The Conduit: Chapter 13

“What would you like to talk about, Commander Shepherd?”

Max chuckled at the girl in front of him. They were hardly on formal terms, considering she was the victim of something horrible and he’d treated her like she was in protective custody rather than a suspect. Now, as he challenged her to a one-on-one, she was formalizing how she addressed him with some umph behind her tone.

“Let’s start with an easy one,” suggested Max. “Do you understand why you’re here?”

“Do you?” she immediately snapped back.

If this were an interrogation like any other that he’d run before, Max would have had his hand around her throat, and she’d have been up against the wall behind her. He’d have thrown his chair back as he lunged at her, theatrically reminding her that the time for playing games was long since over.

Jane was pacing back and forth in the containment cell, her arms folded in front of her, suggesting defensiveness. Max recognized the signs, but didn’t detect her being defensive. The tone in her voice was quite the opposite of someone on the defense. Watching her, he realized Jane believed she had cards to play. Max wondered, what was her game?

“Why were you in the village in Afghanistan?”

“Is that really the question you wanted to ask?” Jane asked, turning and looking him in the eyes.

“What else would I want to ask?”

Max heard her voice in his head, as he heard her asking, “don’t you want to know who I am, or where I come from?” He struggled to remain calm, knowing it wasn’t his imagination. She was actually in his head, but how? He’d interrogated hundreds of subjects over the years and never encountered anyone with psychic abilities.

“It’s not your imagination, Max,” Jane said, chuckling.

Had she heard me, wondered Max. He had questioned if he imagined it, if he wanted her to be more than she was. How was she doing this? Max stood, looking at the girl, tensely wondering what to ask her next.

“Alright, Jane. Where do you come from?”

“You’ll want to sit down, Max. It’s a bit of a long story…” she instructed before her voice faded.

Max took a seat and took out a notepad. He heard Jane mumble he’d need more than a note pad to record her story, so he called for one of the men in the control room to bring him a recorder. When the officer had delivered him a handheld recorder, Max pressed the record button and made a statement.

“This is Commander Maxwell Shepherd of the Oceanic Exploration Station, and I’m here to take a statement from prisoner Jane Doe, a detainee in confinement aboard the station,” he described. “Now, Jane, where are you from?”

Jane began to describe home. It was a simple place, with lush vegetation, beautiful weather, and abundance that abounded.

“Home isn’t where you might think it would be,” she promised.

Jane described home and being a far-away place that his kind couldn’t reach. She knew it was a great distance due to the amount of time she’d spent in captivity before being locked away in an icy tomb. But her home had been a wonderous place, something her father was proud of. She was supposed to be proud of it, but Jane didn’t like that her father had married her off to someone without consulting her.

“My kind, we’re not expected to have feelings, passions, or our own thoughts,” explained Jane. “Do you know what that’s like?”

“Women in my country didn’t have many rights until about one-hundred years ago,” admitted Max.

Her laughter exploded through the chamber as she walked in a circle. Jane found the insinuation funny, that she could be compared to the women from his country. The rights they had were hardly sufficient, and many were still viewed by men as being lesser beings even though they were now doctors, fighters, or whatever they chose to be. None were forced into indentured servitude from the moment of their existence. None were treated as someone’s bound concubine because their father said it was so.

“That’s a horrible way to live,” admitted Max.

“I’m glad you see it that way,” Jane told him.

Jane escaped from the life chosen for her and carried out across a sprawling desert that seemed to last for hundreds of miles. She described how she felt like she was going to die, she stumbled upon an oasis of sorts. It was a place of ample water, growing vegetation, and easy to find fruits to eat. She’d survived escaping from the paradise she was thrust into, a life that was her own private hell.

“What happened then?”

“Three of my father’s soldiers came for me…”

The three that came for her were unsuccessful, ultimately, accepting their own deal with Jane even though her father wouldn’t like it. And, he hadn’t, and didn’t choose to accept the bargain. No, her father had a punishment of his own in mind. But by the time her father had come for her, she’d found someone else.

“There was someone at this oasis with you?”

It was less of a someone, and more of a something, admitted Jane. But they didn’t dissuade her from having her own feelings, and as horrid as he was, he respected her for her feelings and desires. He made her feel valued, unlike her father. And he didn’t expect to be her superior. Jane was his equal every bit in their paradise together. That was why she bore his children…so many times.

“You have children?”

“Had,” sighed Jane.

Max began to get an eerie feeling about Jane’s story. It all seemed traumatic, and while parts sounded to unbelievable to be true, he believed the things she was saying. She was too ambiguous for it to make sense, however. It left Max with questions he waited for Jane to answer.

“So, the relationship you were in, it was a bad one,” suggested Max.

Describing it, Jane made it sound loving and liberating at the same time. For the time she was forced into a relationship of servitude and was taught to relent obediently to what she described as her husband, finding her second relationship was somehow freeing. It sounded to Max like she was an incubator, having had an unfathomable number of young, and yet Jane referred to it in terms that made it sound inviting.

“What about your first husband?” he asked.

“My father found another wife for him, someone meant to forever be less than he was and allow him to crawl on top of her whenever he desired. I couldn’t believe how little I meant to father that he replaced me so easily,” she said, a tear in her eye.

“That sounds horrible,” admitted Max. “What did you do?”

It was a year or so later when Jane returned home for the first time. She admired her husband and his new wife. They were so happy in their little slice of heaven, she told Max. That was why she had to bring about the end of their paradise. She could still enter and exit, despite her father cursing her, banishing her to the roughest life possible. He forgot to close the door, to keep her from coming and going, so she used it.

“Didn’t anyone see you?”

“Do you always see what’s right in front of you?” quipped Jane.

Jane confessed to always having an ability to disguise herself from those not meant to see her. In this case, she appeared to the wife, whispering in her ear about the choices she was forbidden from making. All she had to do was to get the new wife to make one choice, and from there, the paradise her father designed for her husband would fall. It wasn’t even hard, not after what her father had done to her.

“You keep referring to what your father did. What exactly did he do to you?”

Jane described how it was to be a banished mark in her father’s lands, to be known as the rebellious one, and to have fallen from his grace. She was a pariah in her father’s world, and as such, could be mistaken for many things. In those times, it wasn’t unusual for such a curse to be bestowed upon someone. There were many, she explained.

The intercom sounded in the detention chamber. It was Susan. Susan needed Max to step away from the barrier and join them in the control center.

“Just a minute,” Max answered.

“Now, Commander, I need to see you,” demanded Susan.

Max stood and began to leave the detention unit. As he did, Jane stopped him and asked him an odd question. She wanted to know if he liked the odor at night. She wanted to know if he enjoyed the smell of jasmine.

“What did you say?”

Jane looked at Max, smiling as she replied, “Jasmine, do you enjoy it, when you’re visited? Do you enjoy it, in the night, when you’re not alone?”

Max shrugged off the comment, exiting the room and stepping into the control center. He shook off the chills from speaking with Jane. This had been the strangest encounter he had with the girl, but he longed to hear the rest of her story. He felt as if she was opening up to him, in bits and pieces. Somewhere, hidden in that dark and wretched tail of misery, was the truth about who she was. He just had to give her the time to get to the truth.

“What is it?” he demanded.

Susan looked at him, acknowledging the way he was sweating, the dilated pupils, and the slight appearance of being flushed. The tips of Max’s ears were bright red. She walked to him and put her hand against his chest. His heart was pounding so hard she was surprised he hadn’t noticed.

“Look at yourself,” she ordered. “I don’t know what was going on out there, or what kind of a creepy connection you have with this girl, but she was clearly winning.”

Max didn’t like the insinuation. He’d run interrogations, and in Jane’s case, he was letting her rant and getting more than they’d gotten from her in the days since her arrival. Max believed he was firmly in control. He had finally gotten somewhere with her. The more Jane opened up, the more they’d learn about the girl.

“Really?” asked Susan. “What the hell was all that about? Jasmine?”

“I don’t know,” sighed Max.

“But you recognized it…” Susan said, trailing of as Max pulled her aside.

“Do you remember me telling you about the woman in my suite?”

“The cocoa skinned hottie?”

“That’s the one,” he admitted.

“What about her?” she whispered.

Max looked around the control center, making sure the two officers weren’t listening. He admitted that each night his mystery lover came to him, there was a wonderful scent of Jasmine. It was a perfume his wife wore, and something he’d always remember whenever he thought of her. He thought it was part of the reason he’d been so easily seduced by the strange woman.

He didn’t know how Jane would know about the woman, or the scent. He hadn’t told anybody else about it, and while his assistant knew he was looking at staff, Shelly thought he was trying to get to know the names of all those aboard the Oceanic. He hadn’t mentioned the romantic interludes.

“Clearly, she knows more than she’s letting on,” thought Susan. “And that story. How outlandish is that?”

“I found it believable. I think she was opening up,” admitted Max.

Susan described how it sounded to her. A vagabond young girl with a distant and horribly abusive father, in a foreign country, forced his daughter into an arranged marriage at an inappropriately young age. That much she found believable. But the parts about Jane being able to disguise herself, to return to the lands her father controlled, to use suggestions to end the happiness of her former husband and his new wife, were all too fantastic. And the way Jane made her father sound, to Susan, was near cult like.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, she’s playing you. She’s doing a really good job, but she’s using this as an opportunity. For what I don’t know, but I wouldn’t trust her,” explained Susan.

Max stopped and thought about what Susan said. If she was right, then Jane might be the thing that killed those people in the province village before she was apprehended. But she was a child, barely old enough to vote in the states. How could she have taken out so many so easily and then allowed herself to be captured? As much as he believed Susan was looking out for him, he couldn’t see a girl like Jane being so violent.

“Look, it’s not that I trust her. It’s that I don’t think she’s lying right now,” Max assured her.

“At least do this,” suggested the doctor. “Take a break. Step away for a few hours and come back to it. You were up all-night working on the new fog lights with security. A clearer, less weary mind couldn’t hurt.”

Max was exhausted, that much was true. He went back into confinement and asked Jane if there was anything he could have the galley cook up for her. She too dropped the interrogation tension and announced she liked the eggs and sausage; with the sweet pastry she enjoyed a couple of days before. Max promised to have some sent down to her before returning to his other duties.

“Thanks, Max,” said Jane, turning and whistling a tune.

Max walked into his suite and plopped, not sat, on the sofa in the main room. He hadn’t slept for 30 hours or more. He picked up a notepad and started writing notes from the interrogation session. These were the things he wouldn’t be sharing with the group. And as he scribbled notes across three pages, getting his feelings about Jane out of his system, the lights slowly went dark.

Soft, luxuriant hands covered his eyes from behind. He didn’t need to guess. She had returned. Max breathed in the scent of Jasmine, his tensions from the day and a lack of sleep subsided. This was the first time she’d appeared to him during daylight hours. He turned to her, seeing Jane’s face instead.

Max jumped off the sofa, shocked out of his nap. He looked around the room, expecting not to be alone. As he caught his breath, he could still smell the enticing scent of Jasmine through his suite. A quick look at his watch told him he’d been out for longer than it felt. Five hours had gone by since he excused himself.

“Susan,” he said, his hand pressing a button on an intercommunications system. “It’s Max.”

“You have a nice nap?”

“No,” replied Max. “I didn’t. And now I think you were right about Jane.”

“I’ll be right there,” she replied. “Don’t go back to interrogation until we talk.”

“Deal,” sighed Max, slumping into his chair.