The house was quiet with mourning, as unnaturally still and eerie as Major Charles's life had been when Jarod and Kyle were abducted decades earlier.
Major Charles wearily entered the sitting room, his shoulders hunched, the always-present smile absent. Passing the empty kitchen, he turned and glimpsed Emily, curled on the sofa, and silently weeping.
"Sweetheart," Major Charles whispered, kneeling at Emily's side, "I didn't know you were here."
"I didn't know what to do," Emily confided, pushing tears from her face, and sitting. I certainly don't want to go up there. "My room's next to Jarod's and— god, Dad, it was awful. She sobbed for three hours, and suddenly went limp in his arms.
I think she lost consciousness. I asked Jarod if she was okay," Emily continued tearfully, pausing to remove fresh tears from her cheeks, "he turned, looked through me, instead of at me, and gathered her in his arms. I didn't recognize him."
"They," Major Charles said quietly, joining Emily on the sofa, "have a lot of healing ahead of them. Sydney believes it's important they share their grief with each other. He'll be relieved when I tell him they're together."
"Relieved," Emily murmured despondently. "That's wildly premature. He, obviously, hasn't seen them."
"Not yet. He's still with Ian," Major Charles explained, and softly answered the question in Emily's tear-filled eyes, "Ian suffered a severe panic attack."
"Is he sure isn't something worse, like psychosis?" Emily asked. "Did Ian have panic attacks before he came to live with us?"
"No, he didn't. Considering the circumstances this isn't unusual behavior. Sydney gave him something to calm him, and help him sleep. He's going to stay with him until he wakes up."
Emily studied her father's tired, haunted eyes, and swallowed her suspicions and objections.
Her father had witnessed thousands of deaths during his years of military service, lost a son to murder, and now a grandson, and he still hadn't found Margaret.
New wounds scored—and embedded themselves into—old ones, allowing no possibility of healing. Major Charles looked truly broken, incapable of bearing another burden
"I'm gonna hit the rack," Major Charles said wearily, pushing a hand over his face. "What about you?"
Emily moistened her lips, and contemplated her answer. "Soon."
Nine hours. Are they intending to stay up there forever?
Emily feared the answer, and was wholly justified.
Parker and Jarod had absolutely no intentions.
Jarod lay on his side, next to Parker, and, through a blur of tears, watched her fitful attempts to sleep. They were both much too exhausted to sleep, and entirely too devastated to do anything else. Grief was heavy, immobilizing.
The only reasonable answer was to lie still— still expect for the frequent hypnagogic jerks. Parker and Jarod had already plummeted to the void's rock bottom; they relived the free-fall into hell each time they fell back asleep.
Jarod had stopped flinching each time Parker jerked awake, often gasping for breath, occasionally shuddering. He rose once, and only briefly, to loosen the blanket from beneath him, and cover Parker's body.
He wasn't certain how either of them would survive the loss. Still, even in grief's oppressive stupor, Jarod thought of his mother, and wondered if Margaret, too, had struggled to simply draw breath in the violent absence of her child's presence.
"We have to kill them," Parker snarled in a hoarse, liquid voice, answering the sorrow that demanded action, pleaded for justice.
Parker's words inspired a shift in focus, kindled a sliver of determination; they were an infinitesimal glint of all that remained of Parker's will to live lying, half smashed, among the ruins, and an argument for eventually crawling out of bed, and rejoining the rest of the world.
It was a whisper of purpose, and Parker was listening to it.
"Yes," Jarod answered sullenly, "Yes, I know." His voice was filled with an peculiar combination of apprehension and gratitude that Parker thoroughly comprehended.
Neither endorsed, or yearned to perpetrate, homicide; they were simply duty-bound.
Regardless of the danger awaiting them, the sorrow choking them, Parker and Jarod were going to do the difficult thing, the painful thing, instead of dying where they lay.
After scratching at the bottom of their reserves, they were going to scrape together what little strength and resolve that remained between the two of them, merge their resources.
They were going to shower, and force themselves to swallow food and coffee, and live another day regardless of how much it fucking hurt.
And then they were going to raze the Centre.