Reality (The Girl in the Box Book 52), page 30
Heidi sighed and looked at herself in the mirror. “Sarah will be safe,” she said, lump in her throat. “Sienna wouldn't do anything to hurt her. Not really.”
But a part of her didn't know if she really believed that. Maybe Sienna was too cut up inside, too damaged, for love.
No. She shook that thought away. It couldn't be. “Get everyone ready,” Heidi said. “We go on.” She brushed away a single tear. “Sarah will be back. So will Sienna. And until then...we need to be on about the business of love.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTEEN
Scott
“This is the place,” Scott said, as Traverton pulled up. The smaller man had sworn he was all right to drive, and it seemed like he truly was. The address had been easy to come by after a call to Jamal, who had done the thing with just a mere sleepy invocation to, “Stop keeping vampire hours, Scotty,” before complying.
“They're artist hours,” Scott had said, then hung up after scrawling down the address. Now they were here, at a little three-bedroom house in the 12 South neighborhood of Nashville, one that had a light on in the front window.
“How do you want to do this?” Traverton asked, nerves bleeding through in his voice. “You crash in the front and I break down the back?”
“We don't have a warrant and we don't have the right,” Scott said, staring at the light in the window.
“Oh. Right.”
“Let's just go talk to him,” Scott said. “Sometimes you can get a guilty person to confess just by leaning on them.” He thought back to what he knew of Rolniak. “This guy's not a hardened criminal, or at least doesn't present like one. Let's see what he has to say.”
They knocked on the door, Scott standing forward and Traverton hanging back. When Rolniak's voice came from within, asked, “Who is it?” Scott answered: “Scott Byerly.”
The door opened a few seconds later, and Rolniak was standing there, lit between the inside lamp and the one coming from the porch, his expression a mix of clear nerves smoothed over by an attempt to look brave. “Hey, Scott,” he said, voice quivering a touch. “What's up?”
“Can we come in for a second?” Scott asked. “Got something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Sure, sure,” Rolniak said after a moment's hesitation. Then he swung the door wide, and in they went. To the right was a living room, the one with the light on, and sitting on a couch therein, fumbling with a blanket, was a pretty young woman in her twenties. She was trying to block their line of sight to the baby that was latched to her breast, covering it as they came in. “Don't mind the uh...well, that's my girl, Constance, and my boy Bryce.” He hesitated in the entryway. “Um...you guys want something to drink?”
“No,” Scott said, slipping into the living room. “Just wanted to ask you something real quick.” He smiled at Constance, then turned to Tommy. “Why'd you leave the scary message for Scarlet?”
Rolniak deflated immediately. “You talked to the Miami PD, huh?” He looked just sick, a pallor across his face. “Look...I didn't know when I did it that she had that thing happen the night before, okay? I only heard about it after I left it.”
“You expect us to believe that?” Traverton got right up in his face, causing Rolniak to shrink back. “That you had nothing to do with what happened to Scarlet? That you just happened to leave your little present for her the day after someone broke in and roughed her up?”
“I was mad, okay?” Rolniak said, and a bead of sweat popped out on his temple. “She flies everywhere and comes home to Nashville every night on a private plane, right? But I live here, too, and I've got young kids, but I gotta hope there's a late-night commercial flight if I want to get home.” A bitter grimace twisted his lips. “Spoiler alert: most of the time there isn't. Which means the next day I gotta catch a plane or the bus right to the next destination, if not drive through the night with the crew.” He settled his head down. “It's not fair.”
“Maybe you should have looked for something locally,” Scott said, looking over at Constance, who had similarly gone gray in the face. “But seriously – you can't expect us to believe it was a coincidence.”
“Dude,” Rolniak said, and sighed. “I didn't have anything to do with it, and I can prove it to you.”
Scott narrowed his eyes. “Okay. Prove it.”
“You went to the scene, right?” Rolniak asked, giving Traverton, who was still up in his face, a wary look. “Around the side of the house?”
“Yes,” Scott said. “Did you?”
“I did,” Rolniak said, “the next day, in fact, because after Maesie May talked Scarlet into firing your predecessors, guess who the first person she called was? This was after Scarlet was already gone, right? And you can ask Maesie – she asked me to go out there before she came to talk to you. Except I was already in Miami, so I sent my buddy, a PI, to take a look. And he pointed out something real interesting.” His eye glinted as he looked around nervously.
“What'd he find?” Traverton asked, a real edge to his voice.
“You saw it,” Rolniak said. “There was glass all around the side of the house beneath the window, right?”
“Yeah,” Scott said. “What about it?”
“I don't know much about burglaries, but I guess there was too much glass there,” Rolniak said. “Too much for if that was the point of entry, anyway.”
Scott thought about it a second. There had been a mountain of glass outside, but very little inside. He'd assumed it had been from Scarlet cleaning it up, except...she hadn't cleaned it up, had she? At all? “You're saying that wasn't where the person who beat her up came in? I think I agree with that.”
“Then hold on to your boots,” Rolniak said. “Because I'll go one step further, since you asked, and because I don't want this hanging around my name – I'm telling you right now, no one broke in that night.”
“That's crazy talk,” Traverton said. “You saw the girl.” He glanced over his shoulder at Scott. “She was injured, right? Roughed up?”
“Yeah,” Scott said, but now he was thinking it over, too. “Black eye, bruises. She'd been hurt.”
“Oh, she got hurt all right,” Rolniak said. “But I don't think someone did it to her. You just look at that girl, you can tell...she ain't doing all right. She's got all the symptoms.”
“What symptoms?” Scott asked, and now he strode forward, putting a hand on Rolniak's chest, grabbing him by the collar. “What are you talking about? Who did it to her?”
“She did it to herself, man!” Rolniak said, scrambling as Scott lifted him off his feet. “Don't you get it? It wasn't an assault!”
Scott froze in place, holding him there, as the last piece clicked into place even as Rolniak blurted out the truth he hadn't realized, not once, since he'd met Scarlet:
“It was a suicide attempt,” Rolniak said, dangling from Scott's fingertips. “She tried to hang herself and the chandelier didn't hold her weight. The girl's depressed, though she hides it well.” When Scott let go, he grabbed the shirt collar and tried to smooth it out. “But I wouldn't be surprised if she tried it again – and soon.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOURTEEN
Sienna
“All right, Sarah,” I said once I'd gotten her back to the cave and bound her properly next to the fire, “you're going to talk. We've got questions, you've got answers.”
Sarah Barlow stared back at me, a measured defiance clear and present in her eyes. “You're a broken human, Sienna Nealon.”
“Without doubt,” I said, circling around her. Eilish was standing back, still covered in her jacket and little else. “Which should frighten you. Because who knows what I'm capable of these days?”
“I won't betray Heidi,” Sarah turned her head around to look right at me. “I believe in what she does.”
“I'm sure you would follow her right off the cliff,” I said. “But fortunately for you, I'm not asking you to betray her. I just want to know a couple little things, no big deal. Like – how did you meet Heidi?”
Sarah's eyebrows knotted together. She was very plain now that she was outside of Heidi's illusionary grasp, all her glamor seeped away. “I was her nurse.”
Eilish and I looked at each other. “What kind of nurse?” Irish asked.
“Caretaker,” Sarah said irritably. “Heidi is a miracle, see? When I met her, she was trapped in her own mind.” Sarah jerked her head, as if trying to point at it. “Nonverbal. Wouldn't – couldn't even look you in the eye.”
“That's...wait, what?” I asked. I could see by the look on Eilish's face that she didn't quite get this, either. “She seems perfectly fine now. She talks. She looks at you–”
“Because her parents were both neurologists, and they realized,” Sarah said, as if patiently lecturing a couple morons, “that if brain chemistry is a thing that can become unbalanced...maybe with recent advances there was a way to balance it back.” And she looked at me with great significance.
“They gave her the serum to try and cure her...I don't even know what you would call that,” I said. “Severe autism?”
“In that neighborhood, but not quite,” Sarah said.
“But that shouldn't have worked,” I said. “Once you've been injured, your body has a sort of set point. Metahuman healing won't heal you beyond that.”
Sarah's eyes gleamed. “That's not true. It won't heal you beyond it unless you remove the afflicted area and allow it to regrow from the original tissue model–”
“OHMYLORDY,” Eilish said, voice echoing her horror through the cave, “they bloody lobotomized her, didn't they?”
“A little bit at a time. And it all grew back and it now it works flawlessly,” Sarah said, “like they suspected it would.”
“They medically experimented on their child?” I asked, feeling...well, I didn't know exactly what I was feeling. A mixture of horror and shock, for sure. Astonishment, likely. Sick, too.
“They cured her,” Sarah said. “They saved her.” Her eyes were aglow. “And with her, maybe the world.”
“Where are they now?” I asked, fearing I might not quite love the answer.
“You keep looking for some sinister angle with Heidi,” Sarah said. “But you miss the fact that she inspires love in all those around her. They live in Steelwood and still practice medicine. Together.” Really emphasizing that last word.
“She hijacks the bloody will of people around her,” Eilish said. “Makes them do things they wouldn't otherwise do, with people they wouldn't otherwise do it with. That's–”
“Love,” Sarah said. “You're describing love.”
“I was going to say mind rape and literal rape,” Eilish said. “Since you can't consent to any of these things under mind control. But you're likely too addled to realize that. She's pulling the wool right over their eyes.”
“I wish she'd pull the wool over my eyes,” Sarah said, and made the percentage of women in the cave who had cried this afternoon one hundred percent. “Don't you get tired of being lonely? Of feeling that soul-deep ache for someone who can understand you? To feel the passion that comes from knowing someone so deeply, from wanting them not just because of raw physicality but because they know you, your soul, your self, in a way no one else does? And that they love you in spite of the flaws, true and unconditional?”
“There is no such thing as unconditional love in romance,” I said, drawing on a lifetime of cynicism.
“You're so broken,” Sarah said, tears rolling down her cheeks, “and so wrong.”
“Not so,” I said. “Or rather – yes, that's so, but I'm not wrong about this. Let's say you get married. But one night, in the throes of anger, and I mean the kind of anger I'm intimately familiar with, you rake those pretty little manicured nails of yours across your husband's eye. You scream at him. You punch him in the face. Under those conditions, should he still love you?”
Sarah's mouth opened slightly. “I would never do that,” she whispered.
“Fine, it's not you,” I said. “It's someone else. Should the man still love the woman?”
“Was that you?” she asked in a hoarse whisper. “Is that why you're asking?”
“No, it wasn't me,” I said loudly, then paused to consider it. “I don't think. My point is – there are always conditions. You may love your kids unconditionally, but everyone else...there's always conditions. Or there should be, unless you're just some selfless loser without any respect for their own boundaries.”
“What hurt you, Sienna?” Sarah asked quietly. “Why are you so broken? Was it your husband? Not being able to remember him–?”
“I'm asking the questions, Sarah,” I said, feeling a little jabbed. “So she's got powers. Were you there when she got them?”
“I was there when she went into treatment, yes,” Sarah said, looking me right in the eyes. “And when she came out – it was beautiful, Sienna. The girl I'd known all along as like a seedling, in her own shell, went into full flower before my eyes. She taught me things about love, before and after. You never met a more loving person than Heidi, even when she couldn't speak.”
“Where's this love obsession come from?” Eilish asked.
“I don't know,” Sarah said. “She's always liked love stories. Before, when she was...she could be difficult sometimes, like any non-verbal person in that situation was. And you could put on a good love story and she'd just...calm right down. She loved them all, from the top of the mountain, Sleepless in Seattle-style fare to the lowest, cheesiest Hallmark movie. Maybe especially those. You could put one on and she'd just melt away watching it, even when she couldn't say anything.”
“There's your villain origin story,” Eilish said, looking right at me.
“I always thought an obvious gateway drug to villainy was watching Hallmark movies,” I deadpanned.
“You are so dead inside,” Sarah said.
“So, big question,” I said. “What's Heidi's plan?”
“Her plan,” Sarah said, staring me down, “is to keep introducing people who are sad and drowning in loneliness to compatible partners so they can be happy. That's the so-called villainy you want to put an end to, Sienna. You want people to go back to being atomized and alone.”
“Yes, I'm totally in this to create an army of crazy cat ladies and angry incels,” I said. “Or, alternatively – I'm here to free people from mind control and illusory lies they did not ask for, no matter how much they might be enjoying it.”
“They're happier being in love, however it started,” Sarah said, squirming against the light bonds I'd bound her with. “What does it matter if she had to give them a little push?”
“Well, if I give them a little push out of her influence, what does it matter?” I asked. “If they're really in love, unconditionally as you say, won't they stay together? Also, I feel like this has gotten lost in the shuffle, but you guys harbored a fugitive. That's a felony. Pales in comparison to mind-controlling a town so you can make a reality TV show marrying them off to each other like a slightly-less-crazy, real-life version of The Bachelor, but still...that's kinda dark.”
“Your life is dark,” Sarah muttered, not even bothering to look at me.
“Well, that answers some questions,” Eilish said, walking with me toward the mouth of the cave so we could talk. “She's fully juiced, then?”
“Yep,” I said, looking out on the sunset streaming over the valley. “Full suite of emotional control powers plus Rakshasa illusions. Maybe telepathy, I dunno. She's got a lot going for her, though.” I shook my head. “I'd be tempted to track down her parents, the neurologists, see if they can shed any more light on what all she got.”
“But?” Eilish asked. “I'm sensing a 'but.'”
“I don't know,” I said. “Part of me just wants to wade in there and hit her with what I've got to see what it does. The longer I wait, the more chance that this drags on and involves other people. More than are already dragged in by virtue of her powers. I mean, poor Steven Clayton got pulled into this and he didn't ask for it. He's probably missing from a movie set as we speak, and God only knows what Heidi's doing to him in our absence.”
“Finding some small-town love for him, I imagine,” Eilish said. “I feel like there are at least three Hallmark movies I've seen that start with some Hollywood star coming to a small town and finding unexpected love.”
“I'll take the under on that one,” I said, and sighed. “Truth is...I think I know how to fight her.” And I looked right at Eilish. “I just...don't know if...forgive the expression...if my heart is in it.”
Eilish raised an eyebrow at that. “You've beaten the arse off just about every villain you've ever come across. This is where you're drawing the line?”
“Maybe,” I said. “There's a difference, especially from what I've faced lately – I don't hate Heidi. At all. I pity her, at worst.”
“She's running roughshod over a town,” Eilish said. “And she damned near married me off to – I think he was a gas station clerk. Not meaning to insult the profession, but I feel I could have done a bit better than him. So, you're going to have to explain the pity to me. Is it because she doesn't hold a laser beam to her victims’ heads and force them to do as she wants?”
“Something like that,” I said. “That and she seems to genuinely want them to be happy. Most of the villains I face show a reckless disregard for the happiness of their victims...if they're not glorying in their pain.”
“Let me tell you something, then,” Eilish said, “as someone who's used her sweet words to bend men in every which direction – what she's doing is not right. Stealing a person's will – that's a cruelty, a disregard for their wishes and their being. Just because it's soft coercion makes it no less wrong. Just less vile.” She bowed her head. “If I've learned anything after getting a strong dose of my own medicine, it's that such power should be used awfully sparingly, because in its way, it's maybe worse than the gun to the head.”
