Fic: Into the Dark (R) (4/4)
Into The Dark (4/4)
By isis_uf
Rating - R (possible NC-17 somewhere later in the series)
Word Count - 10k-ish
Warnings - Angst with a side of hope, canon-ish (whole series and Final Break), adult themes, references to violence and murder, mild cursing, rampant metaphor use, abuse of imagery themes, one or two probably incorrect internet translations of English to Spanish dialogue
Warnings for series - Whole series (including Final Break) spoilers, violence, (probably) sex, cursing, death, het (canon pairings), classical literature and mythology references, questionable knowledge by the author of science, medicine, code-breaking and the mechanics of shady multinational conglomerates who secretly rule the world
Author’s Note - This is the first of four planned stories that don’t directly violate canon, but take place after Final Break in an attempt to make it more palatable (and, to me, more poetic and satisfying). It will likely be several months before I begin to post the next story (to be titled “Five Minutes to Midnight”). Please understand that it’s plotty and detail-oriented and I want to have it well underway before I post any of it anywhere so that I can avoid backing myself into a corner.
On another note, Michael’s birthday is non-specific because they couldn’t get it straight in canon (I did research it, I swear). I had to make up Lincoln’s, too. The tone and storytelling style of these stories should shift some from story to story. That’s intentional for a variety of reasons. Huge thanks to andacus for the beta, the idea-bouncing and everything else (as always) and to foxriverinmate and jennaxrose for the fact checking and encouragement.
Disclaimer - If it belonged to me I would have established that Christina Scofield had an horrific sociopathic evil twin that took her place after the lovely mother of both Lincoln and Michael died of liver cancer sometime in the 1980s. Since that didn’t happen... you know that nothing Prison Break related belongs to me.
Summary - In some ways, Michael is dead for 1507 days. In a lot of the same ways, Sara and Lincoln are too.
( Day 3, Day 67, Day 122, Day 210, Day 339, Day 365... )
( ...Day 661, Day 904, Day 1179... )
( ...Day 1255, Day 1320... )
Day 1479
On good days, Michael didn’t much notice his guards, too caught up in puzzles and riddles that intertwined in knots. Good days meant he’d loosened a knot or found a code or even - on very good days - broke a bit of it open, peeked inside. On good days he was useful. He was engaged in something, if not with someone.
Bad days were a different story.
On bad days, Michael missed the bulls from Fox River. They’d been detestable two lifetimes ago, forever trying to make him feel like a lesser man, like the basest kind of person. They’d been schoolyard bullies picking on the weak to make themselves feel strong, but at least they’d acknowledged him, interacted with him. At least they’d known he was a person.
These guards didn’t.
They didn’t taunt him, didn’t talk to him, didn’t look at him unless he was doing something he shouldn’t. He was a machine to them, a resource to untangle their Gordian Knot of encoded secrets. They were the network security to the mechanics of his brain as surely as the doctors and nurses were his god-damned IT staff.
Today had started out as one of the bad days, the newest in a long string of them. The project - the god-damned project - was seemingly never-ending. Every code cracked only led to another layer beneath it. Symbols and letters and numbers braided in strings of data, some of which was missing. It was like trying to figure out what Ripe Chance Woods meant when you were missing all the vowels and the bottom halves of the consonants. For all Michael’s brilliance, for all his successes, he could provide them with clues toward their sought after answers, but not the answers themselves.
Lately, there’d been a sense of urgency in the air. Pressure had been been steadily increased and threats had been leveled with alarming frequency. Not at him. Never at him. Always them. He was too valuable an asset and they knew far too well which buttons to push to make him work. But today had been quiet, way too quiet, and Michael was wholly on edge, working furiously over scraps of print outs on the workspace in his room.
The door unlatched, squeaking on its hinges a little as it swung open in announcement of his visitor’s arrival. But Michael didn’t look up, focusing instead entirely on the puzzle in front of him, until the click of high heels echoed throughout his room earning both his confusion and attention.
For a good half of a second, his eyes burned and his throat dried up. For a half-second after that he thought he might throw up.
She had brown eyes and auburn hair and a lab coat, but that was where the resemblance ended. She was too short - probably the reason she was wearing heels - and too tan and her disturbingly bright eyes held nothing of the softness that Sara’s had.
“Hello Michael,” she said, her smile disingenuous and her voice a pitch higher than Sara’s would have been. “I’m Doctor Middleton. I’ll be taking over for Doctor Irving.”
Funny, he’d undoubtedly been here for years, but until that moment, he’d not even known the old doctor’s name.
“What happened to him?” Michael asked curiously, fingers subconsciously tapping out patterns against the steel tabletop.
“He’s been repurposed,” she replied succinctly. “It was felt that you might benefit more from my leadership than his at this point.”
Michael didn’t say anything in response but quieted his hand when her gaze drifted to his staccato fingers. She looked entirely too pleased by the stilling of his hands.
“I’m already doing everything I can,” Michael told her levelly. “A lab coat and a bottle of auburn hair dye isn’t going to speed anything up.”
“Hair dye?” she questioned, obviously amused.
“Your eyebrows are brown, Doctor Middleton,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, well,” she laughed a little, brushing her hair back over her shoulder dramatically. “I figured, what the hell. I’m worth it, right?”
He blinked at her a little in confusion and surprise. It had been so long since someone had just talked to him, made a joke, treated him like a human being, that it threw him now. And, honestly, he wasn’t sure what her angle here was.
“Look, Michael... Can I call you Michael?” she asked suddenly, eyes staring at him expectantly.
The absurdity of being given a choice hit him fully and he couldn’t quite hold back a humorless laugh.
“Doctor Middleton, I’m pretty sure you can do whatever the hell you want,” he replied finally.
She appeared to weigh that for a second, head tilting side to side, lips pursed as she studied the ceiling.
“More or less,” she agreed after a beat. “But that’s no excuse for rudeness.”
“Forced imprisonment, that’s just fine, but rudeness is deplorable?” Michael asked dryly.
“We all do what we have to, Michael,” she replied, smiling a little. “You know that better than anyone.”
“Right,” he replied gruffly, hands scrubbing his eyes in a failed effort to wipe away strain or irritation.
“Doctor Irving was a brute, Michael,” she began again, stepping a bit closer and settling barely outside his personal space. “You and I both know that. It doesn’t have to be that way.”
“You’re... what? Going to be a kinder, gentler dictator?” he asked, tone level in spite of his obvious sarcasm.
“Hmm,” she mused a moment, watching him as if she were studying him. “Do you like horses, Michael?”
“Believe it or not, not a lot of families in the foster care system own horses, Doctor Middleton, and I am pretty sure owning one in downtown Chicago would have been against some city ordinance or another. So, I’m afraid I haven’t had much experience with them,” Michael replied dryly.
“Well I have,” she replied. “They’re amazing creatures, horses. There’s nothing like racing them, experiencing a speed and grace you’d have never been able to achieve on your own. But the thing about horses is if you push them, really push them, you can run them into the ground. They’ll drop dead mid-stride of exhaustion rather than disappoint their master.
“You’re our Seabiscuit, Michael. Doctor Irving was going to run you into the ground,” she levelled with him, eyes serious.
Maybe he ought to have been irked at being compared to a horse, a beast of burden, but part of him was just glad to be acknowledged as being alive.
“We know you’re motivated,” she continued. “But we need results. The General was executed yesterday and with him finally gone there are... factions, I suppose, who are struggling with each other to dominate the Company. That information you keep untangling for us? It’s names and bank accounts and locations of safehouses and other stores of information that no one but the General had access too. It’s what you thought Scylla was in the first place. It’s our silver bullet. And we need it now.”
In fifteen seconds, she’d given him more information than he’d had access to in years.
“So you tell me, Michael. What do you need to make this happen?” she asked. “A computer? A walk along the beach to clear your head? A god-damned tattoo artist? I can make any of that happen, and I will. But if you try to escape, Michael? If you take my generosity for granted? I will be forced to find other resources to aid us. You son is proving quite the problem-solver, utterly off-the-charts at sequencing and decoding. He’s not even four years old and he’s interpreting puzzles and patterns that would probably stump most adults. He’s too young to be of use to us right now, but I’m not above taking him in your place, molding him to fit our needs if you try to escape. And if you try to just kill yourself instead, I’ll take him to replace you and kill the rest of them just for spite. Don’t test me and don’t mistake my generosity for weakness.
“I have an agenda here and I will do anything to succeed,” she followed up. “I refuse to follow the footsteps of my predecessor. So, for now, I’ll leave you to think about things Michael. I’ll be back tonight and by then I expect you to let me know what it is you need for this project to be a resounding success.”
With that, her heels clicked against the solid cement floor as she turned and strode out of the room, imitation auburn hair swaying in her wake. He stared after her for a moment, mind whirring with bits of hope and heaps of terror. There was opportunity here, certainly, but so, so much danger. And, for the life of him, he couldn’t decide if this was shaping up to be a good day or a bad one.
*
Day 1507
It was a testament to how unthreatened their lives had been these last four years that Lincoln and LJ didn’t notice another occupant in the room until Lincoln flipped the light switch.
Darkness bleeding from the room, every muscle in Lincoln’s formidable frame startled at the sight of a familiar blonde sitting in his armchair, her back to a corner, positioned carefully so she wasn’t in view of any windows. He hadn’t seen her in four years and - despite the fact that he didn’t dislike her at all - he wasn’t happy to see her in the least.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Linc asked gruffly, even as LJ beamed brightly at their visitor. “You even being here puts all of us in danger. You even being in Costa Rica probably puts us in danger.”
“I’m not being tailed,” Jane replied sharply, tilting her aviator sunglasses to rest atop her head, her eyes daring him to contradict her.
“Really?” He asked sarcastically. “Then why are you sitting in the dark?”
“I wasn’t avoiding someone tailing me, Lincoln,” she repeated. “I was avoiding someone tailing you.”
Lincoln’s brow furrowed at that and he swallowed hard, long-dormant memories of adrenaline and panic flooding his veins anew even as he shook his head in silent rebuttal.
“Those days are over, Jane,” LJ told her with far more confidence than Lincoln felt and a smile he couldn’t have mimicked if he’d tried. “The Company’s torn to pieces. Even if they had the manpower, they’ve got no reason to keep tabs on us now.”
Jane spared only a brief glance toward LJ, her eyes set in a hard stare locked solidly with Lincoln’s. Something sunk horribly in the pit of the older man’s stomach at the seriousness and severity of the blonde’s gaze.
“When did they start watching us again?” he asked finally, voice deadened by reality.
“Lincoln,” she said, her voice bordering on softness or sympathy or something else he’d never associated with Jane. “They never stopped.”
It was a good thing there was a sofa an arms-reach away because suddenly dark spots swam in front of Lincoln’s eyes and everything sounded a million miles away. Gripping the arm of the sofa with whitened knuckles, he lowered himself to sit across from her.
“Sit down, LJ,” Linc said finally, touching his son’s sleeve as he realized the distant sound of half-muted voices ringing in his ears were LJ’s panicked protests that Jane was wrong.
“Why?” Linc asked finally as LJ crumbled next to him. “It’s been years. If they’d wanted us dead we’d be dead. It’s not like we have anything they want.”
“Yes you do,” Jane replied, her voice self-sure but kind.
“What?” Lincoln asked, completely at a loss. “What could we possibly have?”
“Leverage,” Jane replied simply.
The word rattled senselessly in Lincoln’s head, leaving him feeling like there was a picture somewhere in the periphery of his vision that he maddeningly knew was there but couldn’t quite make out.
“Jane, I don’t...” he started as the blonde pulled out a laptop computer and hesitated briefly before opening in and punching in a series of codes.
A video popped up as Jane turned the screen to face him and LJ. The picture was surprisingly crisp showing a windowless, white-walled room, that was sparsely furnished. A man was walking away from the camera, tall, lanky with longish curls of salt and pepper hair. His hands moved with patterned determination, long fingers puzzling around each other in a painfully familiar way. In truth, Lincoln knew who was on the video even before the man paced back toward the camera, but the muffled gasp from LJ evidenced that the young man next to him hadn’t.
“What the fuck is this, Jane?” Lincoln asked angrily, unready to be confronted so fully with the memories of his long-dead brother. “You break into my house with some old video of my brother-”
“It’s not an old video, Lincoln,” Jane countered. “It’s not a video at all. It’s a live feed.”
For a long moment, it would have been dead silent if not for a choked noise from LJ and the dull hum of the air conditioner in the background.
“What did you say?” Lincoln breathed, not daring to believe his ears.
“Michael’s alive, Lincoln,” Jane told him, leaning forward, arms resting on her knees. “And we’re going to get him back.”
By isis_uf
Rating - R (possible NC-17 somewhere later in the series)
Word Count - 10k-ish
Warnings - Angst with a side of hope, canon-ish (whole series and Final Break), adult themes, references to violence and murder, mild cursing, rampant metaphor use, abuse of imagery themes, one or two probably incorrect internet translations of English to Spanish dialogue
Warnings for series - Whole series (including Final Break) spoilers, violence, (probably) sex, cursing, death, het (canon pairings), classical literature and mythology references, questionable knowledge by the author of science, medicine, code-breaking and the mechanics of shady multinational conglomerates who secretly rule the world
Author’s Note - This is the first of four planned stories that don’t directly violate canon, but take place after Final Break in an attempt to make it more palatable (and, to me, more poetic and satisfying). It will likely be several months before I begin to post the next story (to be titled “Five Minutes to Midnight”). Please understand that it’s plotty and detail-oriented and I want to have it well underway before I post any of it anywhere so that I can avoid backing myself into a corner.
On another note, Michael’s birthday is non-specific because they couldn’t get it straight in canon (I did research it, I swear). I had to make up Lincoln’s, too. The tone and storytelling style of these stories should shift some from story to story. That’s intentional for a variety of reasons. Huge thanks to andacus for the beta, the idea-bouncing and everything else (as always) and to foxriverinmate and jennaxrose for the fact checking and encouragement.
Disclaimer - If it belonged to me I would have established that Christina Scofield had an horrific sociopathic evil twin that took her place after the lovely mother of both Lincoln and Michael died of liver cancer sometime in the 1980s. Since that didn’t happen... you know that nothing Prison Break related belongs to me.
Summary - In some ways, Michael is dead for 1507 days. In a lot of the same ways, Sara and Lincoln are too.
( Day 3, Day 67, Day 122, Day 210, Day 339, Day 365... )
( ...Day 661, Day 904, Day 1179... )
( ...Day 1255, Day 1320... )
Day 1479
On good days, Michael didn’t much notice his guards, too caught up in puzzles and riddles that intertwined in knots. Good days meant he’d loosened a knot or found a code or even - on very good days - broke a bit of it open, peeked inside. On good days he was useful. He was engaged in something, if not with someone.
Bad days were a different story.
On bad days, Michael missed the bulls from Fox River. They’d been detestable two lifetimes ago, forever trying to make him feel like a lesser man, like the basest kind of person. They’d been schoolyard bullies picking on the weak to make themselves feel strong, but at least they’d acknowledged him, interacted with him. At least they’d known he was a person.
These guards didn’t.
They didn’t taunt him, didn’t talk to him, didn’t look at him unless he was doing something he shouldn’t. He was a machine to them, a resource to untangle their Gordian Knot of encoded secrets. They were the network security to the mechanics of his brain as surely as the doctors and nurses were his god-damned IT staff.
Today had started out as one of the bad days, the newest in a long string of them. The project - the god-damned project - was seemingly never-ending. Every code cracked only led to another layer beneath it. Symbols and letters and numbers braided in strings of data, some of which was missing. It was like trying to figure out what Ripe Chance Woods meant when you were missing all the vowels and the bottom halves of the consonants. For all Michael’s brilliance, for all his successes, he could provide them with clues toward their sought after answers, but not the answers themselves.
Lately, there’d been a sense of urgency in the air. Pressure had been been steadily increased and threats had been leveled with alarming frequency. Not at him. Never at him. Always them. He was too valuable an asset and they knew far too well which buttons to push to make him work. But today had been quiet, way too quiet, and Michael was wholly on edge, working furiously over scraps of print outs on the workspace in his room.
The door unlatched, squeaking on its hinges a little as it swung open in announcement of his visitor’s arrival. But Michael didn’t look up, focusing instead entirely on the puzzle in front of him, until the click of high heels echoed throughout his room earning both his confusion and attention.
For a good half of a second, his eyes burned and his throat dried up. For a half-second after that he thought he might throw up.
She had brown eyes and auburn hair and a lab coat, but that was where the resemblance ended. She was too short - probably the reason she was wearing heels - and too tan and her disturbingly bright eyes held nothing of the softness that Sara’s had.
“Hello Michael,” she said, her smile disingenuous and her voice a pitch higher than Sara’s would have been. “I’m Doctor Middleton. I’ll be taking over for Doctor Irving.”
Funny, he’d undoubtedly been here for years, but until that moment, he’d not even known the old doctor’s name.
“What happened to him?” Michael asked curiously, fingers subconsciously tapping out patterns against the steel tabletop.
“He’s been repurposed,” she replied succinctly. “It was felt that you might benefit more from my leadership than his at this point.”
Michael didn’t say anything in response but quieted his hand when her gaze drifted to his staccato fingers. She looked entirely too pleased by the stilling of his hands.
“I’m already doing everything I can,” Michael told her levelly. “A lab coat and a bottle of auburn hair dye isn’t going to speed anything up.”
“Hair dye?” she questioned, obviously amused.
“Your eyebrows are brown, Doctor Middleton,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, well,” she laughed a little, brushing her hair back over her shoulder dramatically. “I figured, what the hell. I’m worth it, right?”
He blinked at her a little in confusion and surprise. It had been so long since someone had just talked to him, made a joke, treated him like a human being, that it threw him now. And, honestly, he wasn’t sure what her angle here was.
“Look, Michael... Can I call you Michael?” she asked suddenly, eyes staring at him expectantly.
The absurdity of being given a choice hit him fully and he couldn’t quite hold back a humorless laugh.
“Doctor Middleton, I’m pretty sure you can do whatever the hell you want,” he replied finally.
She appeared to weigh that for a second, head tilting side to side, lips pursed as she studied the ceiling.
“More or less,” she agreed after a beat. “But that’s no excuse for rudeness.”
“Forced imprisonment, that’s just fine, but rudeness is deplorable?” Michael asked dryly.
“We all do what we have to, Michael,” she replied, smiling a little. “You know that better than anyone.”
“Right,” he replied gruffly, hands scrubbing his eyes in a failed effort to wipe away strain or irritation.
“Doctor Irving was a brute, Michael,” she began again, stepping a bit closer and settling barely outside his personal space. “You and I both know that. It doesn’t have to be that way.”
“You’re... what? Going to be a kinder, gentler dictator?” he asked, tone level in spite of his obvious sarcasm.
“Hmm,” she mused a moment, watching him as if she were studying him. “Do you like horses, Michael?”
“Believe it or not, not a lot of families in the foster care system own horses, Doctor Middleton, and I am pretty sure owning one in downtown Chicago would have been against some city ordinance or another. So, I’m afraid I haven’t had much experience with them,” Michael replied dryly.
“Well I have,” she replied. “They’re amazing creatures, horses. There’s nothing like racing them, experiencing a speed and grace you’d have never been able to achieve on your own. But the thing about horses is if you push them, really push them, you can run them into the ground. They’ll drop dead mid-stride of exhaustion rather than disappoint their master.
“You’re our Seabiscuit, Michael. Doctor Irving was going to run you into the ground,” she levelled with him, eyes serious.
Maybe he ought to have been irked at being compared to a horse, a beast of burden, but part of him was just glad to be acknowledged as being alive.
“We know you’re motivated,” she continued. “But we need results. The General was executed yesterday and with him finally gone there are... factions, I suppose, who are struggling with each other to dominate the Company. That information you keep untangling for us? It’s names and bank accounts and locations of safehouses and other stores of information that no one but the General had access too. It’s what you thought Scylla was in the first place. It’s our silver bullet. And we need it now.”
In fifteen seconds, she’d given him more information than he’d had access to in years.
“So you tell me, Michael. What do you need to make this happen?” she asked. “A computer? A walk along the beach to clear your head? A god-damned tattoo artist? I can make any of that happen, and I will. But if you try to escape, Michael? If you take my generosity for granted? I will be forced to find other resources to aid us. You son is proving quite the problem-solver, utterly off-the-charts at sequencing and decoding. He’s not even four years old and he’s interpreting puzzles and patterns that would probably stump most adults. He’s too young to be of use to us right now, but I’m not above taking him in your place, molding him to fit our needs if you try to escape. And if you try to just kill yourself instead, I’ll take him to replace you and kill the rest of them just for spite. Don’t test me and don’t mistake my generosity for weakness.
“I have an agenda here and I will do anything to succeed,” she followed up. “I refuse to follow the footsteps of my predecessor. So, for now, I’ll leave you to think about things Michael. I’ll be back tonight and by then I expect you to let me know what it is you need for this project to be a resounding success.”
With that, her heels clicked against the solid cement floor as she turned and strode out of the room, imitation auburn hair swaying in her wake. He stared after her for a moment, mind whirring with bits of hope and heaps of terror. There was opportunity here, certainly, but so, so much danger. And, for the life of him, he couldn’t decide if this was shaping up to be a good day or a bad one.
*
Day 1507
It was a testament to how unthreatened their lives had been these last four years that Lincoln and LJ didn’t notice another occupant in the room until Lincoln flipped the light switch.
Darkness bleeding from the room, every muscle in Lincoln’s formidable frame startled at the sight of a familiar blonde sitting in his armchair, her back to a corner, positioned carefully so she wasn’t in view of any windows. He hadn’t seen her in four years and - despite the fact that he didn’t dislike her at all - he wasn’t happy to see her in the least.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Linc asked gruffly, even as LJ beamed brightly at their visitor. “You even being here puts all of us in danger. You even being in Costa Rica probably puts us in danger.”
“I’m not being tailed,” Jane replied sharply, tilting her aviator sunglasses to rest atop her head, her eyes daring him to contradict her.
“Really?” He asked sarcastically. “Then why are you sitting in the dark?”
“I wasn’t avoiding someone tailing me, Lincoln,” she repeated. “I was avoiding someone tailing you.”
Lincoln’s brow furrowed at that and he swallowed hard, long-dormant memories of adrenaline and panic flooding his veins anew even as he shook his head in silent rebuttal.
“Those days are over, Jane,” LJ told her with far more confidence than Lincoln felt and a smile he couldn’t have mimicked if he’d tried. “The Company’s torn to pieces. Even if they had the manpower, they’ve got no reason to keep tabs on us now.”
Jane spared only a brief glance toward LJ, her eyes set in a hard stare locked solidly with Lincoln’s. Something sunk horribly in the pit of the older man’s stomach at the seriousness and severity of the blonde’s gaze.
“When did they start watching us again?” he asked finally, voice deadened by reality.
“Lincoln,” she said, her voice bordering on softness or sympathy or something else he’d never associated with Jane. “They never stopped.”
It was a good thing there was a sofa an arms-reach away because suddenly dark spots swam in front of Lincoln’s eyes and everything sounded a million miles away. Gripping the arm of the sofa with whitened knuckles, he lowered himself to sit across from her.
“Sit down, LJ,” Linc said finally, touching his son’s sleeve as he realized the distant sound of half-muted voices ringing in his ears were LJ’s panicked protests that Jane was wrong.
“Why?” Linc asked finally as LJ crumbled next to him. “It’s been years. If they’d wanted us dead we’d be dead. It’s not like we have anything they want.”
“Yes you do,” Jane replied, her voice self-sure but kind.
“What?” Lincoln asked, completely at a loss. “What could we possibly have?”
“Leverage,” Jane replied simply.
The word rattled senselessly in Lincoln’s head, leaving him feeling like there was a picture somewhere in the periphery of his vision that he maddeningly knew was there but couldn’t quite make out.
“Jane, I don’t...” he started as the blonde pulled out a laptop computer and hesitated briefly before opening in and punching in a series of codes.
A video popped up as Jane turned the screen to face him and LJ. The picture was surprisingly crisp showing a windowless, white-walled room, that was sparsely furnished. A man was walking away from the camera, tall, lanky with longish curls of salt and pepper hair. His hands moved with patterned determination, long fingers puzzling around each other in a painfully familiar way. In truth, Lincoln knew who was on the video even before the man paced back toward the camera, but the muffled gasp from LJ evidenced that the young man next to him hadn’t.
“What the fuck is this, Jane?” Lincoln asked angrily, unready to be confronted so fully with the memories of his long-dead brother. “You break into my house with some old video of my brother-”
“It’s not an old video, Lincoln,” Jane countered. “It’s not a video at all. It’s a live feed.”
For a long moment, it would have been dead silent if not for a choked noise from LJ and the dull hum of the air conditioner in the background.
“What did you say?” Lincoln breathed, not daring to believe his ears.
“Michael’s alive, Lincoln,” Jane told him, leaning forward, arms resting on her knees. “And we’re going to get him back.”