Just A Passing Shadow
Quinn has just turned sixteen. She has been dreaming of Logan almost every night, and tonight is no different.
“Come on, Quinny, let's race!” Eight-year-old Logan’s pony is already ahead, going flat out as usual. He looks back at her, laughing, his brown eyes gleaming with excitement. Quinn does not mind that her pony is slow; she loves to watch Logan ride. Flying free from his dark past, free from the crowding nightmares.
Quinn drifts out of the dream, then sinks back into its clutches.
At fifteen, they have been training with the Facility kids for several years already.
“Hey, Quinn.” He is grinning broadly. “You almost beat me that time.” He walks up behind her, wraps his wet, sandy arms around her, and kisses the side of her neck. He laughs at her horrified face, knowing full well that displays of affection are forbidden, then drapes his arm across her shoulders. They have just completed a lengthy training swim in the sea. Logan’s fine, muscular body glistens in the sun, his long lashes are spikey from the water. Her heart swells; she loves him with all that she is. He is her life, and he makes her very soul soar.
“Goodbye, my darling Quinny.”
Quinn jerks awake. She sits up, her heart leaping in her chest, expecting to see the only one who holds that heart, the one who is her entire life. Instead, she is greeted by nothing but an emptiness and the sound of her breath coming in short gasps, her chest heaving in confusion. She heard Logan whispering, felt his mouth, his warm breath against her ear, yet she finds herself all alone. Overwhelming loneliness squeezes her heart, leaving her feeling lost and adrift.
#
“Hey, Quinny!” Quinn turns to find Alfie hurrying to catch up with her; he looks more than a little worried.
“You haven’t seen Logan around lately, have you?”
Logan has been staying with Alfie. Annie and Freya, Alfie’s illegal Outside family, are not allowed to live in the Facility.
“I haven’t. I thought he had gone out on a mission with some of the instructors.”
“Logan never pitched; we have been hunting for him everywhere. His tracker is not working. He has disappeared without a trace.”
In the last few weeks, Logan has become withdrawn and distant, isolating himself from Quinn. She could not understand it, and he would not talk to her. Now, his whispered words from the other night come crashing down on her.
“Goodbye, my darling Quinny.”
She heard him as clearly as if he were in the room with her. Now she knows, with absolute certainty, that he has left her. Her heart crumbles to dust and her soul shrivels to a husk. Without her Logan, she is not a person; she is nothing but a shadow. No longer capable of having her heart touched, no longer capable of touching another’s.
Chapter 2 — Stolen Lives
Quinn and Logan were babies when they were stolen from the Facility. They had already been through the standard enhancements and alterations before they were born, increasing their abilities and senses far above the average person. This gave them the potential, as they grew up, to become extremely dangerous individuals. These kids are highly prized in certain circles of the underworld.
It has been seven decades since the world was turned upside down by a virus. It was not so deadly that it wiped out the entire world population; the recovery rate of those infected averaged at around ninety percent. But leaders panicked and the entire world shut down, risking the livelihood of the ordinary man on the streets. Protests and rioting worsened the situation, and days became dark and grim. Then the World Committee stepped in and took control. Some called it world peace, others called it world domination. The Committee rules with absolute authority. Being the supreme world ruler is tricky and dangerous; wielding so much power makes one a target for the power-hungry and the ambitious, as well as for those who value their freedom of choice. The Facility is top secret, and it exists for the sole protection of the Committee. The highly-trained special force of assassins is made up of people born in the Facility who start training from very young. The Facility is their home, and their purpose is to deal with any threat to the Committee, no matter how insignificant.
The late Drakeson was an influential Facility official who secretly pursued his own plans and purposes. He had people working for him both inside the Facility and on the Outside. His plan was simple: he swapped Facility newborns for Outsider babies that had died from ‘causes unknown’. Drakeson had a doctor in his pocket who had perfected the art of removing the microscopic tracking microchips from Facility babies and transferring them into the deceased. The doctor did the ‘blood work’ and postmortem to find the cause of the sudden death and falsified the reports. Who would think to question the microchip readings or the official reports? Who would think to question the very security of the most secure place on earth? To further avoid arousing suspicion, Drakeson stole the babies at random, usually with long intervals between each one.
Facility women recover quickly from normal childbirth and are often back on assignment within days of delivering a perfectly-engineered baby. When mothers go out on assignment, they leave their babies at the hospital nursery. Logan’s parents were among those who never came back. They went missing when he was just a few weeks old, leaving him alone without family and vulnerable to vultures like Drakeson, who took advantage at once and spirited the boy away.
Drakeson had couples on the Outside functioning as foster parents until the babies were old enough to be sold on to approved buyers. He had to be very selective about his buyers; nobody could know where he got these high-quality children from. To those living on the Outside, the Facility itself does not exist, far less the super-enhanced children it produces.
Drakeson dropped tiny Quinn off with a foster couple on the Outside who already had a baby from the Facility: baby Logan. Drakeson did not have a chance to arrange another family. It was unlike him to be so disorganized and he hated to put all his eggs into one basket, but the opportunity for acquiring another child fell into his lap and it was too good to pass up. A baby girl with red hair had died on the Outside; what were the odds that a Facility baby girl with fiery hair had just been born? A perfect swap.
Never in his wildest dreams did Drakeson ever imagine that his foster couple would die in a car accident three months later, leaving the system to place the two babies in separate Outside foster homes, the babies had disappeared in a quagmire of red-tape for a while before Drakeson heard about the accident and the demise of the foster parents and by then he had no way of tracing the babies without causing suspicion.
For the first four years of her life, Quinn lived with a decent family who treated her as their own – until they moved away. After that, she was passed around to different foster homes. With her curly red hair and a cute, cheeky little face, the other kids and the house parents always treated her as the darling of the house. That is until she turned eight and ended up at the Lubby place.
Logan was not so lucky. He had a foster family from hell. The parents were abusive and drank excessively. How they even managed to get past the social worker inspections is a mystery. Baby Logan was left alone for hours, unattended, dirty, and hungry, and the older he got, the worse the treatment became. The foster parents smacked him around, starved him, and locked him away for days at a time in a dark, filthy room. His enhanced senses and abilities made him resilient and afforded him fast recovery times; without that, he would never have lived to see his eighth birthday. From the age of five, he ran away on a regular basis. Each time he managed to survive on the streets for weeks at a time before social services managed to catch up with him; then they promptly placed him back into another foster home. Logan lived in more homes than he cared to remember.
Placed with the Lubby family shortly after his eighth birthday, he once again found himself in the care of people who could not care less. This time, however, it was different. He discovered that an angel lived in the house. An angel who warmed his icy, shattered heart and was a balm to his shredded soul; an angel who completed him, anchored him, made him feel like a person. An angel with bouncing red curls, a fiendishly-naughty sparkle in her bright blue eyes, and a constant quirky little smile that was full of mischief. Fate had once more brought Quinn and Logan together, and it would take a superpower to drive them apart again. Or would it?
To sixteen-year-old Quinn, it did not seem to take much to make Logan leave her. He disappeared from her life without a backward glance, apparently without a thought of the devastation he had left behind. It seemed he could not care less that he had taken with him her life, her heart, and her soul.
#
They were just children, lost and unloved, the day they met but the second Quinn set eyes on Logan, her heart was no longer her own. Everything she was, her whole being, belonged entirely to the sad, thin boy with sandy-colored hair and haunted brown eyes, from the moment she saw him coming down that garden path, carrying his battered little suitcase. His narrow shoulders were slumped in defeat and rejection. Quinn stood up and ran down the stairs toward him. She took the suitcase from his cold little hand and put it down at his feet. Placing her hands on his bony shoulders, she looked up into his stormy eyes and saw a spirit bruised but not broken, a soul shattered and bloodied but made from the purest gold. She put her arms around the perfect person standing in front of her and hugged him tightly, as tight as her little arms could squeeze.
“I am squeezing all the blackness out of your heart,” she whispered into his ear. “So that your gold can shine through it.”
Life at the Lubby home was difficult for the younger children and Quinn and Logan became their self-appointed protectors. Though they were both small and underweight for their age, the Facility breeding and early treatments made them tough fighters and quick studies. The older kids and bullies soon learned not to mess with Logan and Quinn, and to leave well alone, those under their protection.
But they hadn’t been at the Lubby place for very long when a vicious-looking woman bundled them into the back of her van and smuggled them back into the Facility, back to an evil man called Drakeson. That was when they learned about real monsters. That was when they came face to face with a cruelty that was inhuman, straight from the mind of a sadistic madman. That was when they saved Piper, and she and her family in turn saved them, helping them to escape from the clutches of the devil himself. It was then that they came to know the true meaning of family and friendship, and what it was to be loved unconditionally.
#
When Drakeson and his goons met a rather sticky end, Logan and Quinn returned to the Facility as part of a large, crazy family. Slotting into the life of a Facility kid is not easy. Normally, training starts from the day they are born, and; to join in with the training at the age of nine is a real challenge. Facility children are treated like the valuable assets they are, and their upbringing is carefully monitored, and they are loved and cherished by parents who are themselves highly-valued assassins. To train emotionally-damaged children to kill is asking for trouble, and Logan and Quinn were put through extensive testing before starting with proper training.
The two children were as devoted to one another as siblings ever could be. As they grew older, that love blossomed into something a lot deeper. Having spent time on the Outside, they know what it is to fly free, to experience the feeling of riding horses through the snow, to see mountains and forests; to be free to go where they please and to do what they please. The Facility is all about rules and rigid routine. There is no freedom of choice and even your family is chosen for you. Those born in the Facility do not know any better; it is the way life is. They are all highly-educated, aware of the outside world, but this is their home, this is where their family is. This is the life for which they were born.
#
“Quinny.”
“Yes, Logan.”
“Do you like it here?”
“What do you mean?”
They are lying on the rooftop of the medical center, the highest building in the Facility. The two escape up there when the confinement of the Facility gets too much. Logan rolls onto his stomach and looks down at Quinn. At fifteen, Quinny is his treasure, perfect and beautiful.
“I mean, is this how you want to spend your life?”
She stares up at the face of the one person she loves most in the world. His golden-brown eyes are serious and shadowed. Reaching up, she runs her fingers through his hair. Lately, she has been finding it difficult to breathe normally when he is close, and right now she is completely breathless.
“Logan,” she whispers. Her blue eyes are glowing.
“Yes, Quinny.”
“Have you ever kissed a girl?”
“Of course, I kiss you all the time.”
“No, I mean a real kiss, you know, like a smoochy kiss.”
“Um, Quinny………” He starts laughing.
“You bastard!” She sits up and jabs him in the ribs. She can’t help smiling; he has a wonderful laugh. “So, do I get to hear the gory details?”
“Awww, come on Quinny, it was nothing.”
“It was nothing, hey, Mister Logan?” Laughing, she pushes him onto his back. “You are such a liar.” She grins wickedly, poking and prodding him in the ribs with her fingers. She knows he hates it; his helpless laughter reduces him into a total wreck. In desperation, he grabs her hands and rolls her onto her back, pinning those torturous hands above her head.
“Not fair, Quinny.” He is breathless and panting, his hair standing up in all directions. He looks down at her, his eyes still sparkling. He is so incredibly sexy right now.
“Logan,” she breathes. “Will you kiss me?”
She stares up at him with eyes warm and glowing, cheeks flushed, hair shining red rainbows and flowing in disarray around her.
“Well?” She arches a brow and her mouth quirks into that cheeky smile.
“Um, do you want a smoochy kiss?”
“Sure.” Her eyes shimmer, and her smile widens.
Logan lowers his mouth and kisses her on the corner of her lips, moving on to the side of her neck. It is payback time. She feels his lips spread into a smile a second before she realizes her mistake.
“Logan! Don’t you dare.”
“What, Madam Quinn? This?” And he starts attacking her with wet, sloppy kisses in her ear and down the side of her neck. She cannot take it, and it is her turn to be reduced to jelly, helpless laughter, and gooseflesh.
“Oh Logan, please stop,” Quinn gasps, begging for mercy. She writhes around, trying to dislodge him. Then she becomes aware that his unbearable wet kisses have become slow and gentle and she stops moving as his mouth glides along the side of her neck, seeking her lips. She turns her head and meets his lips with hers. Keeping her hands pinned above her head, Logan kisses his Quinny. He loves this girl; she is his whole world.
“Let go of my hands, Logan,” she whispers against his mouth.
He releases her and her arms wind around his neck and she pulls him closer. They become lost in one another as Logan slides his hands under her shirt; loving the feel of her warm, smooth skin. He cannot keep his hands off her, he cannot get enough of her. It takes superhuman willpower to tear his mouth from hers.
“Holy shit, Quinny.” His mouth against her ear, he cannot catch his breath.
“No, don’t stop now,” she begs him, her mouth moving to find his once more.
Logan lifts his head. He strokes the side of her face and threads his fingers through the silk of her hair.
“You know that I love you,” he whispers. His golden-brown eyes have darkened, they are nearly black. “I love you more than life.” ……..
That is what he told her, and for the months that followed, she believed him. Their love grew with every day; their need to be near each other, to touch one another, became an insatiable craving.
Then one day he withdrew his heart from hers, leaving her heart floundering in confusion. He became cold and distant, and then he disappeared, taking with him everything that she was. He took her ready smile and her laughter. He took her interest in life and the sparkle of mischief from her eyes. He took her heart and her soul; he took her life.
