Page 4 of Dream Mates (Into The Parallel Omegaverse #2)

Chapter Two

Grace

A gent Weigmier gave me another push into the courtroom as everyone stared at me, sending chills up my spine.

Shit. I knew what this was and why I was here. Fear tangled around me as I recalled the last time I saw the familiar people near the front of the court room. The ones shooting me angry looks, probably mad that I was here.

Professor Jaffey, as well as my boss at Rydor Corp, and two of my co-workers were the ones I’d seen selling weapons to people from another world one night late at work. They’re the ones who plunged me into this whole mess.

Before that night, parallel worlds were just a theory on my laptop. A theory that Professor Jaffey had deemed unworthy of being anything but a hobby.

Which had been wrong. Just like I’d been wrong about her. She’d been a second mom to me. But it was really just a ruse so that one day she could throw me under a bus.

Now here I was, testifying against her.

The judge, in her red robe, gave us an annoyed look. “What is the meaning of this interruption?”

“The prosecution would like to call Dr. Grace Ellington, from world 1218, to the stand,” the woman behind me said–the one that had chastised Agent Weigmier for cutting it so close.

I approached the judge, who gestured for me to take the stand. A number of people eyed me curiously. Taking another deep breath, I continued to recite Pi . 8979323846.

Memory bubbles continued to pop, everything becoming clearer. I hadn’t been wrenched from Wes and everyone, because I was in trouble . It wasn’t because I’d broken interdimensional law.

Agent Weigmier had retrieved me because I was a witness.

A key witness that the defense didn’t want taking the stand. One that had been hidden so no one would hurt me. Because my testimony was key and the defense tried to get rid of me.

My heart squeezed. No, my beloved professor hadn’t just set me up to take the fall, but had tried to kill me when that plan failed so that I couldn’t testify.

“How could you?” Professor Jaffey had muttered to me that night, her blue eyes narrowing. “I gave you a chance. I gave you everything.”

My former mentor, the one who’d persuaded me to pursue a PhD in math and guided me through the process, looked like she wanted to strangle me. Her dark blonde hair, with a hint of grey, was up in a bun and she was dressed in a suit. She looked respectable, likable, and trustworthy.

Once, I’d thought precisely that.

Like I had a choice to testify against you. I’d almost ended up on the defense bench with them.

Or instead of them.

Me not testifying against them had never been an option open to me. I took another deep breath. Yes, I could do this. I had to. So I can go back to Wes. That’s the one good thing that came from this mess. I’d somehow gotten to him.

After a couple of confirmation questions, the prosecution–which was led by the Temporal Authority–asked me about the night Enforcement raided Rydor Corp for violations of the Parallel World Travel and Trade Embargo for Class IV worlds.

Bit by bit, I told the judge what I’d seen that night at Rydor Corp, the defense company where I’d worked during and after my PhD.

I’d accidentally wrecked a colleague's research. To make it up to them, because they were mad at me, I’d been staying late after work to fix it.

I’d gone to the vending machines for a snack and ended up seeing things I shouldn’t have.

Because I could be a real dumbass sometimes, I got closer…

…and had gotten caught.

Those memories I’d had, of running in the foggy dark, of fences and guns and men with badges?

They had been of that night. The night that I’d seen my favorite professor engaging in a transaction with military officers in uniforms I'd never seen.

She, my boss, and a few others had been moving crates of weapons through some strange device that made them disappear.

I ran, was caught, they’d hurt me. Right after that, we were raided by the Temporal Authority Enforcement–or, what Spencer called the Temporal Police.

Enforcement was the department responsible for investigating unauthorized movement between worlds.

I’d been brought in with my colleagues, interrogated, imprisoned, and generally terrified.

Especially when my side project about traveling to parallel worlds was used against me. Professor Jaffey tried to pin their entire interdimensional smuggling operation on me, to make me the mastermind of the operation in order to save herself.

They’d known that selling our weapons to another world was illegal–though they’d tried to plead that they’d only known that people going back and forth was prohibited. Their interdimensional mapping project was a cover for their smuggling ring.

That was why I hadn’t been put on that project like I’d hoped. Why I’d been told that my parallel world project wasn’t viable for funding, just something for fun.

Her plan all along had been to use me as a scapegoat if things went wrong.

The prosecution finished their questions, and the defense took their turn, making me cry, as they painted me as an unstable liar who should be on meds.

They used records from my teenage years to prove that I really could be a mastermind, not just building a device to enable parallel world travel, but orchestrating contact with a parallel universe to smuggle weapons.

“Her disappearance only solidifies her guilt. She was supposed to be in protective custody with the others, and she disappeared. The only one who’d be able to do that would be the one behind this, the one with the connections,” the defense stated.

Another sob ripped from my throat as I wished that Wes was here to hold me. I’d been so lonely after graduation. Some of my colleagues were my friends, but most had gone on to other places and projects. I’d worked long hours and often been isolated from the few friends I had. Probably on purpose.

A secretive loner made a better mastermind.

No one would miss me if anything happened to me, either. I had no significant other, no mother, and had gone no contact with my family, other than the occasional text from the people I’d grown up calling dad and grandma.

Apparently I also made a good mastermind because my calculations for parallel world travel were close .

“If she’s the mastermind and disappeared, then why would she reappear just in time to testify?” the judge asked the defense, her look skeptical.

“Enforcement found her, obviously. Either that or she wanted to make sure they were imprisoned so that she could stay free,” the defense pressed, giving me a scathing look.

“If I could interject,” the prosecution said, “the witness is not on trial here. She didn’t disappear. She was placed elsewhere for her own safety after an attempt on her life when there was a breach in protocol regarding protective custody. She returned because we asked her to.”

I shuddered, remembering that breach.

What I didn’t precisely recall was how I ended up on the park bench in Wes’ world with amnesia.

“An attempt she probably staged,” the defense countered. His eyes focused on me. “Where have you been hiding, Dr. Ellington?”

Don’t trust anyone. Don’t mention where you were, Agent Weigmier had whispered to me before he pushed me into the courtroom.

“With all due respect, where I was is of no consequence, since I’m not the mastermind of this project. I was in protective custody because Professor Jaffey tried to kill me. Just like she killed the others.” My heart wrenched at the thought.

I hadn’t been the only witness that the Temporal Authority had brought in from my world to testify.

“There’s no record of additional protective custody for this witness,” the defense stated, reviewing a tablet.

“Well, yes, considering what happened to the others,” the prosecution added. “We have a full brain map of the events in question. It proves that Dr. Ellington isn’t the mastermind and what she says is true. Not that she’s the one on trial, as I would like to remind the defense.”

The defense froze. “You got authorization for a brain map?”

I didn’t even know what that was, and I had no memory of that. Though my head twitched, as if recalling the process. It didn’t sound fun. Their technology was so beyond anything we had.

The prosecution tapped on her tablet. “Your honor, we’re sending you the permits and scans.”

The judge nodded. “We’ll take a recess so I can examine this evidence and decide whether it’s admissible.”

Professor Jaffey lunged at me. “You bitch. If it wasn’t for me you’d be teaching kindergarten in your small town, married to some abusive, religious, asshole while popping out a kid every two years.”

Uniformed guards held her back.

Tears streamed down my face as Agent Weigmier led me out of the courtroom.

I remembered how good Professor Jaffey had been to me.

How helpful and patient she’d been as I worked through my childhood trauma to get to the point where I could disobey my mother and reclaim the childhood love of math that I’d been forced to forget.

I first met Professor Jaffey when she taught a special seminar at my university in undergrad.

My love of math had been truly rekindled, along with my hopes of getting my PhD.

She’d taken an interest in me and encouraged me to apply to the university that she was going to be teaching at–even if it meant making my parents mad and moving to the other side of the country.

My doctoral program had been hard without family support. I’d been massively underfunded by the university and had to work and take out loans. But she’d invited me to her house for dinner, paid me to babysit her kids, and got me a teaching assistant position.

When she’d formed a partnership with Rydor Corp, I’d been honored to assist with her research, and then be hired after graduation–even if it wasn’t the project I’d wanted, and the pay wasn’t that great.

Especially because I never got the opportunities to research, present, and publish like many of the others had.

Seeing her engage in illegal activity had confused me. It was the opposite of everything I’d come to know about her. But I’d given her the benefit of the doubt.

Hearing her accuse me of being behind it had broken me.

Her trying to murder me had destroyed me.