not sure why he’s trying to piss her off, but when she backhands him across the face, he must know it’s working.
Deirdre’s questions are focused and specific. She asks Barclay about everything from his life in his universe to the recent disappearances here in ours. She’s unyielding and determined—even I feel a little off guard at the way she fires questions at him.
But Barclay doesn’t once seem fazed. A few times he lets out little quips or snide remarks. Once he answers her question with, “That’s a little above your pay grade.” But mostly he’s just silent, wearing a heavy-lidded expression of smugness with his lips curved in an arrogant smile.
He doesn’t flinch the couple of times she slaps him, but his lip is bleeding when Struz finally comes home. He opens the door slowly and scans the room without a single expression coming over his face. His eyes meet Deirdre’s, and after whatever silent communication passes between them, she nods and steps aside.
“Take him to a secure location and confiscate everything he has on his person,” he says to the Marine in charge. “Keep three people on him at all times. Someone has to take a piss, they radio for someone to cover for them first.”
“Yes, sir,” the Marine says.
Two of them haul Barclay up, as Deirdre whispers something to Struz. He nods.
As they’re pulling him out the door, Barclay turns back and looks at me. “You’re smart, Tenner. Just like your father. You know you should come with me.”
My face feels hot at the mention of my dad. I wonder what he would think of all this.
But Barclay has no right to bring up my dad. If Barclay had just come clean with him, maybe my dad would still be here. Which means I’m not about to feel bad for Barclay.
I take a deep breath and remind myself that he didn’t want to tell me his plan, and I wasn’t going to blindly follow him. I remind myself I can’t do anything to help.
“You should come with me,” Barclay repeats. “We don’t have a lot of time.”
What he means, though, is Ben.
Ben doesn’t have a lot of time.
“That asshole has come back to tear more shit apart,” Deirdre says, and I’m a little surprised. She isn’t the kind of person who swears. “What more do we need to know?”
“Where the missing people are going,” I say without thinking. Because it’s true. If nothing else comes out of this night, now we know why people are being abducted.
For a minute it feels like the air has been sucked out of the room. Both Deirdre and Struz freeze with their eyes on me. My heartbeat throbs in my chest.
“Barclay is investigating a human-trafficking ring,” I say. Then I tell them about Barclay following me today, surprising me before I got home, and about Jared opening the door for him.
Struz turns to Deirdre. “Get everyone here in the next fifteen minutes. I don’t care what else is going on.” She nods and grabs the walkie-talkie, and Struz puts a hand on my shoulder. He squeezes lightly, and the look on his face is my undoing. His eyes are soft and the lines on his face express concern and worry—they say, Are you okay? I struggle to keep my emotions under control, keep the sting in my eyes from turning into tears. The truth is, sometimes it all feels like it’s too much, like I can’t take it anymore, like I don’t know how to keep living like this.
Struz can either tell how close I am to losing it, or he just gets it, because he pulls me into a hug. “It’ll be okay, J-baby.”
I know that’s not true, but it still makes me feel better.
When everyone is here—everyone being fifteen other FBI agents, most of whom I know from when they were part of my dad’s team—I start over. They all seem to be aware of what happened four months ago, so I start with the missing-persons cases, the ones Deirdre and I have been working on over the past couple of months. I tell them what Barclay told me.
The only thing I don’t tell them is that Ben is a suspect.
I don’t care where he is or what he’s doing. I won’t let myself think about why he didn’t stay at home with his family or why he hasn’t come back. No matter how much it’s eating at my insides, the facts are that he’s not there and he’s not here. But I know he has nothing to do with a human-trafficking ring, and I’m not about to make him a suspect here.
I tell them what Barclay told me about the human trafficking and that the missing people—our missing people—are being abducted for who knows what and pulled into some other universe where they can’t get back, and we can’t go rescue them because we don’t have the technology.
When I finish, no one says anything. A few people exchange looks, but Struz is clearly thinking something through, and no one else is about to jump in. I start to count the seconds as they pass, and it’s a full minute before anyone speaks.
Then Struz says, “Well, fuck me.”
“So we need to figure out how people can combat that,” Deirdre says. “The first priority has to be that we can’t lose more people. Then we can figure out how to get back the ones we lost.”
Several agents jump in and start talking over one another. There’s mention of the Multiverse Project, something Struz has started. The goal is to prove that the multiverse exists and to figure out interverse travel. Struz recruited a few renowned scientists in Southern California and gave them the necklace Barclay told me I could wear to portal safely as well as a few other things he left behind.
A couple of agents are intent on brainstorming ways to fight against the portals. Someone says they need to tell the public. Make some kind of announcement. Explain to people.
At that, Struz shakes his head. “I’ve already violated a presidential order by telling you what Janelle went through in September. And I’ve just violated it again, by having her share this new information.”
One of the agents I don’t know laughs bitterly. “Who cares? That guy’s not our real president, anyway.”
“Wait, we still have a government?” another guy says.
“Let’s save the jokes for later. We can’t make an announcement until we know how people should keep themselves safe,” Deirdre says.
Struz nods. “We’ll only create more panic.”
“We should change curfew,” I say. The side chatter stops. I feel everyone’s eyes on me and even though I don’t know what I’m doing either, I’m bolstered by the respect most of these people have for me. “All of the abduction cases so far have been