The Fray Theory: Resonance (23 page)

Gone.
There isn’t a single trace of Romer. Neve looks to the rooftop’s exit. Did he
leave? He wouldn’t. And even if he ran, he wouldn’t be able to make it to the
exit in the brief while Neve had her back to him.

And panic sets in.

“Romer?” Neve’s wide eyes
dart about the space, desperately hoping he’s playing a prank on her. But
there’s nowhere for him to hide, even if he was.

“ROMER!?” she finds
herself shouting, impervious to the consequences.

She races back up the slant
to where they had just lain. To the flattened patch of grass, where it’s still
dry compared to the rest of the sodden rooftop.

“RO—” a sudden grip on her
shoulder makes her choke on his name. And then, like flipping a switch, her
surroundings shift: and she’s elsewhere.

In the blink of an eye,
she’s gone from standing outside in the dark, to inside a light-filled room. In
the span of a gasp, the fresh air has become stale.

Her eyes are stung by the
brightness. Her head is spinning from the sudden shift in perspective.

Panicked, she swats the
grip on her shoulder off and stumbles backwards onto the floor.

Squinting against the light,
she backs away from her captor—from a man in dark clothes whose face is
concealed behind a black mask. Just like the man who attacked her at Galen’s.

Romer’s groan gives him
away.

Neve turns her head around
to find him lying onto his belly, gripping the back of his neck.

The floor moans as the man
in black takes a small step forward.

Neve swings her head in
his direction. She then starts to back up, shielding Romer from the man who
ripped them both out of space itself.

The stranger in black
stops two feet shy of Neve, then suddenly swoops down.

Neve screams and recoils
on instinct, but realizes the man dived down to dodge an attack from behind.

An attack from—

Neve’s eyes widen, and she
stares as Dylan strikes again at a speed too quick for her to even register.

The man in black easily
neutralizes the attack, but Dylan launches another, and another, and another
until there is a barrage of strikes and counterstrikes the likes of which Neve
has never before seen—a hybrid of multiple styles of combat too advanced to
even be real.

Neve stares at Dylan,
struggling to recognize him. The boy battling before her has an arsenal of
skills of unimaginable caliber. Tactics she would only expect of spies and
assassins. Strikes so swift, they blur into the air, but powerful enough to
crack a boulder.

But Dylan’s opponent is no
force to be reckoned with, either.

He waits for the right
moment, and with one swift motion traps Dylan in a tight chokehold.

Dylan grips the man’s arm,
drops to his shins, and uses his weight to flip him over his shoulder. He rolls
with the momentum and pins his opponent down, pulling his gun in the process.
He cocks it and aims between the eyes, but suddenly drops to the floor as the man
in black vanishes from right under him.

A few seconds drag by with
nobody flinching. The silence stretches, swells, until it’s too suffocating to
stand.

Neve feels a hand on her
upper back.

She swings her head
around, and then unclenches when she realizes it’s Romer.

They carefully rise to
their feet, barely registering the details of the box they’re in.

Neve looks at Dylan who is
stiller than a statue.

She takes a step towards him,
but the palm of his hand flies up and pins her in place.

He is staring at the floor:
at the shoeprints of the man he had in his crosshairs not ten seconds ago.

“Get back—” Dylan orders,
firm and commanding, at which point Romer pulls Neve back behind him.

With his eyes still glued
to the shoeprints, Dylan slowly rises as well.

His eyes are unblinking.
It’s as if he’s anticipating something. His intensity seems savage—like that of
a prey
and
a predator.

He suddenly swings his arm
around and begins to fire at the phantom spawned behind him at the far end of
the room.

At the onslaught, Romer shoves
Neve back against the wall and shields her with his body.

Neve closes her eyes and
wraps her arms around Romer, her hands shielding his heart and the back of his
head. And she jolts with every blaring blast of Dylan’s gun, the echo of
ricocheting bullets ringing in her ears.

Surviving this will be a
miracle.

Standing between his enemy
and the only people in the world he’d die for, Dylan fires with impeccable precision.
But it’s no use. His target keeps dodging his bullets by vanishing and
reappearing elsewhere.

And if he keeps jumping
out of harm’s way, what is Dylan going to do once he has run out of bullets?

And the specter unwittingly
reappears in the path of a stray bullet. His right shoulder jerks back, and his
blood splatters all over the wall behind him.

Gotcha
. Dylan aims at his head.

“WAIT!” the man’s hand
flies up, and when Dylan hesitates, he pulls off his mask.

Shocked. Relieved.
Confused.

“
You
…” Dylan gawks at
the last person on earth he’d expected to see. At the first face he saw after
an eternity of agony. At the man who rescued him after five hours of suffocating
in a dark coffin. The man who unearthed him from his early grave with three
broken ribs and an irreparable spirit.

“I know you…” Neve’s voice
reaches Dylan’s ears from behind. “You were at my exhibition.”

What
? Dylan frowns while holding the gaze of his
wounded target. “I don’t—” he involuntarily lowers his gun a bit. “Why are you
here?”

“You know him?” Romer
asks.

As though in a trance, Dylan
nods microscopically. “Victor Young.  He was the—” he hesitates, knowing
neither Neve nor Romer knows a thing about what happened that night. “He was my
drill sergeant back at the academy.”

Dylan’s gaze drops down to
the shoeprints on the floor, and suddenly he is sick to his stomach.

Wide-eyed, he looks back
up at Young.

“It was
you
,” he
nearly whispers. “Wasn’t it?”

It’s all making sense now:
the clusters of trail-less shoeprints at his place… his memory loss right up to
the moment he woke up at the academy’s infirmary… “I never flew to New York,
did I?”

“No.” Young presses his
mask down on his wound. “You didn’t.”

His response ignites the
truth, and Dylan’s doubts melt like candle-wax, filling the void inside him that
no lie ever could.

And when he glances at
Romer and sees the shock in his eyes, a part of him feels healed.

Vindicated.

“Explain this room,” Dylan
lifts his aim back onto Young’s head, but he holds his ground, unfazed.

“You know me, Holt,” Young
says with unshakable conviction. “You
know
you can trust me.”

“What exactly were you
doing at my exhibition?” Neve’s voice nears.

“The world doesn’t revolve
around you, princess,” he replies without even looking at her.

Dylan cocks his gun.

Young’s eyes narrow, his
brows creasing. “Is this the thanks I get for protecting you?”

Protecting
..? “What are you talking about?” Dylan asks, his
wielding hand atremble.

“What do you
think
I’m talking about?”

“Say it,” Dylan demands
and watches Young’s face darken. “I want to hear you say it.”

Young closes his eyes. “Your
worst nightmare.”

Dylan’s eyes dart over to Neve’s
sketchbook, and straight back to him. “Who is he?” his voice breaks. “What the
FUCK
does he want from me!?”

“Relax,” Young assures.
“He won’t find you here.”

“If you’re just looking
out for us—” Romer steps up, gripping Dylan’s switchblade, “then why are your
clothes identical to the guys that jumped us earlier?”

Dylan eyes Young’s
uniform.

Romer is right. The men
who arrested him were wearing the exact same outfits.

Young tilts his head back,
exposing his neck—a tell Dylan knows all too well: his patience is wearing
thin.

“You’re one of them,
aren’t you,” Romer says, his inquiry, much more of a statement.

Young looks at him. “It’s
complicated.”

“Simplify it for me.”

He holds Romer’s gaze as a
condescending smile colors his stern expression. “I needed to get them off your
tracks. So I infiltrated their organization.” 

“What organization?” Dylan
asks.

Young hesitates for a
moment, and then exhales a deep breath that deflates his chest.  “Synchrony.”

Synchrony
..? The word bounces around in Dylan’s skull. He
isn’t sure why, but it sounds like something he’d find in Alex’s book: 
Resonance
…
Synchrony
…

“If you’re not with them,”
Romer’s voice disrupts Dylan’s train of thought, “then who the hell do you work
for?”

Young diverts his gaze back
to Dylan. “Come with me, and I’ll explain everything.”

Romer can’t help but
snicker. “How dumb do you think we are?”

“Well—you
are
rejecting
my help without having the slightest clue as to what you’re up against,” he
says. “Does that more or less answer your question?”

“Listen, asshole—” Romer
takes a step forward.

“Romer—” Dylan shoots him
a cautionary glance, but it’s too late. All evidence of humanity has already
drained from Young’s face.

“On second thought—” Young
drags his gaze back onto Dylan, “it might be fun to watch you be torn from limb
to limb.”

And with that, he vanishes
into thin air.

Neve
stares at the spot where Young had stood not a moment ago, as
‘torn from
limb to limb’
echoes in her mind.
What
 did he mean by that? Is that the sort of thing this ‘Synchrony’ does to people?
Or was Young referring to something else entirely?

She feels a grip on her
arm and turns to Dylan as he pulls her into a firm embrace.

Neve’s hands glide up his
back and clasp onto his shoulders. And she nestles her chin in the hollow of
his neck with eyes wide open.

Despite holding him in her
arms, it still hasn’t hit Neve that she’s found him. That merely
minutes
ago, Dylan was a world away.

And now, the only thing
between them is Neve’s utter disbelief. She has
found
him…

“I was so worried,” Dylan
whispers in her ear.

Neve starts to well up,
but she bats her eyes a few times to keep the tears from collecting. And then,
through a thin veil of bitter-sweet sorrow, her focus closes in on a massive
panorama spanning the entire room.

“Where are we?” Neve pulls
out of Dylan’s arms, her gaze glued to what reminds her of a detective’s
investigation wall.

“I’m guessing Young’s
hideout,” Dylan says.

No
, she thinks.
This is way more than that
.

Even with the networks of
thread aside, patterns of all kinds keep jumping out at her, demanding to be
deciphered—from layers of color-coded notes at the smallest scale, to giant
aerial maps at the largest.

There is rhyme and reason
to these walls, but not the sort that sheds light onto Young’s intentions.

Is he a friend, or foe?

Are his claims fact, or
fiction?

She doesn’t know. The
truth could fall practically anywhere along the full spectrum of possibilities.

“We need to get out of
here,” Romer’s voice brings her back. “Like yesterday.” He places his hand on a
sheet of paper, and then forms a fist and pounds the same spot. “Is there like—a
door
to this place?” his gaze darts from wall to wall.

“Yeah…” Dylan responds
with a bit of a lag.

“Where?” Neve asks.

“Behind the bodies.”

“The
bodies
!?” Neve
and Romer both exclaim.

Staring into space, Dylan
nods.

“Are you alright?” Neve
asks.

“I only checked the top
one,” Dylan looks up at the body bags. “It was one of the cops that arrested
me.”

“What happened?” Neve’s
brows crease.

“I woke up all tied up and
gagged in their trunk.”

“Are you serious!?” she
gawks.

“How’d you get away?” Romer
walks over.

“I think Young ambushed them.
Shot ‘em up.”

“So he
did
save
you?” Romer’s eyes widen beneath his furrowing brows.

“I don’t trust him, either,”
Dylan says to let Romer off the hook. “He probably thinks I don’t remember, or
that I didn’t catch it, but right after he opened the trunk, he stuck me with a
needle, and I passed out.”

Needle
..? Neve thinks back to the EMT and how he tried to
do the exact same thing to her. “Did you see what color the drug was?” she
asks.

Dylan mulls it over. “Light
blue, I think?”

Neve looks to Romer with a
knowing smile.

“Well, there you have it,”
he smiles back.

“What?” Dylan asks.

“We think we’re probably
dealing with some sort of crime syndicate,” Romer says. “One with enough pull
to influence law-enforcement, hospitals—”

“Synchrony?” Neve suggests,
then turns to Dylan. “Do you think your sergeant was telling the truth?”

“I don’t trust the prick,”
Romer says as he makes his way to the far end of the room. “Something was really
off about him.”

Dylan follows suit, and then
the two of them start to un-stack the body bags.

Neve cringes at the sound
of cold blood sloshing around inside the bags. Her mind rushes back to the man
she killed in Galen’s parking lot, remembering how his blood was leaking out the
crack in his skull.

It takes everything she’s
got not to double over and throw up.

She rips her gaze away, and diverts
her attention to the wall of intel. Might as well get some answers while
they’re still here.

Her eyes are initially drawn to a
large network of red thread. A quick inspection, and she realizes it’s a visual
representation of Dylan’s whereabouts.

No surprise there. Young has
already admitted to keeping an eye out for Dylan.

So she shifts her focus onto the
blue network.

This one’s tricky. She doesn’t
recognize any of the locations marked down on this network. Except one: the
Gastown gallery where she held her exhibition.

From there, she follows a short
blue thread that terminates at an industrial building.

Romer’s shop
, she nods to herself. Where the men in black—the men from
Synchrony—were waiting to grab him.

Compared to Dylan’s network,
Romer’s is really lacking. But there
is
a rather long thread extending
south, terminating at British Columbia Penitentiary.

Prison
..?

Neve looks at Romer, trying her
best to keep this revelation from painting him in a new light.

But she can’t stop wondering about
what he did.

Is
this
the secret he was
keeping from her? Did he and Dylan both do something, and Romer somehow wound
up with all the blame?

Suddenly, the sight of Romer
handling corpses is unnerving. He just seems so unfazed by it. He almost looks
like he’s helping Dylan move his furniture.

Neve looks away, banishing her
paranoia.

What she’s seen of Romer should be
enough proof of the kind of man he really is.

Before Neve takes her attention off
the network, however, she notices a note pinned right next to the penitentiary.
The scribbles on it look like arbitrary numbers at first, but she soon realizes
they are dates corresponding to Romer’s incarceration and release.

Three years
… Which happen to coincide almost perfectly with Dylan’s
absence.

Neve backs away from the wall and
stares at both networks simultaneously.

If she’s right to assume that
Dylan’s disppearance and Romer’s imprisonment are linked, then it’s quite
likely that Dylan’s return had nothing to do with
her
.

After all, he was in New York, not
the North Pole. He could have reached out to her.

If he really wanted to
…

And suddenly, something else dawns
on Neve—a glaring discrepancy she glossed over in the moment:

How is it that Dylan was teleported
to New York without his knowledge? Wouldn’t his dad have—

Holt
, she remembers. Marcus Holt, the person she hates more
than anyone else in the world happens to share the same blood as the boy she
loves
more than anyone else in the world?

How is that even possible!?

She stifles a bewildered laugh.
It’s incredible how her questions from nearly four years ago—questions she’d
long abandoned—are now so serendipitously being answered.

That’s
why Dylan was so reluctant to introduce Neve to his father.
Why he rarely ever spoke of him. And why whenever he did, he sounded like he
was talking about a complete stranger.

But wait. Holt may have been a
disengaged dad—
and a worldclass douche
—but what about Galen? As Dylan’s
godfather
and
psychiatrist, wouldn’t he have been alarmed by Dylan’s
sudden disappearance?

Neve sinks into thought, trying to
piece the puzzle together.

It makes sense that Galen would
keep the theories from Dylan to shield him from the sting of the truth. It’s
likely that Dylan would’ve been even worse off if he knew his nightmares were
actually happening.

But that still doesn’t explain why
Galen chose to confide in
her
.

And how does Young play into all this?
He claims he’s been watching them for their own good. But if not Synchrony,
then who
does
he answer to?

Neve starts to walk along the
perimeter, scanning the walls for more clues. She steps on something thin and looks
down, recognizing her sketchbook almost instantly.

What is it doing
here
?

Did Young steal it from her
apartment?

Bending down to grab it, she
remembers her most recent drawing; her sketch of the mysterious specter that
spawned at the head of Elli’s grave, and then vanished into thin air.

Like Young
.

But why would the man who’s been
plaguing her dreams want to make such a fleeting appearance?

And at a cemetery, of all places?

Neve thinks back to what Galen
said about ghosts: that they are simply a glimpse of a living person in an
alternate dimension—a glimpse you take through the eyes of your Proxy when you
Resonate.

The more she thinks about it, the
likelier it seems that he was nothing more than a vision. But that still
doesn’t tell her a thing about who he is, or why he’s begun to infest her life.

“Everything okay?” Dylan’s
voice from the back of the room interrupts her train of thought.

Neve turns to him, but
doesn’t say a word.

Upon noticing the
sketchbook in her hand, Dylan slowly rises.

He makes his way over to
Neve, each step smaller than the last, until they’re standing face to face.

“What?” Neve asks off the
dread registered on his pale face. “What is it?”

“How do you know what he
looks like?”

Neve stares for a few
moments. And suddenly, her thoughts are retracing the horror Dylan revealed to
her back at her apartment:

Strangled to death
…

Doused in gasoline, and
set on fire
…

Blood jetting out a
slit in his throat
…

And she realizes Dylan’s
prophetic nighmares are not of freak accidents, but of murder.

Murder at the hands of—

Please say no
. “Is this him?” she nearly whispers, terrified
that her sketch is a rendition of not only
her
nightmares, but of
his
as well.

Dylan doesn’t respond, but
the terror in his eyes strikes to incinerate what little hope Neve had held
onto. And suddenly, she’s standing across him inside a burning house as cinder
rains from the ceiling. As wild flames claw at their skin.

And they go up in smoke,
with eyes wide open.

“Jesus—” Romer’s reaction
to the sketch pulls her out of her hellish nightmare.

“How do you know what he
looks like?” Dylan asks again, his vocal cords tightly-strung.

Neve exhales a shaky
breath. “He’s the man I saw at the cemetery. Right before I started to sink.”

To Sync
, she thinks.

Resonance
.
Synchrony
.
Proxies
.

The boys shift out of
focus as Neve’s gaze zigzags through the air.

If every possible world
exists, then there are as many realities in which Dylan is murdered, as ones in
which he isn’t. So why assume that he’s destined to meet his end at the hands
of this Grim Reaper?

“Look—you’re not alone,” Romer
places his hand on Dylan’s shoulder, but promptly removes it before his gesture
is misread as pity. “And it’s not like Neve and I are
completely
useless.”

“I don’t want you guys
involved,” Dylan says.

“
Little
late for
that,” Romer chuckles.

“You can still get out
before it’s too late.”

“Right,” Romer crosses his
arms and tilts his head back. “And
you
can’t, because you’re
destined
to die a horrible death at the hands of some fucker you don’t even know,” he
nods slowly with the corners of his lips curled down. “Well… that’s that,” he
squares his shoulders. “Let’s just call it quits. That always works out for
everyone,” he says casually, but every single word out of his mouth is loaded
with subtext.

And tainted with
bitterness.

Neve looks at Dylan who’s
staring at Romer like a scolded child.

“Look—” she tries to break
the tension, “the Fray Theory isn’t about destiny. It’s about choice. We all start
at birth, our origin, and carve our path through life, one decision at a time—”