Chapter Ten

"Aubrey."

Frederick took a few steps toward her, but Aubrey took a step back, holding up her hand to stop him from getting any closer. She shook her head slightly. Tears were burning at the backs of her eyes, but she was refusing to let them run down her cheeks. She didn't know what emotion was inspiring those tears and she didn't want to give him the satisfaction of seeing them and being able to give them whatever meaning he wanted to. Until she was able to sift through everything that she was feeling and understand what it meant for all that was happening, she wasn't going to give herself permission to express it or anyone else permission to interpret it.

"I need you to tell me what's going on."

"I haven't seen you in so long," he said.

She nodded.

"Exactly. Years. It's been years. I haven't seen you since you and Mom left for yet another of your business trips and just haven't come back yet." She felt the color drain from her face. "Where is Mom?"

Frederick shook his head, understanding exactly what she was feeling.

"She's fine," he reassured her. "She just couldn't come with me this time."

"Of course, she couldn't," Aubrey scoffed angrily.

"Don't be like that," Frederick said.

"Why?" Aubrey asked. "Because I'm an adult? Because I'm fully grown now so I shouldn't be hurt that my parents don't want anything to do with me? Parents who supposedly wanted a child more than anything in the entire world, but then once you got me decided that you just couldn't hand it and didn't want to be parents anymore?"

"Why would you say that? Who told you that?"

"It was pretty obvious," Aubrey said. "But Nana told me when we talked about it. She said that the two of you just weren't able to reconcile the life that you had built for yourselves when you thought that you were never going to be able to have a child with the one that you got when you actually ended up with one. She said that you loved me, but that you needed to be able to keep doing the things that you were already doing."

"She never should have told you that," Frederick said.

"Why? Is it not the truth?"

"Your mother and I love you more than we could ever tell you. You are everything that we ever wished for."

"No, I'm not. You wanted your own child."

"You are our child. I don't care how you came to be my daughter, but you are my daughter and I love you just as much as if it was the two of us who conceived you and your mother who carried you. There is no difference. And it's because we love you so much that we worked even harder. We didn't want to think that our child lived in a world that wasn't safe. We couldn't bear the thought that you wouldn't grow up or that when you did you wouldn't be able to have the life that you deserve."

"What do you mean by that?" she asked.

Jonah stepped forward.

"Frederick has been working with a crew that uncovered the experiments that Ryan's family started. The operation is much bigger than any of us thought and could be far more dangerous. He has been working with them and the faction on Uoria to bring him down. But it's more than that. It's so much more."

Aubrey felt like another wave of shock had just rushed over her. She had never known what her parents did or why they were always gone. She had always just been told that they were working, that they had to be away, and she had never thought to question it when she was a young child. As she got older, she wondered more, but by then she had already started to accept the reality that she was never going to have the close-knit relationship with her parents that she saw in others and that her true home, her true happiness, was going to come with Nana.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"What's happening here on Earth is only one part of something so much bigger."

"I know that," Aubrey said. "Jonah is from the Nyx 23 project. He landed on Uoria. I know about that planet and about Ryan and his experiments."

"And about the Valdicians?"

"Ryan's minions? Of course."

"They aren't his minions," Jonah said.

"I know that he's a descendant of one and that he intends to be the ruler when they rise into power, but they do everything he says and ensure that he never has to be involved in of the actual dirty work that he wants done."

"They are much more powerful than that," Frederick said. "That's what you don't understand. That's what none of us understood. From the very beginning, it's been the Valdicians. All of this started with them. They caused all of this to happen and they could have caused so much more destruction, but something weakened them. It couldn't destroy them, but it weakened them to the point that they weren't able to complete what they had set out to do. Then the experiments began. The goal shifted from using their own strength and capabilities to take over to using their bred super army of hybrids to take over. Once each of the planets fell to them, the army could be eliminated without concern because they were nothing more than commodities. That would leave only the pure-bred Valdicians and Ryan. He wanted to be the only hybrid left so that he was all-powerful, even more so than the rest of his species."

"I don't understand what any of this has to do with you," Aubrey said. "What could any of that have to do with you adopting me and then barely being around? Or never telling me that you were involved in something like this?"

"And never telling me who you were," Jonah added. "In all the time that we've been together, you never mentioned that you were her father. You knew that she is my wife, yet you only said that you knew Nana, not that you were her son."

"I already told you," Frederick said. "It was too much for you to take right then. I didn't want you to be thinking about Aubrey and all that this meant for her. You needed to be thinking about the mission that was at hand. After that was complete, I intended to tell you."

"What happened?"

"Things didn't go as easily as I hoped. We ran out of time and had to get back to the factory before I was ready. There was more that I had wanted to do, but I couldn't figure it out in time and I had to get back to make sure that Jonah was there to save you. I never got the chance to tell him who I was."

"I still don't understand," Aubrey said. "You keep saying that you were away for so long and that you did so much, but I was talking to Jonah in the basement of the factory just a few minutes before he pulled me out of the hallway. How is it possible that you could have done anything? And why did he change so much?"

"How is it possible that he's here at all when he boarded a ship to go to Uoria more than 115 years ago?"

"That's different," Aubrey argued.

"Is it?"

She didn't know what to say. She was confused, and her head was spinning. She hated feeling so out of control. She hated feeling like she didn't understand anything that was happening around her and that there was nothing that she could do to change it.

"Yes," she said through gritted teeth. "He got to Uoria and was stuck there because of the Covra. That's what allowed him to still be alive now and to come back to Earth."

"It might be possible in different ways, but the point is that they both happened and that they are both possible because of things that you didn't know existed. Sometimes you have to just trust rather than using your own perceptions and experiences to determine what is real and what is possible."

"I don't think that now is the time for you to start trying to be my father and teaching me about the world."

"I've always been your father, Aubrey," Frederick argued. "Just because I couldn't be with you every day doesn't mean that I didn't love you and it doesn't mean that I wasn't doing everything that I could. You can't just pretend that I never saw you or that I never did anything for you. I wish that things could have been different, but they couldn't be."

"Why not? You said that you were working as a part of trying to stop Ryan, but if you and Jonah could have supposedly been gone from the factory for years in your timeline and yet got back within a few minutes after I had last seen him, why were you gone for years when I was younger? Why haven't I seen you in years now?"

"I haven't been able to be with you recently because I knew the time was coming that you were going to be thrown into this and I couldn't interfere. I never wanted my daughter to have to face the danger and the fear that has been a part of my daily life since I became a part of this, but I knew that there was nothing that I could do to protect you. If I let myself get near you, I would try to stop it from happening, and that could cause cataclysmic results. So, I had to stay away from you. I couldn't let myself try to stand in the way and keep you out of it. Even if I thought that it would protect you, the ripples that it would cause could be devastating and, in the end, I would be causing you even more pain."

"What do you mean? How could you have known that I was a part of this? And it still doesn't explain why you were gone for so long when I was younger."

"Time is not finite. It can be manipulated. It can be changed. Though few know how, it is possible to move through it when given the right skills. But the progression of time is finite. No matter how much you try to manipulate time or how much you move through it, it will always be going ahead. There is flexibility in what will happen in time and how it can be shaped, but that is not always the case. In that forward progression there are moments, fixed moments that provide structure to existence. If those events are altered, everything could begin to break apart. You are one of those fixed moments. When you came into being there were two options for how time could move forward with you in it. How all of existence was impacted was determined by which path that you took. One meant near-certain disaster. One gave a chance for survival."

"How could I possibly make that much of a difference?" Aubrey asked. "I'm just one person."

"You're just one person, but you are a piece of something much bigger. How you work within that bigger picture is what makes you so critical. It's also what made it so that I couldn't be near you. You needed to fulfill your part, even if that meant that I had to allow you to be in danger, because if I stopped it, the entire Universe could fall. If you hadn't grown up when and how you did, if you didn't interact with the people that you did, if you didn't find Jonah when and how you did, then the work of many people would be lost and the deaths of even more would have been in vain."

"But I haven't done anything."

"But you have. And you will do so much more. That's what Jonah and I were trying to understand. We were trying to uncover the exact role that you play and why. But we couldn't. We still have to piece it together, but now that you know, we will be able to work on it together."

"How do you know that I'm supposed to do anything?"

"Your patient file," Jonah said.

"My file?"

"Yes. We found that in the abandoned medical facility. A facility that wasn't supposed to be there anymore and was only there because of the Izalux and the records."

"Yes. But it doesn't make any sense."

"Exactly. The dates on it don't make sense. The fact that you went to the doctor three days in a row doesn't make sense. But the question that has bothered me the most is why that one page was missing and where it went."

"And you know why?" Aubrey asked, looking at Frederick.

He shook his head.

"No. But I once knew someone who did. And it has to do with the years that I spent away from you when you were younger."

"Tell me."

"I will, but now we need to leave. We can't stay in one place for too long. Ryan will be looking for us."

He turned and walked out of the room, leaving Aubrey with no choice but to go back into the bedroom and get her bags. Jonah walked in behind her and picked up his bags. She looked up at him.

"How could any of this be real? How could I have anything to do with this when I don't even know what's happening?"

"I don't know, Aubrey. I wish there was more that I could tell you."

"But there is. You could tell me what you've been doing all this time. You could tell me what caused that scar."

"I'll tell you everything. But Frederick is right. We need to keep moving. The poison in the arrows that we used against the Valdicians doesn't last forever. The paralyzing effect is only temporary. Escaping from the factory was never something that Ryan intended. As soon as he found out that we were there, he thought that he finally had his hands on the hybrids and breeders that he had lost, and on us. Getting Ilya back under his control is extremely important to him and knowing that Frederick was a part of the escape only made him angrier. He's going to be looking for us. We've reached a breaking point now. There's no turning back. No hesitation. Ryan has started to lose control and isn't as careful anymore. That means that we and all the others working against him are getting to him, but it also means that everyone in his path is in so much more danger. Until we can connect with the others and put all the pieces in place, we need to stay out of his grasp."

They rode along in silence again, each vigilant, each focused on what was happening beyond the windows. They were looking for anything that might indicate that Ryan was tracing them. It was well into the afternoon before Aubrey realized that she didn't recognize the direction that they were going. She had thought that by this point it would look familiar and that she would be able to gauge how much farther it would be until they reached Nana's house, but when she examined the world outside of the window, she realized that nothing looked familiar.

"Where are we?" she asked, breaking the tense silence in the car. "How far are we from Nana's house?"

Frederick hesitated and glanced at Jonah, but he didn't say anything or even acknowledge the older man. Instead, he reached over and took Aubrey's hand, squeezing it as if he could recognize that she needed the comfort of his touch right then. Frederick glanced in the rearview mirror at her briefly before turning his attention back to the road in front of him.

"We aren't going back to Nana's house," he said.

Aubrey felt like the last of her grasp on her life was draining out of her. A burning started in her stomach as if a hot rock was settled there.

"What do you mean we're not going back to Nana's house?"

"It's too dangerous. There are still vulnerable women and hybrids there. She is their only hope at staying safe right now and if we were to go back there we could lure Ryan or the Valdicians straight to them. For now, we have to stay away from there. It will be much easier for us to avoid him than it would be for them to stay safe if he was to find them."

"Where are we going?"

"Ryan wants Ilya. I don't know why, but he is focused on her. We need to keep her safe."

"I thought that you said that this was about me," Aubrey said.

"You are a critical part of it," Frederick said. "You have responsibilities that you will need to fulfill. But for now, Ryan's concentration is on Ilya and getting his hands on her again. Above all the other women who were in the facility and beyond any of the hybrids that he has made, he wants her. So, we need to bring her to where he isn't going to be able to find her."

"Where is that?"

"Before Ryan was born."