For A Star To Fall

Chapter 16: A Personal Insult

Chapter 16

Jordan felt detached, like his mind was floating somewhere that definitely was not here. Maybe this was what Emyle felt most of the time, he thought, this divided sensation, as if two parts of your mind are separated. It was a strange feeling, but one he welcomed, as it meant that he would not really have to feel anything for a while. Just a brief respite was what he needed, especially after that whole crazy waking nightmare—the word was hallucination, most likely—that he had experienced.

Blinking a little, he watched as Emyle opened the second file, the one with her dad’s name and the four digits that made up the current year. Jordan thought back to the title of the file directly above this one, and felt this faint sense of dread. The previous file was titled Katherine [’03] and Katherine had died in that last video, on the twenty-sixth of October, 2103. He decided not to point out to Emyle that the files and videos were all arranged in the same format—chronological order. And in the two files, the same experimental, torturous process would repeat as Dr. Valin injected his serums into his subjects, causing them what seemed like unbearable pain, even until the moment they died.

It what Jordan thought was correct, and the human body could not stand whatever chemicals Dr. Valin had mixed together and put in his serums, then Emyle’s mom’s death had been inevitable, and her dad’s—Aaron’s—would be too. However, there were only two videos in the file, so Dr. Valin’s experiments could not have done much damage in such a short time, right?

Still, anything could happen. Jordan watched as Emyle gripped the mouse, her index finger poised right over the left-click button as she hesitated. The little white arrow on the laptop screen was hovering above the first line in the file, which was the Word document. Before they had watched the previous video, Emyle had told him that it was better to watch it for themselves rather than read it in paragraphs of words on the screen. Jordan had really regretted listening to her after watching that last video in Katherine’s file. Seeing someone else die, even if it had occurred almost two decades ago was still difficult and painful, especially because he had been reminded of his own mom—or more specifically, her death, and also had to watch Emyle deal with the aftershocks that she had experienced too.

No, for the sake of both of them, Jordan could not let Emyle go through that again. He knew that her dad was the one that had raised her from young, since she had told him that her mom had passed away when she was really young—probably as little as a toddler. This meant that if Emyle saw her dad die the same way she had watched Katherine’s death, she would most likely be way more affected than before. And jordan would have the watch this strange girl that he felt rather affectionate towards go through another bout of what she had seen before, in the previous video. Then Jordan started to wonder what kind of emotions she had to suppress that time and also of the amount and intensity would increase with Aaron Graymark in Katherine’s place. 

Emyle paused, and felt conflict raging inside her mind. Her gaze flicked downwards to the last video on the screen, even though she did not move the mouse. Which one should she click? The Word document or the video? The Word document was most likely a report on the results of Dr. Valin’s experiments, and would probably give her the information she needed without causing her to feel too much emotions, so technically it would be the better choice of the two. But the video would give her insight into whether the place Father was being kept was Dr. Valin’s private laboratory, and what kind of condition he was in—whether he was still relatively healthy or deathly ill. And he would not be dead, Emyle promised herself. The odds were stacked against the probability of that coming true. Besides, it had only been about two days; surely Father was strong enough to hold out as Dr. Valin conducted his experiments on him.

“Go on, click on it already, Emyle. Click on the Word doc,” Jordan urged her on. However, with a slight but decisive shake of her head, Emyle moved the mouse downwards so that the little white arrow was positioned right over the blue bar of the last video which was titled 28/2/2121—today’s date. This meant that Dr. Valin’s most recent experiment on Father had been today and that he had somehow found time to conduct one—perhaps in the morning, Jordan thought, since he was usually free then. Her jaw set, she pressed down two times with her index finger on the mouse, double-clicking on the video.