Justice Keepers Saga--Books 10-12, page 106
They opened one of those doors and shoved her into a massive cell with light-gray walls and pretty much nothing else. Well, there was a sink and a toilet but no bed. She noted the observation windows in the wall to her right.
“Hope you like it,” the guard said, unlocking her cuffs. “It’s the same one we kept one we kept your boyfriend in.”
And then they shut her in.
18
On the lower levels of Operation Batcave, a wide corridor with walls of red stone stretched on for at least a hundred feet. LIS agents shuffled along, some checking reports on tablets, others lost in their own thoughts.
They all had to jump out of the way.
Claire ran through the hallway with both fists thrust into the air. “Yes, yes, yes!” she yelled, skidding to a stop. “This place is the bomb!”
Grinning so hard his face hurt, Jack shook his head. “Take it easy there, Nineties Girl,” he teased. “Nobody says ‘the bomb’ anymore.”
Claire spun around to face him with a smile that could light up the night sky. “I’m bringing it back!” she protested, sauntering up to him. “I mean this place is like straight out of James Bond or something.”
“I’m glad you approve.”
She slapped him on the arm. “Nice job, doofus.”
Turning around, he found his mother, sister and brother-in-law standing there with skeptical expressions. Traveling five hundred lightyears to find him in the middle of a shoot-out with the Denabrian PD? It must have been a bit much.
Adjusting the strap of her purse, Lauren frowned at the floor under her feet. “So,” she began. “You’re in charge?”
Closing his eyes, Jack felt a sudden warmth in his face. “Of the Screw-Ups, yes,” he said with a nod. “The base is run by the Leyrian Intelligence Service. The staff here all report to Helana Shinak.”
Steve looked like a kid on his first trip to an amusement park, a kid who was trying to decide if he really wanted to go on that big rollercoaster with the loops. “You called your team the Screw-Ups?” he asked.
“That sounds like something my brother would do,” Lauren muttered.
Crystal stepped forward, held his gaze for several seconds and then soothed his anxieties away by offering him a pat on the shoulder. “I’m proud of you, Jack,” she said. “It took courage to do what you did.”
“And the people here?” Lauren inquired. “They respect your authority?”
“Oh yeah!” he replied. “Totally!”
Sun chose that moment to poke her head out from a door behind him and peer down the corridor. “Hey, doofus!” she called out. “Get over here! There’s something you need to see!”
“We’ll uh…We’ll continue the tour later.”
Sitting at one of the long, plastic tables in the mess hall, Harry observed the two women across from him. One pale with blonde hair, the other olive-skinned and brunette. Both staring at him, daring him to say something stupid.
“So um,” he began. “This is awkward.”
Slouching in her chair, Della threw her head back and rolled her eyes at the ceiling. “What’s awkward about it?” she said, tossing a hand up. “I’ve slept with you. She’s slept with you. They say a shared struggle brings people closer together.”
A frown compressed Sora’s mouth, and then she closed her eyes, exhaling through her nose. “Thank you for coming for me, Harry,” she mumbled. “Not many people would put themselves at risk like that.”
Harry sat forward, planting his elbows on the table and covering his face with both hands. A low grunt escaped him. “Most people wouldn’t have put you in a position where you needed rescuing.”
It took some effort to look up, but when he did, he found sympathy in Sora’s dark eyes. He knew what she was going to say. That it wasn’t his fault. That he shouldn’t be so hard on himself. He didn’t believe a word of it.
“Learn to take a compliment, dummy,” Della muttered.
“You were very gallant,” Sora said.
His ex-wife killed the moment with one of her sharp glares. Not for him. For Sora. “Yeah, that’s nice,” she said. “Listen, New Girl, could you give me a few minutes alone with him? Harry, we need to talk.”
Rising gracefully, Sora nodded to him. “We’ll talk later,” she promised. And then she was making her way to the other side of the mess hall.
“She seems nice,” Della remarked.
“What did you want to discuss?”
“Your new bosses.”
“My new bosses?” he said. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, Dell, but this is the communist utopia planet. I don’t have any bosses.”
Della lifted her chin and stared down her nose at him. “Oh no?” she asked. “So, you’re not currently indebted to a bunch of freaky aliens who helped you turn our daughter into a telepath?”
“It’s not what-”
“And you haven’t been trying to start the Church of Harry as a way to pay off that debt?”
Pinching the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger, Harry moaned. “Okay,” he relented. “You got me. I’ve been giving sermons because that was the Overseers’ price for saving Claire. What about it?”
“She’s seeing them, Harry.”
“What?”
Turned so that he saw her in profile, Della drummed her fingers on the table as she stared at the wall. “Claire is seeing the Overseers,” she said. “She says that they’re out of phase with our universe or something.”
“What does that mean?”
“You got me. But Claire sensed one as it was observing a dying man. Somehow, she was able to extend her senses to me, Lauren and Crystal. And I gotta tell you that it was the scariest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. She says they’re all over the place, Harry. Watching us. And we don’t even know they’re there.”
Harry wondered if he should have shivered or flinched or given some indication that he was uncomfortable. Most people would be after hearing something like that, but she wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. And for better or worse, he had gotten used to the idea. “Claire can see them?” he muttered.
“Claire can see them,” Della confirmed. “Or sense them. I’m not really clear on how it works. But I know they frighten her. So, Harry. Might I suggest that you take a good, hard look at who you’re working for.”
“And do what?”
“I don’t know,” Della said. “But if your goal was to keep your daughter safe, it’s time to rethink your strategy.”
Day 23
Jack missed his therapist’s office: the nice, yellow walls, the window that let in lots of sunshine. Trying to have a conversation about his state of mind in a plain, gray box with only a round, plastic table and two chairs was depressing. But then the base wasn’t exactly designed with therapy in mind.
Sitting in one of those chairs, Jack folded his hands behind his head and smiled at the man on the other side of the table. “So, doc,” he said. “What’s the good word?”
Dr. Torin Haymoric, a slim, bald man with glasses that seemed to hang off of his large nose, was hunched over with a tablet in hand, reviewing the notes he had taken. “You said that you had some troubles with executive function as a teenager.”
“You mean not doing my homework?”
“Among other things.”
“Yeah, that was definitely a theme.”
The good doctor looked up, scrutinizing Jack through those thin lenses. “And as a young child, were you prone to breaking things at times when you felt overwhelmed by emotion?”
“I honestly don’t know,” Jack answered. He couldn’t remember ever having done anything like that, but then he didn’t recall much of his life before kindergarten. No one did, really. He had read a paper about it a few years ago. Something about activity in the hippocampus. “Hang on a sec.”
His fingers danced over the screen of his multi-tool, placing a call through the base’s internal communications system. A few seconds later, his mother’s face appeared. “Jack,” she said. “What’s up?”
“Quick question, Mom. Did I break stuff a lot when I was little?”
He had imagined many possible reactions to that, but laughter was not one of them. “All the time!” Crystal exclaimed. “We even took you to a child psychologist. But you seemed to grow out of it when you were about four or five. Why?”
“Thanks,” Jack mumbled. “I’ll explain later.” He wasn’t sure what to make of this new information. He felt a little guilty about having caused his parents so much trouble without even realizing it. Guilty and embarrassed.
Somewhere, in the back of his mind, Summer was shaking her head in disapproval. He could already hear the objections that she would bring up the next time they talked. It wasn’t his fault; he had only been a little boy. Regulating strong emotions was hard enough for kids who didn’t have a developmental disorder, and it was looking more and more likely that he had been living with one all his life. None of that made him feel any better.
Clearing his throat, Dr. Haymoric stood up and nodded. “Well, that about settles it,” he declared. “All of this in conjunction with everything you told me about your way of navigating social situations makes the case undeniable. You’re very high-functioning, but you are definitely on the autism spectrum. With a touch of attention deficit as well.”
“Cool.”
The man didn’t look satisfied. “That’s it?” he asked. “You don’t have any questions or concerns?”
Crossing his arms, Jack smiled into his lap. “What can I say?” he replied with a shrug of his shoulders. “You’re not telling me anything I haven’t suspected for a while. Nothing’s really changed now that I know.”
“Well, that’s a very healthy attitude.”
An hour later, he met his mother in the mess hall and told her all about the diagnosis. He wasn’t sure how she would take it, but her first reaction was silence.
Cradling a cup of tea in both hands, Crystal sat on one of those plastic chairs. Steam wafted up from her mug, but she didn’t seem to notice. She just peered into the dark liquid like it was the god damn Mirror of Galadriel. Jack decided to give her a moment. The news he had just shared was the sort that usually threw a parent for a loop. “Autism with a bit of ADD,” she said at last.
Jack sat on the end of a table, hunching up his shoulders like a turtle shrinking into its shell. “That’s what he told me,” he said. “So, there you have it.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“I don’t really have feelings about it.”
“You sure?”
Biting his lower lip, Jack stared into his lap. “What do you want me to say, Mom?” he muttered. “We always knew there was something wrong with me. Now, we know what it is.”
Crystal was out of her chair in an instant, hot tea sloshing over her hand. She didn’t even seem to notice. Her face was a dark thundercloud, and Jack knew that lightning was about to strike. “Don’t talk like that!” she snapped. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with you! Being different doesn’t mean you’re flawed!”
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Sometimes the self-loathing takes over.”
“Well, you learn to control it, mister.”
“Are you burned?”
His mother sucked the tea off the back of her hand and then wiggled her fingers as if testing them. “I should be fine,” she replied, setting her mug down on a nearby table. “I’m much more worried about you. Were you planning to tell your sister?”
Jack hopped to his feet, pacing across the width of the mess hall. He stopped in front of the serving counter, lightly kicking it with the toe of his shoe. “I was going to get around to it. I’m sure it’ll set her mind at ease.”
“About what?”
He spun to face his mother, tossing his hands up as he strode toward her. “About why her baby brother is such a screw-up,” he said. “I’m sure she must have wondered.”
He saw an intensity in Crystal’s brown eyes, and he knew that she was pissed. Cold, calm anger was ten times scarier than open fury, especially when it came from your mom. “After all you’ve done,” she said. “Everything you’ve accomplished. That you can still think of yourself as a screw-up…Tell me, Jack, what would be good enough for you? Hmm? If traveling the stars and saving who knows how many lives isn’t good enough, what would be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Also,” she added. “Autism doesn’t make people into “screw-ups,” as you put it. Thinking otherwise is ableist.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“No, I know you didn’t,” Crystal pressed on. “This is about how you see yourself, not other people. I know you, Jack. It doesn’t matter what diagnosis you got. That psychiatrist could have told you that you’re a genetically-engineered chicken, and you would have walked out of that office thinking, ‘This is why I’m broken.’
“Because you start from the position that you are broken and work backward from there. It’s axiomatic. ‘There’s something wrong with Jack Hunter’ is the fundamental idea that defines your worldview.”
Jack hesitated.
His mother’s face softened, the anger draining out of her. “But,” she said. “You only get like this when something is upsetting you. So, why don’t you tell me what it is?”
Pressing his palm to his forehead, Jack sighed. He ran his fingers through his hair. “Before we went on our mission, yesterday,” he began, “Harry said that I was reckless and irresponsible. That in starting ‘my little revolution,’ I put his family and his girlfriend at risk.”
“And do you agree with that assessment?”
Jack shrugged, grinning sheepishly as he marched past her. “I honestly don’t know,” he replied. “I mean, I guess in the most technical sense, he’s right.”
When he turned around, Crystal was standing there with her arms folded, her head cocked as she studied him. “But…”
“But they were after Harry long before I got involved. So, if he had gone with his plan and somehow gotten himself off world…” Jack paused for a moment to emphasize how unlikely he thought that was. “Who is to say they wouldn’t have tracked him back to Earth? Maybe they would have gone after Claire. Or Della. Maybe they would have taken Sora anyway on the off chance that she might know something. And there are several hundred people on this base who would be rotting in concentration camps if I hadn’t done what I did.”
“So, if you had to do it again…”
“You’re damn right, I would!”
“Then why are you so upset?”
Jack shuddered, a fat tear sliding down his cheek. He shook his head forcefully. “Because I can’t figure out why my friend looks down on me when all I want to do is help. And it’s not just him. Nobody listens to me!”
“Aren’t I listening to you right now?”
“Mom,” Jack said. “For years, Lauren gave me shit about making waves, about bucking the system. She never believed me when I said that Slade was dirty. In the end, I was right, but did she ever apologize? No! She shows up here, on my doorstep, muttering disapproval about how I lead my team. Which, by the way, is not a job I even want!
“It doesn’t matter how many times I’m right! It doesn’t matter how much I accomplish! The next time I say something that people don’t want to hear, the next time I point out some problem that nobody else seems to see, everyone will come up with some excuse for why Jack is crazy, and we shouldn’t listen to him. So, I can only conclude that I must be broken in some way. That there is something in me that prevents me from getting my ideas across.”
Crystal picked up her cup, sighing as she lifted it to her lips. She took a small sip, stalling for time. Jack could tell that his mother was searching for the right words, for some insight that would put his mind at ease; so, he waited. “You’re not broken, Jack,” she said. “You just see the world in a different way.”
“Oh?”
“For most people, being an outsider is painful,” Crystal explained. “Not for you. In fact, you seem to crave it.”
“I don’t know about that,” he countered. “When people get mad at me or tell me that I hurt them, it rips me up inside. And I’m not always right. When it comes to mistakes, oh boy, have I made some doozies. So, I don’t want people to just agree with me.”
“But you want them to hear you.”
He stepped up to his mother, exhaling, trying to assemble his fragmented thoughts into a coherent thesis. “You say I crave being an outsider.” The words were coming out of his mouth before he had any idea where he was going with this. “Do you want to know what I did right after I finished the stand-up routine that got me demoted? I braced myself for the impact.
“Anna would be mad at me. Harry would be mad at me. And that’s to say nothing of how the other Keepers would react. I knew there would be professional consequences. People would tell me that I was thoughtless and childish. And it would hurt. You have no idea how much it hurt.”
Crystal stared up at him, blinking, trying to process what he had just said. “So, if it hurts,” she began. “Why did you do it?”
“Because this social instinct you talk about? This need for acceptance? It’s responsible for some of the worst tragedies in human history! Whether it’s Nazi Germany or Trump’s America, the story is always the same. Sure, some power-hungry lunatic at the top starts it. But the individual soldiers, the bureaucrats, the people who are necessary to carry out these atrocities? They’re not evil. They go along with it because they’re afraid of being outcasts. Because they’re afraid of suffering the consequences. They don’t want to lose their jobs or their homes or be the next person who gets thrown into a cell.
“Justice always comes from those people who are willing to defy power and suffer the consequences. Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning. People who sacrificed everything they had to do the right thing. People who endured torture. People much better than me.”
He was trembling again, sniffling and wiping tears of his cheek. “I learned that when I was young,” he whispered. “The other kids knew I was different. Some of them would torment me, beat me up. I’d look to the bystanders for help – to kids who I thought of as friends – but they did nothing. Because they were afraid of going against the crowd. Well, I promised myself that I would never be someone who does nothing.”
