Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Miss Parker slapped the photo on the deli counter, wrong side up. The man behind the counter gave her a stony glare. He picked up the photo, wiped the counter beneath with a well-loved dishrag, and dropped the photo back on the counter. Wrong side up.

“Lady, I’m working. Order or leave.”

Miss Parker gnawed on her lips to keep the impatience from spilling out of her.

“You haven’t even looked at the photo,” she pointed out, keeping her voice as even as she could muster.

The man had thick, dark eyebrows and thick arms hairy enough to make Miss Parker wonder how many stray arm hairs typically sneaked their way into the average hoagie. As Miss Parker looked on, he tipped a cutting board lined with sliced meat into a shallow tub behind the counter. He took exaggerated care, seeming to revel in every second he kept her waiting. Finally, he turned back to the counter.

“I don’t need to look at it,” said the man. He pointedly did not look at the photo, a year-old employee ID photo of Jarod from when he’d been working out of a college. Instead, he pushed the photo back to her with the tips of his callused fingers. “You’ve never worked retail before, have you? Or any kind of job involving customers? I see so many faces every day, if I tried to memorize them all I’d have no room left in my head for my own ma’s face.”

Miss Parker turned the photo around right-side-up and tapped Jarod’s face. “I never said he was a customer. He’s probably an employee, maybe someone who’s shown up in your life recently. Goes by Jarod, last name varies. That ring a bell, Marco?”

She’d found the man’s name on a piece of paper in a pants pocket previously belonging to Jarod. The pants had been through the laundry, and the paper along with it. The name had been almost completely illegible, but she and Broots had set the Centre linguistics team on the task and came up with four statistical possibilities for first names and three possibilities for surnames, given parameters of… letter shapes, word lengths, a bunch of nonsense Miss Parker was content to leave behind the scenes. Of the twelve possible combinations of first name and surname, only one identified someone currently living in the northeastern United States, according to the latest census: a Mr. Marco Lorefice, proprietor of a sandwich shop in Philadelphia.

Marco frowned at the invocation of Jarod’s name, and in that moment Miss Parker knew she had him. He took the photo to look at it properly. Miss Parker watched his eyes; she saw the moment he recognized the face, first vaguely then with growing certainty. The clinching moment happened when Marco used the tip of his thumb to cover up the bottom of Jarod’s face. His eyes widened, just barely. Finally, he spoke.

“Who is this guy, anyway?” He wasn’t the world’s most gifted actor. He had one glaring tell, which was to speak slightly louder than usual. “He your husband? He run out on you, or what? Looks the type.”

“You know him?” asked Miss Parker, as if she didn’t know.

A beat, as Marco continued to stare at the photo. A muscle in his jaw twitched.

“Nah,” said the man, making a special effort to look her straight in the eye. “I thought for a sec, but nah, sorry. Like I said, I see a lot of faces. Who is he?”

She could call him out, of course. He was clearly lying. But would it help? Probably not. Easier to catch flies with honey than with vinegar, she was sure she’d heard that somewhere before.

“I’m a reporter,” she said. One good lie deserves another. Besides, she’d had occasion to practice her small-p pretender skills lately. “He’s a person of interest on a case I’m covering, and I’m up a creek if I don’t get an insider quote for the weekend edition. My boss grants me an informant fund, if you point me in the right direction I could send some your way. What do you say?”

Marco’s hands gripped the edge of the counter like an acrophobe hanging onto his roller coaster seat for dear life. He slowly unclenched and turned back to his work.

“Tempting,” said Marco. “But as I don’t know the guy, I can’t give you anything worth any money. Except maybe one of Philly’s best sandwiches. You going to order, or what?”

She ordered. A shrimp po boy was ready in five minutes, and eaten in another ten as Miss Parker loitered in her rental car outside the restaurant. Lorefice knew where to find Jarod, it was only a matter of waiting for him to lead her back to wherever Jarod was hiding, and then…

Well, and then she’d catch Jarod.

And then?

And then she’d bring him back to the Centre.

And then?

And then Raines would let her move on.

To what?

Shut up.

Marco Lorefice might have been a terrible liar, but he wasn’t too shabby at shaking a tail. As far as she was aware, she hadn’t given him significant reason to suspect he was being tailed, but maybe shaking a hypothetical tail was simply de rigueur for the sort of guy Jarod would target. He ran several stale yellow lights, abruptly pulled over twice, switched lanes at every given opportunity, and worst of all, his blinker signaling appeared to have little to no relationship with the direction he actually planned to turn. Of course, it was always possible that on top of being a terrible liar, he was also a terrible driver. Regardless, Miss Parker had been tailing a genius for over five years (never mind unsuccessfully) and would not be deterred.

Finally, Lorefice’s car turned without signaling into a parking garage at the base of an imposing office building, a dozen-odd floors of aggressively boring architecture which put Miss Parker in mind of a prison. She looped around the block and pulled into the same garage. An elevator from the parking garage took her to the ground floor, and Miss Parker emerged into a deserted lobby.

Whoever had furnished the place had spared every expense, only allowing the bare minimum of comfort: three cramped chairs with upholstery stinking of cigarette smoke, all barely within shouting distance of a vacated front desk. It took a moment for Miss Parker to recall, oh, that’s right, it was past clock-out time on a Friday. All the nine-to-fivers were home with their two-point-five kids.

But then why had she been able to access the building through the parking garage? Why weren’t the entrances locked?

Miss Parker slid behind the front desk and pawed around, hoping for more information about where she might catch up with Lorefice. Something that read ‘Floor 9: Department of Corruption and Orphan Abuse’ would be perfect, that would be right up Jarod’s alley. She wished she’d brought some backup, even Syd would have helped her be in more than one place at once. The one time she’d thought to cover the exits, and there was nobody there to cover them for her.

She found a building directory mounted to the wall near the front desk, and she was skimming the contents when something dark moved in her peripheral vision, followed by a muffled, hollow thump. When she turned to look, at first she could see nothing awry. She was still alone in the lobby, so whatever had moved, it couldn’t have been inside the building. Then she saw it: an artichoke green filing cabinet lay on its side on the strip of lawn that ran along the side of the building. It was badly dented and vomiting neon file folders onto the grass.

Just like the parking garage entrance, the front doors were conspicuously unlocked. Miss Parker pushed through them and rushed over to the fallen cabinet. A crunch underfoot alerted Miss Parker to a minefield of broken glass around the cabinet. She looked up. Sure enough, a window many floors up had a cavernous hole through which the cabinet had presumably fallen. If Miss Parker strained her hearing, she thought she could hear distant shouts, floating down to her from high above.

She stepped back several paces and counted the floors, from the broken window down to the ground floor. Seven floors.

Miss Parker had the safety on her gun switched off when the elevator doors opened on the seventh floor, revealing another sterile lobby. The back wall was made of glass, with an ornate pattern of frosted glazing and transparent glass allowing unpredictable glimpses of the hallway beyond. At first, it seemed just as deserted as the ground floor. She paused on the threshold to the elevator, listening hard.

The first sign of life was the sound of footsteps — an irregular gait: step, drag, step, drag — and laboured breathing. A figure soon came into view through the warped glass looking out onto the hallway. It was a tall man with broad shoulders, curled in on himself as he stumbled down the hall, putting as much weight as he could on his right leg. As Miss Parker watched, he stopped and put out a hand to the glass wall to brace his wavering balance, smearing red on the glass as he did so. His profile passed by a transparent section of glass, and Miss Parker’s breath caught.

It was Jarod.

His hair was shorter than when she’d last seen him, and he’d grown out a short beard, but it was unmistakably him. She’d last seen him in person over a year previous. As far as she had discerned, his rate of Pretends had slowed over the last couple of months, and the opportunities to run into him were abruptly thin on the ground. In a backwards kind of way, she’d missed him.

Jarod, cornered. For once, she was covering the exits, and he was clearly in no shape to run. He wasn’t in any shape to do much of anything, in fact — trying for dispassionate, she noted the strain in his expression, the tension in his mouth and jaw, the sheen of sweat at his temples. Her study of Jarod’s face was interrupted by the sound of more footsteps, running this time, and an angry shout.

“Jarod, you narc bastard, get back here,” called a scathing voice. Miss Parker recognized the voice from the deli: it was Lorefice. The shout spurred Jarod to action, setting him off at a slightly faster hobble. He reached the door separating the hall from the lobby and flung it wide. On automatic, Miss Parker brought up the barrel of her gun to point in his direction. Jarod’s eye caught the movement and looked straight at her. His glazed eyes took a lethargic moment to register recognition, then:

“What — uh!”  Two loud barks of a pistol, and the sound of shattering glass.

“… Jarod?” she whispered.

Jarod staggered sideways into the shattered door. His feet wobbled beneath him and one hand shot out to grab something to stop his fall. It closed on empty air, his feet gave out, and he crashed to the floor.

Despite the evidence playing out in front of her eyes, it took a moment for Miss Parker to realize what had happened, as if her brain was trying to overwrite the incoming information rather than process it.

Jarod had been shot. At least twice, if the limp was anything to go by. He was still alive and sitting upright, one shoulder braced against the remains of the door to the lobby. But his attacker wasn’t finished.

Lorefice came into view at the far end of the hallway. He no longer bothered to run. He took no notice of Miss Parker, standing still as a piece at a wax museum with her gun pointed uselessly at the floor. He ambled up to Jarod, close enough that Jarod had to tilt his chin up to meet his eyes. Lorefice was the type to get expressive with the barrel of a gun, and he brandished the thing theatrically at Jarod’s slumped figure.

“Gotcha,” said Lorefice.

Jarod swallowed, his throat working in stuttering, groping jerks.

“I’m not — I’m not who you think I… what do you…”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it. You’re loyalty itself! You’d knee yourself in the balls before you’d turn against us! Uh-huh, right. Bye, Jarod.”

He raised his gun and pointed it squarely at Jarod’s forehead.

Miss Parker didn’t think. It was pure instinct.

The next moment, there was a hole in Marco Lorefice’s temple and a new, gory mural in reds and greys on the opposite wall. Miss Parker’s index finger trembled on the trigger. One suspended moment of silence passed, and Lorefice’s body toppled.

… It toppled onto Jarod.

The only reaction Jarod had to having a two hundred-and-change pound man dropped on him was a soft, pained grunt. After that, not a twitch.

You killed him, said something inside Miss Parker. The thought spiraled.

You killed him. You killed Jarod. You killed him you killed him what if he’s dead? You killed him. What if he’s dead? What if he’s gone? You killed Jarod! You killed him. What if he’s dead what if he’s dead what if he’s gone and dead. You killed him you killed him you killed him you killed him you killed him.

And so on.

The next moment, it was like someone had pressed play on Miss Parker. She rushed forward, skidded to her knees, grabbed two great handfuls of Lorefice’s dead flesh and shoved. Throwing her weight bodily into the man’s torso, she managed to push Lorefice’s corpse off of Jarod, onto the floor. One of the dead man’s eyes was half-open. It met her gaze with one dilated pupil — not shocked or accusatory, just a dead eye. She growled in disgust and turned her face and her attention back to Jarod.

Miss Parker would never admit, even in the privacy of her own mind, to the stab of overjoyed relief which lanced through her chest when Jarod stirred to life. He gasped, grimaced and grabbed at his leg. He was alive. She hadn’t killed him; just the opposite, she’d saved his life. At least, for the moment.

Jarod’s left leg captured all his attention. His leg wound bubbled up a slow, regular geyser of blood, creating a dark, growing stain on the thigh of his pants. He clamped one hand over the wound, and with his free hand, he felt up under his shirt for the second wound. Once he found it, he slapped his palm down firmly, with enough force to make Miss Parker wince with visceral sympathy.

Only when he’d accomplished this sequence of tasks did he focus his gaze on Miss Parker.

Miss Parker was used to Jarod’s typical reaction to spotting her, usually across a crowded room at the end of that week’s flavour of three-dimensional Where’s Waldo?. It wasn’t unusual to see wariness, even some alarm. It had been a while, however, since she’d seen real fear. She saw it now.

The fear blew Jarod’s unfocused eyes wide and he jerked back. Before Miss Parker could say anything, he scrambled back on his hands and elbows, dragging himself away from her, wounds forgotten. He soon collided with the closest wall and — and this was where Miss Parker’s sense of the real and the surreal skewed crazily back-to-front — let out a panicked whimper. The sound tugged at her heart.

“Jarod! Calm down, stop moving,” she hissed. As far as she was aware, there was no reason to whisper; if Lorefice had pals, they weren’t exactly queuing to back him up. She didn’t feel that loud noises would help Jarod’s clear distress, however, so she kept her voice low. “I’m not going to — well. I’m not going to kill you. Calm down, lie still.”

With that, she wrapped her own palm around the thigh wound, and tried her best to ignore the full-body wince which resulted. She’d been about to say ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ a statement which would have had a shaky relationship with the truth, at best. She wasn’t here to kick him in the ribs, sure, but she also wasn’t here to bake him a birthday cake. Hence, she supposed, his fear.

Jarod stared at her a moment. He said nothing. He seemed to have come back to himself, if barely. His breathing sounded odd, sounded muted. The panic had dissipated as suddenly as it had appeared. Jarod pushed his hand up under his shirt again and held it to his chest.

“Where did —” She cleared her throat and nodded to Jarod’s torso. “Where did he get you?”

“Lung,” Jarod grunted.

“Oh. Oh. That’s, uh. That’s not good,” she said, and even through the distraction of the moment it sounded stupid to her ears. Jarod noticed, too. He gave her a deeply patronizing glare.

“No, it’s not.”

Miss Parker waited a moment for him to expand, but he didn’t. His lips were pressed together, hard.

“Well, you’re the sometimes-doctor,” she pointed out. “Are — are you going to be all right? Can you make it to —”

“To where?” Jarod snapped. “To a helicopter? To Delaware? No. I can’t.” Miss Parker opened her mouth to correct him, to tell him she’d been about to say ‘to a hospital’, but he continued. “Your hand. Need it.”

“… What?”

His next response was slow in coming, like he needed a run-up at it.

“On the chest wound, so. Doesn’t coll-apse. More.” His words came out in fits and starts. Miss Parker hesitated, thinking how to approach the manoeuvre. Jarod spotted the hesitation, and promptly misinterpreted it.

“Centre doesn’t want —” He inhaled a thin, drawn-out breath. “— me dead. Help. Please.”

“Neither do I, Jarod. Christ, you think that little of —” She stamped down her defensiveness. “Agh, shit. Brace yourself.”

She bent close, taking care not to let go of Jarod’s thigh. Her free hand she slipped under Jarod’s reddening shirt, travelling up until it met his slippery fingers clamped over the sucking wound. His fingers shifted, and hers quickly replaced them. Like the idol swap in Indiana Jones, a tiny hysterical corner of her mind pointed out. Jarod hissed from the pain, then both of his hands disappeared under his shirt. Miss Parker couldn’t see what he was doing, but she felt a successive rapping, on one side of his chest, then the other.

He stared straight at her (through her?) the whole time, and Miss Parker stared straight back. Staring into Jarod’s eyes, with her hand on his chest — it’s not exactly how you pictured this happening, is it? The hysterical corner of her mind was back, and growing bolder by the second. But no. No, it wasn’t how she’d imagined it.

The rapping stopped, and Jarod took over again on wound-plugging duty. Miss Parker sat back, relieved for an excuse to break eye contact.

“Hemothorax,” Jarod muttered. In response to Miss Parker’s raised eyebrow, he expanded: “Blood in… chest cavity.” Miss Parker didn’t know what to do with that. It didn’t sound great. Mutely, Jarod jerked his head in her direction.

“Hm?” she said.

“Ambulance,” he gasped.

“I can’t call an ambulance.” She wasn’t sure when she’d made that decision, but it was made. Jarod’s jaw slackened and a look of hurt and confusion unfolded on his face.

“Why not?”

There was that disappointment again. The worst part was — or was it the saving grace? — he wouldn’t look so disappointed if he hadn’t thought better of her in the first place. But she was thinking of both of them, she wanted to argue. She wasn’t sure how true that was. Possibly very. Possibly not at all.

“Jarod, have you forgotten the dead body next to you? We’d be arrested.”

Jarod gave her a mute look which pointed out, very eloquently, that only she would be spending any time behind bars for their flat-lined friend. Miss Parker ignored him and got to her feet. Jarod squirmed and grabbed for his leg.

“We’re not staying here, though. We gotta move,” Miss Parker said, half to herself.

“To wh—”

“Stop talking with that sucking chest wound, you sound like Raines, for God’s sake.” She tried for her usual bravado, but couldn’t keep a waver out of her voice. Jarod snapped his mouth shut.

Miss Parker stepped over Lorefice’s body and set off down the hall at a half-run. She tried not to envision what could happen if she were too slow, if she returned to find two cooling bodies on the linoleum rather than one. In the third room she checked, she found a box of page protectors; in the fourth, a roll of medical tape in a first-aid kit. She returned to Jarod and brandished both tools. Jarod gave her a wobbly, half-dubious smile.

Five minutes later, a square cut from page-protector plastic was taped inelegantly over the hole in Jarod’s chest. She craned her head back to admire her handiwork. It was a messy job — Florence Nightingale she was not — but it seemed stable and (most importantly) air-tight. Jarod nodded jerkily and gave her a mute thumbs-up.

She didn’t consult Jarod on the next step in the plan. She couldn’t bet on him agreeing, especially since he’d wanted an ambulance. So, without a word of explanation, she:

1. Helped Jarod to a sitting position, 
2. Got behind him, 
3. Hooked both her arms under both of his, and 
4. Pulled.

Jarod gasped and clawed at the floor for purchase.

“Like tearing off a band-aid,” muttered Miss Parker. She began tugging Jarod along the lobby floor towards the elevator. She pointedly did not look at the lengthening smear of blood they were leaving behind. “Except longer and more annoying. So not really much like a band-aid at all.”

“Where —”

“Shh.” She couldn’t bear to hear the pain in his voice. She’d never been able to deal well with feeling sympathy for Jarod. It only ever made her job harder.

At the last hump of the journey, one of Jarod’s feet got caught on the doorway to the elevator. Miss Parker didn’t notice, and heaved again from her under-arm grip. Jarod’s yell of pain should have echoed through the building; instead it was barely louder than a murmur, like a broken Speak n’ Spell. Miss Parker winced.

“Sorry,” she said softly. She didn’t check to see if he’d heard; she just leaned over, cleared his foot from the obstruction, and pulled him the rest of the way into the elevator.

Miss Parker kept her eyes on the floor number display on the elevator trip down. She could feel his stare, from floor seven all the way to the parking garage. Still her eyes stayed glued to the shifting numbers.

“I’m not going to drag you across the parking lot,” she announced to the elevator at large, still avoiding Jarod’s eyes. This was the approach to take. All business. No muss, no fuss. Just the facts, ma’am. “I’m going to get the car. You keep your hand on the leg wound.”

The parking lot was still empty, save for Marco Lorefice’s Pontiac, parked two rows over from her own parking spot. She wondered fleetingly how long it would take the cops to find it once Lorefice’s disappearance was noted. Or maybe it wouldn’t even take as long as that; after all, the body had fallen on Jarod, there was little chance there wasn’t some of the sandwich artist’s DNA material somewhere on Jarod’s person. If he had a record — and from all his posturing and gun-waving, it seemed like there was a good chance he would — they wouldn’t have to find the body to know to look for him. If a forensic technician got their hands on Jarod’s blood-stained person, the foreign genetic material would point to a dead or injured Lorefice like a blinking, neon arrow.

Turning the contingencies over in her mind, Miss Parker pulled her rental car up to the elevator.

Jarod was gone.

For a moment, she wanted to yell in frustration. Then, she applied the bare minimum of logic. He had gun shot wounds, one in his lung and one in his thigh, with only some tape and page protector plastic plugging the former and his own hand putting pressure on the latter. He could not have gone far.

He hadn’t. Miss Parker found Jarod using a railing as a crutch, speed-limping towards the darkened toll booth at the garage exit. He had a cellphone in one hand, and as she watched, he mashed one of the buttons on the keypad. It was Miss Parker’s cellphone. He could have grabbed it at any point — while she was lending her hands for help with his chest wound, while she was avoiding his eye in the elevator, when she’d dislodged his foot from the doorway. It didn’t matter.

Miss Parker didn’t raise her gun, didn’t raise her voice.

“Jarod, stop. Drop the phone.” He froze. His shoulders sagged. He didn’t turn around, nor did he relinquish the phone. Miss Parker sighed. “Don’t make me shoot my own phone.”

The phone dropped. Jarod turned around, swaying on the spot. He looked as though will alone kept him on his feet.

“Centre?” he wheezed.

Miss Parker hesitated.

“Eventually.”

Chapter Text

It took some doing, but finally Jarod was bundled into the backseat of the rental. Miss Parker had put down a foil blanket from her field kit, feeling very much like a serial killer as she did so. The blanket was large enough to both cover the back seat and to fold around Jarod’s shoulders. To keep the blood off the upholstery, she’d said, though she also detected the shivers travelling up and down Jarod’s body. It was a disgustingly humid day, so she guessed it was due to blood loss.

Four blocks from the hospital, Jarod closed his eyes. One block later, Miss Parker noticed.

“Jarod, you still with me?” she said. No response. “Jarod?” Nothing. Miss Parker glanced over her shoulder at the back seat. She turned back to the road, ashen. There was a puddle of blood pooling on the floor of the legroom area. From Miss Parker’s quick impression, it seemed as though it stemmed from the leg wound.

“Damn it. Damn it. Son of a bitch,” said Miss Parker, and followed these up with several successively ruder word choices. “I’m going to kill you if you die, Jarod, don’t you dare.” Then, after a pause: “I need to get you back to the Centre alive.”

As if she needed to give a reason why she didn’t want him to die. She wasn’t sure who she was arguing with. Jarod? He was out cold. Herself?

Maybe.

She pulled into the hospital’s temporary parking zone outside the emergency department.

“Jarod?” she called, gently shaking him after coming around to the back door. Then, when there was no response, not-so-gently shaking him. “C’mon, Jarod. Jarod, wake — wake up. Help! I need some help over here!” She shouted this last in the direction of the automatic doors leading to emergency intake. “Someone, help! I need help with my — help!”

Two paramedics fresh off a patient delivery jogged over with a wheeled stretcher. They didn’t blink at the blood in the backseat, simply loaded Jarod onto the stretcher and bustled him off. Miss Parker leaned back against the car and watched Jarod disappear around a corner, thronged by emergency personnel. There was a nurse at her shoulder, barraging Miss Parker with questions, but to Miss Parker he sounded a thousand miles away.

For the first time since Jarod’s escape, she was letting him out of her sight willingly. She had better not get too comfortable with the feeling. It couldn’t happen again.

“Miss, I need some kind of identification.”

The nurse at the emergency department’s reception desk was down to the penultimate straw on the camel’s back. In her defence, there were two discrete screaming kids harmonizing in the waiting room at the moment. To make matters worse, this woman who’d come in with the GSW John Doe was stonewalling her.

Miss Parker blinked at the nurse. She’d been functioning at maximum adrenaline for a good hour and a half and was now running on fumes. She straightened in her chair, a cheap plastic thing which rubbed runs into her stockings at the back of her legs. Identification. The nurse wanted to know her name. If she gave her name… now, how would it go? The Centre would find out. The name would show up on Broots’s radar, and knowing her luck, it would get back to Mr Lyle. Lyle would blunder into the situation with all the subtlety of a sawed-off shotgun and would try to steal the Jarod collar out from under her. She couldn’t hand over any identification.

“Don’t have it,” she said, words slightly slurred.

“None at all?” The nurse’s expression could be described as ‘politely incredulous’.

Miss Parker had a light bulb moment.

“Look, we were mugged,” she snapped. Indignation came easily. “We didn’t have much on us, and it pissed the guy off. He took my wallet and my phone.” She made a mental note to make sure her phone was turned off or silenced, so it wouldn’t ring later and give the game away. “Then he —”

“Don’t worry about the rest of the incident, you can tell the officer later,” said the nurse. Every word was clipped with chronic impatience. “Can I get a name, at least?”

“Officer?” Miss Parker echoed.

“Yes, officer. We have police on the facilities for cases like these, where the injury appears to have resulted from an act of violence. That is, a crime. He’ll go over the details with you. Now please, miss, a name?”

“Jamison,” Miss Parker blurted, distracted by the idea of having to deal with yet more questions, this time from a cop. The name came automatically to mind. It had been her mother’s, before she met Daddy.

The nurse raised her fingers, poised to type.

“Jamison. J-A-M-I-S-O-N? Good, thank you. Is that your name or the patient’s name?”

“Mine,” said Miss Parker.

“First name?”

“Ma—” Her real name in combination with her mother’s maiden name could still send up red flags at the Centre. She changed tack mid-word. “Margot.”

“Thanks, Margot. We’ll get back to your details later. What is the patient’s name?”

The name ‘Jarod’ would summon Centre sweeper teams even more effectively than Miss Parker’s own name. She scanned her recent memories for inspiration and landed on a recent conversation with Sydney about his twin brother.

“It’s, ah. His name is Jake.”

The nurse caught the stammer and frowned.

“Jake…?”

She couldn’t appear to hesitate, so she gave the first name that came to mind.

“Parker.” Miss Parker grimaced, internally cursing herself. The nurse didn’t seem to notice. She tapped away at her keyboard.

“Jake Parker, great. What’s your relationship to Jake, Ms Jamison?”

‘His perennially unsuccessful kidnapper’ wouldn’t open any doors, she knew. She’d have to be family to have access to Jarod while he recovered.

“I’m his wife. I kept my name.”

The nurse gave her a tight-lipped smile and slid a form across the desk to Miss Parker. “You can fill out this form on behalf of your husband. This mugger, I suppose they got Jake’s wallet too?”

Miss Parker nodded.

“And I suppose you wouldn’t happen to know Jake’s insurance information off the top of your head?”

Miss Parker shook her head. “I can get the information from his employer. It’s after hours right now, though. They’re closed for the weekend.”

“Understandable. You’ll need to get that information to us as soon as you’re able.”

The Centre would agree to cover Jarod’s medical expenses, no question. They had money coming out of their ears, and to boot, they had a vested interest in making sure their lab rat remained alive. This did, of course, put a very concrete deadline on her capacity to avoid reporting back to the home office. She wanted to delay that eventuality as much as possible. The less time Lyle had to swoop in and spoil things, the better.

Some time later, she was rescued from her front-row seat to a performance of Infant Distress in A Minor by a police officer. The officer handed her a cup of coffee (gratis, yet revolting), introduced himself as Sgt. Hobbes, and requested her statement. Miss Parker tried to keep the story light on details, and as close to the truth as possible. Fewer details meant less potential to accidentally contradict herself later.

“Jake and I were out on a walk together when we heard a noise coming from the parking garage under AdeptMax Industries.” She gave the address to a building two miles west of Lorefice’s last resting place, which Hobbes dutifully copied down. “It sounded like it could be someone in pain, and Jake likes to try to be a good Samaritan, so we decided to have a look. We didn’t see anybody at first, but then a man came out from behind a car, and —”

“What did he look like?”

“I was getting to that, keep your hair on.” She had a choice to make here. She could invent someone. There was a lot of potential there for forgetting or confusing details later on, which could lead to trouble in the time it took the sergeant to flip between one page of his notebook and the next. Or she could describe someone specific. She could pick an acquaintance at random, paint a word picture by memory. Or — “He was about six foot two, dark curly hair, thick eyebrows. Looked like he worked out a lot.”

Had a hole in his head. Two, in fact, her mind supplied.

The thing about describing Lorefice as the mugger was, it had potential to turn out either very convenient or very inconvenient. Bullet point A, Jarod likely had Lorefice’s genetic material all over him. And, bullet point B, what with Lorefice’s comfort with firearms it seemed like a fair bet that the man was in the criminal database. So, it probably wouldn’t hurt for Jarod to have an established reason for having Lorefice’s DNA on him, if only to keep the cops out of their hair for a couple extra hours. QED.

It also created a link between the two of them and a dead body which might not have otherwise existed. You take the bad with the good.

“Caucasian, or…?”

“White guy, yeah.”

“And the car?”

“Pontiac. Grey, I think.” It had been a desaturated blue colour, but she didn’t need to leave him all the bread crumbs. Grey Pontiac, she repeated to herself. AdeptMax Industries. Jake Parker, Margot Jamison. So much for ‘light on details’, her exhaustion must be spurring her to run her mouth. She hoped like hell she could keep all the fudged details straight.

“Thanks, this is great. Then what happened?”

“He had a gun, a pistol I think. He asked for all our valuables, but we were just on a walk, we hadn’t brought much. We gave him what we had, our wallets and my cellphone. He seemed frustrated, and he started waving the gun around more, at Jake and then at me. Jake tried to get between me and the gun, and the guy shot him.” It wasn’t hard to act as though she was still shaken from seeing her ‘husband’ shot by a mugger. She simply had to collapse a few barriers in her mind and the memory made her voice shake. “I think he panicked, he must have thought that Jar — that Jake wanted to attack him. He shot him twice, in the leg and the chest.”

Miss Parker replayed the true incident in her head — Jarod spotting her across the lobby, the gun shots echoing down the hallway, Jarod staggering sideways into shattered glass and sliding into a heap on the floor. Miss Parker’s fingers stopping up the hole in Jarod’s chest, his heartbeat hammering erratically under her hand.

For a jarring, impotent moment, she’d thought Jarod was going to die. While the barriers were down, she could admit the idea had been terrifying. Why it had been terrifying, she didn’t care to think about. What would the Centre have done if she’d let Jarod die in front of her? Knowing the Centre they’d probably have ordered the body retrieved. Dead or alive, Jarod was important. A shudder ran across her shoulders and up to the nape of her neck.

Sergeant Hobbes looked up from his notes, having noted the break in her story.

“Nearly there, Ms Jamison. What happened next?”

Miss Parker blinked rapidly to shake herself from the flashback.

“Once he’d shot Jake, the mugger looked scared,” she continued. “He took off in his car. I didn’t see the plate, before you ask. There wasn’t anyone around, but I’d parked the car not too far away so I ran to get it. And then I brought Jake here.”

She let out a shaky breath.

“Is that enough? I’m exhausted. I need to see my husband.”

“Almost. When —” He caught the full force of Miss Parker’s tired glare and trailed off. “You know what, it can wait. Don’t leave the premises without informing me or another on-site officer. I hope your husband pulls through, Ms Jamison.”

But when Miss Parker asked after Jarod at the intake desk, she was rebuffed.

“He’s in surgery, ma’am. We’ll let you know.”

Miss Parker ducked into a single-occupancy washroom and pulled out her phone. If she hadn’t silenced it, it would have been ringing off the hook. Broots had left over a dozen messages, Syd a mere two. Miss Parker pulled up the most recent one from Broots.

“Miss Parker!” said Broots’s tinny voice. “I wish you’d pick up your phone. That is, I hope you’re OK, and if you’re OK, I wish you’d pick up your phone. Mr Lyle worked out that I know where you went, and he’s been hounding me non-stop. He also tracked down the linguist we asked to figure out the surname, but of course he doesn’t know it’s — he doesn’t know which we identified as the most likely.” Miss Parker spared a moment of gratitude for Broots’s latent paranoia. She wouldn’t put it past her brother to pull a recording of this call. If Broots hadn’t self-censored, Lyle would have gained the name Lorefice, which was sure to pop up in a police report sooner or later.

“And he doesn’t know the first name’s Marco,” Broots continued. Miss Parker winced. Never mind. She took back every compliment she’d ever paid Broots. “So, uh, you’ve still got your head start. Lyle’s threatening to send me to a T-board, though. Really wouldn’t mind some help keeping him off my back. Anyway. Call me back! Buh-bye. Why did I say buh-b—”

Miss Parker shut the phone off and stuffed it into her bag, alongside her firearm. She shouldn’t worry. Broots might be an origami bird under pressure but he was loyal. He wouldn’t blab, not from a brute force approach. Maybe Brigitte could have pulled it out of him, but she was long gone.

When Miss Parker let herself out of the washroom, she caught the intake nurse’s eye across the waiting room. The nurse frowned and gave her a small shake of the head. Miss Parker looked over to the double doors through which Jarod had been pushed on a wheeled stretcher. He’d be all right. Even in her head, she didn’t pose it as a question. It was Jarod. He’d be fine.

In her mind’s eye, she saw Jarod sprawled in the back seat of the rental car, red pooling under him and dripping off the foil blanket onto the floor.

He’d be fine.

The waiting room was quieter, and Miss Parker realized after a moment that the two screaming children had left. Grateful for a small morsel of peace, she sank into a grubby chair and closed her eyes.

When Miss Parker opened her eyes again, it felt like it had been five minutes. Judging by the reddening skyline outside, however, she’d slept straight through ‘til dusk. She straightened in her seat and immediately felt the compounded aches and twinges coming back to bite her in the ass for sleeping in a deeply unergonomic hospital waiting room chair. She groaned aloud.

“Jamison! Margot Jamison!”

Miss Parker looked around to see what had woken her up. The intake nurse wasn’t at her desk. The waiting room had emptied out some. Miss Parker counted two more people who were trying to catch some shut-eye while waiting for their turn to see a doctor.

“Jamison!”

Damn, where was this Jamison woman? Holding everything up for everybody else, how rude could you get?

Wait.

The events of the day rushed back to Miss Parker. Tailing a sandwich artist to an empty office building. Jarod’s lung shredded by a bullet. Jarod losing consciousness in the backseat of her rental sedan. The police interrogation. Margot Jamison. She rose from her chair.

“I’m Ms Jamison,” she said.

“I know,” the intake nurse snapped. She stood not two yards away, arms akimbo, looking very much like she’d like to give Miss Parker detention and have her write lines. “I’ve called for you six times now. I don’t have time to come out from behind the desk to fetch patients and family members.”

“Got it, fine. Won’t happen again,” said Miss Parker with sarcastic humility. “Is there news?”

The nurse deflated slightly. “Yes. Your husband is going to be OK.” She tried for a reassuring smile; Miss Parker tried to return it with a reassured smile. They both gave the impression they were acting out a scene in a community theatre production. “The procedure was a success. He is healing, and will need a lot of rest, but you can see him. There was blood in his chest cavity, and it will take time to drain. The doctor will tell you more when she meets with you.”

And she gave Miss Parker directions to Jarod’s hospital room.

Jarod was going to be OK — as she knew he would be. Miss Parker closed her eyes for a moment. It wasn’t unreasonable to be relieved. This would make her job easier.

It was a private room, which seemed a lucky break.

(Miss Parker would later discover that in fact this hospital had a policy of putting GSW survivors in private rooms, to better cooperate with Philadelphia PD presence. For now, though, it seemed like a real stroke of luck.)

She stepped into the room and her eyes fell on Jarod. He was sleeping. She didn’t think she’d ever seen him asleep before, not even on any of the DSAs Sydney had recovered from Jarod since the initial escape from the Centre. The old cliché was that being asleep made a person look younger, and in a way that was true here as well. Or, more accurately, he looked… uncomplicated. Sweet, even. His sleeping expression reminded her of the snippets of guileless enthusiasm she’d seen in him in the early days post-escape.

As if in response to her thoughts, Jarod’s brow furrowed.

“Won’t,” he mumbled. “I won’t. Let me go, I won’t.”

He hadn’t opened his eyes. Miss Parker froze and strained to pick up his mumbled words, wondering what he could be dreaming about.

His voice grew louder. “Stop! Don’t… hm. I’ll.” He broke off for the span of several seconds, like someone had pressed pause on his nightmare. Then it started up again. “I’ll do it. Leave… alone. Stop!”

His body pitched violently to one side, towards Miss Parker, such that he was inches from sliding off the mattress. For the first time, Miss Parker noticed a thin tube tucked under his hospital gown, leading away to an opaque cylinder which reminded her of some sort of antique vacuum cleaner. The contents of the tube were dark red, and the plastic had twisted during Jarod’s nightmare. Miss Parker thought back to what the nurse had said — Jarod would have to have blood drained from his chest. The suction had been cut off, however, when he’d moved.

Miss Parker stepped close and shook Jarod by the shoulder. He jolted awake with a gasp.

“Miss Parker! What —”

He stared around at his surroundings. His gaze paused on the door and on the window, lingering long enough to note the lack of an obvious opening mechanism on the latter. Always looking for a way out.

“You were dreaming,” said Miss Parker.

Jarod’s eyes snapped back to look at her. This time, there was no eruption of irrational fear, as there had been back at the scene of Lorefice’s death. She remembered his panic-stricken look, scrambling backwards away from her, reduced to prey instincts by terror. What had that been about? Now, he only looked cautious.

After a pause, he nodded warily.

“Nightmare.”

“Sounded like a bad one.” She kept her tone light as she stepped around the bed and straightened out the drainage tubing as best she could. Jarod watched as she did so.

“Still in it,” he said bitterly. He grabbed a fistful of blankets and pushed them off his wounded leg. “Or the prologue to it, at least. In the dream I was back at the Centre, hanging out with your brother. I guess I have that to look forward to. I have to admit, I’m surprised to wake up here, and not in Blue Cove.”

Miss Parker pulled a chair up to the side of the bed and sat down. It was more comfortable than the chairs in the waiting room, but not by much.

“You said you wouldn’t make it to Delaware,” she said simply. “You’re the one with medical experience on your resume, I thought I’d take your word on that. Anyway, I’m not in a rush. You’re not going anywhere like that.”

Jarod’s facial expression smoothed out, all expression vanishing. He stared at his leg. There wasn’t anything to see — it was wrapped in layers upon layers of dressing and gauze — but he seemed to be boring through to it with his blank gaze.

“I’m not going anywhere like this,” he repeated. “That’s, yeah. I’m not. I can’t escape.”

Miss Parker opened her mouth to respond, but found she was too disconcerted to speak. Jarod was nothing if not certain in his capacity to beat the odds, at least when it came to going up against the Centre. Never in all the time she’d known him had he ever sounded so defeated. It was wrong, that’s what it was. Jarod shouldn’t sound defeated. She almost had the vaguest urge to say something encouraging. Almost.

“No,” she said, because she could think of nothing else to say. “Not today.”

“Not today, and —” Jarod broke off, and Miss Parker wondered with horror if there was some emotion clogging his throat. Instead, he grabbed at his thigh and groaned. Miss Parker got to her feet.

“I’ll get a doctor,” she said automatically, business-like, turning to the door. Jarod gestured for her to stop. She hovered in between.

“No,” he said, muffled by gritted teeth. “It’s OK. It hurts, but it’s fine.”

“Oh, Christ. Machismo, Jarod? Really?” said Miss Parker. “I'm not a doctor but I’m pretty sure going on pain meds after being shot, twice, is normal and expected. I'm getting a doctor.” But she didn't leave.

Jarod closed his eyes, apparently to ride out the pain. He jerked his head to the door.

“Their anesthesia drugs are too strong,” he said. “I’ve been through withdrawal before, it was a similar dependency mechanism. No interest in doing it again.”

Withdrawal? Miss Parker stared incredulously for a moment before a neuron kicked a memory into gear. The synthetic narcotics the Centre had tried out on him, twenty-odd years ago. Teen-aged Jarod sweating through his blankets and vibrating out of his skin while a stranger held him through it. She couldn’t blame him not wanting to repeat the experience, no matter how long ago it had been. She sat back down.

“Why did he shoot you, anyway? How’d you piss him off?”

Jarod’s eyes opened again, and he shot her a weak glare.

“Lorefice was a kind of middle-management figure in a protection racket. Recently promoted and paranoid about it. I joined the group at an uncomfortable time, Lorefice was almost positive there was a mole, or an undercover cop or that someone was gunning for his new position. Then some lady shows up at his day job asking about his new hire, who’s a person of interest in a case she’s working on. She has a picture of me, looking tidy and upstanding and not at all like a rough-around-the-edges prospective racketeer.”

He watched calmly as realization spread across Miss Parker’s face.

“Then, of course, he was certain there was a mole or an undercover cop in his operation, and just as certain it was me. So he showed up to our next meeting armed.”

She’d gotten Jarod shot. Twice. This was her fault. For one wild moment, Miss Parker considered apologizing. Then her face hardened.

“One of the risks of your vocation, Jarod,” she said, only barely above a whisper. If she spoke any louder, the wobble in her voice would be audible. “Or former vocation, as of now. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

Jarod turned away from her and stared at the ceiling.

“How did you find me so fast this time?” he asked the ceiling.

Miss Parker’s shoulders were so tense her shoulder blades were making dents in the fabric of the chair’s backrest. She forced them to relax.

“You left some notes in a pants pocket in the clothes dryer before you left Cedar Rapids.”

Jarod chuckled ruefully.

“One mistake,” he said. “I guess it only ever had to take one stupid mistake.”

They both fell silent for a long moment, until Miss Parker realized Jarod’s breathing had shifted to a long, deep rhythm. He’d fallen asleep again. 

Sometime during the night, Miss Parker woke for the second time in twelve hours to a tremendous crick in the neck. She didn’t have to wonder what had woken her this time: Jarod was groaning in his sleep. Sweat dampened his hair and one hand unconsciously tried to creep under the gauze and dressing on his chest. Miss Parker reached over and pulled his hand away from the wound. They couldn’t be held up by complications with his recovery, she told herself.

She couldn’t bear to fall asleep sitting in a chair again, nor could she afford to let Jarod out of her sight. In the closet opposite the washroom, she found extra pillows and a scratchy blanket. A love-seat next to the window served as her bed, once she’d pushed it between Jarod’s bed and the door — he’d have to limp around her if he wanted to try to escape. Once she’d made herself halfway-comfortable, she glanced over to check on Jarod. He no longer looked uncomplicated; his features were pinched and pained. The heel of his hand — the one she’d pulled away from his chest — pushed against his upper thigh, as if trying to push the pain farther away from himself; his fingers were white-knuckled, digging into the flesh.

She pulled his hand away, but within seconds it drifted towards the wound again. On the third attempt, she held on, gripping Jarod’s hand tight in her own. After some brief resistance, Jarod’s hand relaxed in hers. Miss Parker fell back on her stacked pillows and drifted back to sleep.

And held on ‘til morning.

Chapter Text

“Cut to the chase, please. When can I take him home?”

The doctor blinked in surprise at Miss Parker’s brusqueness.

“Hm! Very well,” she blustered. “Barring complications, likely Sunday.”

“Sunday when?”

“If he has another good night, Sunday morning.”

Miss Parker snorted. ‘Good night’, she supposed, was relative. She was still massaging feeling back into her hand after a night of Jarod using her fingers as a stress ball. She cast a glance over her shoulder at the bed; he was still asleep.

“What can I do to expedite things?”

The doctor laughed, a laugh of startled shock. It froze when she realized Miss Parker was being serious.

“Expedite. Hrm. That’s one way of putting it. You can help him by letting him rest. It’s the best thing for him right now. Minimize stress as much as possible. Does he have a stressful job?”

Miss Parker quickly turned a laugh into a cough.

“In a way,” she said.

“Well, I’d recommend limiting his contact with work as much as is feasible. I recognize that’s not possible for everyone, but if he needs an excuse to go off the grid for a bit, being shot twice is a pretty good one.”

Minimize stress, thought Miss Parker. It was a big ask. Every moment Jarod spent conscious, he was likely anticipating the move back to the Centre. No matter her perspective on the prospect, she could see how the idea would be stressful. A Parker-led Centre had had its problems, that was true enough. A Raines-led Centre was a different story. Things had gone downhill quickly the moment Daddy had… left. Died. Disappeared.

… Died.

Anyway, she could see why he wasn’t exactly looking forward to it.

“Good to know,” Miss Parker said, giving the woman a quick, tight smile. “Thanks.”

And she closed the door, leaving her and Jarod alone, with the doctor blinking at the closed door in front of her face. Miss Parker turned back to Jarod, and found him sitting up and looking at her in complete silence. He seemed to have picked up this habit of silent staring since being shot. She wasn’t complaining about the silence, but she could have done without the staring. Miss Parker picked an unopened yoghurt off Jarod’s untouched breakfast tray and peeled off the lid. It was mango with fruit on the bottom.

“Morning,” she said. “Any more nightmares?”

“What?” Jarod blurted. “How did you kn— what do you mean?”

“Nightmares,” Miss Parker repeated. “Like yesterday.”

She looked around for an extra spoon. They’d left one for Jarod on the tray, wrapped in plastic, but she wasn’t so much of a jerk she’d steal the man’s only spoon.

“I had a nightmare yesterday?” His surprise looked genuine. He must have lost some memories from yesterday. Granted, he had seemed foggy at times.

“Yep,” said Miss Parker, trying to fashion the yoghurt lid into a scoop shape. “You said it was about being at the Centre with Mr Lyle. Which, incidentally, I wouldn’t worry about. Lyle’s going to be on the outs with the higher-ups when I get back with you. That was the deal. Whoever catches you climbs up the ladder. Whoever doesn’t gets dropped down a chute.”

“A chute?” Jarod repeated with alarm. “Raines has threatened to drop you down a chute?”

“Wouldn’t put it past him, but no. Chutes and Ladders?” Miss Parker said, ladling a mouthful of yoghurt into her mouth with the makeshift spoon. It was an awkward process. Jarod shook his head. “Oh, right. You wouldn’t know it… a board game for kids. It’s nothing to write home about. You didn’t miss much.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Jarod’s mouth sagged at the corners, and he leaned his head back on the pillow.

“Chutes and ladders,” he repeated.

Miss Parker had a sudden premonition — none of that Inner Sense stuff, just regular old intuition — of Jarod sitting in a featureless cell, cut off from the world again. No more discoveries of missed childhood landmarks. It had always been the way things were going to go, if and when Miss Parker succeeded. In that moment, however, it felt more tangible. And more depressing.

“It doesn’t have to be like it was before,” she offered. Jarod looked at her, radiating skepticism. “I’ll have some pull. I’ll… I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense for someone who’s meant to simulate real life to be separated from real life, does it? I’ll have some culture shipped in, to keep you in touch with things.”

“Generous,” said Jarod acidly.

Miss Parker rolled her eyes. “Or I won’t, suit yourself.” She sat at the bedside to finish her snack. “You shouldn’t have to worry about that nightmare anymore, anyway. Like I said, Lyle’s going to be lucky if he keeps his job. He won’t be in charge of the Pretender project.”

“That wasn’t what the dream was about,” said Jarod. “It was about what Lyle did last time I was at the Centre. And whether he’s in charge or not in the future, the Centre endorsed his approach. They would endorse it again in the future, since as far as they knew it was working. Not that I don’t feel reassured by your offer to send me board games through inter-departmental mail.”

“What do you mean, his approach?” She tried to think back to when Lyle and Brigitte had brought in Jarod a couple of years ago. Anything she knew about it, she knew second-hand. She’d been recovering from her own gun-shot wound at the time, laid up in an off-the-grid psychiatric institution. She hadn’t heard much, though she’d badgered Syd enough for details. Jarod had been taken in, he hadn’t done any simulations, they’d tried to move him to Africa and he had escaped en route. Nothing about Lyle’s involvement.

“Don’t pretend to be ignorant, Miss Parker, it doesn’t suit you. His attempts to make me cooperate. The —” He waved a hand. “The electrocution, the cell in the sub levels. Telling me my father was dead.”

The scoop of yoghurt froze half-way to Miss Parker’s mouth. A chunk of mango fell unheeded onto her wrinkled blouse.

“The what?” she said faintly. “Electrocution?”

Jarod raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t know? Sydney knew, so did Broots.”

“I got shot, jackass. I missed weeks. When I got back to work, you’d already escaped. But —” She remembered Jarod’s gift to Lyle, post-escape: a sponge and a pair of jumper cables. She hadn’t understood the reference at the time. She did now. Her voice softened, almost against her will. “He was torturing you? I swear, Jarod. I didn’t know.”

“It’d be on DSA, if you think I’m embellishing.”

Miss Parker scowled. “I believe you. Whatever you are, you’re not a liar.” It sounded ridiculous as soon as it left her mouth. He lied vocationally. That was his whole gimmick. “Well. Not to me. Usually. It sounds like something Lyle would do, anyway. Bastard. You — you didn’t deserve that.”

Jarod’s mouth twitched at one corner.

“I know,” he said. “But thank you.”

There was a knock at the door. Miss Parker opened it to find Sergeant Hobbes.

“Hello again, Ms Jamison.” The officer bent his head to look past her at the bed. “And Mr Parker is awake and on the mend, I see. That’s great! That’s great. Can I come in? I have a few more questions for the both of you.”

“My husband is healing from a very serious injury, Sergeant,” said Miss Parker, channeling entitled middle-class suburban stay-at-home mom with every fibre of her being. “The stress of being interrogated is the last thing he needs right now.”

“It will only take a minute,” said Hobbes, and cheerfully shouldered past her into the room with a customer service smile. Far from looking stressed by this development, Jarod looked as though he was trying to contain a laugh bubbling up out of his throat. He caught her eye, raised his eyebrows and mouthed ‘Parker?’ in her direction.

She glared.

‘Husband?’ he mouthed again.

She mimed a vicious cutting motion at her throat. Jarod was less than intimidated, but he swallowed his laugh.

“Jake, is that short for Jacob? Can I call you Jake?”

“Of course,” said Jarod with a warm smile. He didn’t blink at the pseudonym. But then, slipping into a role was his bread and butter.

“Thanks, Jake. Glad to see you on the mend.”

“So you said,” said Miss Parker icily. “What are your questions, Sergeant? I’d like to get this over with.”

Hobbes’s eyes flicked back and forth between Jarod and Miss Parker, plainly trying to add up the logic of their ‘relationship’. He pulled out a glossy photograph and held it out for the both of them to see.

“This should be quick, thank you for your time. Does this man look familiar at all to either of you?”

It was a head-shot of Marco Lorefice. Miss Parker couldn’t help the flicker of recognition tinged with revulsion that traveled across her face. She’d last seen that face dead. She’d hoped never to see it again.

“Who is he?” she said, instead of answering.

“Marco Lorefice,” said Hobbes. “He’s a suspected racketeer, a rising star.”

“A racketeer?” said Miss Parker. Inside her head, she was scrambling. She should have thought to clue Jarod in earlier on her established story with the cops. Then again, could she have counted on him to play along even if she had? “We were mugged, Sergeant. We didn’t have our mom-and-pop bakery threatened.”

The sergeant laughed politely. “True. But y’know, Ms Jamison, when you described your mugger, it stuck in my head. I couldn’t shake it. It sounded just like Lorefice — I’ve been trying to nail him for months. Then yesterday, his girlfriend reported him missing, and two puzzle pieces, y’know, they came together. They fit. Yes, mugging is not exactly his M.O., but I don’t know what could lead him to be in that parking garage, we don’t know the circumstances. Maybe he had to get some cash fast, we don’t know.”

Miss Parker caught Jarod’s eye, and some silent communication passed between them. Jarod nodded.

“Yes, that looks like the man who shot me.”

The stale thought of Jarod’s blood on the floor of the seventh floor lobby niggled at the back of Miss Parker’s mind. Nothing had come of Jarod coming in with Lorefice’s blood on him, or at least nothing yet. Had she given the cops a clue to Lorefice’s murder (if that’s what you could call it) for nothing at all? When the cops eventually found Lorefice’s body, would they think to try to link it to Jarod? As far as she was aware, neither Jarod’s fingerprints nor his DNA were in the system. If the cops wanted to try to link Lorefice’s death to Jarod, they’d have to get a warrant. Or Jarod’s permission, but she didn’t plan on letting him give that. A warrant would take time, as would a DNA analysis. They’d be out on a chopper before any arrest warrant could come down.

All this screamed through Miss Parker’s brain as she nodded along.

“Yes, that’s him.”

She’d already given the description. It was too late to take it back. She’d have to hope it wouldn’t bite them in the ass later. The Centre would forgive a lot when she came back with Jarod, but they wouldn’t be pleased if she came back with the Philadelphia PD on her trail.

“Thank you both for the positive ID,” said Hobbes with a wide grin. He was a little too excited, Miss Parker thought. New to the job, probably. “This is very helpful. Of course, we haven’t found him yet. When we do, though, would you be prepared to testify against him?”

“We’ll have to think it over, Sergeant,” said Miss Parker loudly, in case Jarod tried to contradict her. It was a non-question, but the fewer ties they had to the case, the better. “You said yourself this man is part of organized crime, a racketeer. We don’t want to be on some… mafia don’s radar. It would be a big risk, and a big decision.”

She looked over at Jarod. He didn’t say a word. Instead, he watched her with a small smile on his face.

“First of all, we don’t believe this to be a mafia case,” said Sergeant Hobbes. “But I understand your concern. We’d protect you, y’know. The Philadelphia Police Department takes pride in our thorough and effective protection of witnesses to violent crimes.”

He sounded like a public service announcement, and a naïve one at that. It was an effort not to snort.

“I’m sure,” Miss Parker said curtly. “Nevertheless, we will have to think it over. Is that all, Sergeant? My husband has not eaten breakfast yet.”

“Oh, by all means —” Hobbes indicated Jarod’s breakfast tray with an expansive gesture.

“No, I meant we’d like you to leave. To have breakfast in peace.”

Hobbes’s face was an open book, and as Miss Parker looked on, it rifled quickly through pages of rage, calculation, and finally reluctant acceptance. His rookie charm facade slipped an inch, then he pasted it back on.

“Of course. Please tell a nurse if you need to be in touch with me. And again, do not leave the premises without informing me or another officer. The on-premise police presence all have a picture of Lorefice, in case he shows his face; so do the nurses. Not that he’s going to show up!” Hobbes held out both hands, fingers splayed, in a gesture intended to calm. “We just want to be ready for anything.”

“OK,” said Miss Parker.

“Thank you,” said Jarod. It was the first time he’d spoken in a while.

“Yeah, no problem!” said Hobbes. Miss Parker caught a slight frown as he turned to the door. Maybe he’d expected more effusive gratitude.

Once Hobbes had left, Miss Parker turned back to Jarod, and was greeted by a broad, unguarded smile. The smile caught Miss Parker off guard — she’d rarely been the focus of a genuine smile from Jarod since they were kids. It transformed his face, she noted. He was always handsome — even on his most annoying days she couldn’t deny that — but the smile brought forth that same uncomplicated, sweet quality she’d seen while he slept, before the nightmares started up. It made him, well. Beautiful.

She realized after a too-long moment of contemplation that he was speaking.

“It’s nice being able to sit back and watch you Pretend in my stead,” he was saying. “You’re good at it. But you stay… you. You don’t lose track of yourself.”

Miss Parker pressed her lips together to keep from smiling at the compliment. She scrambled for a cutting comment about having a life or not being lab-grown, but everything she tested out felt a little too cruel with Jarod shortly heading back to his sheltered existence at the Centre. She cleared her throat.

“Yeah, sure. Eat your breakfast.”

Jarod picked up a miniature box of Cheerios and opened it.

“You weren’t worried I’d ask Hobbes for help getting away from you?” he asked as he shook O’s into a small plastic bowl.

“No.”

Jarod frowned at the milk carton he was using to drown his cereal. “Why not?”

“Because you never have.”

Jarod didn’t reply right away, and the only sound in the room was the crackle of the spoon’s plastic wrapping.

“I’ve never asked for help from the police when you’ve caught me? No, I guess I haven’t. But they haven’t been around. In Florida, during the hurricane. After the Isle of Carthis. Or any of the other times you’ve come close.”

“Jarod, you’ve had people trying to illegally abduct you for over five years. You’ve been near the cops, hell, you’ve been a cop. But you’ve never tried to sic them on me beyond short-term diversions. Never tried to attack the Centre through legal channels, even though you could dress down a courtroom blindfolded. Not that I want you to, but don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

Jarod munched on his Cheerios for long enough that Miss Parker assumed a monologue was in the works.

But then: “You got me there.”

And that was all.

“I got you there,” Miss Parker echoed flatly. He was being deliberately obtuse. “OK, my turn for a question, then: Why not?”

“Good question.”

“And I expect you to answer it.”

More cereal-munching.

“I’ve Pretended to be law enforcement a couple times, at different levels. I’ve unearthed corruption in many industries and institutions, and law enforcement is one of the worst. I also know the Centre’s potential for taking advantage of corruption. Going to the police has a good chance of creating another enemy, or giving my current enemy more foot soldiers. And that, I definitely don’t need.”

It was a good answer. But maybe not the full answer.

“Is that all?”

Jarod stared into his cereal bowl.

“You in prison, that’s not something I want. I don’t want Sydney to go to jail, or Broots either. There are people at the Centre whose imprisonment I wouldn’t lose sleep over, yes. But the collateral damage would be… I wouldn’t want that.” He looked up into Miss Parker’s eyes. “I want you to be free.”

“I…” I want you to be free, too. No, that wasn’t right, hang on. “I want to be free, too.”

Abruptly, Jarod looked bone-tired.

“You’re more free than you think you are, Miss Parker.”

She didn’t like where this was going. A little déjà vu trickled back from their conversation after the take-down of the corrupt landlord in Cedar Rapids. This again?

“How’s that? You’ve said yourself we’re both prisoners of the Centre.”

Jarod nodded. “Yes, I did say that. There’s also a difference between fighting against and being complicit in your own imprisonment. You fought for a long time. You’re not fighting anymore. What changed?”

Miss Parker stood and dropped her unfinished yoghurt in the trash, no longer hungry. She wheeled on Jarod.

“You want to know what changed? Your moles at the Centre must be sleeping on the job. Leadership changed. My father jumped out of a plane, and that walking corpse Raines took over. Daddy would never have hurt me. Raines would have me executed for giggles if the mood struck him. That kind of pressure has a way of focusing a person’s priorities, wouldn’t you say?”

It all came out as a breathless rant of pent-up anger and no small amount of fear. Insufferably Unflappable Jarod raised his eyebrows.

“You’re scared,” he said finally.

“Of course I am!” she burst out. She found she was shaking in her anger. “All the time. And you just make it worse every time you slip away, every time you deprive me of the chance to be the one left standing when this is all over.”

Jarod’s smile was sad.

“I’m scared too, Miss Parker.”

“Stop calling me that here,” she snapped. “Someone will overhear you. It’s Ms Jamison.”

Without waiting for an answer, she stalked over to the windows and checked for vulnerabilities. Jarod watched her skeptically.

“I’m not going to break through the window,” he said dryly. “You’d hear it, and I can’t run on this leg.”

Miss Parker didn’t reply. She focused on scanning the room for obnoxiously large air vents. When she found none, she swept out of the room, leaving a non-plussed Jarod in her wake.

There was a family lounge kitty-corner from Jarod’s private room, with a pile of magazines and a television set airing a soap opera with the volume on mute. It wasn’t a five-star tourist experience, but at least she wouldn’t keep getting caught in emotionally fraught conversational cul-de-sacs by a man with a crippling addiction to head-shrinking. Miss Parker chose a seat with a clear view of the door to Jarod’s room, and settled in to wait. One more good night, the doctor had said. And then she’d be headed home to trumpets and fanfare.

And freedom.

The whole car smelled like hot bananas. It was a scent to turn Sydney’s stomach. After Broots had offered to drive the two hours from Blue Cove to Philadelphia, however, Sydney could hardly begrudge him his choice of snack. And besides, he didn’t have to endure it much longer. They were almost to their destination, just as the shine was wearing off the day.

“We’re taking a gamble that Lorefice’s place of work is open on a Saturday,” Sydney mused. Broots shushed him, the better to concentrate on taking the exit off route 95.

Sydney should have guessed he’d be a nervous driver. He was the type. He would have crumpled under the pressure if he’d been subjected to a T-board solo, which was another upside to going on an impromptu road trip to Pennsylvania. Raines and the Triumvirate couldn’t T-board them if they weren’t there, right? Sydney carefully ignored the niggling thought that they were merely delaying the inevitable.

Only when Broots pulled off onto the correct side road did the moratorium on musing lift.

“It’s where Miss Parker said she was going,” said Broots, as if no time had passed, though it had been a good twenty minutes. He kept his hands rigidly at ten and two. “It makes the most sense to pick up the trail wherever she did. Jeez, why didn’t we just go with her? She could be in real trouble.”

“Did you want to be the one to demand that she bring us along, when she’d already decided she was going alone? Have you ever known her to put up with superfluous acts of chivalry?”

“We-ell, not —”

“That was rhetorical.” Sydney scanned the buildings flitting by his passenger-side window. “Could that be — is that it, there? We can’t already be there.”

“Oh! Yep, that’s the place,” said Broots, squinting at it as they passed by. “It looks like it might be open? I think I see movement inside.”

After finding a parking spot, Sydney and Broots approached the sandwich shop. Sydney took in great lungfuls of air as they stepped up to the front doors, revelling in a completely banana-free bouquet. As Broots mentioned, there seemed to be people inside. The limited lighting suggested the place was probably not open for business, however, and the figures were likely not customers.

Sydney and Broots looked at each other dubiously, then Sydney rapped on the door. The man who answered was a police officer.

“Can’t you read? The place is closed,” he said, jabbing a finger at the ‘CLOSED’ sign in the window.

“I realize that, thank you,” said Sydney with a warm, unruffled smile. “We are looking for a friend of ours who was last seen at this establishment.”

The officer perked up, and opened the door a fraction wider.

“A friend? Who’s this friend, what’s he look like? Hairy guy, thick eyebrows, big arms?”

“Not —”

“Yeah, that’s him,” Broots interrupted. Sydney looked at him askance. “Marco. We were expecting a call today and he never — eh, he didn’t call us. Is he in there? We were, well. We were worried.”

“Marco Lorefice?” the officer said. Sydney and Broots nodded, Sydney a little reluctantly. The cop gave the two Centre employees a once-over. “You don’t look like the sort of people Lorefice would get mixed up with.”

“Mixed up with? Nah,” Broots back-pedaled hastily. The last thing they needed was to be implicated as associates to someone with Lorefice’s record. Broots had done some research on the sandwich artist since Miss Parker’s departure. By his description, Sydney could understand why he’d been a prime target for one of Jarod’s Pretends. “Friends of the family. We know his, uh, mom.”

The cop’s interest flickered out.

“He’s not here,” he said curtly. “If you hear anything about his whereabouts, though, call into the station, wouldja? Your boy’s in hot water.”

“He’s not our —”

The door closed in their faces.

“Wonderful,” said Sydney. “That was a fair attempt, Broots, but I think you’d better leave the Pretending to Jarod.”

“Worth a try,” Broots muttered.

“Of course it was. Let’s go back to the car, see if — oh, I beg your pardon.”

Two officers shouldered past them out of the door and down the steps, one of them their acerbic doorman. They addressed neither Sydney nor Broots, but made directly for their patrol car across the street.

“Broots,” Sydney hissed. “Let’s get to the car, quick. We should follow these two.”

“But —”

“There’s no time to second-guess, let’s go.”

Miss Parker caught a flicker of movement in her peripheral vision: the door to Jarod’s room, easing open. What was he up to? This was one of the hazards of not cuffing him to his bed, but she couldn’t risk the cops or hospital staff noticing and throwing her out of the building. As she watched, Jarod limped out into the hallway, his eyes darting this way and that. Almost immediately, he was accosted by a nurse. The woman was short but well-built, and she applied her considerable brawn to gently-but-firmly guide Jarod back to his room. The susurration of their whispered conversation caught Miss Parker’s ear, though she was unable to make out any distinct words. As she got to her feet, she groped in her bag for her gun. Just in case.

The nurse gave Jarod a look of concern and stopped her efforts to push him back towards his room. Damn him, what was he giving away? Miss Parker’s fingers curled around the gun. She wasn’t planning anything concrete. If she could get close to Jarod without making the pistol visible, however, she’d be able to coerce him away from his would-be accomplice.

She drew close and finally caught some of the words.

“Mr Parker, you really should be off your feet. I know you’ve been through a lot, but there’s no cause for concern. We have officers keeping an eye out for your shooter. But really, it’s just a precaution. You’re perfectly safe.”

“The shooter is not who I — hello,” Jarod said, spotting Miss Parker’s approach and grimacing. “You’re back.”

“I’m back!” said Miss Parker with a grin more closely resembling bared teeth. “You all right, honey? You should be in bed.”

Jarod appraised her for a long moment, and his gaze drifted to the hand she had buried in her purse. His eyes widened fractionally and flicked over to the nurse. He was scared she’d kill the nurse, Miss Parker realized. She felt vaguely offended. To drive home the point as intended, she stepped behind Jarod and pressed the barrel of the gun into the small of his back.

“Come on back inside, Jake.” The threat was implicit. “The dinner menus are coming around soon, aren’t they? We’ll have to decide what to order.”

The nurse visibly relaxed. “That’s right! I’ll give you yours now, and here’s a dry-erase marker so you can check off what you’d like. I recommend the soup, it’s always wonderful.”

And she handed them a long, laminated card with, yes, an attached dry-erase marker. They both thanked her and she bustled off, pushing a cart.

Back in the private room, Miss Parker laughed.

“That was a lame attempt, Jarod,” she said, earning her a glare. “No pun intended. It would have been a lame attempt from your down-the-hall neighbour the octogenarian, and it’s exponentially more pathetic from you. Don’t try me, Mr Parker.”

“Would you really have shot the nurse?” Jarod asked.

Miss Parker stuffed the gun back in her bag.

“Of course not.”

“Would you have shot me?”

No. I couldn’t watch that again. “Why would I pull a gun on you if I weren’t willing to shoot?”

“Dodging the question,” Jarod quipped, but there was no humour in his voice.

“I’m more interested in why you actually thought I’d kill a nurse in a public hallway. Trying to decide whether I’m more insulted that you’d think I’m that stupid, or that you think I’d kill someone just for getting in my way.”

Jarod sat back down on the bed.

“I don’t think you’re stupid.”

Miss Parker waited a beat but nothing was forthcoming.

“You think I’d — you know perfectly well I wouldn’t do that.”

“I do?” Jarod’s mouth twisted in a controlled performance of bafflement.

“Yes.”

“You told me yourself, not even a week ago, after you took down the landlord in Cedar Rapids. You said you couldn’t afford to consider whether you should do something, only that you had to do it. Survival decisions, not moral decisions. I may have figured out what your morals are, but apparently you’re deferring to Raines instead of your own mind. Or to your brother. And the two of them? They’d shoot the nurse.”

Bastard, twisting her own words against her. She hadn’t been back in his presence thirty seconds before he started tearing into her world-view to suck the marrow from its bones.

“That’s different.”

“Why.” A demand, not a question. Miss Parker found that she couldn’t look away. He had her pinned with his attention alone. “You can listen to your own morals when it’s a stranger, but when it’s me, what? The rules are different?”

“Of course the rules are different with you, Jarod,” Miss Parker spat. “The rules are always different for you.”

She felt as if she’d been running a race, the air all clogged up in her throat.

“So you would ruin —”

“Shut up, Jarod!” Too late, she realized she’d said the wrong name, far too loud. “Jake. Shut up… Jake. Don’t twist my words again. The rules are different because I know you. You’re a… a bigger picture.” She gestured vaguely at him.

“A bigger picture.” He frowned at her like she was a crossword clue he couldn’t quite puzzle out.

“Yes.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

And she didn’t, because she couldn’t look any harder at it to find out. If she did, it would all fall apart. She couldn’t even look too hard at “because I know you”, or she’d have to admit how short the description fell from the mark. Because we were friends? Because I understand what you’ve been through? Because you’re important? Because…

It was a pointless, self-flagellating exercise. She looked down at the laminated menu in her hands and cleared her throat.

“The soup looks good.”

Sydney and Broots were at another darkened doorway, butting heads with another part-time cop, part-time bouncer.

“You shouldn’t be up here,” the officer said. As he spoke, he and Sydney carried out a quiet, unacknowledged tug-of-war over the door to the seventh floor lobby. “How did you get past the main floor lobby? This is a crime scene, you need to leave. Immediately.”

“Crime scene?” wheezed Broots. Climbing six flights of stairs had left him out of breath. He and Sydney had discovered on arrival that the police had decommissioned the elevators.

“Yes, and you are potentially contaminating the scene. Have you — yes, I can see you’ve been touching things all the way up the stairwell.” Broots released the railing as if he’d been burned. The uniform sighed. “You’d better come in. You’re employees, I take it? We’ll have to get some information from you, when I can get someone to take you back to the station. We’re short-handed tonight.”

“Employees, yeah,” said Broots, feeling much less confident in his ability to pseudo-Pretend than he had earlier. Sydney said nothing, and Broots imagined his silence was distinctly smug.

“It’s Saturday night, you gents ever heard of work-life balance?” the cop asked.

The question seemed rhetorical, so Broots fidgeted instead of replying. The cop struggled briefly with propping the door open, then gave up and ushered them inside. As they stepped in, the policeman tried to block their view of an adjacent hallway, like a parent using their body to obstruct a child’s view of half-wrapped Christmas gifts. It was in vain.

There was blood on the floor. There was so much blood. And, unless Broots for very much mistaken, that leg visible through the door to the hallway looked very dead.

“Jennings, are we done documenting the scene out here, near the elevators?”

Jennings was squatting over by the dead legs, pouring over a clipboard. She confirmed they were, indeed, done documenting the scene out here, near the elevators. She didn’t look up from her notes.

“Can I move some chairs?”

Jennings gave her permission for them to move some chairs. The doorman-cop moved two chairs to face the least interesting view available, which turned out to be a white, featureless wall. Broots and Sydney sat down without protest.

“I’m going to have a word with our guy on the ground floor, can you two sit tight? Jennings, can you make sure they sit tight?”

Jennings promised to make sure they would sit extremely tight.

“Whose — whose blood do you think that is?” Broots whispered once their doorman had left.

“There’s no sense in speculating,” Sydney murmured.

“Do you think it’s Miss —”

“That’s speculation, Broots.” Sydney sighed. “Yes, of course it could be Miss Parker’s. It could also belong to any number of people who are not Miss Parker. Much as I don’t like to think about it, it could be Jarod’s. It could be Mr Lorefice’s, much more preferable. It could be a murder victim entirely disconnected with our purpose in Philadelphia, since all we’ve done is follow a police car to a crime scene.”

Broots was silent for a moment as his blanched complexion settled into something a little less zombie-esque.

“Whose leg do you think that is?”

“Broots!”

Jennings looked over at the raised voices. Broots flapped his hands at Sydney to be quiet.

“It’s not Miss Parker’s, that’s something. That’s a man’s shoe. Could be —”

“Don’t. Stop speculating,” Sydney hissed.

“Well, it’s not impossible. It could be Jarod. What do you think Raines would say if we brought Jarod back dead?”

A shudder ran the length of Sydney’s body as his mind rifled unwillingly through thoughts of the posthumous experimentation Raines would have planned.

“Broots, I won’t say it again, stop —”

“— Speculating, I got it, sorry.” Broots turned his head several millimeters to the right, trying to catch the crime scene in his peripheral vision.

There was so much blood.

“I have to go sort out my sleeping arrangements. Don’t sprint for the exits while I’m gone.”

“Hilarious. Was the couch uncomfortable, then?”

“… What?”

“You slept on that couch over there last night. Was it uncomfortable?”

“How’d you know that? I moved it back before you woke up.”

Shrug. “I woke up in the middle of the night.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Thank you, Miss Parker.”

“For what?”

“It was a hard night.”

“Yes? OK. So?”

Sigh. “Never mind.”

Pause.

“The couch was fine. I’ll pull it up alongside the bed again.”

“Whatever you like, Miss Parker.”

“What the hell are you smiling at?”

“Nothing at all.”

Chapter Text

Broots hadn’t dared to budge an inch since the start of his and Sydney’s cop-imposed time-out. He had been staring at a blank white wall for a good fifteen minutes when he first caught the name ‘Parker’.

“You thinking it could be Parker’s?” said a gravelly voice. It came from over by the dead leg.

Broots jerked his head over to look at Sydney, who nodded minutely to show he’d heard. Broots strained his ears to catch the rest of the conversation.

“… be, yeah. Doesn’t match the wife’s story, of course, but neither does Lorefice ending up dead.”

Beside Broots, Sydney let out a long, shuddering exhale. So, the dead leg was Lorefice's after all. More to the point, it wasn’t Jarod's.

“Definitely not all Lorefice’s blood.”

“You figure?”

“Definitely. Drag marks to the elevator don’t make sense otherwise.”

Broots ached to turn around. He had a thousand questions he burned to ask; barring that, he’d at least like to match a voice to a face. Drag marks. So someone else, not Lorefice, had been dragged from the scene. Behind Broots, footsteps retreated down the hallway. All he caught before the speakers were out of ear shot were the words warrant and test, and either spittle or hospital. He was betting on the latter.

“Let’s go,” said a voice just over his shoulder. Startled, Broots jumped about a foot off his chair.

“Uh!” he said, eloquently.

“Whoa, relax,” said the voice. Broots craned around to look; it was Officer Jennings. Her clipboard had vanished. “You sure are jumpy. We’re headed back to the station now.”

Sydney stood, re-buttoned his suit, and drew himself up to his considerable height.

“Are we being detained? Are we under arrest?”

Jennings’s smile was an attempt at disarming, but there was a look of warning in her eye.

“No, sir. I’m just going to take down your contact details, we’ll debrief, make sure we can discount you from involvement in a homicide. I’m sure you’d rather not be involved in a homicide investigation, right?” She didn’t pause for their reply. “So we’d all rather get this red tape over with, so you can get home and go to bed. That’s what you stayed on-site for, right? You were waiting for a ride to the station.”

“No, officer,” said Sydney.

Jennings blinked. “No?”

“No, we’ll be off now. Thank you so much.”

Not for the first time, Broots wished he could be half as unflappable as his friend. But he wasn’t, so he stayed mute.

“Hang on one minute,” said Jennings, bristling. “I need to get your names, Mr…?”

“There is no stop and identify statute in the state of Pennsylvania, so we are under no obligation to give our names,” said Sydney. “Have a pleasant evening.”

And he turned on his heel and exited the stairwell door. Broots gaped like a fish at Jennings for a half a second, then scrambled to catch up.

“Can we do that?” he hissed once they’d put one flight of stairs between them and Officer Jennings.

“Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“I’ll be quite honest, I don’t know if stop-and-identify is applicable to people who stumble into crime scenes. But! I’m also pretty sure Officer Jennings does not know either.”

“I hope you’re right, Sydney. She had a point, though. Why did we stay all that time if we weren’t going back to the station?”

“Intel.”

Intel. As he descended the final flight of stairs to the parking garage, Broots mentally recapped. They knew Lorefice, a person of interest in Jarod’s latest Pretend, was dead in what looked like a violent altercation. They knew the cops had connected Miss Parker to Lorefice in some capacity. They knew at least two other people had been present at Lorefice’s death — the dragger and the drag-ee — and one of them had been hurt badly enough to bleed all over the lobby, perhaps even fatally so. And there had been that half-caught word, something about a hospital.

“Something about a hospital,” he repeated to himself aloud, and nearly bumped into Sydney, who was peering out through the exit to the darkened parking garage. Sydney nodded and pushed his way through the door.

“Yes, I heard that too. Shame we don’t know which hospital. But it’s a start.”

Miss Parker stared at the phone in her hand.

It was Sunday morning. The nurse had been around early to check on Jarod’s vitals and re-dress his wounds. The doctor had dropped by a half-hour later to deliver some poorly-received optimism.

“We’d like to keep an eye on you until this afternoon, Mr. Parker, to be absolutely certain your lungs are clear. I’ve also scheduled you with a physiotherapist after lunch to make sure you can perform your activities of daily living,” the doctor had said. “But, I am confident that you should be able to sleep in your own bed again tonight. That’ll be nice, won’t it?”

In a rare slip of the mask, Jarod had grimaced.

“That’s what he’s afraid of, doc.” Miss Parker’s comment had earned her a glare from Jarod and an awkward titter from the doctor, who had no way of understanding the joke.

So, they’d be leaving for Blue Cove today. There was no way around it. They’d need a helicopter ride out, and for that she’d need to call the Centre. Which led her to this moment, staring at her phone.

Do it, her brain shouted at her. Do it now, while he’s in the bathroom.

Before she could over-think the matter, she punched in the number.

“Sam speaking.” It was Sam, the sweeper.

“Sam, I need you to arrange a pick-up this afternoon. I have Jarod,” she said, without preamble.

A short in-take of breath from the other end of the line.

“Congratulations, Miss Parker.”

“Sure. Thanks. Now, the pick-up? We’ll need a chopper to land on the roof. I’m planning on skipping out on a hospital bill, and I’ll need someone to help me get Jarod up to the roof. He’s injured. We need to be in and out fast.” She gave him the address to the hospital. Through the bathroom door, Miss Parker heard Jarod fumbling with the faucet.

“In and out fast, got it. But… you want the chopper this afternoon? We could get there before lunch, easy.”

The doctor had said she needed to verify that Jarod’s lungs were clear. He could skip the physio appointment; they wouldn’t be well-versed on the typical ‘activities of daily living’ at the Centre.

“This afternoon, yeah.”

“… Can you secure Jarod until then?”

Miss Parker tutted. “You questioning my abilities, Sam?”

“No, ma’am!”

“This afternoon, three o’clock would be ideal. Got it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Excellent. Transfer me to Raines.”

She had to be fast. Jarod would be out soon.

Why hide this? Jarod knows he’s going home, asked a skeptical voice from a neglected corner of Miss Parker’s subconscious. Yes, but the longer she could keep him relatively calm, the better. Confronted with the immediate reality of being shipped out to Blue Cove, he could get reckless. She’d heard about the second time he escaped from the Centre, the one she'd missed while recovering from her own gun shot wound. He’d shot a hole in an airplane window and plugged it with a man’s arm. Miss Parker retreated to the far window, in an attempt to stay out of Jarod’s range of hearing. There was a modest park below, where a few patients were walking or being wheeled down winding pathways by nurses and family members, enjoying the sunshine.

“What is it?” Raines was as hoarse and strained as ever.

“Jarod’s coming home,” said Miss Parker. She’d expected a surge of pride, but none came. She only felt tired.

“Hm. Wonderful. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Believe it,” Miss Parker snapped reflexively. “I’ll have Jarod back at the Centre by dinnertime.”

Behind her, Miss Parker heard the soft click of a door closing. She spun around. Jarod stood there, hanging on to the doorknob to the bathroom one-handed to keep his balance. His face sagged with hurt and (absurdly) unmistakable betrayal.

“See you soon, Raines,” she said into the phone, and hung up without waiting for an answer.

“So, we’re headed to Blue Cove this afternoon,” said Jarod softly. Apparently his hearing was better than she’d thought.

“Yep.” On automatic, Miss Parker stepped close to offer her arm, so he could take his weight off his leg as he crossed back to the bed. It had become part of their rhythm, along with jury-rigged sleeping arrangements, awkward silences and sharing hospital food. Jarod frowned at the proffered arm, but did not take it. Miss Parker huffed in annoyance. “Don’t be petty, Jarod. You knew this was coming.”

Jarod laughed, a horribly hollow sound.

“Is this pettiness? I thought it was —” He broke off.

“What?”

Jarod took her arm without looking at her. Miss Parker did a quick two-step to stabilize the two of them without buckling under the weight.

“Fear.”

He limped over and sank onto the bed.

“Fear?” Miss Parker echoed. She didn’t want to hear more of this, but at the same time, she couldn’t help her curiosity. “Is this about Lyle again? Forget Lyle. I’ll handle Lyle.”

Jarod carefully swung his legs onto the mattress, his teeth gritted against the pain.

“I decided over five years ago I wouldn’t run simulations for them anymore. I won’t do it, now that I know to what use the Centre — especially a Raines-run Centre — would put the results. You’ve seen what they’ve done?”

Miss Parker winced. This was going in a direction she didn’t like. But then, she’d asked for it.

“Yes.”

“Can you endorse it?”

Quieter. “No.”

Jarod scrutinized her expression for a long, uncomfortable moment.

“That’s something, I guess. That little girl’s still in there somewhere.”

Miss Parker scoffed. “That little girl didn’t know a damn thing.”

“I have to disagree. Faith would, too. Both of you have been buried too long.” He was firing barbed arrows from his spot in bed. Miss Parker opened her mouth to throw back a poison-tipped retort, but Jarod continued. “You wonder what I’m afraid of, it’s the uncertainty. They could take the Lyle approach, yes. But I’d take that over the most likely alternative.”

“What’s that?” asked Miss Parker, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

Jarod looked down at his fingers, which were twisted around a fraying piece of bandage.

“During my last year at the Centre, I was acquainted with a man — he was my friend, maybe my only friend at the time. A sweet, earnest person. He was a —”

“Janitor,” Miss Parker finished, feeling an ache spread through her chest as she followed his train of thought. Jarod jerked his head up to look at her. “I saw the DSA. It was… horrible.”

“Then you know what they’ll do,” Jarod said with urgency. “If I refuse to cooperate, they’ll threaten to kill someone I care about. And then kill them anyway to punish me for dragging my feet.”

Miss Parker hadn’t thought much about it before, but it bore consideration — once she returned Jarod to the Centre, what was the next step? Had it really never occurred to her? Or, looking at it another way, of course it had never occurred to her. There was nothing on the horizon for her except returning Jarod to the Centre. After that, something nebulous about freedom. Nothing about the future of the Pretender project. She’d never planned to have anything to do with it.

“Your parents? Or your sister?” she said.

Jarod shook his head. “I doubt it. Not unless the Centre lucks out and finds them, but it won’t be a priority. More likely they’d target someone more convenient.” He spat the last word.

Miss Parker’s brain spun through every salient option, carefully ignoring the obvious for as long as possible. ‘As long as possible’ turned out to be about five seconds.

“Sydney,” she breathed.

Jarod’s silence was his answer. Then: “Half the reason Raines has kept him on is his emotional connection to me. The word is, if Sydney quit, I’d break ties with the Centre completely.” Miss Parker heard derision in his voice.

“Are you saying you wouldn’t?” It was a theory she’d always treated as fact. Jarod didn’t answer, so Miss Parker pushed on. “Better question, would it work?” she asked.

“Would what work?”

“Threatening Sydney’s life to make you run simulations.”

Jarod’s profile was a study in anguish. He opened his mouth to reply and shut it again. Miss Parker’s eyebrows shot up.

“Wow,” she said. Miserable, Jarod continued to avoid Miss Parker’s eye. “I’ll tell you what, I won’t let Sydney know that wasn’t a vehement ‘yes’. But only because I wouldn’t want to see his face when he heard. He means that little to you? Whatever his complicity in your horror show of a childhood, he raised you.”

“I know that!” Jarod burst out, and his voice cracked under the strain of keeping tears in check. Miss Parker cast about for something to look at, other than her quarry’s face. There was no privacy in this, in any aspect of either of their lives. “Sydney means — I can’t even start to explain what he meant to me. Means to me. He was the only —” Jarod coughed. “It wouldn’t do any good. You saw what happened to Kenny. Giving in didn’t save him. I’d lose Sydney, and they’d move on to the next blackmail fodder.”

Miss Parker felt a prickle at her temple and glanced up to find Jarod looking at her with… what? Wariness? Terror? Whatever it was, it gave her a feeling of encroaching dread. Her jaw slackened, fell open.

“What, me? I’m blackmail? To hell with that, I’m out of there the second you’re under lock and key. I’m not hanging around to be your walking guilt-trip.” She didn’t voice the obvious question, which was: why would anyone at the Centre believe Jarod would put her, Miss Parker, above the hypothetical victims of the Centre’s work? That question was a little too dangerous.

Jarod didn’t answer. Miss Parker narrowed her eyes.

“Don’t think I don’t see what you’re doing.”

Jarod shifted in his reclined position against the layered pillows.

“I don’t —”

“Damned if I do, damned if I don’t, right? So I might as well throw in with you?”

“Miss Parker, I think —” One arm flung out in her direction, close enough that his fingertips scraped at her elbow. Miss Parker gave his outstretched hand a venomous look. What was this melodrama now?

“They wouldn’t do that to me, not once I brought you back.” Not once I’d fought with my teeth to prove myself useful. “They might do their damnedest to keep me from quitting, but they wouldn’t threaten my life purely as a band-aid solution for keeping you in line. I’m not — I’m not disposable.” Who was she trying to convince, she wondered.

“Miss — agh. Can you —” Jarod broke off into a wordless, wobbly bellow of pain, clutching at his leg. Miss Parker scrambled to her feet, forgetting her diatribe in an instant.

“Jarod?”

His yell petered off into a low moan, punctuated by shaky, strident breaths, in and out. Veins stood out in his hands as he dug his fingers into the flesh around the gun shot wound in his thigh.

“Help,” he croaked.

Miss Parker didn’t think twice. She skidded out the door and down the hall. In some variation upon Murphy’s Law, the second she actually wanted to reach a medical professional, there were none in sight. She stuck her head through every door she came across until, finally, she came across the front desk for the trauma unit. A skinny nurse with curly hair and square-lensed glasses was seated behind the desk. He frowned at her high-speed approach.

“Ma’am, we ask that people do not run in the halls.”

Miss Parker waved away the rebuke. “Jar — Jake, my husband, he needs help. There’s something wrong with his leg.”

“Jake Parker? Gun shot wound to the thigh?”

“Yes. And lung.” After a moment, Miss Parker’s brain caught up with the nurse’s question. She scowled. “Yes, obviously there’s been something wrong with his leg since he was admitted. I’m not an idiot. It’s suddenly causing him more pain, like something has gone wrong. Like a bleed, or a nerve…” She waved her hand eloquently. “Something, I don’t know. I’m not a doctor. I need a doctor. Now.”

The man barely blinked at the order. Miss Parker had never before encountered in the wild someone more impervious to her unique charm.

“That sounds distressing for you and your husband, I’m sorry to hear it,” he said, without a drop of demonstrative empathy. “I’ll contact the doctor on call. Please remain calm.”

He crammed a phone under his chin and jabbed a four-digit code. As he dialed, he took a second look at Miss Parker.

“Ms. Jamison, correct? You still haven’t supplied your husband’s health insurance details. It would be helpful to deliver that information to us at the front desk within twenty-four hours, or as soon as possible.”

“I’ll be sure to get right on that when there isn’t a —”

The nurse held up a finger for silence, and miraculously, he got it.

Once the doctor was summoned, Miss Parker jogged back to Jarod’s room, ignoring the nurse’s further requests that she ‘use her walking feet in the hallway’.

“Hang in there, Jarod, I —”

The room was empty. Jarod's blankets were pushed off the bed and his shoes were missing from the closet. One final benefit of the doubt: she yanked open the door to the bathroom. Still, no Jarod.

“Jarod!” she roared.

The bastard. Of course he’d take advantage of a fleeting moment of sympathy to con her into leaving him alone for just enough time to flee. She was almost (almost) more angry at herself for falling for it. This was his whole shtick, the hammer and chisel in his toolbox for staying out of her reach for so many years. She’s actually failed to anticipate quite possibly the oldest trick in the book. She could kick herself. More than that, she could kick him.

“Can I help you?”

Sydney and Broots stood at the reception desk in the hospital’s main lobby. They looked at each other. It was hard to know who to ask after, since based on their partial information, either Miss Parker or Jarod could have been involved in the altercation with Lorefice. Or both. Or neither.

“We’re looking for a woman, brunette —”

“I’m trying to find my friend, he’s —”

They spoke in unison, and stuttered to a halt in unison. The young woman behind the desk smiled primly.

“I’d be happy to give you directions if you have a room number.”

“That’s the problem,” said Broots. “We don’t know where he — or she — is. Um. We’re not even sure which of our friends has been injured. Or if they have been injured. We don’t know a lot, in short.” A weak laugh bubbled up reluctantly from Broots’s chest.

“We’re trying to find two missing persons,” said Sydney. “We hope very much they are safe somewhere, but to cover all bases we are checking the hospitals. It would help us tremendously if you could put our minds at ease, one way or the other.” Once again, Broots found himself wishing he could come across as Official, in whatever capacity, by default. It seemed to come naturally to Sydney. Maybe there was a good reason he’d been the one to raise Jarod post-kidnapping.

“Oh, are you with law enforcement?” asked the receptionist, eyeing the both of them up and down.

“I’m afraid not, we’re with a think tank based in —”

“Think tank? Like a government think tank?” The receptionist frowned. “I would have to check protocol on that, I’ve never encountered personnel from a think tank before.”

Sydney hesitated. Broots, meanwhile, was carefully examining his shoes. You never knew, there could be important information down there.

“A private think tank, I’m afraid,” said Sydney apologetically.

The receptionist beamed, pleased to be back in more certain territory.

“Oh, sir, I can’t give out patient-specific information to private citizens! You should pursue appropriate channels with the police. Have you reported your friends as missing?”

That was precisely what they were trying to avoid. Sydney and Broots had stayed the night at a hotel, and last night Broots had taken advantage of a moment of calm to hack into the Philadelphia Police Department’s email server. The police were moving too fast for comfort; they were already pursuing efforts to obtain the DNA material of two people, a ‘Margot Jamison’ and a ‘Jake Parker’. Parker was a bit obvious, but Sydney had chuckled at the former.

“Jamison was her mother’s maiden name,” he’d told Broots. “So wherever they are, they’re together. Or at the very least, they’ve been seen together at one point.”

Back in the present, the receptionist smiled at the pair expectantly.

“Yes, we’ve been through all that,” said Sydney. “Hrm. Thanks for your time.”

“We’ll just have to search manually,” said Broots as they left the reception desk in their wake. “If I could just get at a computer… if they’re in the system, I’d be able to find them, no problem.”

“We don’t want to attract any undue attention, especially since we have no real exit strategy once we find them, and negative attention would only exacerbate our total lack of a plan. We can’t risk you being caught sneaking onto a staff computer. You’re right, we need to search manually.”

They passed a café selling overpriced muffins. Broots waved a hand to encompass the crowds of people.

“Search through all this, face by face? Unless we really luck out, the cops will already be here long before we stumble into the right room.”

Sydney pointed to the directory next to the tower elevators. “We can search smart, rather than exhaustively. Look, most of these floors are going to have nothing to do with the trouble Jarod and/or Miss Parker have found themselves in. We can skip the oncology department, the gastroenterology floor…”

“True, I don’t think either would have come to see an ear-nose-and-throat doctor, heh. And we can skip — what’s an ABI?”

“An acquired brain injury. Stroke and traumatic brain injury, mostly.”

“… Can we skip that?”

Sydney shrugged. “Not necessarily.” He punched the elevator button for the second floor. “Even with shortcuts, this is going to take a while.”

“Jarod!”

Back in the hallway outside Jarod’s room, a hospital volunteer with acne scars glanced at Miss Parker with alarm and confusion before pushing a book cart off in the opposite direction at double-time speed. Vaguely, Miss Parker realized she’d used the wrong name again. Jake Parker, not Jarod. But there was no time to worry about that. Her eyes flicked between the elevator and the door to the stairwell. After a mental coin toss, she flung the stairwell door open and pulled her gun from her holster in one smooth, coordinated movement. A moment’s pause on the threshold told her her instincts had been right: below her, she could hear the sound of uneven footfalls on concrete. Jarod was limping down to the ground floor.

“Jarod!” she shouted again. From below, she heard a muffled groan.

It wasn’t a fair race: he, limping and winded with barely two minutes’ head start. She, exhausted but uninjured, armed and furious. Miss Parker caught up with Jarod just as he pressed a plastic card to the card scanner on the door to the ground floor. She caught his wrist, wrenched it towards her, closed in quickly and jabbed his injured thigh with the butt of her gun, hard. He went down like a dropped anchor, and the echoes of his broken cry rebounded off the concrete. Her gun came back up and followed Jarod’s movement as he pushed himself up into a sitting position against the wall. As Miss Parker watched, he ground the heels of his hands into his closed eyes and let loose a strangled yell of pent-up frustration. He punctuated the yell by slamming one hand open-palmed into the wall. It made an impotent, dull thump on the concrete.

It was the yell that made Miss Parker drop her gun arm to her side. It was too close to the echo of every setback, every letdown she’d ever run aground on since that first early morning in her father’s office, when Daddy had told her that Jarod, her old childhood friend, had gone and escaped the Centre. She knew that frustration.

It’s not fair. It was a childish thought to entertain, but it was honest. We should never have been pitted against each other, Jarod. It wasn’t fair to do that to us.

Jarod peered up at her through his fingers and a film of angry tears, and Miss Parker’s guard went back up. She couldn’t say anything, though. There was nothing to say. Don’t do that again, but no, she couldn’t blame him if he did. I'm sorry, but no, the word was empty without follow-up action. You didn’t give me another option, but no, the options were all hers to give. Couldn’t even offer her hand to help him back to his hospital room; either he’d push it away, or ignore it, or take it and be further degraded by his own compliance. In the end, she just stood there, listening to his breathing gradually slow, until two nurses stumbled upon the pair of them and bustled them both into the elevator.

Neither spoke on the ascent to floor 4, trauma unit.

Neither spoke as they entered Margot Jamison and Jake Parker’s private room.

Neither spoke as Jarod eased down onto the bed, lay back and promptly turned to face the opposite wall, effectively shutting Miss Parker out. On Miss Parker’s part, she could only be relieved by the silent treatment. She was angry about the ruse, yes, she was near boiling with rage… but now she had nowhere to put it.

Chapter Text

As it turned out, Jarod’s leg pain had only been a partial ruse. The doctor came by ten minutes after the initial summons and explained to a mute audience that the bullet had precipitated some nerve damage which may well have been the culprit for an acute muscle spasm.

“Unfortunately, I cannot promise the muscle spasm won’t happen again. I’ll be roping your physiotherapist into the conversation about this prior to your assessment with her at four, later today.”

For the first time since their fight in the stairwell, Jarod looked at Miss Parker, a quick assessing glance. Miss Parker’s head jerked minutely, an almost imperceptible ‘no’. They’d be well on their way to Blue Cove by then. Jarod snorted audibly.

The doctor looked briefly disconcerted, then continued.

“Up until now, you have refused any pain-relieving medication, Mr. Parker. Please understand, I don’t want you to feel like we are taking advantage of a moment of vulnerability to try to coerce you into options you’ve previously rejected. But, seeing you in such pain, I also want to make sure you are aware of your options. Are you certain you do not want help managing the pain in your thigh?”

Miss Parker fully expected Jarod to refuse outright, and was surprised when he remained silent and, when she braved a look at his profile, contemplative.

“Fine,” he said, finally. The word was quiet enough that Miss Parker did not so much hear it as read it on his lips.

The doctor smiled. “I’ll have a technician come around and explain the risks and benefits to you. We’ll start you on a low dose, especially since you need to be alert for your physio assessment later.”

Low dose or not, once the drip had been set up, Jarod became markedly more relaxed. Along with Jarod, their cohabitation quarters became observably less tense. The news from the doctor that Jarod’s lungs were clear brightened the atmosphere further. On the other hand, Jarod had also become more talkative.

“I have you to thank for the lung GSW not causing as many complications as the leg. Quick thinking with the page protectors over the wound. Quick thinking, too, taking Lorefice out before he shot me in the head,” he said, words slurring together. He frowned. “Did I thank you?”

Miss Parker looked up from her Reader’s Digest.

“What?” she said, though she’d heard the question just fine.

“I don’t think I did,” Jarod continued, almost to himself. “Thank you, Miss Parker. You saved my life! That was nice of you. Of course, you also tipped Lorefice off in the first place. So, should I thank you or not?”

Miss Parker returned to her reading, an inane human interest story which had, thus far, left a less than null impression on her.

“Ask yourself that question again when you get back to Blue Cove later today,” she said, without looking up.

“Who are you doing this for?”

A complete non sequitur, likely the products of the pain meds. Miss Parker carefully ignored it. Jarod carefully scooted his chair to face her, wincing when he put too much weight on his injured thigh. While dropping off their lunch trays, one of the nurses had encouraged him to get a little crazy and sit on a different soft surface for a while. He’d chosen a maroon armchair by the window.

“We’re both of us trapped by parental motivations,” Jarod said. “I spent years trying to find my parents. You spent years trying to find out the truth of your mother’s death, that was always part of it. But your job, this pursuit. Chasing me. I always figured it was in part for approval from your father. Was I right?”

Miss Parker didn’t answer. She looked at the clock. Three o’clock couldn’t come soon enough. After a pointed pause, Jarod continued.

“It might be painful to think about, Miss Parker, and I’m sorry about this, but your father is gone. So, who are you doing this for?”

“Why do I have to be doing this for anyone? Me, I’m doing it for me.”

“You were ready to leave the Centre for Thomas —”

“Oh wow, you are just full of my favourite topics today, huh?” Miss Parker snapped. She was still flipping through the Reader’s Digest blindly, not absorbing a single word. When she chanced a quick glance up, Jarod had the grace to look remorseful.

“Again, I’m sorry, but there’s a point to this. You were ready to leave then, but part of what held you there was loyalty to your commitments and to your family. Are you still committed? Do you still owe anything to, what, to Mr Lyle? Or to Raines, whatever he is to you?”

Miss Parker slammed the Digest down on the side table.

“‘Whatever he is to you?’ Seriously, where are you getting this, Jarod? Do you have me bugged? Why are you so allergic to me having any pri —” She bit down on the word before it escaped in full, but it was too late.

“Privacy?” Jarod finished. His lips twisted into a sleepy smile, tinged with irony. “I hope both of us can get the privacy we deserve some day, Miss Parker.” He scratched at the bandages around his chest. “To half-answer your question, I have sources. Mainly, I’m just intuitive. Are you going to answer my question?”

“I don’t need to tell —” You do. Who else would you tell? Who else would really hear you? She restarted, speaking slowly as the thought was dredged up from wherever she’d buried it. “I… No, I don’t owe Lyle or Raines anything. They’ve both threatened to kill me at least once. But the Centre is not just Lyle and Raines. There’s Syd, and Broots —”

“Coworkers.”

“They’re more than that,” she snapped. Too late, she caught the calculating look on Jarod’s face, unobscured by the fog of opioids. He’d pulled the admission from her on purpose. Why should it be so important to him that she admit what Sydney and Broots were to her?

“Friends?” Jarod suggested. “Or family?”

Family, or as good as, Miss Parker thought. It wasn’t a thought she was ready to voice aloud.

When she didn’t answer, Jarod continued. “They’ve both had their lives threatened by the Centre, too. What a family you make.”

Jarod was capable of tossing out truly cruel comments when he needed to. Then again, so was Miss Parker.

“And what about yours?” she asked, every word corrosive. “Still scouring the country for Mommy and Daddy? That line you always trotted out about not knowing who you are, give me a break. As if two people who knew you as a four-year-old are going to be able to give you an encyclopedia entry on the True Meaning of Jarod.”

Jarod’s jaw clenched. That characteristic righteous fury emanated off him in waves.

“How am I meant to discover who I am, otherwise? I’ve only ever learned the lives of others, only ever run —”

“Simulations, I know, I’ve heard it a dozen times.” Miss Parker snorted. “That’s bullshit, Jarod. You don’t pretend all the time. I’ve seen DSAs of your down time, in the discs you’ve sent back. I’ve seen you out of character. You don’t have a job between Pretends, but you’re still that damn irritating Jarod in your off time. None of that came from your limited exposure to your family, or from your genes. You want to tell me that your family decides who you are, when you were the one to badger me into figuring out what Lyle keeps under his floorboards?”

By the end, she had nearly run out of breath, and was stunned to realize she’d made a damned good point. They — she and Jarod both — were always so hell-bent on chasing their families. But weren’t they also the perfect portraits of finding identity outside of familial legacy?

“It, it just comes back to my question,” said Jarod. Miss Parker smirked at his stammer. For once, she’d thrown him off his game. “You don’t owe the Centre any loyalty. They’ve done nothing but hurt you and your family. They’ve only kept you captive all this time, just as much as they’ve kept me captive.”

Miss Parker dropped her head back against the chair’s backrest in exasperation.

“We’ve had this conversation at least twice before, Jarod. We’re talking in circles. Sure, I’m trapped. That’s the point. I can’t stop chasing any more than you can stop running.”

“I run, you chase,” Jarod quoted. “I have to hope you’ll see past that mantra some day. Not only because I’d like to stay put somewhere without having to hitch a ride out of town before the week is up — though of course, I would. I want you to escape, too. The Centre wronged us both when they positioned us as enemies, Miss Parker, when we’re uniquely suited to help each other.”

The Centre wronged us both when they positioned us as enemies. It was an echo of Miss Parker’s own thoughts earlier that day, down in the stairwell with Jarod’s frustration and panic reverberating off the walls. We should never have been pitted against each other, Jarod. It wasn’t fair to do that to us. Miss Parker squirmed. When she finally dredged up a retort, it came out hoarse.

“Help? Is that what you call it? Those pointless riddles, the scavenger hunts, always making me jump through hoops instead of just telling me things I needed to know? That wasn’t help, Jarod, that was torment.”

Jarod didn’t seem to have heard. He was looking over at the control hub for his pain relief medication drip. After a moment, he pushed himself out of his chair, poked a few buttons, and yanked out a wire.

“What are you doing?”

“Turned off the drugs,” he replied, curt.

Miss Parker raised an eyebrow. Jarod was on patient-controlled analgesia, so the dosage was entirely within his control. Then again, when you had relief immediately at hand, maybe it was too easy to say yes, and too hard to say no. She could relate to that. She definitely hadn’t kept any half-full cigarette cartons around the house once she’d quit nicotine.

“I was getting too comfortable,” Jarod said, though she hadn’t asked for an explanation. “Heart-to-hearts with you are only going to make the next part harder."

Miss Parker couldn’t agree more.

The third-floor thoracic surgery clinic was a wash, Sydney decided.

“Even if Miss Parker was here at some point, she’s not here now,” he said to Broots, who nodded.

They passed a wall of windows which looked out over the parking lot, and the Delaware River beyond it. Sydney ran through his mental checklist: they’d covered thoracic surgery, now the next floor up was pediatrics, which they could skip, and then — Sydney’s train of thought was interrupted by a sudden dearth of Broots. He hadn’t followed Sydney. Sydney looked around and within seconds spotted his friend. Broots had doubled back to the window and was squinting at the parking lot below.

“Something wrong?” asked Sydney.

Broots didn’t reply for a moment, then pointed down at the parking lot.

“Who does that look like to you? Does that look like Jennings, and the other cop who caught us at the office building?”

Sydney followed his finger to two small figures emerging from a police cruiser. They did, in fact, look like the two detectives they’d met at the scene of Lorefice’s homicide.

“Damn,” he said. “We need to find Miss Parker and Jarod soon, we don’t have the resources to go up against the Philadelphia PD.”

Below them, the figure they’d identified as Jennings held a radio up to her mouth. Down the hall, another radio crackled to life.

“—e advised, do not allow current patient Jake Parker or his spouse Margot Jamison to leave the building, they are wanted in connection with a violent crime. High possibility of concealed firearms. Contain both to the fourth floor if possible. Jennings and Hobbes on site to make the arrest.”

“‘Spouse’?” repeated Broots incredulously.

Sydney ignored him. “Fourth floor,” he muttered, and took off towards the stairs.

“Have you ever heard of the Monty Hall problem?”

An ambiguously negative grunt from Miss Parker. Jarod soldiered on.

“It’s a math problem, all about probability. I taught it to some undergrad kids once, when I was Pretending at a college. In the puzzle, you’re in a game show, and the host shows you three doors. Behind two doors there are goats, and behind the other is a new car. The host asks you to pick a door. Once you do, the host — who knows what is behind each door — chooses a door you have not picked and reveals that a goat is behind it. The host then offers to let you change your choice to the remaining door. The puzzle asks, do you switch to the other door, or do you stick by your choice? The brain teaser assumes you want a car, and not a goat. To each their own. I think I’d rather have a goat.”

Stick by your choice, Miss Parker replied, but only in her head. The problem sounded familiar, but she wasn’t about to admit to Jarod that she had any knowledge of contentious probability problems. She was tempted to make a crack about the time Jarod had sent her a Monty-Hall style game show parody to drop some breadcrumbs for the Centre mystery-du-jour. That would have led to another conversation, however, so she kept mum. She had no interest in getting embroiled in another conversation, especially not now that Jarod’s time on the outside could be measured on the scale of minutes rather than hours or days. This was a transaction, a concrete task. She had to check a box, and she would be free.

“The puzzle made a lot of people angry, because few people understood the answer. If you want the car, which most people do, you should switch to the other door. You have double the chance of getting the car if you switch than if you stay put. I had to devote half a lecture to it before I got everyone on board, the kids got pretty wound up about it. I’ll spare you the explanation.” Jarod had a half-smile on his face, the product of nostalgia. Miss Parker wondered how long it had been since he’d last taken a whole weekend off from Pretending. Did he miss it?

“’Preciate it. I’ll take your word for it,” said Miss Parker, and cringed inwardly. She hadn’t meant to say anything.

“Will you?” said Jarod with surprise. “Most people don’t.”

“Do I look like a math student to you? Most people you’ve discussed probability with probably don’t get invited to parties much, Jarod.”

Jarod massaged his leg. Miss Parker wondered vaguely if the analgesic was wearing off, allowing the pain to rear its ugly head.

“Probably true,” he allowed. “Neither do I, truthfully. I’m rarely around long enough to earn an invitation to a party. Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Get invited to parties?”

What was with his unerring knack for pulling her into a conversation? Miss Parker sighed.

“Invitations, sure. I never have the time to go, though, do I? I’m always chasing after you.”

Jarod ignored the jibe.

“Anyway, the math is interesting enough, but what’s really fascinating is how people react to the Monty Hall problem. For one, how angry people get. I’ve seen people throw punches over Monty Hall. Most people, when they first hear the puzzle and haven’t thought through the math yet, think it doesn’t matter if you switch or not. The odds are fifty-fifty, they say. But what’s interesting is that, when simulations were run of the problem, among people who were either mistaken about the math or didn’t bother with the math at all, the vast majority did not switch their door decision. Surely if the choice of switching or not switching really didn’t matter, roughly half of them would choose to switch?”

Miss Parker had adopted an affectation of untouchable boredom, but she listened despite herself. This must be what it’s like to be in a lecture hall with Jarod as your teacher, she thought. Except at some point, it would turn out your dean had murdered a student, or something, and your professor would then vanish two weeks into the semester.

“When the people who did not switch doors were interviewed afterwards, they were very defensive of their choice. There was value in what they already had, simply because they already had it. Psychologists call it the endowment effect.” Jarod caught Miss Parker’s eye, and in one sinking moment it struck Miss Parker that this lecture was not some dead-end tangent. He was making a point. “Better to make a mistake by sticking to their guns, rather than make a mistake through action.”

“What are you getting at, Jarod?”

Jarod smiled wistfully.

“You’re not like the people who switched doors, Miss Parker. You’re not like the people who chose to stand by their original choice, thinking they had a fifty-fifty chance at happiness, either. You’re a whole new category of game show contestant.”

From down the hall, a clock started to chime the hour. Bong, bong, bong. Three o’clock. She’d asked Sam to arrive at three o’clock. They’d run out of time.

“Why’s that?” Miss Parker said. There was no power behind the question. She felt numb. This was how he was using his last minutes of freedom?

“You already know there’s a goat behind your door. It’s a mean, vindictive goat, and it’s tearing you down every day. But you still won’t switch doors. That’s a real shame, Marcelle. I think you deserve a shiny new car. Don’t you?”

She knew exactly what he was doing. It was a weird, quintessentially Jarod approach, trying to persuade her to defect from the Centre via a brain teaser about goats behind doors. The invocation of her first name was particularly underhanded. Objectively, it was a terrible case. Not in the least convincing.

That’s all you have?, she wanted to shout. Brain teasers? Give me something better. Give me a reason. Give me ammunition. Which was funny, wasn’t it? Ostensibly, she had no use for ammunition, a reason, something better. She was taking Jarod to the Centre, and then she would be free.

Still, she found herself speechless, gaping at him across the hospital room like a fish rudely pulled from water onto dry land.

She was still staring when the phone in her balled fist began to ring. It rang twice before she finally broke eye contact and looked down at the caller ID. It was Sam. On automatic, she flipped the phone open and leaped to her feet.

“What?” she barked.

“We’re coming in to land on the roof of the hospital, Miss Parker. Where should we meet you?” Miss Parker met Jarod’s eye. From the look on his face — scared, disappointed, and so tired, would you look at the dullness in his eyes — he’d recognized the voice if not the words, and pieced together what it meant. “Hello? Miss Parker?”

She hadn’t replied. She had to say something. She couldn’t just… not act. Better to make a mistake through action…

Here’s another brain teaser for you, Parker. Let’s treat it as a hypothetical, watch it play out just for fun. You’ve picked door number 1. Look at that, behind door number 2 is a tyrannical employer and the homicidal dregs of a half-dead family. What say you to door number 3?

Let’s treat it as a hypothetical, watch it play out just for fun. How would it work? Was there time? What were the odds of survival?

Miss Parker shook her head to clear the nonsense, and rattled off the room number. Sam repeated it back for confirmation.

“By the way, you’ve got a couple of cop cars pulling up to the building, should we be prepared for them to try to prevent Jarod’s extraction?” he asked.

Miss Parker exhaled between clenched teeth. There was no time to deal with cops.

“I’ll meet you at the fourth-floor elevators with Jarod,” she said, and hung up.

Over on the other side of the bed, Jarod’s whole body had retreated in on itself the moment Miss Parker had pronounced the room number. Miss Parker hesitated, her hand hovering over the gun holster under her suit jacket. She let her hand drop.

“We’re leaving,” she said. Jarod tensed. An argument congregated on his face.

“Miss Parker,” he started. So it was ‘Miss Parker’ again. What happened to ‘Marcelle’? (Not that she was complaining. She kept that name under wraps for a reason.)

“You want to wait here and get arrested?” she asked. Jarod guffawed.

“That was less rhetorical than you intended, I suspect. If that’s on the table, I’ll take it. Between prison and the Centre, bring on prison.”

She didn’t have time for this. With a tinge of regret, she unholstered the gun. She couldn’t quite muster the nerve to point it straight at Jarod; instead, she pointed it somewhere in the region of his feet.

“Neither of us wants to see you get shot again, Jarod. I won’t say it again, we’re leaving. Get your shoes on.”

He got his shoes on.

Miss Parker covered Jarod’s back with the gun as they emerged into the hallway. To the left was the stairwell, to the right the elevators, where they were meant to wait for Sam and the rest of her sweeper team. Down the hall directly in front of them was the route to the head desk for the trauma unit. A quite literal fork in the road.

There was movement down by the head desk, a small knot of people collecting around the authoritarian nurse Miss Parker had encountered earlier that day.

“Is that…?” said Jarod.

It was. Sydney and Broots, of all people, were talking to the desk nurse and two other people Miss Parker instantly recognized as police officers. They were plainclothes, but their posture and bulky shoulder holsters marked them as cops. Plus, she was fairly certain the shorter one was Sergeant Hobbes.

Miss Parker and her captive were frozen in place for a moment, until Hobbes (for yes, it was indeed Hobbes) began to turn away from the Centre employees. Sydney happened to glance over the sergeant’s shoulder and, in doing so, spotted Miss Parker and Jarod.

“One more thing, officer,” he called, louder than was absolutely necessary. Hobbes turned back.

It was all the distraction Miss Parker needed. She’d have to buy Sydney something nice to say thank you for the assist, if she ever got the chance.

“Stairs,” she hissed at Jarod’s back. For once, he didn’t put up any argument. They slipped through the doorway leading to the stairs.

It was a long way up to the roof. Three flights up, Jarod was already flagging. His injured leg wobbled precariously every time he put weight on it, and his damaged lung made it a constant fight for adequate air.

“We could take the elevator —” He groaned as a tremor ran through his thigh. “ — From this floor, to meet Sam. We haven’t heard anyone coming up behind —” Wheeze. “— us. The cops may still be down on fourth.”

“We’re not meeting Sam at the elevators,” said Miss Parker. She could tell from the look on Jarod’s face that he didn’t understand, but that was all right. He wasn’t meant to. For once, she was the one with all the information. Finally, Jarod broke eye contact to look up at the distance left still to cover. He put one foot up on the next step. His leg shook visibly. This close to, Miss Parker could hear the slight wheeze whenever Jarod inhaled.

He wouldn’t make it on his own.

Miss Parker refused to look at Jarod as she seized his arm and draped it around her shoulders, then curled her own arm around Jarod’s waist. Jarod tensed at the contact, then slowly relaxed into her. His weight gradually settled across her shoulders. When she felt stable enough to do so, Miss Parker returned to the task of climbing the stairs, conscious the entire time of the warmth and solidity at her side.

The stairs led all the way up to the roof. There was a security card scanner on the exit to the roof, but Miss Parker already had an answer for that. She held out an expectant hand to Jarod and snapped her fingers. Jarod raised his eyebrows in a question.

“The security card, Jarod. I saw you with one when you tried to escape earlier. There’s no way you let it out of your sight since. Give it.”

“Oh, you saw that? Sharp eyes.”

To Miss Parker’s surprise, Jarod smiled. A real smile — not wistful or exasperated or mocking. It wasn’t the sort of smile Miss Parker usually got to see. It was close-lipped and impish, like he’d discovered some new delightful corner of human existence. Like the world had lived up to his hopes in this tiny, mundane instance. It was a smile of gold star stickers, justifiably earned.

If this didn’t work, Miss Parker hoped she’d be able to see that smile at least one more time.

Jarod teetered briefly as he took his free hand off the railing to reach into his back pocket, emerging with the security card. Miss Parker took it and turned it over. The face of a security guard she’d seen pacing the hallways glowered back at her out of an ID card photo.

“Remind me to watch your hands anywhere near my pockets the next time we meet,” said Miss Parker. The next time we meet, she echoed in the privacy of her own head. Don’t get ahead of yourself, Parker. One thing at a time. She pressed the card to the sensor and heard a whirring sound from within the door’s locking mechanism. The door swung open.

The heat hit them like an oncoming truck; then came the wind off the helicopter blades, like a parade of motorcycles side-swiping them at the edge of a highway. No shouts greeted their arrival, no square-shouldered sweepers rushed to meet them. The helicopter shone black and bug-like on the dusty rooftop, ostensibly unguarded. Miss Parker’s heart crawled up her esophagus as she and Jarod waddled around the chopper’s perimeter. Only when the fuselage was in view did Miss Parker relax: it was empty.

“They’ve all gone down to the fourth floor,” Jarod shouted over the rhythmic beating of the helicopter blades.

Miss Parker grinned. This was like facing down death. Nothing left to lose. She peeled his arm from around her shoulder and stepped back to revel in the moment. A minute or two couldn’t hurt.

“There’s that reputation of yours for being wily, finally coming in handy,” she said, raising her voice as well. “Sam thinks they need a full complement to take you in.”

Jarod gave her an appraising look. He hadn’t figured it out yet. Miss Parker could have laughed aloud; she might, yet. It was like holding a royal flush when nobody else knew they were even playing poker. She wondered if this was what Jarod felt like when he took down a CEO or a dirty cop or fill-in-the-blank-here. This must be why he was so addicted to withholding secrets — knowledge (whatever kind) was power, and power was a rush.

“What if those police officers we saw down the hall intercept the sweepers? They might get held up answering questions,” said Jarod. She saw his eyes dart to her holster, then glance away as if dismissing an idea. Miss Parker grinned harder. Everything seemed incredibly funny.

“That’s what I’m counting on,” she said.

Jarod frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“No, you don’t, do you? I should take a picture, preserve the moment. I’ll send you a copy.”

Jarod’s frown deepened, became concerned.

“Are you all right?”

“Not even a little. Jarod?” Miss Parker swayed on the spot. She felt drunk on the moment; in reality, she was probably just deliriously tired. “I’m letting you go. Isn’t that ridiculous? I’m letting you go.”

They were in a vortex of wind and sound, the two of them. Jarod didn’t move, just stared at her. When he finally tore his eyes away, he looked to the helicopter, slowly powering down on the landing pad. Then back to her.

“Letting me go?” he repeated, as if the phrase was an unfamiliar idiom.

“You’re a little moronic when offered freedom, you know that? Yes, I’m letting - you - go. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” The grin hadn’t left her face since she set foot on the roof. She probably looked a little manic. At the image this conjured in her mind, she giggled quietly. Jarod stepped back, staggering slightly on the injury he’d momentarily forgotten all about. He made no move towards the helicopter fuselage, however. He didn’t seem to grasp how momentous the occasion was.

“Miss Parker, listen, this isn’t —”

“No, you listen,” she yelled, her smile finally dropping away. Her voice was growing strained from shouting over the noise. “I can’t do it. I can’t take you into the Centre, not after the last couple of days. Even if I didn’t — even if you weren’t the — even if you weren’t Jarod, you wouldn’t deserve it. You never deserved it, but I had to get over myself for that to matter. You won, OK? You made your case for freedom, after all your poking and harassing. I won’t see you go back there. I won’t. I want — I want you to be free.”

It was frightening, it was freeing, it was deeply surreal to just say these things, to just say them! As if they were words for the open air, to speak aloud, instead of worrying over them in the most shadowy recesses of her mind where even her consciousness couldn’t fully acknowledge their existence.

He’d leave now, and if she had anything to say about it, she wouldn’t see him again. The thought made her embarrassingly wistful. He’d been the most important person in her life for so long. This would leave a Jarod-shaped hole in her life, and if nothing else, that would be jarring. She could — oh, what the hell, why not? If it was her last chance.

There was a roaring in her ears quite apart from the sound of the wind on the rooftop. She reached out, and Jarod was within arm’s reach. She wasn’t sure if she’d moved or he had. Before she had the time to second-guess, she curled the fingers of both hands around the nape of his neck, pulled him close and pressed a kiss against his mouth, hard. She left no time for him to react. Just a small indulgence, since she wouldn’t get another chance. She pushed against his chest, firmly and without room for argument, so that he stumbled backwards towards the chopper.

“You’re free. At least, from me. Now, go.”

The loss of equilibrium seemed to snap Jarod back into the moment. His face hardened and he reached out to her. She stepped out of his grasp.

“I can’t go. Not alone,” he said — which was ridiculous, since that was all he ever did. He always moved on, and he always did it alone.

“Yes, you can,” Miss Parker scoffed. “You’re stalling, hell if I know why. Go, now, before the sweepers get away from the cops and come back up here. You want to lose your chance when I’m handing it to you on a platter — stop it!” Jarod was shaking his head at every word.

“I can’t leave you behind,” he insisted. “I know the Centre, I know how they’d react if they found out you let me go. You say I convinced you, but I don’t think you were listening at all! This doesn’t work unless both of us are free.”

“What’s the matter with you? You’re the one addicted to unsolicited rescue, you should recognize it when you see it. Maybe you can’t stand to share the glory, but you need to deal with that in your own time. You know I can’t go with you. Stop looking a gift horse in the mouth and be rescued,” she said. As if she had time for him to come to terms with someone else saving him for a change. What a prick.

Jarod smiled, an open-mouthed grin. It was a smile out of time, taking her back to the first time she’d stepped down the stairs into the Pretender project facilities and seen him beaming up at her.

She’d been flattered, she remembered, though she knew he was the first girl his age he’d ever met.

“Here, look at it this way if it helps,” said Jarod. “I literally cannot go alone. I can’t pilot this helicopter by myself.”

“Bullshit,” Miss Parker countered. “I’ve seen you fly helicopters alone.”

“Not with two gun shot wounds. Not while on post-surgical analgesics. Your brave and selfless rescue will go to waste if my leg goes into spasm and I crash into a cow pasture.”

Son of a bitch, he was right. If she sent him off by himself only for him to get killed in a helicopter crash, she’d never be able to look Sydney in the eye again. Hell, she’d have trouble looking herself in the eye.

All trace of her earlier delirious humour was gone.

“What are you suggesting?”

“You come with me.”

“Yes, I got that,” she snapped. “After that? What would we do?”

She knew what he was offering. Jarod wasn’t the sort for short-term solutions. “Come with me” wouldn’t mean “drop you off at the next gas station”, rather something closer to “defect to my side and become a fugitive from the Centre”. It was too big a question for a snap decision on a rooftop with sweepers and cops closing on their position with every passing second. The thought experiment was too tempting to ignore altogether, however. The Centre might assume the worst if she and Jarod vanished from the hospital at the same time, might assume she’d turned traitor. Whether this was a next-gas-station decision or a defection decision wasn’t entirely in her hands. If it came to it, what would that mean?

What if she could never go back?

It was depressing how little grief she could muster, in this hypothetical picture she’d painted in her mind. It wasn’t as if there was nothing to mourn, though, she insisted to herself. The house, every inch of it graced with casual reminders of her mother’s vibrant life and her father’s steadfast affection. Sydney and Broots, always there to back her play — but then, if she were no longer at the Centre, would it perhaps enable them to leave as well? No, she couldn’t entertain this, it was an irresponsible daydream. For now, this had to be a next-gas-station decision — it couldn’t be more than that. She didn’t have room in her brain for more. Nevertheless, she waited for Jarod’s answer with unconcealed hope. Give me a reason, give me ammunition.

Jarod shrugged and gave her a wobbly grin.

“How about that shiny new car, Miss Parker?”

In plain terms: leave everything behind. Throw everything you’ve ever known away, right here, right now, a split-second choice on a hospital rooftop, too much noise to hear herself think. The choice she’d been avoiding, because it was too far from the norm, too much of a departure from everything ingrained into her brain as… how things had to be. The choice to live apart from the Centre, apart from the Parker legacy. She’d considered it once before, when Thomas had asked her. She’d taken the leap and fallen on her face. It was near impossible to muster the nerve to leap again, when she’d already hit the ground so hard. But, if she could fly…

No.

Or, not yet.

It was too big for right now. She needed something more bite-sized, more manageable, something she could bend her head around. Escaping the cops, now that she could handle. Putting the hospital in the proverbial rear-view mirror, that wasn’t so daunting a choice. Even if this was the first well-intentioned paving stone on the road to defection, for now it was just that, one step.

Finally:

“Let’s go,” she said. Jarod grinned, plainly thinking he’d won. She held up a hand. “I’m not committing to anything, but we need to get away from the hospital grounds. I don’t plan on being arrested or T-boarded today.”

They didn’t spend any further time arguing or planning, which was for the best. No time for either to second-guess, and no time for anyone to interrupt their debate in its final stages. They climbed into the chopper, one on either side of the controls. Miss Parker eyed the foot pedals under their respective feet and was forced to admit (at least, to herself) that Jarod was right. He wouldn’t have been able to pilot the chopper alone with an injured leg.

The chopper lifted slowly off the landing pad. When it had risen around thirty feet, the door to the roof burst open and vomited a small crowd onto the rooftop. Miss Parker had to crane her neck to see past Jarod — there were Sydney, Broots, and Sam, and a couple of nameless sweepers she’d never exchanged ten words with. Less expected, there were Sergeant Hobbes and his colleague. Those who were armed had their weapons drawn and pointed uncertainly at the retreating craft.

“Jarod!” hollered Sam, with something that sounded remarkably like real hatred. He fired, and there was a deceptively innocuous ping as the bullet struck home in the body of the helicopter. Miss Parker looked wildly around for signs of real damage, and was brought up short by a hand on hers. Jarod had reached over and folded her hand in his larger one. Perhaps he’d meant it to be comforting, but she could feel his heartbeat hammering away where his wrist touched hers. That was a comfort of a kind, she supposed.

Below, the cops had turned their attention on Sam, who now lay face-down on the rooftop with his hands cuffed behind his back. The other sweepers were standing around awkwardly, trying to appear not half as armed as they really were. Broots watched the arrest unfold, but Sydney had not let the chopper out of his sight. He raised one hand in a wave. No smile, stone-faced. Jarod had no hands to spare, and did not wave back.

Just like that, they flew away. Miss Parker wasn’t sure how far they’d get, but a choice had been made, and that was the important part. She’d have time for bigger choices later. She squeezed Jarod’s hand, reluctant to let go just yet if she didn’t have to. And she didn’t have to.

So she held on ‘til morning.