Hey guys,

Here’s chapter 7. Next chap should have some good stuff with Vaughn, so keep reading. Thanks for all the reviews, as always, they made me smile.

Thanks for reading,

phoenix

Michael Vaughn sat there, unmoving, his eyes locked on the screen. “Zoom in on that.” The image stopped. It was of a girl climbing into the passenger seat of a moving car. Michael Vaughn knew the girl, he had been searching for her his entire life. But it was not her that he was worried about now. His eyes were locked on the figure driving the car.

“I know him,” he muttered. “But, it can’t be, oh god-“

He leapt up from the swivel chair and rummaged through the file drawer. “Where’s everything we have on Peterson and Sark?”

His assistant ran out of the office, only to return minutes later with a small stack of files in his hands. “Here, sir.”

Michael Vaughn grabbed the files and spread them out across the desk, searching through the stacks and stacks of papers. “Here. Something about an agency-“

“Yes, but we’ve never found any concrete evidence-“

“Until now.” Michael pointed to the screen. “See that man? I know him from a mission only about a year ago. He was an agent under the command of Julian Sark.”

Michael turned back to the papers. “We need to find this place. Get in there and take them down.”

“I might know somebody who can help,” the assistant said. “A prisoner who is known to have connections to Sark. You can try and get the information from them.”

Michael nodded. “Get a team assembled as soon as possible. This is my daughter. I want her home safely with only the best agents, you understand me?”

The assistant nodded and rushed out of the room, leaving Michael Vaughn to get lost once again in the black and white screen, holding the only images he has seen of his daughter since she was a little girl. They bring tears to his eyes.

Izzie power-walked down the hall, anxiously checking her watch. Great. She was late already, and she was sure that if she was following Jason’s crumpled paper of directions right, this was the new combat gym she was supposed to meet him at for training. But now she was lost. And of course the indecipherable scribbles she was still squinting at weren’t helping.

Izzie leaned against the wall with a sigh and stared at the door in front of her. There should be a little plastic sign on it that said G 4, if it was the room she was looking for, but the surrounding wall was empty. She thought it through. If it was the right room, then great, but what if it wasn’t?

Her heart suddenly gave an excited thump. If it was another room, maybe it would have some information for her, anything about her empty past.

All she had to do was open the door.

Before her annoyingly cautious thoughts could stop her, she grasped the knob and pushed open the door.

She slammed it shut again in disappointment. It wasn’t the combat gym, but it wasn’t anything else either. There was no other way to describe it except empty, filled to the brim with nothingness. She had at least expected something, but even if she had looked before, it didn’t seem like the room had ever held anything at all, much less her past.

Izzie walked back out into the hall again, and heard hurried footsteps racing towards her.

Jason grabbed her shoulder. “Hey. Where the hell have you been?” I’ve been waiting for nearly twenty minutes.”

Izzie rolled her eyes. “Yeah, thanks to your remarkable penmanship.” She tossed the scrunched paper at him.

“Sorry. Come on, let’s go. We’re running out of time.”

Izzie followed, and she didn’t know why, but she turned to look once more at the door leading to the empty room.

Nearly four hours later, Izzie hit the padded floor of the gym with a thump.

“You okay?” Jason asked, offering her a hand, which she declined.

“Yeah, fine,” she replied, but a sharp pain tearing through her foot made it perfectly clear that she wasn’t.

“Woah, hang on,” Jason said, taking her wrist and wrapping her arm around his shoulders.

“I’m fine,” Izzie insisted, but he held on tighter.

“I have some bandages and stuff at my place,” he said, pulling her out the door and down the hall. “Just come by for a few minutes,” he insisted.

“Fine,” Izzie sighed. She winced as a headache added to the pain. “You okay?” Jason asked again.

“Yeah, fine,” she repeated, but then said, “Just haven’t been sleeping well.” She suddenly realized how heavy her eyelids felt.

Jason’s face was filled with worry. “You shouldn’t have been fighting,” he said.

“I’m fine,” Izzie said again.

“You’re not,” Jason insists as he jiggles the key into the lock.

The door opens to reveal a small, dark apartment, with a few books and clothes scattered here and there. Jason flips the switch on the wall and the light blinds Izzie’s tired eyes. She flops down onto the couch. She can hear Jason’s voice, becoming more and more faint, muttering something (“ankle- probably sprained, ice”) The room begins to blur, and as much as she wills herself to stay awake, stay awake, Izzie falls into a deep sleep.

She sits obediently in a large chair, tangled in dozens of wires that snake through her hair to her head. She sits in the room, the white room, the empty room, but it is now empty now. The walls are lined with machines, buzzing and humming, and all connected, by a tangle of wires, to her head. Her heart pounds, and she begins to shake. She is alone, and misses her parents and little brother.

Finally the door opens, and a man in a white coat enters. “What’s happening to me,” she asks, trying to sound brave like a big girl, but her voice trembles.

“Listen, Isabelle,” the man says. “We’re gonna give you a new life. A better life. And when you get older, you’ll be able to help us. Would you like that?”

She shakes her head, hard. “No. No, I want to go home.”

“You will. A new home, a new family.”

She can hear the click and whirrs of machines turning on. “No.”

She tries to move, tries to run, but the man in the white coat holds her down. “No! Stop!”

A shock of pain zaps through her small head. “Stop!”

“Stop! No! Help!” Izzie screams, jerking awake, shaking.

“Izzie! What’s wrong?”

Izzie’s blurred vision began to clear and she saw Jason crouched beside her, eyes wide and panicked. She was tangled in a fleece blanket, and sweat plastered her clothes to her skin.

“Bad dream,” Izzie gasped. But it all felt so real. “No it’s couldn’t have been, but-“ she stops, and looks at Jason with eyes full of new understanding. “I think it was a memory.”

“It’s coming back?” Jason asks.

She shakes her head, confused. “No, not all of it, just that. I was here, in that empty room by the hall you found me in today.”

“You were asleep for a while, then you just started screaming and shaking-“ Jason puts a hand to Izzie’s forehead. She flinches a tiny bit, but doesn’t pull away from the touch. “You’re hot, too.”

She would laugh at the double meaning but she doesn’t have the strength. Sleep starts pulling her mind away again. Fearing for another nightmare she tries to hang on, but the blackness starts to encompass her and that last thing she remembers before letting go completely is a pair of warm arms enveloping her and a hand stroking her hair.

It wasn’t an easy sleep, and Izzie’s mind, poisoned with the nightmare that keeps playing over and over every time she closes her eyes. Finally she woke again with nothing more than a headache. Jason’s gone. Not that she thought he would still be here anyway. Better leave before he gets back, she decided, and carefully stepping on her injured ankle, she hobbled out of the apartment.

She scanned a map of the building in her mind. To get back to her room, she has to walk down the hall past the offices and the lobby.

Walking on tiptoe past Sark’s office, praying that he won’t see her, Izzie heard yelling and curiously pressed her ear to the door. Sark and Jason.

“This was all just a side effect of the procedure!” Sark was yelling. “How could you have let her see that room, it must have sparked her memory-“

“How could I?” Jason was now yelling. “It was nothing I did, but you! Take this girl’s family and life away just so she can become your perfect little secret agent! No one deserves this life, least of all her.”

“She was born for this!” Sark insists. “Look at her family! She means everything to this company!”

“Her family! A family you stole from her? Memories that you took away so all she has left now are the nightmares? She woke up all screaming and shaking last night, did you know that? What did you do to her? What the hell did you do?”

Izzie jumped away from the door, tears running down her face. She raced as fast as she could on her hurt ankle. She reached for the doorknob, but then she heard the screams.

She turned to find the lobby filled with people dressed in black, their faces covered, and each armed with a gun.