Chapter One

Aubrey felt her legs shaking and black spots were dancing in front of her eyes. She couldn’t process what Jonah had just told her. It felt as though her mind had simply rejected what he had said and was forcing it back toward him, stopping it from going completely through her thoughts as if that would somehow stop it from being real. She closed her eyes and squeezed them, wanting to stop the spots and regain control.

“What did you say?” she asked.

She felt Jonah step closer to her.

“This patient file,” he said. “It’s yours. It has your name on it.”

Aubrey drew in a breath, concentrating on how it felt filling her lungs and then streaming out so that she could focus. Fill and release. Again. Fill and release. Again. And again. Finally, she felt as though she could think clearly. Her eyes opened and she looked at Jonah.

“Why do you think that it’s mine?” she asked. “I’m not the only Aubrey in the world. It’s just someone else who went here a long time ago named Aubrey.”

Jonah nodded.

“I know,” he said, “but look.” He held the file out to her, forcing her to look at the metal cover. “It has your last name. My last name. And the middle initial is the same as your maiden name. This is exactly how you write your name.”

Aubrey didn’t want what he was saying to be true. She didn’t want to think that this completely outlandish, unimaginable concept could actually be happening around her. She shook her head again, turning away from him. With Jonah at her back, she couldn’t see the patient file. She didn’t have to see the look on his face or the concern in his eyes. With him at her back, Aubrey could pretend that nothing had changed. She could imagine a different way that she had met Jonah and a different way that their relationship had grown. She could pretend that there wasn’t so much danger and uncertainty laying ahead of them.

“Aubrey,” he said, trying to get her attention. When she didn’t turn back to him, he continued. “You know as well as I do that just because something doesn’t make sense, doesn’t mean that it isn’t real. I am irrefutable proof of that. If this patient file really is yours, it has to have something to do with this.” He paused for a moment and Aubrey could feel the tension that was building in the small, dim space. For the first time, she felt nearly desperate for more light. “I need you to tell me that you have been absolutely honest with me, that there’s nothing that you haven’t told me or that I need to know.”

Aubrey spun around to face him, her arms folded over her chest.

“What are you saying, Jonah? You think that I lived a hundred years ago like you did, but just haven’t told you? That I was a lowly member of the crew on the StarCity and that I’ve been pining for you since then? That you never noticed me when we were hurtling through space or after we smashed into Uoria, but then I found a way to travel to Earth and as soon as I found out that you had come back, I devised a plan to find you and force you to accept me? What is it that you think that I wouldn’t have told you?”

Jonah looked remorseful.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have asked. Of course, you’ve been honest with me. I never should have even let that go through my mind. It’s just that…” he lifted the patient file again, “…what if this is yours? How do we explain it? What could it possibly mean?”

Aubrey locked her eyes on the file for a few intense seconds and then lifted them back to Jonah.

“How do we know if it’s mine?” she asked.

“We open it,” he said. “We read it and see if it has your information in it.”

“How?” Aubrey asked. “You yourself said that the patient files are protected from unauthorized access. Each one of them is guarded as part of the ‘plague’.”

“The purpose of locking the patient files and restricting access to them was to protect the privacy and safety of the patients,” Jonah explained. “The computer virus that led to the plague was used specifically to harm people. There was a time when people would use the information that they gleaned from patient files for other fraudulent reasons. They would file insurance claims using another person’s identification information, or try to get medications that they could keep for themselves for recreational use or sell. Sometimes they would be able to use the information to steal the financial details for that person and steal their money. That wasn’t the case with the plague virus, though. That was sent out specifically to cause harm to people’s health. The terrorists didn’t want medical treatment or medications or even money. They wanted to cause destruction and death.”

“What does that have to do with why these files aren’t locked?” Aubrey asked.

“The files kept by the University medical ward were designed for the ward itself. They couldn’t be used for those other purposes because most of that information wasn’t even kept in the files, and what was kept there was coded in such a way that only people who worked here would be able to understand it and use it in any way. The locks that were placed on these files were specifically placed there to make sure that the details couldn’t be compromised or used to cause harm to the patient. In order for them to be able to harm a patient, though, the patient would have to be alive. A terrorist with the goal of causing illness and pain would have no use for a dead patient.”

“So, there was no reason to continue to guard the files once a patient was dead?” Aubrey asked.

“Or at least until that file was no longer needed,” Jonah explained. “The locks on the files had to be renewed regularly to ensure that they stayed effective and that the permissions could be adjusted if necessary. This way, if someone did happen to figure out how to access the files, the permissions could be changed and block out threats as well as ensure that no one who wasn’t aware of the issue could access the compromised file and use the inaccurate information to attempt to treat the patient. Once the files were no longer necessary, though, they didn’t have to renew the locks any longer. If they weren’t renewed, the file would go into an emergency locked state for a set period of time and then become inactive, and therefore accessible by anyone who might want to look at them. This made sure that they could still access the information for research purposes or other reasons without putting an actual person’s life at risk. If these files were still active, they would have been brought with them when the medical ward shut down and the new hospital was built. They were left here, which means that they weren’t needed, or they were being hidden. Either way, they wouldn’t have renewed locks.”

Aubrey looked at him for a moment and then nodded toward the file.

“Open it,” she said.

Jonah hesitated for a moment with his hand flat on the front of the file.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “Once this is open, there’s no going back. Once we read what is inside this, we can’t pretend that we never did.”

“I’m sure,” Aubrey said. “The point at which I could have turned back happened before I walked into that lab that day. Once I found you, there was nothing that I could do to change the way that I feel about you, or the fact that I am irrevocably involved in all of this. Even if we didn’t read what is inside the file, we couldn’t pretend that we didn’t find it. It’s not like we could just put it back in the file cabinet and act like we never found it and that we are still looking for the same answers that we were before. Because we aren’t. Not anymore. There is so much more to this than either one of us thought and if we are going to do it, we have to do it completely and fully. We are already committed to this, whatever it is, and it doesn’t matter what is laying ahead of us. We’ll face it and conquer it together. We have no choice.” She drew in a breath and let her shoulders relax. “Open it.”

Jonah mirrored her sigh and nodded. He stepped back up to the registration desk and placed the file on it. Pulling the lightstick closer so that its full illumination was at its strongest over the file, he tucked his fingers under the metal cover and flipped it open. Just as with his file, the pages inside were made from what looked like slivers of glass nearly as thin as paper. Words appeared on them in text so clear and bold it looked as though it were printed in ink across them, but Jonah knew that they were imprinted into the pages by computer. The pages were crafted in such a way that the only visible text was that which was on the page that was on top at that moment, masking the text from pages below to prevent confusion. When turning the pages, however, the text from all of them became visible again, creating a blur of text that almost made it look as though it was written in a nonsensical language they wouldn’t be able to decipher.

Jonah turned to the page of personal details and their eyes scanned over the information on it. Aubrey felt her heart beater harder and more intensely as she saw the correct birthday, weight, height, and other details. Each bit of information that she reached only confirmed that Jonah’s initial assumption was correct. This was, in fact, her patient file. Her mind felt as blurred as the words on the pages. She couldn’t understand. It just didn’t make sense. But as Jonah had pointed out, it didn’t matter if this didn’t make sense. None of it made sense, and that was exactly why they were trying to figure it out. This was just another piece of this puzzle, another mystery that they were going to have to resolve.

“What is the date on the last entry?” she asked. “If this is actually a file from some time that I was here, then there should be records of each of the appointments that I had. We should be able to track all of the times that I came here and why.”

Jonah nodded.

“You’re right,” he said.

He flipped the pages to the end and then flipped back a couple of pages. Aubrey could see the look on his face become more confused as he went back and forth a few more times.

“What is it?” she asked.

“There’s only three appointments,” he said.

“Three?” Aubrey asked, looking down at the file. “There are only three appointments in my whole file? People don’t just go to the doctor three times, unless it’s a specialist.”

Jonah shook his head.

“No. There’s no mention of a specialist of any kind. It was just normal appointments. Three times in a row.”

“In a row?” Aubrey asked. “What do you mean?”

Jonah pointed at the date at the top of one page, turned it and pointed to the date on the next, and then to the one on the final page of the record.

“These dates show that you came to the office three days in a row.” He stared at it for a few moments, the look in his eyes telling her that he was trying to remember something that was just on the edge of his memory. “Look at the year. That’s the same year that I left on the Nyx 23 mission. But none of those days make sense. I left almost two weeks later.”

“How about any of the rest of the crew?” she asked. “You said that the whole crew had to come in for exams before leaving on the mission and that it was clandestine, so you weren’t able to come in at the same time or it would make people suspicious. Could other members have come in that far in advance?”

“I don’t know,” Jonah said. “We didn’t know when the others were going in. I only knew that there were others who were there going at the same time that I did because I saw them when I was here. I was the last person to get my examination. We left really soon after that.”

“So, I supposedly went here and saw a doctor, three days in a row almost two weeks before you came for your last examination before you left for Penthos?” Aubrey asked, trying to work her way through the confusing situation and hoping that if she said it enough times, something would occur to her and she would be able to figure it out. “Why, though? What does it say about those appointments? If I wasn’t seeing a specialist, there had to be some other reason why they would make three appointments for me in a row. Was it the same doctor?”

Jonah looked at the pages again and shook his head.

“No,” he said. “It says here that you saw three different doctors in three different exam rooms.” He turned the final page and paused. “Wait,” he said, pushing the page all the way open. “Look at this.”

He ran his finger down the inside of the spine of the file.

“What is it?” she asked.

Jonah pulled his hand back and looked at his fingertip. There was a red line on it as if something had nearly cut through the skin.

“Glass,” he said. “It looks like tiny shards of glass. Like there was another page in the file and someone broke it out.”

“I don’t understand,” Aubrey said. “They broke a page out?”

“Yes,” Jonah said. “Like tearing a page out of a book, but these pages are made of glass, so they can act as screens. To get one out of the record would mean having to break it. But why would someone want to take out a page of your file?”

“It had something on it that they didn’t want anyone to see,” Aubrey said. “For some reason, that one particular page had something on it that was serious enough that they didn’t want anybody to find out about it, even when they decommissioned the record.”

“What could possibly be in your medical record that somebody would be that worried about other people finding? Especially when you only came here three times. That doesn’t really seem like enough time for you to have done anything that could justify that kind of reaction.”

“That’s just the thing,” Aubrey said. “What if it doesn’t have to do with something that I did in the time that I was visiting the medial ward, but the time itself?”

“What do you mean?” Jonah asked.

“These two pages are each for one of the appointments that I had with the doctor. A broken page would mean that the third appointment took up two pages. But that doesn’t make sense. What could have happened to me in those two days that suddenly they would need two pages of my file to record everything?”

“But if you came back for a fourth appointment…”

“Exactly. Another appointment, another page. Someone didn’t want anyone to know that I came back a fourth time.”

“Or maybe what doctor you saw.”

“I think that we need to go talk to Nana,” Aubrey said. “She says that she and her mother used to look through that book about Nyx 23 all the time. When she gave it to me so that I would find out who you are, she told me that her mother was really focused on the page with your picture. She rubbed it so much that the picture felt rough when I touched it. That has to mean something.”

“Did you ever meet your great-grandmother?”

Aubrey shook her head, looking down at her file again so that she didn’t have to look at him and let him see the emotions in her eyes.

“No,” she said. “She died a long time before I was born.”

“Do you know anything about her? What she did for work? Where she went to school?”

“No,” Aubrey said.

“What about her name?”

Aubrey shook her head.

“Nana never told me anything about her. I know that it was really hard on her when her mother died and that she never really got over it. When I was younger she would sometimes say that I brought back a lot of memories of her.”

Jonah looked at her strangely.

“Brought back memories?” he asked. “That’s kind of a strange statement.”

“Why?” Aubrey asked.

Jonah shook his head with a slight shrug.

“I’m not sure. It just strikes me as strange. Well, what about your parents? Did they tell you anything about her? Whose child was Nana’s, your mother or father?”

Aubrey felt bombarded by the questions, overwhelmed by everything that Jonah was asking. It felt like too much, like he was going too far. Taking a breath, she tried to remind herself that this was her husband, the man who had bared his soul to her and told her everything about himself in an effort only to make her understand how much he loved her. He deserved the same respect and honesty that he showed to her shown to him.

“I don’t know very much about my mother and father,” she admitted. “I didn’t get to spend much time with them.”

“That’s right,” Jonah said as though remembering what little she had told him about her childhood. “You said that they traveled a lot when you were younger and that you spent the times when they were away and when you were on breaks from school with Nana.”

Aubrey nodded.

“I did,” she said. “They had always wanted children. At least that’s what Nana says. She was my father’s mother. She said that from the time that they were just dating they talked about having a big family one day and all of the things that they wanted to do with their future children. They were so excited to build this whole life. But then my mother just didn’t get pregnant. They tried and tried, but it just didn’t happen for them. So instead they decided to focus on their careers. They both became very successful in their fields. That’s why they traveled so much.”

“But what about you?” Jonah asked. “Were you a surprise pregnancy?”

“Not exactly,” Aubrey said. “It was a few years after they got married and they had pretty much put the idea of having a family behind them. Then Nana went outside her house one morning and literally found a baby lying in a basket on her porch.”

“You?” Jonah asked.

Aubrey nodded.

“Me. There was a letter and a few baby things with me, but that’s it. She never had any idea who left me lying there. It didn’t matter, though. She scooped me right up and brought me inside. She called my parents, who happened to be in town, and they came right over. They decided that I was the baby that they had longed for for so long.”

“So, you’re adopted,” Jonah said, his voice holding an indecipherable combination of surprise and awe. “You hadn’t told me that.”

“Kind of,” she said.

“Kind of?” Jonah asked.

“Well, I mean, yes, I am adopted, but no one knows that. Up until right now only Nana, my parents, and I knew. As soon as they saw me, my parents knew that I was very young. A day or two at the most. My birth mother had literally delivered me and brought me to Nana’s house. They decided that they would pretend that my mother had given birth to me at home. They called for a midwife. Nana is extremely well-known in this area and her name gives her considerable influence. She explained to the midwife that my mother had delivered me and was doing absolutely fine, so she didn’t need an examination, but that she did need a birth certificate for the new baby. Even though the midwife should have known to examine her anyway, she didn’t question what Nana said. She gave them a birth certificate for me and I was officially their child. No one ever had to know the truth. As far as the rest of the world knew, they were just very private about the pregnancy and she delivered a little earlier than expected.”

“So, if they were so careful about not telling anybody else what was really going on, why did they tell you?” Jonah asked. “Why didn’t they just let you think that you were theirs and never let anyone know?”

“They did for a while. I think that might have even been the plan. But then they realized that even though having a child was what they had wanted so desperately, it wasn’t what their lives were about anymore. They loved me. I know for certain that they did. But they figured out that they had put the idea of a family behind them for so long that they couldn’t really get back to that space in their minds when they had the opportunity to make those dreams come true. They went back to traveling for work and I started spending even more time with Nana. One day, I was playing in Nana’s attic. There were always so many treasures up there. It was amazing. It felt like the whole world was packed into that space. Of course, you know how big Nana’s house is, so you can imagine that the attic isn’t exactly the size of a normal attic. I didn’t know that, though. I just figured that everyone had a space that big to play and explore. One day I was doing just that and I found a basket that I thought was for a doll. I brought it over to a clear spot on the floor where I had been setting up a little house. I tucked my dolly into it and let her play with the baby things that I found with it. When Nana came upstairs a few minutes later, she found me with it.”

“Was she angry?”

“No. The opposite, actually. She was happy. Relieved, even. She started telling me a story about a little baby who showed up unexpectedly but was the most wonderful thing in the world and that she had slept in that basket. Of course, I had no idea what she was talking about at the time. She told me that same story over and over when I was little. Every time that I played with my dolls. Finally, one day I asked her if she was talking about me. I don’t even know what made me think that. I can’t remember any particular thought or event or anything that made it click. It’s like she had just said it enough times that it finally sank in and maybe a part of my brain that I couldn’t even access remembered it. Does that make sense?” Jonah nodded, and Aubrey continued. “Anyway, that’s when I found out. We sat down with my parents that night and talked about it. I was expecting them to be mad at Nana, or even at me, but they weren’t. I think by then they had figured out that that wasn’t a secret that was theirs to keep. They said that I deserved to know who I was and even though they loved me just as if I was their own child, there was part of my identity that I would never be able to know if they pretended forever that the first couple of days of my life didn’t happen. We even started celebrating my birthday twice. Once on the day that they believe that I was born, and once on the day that they adopted me.”

“It doesn’t sound like you being adopted was ever a problem for you. Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

“Just because I’m not embarrassed about it doesn’t mean that I really want to tell people. My parents intended people not to know, and I feel like I should respect that. I guess that’s silly.”

“Do you see your parents often?” Jonah asked.

“No. I haven’t seen them in a couple of years. They’ve been traveling so much, and I’ve been working. We don’t really have much chance to coordinate with each other.” Aubrey shook her head, trying to dispel the gloom that had settled over her. “We just need to go talk to Nana. She has to know more about this than she has told me. It can’t just be that she sat with her mother and looked at the pictures. She has to have said something to her.”

“We should take the rest of these files with us,” he said. “Just grab all of them. I don’t know if any of the other ones have anything to do with any of this, but if there is any chance that they are here for a reason, then we should have them.”

****

They scooped all of the records out of the drawer of the file cabinet and headed out of the medical ward. By the time that they reached Nana’s house, the sun was just starting to lighten the horizon, but Jonah wasn’t tired. Adrenaline was running through him and he felt like his body was buzzing with the energy that it caused. They carried the files that they found into the house and put them on the kitchen table. He started the coffeemaker to make Aubrey a cup of coffee as he did every morning. She drew in a breath of the rich smell.

“That smells wonderful,” she said.

“I figured you’re going to need it,” he said. “It’s almost time for you to leave for work.”

Aubrey shook her head as she looked down at the stack of files on the table.

“No. I’m going to take the day off.”

“You are?” Jonah asked, feeling shocked. “What about the project in the lab? Won’t they need you?”

“I’m sure they will,” Aubrey said. “But you need me, too, and you are always going to be more important. Besides,” she reached for her file and held it up for him to see. “I’m pretty sure I’m sick.”

Jonah gave a short laugh and carried the mug of fresh, hot coffee to the table. He put it down and went to the refrigerator for the cream. The thick white ribbon cut through the blackness and then billowed up from the bottom of the mug, swirling into a smooth light brown. He added a sprinkle of sugar and stirred it before handing the mug over to her. Aubrey took a sip and Jonah watched her shoulders relax as the sweet flavor flowed through her.

“We should bring all of this stuff into the study,” Jonah said as it suddenly occurred to him that soon Gannon, Mordecai, and the rest would be waking up and coming down the stairs. “I don’t want to get anyone else involved until we absolutely have to.”

Aubrey nodded and grabbed a handful of the files. They carried them into the study and rested them in the center of the massive dark wood desk in the center of the room.

“Wait here for Nana,” Jonah said. “I’ll go upstairs and get the book and the rest of the files.”

She nodded again and took another sip of her coffee. Jonah rushed out of the room and up the stairs toward their bedroom, thinking about coffee, doctors, and the busy, thrilling days that led up to him leaving Earth and spiraling into the unknown.