A Place Where There Is No Darkness

Nineteen

There were faces and garish lights one second, and the next, there was nothing. There were voices and then silence. Chaos and peace. I felt like I had somewhere to be, something to do. But I couldn’t remember and I didn’t have the energy to concentrate and besides, every once in a while a voice would tell me to just calm down, which were about the only words that truly registered in the jumble of all the talking.

I tried to calm down. It didn’t always work.

Also, somewhere in all the activity, there was pain. Dulled, sometimes imperceptible altogether, but it was there.

As was he.

Sometimes out of sight – sometimes probably in another room –, but there all the same.

It calmed down after a long while. The thousands upon thousands of touches and prods ceased; the flurry of movement was over and I was somewhere quieter. More alone – though less alone than I had been most of my life. There was only the beeping.

I drifted. Somewhere. I wasn’t conscious, not in the traditional way, but I wasn’t completely asleep either.

And then he was there again. And I cherished it.

And then I wasn’t.

And so it went on until I could finally, after days or years or decades, open my eyes.

When I first forced my heavy lids apart, everything was blurry. It was white, I could tell that much, but the painting on the wall was nothing but a colourful blob, the window was a tunnel of light and the ceiling – I couldn’t look at the ceiling without spikes cutting open my scull.

The pain was excruciating. It was also brief. As soon as I closed my eyes again, it all calmed down and I didn’t have the urge to throw up anymore. It occurred to me to just drift off again, and I was about to, but in the end I forced my eyes back open for some reason. It was only then that a voice registered.

“Sorry about that,” it was saying. Before I could determine anything about it or try to understand the words – before I even decided it belonged to a man, which was pretty obvious –, I knew that it was familiar. I also knew that I wanted that voice to be here, with me.

I noticed that the lights were dimmed now, or maybe turned off completely. The ceiling had become a dull white.

The window was now the only source of light.

The painting had shaped into a landscape with a lake and a wooden cottage. I liked it, at least the parts that I could see from my bed.

I liked his face even more. As he leaned over me, his eyes two pools of hot chocolate and worry, I felt cared for. I hadn’t felt cared for since I was eight.

“Hey, there. Nice to see you again,” he said.

I smiled. “Hey there back.” My voice was raspy and Mitchell disappeared for a second, only to reappear with a glass of water in his hand.

I drank greedily, letting the water soothe my throat. It felt good. As soon as that happened, though, some kind of mechanism in me kicked in and I panicked. I wasn’t supposed to feel good, not until …

“Orwell?” I asked, the word weakened additionally by the fear in my belly. I had to know what had happened, of course. I just didn’t really want to. Not if it was bad news.

Mitchell sighed, taking the glass from me and placing it back on my nightstand. My stomach churned and my heart picked up. Mitchell noticed, glancing quickly at the monitors next to my bed.

Why was he taking so much time? Why not just spit it out already?

“We, uh, we had him. We had the whole building surrounded, there was nowhere for him to go.”

The silence was deafening. It was killing me. I could barely even hear anymore over the rushing sound in my ears, so I urged him on. “But?”

“Well, we have him. And all the others. But they got to the computers before we did. Wiped everything. We, uh …” I looked at him expectantly. “We don’t have any evidence.”

I felt myself deflate. I let out a deep breath. So deep I hadn’t even known that much air could fit into my lungs. My ears rang. My eyes stung.

“Oh, just that.”

“Yeah.” Then he perked up. He glanced at the monitors again, frowning. My heartrate was going back to normal. He raised his brows, staring at me.

“Are you okay?” he said, looking at me as if I was going into cardiac arrest or something. Maybe he really believed I was.

“Yeah. Never better. Hey, Mitch, do you know where my clothes are?”

“Uh, excuse me?” He was getting up from the chair, but I suspected it wasn’t to go looking for what I’d asked for. He was probably getting ready to call for a doctor any second now.

Time to turn it down a notch.

“I mean the pants I was wearing when they whipped me.”

He was quiet for a minute and a half. I would have rushed any other person, but not him. I let him take his time. Sift through things, do it in his own pace.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, they put your clothes in that chest over there.”

“Could you maybe get them for me?"

He was still dumbfounded. It took him all of five seconds before he ripped his gaze away from me and moved slowly, as if in slow motion, toward the cupboard.

He took out a plastic bag and strode slowly back to my bed. He handed it over carefully and held onto it longer than strictly necessary, as if he were still deciding whether I was sane or not.

I pulled the bag free of his hand and roamed through it. There wasn’t much in it. The pants and the top I had worn when they’d flogged me. And something else. Something no one knew about.

I pulled out the pants and reached into their pocket. My hand closed over the little object.

“Willy is safe, right?”

“Yeah.”

“No way Orwell can get to him?”

He bobbed his head. “Not in the next two days, at least.”

I nodded and let the bag fall to the ground, forgotten. To Mitchell, I held out my fist and when he opened his palm, I let the small USB drive fall into his hand.

“Happy birthday.”

“It’s not my birthday,” he said absent-mindedly, looking at the device. “What is this?”

I shrugged, smiling brightly. Maybe I was a little too cocky, I don’t know. The drugs were definitely doing their part, too. “It’s a USB drive.”

“And what’s on it?”

I smiled wider. “They’re three years old, but these are all the records the Elite had at the time.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah, well, Orwell thinks he’s smart to put more than one computer geek on the same task. One performs, the other one controls. What wasn’t that clever was taking the smartest computer geek in the country and pairing her with someone, well … let’s say average.”

“What are you talking about?”

I shrugged. “It wasn’t hard to get all their records. I know my stuff. I was their computer expert for years. Of course I made my own copies! They come in handy every once in a while. Like now, for example.”

He stared at me, mouth wide agape. His fingers were closed carefully over the drive, tenderly, even, as if he were stroking a long-lost child.

“You said this was three years old. So, what, you’ve had it this whole time?”

I shrugged again, letting the silence speak for itself.

“So this whole mission was a scam.”

“Not really. I got what I wanted and you got what you wanted. Everyone wins.”

“You mobilised the whole FBI for nothing.”

“Not true. We saved my brother.”

“Right. Your brother.” He stared at me angrily, his eyes ablaze. “Because he’s the only important thing in the world.”

“Not the only important thing. But one of the very few, yes.”

He stood up, looked at the ceiling, took a few deep breaths. The anger radiated off of him in waves, but it got better over the course of thirty-three seconds. Then he uttered a single word. “Why?”

“Would you have helped me if I’d told you that I already had all the evidence? Or would you just have confiscated it, then tried to take the Elite down yourselves and got Willy killed in the crossfire?”

He looked down. “I would have helped you,” he said, but he sounded like he wanted to convince himself.

I looked down, too, sighing. “Maybe. Or maybe not. It was a chance I wasn’t willing to take.”

“What if you had died? This – all of this would have gone to waste. The Elite would have gone free. And for what?”

“It wouldn’t have gone to waste,” I whispered.

“What do you mean?” He came back to my bed, but he didn’t sit down. His shoulders were squared; he stood straight and tall as ever, yet where he normally seemed graceful and confident, he now looked a little stiff. As if this wasn’t what he wanted at all. As if he wanted to let his shoulders slump.

I flushed. “Well … I have more than one copy of those files. I hid some of them in the safehouse. Swallowed one such USB drive, too.”

“You did what?”

I shrank into my pillows. “If I died and all they found was my body. They would have performed an autopsy and found it, in the end.”

He stared at me. I stared back. He shook his head. “You’re nuts.”

I hesitated for a few heartbeats. Five of them, to be precise. Then I let my features soften. “Been called worse,” I said with a hopeful smile.

He smiled back faintly, remembering a similar conversation we’d had in a car, driving towards Elite’s safehouse. It seemed ages ago now. At the time, I had known nothing. I had believed I could be dead in a matter of days or weeks. I had believed the same for Willy.

Now I dared believe something completely different for the first time in what felt like forever.

“Really?” Mitchell said, speaking the words I had spoken that dreadful evening before we had landed in the river and this whole adventure had started. I smiled, too. He remembered. “By whom?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

The laugh we shared afterwards left me drained and achy, but it greatly outweighed the physical discomfort. I hadn’t laughed like that in years. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t laughed like that with anyone but him. It was a completely new prospect, a novel way to live a life. It could become my way, I thought, if I wanted it.

A comfortable silence followed and I let my eyes slide shut. Mitchell probably thought I’d fallen asleep again, because he carefully took my hand and started drawing little circles onto my skin with his thumb. I wondered if he’d done it before, then decided it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he was doing it now. That I hadn’t messed everything up with my little revelation. That he still trusted me. Or, at least, that he would one day.

I smiled. His thumb stopped short for two point three seconds, then picked up its movement again. It was very slow, gentle, deliberate. We both felt every atom of the other’s skin as our hands touched.

“So you’re not asleep,” he stated. I shook my head, staying silent. I liked the silence. Of course, there was always something to fill it with. Something that had to be done or said. It was the nature of the way we lived.

“Where’s Willy?” I mumbled. I could hardly believe it had taken me this long to ask the question. I guess I hadn’t felt the urge to doubt Mitchell when he’d told me that my brother was safe.

That was a new one.

“We brought him to a safehouse to take a nap. He’s coming back here tomorrow. After you’re well enough to be transported, we’re keeping you both in witness protection for a while. And after that, well …”

His mysterious voice was enough to bring me back from the brink of sleep and make my eyes shoot open. Or, like, slide open. Slowly. Either way, I was looking at his face again, and now he was the cocky one. He was smiling.

“What?” I demanded.

“Oh, well, I don’t know. There’s just this rumour going around the FBI that maybe a girl with a vast knowledge in computer science and a huge ego will be given the opportunity to join, if she wants. You know, given how she’s helped us out with the greatest criminal organisation of our time and all that.”

“What about prison? My sentence?”

He shrugged. “I think it’s been revoked. After everything you did, it’s the least they can do, I’d say.”

I smiled, feeling something loosen inside my chest. This – all of this was too good to be true. Somehow. I’d always wanted something like this, always dreamed of it, but I’d never before been given anything I’d dreamed of. This wasn’t how my luck usually went.

Something wasn’t completely right, was it?

Thinking of it, my mood turned sour quickly. “It’s weird, isn’t it?” I said musingly.

He raised his eyebrows. “What is?”

“You know. It was the biggest criminal organisation of our time, or so they keep saying. Why was it so easy to take them down, then?”

He chuckled. I didn’t join in this time and so he quickly stopped and followed my serious example. “You and I have vastly different definitions of the word simple, Elle.”

“No, I mean … people have been trying to destroy the Elite since before we were born, Mitch. And now we just waltz in there and do it? What if …”

“What?” He was getting more attentive. Maybe this was bothering him, too, and he just hadn’t been able to say it out loud yet.

“What if we stumbled into another one of Elite’s traps? What if this is what they wanted? What if there’s an agenda behind the agenda?”

He sighed. There wasn’t much to say to that. Unless you had logic on your side, which Mitchell obviously did. He has thought about this, I realised. A lot, apparently, because he had his arguments lined up and ready to go.

“You wanna know what I think?”

“Hit me.”

“I think the Elite always relied too much on its ability to move quickly. It couldn’t rely on the loyalty of its members, because they’d recruited half of them under duress and the other half was simply mad, so protocol was to move to an unknown location anytime any kind of problem occurred. But this time, they hadn’t counted on the FBI being there as fast as we were. When Willy and I escaped, I found a car and I drove to that bank. I had a little trouble finding it without Evan –“

“Right, how did you even manage that?”

He shrugged. “More luck than anything else. I’ll tell you another time. Anyway, when I got to the bank – which was pretty fast with the car –, it was a crime scene and the FBI was already there. Since Orwell takes away all phones and you can’t send out any messages, everything would have taken a lot longer if it weren’t for the agents at the scene. We were there and back in about thirty-five minutes and the backup arrived about ten minutes after that. It all went down very fast – faster than ever before, faster than the Elite expected and faster than they could mobilise everyone – and I think that that was vital in the end.” He looked at me, still smiling faintly. “It was because of your plan, I think. It was a good plan. You really are a genius, aren’t you?”

I rolled my eyes but laughed nonetheless. “You know, you’re giving me way too much credit. I mostly just went with the flow and did the best I could with what I was given.”

“Oh, right. That’s easy, then. Any i***t could have done it.”

“Right.”

He bit his lip, smiling, and looked down. “Well, either way, I don’t think we could have done it without you.”

I laughed outright at that. “Definitely not. Look at what you’ve got in your hand there!”

His attention shifted back to the drive and his face went from amused to pensive in a matter of seconds. He looked at me, holding up the drive. “What exactly is on this?”

“Everything,” I said, then decided to elaborate. “Everyone who had worked for them until then. All the missions, who carried them out. All the robberies, the murders, who committed them and why. The bigger picture behind it.”

He blinked, only slowly grasping the weight of what he was holding in his hand. Indeed, it might be too much to bear for a single man. But I didn’t have to bear it alone anymore. He didn’t, either.

“So, what … you’ve always told me you don’t know who committed the murder you were accused of. Was that a lie …?”

I shook my head. “No. I haven’t seen the files.”

“No?”

“They’re encrypted. I would have needed hours to decrypt them and by that time, someone would have noticed, don’t you think? But with the fancy equipment the FBI has, I think your boys can crack it in a few weeks, if they’re as good as they say.”

He c****d an eyebrow. “What, a team of computer scientists of the FBI can’t crack this code in a few hours, but you can?”

“Of course, haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve said?” I said, winking. “I would do it myself, but you know, I’m a patient right now and after that it’s witness protection for me and, oh … by the time I get my life back, your guys will probably be done with it.”

“Yeah, yeah, your life is horrible, now save it for the press.”

My eyes widened. I could literally feel myself paling and the machine next to my bed started going crazy. “The press?” He didn’t say anything, so I started blabbering, which was what I usually did when something wasn’t quite to my liking. “What, they’re here? Like, now? What do they want with me?”

He let me squirm a little longer, then smiled widely, letting go of all the pretence. “Got you there, didn’t I?” I swatted him, but he easily sidestepped my weak punch and his smile deepened.

“You’re a jerk,” I said.

“And you’re lucky,” he countered. “The FBI is hoping to recruit you for undercover missions – but you didn’t hear that from me –, so they’re keeping your identity covert. Most of the members of the Elite don’t even know who betrayed them. The only ones who saw you here were the few doctors and nurses who are directly on your case. They’ve signed confidentiality agreements and everything, it’s a pretty big deal.”

“And I’m in a private room,” I noticed, looking around again.

“You are.”

“And you’re here, too.”

He frowned, apparently wondering where I was going with this. I was kind of wondering that, too.

“Yeah?”

“I guess what I’m trying to say is … thanks. You know, just for being here.”

He smiled down at me. “You are very welcome, Elle.”

And as he leaned over me and I didn’t know what he was about to do – was he going to kiss me or only rearrange my blankets or pillows? – and my heart sped up and I heard the constant beep, beep, beep get faster and louder and more consistent, I realised what had felt so wrong earlier. It wasn’t the ease with which we had won this fight, because, let’s face it, there hadn’t been any ease to it at all.

No, ironically it was just the opposite. I had never felt so right before. Or, at least not for a very long time. Everything had slid back into place. For now, for this moment, everything was as it should be. I knew it. I could feel it, but the feeling was so alien that I’d needed a long while to recognise it.

This wasn’t wrong. This was right.

Now, I could build on that.