Day 23
The building had obviously been burnt, that much was clear. Soot stained it to the extent that it was impossible to tell what color it had once been. It had not, however, burnt completely to the ground. The evacuation must have been even more hectic than my father's journal described, because it seemed to me as though they'd put it to the torch and then immediately got the hell out of there. Nobody had been back to check.
For that matter, there was apparently nobody here now. Jamie was relieved and, I'll admit, so was I, but Dana wasn't letting her guard down. She guided the van slowly down through the long-broken fence and past what might have at one time been guard towers but were now just burnt wrecks. Every foot we moved, she stayed alert, scanning every possible area for the cover it might provide assailants and places we could take cover from them. Even under ordinary circumstances, I'd rarely seen her this high-strung, but the times that we'd moved forward into something we thought might be a trap had been relatively rare.
Finally coming to a decision, she drove the van up against the failing wall of the main building, leaving barely enough room between it and the wall for a person to stand, which was no doubt to provide us some sort of last-ditch cover should we be overrun. She faced me and, as quietly as she could, asked “You got anyone here, Derek?”
I hadn't even thought to look, I'd been too busy tapped into the minds of my friends. Of course, people with hostile intent tended to get my attention if they were anywhere nearby, but it wouldn't hurt to take a moment to concentrate and see if I could find anyone.
“Nothing's here.” I said, after a moment's thought.
Dana finally seemed to relax. “Well, looks like we've got the place to ourselves, and it still stands.” She exhaled loudly and slowly. “Let's do this.”
We opened the doors up. Jamie came out the back, me out of the passenger side, and Dana out between the building and the van. We were all armed – Jamie and I with pistols and Dana with the shotgun she'd been favoring since the siege; just because I didn't sense the presence of anything here didn't mean that we shouldn't be prepared.
The road we'd followed ended at one end of the long, flat building. Apparently visitors or workers were supposed to park inside, as there were several garage-style doors. These, however, had been badly warped by the fire and would probably not open without a great deal of persuasion. Next to them, however, was a flimsy wooden door blackened with soot. It had probably also been locked, but it wasn't likely to stand up to a firm shove, let alone a determined kick.
Dana provided the kick.
We walked inside slowly. Dana and Jamie were listening for anything and I was trying not to concentrate on their minds, instead reaching for any others there. We were still alone, it seemed.
After my eyes adjusted, the purpose of this garage became clear; it was indeed for vehicles, as some were still here. Either the evacuation had been pure chaos and it had become impossible for the people who were supposed to be driving them to escape, or there had simply not been enough people left after the plague to evacuate.
Dana had already turned toward the only other exit, shotgun at the ready. She nodded at me and gestured toward it. I didn't recall having volunteered for door-opening duty, but of course Dana would want to be on weapons and I didn't want Jamie in the line of fire, so that left me to be brave. Reluctantly holstering the pistol, I got out the flashlight. Assuming I wasn't cut down in a hail of bullets upon opening the door, I'd need to see what I was doing.
The door nearly fell off when I tried it – it was metal unlike the wooden entrance, but it had been warped badly and the hinges securing it to the door had barely been holding it on. Jamie was already behind Dana and this left only me standing exposed to the suddenly opened hallway.
I was not cut down in a hail of gunfire. I continued not to feel any presence. I shined the flashlight down the hallway and was rewarded with a soot-covered expanse. The walls were made of concrete, though, so not much had happened. The building was likely to still be sound.
“Orin” My PDA spoke up again, so quietly I could barely hear it. “Looks like you've finally got here. Speak up if this is you, if you can.”
I nearly jumped out of the doorway, at first convinced that the voice belonged to some hostile Trooper tasked with overseeing the abandoned building. Dana looked at me urgently, shaking her head and thinking what a bad idea it would be for me to answer the PDA. The last thing we needed was for my machine to be piping up during our infiltration attempt.
Jamie, however, was wondering if the voice once again belonged to my father. If that was the case, I'd want to hear what it had to say.
I sided with Jamie, and whispered. “Orin's not here.”
The PDA was silent for a moment, and I feared that whatever protections my father had put on the data had decided I was a threat and was deleting data as I was sitting here wondering whether I'd done the right thing.
“Your voiceprint is not on file.” it said back, dashing my hopes that somehow my dad had got ahold of an old voiceprint of mine and computer-aged it or something.
“Derek, shut the damn thing off!” Dana whispered harshly on the other side of the doorway.
It spoke up again as though to spite her. “You'll do.” it said simply. “Is it safe to talk?”
Dana was again emphatically shaking her head no. I couldn't read her mind at all now, I realized. She'd blanked it to me completely. I felt a sudden surge of anger. There was nobody here, no danger to us, we had in journal form what was essentially a guide to the entire compound, and she wanted me to shut it off? I wasn't going to do it. “Yes.” I answered without whispering. I continued not to be riddled with bullets.
Jamie smiled over at me, though it was more because she'd correctly predicted my behavior than any particular joy on her part. Dana rolled her eyes and spoke back at me. “If that gets us killed, it's on you. And you're on point from now on.”
I nodded in acknowledgment, as the PDA had begun speaking again and I didn't dare interrupt it.
“I've unencrypted this voice tour, as it is. I'll tell you important things you'll need to know. If I'm here, of course, just have me tell the machine to shut up and I'll stop. The most important thing right now, is my prison cell. It's ahead, past the stairs, fourth one on the left.”
How he'd known we'd be approaching from this direction, I didn't know. It was possible he had different recordings for every eventuality, I got the impression he'd had a lot of spare time.
As I had now unceremoniously been given the point position, I headed through the door first, keeping the flashlight pointed ahead. It was my hope that it would temporarily blind any potential assailants, instead of acting as a huge 'shoot me' beacon.
The stairs were immediately to our left, the door having fallen off in the evacuation at some point. I briefly pointed the flashlight down them, but spotted nothing and sensed no-one. I could feel Dana's impatience behind me, masking some other emotion she didn't want me to feel. Now that she was here, she wanted to be done with it. Whatever closure this pilgrimage would bring her, she wanted to have it and be on her way.
My father's cell was easy to locate; it was the only one whose door was open. The others were stuck fast, and if I were to somehow loose them I feared all I'd find inside would be charred corpses.
As I approached it, the PDA spoke up again. “Time to see if I'm in there.” it said, followed by:
“Shut that damn thing off!” Dana demanded, more loudly than she'd intended to. In fact, she hadn't intended to say anything at all. Her mind was a flurry of conflicting thoughts, her paranoia about remaining Troopers at the forefront.
The recording cut off suddenly, as the text itself always had. It wasn't my father's voice doing the narration, rather somebody else. None of the other entries had ever had voice in them, and I hadn't even been aware this one did. She sounded young, scared, and familiar.
Nobody said anything. I took a step forward and looked into the room that had been my father's.
Fire had not been kind, but what it had eliminated I could re-create in my mind. The windows hadn't blown out during the conflagration, but were completely blackened with soot. My father's desk, his computer, both had been rendered nearly unrecognizable. A pile of ash was, I assumed, his bed. An empty black hole in the wall had once likely been a closet. I lingered there, looking over the blackened remains of memory and feeling despair. Why had I come here? I knew, ever since that day long ago when I'd gotten to that last entry of the journal, that my father was dead. Some part of me had hoped, though. Some part of me wanted this place to still be operational. As a child, I'd had fantasies of getting all of the rebels together and laying siege to this building, rescuing my father, and living a normal life. They'd been childish fantasies, and I thought I'd left them behind years ago. I guess I'd been wrong – faced with this bleak proof, I felt nothing but emptiness.
Dana was feeling much the same. She had looked over the journal nearly as often as I had, though in later years she'd made it clear that it belonged to me. Now she was seeing the same horrible truth, and feeling the same terrible pain.
Only Jamie kept focused. She was looking up and down the hall, listening carefully. Even her focus was split, though, between keeping a lookout and worry for me.
“I guess I'd have spoken up if I were here, huh.” the PDA said, and even it seemed a bit sad.
The voice was the spur we needed. First I, then Dana, stepped back from the doorway. I slowly pushed the door back toward closed and, when it didn't stick, moved a few steps down the hallway so that the door was blocking my view of the room. Dana did much the same.
“You'll want to go to the experiment rooms, next.” the machine was unflagging, and didn't seem to have surrendered as wholesale to the despair as we had. “There's bound to be evidence of what happened there. Through the doors at the end of the hall, last doors on the left and your first left after that. The door might be locked, I was never allowed in that room. It's probably observation. I know for a fact that they recorded everything that went on in there.”
Dana grit her jaw and frowned. “That's where we're going, then.” Apparently forgetting I was supposed to be on point, she moved determinedly ahead. Jamie and I followed.
A shriveled pair of double doors on our left led to a thoroughly gutted cafeteria. There was obviously nothing there, and a pile of melted plastic indicated it was likely the place where the fire had started. The Troopers had apparently just brought in gas containers, set a fuse, and got the hell out of the place. We left in a much less hectic fashion, taking a cursory look over to make sure that it wasn't somehow an experiment room in disguise before backing out and heading straight through the broken hallway doors which led to the other half of the compound.
This hallway was less badly touched by the fire; apparently the doors we'd just passed through had provided some kind of insulating effect, albeit temporary. It stretched off into the distance, one door to our left. We passed it, moved slowly forward. The entire time, Dana kept her mind blank and Jamie watched carefully behind us. I tried to keep my mental senses at their peak in case of hostile contact, but was distracted by Dana. Mind-blanking is the art of, essentially, thinking of noise in an effort to conceal your actual thoughts. Experts at it could do this and actually maintain a train of thought, and I'd long known Dana to be an expert. This is why it was strange she was concentrating so hard on it, so hard it almost acted as a poor man's jammer.
The hallway ended, one door apparently fused with the wall led onward, and another that had either been left ajar or forced that way to our left. I shined the light but again Dana took up point, neither her mind nor her voice offering any explanation as to her sudden straightforwardness.
This smaller hallway had two doors on the left, and it was the first one we were interested in. this one seemed to have been fused to the wall as well, but Dana had already taken out a tire iron she'd liberated from the van. Shotgun already set aside, she was trying to lever the door open.
I was torn; on the one hand, I was just as eager as she was to learn what it was my father had wanted to lead us to. On the other, her mind just below the layer of noise was a deluge of conflicting emotions. I'd never known her to get so upset that her own mind-blanking failed, and it was for that reason I didn't want to approach her.
I didn't have to; during my indecision she managed to force the door open. With a loud squeal of protest, it came open and Dana slipped inside without even checking for anyone first. I followed, and Jamie again protected our back.
The room had melted. There had once been televisions, recording implements, chairs, file cabinets and tables, but now it had been reduced to slag. I thought perhaps another fire had been started here until I looked through the broken one-way glass to see a melted heap of plastic similar to the one I'd seen in the cafeteria. They'd burnt down the experiment room itself, not the observation room.
Dana was working at the warped remains of a filing cabinet with the tire iron, but not managing to do more than bend parts of the metal away. She stopped for a moment, took a deep breath, then began work again in a less frantic way.
“What are you looking for?” Jamie gave voice to the question in my own mind.
“I'll show you.” Dana replied, finally popping open the cabinet. It only extended some of the way out, but it was enough. She reached inside and took out a small safe, hefting it up on top of the remains of a metal table. “Fire safe.” she said, grinning in a way I didn't altogether like.
“Evidence?” I asked, but she wasn't listening, she was at the combination lock dialing away. I hadn't known she was a safecracker, let alone an expert one, but it was open in less than a minute. Almost as though-
“You knew the combination.” Jamie said, her eyes wide, again giving voice to my own suspicions.
Dana turned around and sat down, and it was only now that I could see the wetness in her eyes, feel the stress she'd been struggling to blank from me. “Derek, can you play back that last entry in the journal? Like it did earlier?”
I had no idea what was going on. Dana was suffering from some sort of breakdown, I was fairly certain. I'd never felt such a thing before, even through the mind-blank I knew something was very, very wrong. I couldn't turn her down, though. I looked through the PDA for the journal entry and found the newly-unencrypted voice entry for the last journal. I played it.
“My name is Dana Merrick.” she said, the tears flowing freely now, the mind-blank gone, the emotions she'd been trying to keep from me and herself alike spilling over, taking control of her. She sobbed before me, the strongest person I'd ever known, the woman who raised me as her own. A Trooper all along, my father's mysterious benefactor, the reason that I even had the PDA. She'd never told me, never said anything, never even hinted at her past, at their connection. And now all the years of denial, the guilt that she hadn't gone farther to save his life, the horrible feeling that she'd failed both him and me, even after all this time, it was all in the open. I did the only thing I could.
I hugged her, and held her close as she'd done for me years ago.
For that matter, there was apparently nobody here now. Jamie was relieved and, I'll admit, so was I, but Dana wasn't letting her guard down. She guided the van slowly down through the long-broken fence and past what might have at one time been guard towers but were now just burnt wrecks. Every foot we moved, she stayed alert, scanning every possible area for the cover it might provide assailants and places we could take cover from them. Even under ordinary circumstances, I'd rarely seen her this high-strung, but the times that we'd moved forward into something we thought might be a trap had been relatively rare.
Finally coming to a decision, she drove the van up against the failing wall of the main building, leaving barely enough room between it and the wall for a person to stand, which was no doubt to provide us some sort of last-ditch cover should we be overrun. She faced me and, as quietly as she could, asked “You got anyone here, Derek?”
I hadn't even thought to look, I'd been too busy tapped into the minds of my friends. Of course, people with hostile intent tended to get my attention if they were anywhere nearby, but it wouldn't hurt to take a moment to concentrate and see if I could find anyone.
“Nothing's here.” I said, after a moment's thought.
Dana finally seemed to relax. “Well, looks like we've got the place to ourselves, and it still stands.” She exhaled loudly and slowly. “Let's do this.”
We opened the doors up. Jamie came out the back, me out of the passenger side, and Dana out between the building and the van. We were all armed – Jamie and I with pistols and Dana with the shotgun she'd been favoring since the siege; just because I didn't sense the presence of anything here didn't mean that we shouldn't be prepared.
The road we'd followed ended at one end of the long, flat building. Apparently visitors or workers were supposed to park inside, as there were several garage-style doors. These, however, had been badly warped by the fire and would probably not open without a great deal of persuasion. Next to them, however, was a flimsy wooden door blackened with soot. It had probably also been locked, but it wasn't likely to stand up to a firm shove, let alone a determined kick.
Dana provided the kick.
We walked inside slowly. Dana and Jamie were listening for anything and I was trying not to concentrate on their minds, instead reaching for any others there. We were still alone, it seemed.
After my eyes adjusted, the purpose of this garage became clear; it was indeed for vehicles, as some were still here. Either the evacuation had been pure chaos and it had become impossible for the people who were supposed to be driving them to escape, or there had simply not been enough people left after the plague to evacuate.
Dana had already turned toward the only other exit, shotgun at the ready. She nodded at me and gestured toward it. I didn't recall having volunteered for door-opening duty, but of course Dana would want to be on weapons and I didn't want Jamie in the line of fire, so that left me to be brave. Reluctantly holstering the pistol, I got out the flashlight. Assuming I wasn't cut down in a hail of bullets upon opening the door, I'd need to see what I was doing.
The door nearly fell off when I tried it – it was metal unlike the wooden entrance, but it had been warped badly and the hinges securing it to the door had barely been holding it on. Jamie was already behind Dana and this left only me standing exposed to the suddenly opened hallway.
I was not cut down in a hail of gunfire. I continued not to feel any presence. I shined the flashlight down the hallway and was rewarded with a soot-covered expanse. The walls were made of concrete, though, so not much had happened. The building was likely to still be sound.
“Orin” My PDA spoke up again, so quietly I could barely hear it. “Looks like you've finally got here. Speak up if this is you, if you can.”
I nearly jumped out of the doorway, at first convinced that the voice belonged to some hostile Trooper tasked with overseeing the abandoned building. Dana looked at me urgently, shaking her head and thinking what a bad idea it would be for me to answer the PDA. The last thing we needed was for my machine to be piping up during our infiltration attempt.
Jamie, however, was wondering if the voice once again belonged to my father. If that was the case, I'd want to hear what it had to say.
I sided with Jamie, and whispered. “Orin's not here.”
The PDA was silent for a moment, and I feared that whatever protections my father had put on the data had decided I was a threat and was deleting data as I was sitting here wondering whether I'd done the right thing.
“Your voiceprint is not on file.” it said back, dashing my hopes that somehow my dad had got ahold of an old voiceprint of mine and computer-aged it or something.
“Derek, shut the damn thing off!” Dana whispered harshly on the other side of the doorway.
It spoke up again as though to spite her. “You'll do.” it said simply. “Is it safe to talk?”
Dana was again emphatically shaking her head no. I couldn't read her mind at all now, I realized. She'd blanked it to me completely. I felt a sudden surge of anger. There was nobody here, no danger to us, we had in journal form what was essentially a guide to the entire compound, and she wanted me to shut it off? I wasn't going to do it. “Yes.” I answered without whispering. I continued not to be riddled with bullets.
Jamie smiled over at me, though it was more because she'd correctly predicted my behavior than any particular joy on her part. Dana rolled her eyes and spoke back at me. “If that gets us killed, it's on you. And you're on point from now on.”
I nodded in acknowledgment, as the PDA had begun speaking again and I didn't dare interrupt it.
“I've unencrypted this voice tour, as it is. I'll tell you important things you'll need to know. If I'm here, of course, just have me tell the machine to shut up and I'll stop. The most important thing right now, is my prison cell. It's ahead, past the stairs, fourth one on the left.”
How he'd known we'd be approaching from this direction, I didn't know. It was possible he had different recordings for every eventuality, I got the impression he'd had a lot of spare time.
As I had now unceremoniously been given the point position, I headed through the door first, keeping the flashlight pointed ahead. It was my hope that it would temporarily blind any potential assailants, instead of acting as a huge 'shoot me' beacon.
The stairs were immediately to our left, the door having fallen off in the evacuation at some point. I briefly pointed the flashlight down them, but spotted nothing and sensed no-one. I could feel Dana's impatience behind me, masking some other emotion she didn't want me to feel. Now that she was here, she wanted to be done with it. Whatever closure this pilgrimage would bring her, she wanted to have it and be on her way.
My father's cell was easy to locate; it was the only one whose door was open. The others were stuck fast, and if I were to somehow loose them I feared all I'd find inside would be charred corpses.
As I approached it, the PDA spoke up again. “Time to see if I'm in there.” it said, followed by:
Merrick sighed loudly and grabbed my arm, pulled me into the hallway. “Get the hell out of here. If they catch you escaping you're dead, but you'll be dead no matter what, so get the hell out of here!”
I pushed the PDA at her. “Please, just take this with you.”
“Shut that damn thing off!” Dana demanded, more loudly than she'd intended to. In fact, she hadn't intended to say anything at all. Her mind was a flurry of conflicting thoughts, her paranoia about remaining Troopers at the forefront.
“You don't even know my name.” she objected loudly. “You don't know you can trust me!”
I could, though, her only concern was that I get away, quick, now, while I still could “Fine, tell me your name. It doesn't matter. You're the only one I can trust now.”
She sighed. “My n--
The recording cut off suddenly, as the text itself always had. It wasn't my father's voice doing the narration, rather somebody else. None of the other entries had ever had voice in them, and I hadn't even been aware this one did. She sounded young, scared, and familiar.
Nobody said anything. I took a step forward and looked into the room that had been my father's.
Fire had not been kind, but what it had eliminated I could re-create in my mind. The windows hadn't blown out during the conflagration, but were completely blackened with soot. My father's desk, his computer, both had been rendered nearly unrecognizable. A pile of ash was, I assumed, his bed. An empty black hole in the wall had once likely been a closet. I lingered there, looking over the blackened remains of memory and feeling despair. Why had I come here? I knew, ever since that day long ago when I'd gotten to that last entry of the journal, that my father was dead. Some part of me had hoped, though. Some part of me wanted this place to still be operational. As a child, I'd had fantasies of getting all of the rebels together and laying siege to this building, rescuing my father, and living a normal life. They'd been childish fantasies, and I thought I'd left them behind years ago. I guess I'd been wrong – faced with this bleak proof, I felt nothing but emptiness.
Dana was feeling much the same. She had looked over the journal nearly as often as I had, though in later years she'd made it clear that it belonged to me. Now she was seeing the same horrible truth, and feeling the same terrible pain.
Only Jamie kept focused. She was looking up and down the hall, listening carefully. Even her focus was split, though, between keeping a lookout and worry for me.
“I guess I'd have spoken up if I were here, huh.” the PDA said, and even it seemed a bit sad.
The voice was the spur we needed. First I, then Dana, stepped back from the doorway. I slowly pushed the door back toward closed and, when it didn't stick, moved a few steps down the hallway so that the door was blocking my view of the room. Dana did much the same.
“You'll want to go to the experiment rooms, next.” the machine was unflagging, and didn't seem to have surrendered as wholesale to the despair as we had. “There's bound to be evidence of what happened there. Through the doors at the end of the hall, last doors on the left and your first left after that. The door might be locked, I was never allowed in that room. It's probably observation. I know for a fact that they recorded everything that went on in there.”
Dana grit her jaw and frowned. “That's where we're going, then.” Apparently forgetting I was supposed to be on point, she moved determinedly ahead. Jamie and I followed.
A shriveled pair of double doors on our left led to a thoroughly gutted cafeteria. There was obviously nothing there, and a pile of melted plastic indicated it was likely the place where the fire had started. The Troopers had apparently just brought in gas containers, set a fuse, and got the hell out of the place. We left in a much less hectic fashion, taking a cursory look over to make sure that it wasn't somehow an experiment room in disguise before backing out and heading straight through the broken hallway doors which led to the other half of the compound.
This hallway was less badly touched by the fire; apparently the doors we'd just passed through had provided some kind of insulating effect, albeit temporary. It stretched off into the distance, one door to our left. We passed it, moved slowly forward. The entire time, Dana kept her mind blank and Jamie watched carefully behind us. I tried to keep my mental senses at their peak in case of hostile contact, but was distracted by Dana. Mind-blanking is the art of, essentially, thinking of noise in an effort to conceal your actual thoughts. Experts at it could do this and actually maintain a train of thought, and I'd long known Dana to be an expert. This is why it was strange she was concentrating so hard on it, so hard it almost acted as a poor man's jammer.
The hallway ended, one door apparently fused with the wall led onward, and another that had either been left ajar or forced that way to our left. I shined the light but again Dana took up point, neither her mind nor her voice offering any explanation as to her sudden straightforwardness.
This smaller hallway had two doors on the left, and it was the first one we were interested in. this one seemed to have been fused to the wall as well, but Dana had already taken out a tire iron she'd liberated from the van. Shotgun already set aside, she was trying to lever the door open.
I was torn; on the one hand, I was just as eager as she was to learn what it was my father had wanted to lead us to. On the other, her mind just below the layer of noise was a deluge of conflicting emotions. I'd never known her to get so upset that her own mind-blanking failed, and it was for that reason I didn't want to approach her.
I didn't have to; during my indecision she managed to force the door open. With a loud squeal of protest, it came open and Dana slipped inside without even checking for anyone first. I followed, and Jamie again protected our back.
The room had melted. There had once been televisions, recording implements, chairs, file cabinets and tables, but now it had been reduced to slag. I thought perhaps another fire had been started here until I looked through the broken one-way glass to see a melted heap of plastic similar to the one I'd seen in the cafeteria. They'd burnt down the experiment room itself, not the observation room.
Dana was working at the warped remains of a filing cabinet with the tire iron, but not managing to do more than bend parts of the metal away. She stopped for a moment, took a deep breath, then began work again in a less frantic way.
“What are you looking for?” Jamie gave voice to the question in my own mind.
“I'll show you.” Dana replied, finally popping open the cabinet. It only extended some of the way out, but it was enough. She reached inside and took out a small safe, hefting it up on top of the remains of a metal table. “Fire safe.” she said, grinning in a way I didn't altogether like.
“Evidence?” I asked, but she wasn't listening, she was at the combination lock dialing away. I hadn't known she was a safecracker, let alone an expert one, but it was open in less than a minute. Almost as though-
“You knew the combination.” Jamie said, her eyes wide, again giving voice to my own suspicions.
Dana turned around and sat down, and it was only now that I could see the wetness in her eyes, feel the stress she'd been struggling to blank from me. “Derek, can you play back that last entry in the journal? Like it did earlier?”
I had no idea what was going on. Dana was suffering from some sort of breakdown, I was fairly certain. I'd never felt such a thing before, even through the mind-blank I knew something was very, very wrong. I couldn't turn her down, though. I looked through the PDA for the journal entry and found the newly-unencrypted voice entry for the last journal. I played it.
“You don't even know my name.” she objected loudly. “You don't know you can trust me!”
I could, though, her only concern was that I get away, quick, now, while I still could “Fine, tell me your name. It doesn't matter. You're the only one I can trust now.”
She sighed. “My n--
“My name is Dana Merrick.” she said, the tears flowing freely now, the mind-blank gone, the emotions she'd been trying to keep from me and herself alike spilling over, taking control of her. She sobbed before me, the strongest person I'd ever known, the woman who raised me as her own. A Trooper all along, my father's mysterious benefactor, the reason that I even had the PDA. She'd never told me, never said anything, never even hinted at her past, at their connection. And now all the years of denial, the guilt that she hadn't gone farther to save his life, the horrible feeling that she'd failed both him and me, even after all this time, it was all in the open. I did the only thing I could.
I hugged her, and held her close as she'd done for me years ago.
posted by Roger Ostrander at 7:41 PM
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