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16
That Can't Be Good
Mimi
Everyonewastalkingaboutit. About how Jack had saved RATS. No one knew it had been me who had risked life and limb to get a working tablet to him in his locked bedroom, so he could gain access to the system and set things up to save us. They didn't even mention Sally's contribution to the plan with the promotional videos she'd been doing. All I could hear in the corridors as I walked toward Dispatch was Jack-this and Jack-that and thank God for Dr Jack Evans.
I snorted softly to myself. It wasn't as if Sally and I needed the attention, anyway. It was better for both of us, in fact, if our names weren't mentioned around Shadowship too often. Especiallymyname.
Our seventy-two hours were up and Bryan and I were back on the roster. The next flight was ours and I didn't want anything to upset the apple cart. It was bad enough that everywhere I went I got the stink-eye from Jessica Harding and her sycophants. I really didn't want Anderson thinking too hard about how Jack managed to crack the lock on his computer console in his bedroom while under house arrest.
So, I simply smiled, nodded my head, offered the odd 'wow, he did it!' And kept my head down and my hands inside the vehicle at all times and made my way to Dispatch.
There'd been less flying lately. Which wasn't a bad thing considering we only had two working Vehicles. Well, three now, but no one counted Jack's. And it also wasn't a good thing, because it meant we weren't hunting down our lost Interns and we weren't hunting down Sergei and my family.
My family. Holy astronaut balls! That thought always left me feeling out of sorts. They were my family, but they also weren't the family that I had grown up with. I thought my grieving process had progressed rather well, considering everything that had transpired. Not to mention the fact that somewhere out there was a duplicate Wylde Family still well and truly alive, doing Sergei's bidding. I had cried for them all, multiple times, but I was still getting up and facing each day, still alive and breathing.
But even if I did manage to get my alternate parents and Alternate Carrie away from the Russian, there was no guarantee that the people at RATS would accept them after what they had all done. Especially my alternate parents.
People had died because of them.
And then there was Anderson to deal with. Anderson, who had the ear of the Prime Minister who in turn had a bee in his bonnet about making RATS profitable. His suit-clad officials were everywhere at RATS. Every corner you turned, there was a Suit and a Goon watching your every move.
How I could get my alternate family safely away from Sergei and safely into RATS was beyond me.
And that didn't even take into consideration what Time would have to say about it. So far, Time had been behaving itself, but I felt itchy about it. As if my skin was too tight, or I could feel someone watching me from the shadows, waiting to strike. It wasn't a nice sensation and when you're talking about Time, it wasn't a good sensation to have.
Time liked to correct anomalies and my family being out of time was an anomaly that Time would try to fix at some stage. It would also try to fix me, I was sure.
For now, though, I was flying again, which meant I had a chance to save my family — the alternate ones, at least — even if I only saved them to send them back to our time, in an alternate universe from theirs.
I shuddered at the complexity of our situation, at the unfairness of it all. We hadn't asked for any of this. It had all happened because of Sergei Ivanov.
Had he met my parents in St Petersburg our time and seen something in them that would trick Time itself long enough for him to get his revenge on RATS? And had he seen them before or after he took Carrie at Cape Canaveral? Just because we had already been mourning our parents when that happened didn't mean that Sergei had picked them up already when he flew through Launch Pad 39A and picked up Carrie.KilledCarrie and picked up Alternate Carrie instead.
Carrie could have been the Origin Event; in fact, we thought she was. But then, it could easily have been my parents, too. Or me. We had no way to ask Time and, with an answer, correct it. And Sergei wasn't talking to us, so even if he could unequivocally say that Carrie or Mum and Dad were the Origin Event, he wouldn't give us the advantage of answering truthfully.
I was sick and tired of Sergei Ivanov.
I walked into Dispatch expecting someone to yell at me and tell me I had no right to be there, but Dr Bauer simply acknowledged my presence with a nod of her head and went back to her work. Amanda was back and had been reinstated as a dispatcher. That would have been Jack's doing. I almost felt like Jack and I were living two separate lives right now. His was basking in sunshine and mine was covered in shadows.
It almost felt like we were already saying goodbye, too.
Feeling more out of sorts than normal — which was saying something — I walked across the room and stopped at Amanda's desk.
"Glad to see you're back," I offered.
"Glad to be back," she said in reply. "I hear you just got back, too."
"If I didn't know better," I said, "I'd think Anderson went to the Yoyo School of Business Management."
Amanda snorted just as someone cleared their throat behind me.
I looked over my shoulder, and what do you know? Anderson and one of his black-clad Idiots were standing right there. Of course they were.
"How nice to see you, Mr Anderson," I told him. "We were just talking about you."
"I heard, Dr Wylde." That never got old.DrWylde. I grinned at him.
