Lord, Grant Me The Freedom…
Part 2
“Freedom is
not the right to live as we please, but the right to find out how we ought to
live in order to fulfil our potential.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Jarod lay on
the bed, one hand over his eyes to block out the sunlight that streamed in
through the window and onto his face. Three weeks. He was beginning to count
down already. His mind traveled back to the courtroom.
The verdict.
Guilty.
The sentence.
One year.
That was all.
It was a light sentence, considering the crime, but for a man who had not
committed the crime, it was a weight he felt that he could never throw off.
One year.
Three hundred
and sixty-five days.
Eight
thousand, seven hundred and sixty hours.
Five hundred
and twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes. Roughly. But, with the time he’d
already served, those long three weeks, that left only three hundred and forty-four
days or eight thousand, two hundred and fifty-six hours or four hundred and
ninety-five thousand, three hundred and sixty minutes. Give or take. The
meaningless calculations took up some of the time, but not enough.
Jarod looked
out through the bars to the sky, which was reddening as the late autumnal sun
set. He was trapped again. Helpless and hopeless with amazingly less chance of
escape than ever before. And only because he had been pretending to be someone
else. He silently cursed the gift that had been given to him. Perhaps it was a
wonderful to be able to help people, but what if you ended up in a place like
this? Twice. Not just once, in a man-made hellhole and through no fault of his
own, but now twice. And all because he had something that almost no one else in
the world had. The ability to become those other people was what had been
responsible, both times, for the situation he was currently in.
The rooms
were a similar size and similar coloring, with the lack of any bright hues. The
small camera in the corner completed the illusion that he was in the same place
and it was only the lack of simulations that convinced him that he had not been
returned to the Centre when he was unaware of it.
He moaned
slightly and rolled over onto his side, facing towards the wall. A vain attempt
to hide himself from camera, as he had done so often in the past.
A whole
month. Miss Parker stared at the wall in her office, her arms folded as she
leant back slightly in the chair. Her feelings of failure were intense and she
could constantly feel them gnawing away at her. It was not only the month which
had passed since Jarod had made any contact with anyone from the Centre, but
also the fact that three and a half years had passed since he had first escaped
and she was now no closer than she had ever been to capturing him.
Of course the
Tower was demanding answers. But they could only push her as hard as she
allowed them to. It was her own force, and her own pressure, that drove her
onwards when everything else seemed hopeless.
Everything
logical told her that he was gone, that something had finally caused him to
break connections with them. With her. It was that which hurt most, although
she hated to admit it, even to herself. She turned over in her hand the gift
that Jarod had sent to both herself and Sydney, nearly six weeks earlier. A
small mirror. The note had been so pointed, despite containing only two words.
’Know
thyself’.
Broots
glanced up from the computer as Miss Parker burst in through the door. It was,
he though ruefully, becoming more than a daily occurrence and almost an hourly
one. Now he looked up as he shoved a piece of paper under her nose. The paper
itself and the words written on it were annoyingly familiar, as was the
sentence she uttered.
“Find out for
me where these come from. Trace their origin.”
As she left,
he stopped her dead in the doorway. “I’ve already done it, Miss Parker. I’ve
got the answers here.”
She turned
and stared at him. The one word was like a drop in a still pond. “How?”
“Well,
um...Sydney asked me to do it yesterday.”
Broots began
to slide down in his seat until the computer screen hid Miss Parker from view,
at which point he immediately felt better. It didn’t last. She moved around
until she could both see and reach the card he held in his hand and which was
identical to the one she had given him.
Her glance
moved between the paper and the nervous technician for several more moments
until finally she moved over to stand behind him while he deactivated the
screensaver and showed her the results that he had found.