Field Investigations

Chapter 14: Interrogation

"Uh... What do you mean?" I tried to read his facial expression. Was he anxious? Upset?

He didn't respond, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a Transporter while opening his Field Interface with his other hand. His transporter was shiny, silver, and perfectly spherical with smooth dials and a small, curved touchscreen on the bottom. I watched silently as he tapped furiously at the screen while swiping with his other hand through different graphs on the Field Interface. After a minute, he spun the top dial open and pressed down on the button on his Transporter, immediately turning transparent. 

"We're in what's called an isolated Field right now. No one in any other dimension, Field or not, can hear or see us right now," he told me quietly, as if he didn't quite believe what he was saying about not being seen or heard. "And we're untraceable. The Field Interface won't display our location to anyone."

"What's going on?" I asked. "Why are you whispering if we can't be seen or heard?"

"Like I said a minute ago, there are some questions I need to ask you." He completely ignored my second question.

"Questions... about what?" 

"Kenna Rainer is one of the scouts who brought you here. Correct?"

"Yeah," I told him. "Why? Is she alright?" Douglas had told him to send down someone from the medical team to check on Kenna. Could it be that she's more badly injured than we thought?

He brushed off my question. "That doesn't matter right now," he said. "How was Kenna injured?"

"She... she was shot."

"By whom?"

"These people... in the Field." I wasn't sure how much I should tell him. I definitely didn't trust him, and I didn't know what he wanted with this information.

"Were these people in the Field on your bus, or did you encounter them outside?" 

"Why does this matter?" I didn't want to accidentally tell him anything that would endanger Kenna or I. 

"It doesn't matter why this matters. I'm not joking around here. We need this information."

"Who's 'we'?" I was sort of enjoying being the person withholding information for a change. 

"Just tell me. Were these people on the bus or off the bus?" John was starting to get pretty annoyed. "Listen, did you forget that you were kidnapped and brought here?"

"You've been telling me for the last half hour that I 'wasn't really kidnapped'," I reminded him. "And I'm sick of nobody telling me anything. Why should I tell you?"

"Because I'm working with the people who kidnapped you," he said. "Your best bet would be to assume that I'm a terrible person who has no qualms about harming those who stand in my way."

That was a ridiculous thing to say, but it was also, in some strange way, right. I didn't want to raise suspicion, and if I kept arguing right now that would definitely be a step in the wrong direction, making any sort of escape plan harder to pull off.

"They were on the bus," I told him.

"And how did you end up in the Field on the bus?"

Wait, Kenna was allowed to let me go into the Field earlier, right? If she wasn't, answering honestly could make the situation worse for both of us. Lying could be risky, though, and if she was allowed to send me into the Field then making something up right now would only further complicate the situation. And I couldn't wait too long to answer, either. He'd think that I was trying to cover something up if I stalled for too long.

"We went into the Field to... to get through a traffic jam." Not the truth, but not a lie either. Not really an answer at all, but to him it should seem like one.

"And you saw these people, correct? They followed you back out of the Field?"

"Yes," I answered. He looked at me intently like he thought I was still hiding something.

"How did they look?" he asked me. 

"They were dressed in..." I thought back, trying to remember. "In suits, like they were on their way to some sort of interview. There were two people, a man and a woman. The man had blond hair, long hair that went down to his neck. And the woman-"

"No, that's not what I meant," he complained, clearly frustrated. "Did they have the pin?"

"The what?"

"The pin," he said again, like his meaning should be obvious. "Clearly they didn't if you still don't know what I'm talking about."

"Well, they had name tags on, if that's what you mean," I remembered, "but I couldn't read them. They were too far away," I explained.

"Are you sure they were name tags?" he questioned, straightening up like a cat that just spotted a small bird perched a few feet away. 

"No - well, not really. The writing seemed like maybe it was in a different language, but I don't know. I was probably just too far to read-"

"What did the letters look like? On the name tags, I mean."

"I - I'm sorry. I don't remember. Like I said, I was too far away to really see them." For a second, I thought he was going to press for more answers, but instead he seemed to relax a little. He pressed down on the button, and I jumped a little when I saw myself return to my normal, visible form.

"We're almost there," he told me.

"What?" I wasn't sure what he was talking about.

"The elevator," he clarified. "We're almost to the three-hundred and forty-seventh floor."

"Oh," I said. "Can - can I ask anything else?"

"Sure, go ahead." 

"What's on the three-hundred and forty-seventh floor?" 

He laughed. "Well, you'll find out in a second, won't you?" As he spoke, the LED display that showed which floor we were on ticked up onto three-hundred and forty-seven. There was a loud, ringing noise as the elevator doors slid open in front of us, revealing a long hallway with what looked like hundreds of doors on each side. 

The first thing I noticed was the strange pattern of the carpeted floor. The design, made up of different shades of purple, made the floor look as if it was filled with large bumps and craters like the surface of an asteroid. Walking along it was a little disorienting when I first stepped out of the elevator.

"Why the surface-of-the-moon design?" I asked. "It's making me dizzy."

"Oh, no particular reason," he responded. "It's just much more fun than all the other patterns we had to choose from." He seemed much more relaxed now. It was almost like he'd forgotten that, only a minute ago, he had been questioning me as if I'd committed a crime.

The next thing I noticed was that, while the hallway was well-lit, there was a distinct lack of windows and light bulbs. It seemed like the floor, walls, and ceiling themselves were the light source, emitting a light, uniform glow in all places so that there were no shadows in the hallway. The lack of shadows gave the hallway an eerie look, as if every shred of darkness had been forcibly vacuumed out of it in order to give it its artificial brightness.

But the last thing I noticed, the most off-putting quality of this hallway, was its silence. Not a normal kind of quiet like the kind in New York or Toronto with the ambient noise always humming in the background, but the kind of silence that screams over all other noises like a pair of extra-powerful noise-cancelling headphones. 

The combined effect of the floor, light, and sound (or lack thereof) was starting to get to me, and I could feel my heart speeding up in my chest. I needed to get out of this hallway. No - scratch that - I needed to get out of this place. I needed-