When The Roles Reverse

Chapter 5

I sat in the driver’s seat, watching as the surroundings whipped past us. Sofia had set it on auto-cruise and was currently working on reading the charts from the Speed to give us a more exact location of where John could possibly be. She had warned me that there was a slightly chance John wasn’t there.

                I could only cross my fingers and hope he hadn’t moved.

                Sofia groaned, grabbing my attention from the window. I turned around in the chair, my eyes resting on her slumped body. She had her forehead pressed into the palm of her hand, her finger tapping a pencil furiously against the bench. She had her body stretched out along the bench so that the tips of her toes touched the end. Papers were scattered all about.

                “What’s wrong?” I asked.

                She didn’t look up, “I’m just getting really frustrated with this.”

                “What do you have to do?” I asked, standing up and walking over to her. I kneeled by her head, scanning the papers before her. Numbers were everywhere, lines connected some, circles around others. Some numbers were entirely different colors. She had drawn some of her own shapes and lines onto the papers, a few X’s over top of some numbers.

                I started at it, utterly confused at how anyone could make any sense out of these.

                “I have to figure out which of these belongs to your friend.” She said tiredly

                I gritted my teeth, “He’s not my ‘friend’”

                “Sorry” She mumbled, not sounding sorry in the least “But you know what I mean.”

                “Yeah.” I sighed “I wish I could help you, but I don’t know what I’m even looking at.”

                Sofia laughed slightly, closing her eyes, “You’re funny.”

                “I’m…sorry?”

                “Don’t be.” She shrugged, opening her eyes again.

                “Sorry,” I mumbled “I’m distracting you.”

                “No, please.” She smiled gently at me. “I really can’t focus on this.”

                I leaned back, crossing my legs. Sofia sat upright, rubbing her eyes.

                “I just wish this wasn’t so complicated” She mumbled.

                “What do you have to do?” I asked “Dumb it down.”

                She giggled before pulling a sheet over paper down. Pointing with her pencil, she explained “I have to figure out what groups these numbers belong to. Once I have them grouped, then I have to figure out what the numbers represent. See these numbers here?” She pointed to a few that had circles around them. “They all represent part of John. I need to get 345 of these together to get the basics of John, which is enough to figure out where he is.”

                “Wow—”

                “That’s not the worst part” She cut me off. “What if John got splinted? Then part of him is somewhere else. I have to keep that in mind once I find 345. From there I have to make sure they all match frequency with each other using this graph.”