Confrontation (Implanted Book 3) Read online

  Cecily bawled. She really let loose, and he knew he’d just released her from a weight she could have never unburdened for herself. He heard the relief of years of suppression in her sobs, and he sat next to her on her log.

  “We are in control. Nobody else. Only us, and we’re stronger than any of them. And we know so many secrets.”

  Just as quickly as her tears came on, they dried up. She gasped a couple times, catching her breath, and then she said, “Thank you, Jamie.” She looked up at him with swollen eyes and took his hands in hers. “He wasn’t always horrible, but once he was, he really was.”

  “I kind of liked John,” Mandy said, trying to sympathize with Cecily somehow, but not understanding all that just happened.

  “I didn’t,” Junior said. “He had dead eyes. Always watching you too. You did right, Daddy.”

  Jamie didn’t like what they’d seen him do. Maybe he did have anger and temper issues, but with what he knew now, those were probably his best assets for survival in a world where almost everyone is implanted to be controlled.

  The point of the control was still a little unclear to him, but he was certain on one thing. McElroy had been at the very top of whatever group created and implanted everyone. It seemed to him that few people had UNE issued implants than McElroy’s. And then there were those separate from the UNE, but some of McElroy’s people were moles working in the UNE medical and technical fields. Maybe there were even some politicians.

  “Okay,” Jamie said. “Here’s what we do. We go to this little town northeast of here to the beach, and we wait for a fast boat. It’ll come eventually. It’ll take us to a place I lived, where a woman taught me a meditation. We’ll find her. She can and will help us find Emily, Katie and Steven. I know it.”

  “Why haven’t they tried to contact us with the magic hat Emily talked about?” Cecily asked.

  “I don’t know. We don’t know their tech, where they are. What their situation is. But if anyone I know will have a great idea about finding them, it’s Ingrid. Some call her Jan.”

  “Wait,” Cecily said. “You learned a meditation that helped you block your thoughts? Block them from seeing all of you? Like we both did?”

  “Yeah, from Ingrid, my therapist in the Netherlands.”

  The tiniest beam of sunshine peeked through a small parting in the clouds. Cecily’s eyes sparkled. “Someone taught me one once. She said she’d learned it from a Japanese woman when she was six. Think in your associations. Basically that.”

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  “It was Amanda who taught me how to do that particular meditation the day she got Michael’s brainstem implant. And I guess her pineal gland one too. She wrote it on my phone and my tablet, said it could save my life someday.”

  Jamie thought for a moment, admiring how Cecily’s curls wound wet around her cheeks. “Amanda. It seems like her mysteries never end. I still don’t know who she really was, and this isn’t a coincidence. That she impressed that particular meditation on you, I mean.”

  Cecily stood up, glancing down at John’s body. Jamie realized what a messed up lot of people the four of them were. “Let’s go,” she said. “Beat the water washing down the mountains. Children, ever been on a fast boat?”

  They shook heads in unison. Junior looked slightly interested. Mandy said, “I just want to see the unicorn again. I love her. Other than Junior, she’s my best friend.”

  Cecily and Jamie turned and stared down at her.

  “A rainbow unicorn?” Cecily asked with a tiny smile.

  “Yes. You must have met her too. She has a southern accent and says words wrong all the time, but she always makes me laugh. I love her seat.”

  “When’s the last time you saw the rainbow unicorn?”

  “When I hit my head from the flooding water. She came and told me it would be okay. She told me funny jokes about old people.”

  Cecily and Jamie exchanged glances. “Do you know when you’ll see her again?” Jamie asked.

  “Never know, but it’s at least once a day.”

  “She comes and sees me too,” Junior added. “But she says I’m too serious so I don’t think she likes me.”

  Cecily squealed with delight, picking up each twin and swirling him and her through the rain. “You two are as cute as buttons, you know that?” Her cheeks glowed pink with excitement. This must be the first time in her life she could allow herself to feel and let loose the joy of loving her daughter.

  Jamie grinned, forgetting the seven lives he took just a little while earlier.

  Chapter 10

  Three Years Later

  Jamie had been looking everywhere for Cecily. In all the different island treehouses they’d built, in the brush where she sometimes took naps because she loved the smell of the leaves and flowers there. He even walked the beach for a half hour. Where was she?

  He felt a bony hand attempt to tickle his hip. He turned and Emily grinned up at him. She was getting tall for twelve. “I been lookin’ all over for you. We all been.”

  He grinned down at her. “I’ve been looking for my wife. She said she had a surprise for me. Do you know anything about that?”

  The tooth that had fallen out so long ago had grown in crooked, but it added innate charm to her grin. “Maybe I do. But it might be way too late now.”

  “She got me chocolate and ate it all?” Jamie asked.

  “Oh my gosh, I’d die to have chocolate again. We gotta go on a fast boat run. We’ve not been in weeks.”

  “Alright,” he said. “Chocolate from fast boat ride to Japan is on the list. Now, where are Cecily and the twins?”

  “Come on, follow me. I’ll show you the fort we made yesterday and today just for this.” She skipped over the sand. Sometimes Jamie could see Emily’s influence on his own kids, but they didn’t have her innocence and carefree way. The way Jamie thought kids should feel and act.

  They were nine now and talking all the time. Their conversations were just so…loaded with Big Stuff, the Questions of Life and Eternity. Emily wouldn’t understand and make a joke, and his two would then truly laugh. He wasn’t sure if he himself had ever made either one of the twins laugh as hard as Emily could make them go on.

  As they entered the island jungle, Emily glanced back and said, “Oh yeah, Uncle Stevie and Katie aren’t going to make it. They said something stupid like it was our special family time. As if they ain’t our family. Well, Katie ain’t, not yet, but Uncle Stevie’s getting closer day by day. And slow and stupid wins the race. That’s what he says when I ask him why he hasn’t even kissed Katie in three years.”

  “Well, Em,” Jamie said, climbing over vines. “I think she intimidated him a little a few years back when…you know. The cap, like the one you wore to easily enter someone’s pineal world and alter it. That was some underground, not even heard of by almost everyone on the planet stuff. Hell, it might even have been her own design. All that tech she knew must’ve humbled ole Stevie. She’s got a mind as fast and sharp as a computer processor. He’s scared of her.”

  “Ha!”

  “At least a little.”

  “Yeah, I guess I can see that. He used to have no problem talking to any girl all honest and flirty, but I think he’s tryin’ to win over Katie’s heart. It’s sweet.” She pulled some seemingly random branches aside, revealing Cecily and the twins sitting inside a dome-shaped leaf and jungle flower enclosure, sweet smelling and super secret. Just the way the kids liked it.

  Cecily grinned up at him. They were so close now that they had learned through Ingrid’s teaching and practice to use the pineal implants so they could be on a closer level to each other. Mind talk, like the twins. For Jamie, it wasn’t like he heard her thinking or felt her feelings. It was more like he was delivered the information of Cecily’s state of being at all times. This hadn’t happened with anyone else, and she said it hadn’t for her, either.

  “The sun’s about to set,” she said to him. “And we prepared a special tre
at. Finally explored the western gulch two days ago and brought you back some presents.”

  The girls giggled. Junior smiled softly, seemingly lost in thought. Jamie crawled inside the fort. “So, what in the world did you find on the other side of a deserted island that would be worth this production?”

  Cecily produced a jar from under her shirt. Something inside was…glowing. And moving. Jamie winced. “What the—”

  “They are glow worms, Daddy.” Mandy touched the jar and smiled up at him. “We made the fort and now that the sun’s setting, we’re going to put the glow worms all over the fort walls. They’re slow. They usually just sit there at night.”

  “That’s ‘cause they’re matin’, right, Mama?”

  Cecily laughed, opened the jar and dumped out a large pile of greenish glowing fat caterpillars. “Go ahead, kids, decorate. And Em, I have no idea what a mating glow worm looks like from a non-mating glow worm. I didn’t even know they were a real thing until we found them.”

  A thought crossed Jamie’s mind, a shadow of some forgotten and important memory, but then it was gone.

  The sun set and the fort was lit up all around by the little glowing worms. They were pretty lazy, not moving except to check out kids’ fingers when they were pressed against the little guys’ faces.

  “Alright, kiddos. You got to see the fort with the worms at night. Now, Jamie and I are going to take over in here. We need some romance, so scoot.”

  Emily stuck her tongue out at Cecily while Mandy and Junior bowed. They’d picked that up from fast boat rides to Japan. They really loved that territory, and it’s highly developed culture. Something about it resonated with them, and it made sense to Jamie.

  After the kid sounds faded away, Jamie pulled Cecily between his knees and she leaned back against his chest. He smelled her hair. Just like the flowers in the fort. The glow worms made her skin seem to have its own glow from within. He looked at his hands, but of course, it was woman magic. He had his usual hands, just lit a different color. He stroked her hair and felt her contentedness. He knew she felt his; they seemed to form a feedback loop in their implants at times like these.

  All of them had kept the pineal implants, and Cecily finally had her brainstem implant removed. The twins, because of the fibers growing out of their implants, couldn’t have the brainstem implants removed. Sometimes Cecily would feel sad for them, he felt it. She worried about their having to feel all those awful Company people’s feelings. To Jamie, it was what it was. They were never going to be normal, so he saw no reason to box them in. They were the only two people like them on the planet—grown in an incubator with electromagnetic whatnots and metal attached to both of them. What kinds of spontaneous experiments had McElroy done to their growing fetuses? Like how he’d dropped Amanda’s old implant into Jamie’s head on a whim? A scientist’s secret dream, he’d said.

  Cecily understood and agreed, but she still worried.

  Softly, she said, “Remember when we saw Ingrid after the hurricane?” They always referred to that day as the day of the hurricane.

  “Yeah, she was shocked.”

  “Not too shocked. She saw your potential and nurtured it. I think it was more like pure delight that you found your answers and made it back to tell her about it.”

  “Yeah, and she had some whoppers for us about the pineal implants.”

  In fact, Ingrid had a European one put in when she was a teen, a totally underground operation where the goal was to get a pineal implant—a different kind and build than McElroy’s—intended to enhance the sexual experience by making lovers feel one another when doing what they do best. Ingrid was one of the lucky ones whose didn’t get botched and cause brain damage.

  They’d spent a week at Ingrid’s home in her basement and learned many new things. Especially that Ingrid was a rebel through and through. She was thrilled that her saying saved Jamie, and confided with one sentence, refusing explanation, that it was a rebel underground technique that one passes to another he suspects of having a control implant, in hopes the one who heard it tried it and learned it.

  Emily paid them visits while they stayed with Ingrid, insisting on showing herself as the unicorn because she said, “It expresses me like I really am, ya know?”

  Through Em, they got word to Steven and Katie that they were in Amsterdam. Next thing the four of them knew, they were hopping different fast boats to get to a reclusive island Katie found by going over G-Float images and videos. The reunion between Emily and Cecily made Steven let a few tears roll, and Mandy and Emily hugged and hopped in place for a year. Junior got pinched cheeks and a big, wet kiss on the lips from Emily after she finished gooning with Mandy. His eyes popped out of his head at that and he turned bright red.

  Jamie chuckled.

  “You were thinking about Junior blushing when Em kissed him.”

  “Mmhmm.”

  “It’s so nice in here. These worms are magical. It’s perfect, being in here with you, surrounded by mythical beasts. Glow worms! I just can’t get over it.”

  “I was shocked when you pulled them out. But maybe that’s because your shirt hiked up a little bit. I may have seen nipple, but I’m not sure. It was a quickie tease-flash.”

  She laughed, turned to him, kissed him longingly, and then settled back against him. They equally treasured moments like this, where not a problem could touch them. They were strong together, and they were deeply in love.

  “Things are pretty great,” Cecily commented in response to Jamie’s thoughts.

  “Yeah. And glow worms to go along with it.”

  They were quiet, watching the worms sit and glow on the flowers and leaves of the hidden tent. An uneasy tension filled Jamie, and he sensed it from Cecily too. It crept in as he watched the glow worms. Something about them.

  “It’s like it’s too perfect. Not real,” Cecily said. He could feel her worrying side coming to the surface.

  Jamie didn’t say anything. The more he thought about it, the stranger the glow worms looked. So slow and lazy and fat. But where did their lights come from?

  He picked one off a vine and examined it closely. It had the usual sticky million legs and gushy caterpillar body, but its glow was pretty magnificent. It wasn’t glowing on its skin, like a coating, nor was it glowing from within. It just…glowed a perfect and unexplainable light that never seemed to go out.

  “You got these three days ago?” he asked her.

  “Yeah.” She sat up, faced him and folded her legs in front of her. “And they still glow. I haven’t put them in the light. I don’t even know if they work that way. Maybe that’s just stickers. I haven’t given them much thought until you just did. Something about them worry you? Say it. Say it in words and explain to me what you’re thinking, feeling.”

  He took her hand and put the glow worm in her palm. It made her look like she had fairy fingers. “I don’t know if glow worms are real. I never learned about them. And we have no access to information satellites until Katie gets the—whatchamacallit—device thing she’s building to get us back online with the world anonymously. I can’t go look it up. So I don’t know right now if this is a real glow worm, a thing found in nature that’s just neat as hell, or…”

  Cecily ran a fingernail over the worm’s back. It didn’t react except to tuck its rear in a little. “Or if we’re somewhere else where there are no such things as glow worms. We’re stuck. Stuck in some false reality…” Her face darkened into her old frown that she’d left behind in the last few years.

  “The way I see it, is we can trust what we’re experiencing is reality, or we can test our paranoia at every turn to make sure.”

  She nodded, gazing at the glow worm in her palm. “It really is perfect.”

  “We can wait until Katie’s done building her gadget and then we’ll look it up.”

  She peeked up at him. “Or we could squash it and see what happens. If it’s a real bug, it’ll die and the light will go out.”

  “Well,
it might not go out right away. It might have to fade.”

  She frowned down at it. “It doesn’t look like a real thing to me.” Eyes back up to Jamie, looking for an answer as to how to handle this new and unexpected obstacle.

  “Yeah, I say we squish one. Maybe two to make sure. Do you have a light?”

  She pulled a pinkie-sized electric lantern out of her shorts pocket and flicked it on. The glow of the worms overpowered it until Cecily held the little lamp close to the main worm in question. “It really doesn’t. Look closely with the lamp. It looks like something somebody would make up.”

  Jamie examined it. He felt unease wash over him. How they had wanted his secret. As if he could just give it to them in front of McElroy. “I do feel bad about not helping all those slaves in the white sand desert.”

  She knew what he was talking about. He’d just never actually said it before. “Me too.”

  “We have to know. That’s what I think. We always have to know as best we can. We have to analyze…watch for things…use the implant for more than just intimacy between the two of us. Don’t get me wrong, I love how close we are. How it brings us together. Something good came out of the control. We’ve harnessed some aspects. Maybe we should be more aware, ask more questions, try things with our implants. Different things.”

  “Maybe our implants can make us psychically squash a caterpillar.” She grinned.

  “Are you doing it, or am I?”

  “I’ll hold it closed in my hand, and you squeeze my hand together into a gooey mess. Then we’ll examine the body.”

  “I like the way you like to get your hands dirty.”

  She grinned, closing her fist around the glow worm. “On three,” she said, and counted up.

  At three, he squeezed her palm as tight as possible without hurting her hand. She made an “ew” sound, and then they both sat in silence.

  “Are you going to open your hand?”

  She was worried. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to know.”