Listen (Muted Trilogy Book 2) (7 page)

“It will help.” Jemma ran her thumb along her phone. She had so much to say, but she didn’t know what was safe, and it seemed their time was already out. Her guard gestured for her to come, while Jack’s moved to stand behind him, one hand on his shoulder to communicate rather effectively that Jack should remain seated.

She looked her guard in the eye, hoping for some small spark of sympathy, any indication that he might let them say goodbye with something other than electronic voices, but she saw only impatience.

“Tomorrow, then,” she typed. Jack nodded, and she felt his eyes on her until the guard led her out of sight.

SEVEN

Finding More

Instead of leading Jemma back to her cell or to the laboratory for her afternoon session with Dr. Harris, her guard led her even farther down the hall, stopping in front of an unmarked door and gesturing for her to enter.

Jemma paused with her hand on the doorknob, wondering what else they might possibly be changing today. She welcomed the change, the break from the monotony, sure, but she didn't trust it,
couldn’t
trust it.

Then again, one of those changes had meant seeing Jack again, and even with the restrictions on their time together, she couldn't see many ways in which that could be a bad thing for her.

"Your new room." The harsh, electronic voice from the guard, when her nerves were already strung tight, made her heart skip, and she closed her eyes for a moment to gather herself.

She finished turning the handle and pushed into the room, stopping just inside, still gripping the doorknob. There was a bed. It wasn't much bigger than her cot, but it had an actual mattress, not a piece of tight cloth across a metal frame. Jemma resisted the urge to rub her back, then moved all the way into the room.

Though plain, this area appeared to be an actual bedroom. There was a desk, the kind with a chair attached, anchored to the ground. It would be a tight fit, but more comfortable than trying to eat while reading her newspaper on the floor or on the tiny cot from her cell.

There were two doors in the wall opposite the entrance, and Jemma opened the first to reveal a closet. In it, on hangers attached to the bar like she'd seen in some hotel rooms, hung blue jeans and white t-shirts. She checked the tags and saw they were in her size, or at least the size she’d worn when she’d been taken. She knelt down to open the drawers in the tiny dresser at the bottom of the closet and found plain white underthings, creases attesting to the fact that they'd yet to be worn. Jemma was unsurprised to find that the drawers didn't pull out all the way.

Behind the other door was a bathroom. It was nearly identical to the one she'd been using, functional and undecorated. The mirror was set into the wall and seemed to be made of shiny plastic, like a kids' mirror. Her toothbrush was attached to the sink by a very short length of chain; Jemma would need to lean forward until she was almost touching the sink to brush her teeth. The toothpaste, at least, they didn't seem to think she could use against them, and it rested behind the faucet.

She stepped back into the main portion of the room. The door was shut, and she saw the same black dome she'd almost adjusted to in her previous cell. She was still being watched.

It was still a cell, in many ways. They'd gone to great lengths, though, to make the room as comfortable as possible without giving her any potential weapons. As she sat on the bed to wait, fighting a sigh as she sank into the soft mattress, she wondered what they hoped to gain from this.

***

The rest of the day held no further surprises. Dr. Harris's session went exactly as it had the day before, and Jemma was led back to her new room for supper and sleep.

She woke the next day as her newspaper and food slid under the door as it had in her former cell. She stretched before retrieving them. She didn't feel relaxed, but neither did she feel half-starved or as sore as she'd been after waking on the cot.

Breakfast was instant oatmeal, again, strawberries and cream this time, a little easier for her to stomach than some of the varieties. She’d just finished eating it when her guard, the same one as yesterday, came to get her for her time with Josh.

The longer walk to the lab from her new room held nothing interesting. Most of the doors were closed, and there were no windows until they reached the labs, the few they passed empty as usual.

When she sat in her chair, Josh beamed at her, his eyes twinkling. “How are you liking your new accommodations?”

“Were they your idea?” she typed after she pulled her cell phone from the pocket of a new pair of jeans.

She was pretty sure his expression, his lips pulled down without undoing his smile, was supposed to look humble.

“I might have suggested a few times that we would get better results if you were more comfortable. They approved almost all of my suggestions.” By the time he finished typing, he was no longer trying to hide his grin.

“They’re appreciated,” typed Jemma. The changes
were
appreciated, really, in a lot of ways. She could deal with everything better given her small doses of almost-freedom, her brief breaks with Jack. She still couldn’t quite shake, though, the feeling she’d performed well enough to earn a treat, and she was tired of feeling like a pet. It was particularly off-putting since, as far as she could tell, she hadn’t been giving them any better results than they’d started with. What would happen if she didn’t keep performing like they wanted her to?

Josh hooked her up to the monitor, patting her arm before turning his attention to his tablet for a few quiet minutes. “Okay,” he typed finally, “we’re going to do the same as yesterday, questions back and forth, but I want you to make sure you’re really trying to send the telepathic responses today. All right?”

Jemma nodded. “You really think you’re helping?” she tried first. Josh’s grin grew as he looked at the monitor, fading only slightly when she typed the message.

“I do. Look.” He gestured at the monitor. The spikes displayed from her message looked higher than usual. Had it really made that much of a difference, just being rested? “We’re closer to being able to communicate, to figuring out how this works.”

They were high again at her next message. “Is that all you’re trying to do? To make people able to Talk better?” She felt her brow furrow as she tried to understand.

“It’s a part of it, yes, but we’re also trying to save people.” He watched her as he typed. Jemma could tell by his earnest expression that he really, truly believed this. He grinned at her again. “My turn to ask the questions. Are you and Jack romantically involved, as you pretended to be?”

Jemma hesitated. She wasn’t sure whether to tell the truth or the lie they’d been working under before they’d been taken. If she told the truth, she wasn’t entirely sure what she would say.

At her hesitation, Josh typed again. “I ask because I expected a kiss, at least, out of your reunion yesterday, but judging by that hug, you weren’t faking entirely.”

The idea of Josh watching what the cameras recorded made Jemma a good deal more uncomfortable than thinking that a faceless security team watched.

“I missed him,” she sent finally, typing it into the silence.

Josh nodded, seeming to accept the spike of activity on the monitors and her non-answer as the truth that it was. “Do you like your job?”

Smothering the impulse to yell at him, to hit him, to do something to show how she felt about his asking about this, about the job he’d helped take her from, Jemma answered with a simple, “Yes.” She continued their questions and answers with factual responses and detached inquiries, devoid of excess emotion or information. She did make genuine attempts at sending her communication telepathically, though, and when they finally stopped for lunch, her head was pounding.

“Leave your cell phone here, please, so we can charge it.” Josh reached for her phone.

Jemma typed, “Without my phone, how will I talk to Jack?”

Josh shook his head. “We let you have it yesterday, but the deal was that the phones would be left with us while you two are at lunch. I’m sorry about that.” He glanced at the window, then back at Jemma. “You can probably get away with brief contact one more time without them sending you to your rooms.” Josh held out his hand, waiting for the phone, grinning, and Jemma passed it over, giving it one last look before joining her guard in the hallway.

***

When they got to the cafeteria, Jack was again already waiting, watching the door this time when she entered. He smiled at her, and she smiled back, something tight in her shoulders unwinding.

They could figure this out, could work around losing even their supervised communication. She felt for their connection, finding just that same remnant of it that had been present since they’d been taken. The fact that she missed having someone else in her head, that she didn’t actively want to be alone in her own mind, it was disorienting, maybe more so than the muted connection.

Jemma retrieved a sandwich and drink, her stomach rumbling, then sat down across from Jack, who’d already gotten his. She unwrapped her sandwich and took a bite, rubbing her forehead as she chewed.

Headache?
Jack mouthed the word before opening his own sandwich, watching her rather than eating.

Jemma nodded, then held up her sandwich and smiled tightly, hoping to convey that it helped. He took a bite of his sandwich, and she wasn’t sure he understood. She studied him; the circles under his eyes seemed less pronounced, his shoulders more relaxed.

With him in front of her, it was automatic to reach for their connection every time she wanted to communicate. She made a face at its limitation before searching for a different way to ask whether he’d gotten the same upgrade to his sleeping situation as she had.

She put her hands together, resting her cheek on them, then raised her eyebrows in question.

Jack’s lips pulled up to one side, and he nodded.

“This is almost nice,” Jemma sent, the words echoing in her mind, and she saw her surprise reflected in Jack’s face before he glanced at the guards. They were standing on just one side of the room today and seemed bored already. Jack looked down at his sandwich, and Jemma quickly followed suit.

“Can you hear me?” Jack sent, and her tension somehow uncoiled further while simultaneously increasing, the sound of his voice as comforting as it had been yesterday clashing with the fact that they were doing something their captors wouldn’t likely approve of.

“Yes.” Jemma kept her head still, avoiding a visible answer to the unspoken question, and a thrill shot through her, the emotion not entirely her own.

“How is this… I’ve tried.” He took another bite of his sandwich.

“I don’t know. I’ve tried, too.” Jemma looked up at him, and he winked at her, pointedly avoiding looking toward the guards.

“We’ve probably got fifteen minutes left, tops. If it was gonna work, Talking from anywhere else in the building, it would have by now.”

“I agree.” She looked back down at her sandwich. Watching him, there was no way she was going to be able to hide her conversation with him. “Have you seen or heard anything that might help us escape?”

“To business, then?” She could see just a sliver of his face as he grinned at his sandwich. “Not a lot. I think I know roughly where the guard room is. They had a lot of them on me, for a while, and they don’t seem to expect a lot out of me, mentally.”

“Pretending?” she asked.

He sent a surge of agreement. “I make it look like I’m trying, but the guys who test me, they really can’t stand me. They don’t pay a lot of attention, mostly just make faces at the monitor.”

“I’ve not exactly tried my hardest,” sent Jemma, “but I’m not limiting much, either.”

“No, but you’ve managed to get things through your cooperation.” He sent admiration to her, soothing some of her worries about jumping through hoops. “You mentioned a newspaper?”

“Every morning.” She paused. “They got me a better room yesterday, too, after lunch. What about you?”

He sent another wave of affirmation. “Yeah, but I didn’t get an explanation for the change.”

“Josh,” she sent, “the guy who tests me in the morning, he said he asked for it. He said they’d get better results if we were more comfortable.” She tried to keep her mental tone neutral, but she saw him look up at her, and she did the same.

“He sounds like he likes you. Can we use that to get out of here?”

“He thinks that our being here is the right thing, that it’s going to save the world. He likes telling me things, too. He told me we could probably get away with contact one more time today, and he lets other things slip sometimes.” She clenched her jaw. “I hate him, Jack, and I hate myself for going along with him.”

Jack reached across the table and cupped her face. Jemma leaned into the contact, into the reassurance he sent with it, closing her eyes until she and Jack jumped apart at the blaring of an alarm. It stopped as soon as he ceased contact.

“That is your last warning,” typed Jack’s guard. “Any further contact will result in immediate isolation. You have five minutes remaining.”