by Jenna Black
Caroline smiled at her regretfully. “I’m afraid not. Not for now, at least. Perhaps tomorrow, when things are more … settled.”
Nadia highly doubted things would be “more settled” so soon, not if the entire board of directors had been killed, but she nodded in something resembling agreement anyway.
* * *
Nadia slept almost twelve hours straight, then spent the rest of the next day pacing her small room in the barracks with nothing to do. There were armed guards at each end of the hall, and though they weren’t unkind to her, they wouldn’t let her pass, and they wouldn’t tell her anything.
Meals were brought to her room/cell, but Nadia had no appetite and barely nibbled at any of them. Sometimes she cried for all those she had lost and for her own uncertain future, and sometimes she was so numb she barely felt human.
The day felt endless, and she wondered how many more she would spend in this state of suspended animation. She was pretty sure she’d go mad if it was much longer.
Nadia had just finished picking at her dinner tray when there was a commotion outside. She set the tray aside and rose to her feet, taking a deep breath and trying to look brave. This could be a firing squad coming to put her out of her misery, for all she knew, but she was in one of her numb phases, and the possibility barely raised her heart rate.
The door to her room was open, and she saw three armed men in off-the-rack business suits march down the hallway, looking right and left. A security detail if Nadia ever saw one, checking out the area before allowing an important dignitary to enter. She swallowed hard, some of the numbness fading away as she wondered who had risen to power to fill the sudden vacuum.
The security detail must have been satisfied, because she saw them pass by her room again, walking with brisk purpose. Nadia’s heart was now beating like a trapped bird, and she was glad she’d eaten so little or it might have come back up.
More footsteps in the hall, coming toward her room. Nadia held her breath.
And let it out with an incoherent, wordless cry when Nate appeared in her doorway.
She flung herself at him, practically tackling him to the floor in her eagerness to touch him and reassure herself that he was real, that he was flesh and blood and not a figment of her imagination. Nate laughed and hugged her back just as eagerly.
They held each other somewhere between too long and not long enough, then by mutual agreement pulled apart. There were shadows in Nate’s eyes, though he seemed to be uninjured. Nadia’s mind insisted on conjuring up the image of his body lying dead half on top of Dorothy’s, blood pooling from multiple gunshot wounds, wounds Nadia had delivered. Her eyes burned with yet more tears, but she blinked them back.
“How did you get out?” she asked.
“We weren’t the only people in that board meeting,” he reminded her. “Not the only people who knew the truth about Thea and Dorothy. Everyone panicked and ran away when the guns came out, but since Thea wouldn’t let them leave the building, they had time to calm down and regroup. Dorothy had given her men orders to detain everyone, but her men had a hard time carrying them out in the face of twelve angry board members. Especially when the board members started telling them what had happened.
“Belinski and I held the doors for as long as we could, but they eventually blasted their way in. We surrendered then, and they took us downstairs, meaning to lock us up with all the rest of the detainees, but by the time we got there, the board members were in charge. We told them the missile strike was coming, and except for a few of Dorothy’s most stubborn men, we got the hell out of there.”
His voice choked off and his eyes looked shiny. “I thought you were dead,” he said. “I didn’t know where the emergency exit let out, but I figured if you had made it, someone would have found you shortly after the attack ended. But they couldn’t, so I assumed you were in the building. What happened to you?”
Nadia’s story took a little longer to recount, so they both sat on the edge of the cot while she told him everything that had happened. There was a part of her that was tempted not to tell him about the Replica, not to tell him she’d shot that Replica dead even thinking it might be him, but in the end, she decided to tell him the whole truth.
“I’ll never know whether that Replica was one of Dorothy’s puppets or if it was really you. Sort of you.” She sighed, because it was impossible to talk about Replicas without getting confused.
To her relief, Nate looked sad about what had happened, but not angry.
“You did the right thing,” he said. “Even if that had really been me, it was the right thing to do. Jesus, Nadia, she was going to kill off the entire human race! Don’t you dare feel guilty about what you had to do to stop her.”
Just because it was the right thing to do didn’t mean it didn’t hurt like hell. Especially when she could never know if that Replica had had Nate’s mind.
Nate reached over and took her hand, squeezing it hard. “It had to be one of her puppets,” he assured her. “Why would she want an old copy of me running around when she could have one that looked just like me but did everything she told it to? The real me would have been a pain in her ass and might have resisted her even with a gun to its head. Much safer for her to use a puppet.”
Nadia nodded, because the logic made sense. Too bad logic wasn’t enough to create anything like a sense of certainty. And nothing Nate could say would heal the wound she had created in herself when she’d pulled that trigger, so she changed the subject.
“I take it Chairman Belinski and the board members made it out in time?”
Nate narrowed his eyes at her, knowing her too well not to see that she was still struggling, but he didn’t push it. “Yes. All of them, and many of the security personnel. A couple of them even thought to grab one of the fake board members we shot so they could do an autopsy.”
Nadia raised her eyebrows. “And did they? Do an autopsy, I mean?”
Nate nodded. “They were able to confirm that the brain wasn’t a normal human brain and that there were a couple of microchips implanted. It’s enough to prove we aren’t raving lunatics.
“I’m sorry it took me so long to get to you,” he continued. “At first, I didn’t know you were alive, and then I was caught up in the whole ‘who’s in charge?’ mess. The board members supported my claim to the Chairmanship, but the military wasn’t too sure, so there was a lot of confusion. Proving our claim about Thea’s puppets helped a lot, but my situation is a bit … precarious.”
And the more information that leaked out to the general public about what had happened, what Thea had done and planned to do, the more precarious Nate’s situation would become. He was a known Replica, and there had been people who’d held that against him before all of this mess.
“Have you … Have you been able to find Bishop or Dante?” she asked, terrified of the answer.
“Not yet,” he said, squeezing her hand again. “As you can imagine, the Basement-dwellers who survived are pretty damn hostile right now, so for any of the rest of us to get in there is pretty much impossible unless we want there to be more killing. I’ve got people broadcasting the information that Dorothy has been removed from office and that there will be no further attacks on the Basement. I’m hoping that Kurt and Dante will hear the news and come out so we don’t have to go in after them.”
Nadia wanted to know now, as she was sure Nate did, but she understood the need to wait and be cautious. Even sending in humanitarian aid was going to be risky in the devastated region, and Nadia could hardly blame the surviving Basement-dwellers for adopting a “shoot first, ask questions later” attitude.
“What happens now?” she asked in a small voice, overwhelmed at even the thought of what Paxco would have to do to recover from everything Thea had done. She had to have practically drained Paxco dry to fund her “research” and her military campaigns and her board member replacements. And she had been their primary source of income ever since she had invented the Replicati
on process. How were they going to rebuild the Basement with no money and no major source of income?
“For now, we just keep putting one foot in front of the other and see what happens next.”
* * *
Nate convinced the board of directors to overturn Gerald Lake’s trumped-up treason conviction and set him free from Rikers Island. Nate wasn’t there when Nadia and her father were reunited, but he talked to her on the phone, and she told him her father was not the same man she remembered. Nate didn’t know what Mr. Lake had suffered at Rikers, but his injuries and the loss of his wife during the prison riot had broken his spirit. Nate could only hope for Nadia’s sake that time really did heal all wounds. Nadia had suffered more than enough already, and she deserved to have her father back.
Freeing Gerald Lake had been the one bright spot in the truly dismal days after Nate became the Chairman of Paxco. Too much information about Thea and her puppet Replicas had leaked out into the public, and the backlash was bringing an already crippled economy to a standstill. Employees went on strike, and though that was technically illegal in Paxco, neither Nate nor the board had the heart to prosecute them.
More disturbing were the mounting calls for Nate’s immediate resignation—or even his arrest and execution—because he was a Replica. He had never in his life been able to go anywhere without a security detail, but now he practically needed an army, and instead of traveling in a limo, he went by armored car. The unrest was ugly enough that Chairman Belinski offered to send a peacekeeping force to help keep order—and Nate was forced to accept, which didn’t do much to improve his popularity.
The borders of the Basement were still closed because it wasn’t safe for aid workers to go in. Nate further depleted the treasury by ordering food and water air-dropped into the ruins. When after three days there was still no word from Kurt or Dante, Nate bought a couple of cartons of cell phones with his own money and had them dropped with the food over what had once been Red Death territory. Phone service had been restored almost immediately, but the power had been out so long that it was unlikely anyone in the Basement had a charged phone to call out with—and power couldn’t be restored until the survivors stopped shooting at people so utility workers could go in.
From the moment he knew the phones had been dropped, Nate had made sure he always had a phone in his hand or pocket, and he made doubly sure his staff knew that any personal calls were to be put directly through to him, no questions asked. Every time the damned phone rang, his heart leapt with hope, only to be disappointed time and time again.
Until Saturday night, when he returned to his apartment after yet another wearying day of bad news and public censure. He poured himself a drink and sat in front of his floor-to-ceiling windows, staring out at the city and ordering himself to stop at one, rather than drinking the whole bottle and sinking into oblivion as he longed to do.
He was midway through his second drink, which he swore would be his last, when the phone in his pocket buzzed. He’d had enough false alarms by now that he didn’t get his hopes up, even when he glanced at the phone and didn’t recognize the number.
“Hello?”
“So, do I have to call you Mr. Chairman now?” Kurt asked. And to his utter shock, Nate found himself bursting into tears.
He was not a crier, hadn’t been even as a child. He’d shed some tears over the things he’d seen and experienced since he’d awakened as a Replica, but nothing like the maelstrom that shook him now.
“I’m all right,” Kurt reassured him. “It took a while to hear the news this deep in, and I had no way to reach you until you dropped the phones.”
Nate couldn’t have talked if he’d wanted to. It felt like he had a basketball lodged in his throat.
“Is it true what I hear?” Kurt asked. “Is Thea dead?”
Nate tried to answer, but still couldn’t manage it. Even drawing breath into his lungs was hard, but he kept trying. Kurt seemed to understand, waiting patiently on the other end of the line while Nate pulled the shreds of himself together.
“She’s dead,” Nate finally managed to croak out. Engineers had confirmed that the gaping crater that now existed where the Fortress had once stood was deep enough that even the subbasement had been taken out, the missile strike so precise that not a single building outside of the Fortress’s gates had been damaged.
“You’ll have to tell me the full story of what happened. Bet it’s a good one.”
It depended on your point of view, Nate supposed. “Is Dante okay?” he asked, surprised to find out he actually cared, and not just because he knew Nadia would. It was hard to have lived through everything they had together and keep up the spirit of cordial dislike.
“Mostly,” Kurt confirmed. “He’s got a broken arm, we think, but we splinted it up real good and he seems to be doing all right. Getting a doctor to look at him would be good, though, just in case. How about Nadia and Agnes?”
“They’re both fine,” Nate said. “I’ve only seen Agnes once since the missile strike, but she seems to have made a full recovery. Nadia wasn’t hurt but … Well, she’s gone through hell, and it’s going to take a while before she’s fully herself again. And Shrimp?”
“We almost lost him. He was trying to pull some kid out of the rubble, and the whole thing collapsed on him. I was there when it happened. Thought for sure he was dead. But he’s tougher than he looks. We dug him out, and other than some nasty bruises, he was okay. Even saved the kid.”
Nate smiled, all the good news lifting some of the gloom that had been hovering about him.
“We saved a lot of lives by getting people into those tunnels,” Kurt continued, “but there are still a lot of dead.” He sighed. “A lot of dead. Especially in what used to be the free territories. Haven’t found anyone I used to know there still alive.”
“Not even Angel?” Angel had seemed well-nigh indestructible to Nate, a tough-as-nails survivor.
“Nope. That little people’s army she put together got wiped out when they tried to destroy one of the barricades. Good thing we didn’t all join up or we’d probably be dead, too.”
Nate didn’t know what to say, especially while feeling guiltily glad that the people he cared most about had lived, so he changed the subject. “When can I see you? Will you come out of the Basement?”
“If you guarantee me the troops on the border aren’t going to shoot me, I’ll come out—and maybe we can talk about how to get some help in here, ’cause we sure as hell need it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Nadia was far too agitated to hold still, so instead of sitting demurely in the living room to await her guest, she paced the foyer of her apartment. The butler, Crane, kept giving her repressive looks meant to send her scurrying back to her proper place, but she no longer gave a damn about the fussy, antiquated etiquette that Executive girls were supposed to adhere to.
The expected knock on the door occurred, and Crane made his slow and stately way over to answer it. Having no patience with slow and stately, Nadia darted past him and yanked the door open so hard she was lucky it didn’t fly off its hinges.
Standing in that doorway was the most beautiful sight Nadia had ever seen.
Dante had obviously stopped to get cleaned up—and to see a doctor, judging by the splint on his left arm—before coming to see her. She would have been just as glad to see him if he were covered from head to toe in dirt and stank like rotten cheese—and she would have been just as unladylike in her greeting.
“Dante!” she cried, throwing her arms around him and hugging him tight. She was well aware of Crane’s disapproving frown, but she took her greeting one step further anyway, kissing Dante like her life depended on it.
Dante returned her kiss eagerly enough, but he pulled away sooner than she would have liked, giving Crane a self-conscious look.
She still didn’t care what Crane thought, or what he might whisper to the other servants and her father. She was through with being a proper Executive, a
nd if she wanted to kiss a low-level Employee right on the mouth, then that’s what she would do.
Dante, however, was clearly not as comfortable with her newfound spirit of rebellion, so for his sake she reined herself in. She couldn’t seem to let go of him, though, so she kept hold of his hand as she led him to the living room.
“We won’t be needing anything,” she told Crane, knowing he would pop in and ask in just a couple of minutes. “And we do not wish to be disturbed.”
Crane’s eyebrows reached for his hairline. “But, Miss Lake—”
Nadia made a dismissive gesture. “No arguments.” If Crane knew how much time Nadia had spent unchaperoned in Dante’s presence, he’d probably have heart failure. The idea that she had once worried so much about such things herself seemed almost impossible to believe. “Come on,” she said, tugging on Dante’s hand and ignoring the butler’s second attempt at protest.
“Is he going to run off and tell your father?” Dante asked, worried.
Nadia shook her head. “My father’s in no condition to play head-of-the-household right now, and Crane knows it.”
There was a part of Nadia that was still deeply angry with her father for the way he had failed to stand up for her when she had needed him most. She suspected that was the kind of wound that never fully healed. And yet she couldn’t help but feel sorry for him after everything he had suffered. He had survived Rikers Island, but he was far from unscathed. He had never been all that strong-willed in the first place, and he was no match for Nadia now.
Despite her request not to be disturbed, Nadia knew the living room was hardly a private place, so she refrained from sitting on Dante’s lap and devouring his lips as she so wanted to do. Instead, she sat close beside him on the sofa and looked him over.
He had lost a bunch of weight, as evidenced by how loosely his clothing hung upon him. He’d also spent a lot of time out in the sun—no doubt trying to dig through the rubble—and the freckles on his nose had multiplied. He was in desperate need of a haircut, and his hands were covered in cuts and bruises and calluses. And yet the sight of him made her heart flutter, just as it always had.
