields from within was my best hope.

I couldn’t help but wonder what was happening to his body as I wreaked havoc on his brain. Didn’t the people around him notice something was happening? Maybe he was alone, with no one around to help him. Maybe he was beyond help. I could only hope that was the case.

Finally, I came to his last memory. The darkness was so close, pressing down in on me, making it hard to breathe. I’d stopped watching the memories ages ago, but I was curious about this last memory. So heavily guarded, buried deeply among all the others, it had to be something special. Peering into the block, I found myself in a hospital room. A woman with sweaty, long brown hair lay in the bed with a bundle in her arms. Tears streamed down her face as she gazed down at the sleeping baby. Machines beeped and nurses bustled around, but I barely noticed them. All I saw was the woman and the baby. Shields put one tender hand on the baby, and then leaned in to kiss the woman.

Pulling back in horror, I hesitated with the memory in my hands. This tiny, wooden block was probably all that kept me in the Potestas’ prison. But the image of the baby stayed my hand. He had a family. The knowledge was hard to digest. Did they know his plans for the world? Were they also members of the Potestas? For their sake, I almost hoped they were. Otherwise, they’d be in a lot of danger.

The memory tumbled from my hand at the thought. Whose side was I on? Anger bubbled up inside me. I didn’t want to have to take sides, but if I did, I always and inevitably would choose the side of life.

I reached over and picked the little, wooden block back up, which proved difficult in the tight space. The Unseen didn’t plan to murder thousands and thousands of people. They were trying to save those lives. And so was I.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered to the baby as I crushed the last memory in my hand, knowing he would never hear me, but hoping he would one day forgive me for killing his father.

As the darkness caved in around me, crushing me, I sent out a silent prayer. At first, I wasn’t sure what I was praying for. My own soul? Owen’s safety? Peace for Mitchell and David? The end of the Potestas? In the end, it was all of the above.

The weight on my spectral body was excruciating. My head felt like it was going to explode, right along with my chest and my arms and legs. I tried to push back, but there was nothing to push back against.

I cried out in fear and pain, and then it was over.