Shards

chapter 17

Chapter 17:

My eyes flew open and I looked around. At first I didn't know where I was and that almost sent me into a fit of hysteria.

“Jane! Jane! Are you alright?” It was James, knocking at the door.

Was he really that selfconscious about going into the girl's bathroom? Pushing the panic back into the locked box where it belonged, I crawled across the floor to where I'd left my crutches. Then, using the bathroom wall, I managed to drag myself to my feet. I'd just finished pushing my few stray hairs back into place when the door flew open. It was Erica.

“Oh, Jane, good. We'd thought you'd fallen in or something.”

“No, no, I'm good.”

I tried to smile in a convincing manner. She didn't look convinced.

“So, I'm assuming you recognized the general?” She held the door open for me.

I shook my head. “No. I just got this really weird feeling in my stomach, and chills. Uh! Thank god that's over and done with.” I looked over my shoulder towards one of the bathroom stalls.

Walking out into the hallway, I felt Erica's questioning eyes on the back of my head.

“Jane!” James called out to me. “What happened? What were you doing in there?”

I raised an eyebrow. “What do you think? I can give you a play by play if you want...”

“No... it's fine. So, do you think you knew Earin Philips?”

Yes. “No.”

A strained expression flashed across James's face, but it was gone as quickly as I'd seen it. Putting his mouth a centimeter from my ear, he whispered. “Don't think we're not going to have a talk about this later.”

Then, acting like nothing had happened, he began to follow Erica back down the hall. A smile played at the corner of my lips. I'd expected nothing less. Now, I had a decision to make. Exactly how much was I going to tell him? But that was a question for another time. Right now, I simply needed to make it through the rest of the day without freaking out over something. When we reentered Leon's office, he was still sitting in front of the computer, staring intently at the screen.

“Hey! Look who's back.” He spun to face us. “I thought I'd scared you off.”

I shook my head. “Nature calls. So where were we?”

“Ah, well we were just talking about that poor general who got his head blasted in. While you were in the bathroom, I did a bit more digging and Reynolds is being held in a mental health facility up in DC.”

Now that didn't make any sense. If Jonathan was from the Compound why was he still serving time in a regular old jail cell? From what I knew, that didn't sound like them. Maybe that was just a front. Maybe he wasn't there at all. Or maybe the twenty year old had been deemed a lost cause. I didn't know the age range of kids in the Compound, or what happened to them once they passed a certain point. I knew that unsatisfactory subjects were terminated but if they'd made it to their teen years, what happened? Maybe I could try to request a certain flashback. It had worked before, when I'd learned how I'd met Ian.

“Now, why do you think that Naithen boy was so fixated on Philips's death?” James asked, pulling up a chair.

I did the same.

Leon shrugged. “He was psychotic. They tend to fixate on things.”

“I'm the psychiatrist here. And the diagnosis was schizophrenia.”