Recursion(59)

He hopes Helena has realized what’s happening and fled. He needs to buy her more time. If she can get to her Red Hook lab, in four months, she can finish building the chair and return to this day and fix this.

“You’re not hearing me, Gwen. Take everyone back down to the garage and leave.” Barry turns and screams down the corridor toward the lab, “Helena, run!”

The sound of rattling gear starts down the corridor—they’re moving toward him.

Barry juts around the corner and fires a shot at the ceiling.

The return of gunfire is an instantaneous overreaction—a maelstrom of bullets strafing the corridor all around him.

Gwen screaming, “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

“Helena, go! Get out of the building!”

Now something rolls down the corridor and stops three feet from Barry. Before he even has time to wonder what it is, the flash-bang cracks open, a blinding ribbon of light and smoke unfurling, his vision bright white and the high-pitched tone of temporary hearing loss blocking out all other noise.

When the first bullet hits him, he doesn’t feel any pain—only impact.

Then comes another and another, tearing into his sides, his leg, his arm, and as the pain comes, it occurs to him that Helena won’t be saving him this time.





He who controls the past controls the future.

   He who controls the present controls the past.

   —GEORGE ORWELL, 1984





HELENA





November 15, 2018–April 16, 2019





Day 8


It is the strangest captivity.

The apartment is a one-bedroom near Sutton Place, spacious and high-ceilinged, with a million-dollar view of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, East River, and the distant sprawl of Brooklyn and Queens.

She doesn’t have access to a phone, Internet connection, or any other mode of contact with the outside world.

Four cameras, mounted to the walls, keep watch over every square inch of space, their red recording lights glowing above her even while she sleeps.

Her captors, a couple named Alonzo and Jessica, carry themselves with a calm collectedness. In the beginning, it eased her nerves.

Day one, they sat her down in the living room and said, “We know you have questions, but we aren’t the ones to answer them.”

Helena asked anyway.

What happened to Barry?

Who raided Marcus Slade’s building?

Who’s keeping me here?

Jessica leaned forward and said, “We’re expensive prison guards, OK? Nothing more. We don’t know why you’re here. We don’t want to know why you’re here. But if you’re cool, we, and the other people working with us, who you will never meet, will be cool.”

They provide her meals.

Every other day, they make a run to the grocery store and bring back whatever she writes down on a piece of paper.

On a surface level, they’re friendly enough, but there’s an undeniable hardness in their eyes—no, a detachment—which makes her fairly certain they would hurt her, or worse, if the order ever came down.

She watches the news first thing in the mornings, and with each passing cycle, FMS occupies less bandwidth in the endless parade of tragedies and scandals and celebrity gossip.

When another school shooting takes nineteen lives, it is the first day since the Big Bend appeared that FMS isn’t mentioned in the top headlines.



* * *





Her eighth day in the apartment, Helena sits at the kitchen island, eating a breakfast of huevos rancheros and watching sunlight pour through the window that overlooks the river.

This morning, in the reflection of the bathroom mirror, she inspected the row of stitches across her forehead and the fading, black-and-yellow bruise from the SWAT officer who knocked her unconscious on the stairwell of Slade’s building while she was trying to escape.

Each day, the pain lessens as the fear and uncertainty grow.

She eats slowly, trying not to think of Barry, because when she imagines his face, the abject helplessness of her situation becomes unbearable, and the not knowing what’s happening makes her want to scream.

The dead bolt turns, and Helena looks down the short hall into the foyer as the door swings open to reveal a man who, up until now, has existed only in a dead memory.

Rajesh Anand says to someone in the hall, “Close the door and turn off the cameras.”

“Holy shit, Raj?” She leaves her stool at the island and meets him where the hall opens into the living room. “What are you doing here?”

“Came to see you.” He stares at Helena with an air of confidence he didn’t have when they worked together on the rig, looking better with age, his clean-shaven features at once delicate and handsome. He’s wearing a suit and holding a briefcase in his left hand. The corners of his brown eyes crinkle with a genuine smile.

They move into the living room and sit across from each other on a pair of leather sofas.

“You’re comfortable here?” he asks.

“Raj, what’s happening?”

“You’re being held in a safe house.”

“Under whose authority?”

“The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.”