Chapter 47

The room below is about a quarter the size of the greenhouse. On one side are three cots and some shelves that are dusty and empty. On the other side is a Net Center with two stations, neither of them operating. Covering it all is a thick layer of dust, like the room hasn't been used in a long time. I learn it hasn't.

"For years, Ethan and I worked down here to help others like me obtain new identities and find some semblance of a life. After Ethan died, I became braver. Maybe I just felt I had nothing to lose. I showed up at a Congressional hearing on the FSEB and announced who I was." She tells me about the Federal Science and Ethics Board, some government agency I probably learned about in school but never paid attention to. I should have. They were the ones who had decided she was illegal based on a point system of replacement parts.

"I was taken into custody and spent a year in what they called detainment. Same thing as jail, but with none of the rights. But I already had all the groundwork in place before I made my move. I felt the time was ripe, and I had given all of my information to a Congressman Peck, who championed my cause. And I had plenty of hired guns ready--publicists--who were armed with enough video--all the good of me, all the bad of the FSEB, and press releases that never quit--that the FSEB hardly knew what hit them. They never could catch up. I have to say it was probably the best campaign in history. Of course, like I said, the time was ripe, the public was ready. It was the beginning of the personal privacy era. Other than public space ID, all personal tracking information and devices were being outlawed. The heavy hand of the FSEB was already crumbling--this just brought them down faster. In the end, the campaign came together in a moment that would have made my mother proud. It was as dramatic and well-choreographed as the climax of a ballet. At the height of the hearings, Allys walked in leading forty other Bio Gel recipients who had gone over the FSEB's quota system, all fine, upstanding citizens of the country. That did it. The FSEB came tumbling down, and new standards were adopted."

"And you were the new standard. Ten percent." I try to keep my voice flat, but the strain comes through just the same. I step over to a dusty Net Center and draw a smiling face on one of the tables with my finger.

"Locke--"

I whip around to face her. I want to walk over to her. I want to take her face in my hands. I want to kiss her the way I always wanted to back then but was too afraid to try. I want her to feel my lips pressing against hers and then hear her say that Locke Jenkins isn't human.

But I'm good at changing subjects too. "So that's when you abandoned all this?"

She peers sideways at me, looking just like the sixteen-year-old Jenna that I used to trail after like I was a lost puppy. She is so much the same, but so different too. She's been married. She has a child. For God's sake, she's not a freaking virgin like me.

She had been living while I was waiting to live.

"Yes, that's when I abandoned it," she finally answers, but I know there's more to her hesitant reply. Not quite a lie, not quite the truth. Something she is not willing to tell me. Silence and stale air hang between us. I nod awkwardly for no reason at all, just to fill the space.

Her hands drop to her sides, and she bites her lower lip. She looks at me like something is knotting inside of her. "I was up all night last night," she says. Her hand shakes as she reaches up to brush hair away from her face. "Once I got you settled, I lay awake, staring at the ceiling. I couldn't get it out of my mind. What's been done to you, it's my fault. The way my parents worshipped me--I never thought--" She shakes her head. "My father never meant to hurt you and Kara. Maybe he should have known, but he had no idea about Ash." She begins pacing, and word after breathless word races out of her. She is looking at the ceiling, her feet, everywhere but at me. "It was my mother's idea. They had already scanned my brain, because you know my parents, they would never let me go, but day after day, my mother saw your parents at the hospital, and she couldn't bear to see what they were going through, and she begged my father to scan your brains too just in case--"

"Jenna--"

She spins around to face me, her blue eyes fixed on mine, and whispers, "How did you do it, Locke? How did you survive for two hundred sixty years? I was only there for eighteen months, and it haunted me for years. It still--" She stops abruptly, shaking her head like it is too painful for her to imagine. Now she looks like the Jenna I knew. The Jenna who was sometimes frightened. The Jenna who held my hand and was as uncertain about life as I was. The Jenna who had more questions than answers.

That's something I'm still short on. Answers.

How did I do it?

She stares at me, unblinking, waiting.

I don't know how I survived. I'm not sure I did. I'm not the Locke I was.

I went where I had to go ... I survived on gulps of memory ... scraps of touch ... a good kind of quiet ... a peace. I went to be with my memories....

"Kara. And you. That's how I survived. You were with me."

Her head tilts slightly like she's confused.

"My memories, Jenna. I heard you once. You cried out to me before you left. I knew you were there. I looked for you, and when I couldn't find you, I remembered. You walked with me. You talked to me. 'My eyes, Locke, look into my eyes, and you will see the sky.' That's what you told me when I couldn't remember its color anymore. You, Jenna. That's how I survived."