Duskwood: Love's Beginning

20 - Jake

It hurt me that Jayna had doubts about my intentions. Not because she didn't have a right to. She had every reason to distrust me. I was secretive, demanding, and purpose-driven. Her doubts hurt because I didn't want her to struggle. She was so kind-hearted and sensitive. Who, other than someone so compassionate, would accept the words of strangers and invest so much time in helping them? She inspired me to be better, and stronger. Jayna made me feel like I was worth more than I thought, more than anyone had ever seen me for. And I wanted to be worthy of her admiration.

I knew by her phone's GPS that she continued to work long hours through all of this. It must surely be taking a toll on her, emotionally and physically. I knew it was on me. Despite concealing myself from the government for all these years, I had grown somewhat complacent during that time. It was easy to be anonymous in Los Angeles. In a city full of transient persons, nobody questioned my ability to pay cash for the warehouse space where I worked and slept. I thought with regret about all the expensive servers, the soft mattress, and the chair I could spend hours sitting in. Yes, I had made myself quite comfortable.

In the meanwhile, Jayna's life had become uncomfortable. I was sure of it. The protector in me wanted to release her, let her go back to her normal life. But selfishly, I needed to keep her working with me. Not just for me, but also because she gave me data and insights that would have been otherwise unattainable.

My alerts went off; my devices were set to shut down within thirty seconds when they sensed the FBI trying to break through my defenses. I was short, perhaps curt with her, but I knew it would cut me off soon. I wanted to encourage her to reach out to me if needed, though. I loved coming back online and finding messages from her.

Damnit. Everything powered down before I could finish saying goodbye. I was only going to tell her that she should try to make amends with Lilly. Warn her of what was coming. But it was out of my hands now; the forced shutdown meant that my cloud server would automatically start the protocol. I would also be unable to log in using these devices for at least 24 hours.

In fact, it was probably best that I scrapped them and changed to different hardware. If the FBI was getting this close, they may have even seen the digital signature for this phone and laptop.

Part of the shutdown protocol had included a complete data wipe, so the only thing left to do was to physically destroy the hard drive and phone. I could easily pick up new hardware tomorrow after I was safely away.

So much for sleep. I cleaned up my items from the motel room and headed out.