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Chapter Thirty-Eight

Juliette

Paris, France

Night

J uliette rested on the razor edge of consciousness. She could hear the low rumble of male voices. They seemed distant, from the other side of the room. It was a nice sound. Calm.

She'd picked out the names Honey and Gage along with the one she already knew, Thorn.

Her hand was comfortably warm, and there was a slight pressure. She was holding hands, she realized. And the hand she held was a tether, a grounding cord, an anchor. She rolled her hand and intertwined her fingers, feeling happy. Her lips slid into the ghost of a smile.

She liked it there in this neverland between wake and sleep.

This was peaceful.

The tinnitus was still a high-pitched hum, but it didn't stab into her brain. She could almost ignore it. Maybe the male voices were a counter balance.

"Hey, Brigitte, how about you, me, and Honey go and get an exfil plan together? Somewhere quiet where we won't disturb her."

Silence followed.

"We'll leave Thorn where he is and fill him in once we have a course of action."

Another stretch of silence. She didn't want to wake up. If she opened her eyes, then she'd pull herself away from this moment of contentment. It had been so long since she'd felt this level of peace. She actually couldn't remember, no, wait, yes, when she was in Tanzania with that amazing herd of elephants. The sun setting, the herd climbing from the water. That had been bliss. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Someone else's mind and body.

A deeper voice chuckled. "Are you afraid Thorn's going to scoop her up and run? His orders are to keep eyes on until the exfil, and, that barring a sudden emergency, there should be no exfil without the doctor signing off on her stabilization."

"Thorn, you aren't going to go rogue on us, are you?" the other guy asked. "You're planning on following orders?"

Thorn didn't answer. She had to assume he'd given them some sign.

A door opened, there were sounds of steps and movement, and then the door snicked shut.

Good. Now there was quiet, and she could float.

"Arya?" The fingers tightened a little on hers. A hand smoothed back her hair then rested on her head. A thumb swiped smoothly across her forehead. "Arya, can you wake up?" the man asked in Arabic.

Maybe she had just been dreaming – a terrible nightmare and then a peaceful dream.

"Arya, I'm sorry to have to do this. But I really need you to wake up now."

Arya knew that on the other side of wakefulness would be truth. And truth would hurt. Her smile fell off, and she squeezed her eyelids a little tighter together. But far from helping her grip into that space in between, it bobbled her to the surface of consciousness.

"That's right, you're doing great. Listen to my voice and wake up. I need you."

Arya blinked her eyes open. The thumb soothing her forehead stilled. She was staring into deep brown eyes filled with affection and concern.

"I'm Thorn," he reminded her. "Can you hear me?"

"Yes," she spoke to him in Arabic. Her head turned, and her eyes slid around the room.

"You're in a clinic. You got sick in your room in Paris. I brought you to the clinic."

"You skipped over the bad people that you beat up to save me."

Thorn didn't answer that.

"Your calling me Arya now and not Juliette like last time."

"Is that your name?" he asked.

She stilled. "I think it is. I think that my name is Arya Khouri and not Juliette DuBois. Why would I have two names?" she asked.

"That's what we're trying to figure out. My job–" he stopped and gave a little shake of his head. "I want to protect you, and I need to know who it is that wants to hurt you. We're here in the clinic but we want to take you back to the United States." He was watching her. He seemed to be absorbing every nuance of her reactions.

She could tell he was trying to say the right thing in the right way for her sake. Arya squeezed his hand to encourage him to just speak.

"My team needs the information, so we know how to keep you safe, but you've had some medicine that's made you forget things. It's possible that you might remember the answers now." He leaned a little farther forward, resting his elbows on his knees, bringing his face down more in line with hers. "I wanted to ask you while we were here in the clinic so there was a doctor here if you needed help."

"Thank you." Arya tried to work up a smile to ease him a bit. But it felt wrong on her face. She wanted to be honest with Thorn and that meant even a silly lie, like a fake smile, would be a break in trust. She felt like trust between them was profoundly important. "I'm ready. I'll answer my best. Would it be okay if we spoke in English? It's been a long time since I spoke in Arabic."

"Of course," he said, switching languages. "Whatever makes you feel more comfortable." Without releasing her hand, he swung around and gathered a laptop, bringing it closer to where Arya could see that someone was on a video call.

"Hello," said the young woman with a gentle smile and long blond hair. "My name is Lynx. Can you hear me all right?" she asked.

Arya let her gaze drift to catch Thorn's. He smiled at her encouragingly. "She's a colleague who works for my company, Iniquus. She's helping me get you home."

Arya nodded.

"She wanted to talk to you about how you're feeling and some things we've learned about why you're feeling so sick."

Arya's eyes widened, and she stopped blinking, or breathing.

Thorn rubbed his thumb over the back of her hand. "I'm here. We'll do this together, okay?"

Arya nodded.

"Thorn asked me to speak to you," Lynx said. "He thought that my talking to you over the Internet would give you some distance from the situation." Her face broke into a grin. "And to be honest, he was afraid that his speaking to you might feel intimidating. He is kind of intimidating." The tone of her voice made it sound like the two women were best friends sharing a good joke. "It's his job to strike fear into the hearts of our enemies. And he does that very well."

It was working, Arya's face began to relax. Her shoulders weren't all the way up to her ears.

" You are not the enemy. And Thorn along with our whole team are dedicated to keeping you safe." She paused and waited for Arya to nod. "Is there anything you need right now? Anything that might make you feel more comfortable? You've had a rough seventy-two or so hours, now. You've been very ill and at the same time, you've been heroic in saving yourself."

"Thank you," Arya said, her voice rough and rasping.

"As time has passed since you haven't felt well, I'm wondering if it's possible that you might be remembering things that go back in your past? Maybe remembering things that happened before you had an operation?" Lynx asked.

"Yes." Arya exhaled.

"Let me give you a bit of information that might help make sense of at least some of it. Is that something you would like to know? Or maybe it's something you'd prefer to wait until later, once you're home?"

"No, now," Arya interrupted her. "Please," she tagged at the end, more quietly. She reached over to where Thorn was holding her hand and wrapped her other hand there too, hanging on as if for dear life.

"All right, but I need you to stop me if this becomes overwhelming."

Overwhelming? Everything right now was too much. Bursts of sound and color, thoughts and names, faces and theories. Everything swirled and dipped then soared over head. Facts might just be the place where Arya could rest.

"We have some information for you about your memory. The blood sample that was drawn by the medics showed that you had a drug in your system that is unrecognized in pharmacological literature. I want you to stop me if I say anything that you don't understand or that you'd like me to repeat. We can put voice-to-text on the screen if it would be helpful."

"Yes." She sighed. "Yes, thank you. It takes a lot of energy to try to focus and hear everything."

There was a pause and when Lynx said, "Testing, testing, testing." It came up on the bottom of the screen.

"This is working," Arya said.

"We brought in a professor of pharmacology and had her look at the results of your blood test. She said that the medicine in your body was similar to another drug that had been tested for people with severe PTSD. The one in your blood stream had some differences. She believes, as this drug leaves your body, you would develop a fever and have an experience very much like a heroin addict coming off of that drug."

"Is it addictive, the PTSD medicine?"

"No. She thinks that the initial detox will be the only issue. Though, it could be that you might crave it for psychological relief. But we can get you help with that and get you on some better medications if you need them." Lynx tipped her head. "My understanding, from talking to Roxanne, is that you had intermittent fevers that were not predictable in terms of the length between them. Is that right?"

They had gone to talk to her care giver? "Yes, sometimes a few days, sometimes many weeks…"

"And Dr. DuBois took you to his Montrim lab and gave you a bag of IV fluid?"

She cleared her throat wondering just what was in those IV drips. She'd always felt so sick ? she'd just trusted. "Yes, it always helped."

Lynx nodded with a gentle smile that felt friendly and concerned. "Did you ever burn through the fever to see how you felt without the IV fluids?"

She squeezed Thorn's hand. "Never."

"It's probable that he was administering the drug and when it started to leave your system, he would give you another dose."

"But how would a dose last that long? I remember distinctly that once I was up to my twenty-second day. I was giddy, thinking that I might not have that fevered reaction again. How could the drug stay stable in my body that long?"

"The professor said with encapsulation. But, to be clear, our expert didn't study the drug. She was making some educated guesses."

Arya's gaze travelled along the far wall of the small clinic room. "I thought a new fever was starting just as I got on the plane. I almost turned around. By the time I got to Toulouse, I was feeling pretty bad. The next morning, twenty-four hours into feeling ill, things started to feel off in my brain with my memories when I went to my childhood apartment. The pictures that I called ‘memories' flashed up as ? I'm looking for the word ? all I can think about is phantom pain from an amputation. It was disorienting. As I went to visit the places from my memory, pictures in person ? what was described as a childhood apartment and then my grandmother's house ? it seemed odd to me how nothing had changed from those pictures to twenty years later."

"That fits doesn't it, Lynx?" Thorn asked.

"With what the sailors said in their description of their experience?" Lynx asked. "Yes, I just got hold of an unredacted file from back in 2000 on that, and Arya's experience sounds parallel."

Fit? Obviously, there was data available. Later, when her head was quieter, Arya thought she'd ask to read it.

Lynx turned her focus back to Arya. "Others were part of a PTSD experiment that was conducted in 2000. The men reported the same sensations and confusions. It can be extremely disorienting – all of this can. I'd like to take a break from the information and check how you're doing."

"Science helps. Facts…" Arya took a few deep breaths. "The longer I felt feverish, the more things shifted for me. It was like a veil was being pulled back. When I saw the men, the Russian scientists, who pointed their guns at me and forced me into their car in Toulouse, I recognized them. There are other memories now. They're coming back to me. Not – well it's like a tide isn't it. The water laps out then a wave brings it in. Each time, the water is just a bit higher on the shore."

"When we get you back to the United States you will be given all the support you need. The professor hypothesizes, based on lookalike drugs, that all of your memories will return, good and bad. But you won't be alone as you integrate them."

Arya looked up until her gaze met Thorn's.

"You have Thorn there with you," Lynx said. "You can trust him. You can lean on him. He's there for you."

"Yes," she said, and in that moment, she fully believed it. But she'd trusted others, and they had betrayed her.

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