It stopped and Dani sagged, hanging limply from the shackles. They cut into her wrists.
“I warned you.” Jada’s voice sounded dead.
She released Dani from the tethering ring, hoisted her up and tossed her over her shoulder once again.
Dani tried to remember the way. The turns, the stairs. Two flights of stairs and another long corridor. Jada paused, and she heard the click of a door lock.
From what Dani could see, dangling upside down, this room was very different, more like a luxury hotel suite. Jada carried her through a big living room and into a large bedroom, with a picture window that overlooked a river canyon. The sun was sinking, and the sky was streaked with lurid red-orange clouds.
She tossed Dani down onto a big four-poster bed, and brandished the stun baton, grim faced. Her forehead was shiny with sweat. Her mascara was running. Her eyes were wet. With tears.
“One word and I zap you.” Her voice sounded hoarse and thick.
She grabbed Dani’s wrist and jerked it up, twisting a thick zip tie around it.
Dani had learned to fight dirty very young. She’d perfected the skill in juvie and refined it at the Riplinger foster home. She had nothing to lose.
She looked up at Jade. “Zoe loves you,” she said.
Jada froze, mouth agape. She stared at Dani, her face full of panicked confusion.
Dani wrenched her arm free, lashing the loose zip tie across Jada’s eyes like a whip. She wrenched the stun baton from Jada’s hand and jabbed it at her chest.
The long, buzzing zap blended with her own horrified shriek.
Jada arched back, choking—and slid heavily off the bed to the ground.
Dani stood there, disoriented. Her ears rang, her legs shook. Move or die. She moved, forming a plan out of nothing. Out of thin air and no alternatives.
Jada’s boots. Too small but fuck it. She jammed them on. Dani ripped open the straps that fastened the armored vest, unbuttoned the uniform jacket with cold and clumsy fingers and yanked it off Jada’s powerfully muscled shoulders. Pants next, a very tight squeeze. Weapons belt, fast adjustment.
Jada’s eyes fluttered. Maybe she was cold. Nothing left on her but military-style underwear. Panic exploded in Dani’s chest. She lunged with the baton and gave Jada another long zap, feeling fucking awful. This was not what she wanted to do or be.
She took one of the zip ties and threaded it through the bedframe, fastening Jada’s wrists together and ratcheting the thing as tight as she had the stomach to pull it.
Then she stared down, her eyes watering. Jada’s face was hot with fever and her eyes were glazed and unfocused. Her braid had come loose and was unraveling in ripples over her shoulders. She was muttering.
If she lived through the stim sickness, she was going to suffer for what Dani had done. But that wasn’t Dani’s fault. She hadn’t started this fight.
But she was going to finish it. Or try like hell to.
The black armored vest barely closed. The rest of the outfit was way tight on her and the boots were pure, screaming hell but fuck it. No whining. Go go go.
She put Jada’s helmet on but didn’t fasten the strap. She looked down at the raised design on Jada’s neck. Same as the one on the helmet. Silver, black, red. The slave soldier guys who helped capture her on the highway all had similar tattoos.
She was going to have to fake that part of the getup somehow. She glanced at herself in the big mirror that faced the bed. God, she looked like crap. Ashy skin, reddened eyes, colorless lips. She would fool no one looking like this.
She had to primp like Jada if she wanted to masquerade as one of them.
Jada was stirring and moaning under her breath. Some crazy impulse compelled her to kneel down next to the woman. It was sentimental, idiotic and dangerous, but screw it. This was who she was. It was all she had to work with.
“Jada,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. Know this. It’s true that Zoe loves you. She never forgot you. She never stopped looking for you.” She bent lower and kissed Jada on her damp forehead. “That’s from Zoe.”
She stumbled to her feet and backed away, trying not to cry. She’d expected Jada to headbutt her, smash her nose, bite her face. She’d expected to get sliced and diced in a lightning-fast scissor move between Jada’s powerful legs. But she hadn’t been.
Jada just stared up at Dani, a confused, vulnerable look in her fever-dazed eyes.
Dani fled, blinking away tears, and pounded toward the stairwell.
Two flights down, if she remembered right. Yes, here was the long corridor with the black speckled tiles and the fluorescent lights, but there were lots of unmarked doors. Not locked, thank God, but they were all dormitory cells, each identical to the next.
Dani looked for the room with a wastebasket by the door that held a tied-off plastic bag of vomit. She found it on the fourth try. Eureka. Her guiding star.
She dug through Jada’s makeup drawer with feverish haste. The foundation was the wrong shade, but eyebrow pencil, liner, mascara and some bronzer blush helped. So did that crimson lip stain. Wow, potent stuff. Almost too attention-getting for her current situation. She didn’t want to stop men in their tracks. She wanted their eyes to slide over her and keep on going.
Too late to fix it. This whole thing was a long shot, anyway. She’d take a run at it and hope for the best. She yanked open the nail polish drawer and rattled around until she found the colors she needed. Red, silver and black.
She stared at the helmet in the mirror and carefully tried to reproduce the pattern on her neck with nail polish. She had to swab off a few false tries with the nail polish remover, but the stuff went on in a thin line and dried fast, and she had a steady hand. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t half bad, considering.
She used the hair dryer mounted on the wall to dry it and headed for the stairwell, wondering what in holy hell her next move could possibly be.
To start, she had to imitate the walk and talk of a woman who could break a guy in half with the greatest of ease. It was all about attitude. She summoned up some ’a that and kept going.
Fake it til you make it. She’d done it all her life.
She stopped in front of the elevator…and it slid abruptly open.
Chapter 26
“Goddamn it, Sisko, hurry,” Zoe muttered.
“He is hurrying,” Hannah said, an edge in her voice. “Leave him alone. He dives faster and farther than any of us do, so just shut up and wait already.”
Sisko didn’t respond, or even appear to hear them. He sat there in the back of the Lexus, laptop on his knees, eyes wide and completely blank. Deep in a data-dive for info on the building complex to which Zade’s nano sparkles had led them. Public archives listed it as a research facility owned by Antares Tech, a company based in Southern California.
Asa never ceased to be startled by the shit this crowd could do. Hacking without hardware. Or rather, the hardware was already in their skulls, interfacing with their naked neurons. It creeped him out, but they seemed used to it.
Hannah had survived it, and so had Noah. Having siblings with superpowers complicated the family power dynamics, but fuck it, he liked a challenge. And he always held his own.
They were parked about twelve miles away from the place on a remote country road. Brenner was on his way with the helicopter. Zoe had parked her sleek Jag a ways back and joined them. Currently, they were huddled inside the SUV pondering their next move.
Finally Sisko’s eyes opened. “Security is tight,” he muttered. “Didn’t get much.”
“What did you find?” Zoe asked.
Sisko closed his eyes for a moment and nodded toward the tablet Zoe held. “Have at, people,” he said. “Done and downloaded on all implants and linked devices. Building plans filed fourteen years ago. Building completed ten years ago. No idea if they’re accurate.”
Zoe
, Simone and Hannah hunched over their various devices. Asa looked Sisko over critically. “I’ve seen you look less tired than this after battle,” he commented.
Sisko grunted. “Battle’s more fun,” he said sourly. “At least you get the buzz. This is more like a disembodied mind-fuck. Playing ten games of 3-D chess at once. And the stakes are your best friends’ lives.”
Asa nodded, trying not to gawk at Zoe’s elegant profile. No point. She stared fiercely down into her laptop. She was convinced that he was an unmod deadweight. Plus, she could probably snap him like a twig if he pissed her off. Which he would, of course. It was a mathematical certainty. He pissed her off just by breathing and existing.
Imagine what he could do if he applied himself.
He wrenched his gaze away from her. “You got a visual? In real time?”
“Satellite feed,” Sisko replied. “Take a look.” He held out the laptop.
“You can hack satellites with your mind? It’s that easy?” Asa felt almost offended.
“Watch who you’re calling easy. Hey, you guys.” He looked up at Zoe, Hannah and Simone. “Take a look at this live feed.”
Asa took the laptop. Sisko enlarged the image until it filled the screen and all of them bent over to peer at it.
“The place is swarming with people,” Asa commented. “Looks like a convention.”
“Of course,” Zoe said grimly. “They’ve come to see the show.”
“Three main entrances,” Hannah murmured. “The front lobby, this one next to the dining hall, and around back where all these trucks are.”
“Bet that’s a shipment of weapons for the slave soldier reinforcements,” Sisko said.
Asa studied the image. Each new batch of operatives had its own dedicated equipment coded specifically for their implants, and after the recent battle with Mark, Asa had ended up fielding a whole truckload of high-tech Obsidian weapons that psycho fuckhead had left behind. But since the gear only responded to Brenner, the Obsidian slave soldier they’d rescued and salvaged from that battle, the weapons were completely useless to the rest of them except for research purposes. They took up a crapton of storage space, but whatever. You didn’t haul shit like that to the municipal dump.
“Could be weapons,” Asa conceded. “Could be frozen broccoli florets, chicken tenders and hash browns for the cafeteria. Sometimes things are random and boring.”
Zoe rolled her eyes at Hannah. “Is your brother always this annoying?”
“He’s usually much worse,” Hannah told her. “This is as good it gets with him.”
Asa tuned them out and turned his full attention to the satellite image of the building complex. He manipulated the touch screen, zooming it out and catching a subtle flash of movement that quickly vanished. He zoomed in tighter.
“Look,” he said, pointing to a steep, meandering canyon. The Antares Tech facility was built on a high plain which abruptly cracked into the canyon. The river running through it gradually widened out to a silted-up delta.
“What?” Hannah demanded. “What are you looking at?”
“You guys didn’t see that truck moving, about four seconds ago?” He pointed to the canyon upriver. “See that line? That’s an asphalt road. It was there. Going west, down into the canyon.”
Sisko frowned. “Wait,” he murmured, and his eyes went blank, inwardly focused.
Asa knew from his experience with Noah, Hannah, Zade and Brenner that Sisko was replaying a clip archived in his memory banks, stopping now and then to examine every pixel, metaphorically speaking. From the looks on their faces, Hannah and Zoe were doing exactly the same thing.
He and Simone exchanged rueful glances. The only two schlubs here with no cranial implants. Sometimes it felt lucky. Sometimes it didn’t.
“I see it now,” Sisko said. “The truck went in but it didn’t come out.”
“Any record in the blueprints of an elevator or stairway leading down to the lower canyon level?” he asked.
“Nope,” Hannah said. “Not a thing.”
“Look. There goes another one.” Simone pointed.
The vehicle disappeared beneath the cliff overhang. They waited, but after several long moments, it still didn’t reappear.
“There’s an entrance there,” Asa said. “Maybe it leads to a bolt hole, or a storage space, or an underground testing facility. A place to do unspeakable research where no one can hear you scream.”
The Midlanders frowned at him.
“Is that supposed to be funny?” Zoe asked coldly.
“Nah, just thinking out loud,” Asa said. “I vote for the canyon. There won’t be as many people down there because of the circus upstairs. And they’d see us coming for miles away from all the other approaches. Plus, there’s a place out here for the helicopter to land. Trees and bushes by the riverbed for cover.”
A brief silence. “OK,” Zoe said. “We go in at the canyon entrance. Hannah tries to communicate the plan to Zade and Luke. Brenner and Simone stand ready to extract. Everyone on board?”
Nods all around.
“Suit up,” Sisko said. “Brenner will be here any minute. He’s got the rest of the gear. Thermal camo for everyone.” He looked at Hannah. “You ready to start messaging?”
“I need to get closer before I start jiggling the signal,” Hannah said.
“Tell you what. You get as close as you need to be, and just stay right there with Zoe and Simone,” Asa said. “Sisko and I will go in.”
“Fuck that,” Hannah said stonily. “Zoe and I both need to go in with you. Obsidian has their kill codes and Luke hasn’t been scrubbed. The chances he comes through this thing without being coded are zero. We need Zoe there to help if his heart’s stopped.”
Asa looked around, lost. “What the fuck?” he asked Zoe. “Starting his heart? Are you a cardiologist, or a trauma surgeon, or something? I thought you were a chemist.”
“I am,” Zoe said.
Asa waited, but more was not forthcoming. “So? What’s the deal?”
“She’s a healer,” Hannah said.
There was an uncomfortable pause. Zoe would not meet his or anyone’s eyes.
“Healer,” Asa repeated. “What, you mean, like…faith healer?”
“I don’t have any faith,” Zoe muttered. “I just sometimes…help people who are hurt or sick. I don’t know how it happens. I can’t explain it, and it’s not reliable or controllable. Not at all. So don’t ask. Because I genuinely don’t know.”
“She’s a healer,” Hannah said forcefully. “She doesn’t want to be, but she is.”
Zoe looked rebellious. “Whatever. I’m going in. My little sister’s in there. You’re the one who should stay back. You’re an unmod. It’s insane.”
Asa nodded in Hannah’s direction. “I have a little sister, too. She goes, I go.”
“They’ll rip you to shreds!”
He gave her a thin smile. “Bring it,” he said.
* * * *
Shit. Dani put on her best robot face. No time to retreat as a skinny guy pushing a big rolling luggage cart piled with identical silver travel cases shoved his way out into the corridor.
The second guy stepped out, face turned away, still complaining. “…their fucking beauty cases up to their rooms for them? Just because The Great Dickbreath himself wants them all in fucking formation in the auditorium to look good for the committee! So now we have to haul about two tons of their personalized weapons down to the cave from this level? Like, fucking fuck, man. If they’d just come in through the canyon road to begin with, we could have rolled it right into the cave with no trouble, but now we have to make sixty fucking separate trips with a fork lift to haul all their fucking shit down into the—”
“Stu,” the other guy said, eyeing Dani. “Shut up. Company.”
The guy stopped short and turned to stare
at her. Big dude, double chin.
She gazed back. Her heart thumped so hard, those guys must be able to hear it.
“What the hell are you doing up here?” Stu asked. “You’re a new one, right? I thought all you soldiers were supposed to be downstairs.”
“Under orders. Prisoner transport.” She kept her voice flat and clipped. “Hale wanted her confined in his room.”
Stu laughed unpleasantly and exchanged a knowing glance with the skinny guy. “Yeah, he likes to school those bitches up close and personal.”
“Good for him.” The skinny guy heaved the rolling cart into the corridor and began tossing the metallic cases off haphazardly. “I’m leaving these bags right here. I don’t do door-to-door baggage service for fucking cyborgs. They should be doing it for us.”
He muscled the cart back into the freight elevator. The doors started to close, but Stu held them open, giving her a questioning look. “Coming?”
She gazed at him, panicking inwardly. “Ah…”
“I heard he wants you new ones all in the auditorium.”
“Right.” She wished she knew how operatives talked. Probably they didn’t, unless questioned. And she hadn’t counted on elevator scrutiny from interested men checking out her ass. Probably wondering why it wasn’t more tight and toned.
“Jeez.” The skinny one looked her over as the door slid shut. “Does he pick out you girls online somewhere or what?”
She was terrified of giving a wrong answer. “Huh?”
“Hale, I mean,” he specified. “You girls are all so hot. He switches it up every time, you know? He got that black-haired one who looks Polynesian or something. Before that was the tall blonde with the big rack. Before that the redhead.”
“Redhead didn’t last long,” Stu said. “Sam said he loaded her into the incinerator a few months ago. Couldn’t tell what killed her, though.”
“Guy’s a goddamn pervert, if you ask me,” the skinny guy muttered.
“Nobody asked you, Bailey,” Stu said, eyeing her crotch. “But you girls don’t mind, right? I mean, like, the operatives are programmed to just do what he wants, right? You’re sexbots. You don’t care. Do they program you to like it?”
In My Skin (The Obsidian Files Book 3) Page 26
