“But I need you. Not right now, but very soon I will. I will need your skills, I will need your strength and whatever courage you can still muster. I will understand if you leave and I won’t stop you… but I’d very much like you to stay.”
With a deep sigh Caleb took his hand off the handle and shoved the door shut again. He shook his head as he walked back to the bed and sat down.
“I have a pretty fucked-up head, you know?”
Jane knew. “Yeah, I noticed. I can help you with that, if you want. It doesn’t have to stay like that.”
She watched as Caleb raised his head to meet her gaze. She saw a pride in him that was both noble and foolish. The kind of pride that could move a man to great deeds, while setting him up for a certain and painful death. She saw that Caleb didn’t fear death, and that he believed himself to have gone so numb that pain could no longer touch him. Jane knew he was wrong.
“Why are you staying, Caleb?”
“Don’t you already know?”
“Tell me anyway.”
Caleb shrugged. “We got a contract. It’s not done, clearly.”
Jane’s mind raced as it looked for the right smile to give him. Smiling was a difficult thing that came so naturally to most people. Most people, of course, had had years of immersion in normal communication with others. They would learn, at the earliest age, what kinds of faces to make and when. Later in life, those faces became easy and almost instinctive. But if you had to learn, theoretically with only a mirror to aid you, what a smile looked like and how to use it, it got very tricky. And it wasn’t just the lips—your eyes had to be involved too or the whole expression looked fake.
Jane decided on a slight curl of the right corner of her thin lips while she allowed her eyes to settle slightly. Appreciative and understanding, that was what she was aiming for.
“Thank you, Caleb. But I want you to know that if, in the future, you decide to leave, I will understand. I won’t ever stop you.”
“Could you… technically… force me to stay?” Caleb asked.
Jane considered how to answer that question. To be truthful would perhaps scare him, but to lie might do more damage still. If he felt, even for a moment, that he couldn’t trust her, then he’d be on guard with her too. Very soon their interactions would devolve into understated hostilities and it would only go downhill from there. Not unlike her relationship with Agent Bradford.
“I could say things based on what I know about you. Things that would make you question your actions and motives. Manipulating people is easy when you know exactly what and how they think.”
“And mind control,” Caleb said. “You showed me mind control.”
“My abilities in that area are not well developed at all. I could… make you move your hand, or raise your shoulders, but I’d only have control for a very short moment.”
Caleb asked, “So, would you prefer I just stay quiet from now on? It could have some tactical advantages and if you know what I’m thinking anyway….”
“No. That’s the last thing I want. I want you to have agency in our interactions. I will respond to what you say, not to what you think, unless there is some kind of emergency. Whatever strange thoughts you come up with that you don’t say out loud, I will try my hardest to ignore.”
Then Caleb’s mind, like not thinking about a pink elephant, involuntarily associated a wide series of dirty and inappropriate thoughts.
“Yes, I’ll ignore those especially,” Jane said with a smile that was almost genuine. Then she winked at him as she said, only half-jokingly, “I have those too, you know.”
Caleb’s head had been spinning ever since John C. Reilly, who wasn’t there, had cracked his skull with the machine gun that didn’t exist. Now he sat on his hotel bed with that same head cocked as he listened to everything his client told him.
Why had he stayed? That was what she had asked him and he had told her it was because of the contract. It was a half-truth, Caleb knew, and he imagined that Jane knew it too. The truth? In its entirety? Caleb wasn’t so sure himself.
Caleb hated bullies. He had hated them on the playground when James Sullivan pushed little Rachel Meadows around. He had hated them when he was sixteen and a bunch of thugs thought they could terrorize his neighborhood.
Caleb’s response to bullies was always the same. Swift and violent. He had broken James Sullivan’s nose on the pavement in front of his building and had taken a bat to the kneecaps of the two thugs that bothered his mother.
At eighteen he had joined the army because he believed they would allow him to fight the biggest bullies out there. The terrorists and the undemocratic regimes would learn to fear him.
Not all bullies could be beaten. He had learned that when he faced the brunt of John C. Reilly’s uncontrollable bloodlust.
After returning home from Iraq he had met yet another bully that he had no chance of ever defeating. The monstrous cancer that tore his mother up from the inside.
Perhaps he saw a bully now in the shape of Agent Bradford. Or perhaps the strange Dr. Greer that Jane had shown him triggered his long-dormant instinct. The experiments done on Jane; the brutality of seven dead children in the name of science; the cruelty with which they tried to control his client’s movements.
Caleb had spotted a bully and he was tired of them winning all the time. He would protect Jane Elring to the best of his abilities. In due time he would master the fear she caused in him, he believed.
But what did he fear exactly? What was it in the girl that scared him? It wasn’t really her unique and strange abilities that bothered him. No, it was the fact that he now saw the inadequacies and weaknesses of his mind reflected in her dark gaze. She knew everything about him, apparently, including all the things he was ashamed of. All the things he hated about himself.
Yet, even now when he was at his weakest, Jane smiled at him warmly as she sat on the edge of his bed. She needed him, she had said, and Caleb believed her. He just hoped that he could come through for her.
“So this thing that attacked me? Showed me the stuff that wasn’t really there. What is that?” he asked.
Jane shrugged. “I’m not quite sure yet. That’s what I was hoping to find out before, well, its attack on you.”
“But you can interact with it. You kicked it out of my mind.”
“Pretty much. You have to let me know if you feel it sneaking up on you again. It doesn’t have to get that bad.”
Caleb thought back to the brutal itch that had struck the inside of his body and burned inside his skull.
“That’s easy to do. You can’t miss it. I thought I was having allergies or something.”
“Itchy, huh? Ethan Walker’s mind registered the same thing. Then it started burning.”
The mention of Ethan Walker gave Caleb pause. He thought back to earlier in the day when Jane had fought to have him transferred out of town. She was convinced he was going to die.
“You said Ethan Walker was dying?”
“This thing attacks the mind and leaves a cerebral print. That’s why the patients show signs of brain damage, or stroke. But what the doctors can’t see is what lies underneath that.”
“What?”
“This thing consumes life. It tortures people until they can no longer stand it, and then, offers them a deal.”
“What deal?”
“No more suffering—death—in exchange for their energy, or their souls, if you like.”
Caleb leaned back against his pillow as he considered Jane’s words. So it was, regardless of whatever else it was, basically a predator. Putting it in those terms gave him some peace of mind because now he understood it. After all, he too could be a predator, if he had to be.