Page 44 of Take You Home (Redwater Demons #3)

“Forget that. I’ll get Foxe to finish them.” Nostrand leaned forward. “Your interrogation rotation is starting early. We have a problem.”

Chester paused. They never started his interrogation rotations out of sync with Nostrand’s, not with Chester being a probationary interrogator. “What? What’s going on?”

“It’s…” Nostrand’s jaw worked. “It’s your buddy. Jackson. He just defected. ”

All at once, the world went very quiet around Chester. Absently, he registered that the blood-soaked sponge slipped from his numb fingers and hit the floor with a dull plunk, but the signal to pick it up got stuck somewhere between his brain and his arm. “No. That’s impossible. That’s??—?”

“Yeah, well,” Nostrand said shortly. “It happened. A strike team caught him trying to join Sawyer Solomon and Naomi Gutierrez. Apparently, he knows where they are.”

That explained it. Damn it, JJ. Couldn’t he have just asked for backup like a regular person? “Then he wasn’t defecting, Nostrand. He must’ve been trying to convince them to come home. He??—?”

“So he nearly killed Hawthorne and Massimo for shits and giggles, then?” Nostrand snapped.

Chester flinched. “He?—he hurt someone?”

That didn’t sound like JJ. That didn’t sound like JJ at all. That didn’t??—

“Yes. But they incapacitated him before he escaped.” Nostrand jerked his head towards the wall behind Chester?—the one connecting this hallway of interrogation rooms to the next. “They put him in Room 16. He’s your first assignment of this rotation.”

Chester’s stomach bottomed out. “What? No. No, I?—I can’t??—?”

“Yes, you can.” Nostrand’s voice sounded different from usual. Still hard and unyielding, but maybe the slightest bit quieter. “You can and you will, Locke. You know Jackson inside and out. That means you might just be the only one who can pull this off.”

“But I?—?” Chester’s lungs felt tight. “I??—?”

“The entire situation with Solomon and Gutierrez is so unprecedented that the Council is willing to show Jackson some level of clemency,” Nostrand cut in.

Chester’s heart leaped. “And you know how rare that is. If you can get Jackson to tell you where they are, the Council won’t burn him alive.

They’ll attempt reeducation first.” His eyes narrowed.

“ Not many interrogators get the opportunity to save a dissident before they’re too far gone.

Don’t screw it up, Locke. Jackson’s fate is on you. ”

“So that’s how they did it,” Obie says.

On the mattress next to him, twenty-two-year-old Chester takes a moment to drag his eyes away from the memoryscape still playing out in front of them like a movie on a screen. “What?”

“How they got you to agree,” Obie says, nodding at where Memory Nostrand is explaining the assignment to an ashen Memory Chester.

“They specifically tailored it to make it sound like you were saving JJ?—and that you were the only one who could pull it off. They made it sound like, if you truly cared about him, then you had to do it.” Obie meets Chester’s eyes. “Of course you agreed. You love JJ.”

Chester’s fingers tighten around Obie’s, but he doesn’t answer. Now that Obie has access to Chester’s memories, he doesn’t technically need the physical contact anymore, but he isn’t going to say anything unless Chester does.

Obie looks back at the sixteen-year-old Chester, frowning. There’s something different about him, something that was especially prominent right before Memory Nostrand walked into the room.

It was in Memory Chester’s shoulders, Obie thinks. They were more relaxed than Obie has ever seen on his own version of Chester. That hard edge in his eyes wasn’t there yet, and neither was the stony mask Obie is so familiar with. No, this Chester almost seemed…

Hopeful. Obie’s heart cracks a little. “You were so young.”

“I mean?—?” Chester’s shoulders hunch. “I guess. Sixteen isn’t really that young.”

“You were a child, Chester. By human standards, you were still considered a child.” Cautiously, Obie rubs his thumb over Chester’s knuckles. “Do you want to skip ahead?”

Chester’s face was bloodless as he approached Room 16. On the other side of the one-way glass, JJ was already strapped to the interrogation table, his expression hard and his eyes fixed on the ceiling.

Chester’s hands started shaking again. He clenched them into fists to hide it.

This was going to be bad. He knew it was. JJ was going to hate him, especially at first.

But, as long as Chester got a confession, at least JJ would still be alive to hate him. Taking a deep, steadying breath, he forced himself to grab the doorknob and shoulder his way into the room.

JJ’s eyes shifted over to him, dark and shadowed. “Hey.”

His tone was curter and more distant than he’d ever used with Chester. Scowling, Chester stalked over to the interrogation table. “What the hell are you doing, JJ?”

“Right now?” JJ tested the restraints around his wrists. “Not much.”

“Jackson,” Chester snapped.

JJ scoffed. “Wow. Last-name basis already? You work fast, Locke.”

Chester fought back a flinch. “You’re right,” he said, hating how easily the words came out.

Hating how smoothly his brain slipped into interrogator mode, into that delicate back-and-forth, into giving a little to get even more in return.

“I’m just… frustrated, JJ. And so confused. Just tell me what happened, man.”

JJ’s jaw tightened. “You know what happened. I’m sure the Council told you all about it. ”

“We both know they exaggerate, Jayj. I want to hear it from you. The truth.”

“No, you want me to say something to incriminate myself,” JJ said, an edge creeping into his voice. “I know how this works, remember? You’ve told me about all your interrogation strategies.”

Damn it. Chester bit back a grimace. “Well, the Council told me that you tried to defect and join Sawyer and Naomi. But I’m certain that can’t be right, because the JJ I know wouldn’t do that. They betrayed us. They left us.”

“No, they left you.” JJ’s eyes moved back to the ceiling. Away from Chester. “The night they left, they asked me to come with them. I?—I said no. And I’ve regretted that every single day since then.”

“Why?” The word tasted like ashes on Chester’s lips. “Why would you regret that?”

JJ laughed bitterly. “Because at least they didn’t look down on me?—on us.

At least they didn’t ignore us and disdain us and outright insult us for daring to exist. The Sanctum doesn’t want us, Chester.

They never did. They’ve been trying to get rid of their resident neophytes from the start.

I didn’t?—I didn’t realize just how much everyone hates us until now. ”

“That… sounds accurate, actually,” Obie says, casting a sideways glance at the real-life Chester next to him. “Did JJ come up with that himself?”

Chester shakes his head, his eyes still locked on Memory JJ and Memory Chester. “The Council told him what to say. Or they gave him the broad strokes, at least?—the quick-and-dirty guide to being a believable dissident.”

Obie narrows his eyes, considering the memoryscape. The explanation makes sense, but it doesn’t feel like the full story. Because there’s something about JJ’s words, about his tone, about his body language??—

Something that seems a bit too familiar. A bit too similar, Obie realizes, to Chester himself. “I think there’s more to it than that.”

Chester’s eyes flicker back to him. “What do you mean?”

“Sawyer said that you were more outspoken from the start, right? More likely to question orders, more critical of the bloodlines hierarchy.” Obie nods at Memory JJ. “So the Council had JJ say exactly what you were thinking?—and explicitly show you the price of those views.”

Chester flinches, his eyes widening. “I?—I didn’t even think about that. I just thought they chose JJ for my final exam to try and isolate us from each other, but?—but??—?”

He struggles to articulate his thoughts. Obie waits, lowering the volume on the memoryscape. He knows that Chester needs to work through this himself and reach his own conclusions, just like with the Teresa Roz situation, but??—

But it isn’t fun to watch Chester realize just how powerless he’s always been.

Eventually, Chester finds the words he’s looking for. “They wanted me to hear JJ’s voice every time I questioned my position in the hierarchy,” he says hollowly. “They?—they wanted me to remember this moment every time I spoke out against the Council.”

Obie hesitates. “Did you?”

For a split second, Chester’s face crumples. He looks away.

In the memoryscape, Memory Chester reaches for a knife. Hastily, Obie pauses it. Neither of them needs to see that. “So that was before. Want to review what happened afterward?”

Chester left JJ half-conscious and bleeding on the interrogation table.

He couldn’t worry about that now. JJ had finally, finally, finally given Chester an address in a hoarse, dazed mumble, and Chester couldn’t waste any more time before getting it to his superiors.

The sooner the Council could confirm JJ’s intel, the sooner they could hopefully release him from the prison and undo whatever damage Sawyer and Naomi did to him. Chester needed that. He needed? ? —

He needed JJ to be safe. Safe and whole and never, ever under Chester’s knife again.

Nostrand was sitting outside the one-way mirror with a clipboard. Was this one of Chester’s graded interrogations? It had been at least two months since the last time Nostrand submitted a progress report to the Council.

Chester hated that this was going to be included in his file, but at least it would have a happy ending. “174 Marshall Street,” he said without preamble, stopping short just in front of Nostrand. “That’s where JJ was going. That’s where?—where Solomon and Gutierrez are.”

Nostrand set his clipboard down next to him, pushing himself to his feet. “I’ll let Councilwoman Nasir know that it’s over.”

“And?—?” Chester’s hands kept twitching. Why did his hands keep twitching? “And the Council said they’ll show him clemency, right? That they won’t?—won’t hurt him?”

“Write your post-interrogation report,” Nostrand said. “We’ll talk after that.”

Paperwork. Right. Chester’s job wasn’t over yet. “Okay,” he said, and he jogged off towards the computer as Nostrand pulled out his phone to text the Council.

“You…” Obie’s heart twists. “You look like you aged half a decade in that interrogation room, puppy.”

“Not so young anymore, right?” Chester says, a hint of bitterness creeping into the words. “And I do remember this next part, actually. Because Nostrand did something he’d never done before.”

Trepidation coils down Obie’s spine. “What? What’d he do?”

“He was actually a good mentor,” Chester says.

“Done,” Chester said, stepping away from the computer. “So with JJ??—?”

“Wait,” Nostrand ordered, squinting over Chester’s shoulder at the screen. His mouth moved silently as he read the words, checking Chester’s work more carefully than usual, before he nodded once, flipped over his rubric, and put one last checkmark. “Sit down, Locke.”

Why did he want Chester to sit down? Chester was fine. He was??—

He sat down. Instantly, he wasn’t quite sure if he could stand up again, but he’d worry about that later. “I’m fine,” he said, twisting his fingers together to hide their trembling. “But JJ??—?”

“?—?is also fine,” Nostrand cut in, jerking his head towards Room 16.

To Chester’s shock, two of the infirmary’s spellcasters walked directly inside and started to unstrap JJ from the table.

“The spellcasters are going to heal him now. He wasn’t actually a dissident.

He volunteered for your final exam, which you just passed. Well done.”

The words slammed sideways into Chester’s brain, not penetrating and not computing. His final exam? What about his final exam? And what did Nostrand mean about JJ not being a dissident? Chester just interrogated him. He just interrogated him, and?— “What?”

To Chester’s surprise, Nostrand didn’t berate him for not understanding.

Instead, he sat down next to him and repeated, slowly and clearly, “Jackson wasn’t actually a dissident.

He volunteered as a fake defector for your final exam.

That interrogation you just performed was your final exam. You passed.”

Chester’s pulse roared in his ears. It sounded an awful lot like screaming.

“For the record,” Nostrand said, “I told the Council that this was a bad idea. But they’re obsessed with proving that you neophyte hunters can match the rest of us, so they decided to give you the most traumatic final exam possible.

” He let out his breath in a hiss. “And you passed. So I guess that counts for something.”

Chester’s chest felt tight. Breathing shaky, hands clammy. He was distantly registering Nostrand’s words, abstractly understanding their meaning, but he didn’t quite believe them, couldn’t quite believe them, because??—

Because he couldn’t have tortured his best friend for nothing, right?

“Your status around the Sanctum just went up,” Nostrand continued.

“You know how quickly gossip spreads around this place. Everyone knows about your final exam by now.” He leaned forward.

“Don’t ruin it by having a breakdown in public.

Keep your head down, speak to no one, and walk calmly to your room.

Don’t embarrass both of us.” He pushed himself up. “Come on. On your feet.”