The Final Showdown - The Moon Trilogy - Book 3

Chapter eighteen:

   When Rachel finally arrived, everyone was sitting in the living room talking as if nothing was wrong.

   No, not everyone. Everyone except Johnathan. And they weren't talking about him, the aliens he'd brought back, or anything of the sort, which either meant that he'd never returned, or that he had and he hadn't brought the three aliens with him.

   They all seemed to be talking about Clarity, and what to do about her. The only reason any of them were awake was probably Clarity. Clarity....

   She was in a coma. Rachel's blood ran cold. She couldn't believe herself. She'd completely forgotten!

   "Have any of you seen Johnathan?" she asked, forcing nonchalance into her voice even though the only thing she wanted was to strangle something. More specifically, someone.

   "No." Scarlett said, looking up from her conversation with Sam, a crease forming between her eyebrows. It was a subtle shift, nothing else changed. But it was Scarlett's tell. "Why?"

   Rachel was literally opening her mouth to reply when Johnathan walked into the room. He'd come from the bedroom hall. The dirty, dirty serpent. He was trying to trick them all again.

   She looked hard at Johnathan, and she sent silent message. You're not going to get away with no explanation this time, buddy.

   He sighed, and for a minute, Rachel thought that he'd been able to detect her silent warning, but that was impossible, right? Well, he was an alien. Nothing was really impossible with him at this point. He could turn into an entire dragon, after all.

   "I think you'd better start with your side of the story, Rachel," Johnathan said, gesturing with his eyes at the gathered group. Your move.

   She narrowed her eyes. What was he playing at, now? She wished she could put her finger on it, why he just seemed so... off. The look in his eyes? Was is simply mistrust, lingering in the back of her mind since he'd been revealed as an ex-agent after helping them in the Organization headquarters, two years previous?

   With his remark, everyone in the room turned their eyes to her. She was trapped, but he was just as stuck, at least if she had anything to say about it. She would make sure of it.

  "What story?" Alex asked.

   Rachel made sure not to leave out any details as she recounted what had happened. She added careful emphasis on the fact that the aliens had been looking for Johnathan. As she was in the middle of telling all, Benny walked in, clearly worn from his struggle against the bike. She didn't pause. He already knew all this, anyway.

   The words petered out as the story came to close and she let the silence hang in the air.

   When she was finished, she was glad to see that her story had had the desired effect. Everyone had now turned, looking to Johnathan for an explanation.

   She smiled. No getting out of it this time.

   He sighed again. She felt a sprout of satisfaction take root. She'd gotten him this time.

   His eyes subtly flicked around the room: where to start, where to start.

   It was his own fault. He'd put himself in this situation by being such a... nobody that no one knew anything about.

   "I assume you know I'm an alien..." he started, only to pause. "Or—I'm sure you guessed, at least."

   He crossed his arms and looked at the ceiling, as if searching for the right words.

   "I'm not like Rachel, though... I'm from—not earth." He said slowly, finishing on a sigh.

   No one spoke. Still stuck.

    Johnathan sighed again. He was doing an awful amount of sighing. Wouldn't someone have noticed that a whole alien had come to earth? It had been different when her ancestors had come, so long ago, but him? Impossible.

   He muttered something, too low for even her excellent hearing to catch.

   "I feel like there should be an 'and,'" Scarlett prompted. So far, everyone was being a lot more patient than Rachel was feeling. Couldn't they sense what she did? he couldn't be trusted.

   "The aliens are looking for me because they... it—" he stopped again, his words hitting another brick wall. "This is ridiculous." This mutter was loud enough to hear. "They think I owe them money. I forgot about them entirely until I saw the news." A gesture towards the new screen. "I didn't think they'd chase me all the way to Earth." He shook his head.

     He seemed done with his explanation, but Rachel was far from satisfied. She knew just about as much as she'd known before. He was bad with money, apparently, but other than that, she'd already had strong suspicions about his alien heritage. Nothing else had been revealed. At all.

   "That's isn't good enough. You talk without saying anything! No one knows anything about you, and I know that I, at least, want to know a bit more if I'm gonna be staying in the same building with you." The thought that he was a space murderer, no matter how ridiculous it sounded, had stuck in her mind. And the thought that he was associated with Clarity was just that much worse.

   He raised an eyebrow. "Like what?"

   She could feel the eyes of the rest of the team on her now, but she was far from caring. She'd been dealing with Mr. tall dark and mysterious for far too long to tolerate his nonsense anymore.

   "I don't know, your real name? What planet you're actually from? What's your ideal first date? Your age? I honestly couldn't care less, space-boy." Rachel snapped, letting out a little bit of her frustration. She was tired of blindly trusting everything about Johnathan. He was dangerous, and no one but her seemed to think so.

   "Why would you want to know my age?" he asked, this time raising both eyebrows. A spike of aggravation tore through her. He was making her look like an idiot to get out of a sticky situation!

    She shrugged, not letting him get to her. She wasn't going to back down. She couldn't.

   "Well, I'm twenty-three." He said. "I think..."

   Oh, he thinks. What was that supposed to mean??

   She opened her mouth, a hot retort quickly springing to her tongue.

   "Rachel's right." It was Benny, effectively cutting her off. What was he doing? "Sure, we don't know anything about Johnathan, but that doesn't matter. None of us really know anything about anyone, we just pretend that we do. Isn't it enough that he's on our side?"

   There was a pointed look in his eyes, telling her to stand down. He knew she wouldn't, not if she didn't have a good reason to.

   The argument fizzled away. He had a point. A good one.

   She probably knew just as little about Sam or Alex, thinking about it. Johnathan had just... seemed so much more suspicious about it. Too quiet, too distant...

   She sat down with Benny, defeated. But even though she had conceded the victory to him, she still elbowed him subtly in the ribs as pay-back for interrupting her and ending her fight almost before it had started.

   He glared over at her and rubbed the spot she'd hit, but didn't say anything else.

   He deserved it.

   As if nothing at all had happened, the talk quickly started up again about Clarity. The thing that stood out most about the conversation, however, was the complete lack of solutions they had. No one had any idea how they were supposed to help.

   They talked in circles, always coming back to the same bare skeleton of information they had. Rachel tried to tune it out, hating every second of the endless reminders that she was so helpless to fight whatever it was that was happening to poor Clarity.