Jenny Plague-Bringer(141)
In time, she drifted back to gaze at her own bullet-shattered corpse, with no more emotion for it than a cast-off piece of clothing on the floor. She’d already begun to see that her life as Juliana was only the most recent chapter in a story that stretched back a hundred thousand years, all of her lives as a human being. She recalled that she was an outsider on this plane, in this world, not a human soul at all. If human beings had an afterlife, that was not for her to experience. She could only wait for the opportunity to be born again. Until then, she was isolated. Between lives, her kind could only communicate through formless feelings and sensations. True communication and contact required a human shape.
She was dead, beyond pain, beyond suffering, beyond desire, beyond hope. In the native formless condition of her soul, she could only watch, wait, and listen.
Chapter Forty-Five
It was three in the morning when Tommy opened the door to Esmeralda’s concrete cell. He left the lights off, though the camera in her ceiling probably had a night mode. He shook her by the shoulder. “Wake up. We’re going.”
“What?” Esmeralda sat up, rubbing her eyes. “Who...what are we doing?”
“I’m helping you escape,” he whispered. “Like you wanted. We have to go now. I brought you these.” He dropped a folded set of surgical scrubs onto her bed. “You don’t want to be wearing the orange jumpsuit.”
Esmeralda looked at the thin blue shirt and pants.
“We have to go now. You know they’re watching,” Tommy urged.
She nodded and got out of bed. He relished a moment of seeing her in the simple cotton bra and panties they’d issued her, the delicious curves of her warm, brown body...her long, glossy black hair, her deep, dark eyes. He’d missed her badly. He’d made a few more visits at Ward’s instruction, explaining why she needed to agree to work with ASTRIA. He knew her life would be in danger if she didn’t start acting happy to cooperate. The flickers of past-life memory he’d experienced since arriving Germany made that clear. When Ward, or Kranzler, was done with you, your life became disposable.
“I’m ready,” she whispered.
“They’ll be coming for us.” Tommy led the way out into the cellblock corridor. He’d spent more than a week working out his plan, such as it was. He’d blasted a guard full of fear and taken his access card, then gone down to the cellblock and terrified the guards there, breaking their minds.
“We should get Jenny,” Esmeralda whispered as they hurried along the corridor.
“I thought of that,” Tommy said. “Look.”
Mariella and Seth emerged from Seth’s cell. Like Esmeralda, Seth had changed from his jumpsuit into surgical scrubs. Mariella had come down with Tommy, and she’d freed Seth from his cell with an access card taken from one of the cellblock guards.
Seth looked suspiciously at all three of them—Tommy, who’d always been his enemy in their past encounters; Esmeralda, who Seth had seen possessed by Ashleigh’s soul; and Mariella, who had been cooperating with Ward for months.
“If this is a trap, you’re all dead,” Seth told them. “I mean it.”
“It’s not a trap, Seth. The guards could be here any second.” Mariella took Seth’s arm, and her expression turned to one of horror. “They’ll be here in a minute, a response team with biohazard masks and automatic rifles. We have to run!” She pulled Seth behind her as she ran north along the wide corridor.
“Who is she?” Esmeralda whispered to Tommy as they started running.
“Mariella,” Tommy said. “She can see the future.”
Tommy had taken a huge risk asking Mariella to help him break Esmeralda free. Mariella saw Tommy as someone loyal to Ward, and he was supposed to see her the same way. He’d only approached her with the idea because he remembered that she had decided to escape in their last life. Tommy no longer cared what happened to himself—he was determined to help Esmeralda. So he’d taken the risk, suggesting they could free Jenny and Seth at the same time. He had gambled that Mariella wanted to help her friends.
It was paying off—once they freed Jenny, the five of them would be far more difficult for the guards to stop than Tommy and Esmeralda would have been on their own.
They passed the guards who’d been on duty at the cellblock desk, one of them now trying to hide behind a fake potted plant, the other waving his TASER and screaming at shadows on the ceiling.
From his previous life, Tommy knew every inch of the facility, the side corridors and maintenance tunnels. Anything might have changed since then, doors and hallways could have been sealed, but between Tommy’s memories and Mariella’s ability to see the future by keeping her hand on Seth’s arm, they found the safest course through to the lab corridor, avoiding the guards ahead and the heavily armed team pursuing them from behind.