Maple Falls English Version

Reconciliation

Chapter 20

                                                                                                                 RECONCILIATION

                                                                                                                                                          

                                                               Seattle

                                                          January 2041

It took a long time until they received the first clues. They had enjoyed Christmas as much as possible and shortly before New Year's Eve the first tips came to Alec.

Max had gone to him but he had holed up in Joshua's old house over Christmas like he did every year. He then sat there for days, playing the piano and was unresponsive. She now knew why he completely isolated himself from time to time and she wanted to finally talk to him as soon as he was responsive again and relieve him of some of his heavy burden.

So far, Oliver had not been able to reconstruct the route of the vehicle in which Gray was kidnapped. They had fragments but it didn't make a complete route.

It was approaching January 15th and therefore the birthday of the older Y2 group. And Seth became more and more restless every day. He wanted to celebrate his birthday with Grey and the clues only slowly formed a picture from which they could develop a plan to get to Grey.

Max and Alec had finally arranged to meet after Alec had emerged from his obscurity and they sat down with all the documents, information and everything they needed to talk about upstairs in the room where Grey and Seth had spent the last few weeks. A few more tips were added and they laid out the puzzle pieces on the floor to get an overview. Alec was standing in front of the large area of papers and pictures when Max looked at him sideways and the question blurted out:

“Can you remember exactly how Ben came to be?”

“You mean whether I wanted to do it or just whether I can remember details”.

“I’m more referring to your feeling about it.”

“Feeling, no, I don’t have feelings, you know.”

As always, he tried to get out of it with sarcasm and irony so as not to have to deal with his feelings. She had looked a little too deeply into his soul too often.

“Alec, please, it’s important to me.”

He looked at her pleadingly, he didn't want to dive in there himself, but he would actually do almost anything for Max and so he sat over on the bed and put his head in his hands. He began to tell the story. First, from the day the kidnappers caught him. Then how he kept waking up and how he stayed awake longer and longer could stay. They were practically always under observation except when they were taken to their cells and the gas was supposed to make them incapacitated again. At first he wasn't able to stay awake for full days. At first it was a few minutes, later a few hours. He knew the area and he soon knew that he was not being held there alone. And then the day came when he realized that everyone under the influence of the drugs was doing exactly what they were told. Nobody spoke, everyone was silent and walked in step like zombies. He didn't know how long they had been there, but he felt that there were always gaps in his daily routine during which he couldn't stay awake at first. He then realized that all of the female X5s were succumbing to their heat through the cat DNA but were controllable through the drugs.