Remember Jamie Baker (Jamie Baker #3)(14)

He just blinked at me, still too stunned to move. I looked to Tyson for answers, but he was gaping at me too, with his mouth hanging wide open. In fact, everyone riding in the back of the truck with me was now staring at me with huge, surprised eyes.

“What is it?” I demanded, speaking to the entire group.

Ryan snapped out of it and focused his thoughts before speaking. “Boyfriend?” His face was completely blank of expression, and his tone of voice was perfectly innocent.

“Tony,” I said slowly.

I didn’t know what Ryan was trying to hide from me, but there was definitely something going on. He was putting every ounce of energy he had into keeping his real thoughts and emotions masked.

“He’s not really my boyfriend,” I said, searching for some kind of clue as to what was wrong. “I mean he was, sort of, I guess, but we broke up. It’s complicated.”

“We’re listening…” Tyson prompted.

I sighed. “Complicated, as in I was engaged to him before the amnesia, but afterward I just never fell in love with him again, and now he hates me for it.”

Tyson jerked back, and Ryan went positively rigid. He clenched his jaw and fisted his hands so tightly it hurt to look at them. His knuckles were completely white. When his whole body started to tremble, Tyson reached over me and flicked his arm. “Ryan,” he hissed, “keep it together. Let her explain.”

Ryan sucked in a breath. He didn’t look like he would be ready to speak anytime soon. “Ignore him,” Tyson said to me. “He’ll pull it together in a minute. Tell us more about this guy.”

“Why don’t you start from the beginning?” a large black man suggested. He spoke with a thick African accent and was using a low, steady voice, as if trying to keep things calm. I still had no idea what was going on. The tension in the truck felt ignitable—like one wrong word, one spark, and we’d all go up in flames.

The man looked like he was the oldest of all the ACEs besides Major Wilks. He was most likely in his early forties, and as tall and big as a professional football player. He looked like the type of man people would cross the street to avoid, but when our eyes met his face softened, making him seem more like a giant teddy bear. “What happened after the explosion?” he asked. “What do you remember from before?”

Ryan was still on the verge of going completely insane, so I tried to do as Tyson suggested and ignored him. They would explain in a minute. “I don’t remember anything.” This part of the story, at least, I knew how to tell. “As far as I’m concerned, my life began six months ago when I woke up in the bottom of a crater in Las Vegas. There is absolutely nothing before that.”

Tyson’s eyes bulged, and he got this look on his face suggesting he was appalled by the thought. I pretty much agreed with him. “What’d you do?” he asked. “Wander around by yourself until the cops picked you up?”

I shook my head. “Tony found me almost immediately. He was another one of Visticorp’s subjects.”

“Another PAC?” one of the ACEs asked. They all shot each other excited glances.

I nodded. “He’d gotten out before the building exploded but hadn’t gotten far, and he came back to see what was left. I was it. Everything else had just been…vaporized. I don’t know what I would have done without him. Donovan probably would have found me. Or the police would have. We ran off just as the emergency vehicles started to show up.

“Tony had a place already set up for us that his friend had been helping him with. They’d been making plans to escape for a long time. Tony said the explosion was that escape attempt gone wrong, but it worked out okay, and we had this safe house out in the desert that—”

“Teddy?” Ryan asked suddenly. “You’ve been living with Teddy this entire time? And he told you that you were raised in the Visticorp labs together, and that you were engaged?”

For reasons unbeknownst to me, blind rage overtook Ryan. In desperate need of something to hit, he jumped up and threw his fist into the metal wall in the front of the truck. His knuckles had to be fractured, but he acted as if he didn’t feel any pain.

“Ryan, chill!” Tyson yelled as the truck pulled over and came to a stop. They must have heard the racket from the front of the truck.

As soon as the truck stopped, Ryan jumped out and went stomping off into the desert. The soldiers all exchanged worried looks, and Tyson went running off after Ryan. Major Wilks yelled after Ryan, but it was Tyson who answered him. “Sorry, Major; Ryan needs a minute to cool off. We’ll be right back.”

Mystified, I could do nothing but sit there. “What was that?” I asked no one in particular.

“You’ll have to forgive him, Angel,” the large, calm ACE said quietly. “This is very hard for him.”

“What is?” I asked. “What on earth is going on?”

The man struggled to come up with an answer and finally grimaced. “I think it would be best if Ryan explained…once he’s settled down a little.”

“A little?”

He cringed again.

I was just about to get out of the truck when I heard Tyson catch up to Ryan. “Ryan! Come on, mate, you’ve got to settle down. It’s not as bad as it could be.”

Ryan was still too out-of-his-mind-angry to think straight. “She was with Teddy this whole time! TEDDY!”