Chapter 11

"Ian, I swear to God, if you don't get back here—" Cal cut himself off. He chased Ian around the figure eight pool, arms outstretched, trying to get his super soaker water gun out of Ian's hands.

From her spot on the lounge chair, Chloe grinned. Ian kept squirting his friend even as Cal chased him. Impressive.

Chloe had spent almost half of the afternoon hanging out with Ian and his friends in the indoor pool, laughing and joking around with the group. It was fun, but most of all it was relaxing and that was what she truly needed right now. Three days had passed since the whole shooting fiasco at the awards show and the more time that went by, the more she sat and thought about the whole thing.

The room that housed the indoor pool felt more to Chloe like a giant greenhouse than a pool room. Overly tall glass windows surrounded the pool on three sides. The wooden structure weaving through each window and across the ceiling kept the tall clear glass stable. Whoever had designed the indoor pool had made a beautiful decision to line the outer edges of the pool with large grey and brown stones that flattened to create a polished floor. Around the pool in strategically placed outcroppings of stone grew medium sized ferns.

Chloe sat in one of the cushion-covered lounge chairs at the edge of the deep end. She'd plugged in her ear phones and tapped her foot to the quick, sharp beat of one of Ethan's older songs.

Though she'd decided to listen to music, she did keep watch over everyone else. She refused to miss anything that happened.

Ziggy—who'd wrapped his camera in plastic and stood in the center of the pool—spun slowly to catch Ian and Cal with his lens. At the shallow end, Sarah and Havana floated lazily on two different colored rafts.

Something in Ethan's song caught her attention. She stopped, sat up, and grabbed her music player to rewind what she identified as the bridge. Among all the notes in the song, three chords stuck out to her and glowed in her mind as if she'd spray painted them in bright metallic gold. She paused. Rewound again.

Those three chords repeated over and over in her head and she added them to the new melody forming. She hummed the connecting notes while searching frantically for a piece of paper.

If I don't write this down I'll lose it.

She desperately didn't want that to happen, especially as words flung themselves at her out of the blankness of her mind.

After yanking out her head phones, she scrambled over to her little bag she'd brought in. Her leather note book was inside, along with a pen, just for this type of occasion.

She kept humming the one line of melody as she scribbled it down. Then, she placed the words with it. "This glass maze won't ever end. We see the finish but how do we get there?"

Finish didn't seem like the right word. She frowned down at her scribble, crossing the line and rewriting the second part. "This glass maze won't ever end. You see what you want, but truth is, you don't know me at all...at all..."

She sang it. Over and over and over. Until it solidified and felt right, felt like two puzzle pieces connecting in her chest.

"Yes." Chloe grinned down at her paper. "That'll work." Eagerness built up inside her. She couldn't wait to sit down and piece all the words together.

Silence throughout the pool room had her glancing up. It felt much like coming out of a fog cloud and back to the present.

Five pairs of eyes stared at her.

Ziggy spoke first, "I got that whole thing on camera." He beamed at the other girls in the pool. "That was super cool."

Her entire face flooded with heat. She'd forgotten for a moment that she wasn't alone in the pool house. In fact, it almost felt like she'd been in her own imaginary bubble .

"Sorry." Chloe croaked out. "Sorry."

"What are you apologizing for?" Havana gave her own grin. "Ziggy's right, that was pretty cool."

"It's interesting to see sometimes where you get your ideas from." Ian walked over to her, the squirt gun still in hand. "The other day I watched you write down words on a napkin at the breakfast table after Ethan said something about pandas. It makes me wonder what goes on in your head sometimes."

Chloe sniffed. "If I told you, you'd probably think I'm psycho." She remembered writing on that napkin. Ethan had been talking about visiting the local zoo and how much he'd like to see some pandas. The second she heard the word panda, she thought of bamboo and after that, bamboo pens. Bamboo pens led to handwriting and handwriting went eventually to love letters. "I'd write a thousand letters just to bring your memory closer to me," was the phrase she'd put down.

"Maybe." Ian said. "But it's still fascinating to see you work."

That made her wonder about all the other people out in Sarias. How did they come about their ideas? All of hers seemed to launch themselves right at her. Did other people just sit down at a table and smash their head onto the wood until they came up with words? Ethan usually did that—without the smashing—and had a knack for coming up with entire songs right on the spot. "As long as I have the emotion I want to convey, I'm all set." He'd told her.

"Can I post this video on my blog, Lizzie?" Ziggy asked.

Lizzie. She'd told all of Ian's friends to start calling her Lizzie instead of Chloe. While it still took her a moment for her brain to match up that they were talking to her, she did feel a lot better about her decision.

It was important that she followed her own advice of moving on from Frank's evil. Part of that could only be done by taking back her true name and getting rid of the fake one Frank had given her. She'd spent a lot of time yesterday talking to Melena, Ethan, Miranda, and her siblings about having them call her by her birth name.

It wasn't much, but it was a start. And that was good enough for her.

Chloe thought about it, then shrugged. Even though embarrassment swept through her. "I guess so." Though why people would want to see her scribble down some words and act like a slightly possessed maniac was beyond her.

"People will like it." Ziggy assured her. "Trust me."

And then Ian shot her in the face with the water gun. "Ian!" She shrieked, ditching the lounge chair to keep her stuff safe.

She messed around with Ian and his friends for a little bit more, at one point ganging up with Havana to get her little brother pushed into the pool.

They all had a great time.

Five o'clock rolled around and Chloe figured she should probably get her stuff together. She told Ethan earlier that she'd meet him in the dining room for dinner at six. In order to be there in time she'd have to leave now so she could get changed out of her sporty green bikini and into something a bit more formal.

Off the side of the pool house sat a smaller change room that separated into changing stalls. One wall had cubbies that ran all the way up to the ceiling where guests could put their clothes and towels. Next to the bookshelf-looking wall was an entire rack of clean white towels, so Chloe wasn't quite sure why people brought their own towels.

She'd put her clothes in one of the lower rungs, about waist height, next to Havana's sneakers.

Right?

Chloe patted her hand all the way to the back, but no, her clothes were not there. Maybe someone put theirs with hers on accident?

She peered through the others clothes as politely as possible, picking up t-shirts and pants. Oops. Why did Ziggy wear rubber duck boxers?

Nothing. Maybe Ian played a joke on her? Except why take her clothes when she obviously had a swimsuit on? She could just walk around with the bathing suit. It wouldn't be comfortable, but it would still work.

"Ian?" She peeked her head through the door into the pool, "Did you take my clothes?"

Ian, water dripping down from his hair into his eyes, rubbed his hands over his face. "What?"

"Did you take my clothes?" She asked. "Because it's not funny."

"I didn't." He frowned at his friends.

Chloe looked at the rest of his friends with narrowed eyes. They all shook their heads. "Come on guys, someone had to. This joke doesn't even work. I'm clearly semi-dressed. You're supposed to wait until the person is naked to take their clothes and leave them stranded."

Cal cleared his throat. "No offense Lizzie, but I don't think I'm comfortable enough with you yet for naked jokes."

"Me neither."

"Nope."

"Yeah, no." Ziggy sniffed.

She believed them. But then where in the actual hell did her clothes go?

Ian chewed at his lip, "You don't think..."

Her stomach dropped. "No. No, they've got to be here somewhere. Maybe I just put them somewhere else."

They got out of the pool and toweled off, then helped her search for her clothes.

Turning the changing rooms inside out took five minutes. "I don't get it. I was wearing a purple shirt. That's a pretty distinctive color."

"It is." Havana said. "Is there a cleaning crew that comes in? Maybe they accidentally grabbed them?"

"No, they come in at night." Ian said. "Or they would've waited until we cleared out."

"I'll check with Miranda..." The words felt hollow coming out of her throat.

She met Ian's gaze and they shared a look. The nervousness in his expression echoed hers. "There's got to be a reason. It'd be silly to think..."

"Or not." Ian replied quietly.

With a sinking gut, Chloe grabbed a towel. "I need to talk to Jackson. I'll...I'll see you all later."

Then she left to go find her brother, clutching desperately at the hope in her chest that she was wrong.

~*~*~

Jackson

Jackson thought for sure his eyes were bleeding. After coming back from a sit-in on the king's council meeting, he'd perched at his desk and started to go through the seemingly endless pile of police reports. Really he just needed to pass time before his general debriefing later.

A general debriefing essentially gave the police force leaders a chance to air their disputes and update him on their progress reports. Nothing ever changed with the progress reports and the disputes always took more than one session to be handled—if they could be solved at all.

All in all he felt like it was a major waste of his time.

"Sir?" Avery stepped up in front of his desk. Her black hair had been pulled back today in an intricate knot at the back of her head. Wisps of escaping tendrils hung near her face and grabbed his attention. He liked the slightly messy hairstyle. "I need your signature for the second press release statement on the award show shooting."

Jackson flipped his pen through his fingers a few times. "Did we keep it as vague as the first one? The last thing we need is for this guy to know we're on to him."

"Of course, Sir."

He looked around at his desk and the amount of folders and files and seemingly endless paperwork he had. Except, Avery had almost as much as him—being his assistant and all. With a sigh he took the paper from her, scratching down his name as he spoke, "Avery, do you ever get tired of this job?"

She tilted her head in confusion. "Sir?"

He gestured at the office around him. "You're trapped in a single room for most of the day, staring down at numerous amounts of paperwork...does it ever frustrate you?"

Avery's gentle eyes met his for a moment. She must've seen something in his expression—probably the unending exhaustion—because she delicately folded herself into the chair in front of the desk. "Can I be honest with you, Sir?"

"Always. You know that."

"Sometimes I do get bored of the job." She said, "But that doesn't mean I don't love it. We get to do something important. It's not obvious sometimes—well, for you it is. For me, not so much."

"How so?"

"Saving people." She leaned forward, her lips curving into an encouraging smile. "A lot of people don't think paperwork can do that, but this stuff?" She waved at the statement in his hand, "They're all reports, enactments, and updates. All of it on the military and how well it works to serve and protect its people.

So yeah, it's not obvious." She shrugged her shoulders. "But it does good things."

That was a different way to look at it. He quite liked the optimism she had in her day-to-day life. What would it be like to wake up each morning and have that? "I see." He said.

The statement paper in his hands couldn't have weighed more than an ounce, but the words on it weighed thousands of pounds. The words on it would deceive people. But it would also help keep safe his little sister. And that made it worth a ton.

"You're right." He admitted with a half-grin. "Thank you, Avery."

"Any time, Sir."

He'd just opened his mouth to comment on how pretty Avery looked today, but the words escaped him as the door burst in.

"Jackson!" A very out of sorts Lizzie rushed in. She wore nothing but a green swimsuit and a towel and smelled strongly of chlorine.

He stood immediately, his face flushing at his sister's lack of modest attire. "Lizzie? What's the matter? And where are your clothes?"

He'd pulled off his jacket, wrapped it around his little sister, and had her sit down while Avery worked to get her some water.

"Jackson, I think—I think—" She tried, flustered too much. She could barely get the words out with all the anxiousness coursing through her tiny body.

He held up a hand. The fear in her eyes had his years of training kicking in automatically. All of his focus sharpened. "Wait. Take a deep breath."

Only after she took a nice, deep, shaky breath did he say, "Okay. Start from the beginning."

She did.