Free Acolyte by Seth Patrick Page B

had a terrible price. The stronger it was, themore dangerous it became. It was a vulnerability she’d been terrified of since her first crush. Now that the real thing had found her, she was horribly aware of it.
    In short, Annabel Harker had allowed herself to fall in love. She’d been regretting it ever since.
    She’d run with it to begin with. The trauma of the fire at Reese-Farthing Medical, the shock of Jonah’s near-fatal shooting, then his long, slow recovery. She felt comfortable around Jonah in a way she hadn’t experienced before, and found herself missing him after ever-shorter times apart. She had hidden her fears deep down. She had dared to be happy.
    The doubts had returned suddenly one night. In bed, they were kissing; she’d moved to get on top of him and he’d winced, pain growing on his face, hand on the still-angry scars on his chest. The horror must have been clear on her face. Jonah smiled, raised a hand to calm her. After a few seconds he managed to speak.
    â€˜Just a muscle spasm,’ he said. ‘I get them from time to time. It’ll pass.’
    He looked so grey.
    They walked along the beach later that night, and she could see the bliss in Jonah’s face that she too had felt earlier that day, but now she understood that the thing she’d always dreaded had found her: Love, and all that came with it. It terrified her.
    Since then she’d spent relatively little time in her home in Virginia, focusing instead on her investigation. She knew that this left Jonah confused but she didn’t know what else to do. It was the only cure she knew: physical distance, keeping herself busy. Falling for him had been a mistake; unpicking that mistake would hurt both of them, but it was unavoidable. As her dad had always told her, it was better to pull a Band-Aid off quickly. Less painful that way.
    â€˜Fucking hell,’ said Annabel aloud.
    The taxi driver looked up. ‘Excuse me?’
    â€˜Nothing,’ said Annabel.
    *
    Her apartment was small and sparse. She paid everything in cash and had rented it under a false name – Jonah’s repeated reminders for her to be careful were unnecessary, as she always
was
careful. She had another similar place in Sacramento, the benefit of independent means. Since she’d started to spend more and more time in these West Coast boltholes she’d been tempted to make them a little more homely, but part of her wanted to keep things Spartan. She felt she didn’t deserve comforts.
    She dumped her bag by the couch and checked her watch. She wouldn’t have to leave for her meeting for another forty minutes and she wanted to use that time to get her head into the right place.
    In the corner of the room was a whiteboard. She rubbed the board clean whenever she was gone from her apartment for any significant time, but while she was there she used it to get her thoughts in order, trying out new ways to link the things she knew. She stepped over to it and picked up the pen, wanting to get her focus back, and to push Jonah out of her mind.
    She began by writing the word
Unity
in the top middle of the board. Unity was the group that Michael Andreas, the wealthy biotech entrepreneur, had formed after a research team working on possible military uses of revival stumbled into contact with something they believed was not human. The military had assumed the research was nonsense and abandoned it, but Andreas and his team had continued. These entities were benign, they thought; lost in some unimaginable void that revival had given access to. They termed these beings
Elders
; ancient and alien, wise beyond measure, yet trapped in the darkness for countless millennia and stripped of everything they knew, even how they had been lost in the void in the first place.
    The members of Unity believed these Elders could give humankind invaluable knowledge, if only they could be taken from the void and allowed to recover from their