For a couple long and incredibly silent seconds, I just stood there in shock staring at the man in front of me. I couldn't think of anything to say or do. Hell, I couldn't think of anything at all. I just stood there while a loud static sound seemed to play through my head. Of all the possible things I had considered might happen when we got to this place, running into Robert Parson wasn't anywhere on the list. What the hell was I supposed to do now? What was he doing here? Where did he come from?
For his part, the man allowed the silence to carry on for a moment before speaking again. “Something tells me you're not one of his, are you?” He looked me up and down, mouth pursing thoughtfully. “No, you're definitely not one of his. So my question is, what are you doing here? You're not just some kid out looking for a thrill, or those traps would've caught you. You couldn’t have gotten in here if you didn’t know what you were doing. You disabled them or you snuck past them. Either way, you made it all the way in here because you were looking for that thing.” He raised his hand to point at the machine. “Which leads me back to, who are you?”
While I had been standing there lost in my shock, I heard Paige’s increasingly insistent voice through my bluetooth earpiece wanting to know what was going on. She was obviously getting worried. So worried, in fact, that she stopped waiting for a response and said she was coming in. Which she somehow managed to do so quickly and quietly that the first sign that she was even inside was the door to the stairs being kicked open and the sound of her clothing rustling in the air as she jumped all the way to the bottom without hitting a single step.
“Stop!” she snapped that single word even as she landed smoothly with a pistol pointed at Robert. She was holding it steady, and directly at his head as she took in the situation. Only belatedly did she seem to notice who it was, and froze not unlike the way I had. I couldn't see her expression behind the mask she was wearing as well, but I could imagine it looked similar to my own.
If he was at all surprised or worried about the second girl who was just showing up and pointed a gun at him, Robert didn't show it. He simply stood there and looked at both of us curiously before grunting under his breath. “Now that's a little more curious.” His gaze centered on Paige. “I wasn’t sure about her, but watching the way you move, you’re definitely one of his creations. So why exactly would any of his creations be breaking into his place here to steal his machine?”
Paige’s voice was dark and brittle, clearly barely containing her anger in that moment. “I'm not his. He doesn't own me.”
Robert considered that briefly before inclining his head. “Ah. You're the one who contacted me back then. You're the one who exposed him in the first place. Then you just disappeared. Or seemed to.”
He went silent for a few seconds, still holding the gun, but without actually pointing it toward either of us. It was just sort of there. Paige hadn't taken her aim off his head, but he still didn't seem to care. He paid absolutely no attention to it. Instead, he just stood there looking thoughtful for another few seconds before making a noise of decision.
“To be honest, for a while I thought you exposed him just to take his place, but then there was nothing. So I thought he killed you before we could take him. Still, I wanted to make sure. So I went through a whole little investigation. Tried to find out everything I could. Which led me around to one thing.” He offered a thin smile, holstering the gun pointedly. “How are you doing, Paige?”
It wasn't too surprising that he knew who she was, not after the clues he had left. Which, to be honest, I still didn't know why he’d done that or who the clues were for. There were those toys in his cabin that had led me to the file about her in the Seraphs place. But that couldn't have been for me. He didn't know anything about me being aware of my parents, and he couldn't possibly have known I would have any access at all to those files.
Paige slowly lowered her own pistol and reached up to take the mask off. “If you figured out who I was, why didn't you ever say anything?”
Robert shook his head. “It seemed to me like you went through a lot of trouble to hide your identity. I assumed you wanted to keep it quiet and live a normal life. At least as normal as you could. Pittman was already in prison. I thought the best way for you to move on was if everyone left you alone. If anyone else knew who you were or what you were capable of, or even where you came from, you’d never get that chance. And after what you did to help stop him, you deserved that much.”
He gave me a brief, curious glance before turning back to her as he added, “I suppose it makes sense that something like this got you to come out here. He's the one responsible for what happened in Detroit, isn't he? As soon as I heard about the Breakwater thing and who was involved, I knew it had to be him. That's why you're here.” He pointed at the machine again. “That thing is supposed to get him off that island somehow. Now please tell me you're not stupid enough to think you can trade his freedom for the cure to save your adopted sister and everyone else.”
Paige kept her voice flat. “I am nowhere near that stupid. That thing is a teleporter. We're going to use it to get to him and get the cure the hard way. For him.”
Robert cocked his head a little, absorbing that. “Yeah? What makes you think you can do enough damage to make him give up literally the only advantage he has? I don't think you're the type of person to go that far. And even if you were, I don't think you're dumb enough to think it would work. He’s not about to give up his advantage no matter how rough you are. Believe me, that’s not a bluff you can win.”
He was still clearly curious about who I was and what I was doing there, along with why I hadn't said anything yet. I could have spoken, of course. I had my voice changer active under the mask. He wouldn’t immediately recognize me through that. And even if he did, would that be a bad thing? I still didn't know. There was so much I didn't understand. Was he still part of the Ministry? Would he tell my parents the second he knew about me? Almost every sense I had was screaming at me to trust him, but could I trust my instincts? Could I trust anything right now? I had no idea. I was so confused and lost and the only thing I could do was stay there frozen, waiting as these two continued their conversation.
Paige, for her part, shook her head again. “We weren't planning on torturing him. Let's just say we have a virtual reality machine. A friend of ours is fixing it up so we can plug Pittman into it and get into his subconscious. We can find out things he doesn't want us to know by pulling him into virtual reality and making his brain show us the truth.”
Yeah, that had been our plan. We were going to teleport Pittman off of Breakwater or teleport ourselves there, we still weren't sure on that exact point. But either way, we would have the virtual reality machine and plug him into it. Wren was working on combining her work on that with the suit she had put together to force Ashton to lead us to the vials. The suit worked by reading their subconscious thoughts when they were asked a question and controlling their motor functions to lead us to the place they were thinking of. Wren was pretty sure she could adapt that to work in virtual reality so he would move in the precise way he needed to in order to make the cure. It was our running theory anyway. And, of course, the best shot we had.
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After absorbing that as well, Robert brought his hand up to his chin and ran his fingers along it thoughtfully. Then he grunted. “You're part of that new Avant Guard group. Poise, right? I haven't been spending much time in Detroit lately, but I do keep up on things. As much as I can anyway. And from what I've heard, that's the group that could and would try something like this. Which makes you…” he turned to look at me once more. “Hmm. You're the right height for a couple, but you're definitely a girl. So I'm gonna say you're the one she always partners with. Style, isn't it? Poise and Style. You're another one of his creations, one that went rogue too.”
Oh boy. Yes, it was probably a good thing that he was jumping to that very understandable conclusion. After all, we did look identical whenever one of us wasn’t actively disguising ourselves. And if things hadn't changed at the last minute, Sierra really would have been the other one here. But did I want to let him just keep going along with that assumption? Should I just tell him who I really was? I still didn't know. I'd been debating that wildly in my head this entire time. He was the man who had saved my life. When I looked at him, everything I had said that I could trust him with my life, with my soul. He would never ever betray me. But up until a few months back, I would've thought the same thing about my parents. And part of me still did. My family loved me. They wouldn't knowingly hurt me either. But even if they wouldn't knowingly hurt me, would they do something bad thinking it was for my own good? And would this man, whom I also trusted with everything I had despite barely consciously knowing him, do something that was bad just because he thought it was for my own good as well?
Finally, all I could do was give a short nod. “Pretty much.” I kept my answer short, not wanting to say too much even with the voice changer.
Paige, who had obviously been waiting for me to decide how to answer, rolled with that immediately. “It's a long story,” she informed him slightly. “And not one she likes to get into. So why don't you tell us why you're sitting here with this thing?”
Robert glanced at the machine again before turning back to her. “Like I said, I figured out he had to be involved. I've been tracing your big sister's footsteps for a while, trying to figure out how they ended up on Breakwater. That led me to a few of their men, Breakwater’s, that is. They were… well let's just say they were trying to clean things up and erase any other connections to that place. It turns out Flea and Trivial told those people exactly how they ended up there. But Breakwater didn't bother telling our authorities. They just sent people over here to erase that trail themselves. On the plus side, it seems those Star-Touched were smart enough not to tell Breakwater the truth until they were on their way home. They kept that little bit of information to themselves to make sure the prison people didn't try to pull a fast one and accidentally lose them.”
Oh, right. We had wondered about that and whether we would end up finding nothing here because the authorities had already taken the machine. But nothing in what Paige had been able to find in official files or communications had indicated that they had any idea about this place, so we took a shot. Now at least we knew why the officials didn't know. Of course Breakwater had wanted to cover up something like that. They wouldn't want anyone, not even the American government, to have their hands on a device that could teleport people onto their island.
Robert continued easily. “All that led me here, and I've been examining this machine trying to decide what to do with it. To tell you the truth, part of me wants to turn it on, go over there, and beat the shit out of Pittman myself. But that wouldn't really accomplish much, now would it? On the other hand, if you think it could be used to drag him over here, that's another story.”
I shook my head quickly, the words coming before I really thought about it. “You said it yourself, beating him up wouldn't accomplish anything. He's not going to tell us how to make the cure just because we hurt him. We have to get him back to Detroit and plug him into the machine so he has no choice but to show us the truth.”
Robert looked at me, his expression curious once more. But whatever he was thinking, he didn't give voice to it. Instead, he simply gave a short nod and replied, “You're probably right. As nice as it might feel to punch that son of a bitch until his face breaks, it wouldn't get us anywhere. That's another reason I've been sitting here thinking, trying to decide who to involve in this.” He looked back-and-forth between us. “Now it seems like I've got an answer that I wasn't even considering.”
All of this was dangerous. It was so very, very dangerous. Involving Robert in this whole situation? How could I even consider it? And yet, was there any other choice? It wasn't like he was just going to back off and let us do it without him. Not now. We'd given him a potential solution to his problem, a way to get answers out of Pittman. But there was absolutely no way he would just step back and let us do the work ourselves. No, he would have to be involved. Even though involving him ran a very good chance of exposing my identity. And I still didn't know if that was a good thing or not. There was such a big part of me who wanted to rip off the mask, throw myself at this man I subconsciously trusted so much, and tell him absolutely everything.
And even beyond that, I wanted to get answers from him. There were so many questions I had about everything, including his cabin out in the woods, what was going on between him and Pencil, and everything else. I needed actual answers, but I was afraid that the only way to ask them was by exposing myself to more danger.
I was torn, to say the least. I have no idea what the right answer was, and if I did reveal myself, it was something I could never take back. After all, unlike my parents, I didn't have a convenient person to erase his memory if this went wrong.
Did that sound bitter? It probably sounded bitter.
We were all silent for a moment before Paige gestured while starting to move to the stairs she had just leapt down. “Give us a minute, would you?”
Robert gave a simple nod. “Of course. The machine and I’ll just wait here for you.”
Paige and I started to move to the stairs to go up and talk this out. But even as I took a few steps that way, a sound caught my ear. It was coming from Robert's phone, a chime that filled the air. He glanced at the screen and frowned. “We have company.”
Paige snapped her gaze that way, speaking sharply. “More of Pittman's people?” From the sound of her voice, she was more than willing to take all of her frustration out on them if so.
Robert, however, shook his head and turned the phone to show us. There was a view of the street outside. I could see our van, but also about six others, all lined up along the curbs. There were people in official looking uniforms going up to the houses around us and pulling people out. I didn't know what they were telling them, but within just a few seconds dozens of people who lived in this neighborhood were being rushed to one of the vans and driven away.
“Breakwater people,” Robert informed us flatly. “Looks like the guys I took care of had a lot of backup. And they won't be playing nice.”
Paige made a noise in the back of her throat before sighing. “They also won't listen if we tell them we need to use the machine to fix this problem, will they?”
Robert grunted, looking down at his pistol as he drew it back from the holster. “No, they won't. Their job is to protect Breakwater and stop that place from getting any more bad publicity. There's no way they'll risk allowing an access point like this to exist, or let anyone else know about it. They're here to destroy the machine and make sure it can’t ever be used again. They won’t care about fixing the situation in Detroit.”
Of course, this whole situation couldn't resolve itself peacefully. We couldn't just get the machine without much fuss and drive home with it. No, even running into Robert wasn't enough of a complication. Now we had to fight these Breakwater people. Because if they got their way, they'd destroy our only chance of getting answers out of Pittman and fixing this whole situation. I had to fight the people responsible for keeping the worst of the worst supervillains in prison in order to save Irelyn, my parents, and everyone else who had been poisoned.
But hey, at least I was going to have an exciting road trip story to tell.