******Sarah******

*Man it’s been awhile since I’ve been behind a wheel* came his thoughts as he sat down. Behind that thought seemed to be a great deal of weight like it had been far longer than six years for him. *Oh it has,* came his thoughts again. *You almost stepped all the way into the beginning of that story I promised you. You wouldn’t believe it without a bit of an explanation first, and the fact that it is such an unbelievable story may have been enough to shatter your mind. So like I said, don't go wandering off up in there, you were just starting to get interesting.* He grinned at me as he threw the jeep into gear and started heading toward the airfield.

*So, Caleb,* I began thinking to him, *this link, you’ve been part of one before? How do I turn it off? I can barely hear myself think. You’re thoughts are bouncing around one after the other, too fast to make much sense of.*

The humor I felt coming through the link touched a nerve in me and I couldn’t help letting some of my anger slip through the link to him. *I’m not laughing at you, I was remembering the first time this happened, and please, it’s Jack. I haven’t gone by Caleb since… I disappeared.* a confusing flash of images accompanied his thoughts until settling on that of a young girl, maybe 9 or 10 years old. Her dark, shoulder length hair whipping around wildly as her head turned revealing startlingly bright green eyes, then it was gone. *I’d found her not far from an old smugglers trail through a forest in France, lost and scared out of her wits. She just curled up tighter and cried harder when I tried to calm her down. I tried using my... relatively new skills and bungled it… much like you did* he thought when he caught me fixing on that flash of green eyes.

The warmth and depth of emotion behind his thoughts startled me coming from this man who could kill another so easily. *You love her.* I thought.

The cold black anger and despair that rose up in him preceded the flash of a wall of flames in my head searing my thoughts for a moment. Then nothing. Not a hint of a thought from him. *She died a long time ago.* he finally thought back, again the weight of a great span of time seemed to press across the link.

*So what happened?* I thought, *With the link I mean.* The humor that rose back up in him comforted me this time, anything was better than that dark despair.

*I spent the next three months figuring out how to break it without hurting her. All the while she skipped merrily through my mind, babbling in French. I swear I learned more of the French language from that little girl than any of the best masters I’d sought to eliminate my accent.* He looked over at me with a look that made me think I was about to pay for my earlier recklessness creating that link. I suddenly felt sucked into a bubble, and found myself being dragged along by a little dark haired girl, the same one as before? She looked clean and energetic, all trace of her former distress erased. I glanced down at the hand I felt her tugging on, not mine after all. This must be one of his memories, a little glimpse at what was under the surface thoughts.

The girl dragged Jack down an old dusty street, pulling me along for the ride. It was hedged in by ragged buildings on both sides, here and there men were making repairs to houses and shops that looked to have been gutted by fire. The girl’s lips didn’t move but I could hear her chattering happily in French in Jack’s head.

After a long walk through the dusty town, where Jack being shepherded by the girl was obviously a common enough sight, she stopped suddenly next to a building on the right, her chatter quieting as well. She wore a clean but well-worn grey dress, her hair now past her shoulders looking clean and taken care of. She stood looking intently through the open door. The sign over it was in French, but the engraving of a pair of shears cutting a lock of hair proclaimed it a barber shop.* Puis-je obtenir une coupe de cheveux?* The thought rang clearly in my head as she turned around and fixed Jack with a piercing stare, her bright green eyes full of intelligence and fire.

Before Jack could answer, the vision faded and I was securely back in the front seat of the jeep. The thoughts burst forth at him immediately, *How did you do that? What did you do? And what did she ask you there at the end?* The explosion of thoughts in his head must have startled him out of his own musings, because he snapped his gaze in my direction for a second before looking back to the road. His attention to what was in front of us made me take a second look to get my bearings. What the hell? We were coming up on the barricade to the airfield already. I know I wasn’t stuck in that memory for the entire twenty minutes the drive should have taken but here we were.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

*I pushed you into an old memory of mine.* he thought, looking over and giving one of his half smiles. *And slowed your reception of it keeping you in for longer. It’s a little trick I came up with for my inquisitive green eyed friend. It gives me a chance to have my head to myself for a few minutes to think.* Almost as an afterthought he added *She asked me if she could get a haircut.*

Suddenly I was very curious to know more about her, and how thinking of her, whom he seemed to genuinely care for, could cause so much pain and hatred. *What was her name?* I queried.

*Jehanette de Vouthon!* he chirped in a voiced pitched and cut off like the exuberant little girl’s in the memory bubble. *She changed it later in her life making it harder and yet easier to track her down at the same time.*

I laughed out loud finally catching on to his game. A man holding an assault rifle at the ready waved us through the gate, not glancing twice at the hologram still covering Jack’s face after he caught sight of me. *You’re trying to distract me so I don’t try to pry further in your thoughts aren’t you? Okay, I’ll bite. What did she change her name to?*

He laughed back at me and replied *I wasn’t. I’ve tried to protect her identity for so long, but everything eventually comes to the surface and becomes known. Old habit I guess.*, he said with an obvious mental sigh *She mostly went by Jehanne la Pucelle. She couldn’t help it, the name just followed her wherever she went.*

The name rang a bell in my head. I just had no idea where I had heard it before. I had no time to sift through my own memories to figure it out though, as Jack parked the jeep near an open hangar with a large cargo plane in it. There were a number of people in the hangar, most of them with their wrists behind their backs looking on in confusion. These were watched over by men, and one woman I could see, wearing the standard military fatigues that were an everyday sight around here.

Jack immediately stepped out of the jeep, finally turning off the horrendous hologram of Major Shaw’s face. The smirk he shot me told me he had caught the thought and found it amusing for some reason. Damn it! Just because I was glad to no longer see that man’s face didn’t mean I was happy to see his, like he seemed to think! I fumed, sure he could catch most of it through the link.

How can he hear my thoughts so clearly, when all I get from him are a plethora of scattered thoughts and images with no apparent connections? The constant barrage of his thoughts streaming through the connection made it hard for me to hear my own thoughts. The only consolation I had was that my thoughts seemed to be as jumbled as his were, even to me.

*Sorry, but you chose a very inopportune time to experiment with your abilities,* he thought at me as I got out of the jeep to follow him. The thoughts firing off seemed to slow and become more… linear, was the only way I could describe it. *I happen to have a great deal on my mind at the moment, foremost on it is how I’m going to keep you out of any firefights.* His plans, what I could catch of them, seemed to constantly shift, as if he were trying to take into account all of the possible problems and their solutions. The quicksand of his thoughts would shift to something different just as I thought I had hold of what he was going to do.

“Marco!” he called out, moving deeper into the hangar.

A young man leaned out from behind the plane, “Polo! Sir!” he shouted, with a quick grin as he jumped off the ramp and approached us.

“Status?” Jack requested, fighting a small smile of his own.

“Four wounded; one of ours, three of theirs. Medic is in there keeping them stable,” he said, expression and tone turning serious as he motioned to the plane. “Psyche squad is holding here for exfil, while Chameleon acquires more transportation. This bird may not be big enough for our first jump out of this pit. Sir.”

“Good. Have all unoccupied squads move to secure a corridor for Michael to withdraw along. I want no surprises waiting for them.” I caught a blurry image cross his thoughts as he said this. It was the disturbing sight of charred body parts scattered across one of the compound streets. *Sorry,* he thought to me as I shivered, *It is my job to make sure things like that don’t happen. So sometimes the thoughts may be strong enough to produce a blurry image like that.*

*That doesn’t mean you have to share them!* I shot back hotly, regretting the outburst immediately. After all, I wouldn’t be seeing them if my curiosity hadn’t ‘killed the cat’ in the first place. He glanced over at me, a curious look on his own face, before turning back to the young man in front of him.