Page 100 of Black Curtain

Kiko was right. We should have figured out more by now.

We sucked at this.

I looked around at the rest of them.

“Sight,” I said finally. “He needs our seers’ sight. It’s the only thing that makes sense. He said he needsusto do this, right? The only thing we have that he doesn’t is sight.”

“So we use our sight on what?” Dalejem asked.

He sounded as annoyed and frustrated and skeptical as Kiko.

He motioned around the way Nick had, copying his mannerism, consciously or not.

“…It’s like Kiko said. These people aren’t real. There’s nothing to read. There’s nothing new to learn. Even if we could read them, we wouldn’t be readingthemat all. We’d be reading Brick, most likely, or whoever programmed this crap for him.”

“That may not be true.” Jax held up a finger. “We talked about photographs, right? Maybe it’s like a photograph back home? Maybe we can use the images of these people to track them. Or to read them––”

“They’re dead, Jax,” Dalejem said impatiently. “There’s nothing to track. Or read.”

“Yeah, I get that. But we could do time jumps, or––”

“No.” Black shook his head. He motioned towards the sky, indicating the organic field encasing the house. “No. We’d need higher structures for that. We can’t do that without knocking ourselves out. That field will interfere. Time jumps are like location jumps. We can’t do either without leaving the field around the house. We can’t leave the house. Brick wants us here. Inside. At all times.”

“There must be a reason for that,” I blurted. “Like the rest of it. Or he’d take the field off, right? He’d lock us in some other way. After all, does it really matter if we can contact our friends, if we can’t get out of here? What good would it do us, really? We can’t help them. We likely couldn’t even warn them. Brick could have easily overrun the entire resort before we woke up in this place.”

The others turned, staring at me.

“Maybe the field only works one way,” Black said, frowning.

“Maybe?” I threw up a hand. “But he likely could have locked us in without it.”

“Does he know you can’t jump anymore, doc?” Nick asked.

I frowned, glancing at Black.

That part, we weren’t so sure about.

“Because if hedoesn’tknow that,” Nick added. “Then that field might not have anything to do with this puzzle Brick wants us to solve. He might’ve erected that field to keepyouhere, Miri. He might have thought hehadto put the field in… to keep you from jumping us all out of here as soon as you were awake.”

There was another silence.

In it, I could feel everyone frowning at me, thinking about what Nick said.

I realized there was more to that silence, too.

Something about the changes to me and Black still puzzled Dalejem. It had something to do with Black’s cousin and his wife. He couldn’t quite comprehend how we could just “lose” the Dragon and Tortoise things.

He thought those things were a part of who we were.

“Not really,” Black said to Dalejem, clearly hearing his thoughts, too. “Not at all, actually. You can’t really compare me and Miri to my cousin or his wife.”

“How, though?” Jem stared at me, then at Black. “How is that possible?”

I shrugged, holding up my hands.

I had no idea how he expected me to answer that question.

“With the Bridge. And the Sword…” Jem trailed, glancing at Nick, who glared openly at him. Jem seemed to ignore his mate’s anger with an effort. “They couldn’t change what they were. It wouldn’t have been possible. It was who they were.”

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