Chapter 18

Silicia drove them all the way down to southern Illinois, stopping only occasionally at gas stations or at the side of the road to sleep. The entire time, she kept up a steady stream of inane conversation while Tump stared out of the passenger side window in amazement. Silicia had no time to admire the rural midwest as it sped past - she was busy drafting up their new lives. The easiest way to disappear was to reappear as someone else. Her passport and other important documents were hidden away under the cushion of one of the back seats, and as soon as they'd crossed the border into Illinois, she pulled over to use a creaky old phone booth by the road. The connection was fraught, but could not be traced to Silicia Dale, and the lady from the Social Security office understood her just fine.

---

Champaign was a lovely city made up of wide dust-brown streets and lively lush trees throwing shade onto squat old buildings. Spring welcomed them with a cheerful breeze, which smelled heavenly after too many hours in the car.

Silicia put on the act of her life trying to convince a series of government workers that she was fleeing a life among the amish with her nephew, and was met mostly with polite disinterest. That was alright, because either way they walked out of the office with two brand new identities.

At the hotel she called herself Alicia Rue & him Thomas for the very first time. The young woman at the reception was easy to chat up and felt misplaced pity for the two of them that led to them getting breakfast on the house the next morning.
Silicia had already lined up a series of possible work places, and so she knuckled down writing out application after application in their little hotel room while Tump watched tv, soaking up knowledge about a world as yet unknown to him like a sponge. She made an effort to talk to him as much as she could, trying to quiet that little voice in the back of her head that whispered to her that she'd done irreversible damage to him by making him forget. It took a while before he seemed to find his footing and started acting more like a 15 year old kid than a traumatized shell of a person again, and so she could assure herself that he was better off this way.

Twice that first week she dreamt of running through an endless impossible maze of corridors which looked exactly like the ones she had walked 5 days a week for years.

---

Alicia Rue had never given the direction of her life all that much thought. As a teenager she'd wanted to do something cool, and so she'd gone to university where she'd met Mira, and Mira's plans had become hers. Even when she'd finally detached herself a few scant months ago, she had been caught up in urgent matters so completely as to never question what would come after.

Now it was after, and she had a kid to her brand new name, a low paying job in a city miles away from where she'd grown up and absolutely no clue what the rest of her life would look like.
So, for lack of a more meaningful thing to do, she clung onto 'Tom'. She spent her energy on helping him with homework, teaching him to wash dishes and fold clothes, to read street signs and use a smart phone.
But as much as she tried to focus on their peaceful future, she was irrevocably changed by their shared half forgotten past. When she spaced out over tax forms, she found herself wondering about Fred, when she passed out in front of the tv, her dreams were haunted by ghastly visions of what had happened to the other kids. Whenever she left him at home, she left the kitchen window open so he could climb out in an emergency.
Worst of all was not the paranoia, but the burning curiosity. Every morning she scanned the paper for mentions of Tump Inc., and every few days she would lose herself looking through forums and threads online for anything, anything at all that would tell her what had happened after she'd left.

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Tump was a shy but friendly kid, and so he made a lot of friends, though Silicia worried about how deep those connections actually went. He still leant on her a lot, and though she didn't mind, exactly, she had expected that he would eventually grow ashamed of her as all teenagers did of their parental figures. But he never did.

Finally, when she came home one night he introduced her to his new online friend group, which he'd met in a little online community he was active in. She'd encouraged him to take charge and help shape it when the chance was offered to him, and she was satisfied that it was a good way for him to learn about responsibility and conflict resolution.
That did not go as smoothly as Silicia might have hoped, but she did observe that it made him very passionate about helping and guiding his peers. The thought crept up on her unbidden then: there were people who needed him more, and she'd turned her - and his - back on them.

That wasn't a productive way of thinking about it. Making the best choice in the long run sometimes involved facing harsh realities, she decided. But still the image of Alec floating in a tank, angry, helpless, wouldn't leave her.

---

Silicia was walking home and clumsily cramming the last pastry the bakery had had into her mouth when she could finally avoid it no longer. Her phone dinged in her pocket - she refused to get anything smarter than a blackberry with a slide out keyboard - and she checked it to find a message which read simply:

Please help. We need him.
-L

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Tump was not only the missing puzzle piece to Tump Inc.'s monstrous plan, but also the one thing which could unravel it all. To bring the company down would require turning their own system against them, and the only way to do that was from the inside. And the only person who could do that...

For nearly a whole week, Silicia was able to brutally beat the knowledge of what she had to do back down. This sucked - it really, really sucked.
But there was no way around it.

---

It wasn't that she thought Tump wasn't capable. She was just of the firm belief that he should not have to carry this much responsibility on his shoulders.

With a heavy heart, Silicia did what she did best: she plotted. She prepared Tump as best she could, she anonymously made contact with what was left of her seditious network at the facility, she worked out contingency plans. She was quite plausibly stalling, but this was far too important to mess up.

Eventually, after weeks of this, she sat Tump down at the kitchen table one Saturday evening and began to explain. They both cried, and when she offered that he slap her he declined, but she could see in his eyes that he considered it. They went to bed, neither of them sleeping, and she didn't see him until Sunday afternoon.
He came up to her as she was writing out some unimportant email under a name that wasn't really hers and said, "how do we start?"

---End---

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