I’m so thrown off guard, I feel like I’ve been punched.
“Somewhere else,” Barclay says, and I can’t tell if he’s actually not thrown by the question or if this is another one of those roll-with-it moments where he wants to see what kind of information he can get before revealing his cards.
Either way, I’m not having any of it. “We don’t know where Ben is.” I say the words deliberately, clearly, so there’s no room for any confusion. “That’s why we broke you out.”
“He didn’t send you to get me?” Elijah says, then he looks at Barclay. “You better start fucking talking.”
Barclay shrugs and leans back in his chair. “We don’t know where Ben is, but we need to find him.”
Elijah doesn’t say anything. “Do you know where he is?” I ask.
“I might have an idea.”
“He’s been convicted of human trafficking, unauthorized interverse travel, and treason,” Barclay says. “The order for his execution has gone through, and IA is going to execute everyone he cares about in three days if we don’t figure out who’s behind the trafficking ring and come up with the proof we need to take them down. So we need to find him.”
“Oh, that’s it?” Elijah laughs and the bitterness makes me shiver. He shakes his head. “We’ve got bigger fucking problems than that.”
My breath catches in my throat. Breaking out Elijah was supposed to find us more answers, not more problems. We have enough of those.
“About three months ago, IA grabbed both me and Ben and brought us in, threw us in that prison,” Elijah says. I almost interrupt and tell him we know this part. But I bite my lip and let him finish. “A couple guards brought this guy in, Constantine Meridian, or something pansy like that, and he told us he could get us out if we worked for him.”
Constantine Meridian. I picture the guy I saw outside of Derek’s cell. His military-green button-down with blood spattered on the front. His shaved head and the barbed-wire tattoo on his neck.
“The choice was join up or get your shit kicked in. When that didn’t work”—he pauses and looks at me—“it was join up or watch them kick the shit out of people you care about.”
I swallow. I’m not surprised. I saw what Derek looked like and the shape Elijah was in.
“I held fast,” Elijah says. “Me. I told them I didn’t give a shit about anyone including myself.” I know it’s a lie. No matter what he was like in my world, Elijah cared about getting home, he cared about getting back to his family. And he cared about Ben.
But what he says next is even more wrong.
“Ben, fucking Ben. He said, ‘Sign me up.’”
03:01:11:36
“There’s no way he would do that,” I say, my voice firm.
I’m relieved there’s something I can be sure about. Ben isn’t a bad guy. He would never help them. I look at Barclay to validate what I’m saying, but he just sits there. No disagreements. Worse, there’s no surprise on his face, nothing to suggest he didn’t know this was coming.
I shake my head. “Ben wouldn’t do that,” I say again. I know Ben. I know what he went through—how guilty he felt—when he was in my world. He would never use what he could do to smuggle people—to make people slaves. Not for anything.
Elijah touches my hand.
I look from Elijah to Barclay. “You know he wouldn’t.” I’m practically pleading with him to agree with me. Elijah’s been tortured and locked away in prison for months. He’s delusional. But Barclay is rational. And we’ve talked about Ben. He told me he didn’t believe that Ben was involved—that Ben was just some kind of scapegoat for the dirty IA agents to cover their tracks.
But when Barclay looks down and avoids my eyes, I know.
This is what he expected to hear.
Which means I’m missing a huge piece of the puzzle because I can’t think of anything that would make Ben join a human-trafficking ring. Of all people, Ben knows what it’s like to stumble out of his world and end up somewhere else—somewhere he doesn’t belong. He would never inflict that on anyone else.
I turn away from the table and look around the café. It’s the first time that I notice there’s another Seattle’s Best right across the street. Apparently Seattle’s Best is this universe’s Starbucks. I’m trying to grasp some kind of normalcy, something I can latch on to, something that will