Day 17

Orin was a man of his word. For the third morning in a row, he was downstairs speaking to Jamie before I'd woken up. If I were the jealous type, and if Jamie wouldn't cause me grievous bodily harm for even mentally referring to her as 'my woman', I'd be annoyed he was spending so much time with my woman.

Not that Jamie and I had really been getting up to anything. If anything, life as a couple was surprisingly like the life we'd been leading before. There was more kissing, more dinners together, and more wistful gazes. There was me no longer having to act polite when she was thinking about me. But for the most part we were simply together, as we had been in the past. It felt different, though, having all these thoughts in the open. It was refreshing, for one.

I walked downstairs and Orin stood up and made as though to shake my hand, once again re-playing the scenario of my first morning in town. My PDA again remained silent, thankfully, and it was then that I realized that Orin wasn't holding his hand out as a greeting, he was giving the machine back to me. I was somewhat slow while first waking up.

“Thanks.” I think I mumbled while taking it back and glancing at it. I took a seat across from the chair Orin had occupied every morning I'd been here and he took his customary place.

Picking up the vague notion of my thoughts regarding his constant visitation, Orin chuckled. “Robin said to me, in fact, that my visits to this house over the past days marked an unprecedented era of routine for me, as normally I am kept too busy on too many projects to do the same thing twice, let alone three times.”

I felt bad for keeping him. “Will Robin be angry at me for taking up all your time?” I asked with more seriousness than I'd intended. To lighten the mood, I added “Because frankly, strong women intimidate me.”

“No they don't!” Jamie insisted.

“Yes ma'am.”

She gave me that look again, the one which indicated she's realized she's been drawn into one of my elaborate setups for a cheap joke. Her thoughts were even less flattering, but even if she wouldn't display it she was laughing on the inside.

“You're not keeping me against my will, I assure you, and Robin knows I am one to do what I will” Orin said, trying not to laugh. His smile slowly vanished from his face as he considered what he had to say, and I instantly knew that his visit was about more than returning my journal.

“I discovered little more of your father's entries than what you have already, no doubt, read.” Orin said. “Though I hope you will not think ill of me for perusing some of them.” After I waved to indicate that this was fine, he continued. “The data he'd encrypted included the location of the facility he was being held at, in addition to directions he remembered from the first time they'd bussed him there. He put in what he knew of the building's layout, both from his own experience and the minds of the guards put in charge of him, and what their schedules were like, though this was later amended to include the fact that they guards were changing on a more rapid basis, and that the plague had destabilized things somewhat. He indicates that Merrick is to be trusted.” At this he finally paused to take a drink. “Do you know who Merrick is?”

I shrugged. “I know the outfit that had my father later became the Troopers. And as good at Jamie is at this sort of thing, we don't have many taps into the Trooper personnel networks. The only thing we were ever able to find out was that there's nobody on active duty with that name.”

Orin nodded. “If you wish, I could task some of Chad's men to uncover the identity of this woman. She might shed a great deal of light on not only your father's life, but Trooper research into the plague.”

“If she's alive.” I said, repeating what Orin had been thinking.

“True.” he conceded. “There is another option, however. The facility was abandoned, presumably due to plague attrition and the need to move more troops to the front lines. Records of it were purged from Trooper computers – I witnessed this purge via our taps myself – and it was marked as a failure. In short, I do not believe there is any remaining armed presence there. If you wished, you could return to it and see what you could recover.”

The day before, when we'd been let out of our tour and had begun talking amongst ourselves as to what jobs we might like in our new home, I'd been unable to answer my comrades' questions. Nothing Orin had showed us had appealed to me. I wasn't much of a mechanic for either software or hardware, I had no medical training, and even going out of town to recruit or run other operations seemed out of my league. This, though. This appealed to me. Technically, I supposed it'd be an 'op' as Gallow had put it. Even if it was just for my own sake, whatever information I could bring back would be helpful. And if it was true that it'd been marked a failure and the Troopers had never come back, it'd make a highly useful secondary base for the rebels of Haven. Only one problem remained.

I turned to Jamie. “Jamie, I have to do this. But I don't want to put you in-”

Her expression changed from the interested listening one she'd been showing Orin to one of displeasure slowly as I was speaking, until finally she interrupted me. “So help me God, if you are even thinking of telling me to stay behind here where it's safe while you go out and do something boneheaded, I'll save the damn Troopers the trouble of killing you. If you go, I go.”

“Okay.” I said meekly, as she'd completely correctly interpreted what I was going to say, and then reacted with pretty much the exact reaction I'd expected.

Orin nodded. “In this, you are not under Gallow's command. This is something you're doing on your own, and so you may take whoever you wish with you. We will give you the van you used to drive in here, and by way of advance payment for whatever information you bring back, we'll have gassed it up and filled it with supplies. You may speak to your other friends to see if they will undertake this with you.” he was smiling, obviously having already anticipated my acceptance of the idea. “I wish you luck. Just let me or Robin know when you are ready to leave.”

Orin showed himself out and I leaned back in the couch I'd been sitting on, letting my breath out slowly and thereby also some of my tension. Just days ago, I'd felt as relaxed as I'd ever been upon learning that this town was a safe haven. Now it was as though all the stress of my life previous to that point had been introduced. I'd be leaving this place, this one safe place, to find a building which had burned down twenty years ago for records which may or may not even exist and, if they did exist, would almost certainly still be guarded. Yet I couldn't turn away from it. The only link I had to my father was this tiny computer, and it had been his dying wish that someone find it and then find him. If I couldn't find him, the least I could do was find the place he'd spent the last few years of his life. Orin's hope had been that there was still valuable information there, and I know my father would have certainly wanted it to be found.

“Sorry about-” I began to apologize to Jamie.

“Shouldn't have snapped at-” she began to apologize to me.

It shut us both up, and then we were kissing again. Whereas before there had been a lighthearted playfulness to the rare event, now there was something else. A realization that we might not get another chance, the knowledge that there was certain danger ahead. Even after we'd stopped kissing, we held each other for several minutes.

John and Dana, as Jamie had already known, had been given the house next to ours. When Jamie and I finally managed to get our bearings enough to walk again, we headed there to tell them what we'd decided about Orin's news.

“I'm in.” Dana said, in a tone that brooked absolutely no argument. Her mind was resolute in this, focused on seeing the place where my father had died. They'd known each other, that much I knew, and though I have no reason to believe they'd been having an affair before his departure, I knew they'd been close. After his death, Dana had raised me as her own, first moving into the quarantine zone and then later smuggling me out. She had as much, if not more, invested in this than I did.

John, on the other hand, was of another mind. “No, goddammit. No. I'm not going back out there, not after I find the one sane place on the entire damn planet, okay?”

“I'm still going.” Dana replied.

John seemed utterly flabbergasted at this news. “What? How can you even be thinking sanely? Remember what happened last time you were out there? No? It's because the goddamn troopers nearly bashed your goddamn head in!”

Dana was angry, angrier than I'd ever known her to be, but she refused to answer to John, refused to explain. Their relationship was a close one, but they'd had their share of fights and this hadn't been the first. It had been the most hurtful, though, and I regretted even mentioning Orin's news to them. It hadn't been like I had a choice, though. I owed Dana.

John was enraged beyond words at this point. Part of this was jealousy; the fact that Dana was willing to risk her life just to see the place where someone who'd died two decades before was buried and yet wasn't taking John's feelings into account at all grated. Another part was simply that Dana didn't seem to care one way or another whether John was even around. She got cold when she was angry, and now she was freezing.

Jamie and I left, and Dana left with us, with John literally shaking in the doorway being us, grating his teeth together in an effort to keep the invective from exploding out at us. I knew what he wanted to say, could feel all the hateful things he was thinking about Dana and especially about me for taking her into this, for being their ruin. He said none of them, though, merely watched us go, left alone with his rage.

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