Endgame (Book 3)

Chapter 39

"Depends. Who am I talking to?" I asked.

"Are you serious right now?" He raised one of his hands towards me, probably just as a gesture, but I quickly aimed my flat palm at him anyway.

"I won't ask again," I said.

"I'm Jeremiah. You know, the person taking care of you for the past few days?"

"I wouldn't really call it that..." Ashley dropped in.

"Your eyes aren't black anymore," I said aloud. He wasn't giving off any of Di-Men's energy, either.

"Why would they be?" Jeremiah's eyes shifted across the room, meeting everyone's faces. "Why is Sage unconscious?"

This is just like the weird mind control that was going on while I was in the Antarctica facility. He has no recollection of anything he's done.

Actually, now that I think about it, I never got to figure that whole situation out completely. Blink stopped me when he woke me up. Unless...Zero was the one doing it? Was he manually trying to push me out of the capsule from inside my own mind? Was he the reason why I was able to make it out of there?

Whatever happened to Blink?

"Because you did it to her," I said audibly. "And now, you're going to tell me how."

Dad breathed heavily. I glanced at him; he gave me an approving nod.

In a second, I had Jeremiah hands tied behind his back with a piece of rope I found in the garage. From what I had seen of him and Cassie, they needed an appendage to use their powers. They used their hands, mostly. So without them, I would at least have time to subdue him before he could use them.

Jeremiah wiggles his hands and looked over his shoulder to look at them. "What a nice way to treat a guest," he said dryly. "But you still haven't told me how I got here."

"I'm sorry I have to do this right now, but I'll explain it to you after you tell me something."

"I have a feeling I know what you want. I'll tell you anything you need to know."

The expression of shock mirrored on all of our faces seemed to amuse him. He laughed lightly, maintaining eye contact with me.

Everyone stood around a loose circle in the room around him, eager to hear what he was about to say.

"By this point, I'm guessing the only thing you don't know- or are interested in hearing- is how Zero came to be, exactly," he began. "He- please stop, Cassie. You don't need to check if I am telling the truth. I have no reason to lie."

Cassie looked at the floor, her face turning red. The wood around her feet groaned.

Her natural response to embarrassment was to make a telekinetic shield around herself physically. I wasn't sure why she did this; she could never tell me why, just that it was a natural reflex that helped her relax.

"Continue," I ushered him.

"Oh, right," Jeremiah said. "Anyway, Zero was the result of a failed experiment we performed a very long time ago. We were trying to make you- er, the other Jay- stronger by exposing him to a seemingly harmless variant of dimensional energy. But it didn't work."