“What do you remember? Tell us, Indie. Tell us what you remember.”
She closes her eyes and swings her legs over the side of the couch, her fingers grasping for my shoulders like she needs to steady herself. “I’m not sure.”
Donovan sits down next to her. “Try harder. Just… take a deep breath and let your mind go blank. Then think back to what we were talking about. I led you into it with a timeline. And when we got to your twentieth birthday, you stopped me and went back to when you were fifteen. Can you tell us—”
“OK. Hold on.” I put a hand up to stop Donovan. “We need to know that, but first… I need to know if you remember what happened on your twentieth birthday, Indie. I need Adam here for this and he can’t come home until you remember what happened that day.”
She opens her eyes to look at me. “Why can’t he come home?”
“Don’t you remember? Yesterday you wanted to kill him, Indie. He doesn’t trust you.”
She starts shaking her head. “No. I didn’t say that. Did I say that? Why would I say that? Oh, my God. My head hurts so bad.”
Donovan stands back up. “OK. That’s enough. You need to rest for a little bit, Indie.”
“Rest?” I can’t believe he just said that. “No. We’re so fucking close, Donovan! We can’t stop—”
“She’s tired, McKay.” Donovan’s voice is low and serious. “And her head hurts. We need to let her relax.” He turns to Indie. “It’s a lot to process, Indie. I just want you to close your eyes and try to sleep.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“Just try, OK? If you wake up in a few hours, we can try again. And there’s always tomorrow.”
“But he thinks—”
Donovan cuts her off. “It doesn’t matter what Adam thinks. You’re here now. You’re home. And you’re with us. We’re gonna figure it out. OK?”
He pauses to let her agree but it takes her more than a few seconds to even manage a half-hearted nod.
“OK. Good. McKay and I will be right out in the kitchen. If you need anything, just come find us.”
“OK.” Indie’s voice is small and for a moment she sounds like little Indie again. The little girl I knew before we turned her into… this.
Donovan grabs me by the arm and turns me towards the door. I leave the office and walk down the hallway into the kitchen. Sit on a bar stool and prop my elbows on the granite island so I can hold my head in my hands.
It’s pounding too. Like it was that day everything happened.
Then I have this sudden, irrational fear that someone got to me too.
No. That’s not even possible. I was never one of the kids like Indie.
But Adam could’ve been. I say ‘could’ve been’ and not ‘might be’ because I know he’s not like Indie. If the Company got inside your head, you don’t make it to thirty-seven without knowing that. They trigger them young. And if these kids don’t have people like Adam on their side, they get used up and thrown away by the time they’re twenty.
Ironic then. Isn’t it? That we thought we did everything right for our girl and on her twentieth birthday all that hard work was gone in an instant.
“Well.” Donovan sighs.
“Yeah. At least now we know where it all went wrong, I guess.”
“It’s not gonna help us much though.”
“Do you…” God I don’t even want to ask this question. “Do you think that Indie’s been with this Carter guy for the past four years?”
Donovan doesn’t answer right away and that gives my stomach plenty of time to roil with the thought of someone controlling her like that.
“I don’t know, McKay. But the most important thing is that she’s here with us now. And we need to make sure she doesn’t leave.”
“How do we do that? I mean… if she wants to leave…” I don’t finish. Just let the obvious hang there in the moment.
When I look up at Donovan, he’s chewing his thumbnail, his lips forming a deep frown as he thinks. “We need to tell her.”
“No.” I shake my head. “No. She doesn’t even remember Maggie, Donovan. How are we gonna tell her? And she looked right over at the empty space across the lake where Nathan St. James used to live and didn’t even comment that the fucking house isn’t there anymore!”
“I don’t even know what happened to that fucking house, McKay.”
“I bought the land. After… you know. And then I had the house razed.”
“What?” Donovan looks at me. And for a moment I think… he’s gonna figure it out. That genius brain of his is gonna put two and two together and come up with the square root of something I barely understand.
And then he’ll know the truth. He’ll know what else I did four years ago.
But he just lets out a long breath. “That was a good idea. I don’t think I would’ve thought of it. So… you? You handled all the… details after?”
I nod. Hesitantly.
“OK. Well… that’s good to know. But Indie can’t move forward until she remembers what happened that day. She needs to know, McKay. We’ve come this far. Just… we have to fuckin fix this.”
“She will lose her mind all over again. I think we should just concentrate on where she’s been and who this Carter guy is. He’s the threat, not her. Forget the fuckin’ past. It’s over now.”
“And how do you suppose we do that? Hmm? We can’t put her under again. I know this Carter guy, McKay. He’s very good at his job. He went off the rails fifteen years ago and now that the Company is gone, there is no way to reel him in.”
“You know him?”
The response I get from Donovan is something in between a nod and a shake of his head.
“How do you know him? From where? Who is he? What is he? Is he PSYOPS? Is he a Zero?”
Donovan sighs. “Both, I think. Or maybe neither. I’m not sure it matters. What matters is… what matters is that he took her mind, McKay. He’s got it. And there’s no real way for us to get it back without his permission.”
I stew in that for a while, thinking. There has to be a way. I never thought I’d wish that the Company was still around. The whole time they were in charge all we wanted was out. But if they were here Adam or Donovan could go to… someone. Ask for a favor. Get a face to go with that name. And then we could hunt him down and end this shit for good.
“Hold up,” I say, because I just had a thought. “How did Indie get to my house?”
“That’s… rhetorical, I assume?”
“I mean, she got to my house somehow. And this Carter guy wasn’t a part of that.”
Donovan pauses. It’s a long pause too. “For all we know he sent her to you. He knew you’d call me and then we’d bring her here. He could be out there in the woods somewhere just waiting for us to leave her alone for a moment so he can trigger her again. Finish what he started. He was after us, right?”
“Was he? Do we really know that?”
“Well… she did drug us, McKay. I can only assume she did that with the explicit intention of finishing the job. And if Nathan hadn’t come and interfered, I’m sure we’d be dead right now.”