by Cathy Pegau
My stomach churned. It was my own fault for asking her to help. I squeezed my eyes shut and hugged my legs tighter. “Is she all right?”
“She’s okay. A little shaken. Liv, look at me.”
I drew in a slow breath and blew it out before opening my eyes.
“He was going to hurt her. I had no choice but to tell him you had the files. You know that, right?”
“I know,” I said, my voice rough and quiet. “And I had no choice but to do what I did.”
Frown lines creased his brow as he alternated glancing at me and watching the traffic ahead. “Telling Talbot?”
I nodded then swallowed hard. “And Sterling.”
His face smoothed to almost slack-jawed astonishment. Hitting him in the head with a steel beam would have produced a similar expression. He stared out the windscreen, but I doubted he saw more than necessary to keep from wrapping us around another vehicle. “Sterling?”
I relayed my meeting with the CMA agent, telling Tonio everything from Sterling having our picture, to his knowing about the Milchner job, to his threat to have us sent to a correctional mine for past activities. I tried to explain why turning the files over to Sterling would save us. Eventually. Tonio listened without uttering a single word, not even a grunt or groan at my lack of fortitude.
“He’s after Exeter and the Greys,” I said, winding up my excuses. “Chances of our getting away with blackmailing Exeter were dwindling to near zero while the chances of our heading to a correctional mine were growing.”
The unraveling of Willem’s scheme wasn’t entirely my fault. Somehow Sterling had made the Exeter-Grey-Milchner job connection before I was asked to join. Except for Sterling pegging me as the weak link, and my falling in love with the mark, I’d succeeded in doing the job I’d been hired to do. Yay, me.
Neither of us spoke as Tonio maneuvered through morning traffic. The bunching of his jaw muscles was the only indication that he was upset at all.
“Tonio?”
“You should have told me sooner.” There was no inflection in his voice, no blowup of anger. In a way, his lack of emotion was scarier than if he had yelled.
What would have gone differently if he had known about Sterling? Would he have told Willem? Probably, but I doubt Willem would have pulled the plug. There was too much money at stake. I had a job to do as far as Willem was concerned. Though after getting the files, he would’ve killed me. Would they have kept me from finding Zia at the Station? They would have tried, and I’d have hated them for it or done it anyway. Probably both.
“It just happened yesterday. Besides,” I said, “would it have mattered?”
He didn’t respond for a minute, but we both knew the answer.
“You have the files both Willem and Sterling want, but we’re giving them to Willem.” He shot a glare my way. “So in the end we’ll be nailed by Sterling anyway.”
I slipped my hand into my coat pocket. Under the heavy bulk of my pulser I felt for the plastic card Sterling had given me yesterday. I withdrew the blue rectangle and held it out for Tonio to see. “Not necessarily.”
“You’re sure we can trust Sterling?” Tonio asked not for the first time in the last seven minutes.
We’d abandoned the stolen ground car in an alley a block from our building, making our way through morning commuters to the entrance. Cold wind gusted between the megascrapers. On the horizon, thick, leaden storm clouds rolled in. The symbolism wasn’t lost on me.
“We don’t have much of a choice at this point.” I tugged my coat tighter around my body, tucked my chin into the collar and tried not to wince. The brisk walk stretched the skin at my side, making it ache. In the car, a quick inspection of the proximity burn had shown scorch marks on the cloth and second-degree burns. Zia had taken the brunt of Connor’s shot.
I shook off the mental images of her ravaged body, returning them to their cell before they could overwhelm me. No time for that, not yet.
I shoved my hands into my pockets; the right bumped the pulser. I wrapped my cold fingers around it, tracing its simple lines. “I trust Sterling more than I trust Willem.”
Tonio grunted in what I assumed to be agreement as he held open the door to the building. Several people passed us on their way out. As Tonio and I entered the elevator car, a man with reddened cheeks jogged into the lobby.
“Hold the elevator,” he called from across the room.
Tonio pressed the close door button. I’d have laughed at the shocked indignation on the man’s face any other day.
“Roof access,” Tonio said. “Code AK99574.”
“Roof access code accepted,” a mechanical voice replied. “Thank you, Mr. Murphy.”
I cocked an eyebrow at Tonio. “Who’s Murphy?”
“Building maintenance.” He watched the floor number display over the door. “I copped the code for Willem when we first got here. You know, just in case.”
Today was definitely a “just in case” kind of day.
When the numbers reached the low twenties, about a dozen floors from the roof, Tonio withdrew a black pulser from under his shirt at the waist of his trousers. He thumbed aside the guard over the power button, charged the weapon then returned it to the small of his back and covered it with his jacket.
I checked the satchel for Mom’s data stick, reassuring myself that it hadn’t been lost. It sat at the bottom of the bag, next to my comm. My comm with the file that could help Zia. Leaving the stick in the bag, I tucked the comm into my left coat pocket.
In my right-hand coat pocket I found the guard protecting the power button on my pulser and slid it over. When I pressed the button, the gun warmed.
Tonio turned to me. He brushed the backs of his fingers across my cheek and stared into my eyes. “I won’t let him hurt you or your mother, Liv. I swear.”
The ache of remorse for getting us into this, for losing what we had together, rose up through my gut and into my chest. “I’m sorry,” I said in a husky whisper, “I never wanted—”
“This isn’t how we saw our lives turning out. We’ll get through it.” He cupped my cheeks between his palms then pressed his lips to mine. “I do love you, you know.”
My heart spasmed. I couldn’t return that love, not in the way he wanted. “Tonio.”
“And you love Zia Talbot.” He drew away from me, a crooked grin quirking his mouth. “I blew it with you.”
“We blew it together.”
Tonio lowered his hands and nodded. “I hope you have better luck with Talbot.”
I swallowed hard and tried not to think about how I’d last seen her. Would I ever see her again?
The elevator shuddered to a stop and said, “Roof access.”
I wiped damp hands on the sides of my coat.
“Your friend better arrive soon,” Tonio said.
It had been a good ten minutes since I’d called Sterling, plenty of time for him to get here. I hoped.
The elevator doors opened.
Ten meters in front of us stood Willem, Sabine, Chaz and Natalia. Willem’s hands were tucked into the pockets of his black coat. Mom’s red wrap was incongruously cheery for the situation, though the strain lines on her face made her look her age. Chaz, also in black, held her arm and pointed a pulser at her chest. Natalia stood beside Chaz. Her short, bright pink jacket made my teeth hurt.
I met Natalia’s eyes and searched for that spark of awareness, a sign of the mutual loathing for Willem we seemed to share last night. It wasn’t there. Her eyes were as vacuous as ever. Had last night been a lie? A test of my loyalty? A test I’d failed?
“Glad you could make it,” Willem said, drawing my attention to him. “Step out of the car.”
Grit crunched under foot as Tonio and I exited the elevator and took an automatic step away from each other. Rule of thumb: Spread out the target area. Five meters to my left was a green maintenance shed. In front of the shed, a waist-high venting tube.
A blast of icy wind made my eyes tear. My hand
itched to dive into my pocket for my pulser but I resisted. Chaz could, and probably would, shoot Sabine with little provocation. Any wound from a pulser was potentially fatal, but a chest or head shot virtually guaranteed death via disruption of the heart’s or brain’s electrical impulses. Fast and clean, but dead as dead could be.
Other than her lack of makeup and unkempt hair, Mom appeared all right. When I tried to speak to her I realized my jaws were clamped too tight to form words. I made the effort to relax then licked my lips.
“You okay, Mom?” My voice was more controlled than I’d expected, given how angry I was at the Greys and how scared I was for her.
Where the hell was Sterling?
Mom forced a smile and shrugged. “Could be better.”
Willem laid a hand on her shoulder, a gesture that would have been companionable if you discounted the ice in his gaze. “She’s fine, Liv. No harm.” The implied “yet” tightened my stomach. “You have the files?”
“It’s here, everything about the K-73s. I made sure they were more than useless numbers.” Slowly I reached into my satchel.
“Hand out of the bag,” he ordered. I withdrew my empty hand. Willem smiled, all teeth and no amusement. “So now you know what Exeter’s doing with the miners and the artificial lungs.”
“Artificial lungs?” Another gust rocked me on my heels. It almost blew me over after hearing that.
“That’s what the K-73s are?” Tonio asked.
“Exeter calls them filters,” Willem said, “but they’re modified biomechanical organs. They don’t work like the company wants. Can’t mass-produce them and get it right for everyone.”
K-73AL. Artificial lungs. Reading the reports this morning—an hour earlier? It felt like a lifetime ago—we’d thought they were ineffective atmosphere scrubbers or personal filtration systems. They were PFSs, but more personal than we could imagine.
Artificial organs, like Sterling’s eye, had been around for over two centuries. Some were modified for a recipient’s lifestyle or occupation, but those were very expensive and required extra time to personalize, and still sometimes caused problems for the user. Whatever Exeter was doing, or not doing, with their version of the lung made them deadly to almost half their “volunteers” and the company vulnerable to blackmail.
Oh, Zia, what were you involved in?
“How do you know all this?” The words scraped my throat, raw with grief and dismay.
Willem adjusted the cuffs of his coat. “Chaz’s time inside one of Exeter’s correctional mines five years ago. Inmates transferred without notice, a few due to get released were never heard from again on the outside. When Chaz got out, we talked to a few former prisoners, bribed a few guards.” A predatory smile curved his mouth. “We pieced together a likely scenario but were missing a few vital elements.”
Chaz jerked his head toward Natalia. “Nat honeyed up to Talbot’s assistant, James. He met with an accident before we could get everything we needed.”
Beside him, Natalia’s expression remained unreadable, except for a twitch in her left eye. Maybe she felt bad about James. Had she warned him about the Greys before his “accident”? I guessed he wouldn’t be returning to Exeter after all.
Willem cast a scathing glare at Chaz. “You’re lucky we got the Milchner info before you shot him.” His cold blue gaze settled on me again. “We were after files he’d copied, but they were as useless as the stuff you found in Talbot’s office. What we did find was evidence of some side projects he was working on.”
“Side projects?” I asked.
“Mostly dirt on other employees,” Willem said with derision, as if inner-office blackmail was beneath him. Then he grinned. “But helpful, in the end. The HR drone responsible for hiring temps is into some kinky activities.”
So that’s how they’d gotten my resume to the top of the list. James had hidden his own fodder for funding an early retirement plan, but not the key to the Greys’ extortion scheme. That snippet of a conversation he’d stashed in the SI and the files Zia had kept at home were everything James was supposed to give the Greys. And now I had them.
“If the CMA learns about the ALs and the volunteers, Exeter could lose everything,” Willem continued. “Convictions for most of their executives and liquidation of the company versus a mere two-hundred-million-credit payoff? What we’ll demand will seem like a bargain.”
Which explained why Connor was sent to stop Zia when I tripped the alert on her computer. She had threatened to go to the CMA if the death rate numbers didn’t improve. Exeter assumed she’d decided it was taking too long. Another wave of guilt churned my stomach.
“Put the bag down, Liv, and step back.”
Tonio and I exchanged glances. His jaw muscles bunched. “Do it.”
My hand tightened on the satchel’s strap. “But—”
“Do it. It’ll be okay.”
I didn’t have that much faith in Willem’s sense of honor and fairness. Once I gave up the data stick we’d be vulnerable. And dead.
I looked at Willem. “Let Sabine go into the elevator, and I’ll drop the bag.”
“Liv.” Tonio’s warning tone didn’t surprise me, but we both knew how the Greys played.
Willem grinned again. “Don’t you trust me?”
“About as far as I can throw you.” Preferably off the roof, but I didn’t add that last bit. Where the hell was Sterling?
Willem laughed, really laughed. “I like you, Liv. You don’t take shit from anyone.” The amusement fled from his face. “Drop the bag or I’ll kill her. Or maybe I’ll kill you first.” He pursed his lips in a mock pout and patted Mom’s shoulder. “Wouldn’t it be sad for momma to watch her baby girl die at her feet?”
My stomach knotted as Sabine and I locked eyes. She paled, fear flashing across her features. “Do what he says, Olivia.”
Chaz raised his pulser from Sabine’s chest to her temple. There was no expression on his face. Not glee, not anger. Nothing. Where Willem savored the power he held over people, killing my mother would just be another part of the job for Chaz.
I eased the satchel strap off my shoulder and held the bag in my left hand. “What happens after we make the exchange?”
Willem opened his arms, palms up. Mr. Magnanimous. “What do you want, Liv?”
“I want to leave here with my mother and Tonio. Alive.”
“And not take your cut? That’s very kind of you,” he said.
I’d never offered it, but we both knew after today I wouldn’t see a credit. At this moment, that was fine by me. I wanted to forget I’d ever met the Greys.
His gaze shifted to Tonio. “How ‘bout you, Calderon? Who are you standing with?”
“Depends,” Tonio said with a shrug. “Deal fairly with Liv and Sabine, and I’ll know you’re not gonna fuck me over later. I’ll finish the job with you.”
What the hell? Was he doing this to deflect Willem’s anger? I didn’t want Tonio in any more danger.
Tonio and Willem regarded each other for several long moments. Another gust of wind cut across the rooftop.
Finally, Willem nodded. “Let her go, Chaz.”
Chaz lowered his pulser and nudged Sabine forward, his gun trained in our direction.
I walked toward Willem, holding the satchel with my left hand. I held my right near my pocket. When Mom was even with me, I said, “Go to Tonio, Mom. Get in the elevator. I’ll be right there.”
I hoped so anyway.
With a jerky nod and worry in her eyes, she kept moving.
I waited until her feet no longer crunched on the gritty rooftop, telling me she was in the elevator and behind Tonio, before laying down the satchel. I clutched my coat closed with my left hand, slid my right to my pocket. Slowly, I backed away until I was beside Tonio.
Willem grinned. “There, was that so hard?”
As he stepped forward to pick up the bag, his other hand went into his pocket.
And so did mine.
In a blink, the fo
ur of us had pulsers aimed at each other. Only Natalia stood there unarmed, her eyes wide and her hands deep in the pockets of her silly, blinding jacket. My insides quivered but my hand was steady as I trained my weapon on Willem.
“Not a very trusting crew, are we?” he said.
“Damn shame,” Chaz added.
“Liv,” Tonio said, “get into the elevator with Sabine.”
“We’ll go together.” I stepped closer to him, careful of my heelless boots on the uneven surface.
“I’ll make sure you’re safe.” Like he always promised.
“Tonio—”
“Go.”
As I opened my mouth to argue, another gust rushed across the rooftop from behind the Greys and Natalia, but it was hot and metallic. A black-and-silver air assault vehicle with the gold CMA insignia on its side rose over the lip of the roof in the wake of the wind, its anti-grav lifters whining.
“CMA. All of you, drop your weapons,” boomed Nathan Sterling’s voice.
Willem barely glanced backward. A snarl contorted his features as he glared at me. “You bitch.”
The hand on his pulser twitched at the same time mine did. Both of us missed as we dodged aside. The heat of his shot whizzed past my ear.
“Come on!” Tonio grabbed my arm and propelled me toward the maintenance shed, drawing fire away from the elevator and my mother.
Willem’s gun spit deadly energy pulses as he ran behind the vent tube.
Half-turned toward Willem as we ran, I held my trigger down and kept firing. My aim wavered—I wasn’t the best shot in the ‘Verse—sending pulses arcing past Willem, into the vent tube and roof. He dove for the ground while firing, missing, as well. He wasn’t much better than I was. Eventually one of us would get lucky. Or unlucky.
Tonio cursed and shoved me behind the shed. I stumbled, fell, scraped my knees and palm. Without stopping, I got back to my feet and took cover on the other side of the shed.
Crackling pulser fire filled the air. Beneath it, my heartbeat pounded in my ears and my breath rasped in my throat. The stench of burnt ozone invaded my nostrils.
