She tried to bring her focus back around to his words. But the static in her head crested. She lost his words in the wave of the damn buzzing. She widened her eyes, as if it would help her to understand if she could see them all better, and turned them to look from man to man.
The Councilor preened. The ox was amused. The rims of Lucas’s ears reddened, and his lips compressed into a white line. Reyes was neutral. Always neutral.
Was that part of the burden? The thought snaked away. She clung to it, and the flesh under her skin began stinging again, ant bites spreading. It hurt worse when she tried to cling to understanding. If she let go, hazed out her focus, the burn subsided. By the time she brought herself back to awareness, the ox’s voice filled the room again.
“…began experimenting with different levels of current after a riot at Madisonville.”
She recognized the name of the Council prison reserved for criminal Sparks. It was in Zone Two. No. Zone Four? Yes, it was in Four.
“It was an accident.” The man smiled. “But when even the strongest of our Spark offenders were incapacitated, we realized what we should have known after experiencing the grounding hangover.” The man was pleased, rocking back and forth on his toes. “That happy discovery led to different modes of application. All of the Madisonville prisoners are fitted with electric collars like the shipment we’ve been promised.”
His voice became a buzz again, blending with the buzz in her head.
“…can see it disrupts the critical processes we Sparks use to maintain Dust activity. No focus. No Sparking. It will also reduce her resistance to suggestion. We’d like to find out exactly what she can do, but without the demonstration Agent Brayer got.” He clapped Lucas on the shoulder and laughed.
The Councilor’s leer raked over her again as he spoke. “…like to make sure the current fluctuation will be effective before I go. I’ll be very disappointed if this one—” He broke off and turned a more respectful look to Reyes. “If Lena is as big a disappointment as the last one because I could use the prestige of—.”
The last one? She pulled in her focus sharp and tight, gritting her teeth against the pain. There had been another?
Reyes’s head snapped up though he shifted the movement into a casual back and forth stretch of his neck. The ox immediately spoke over the Councilor, offering reassurances and making a display of sliding up a handle from the end of the bed to prepare the demonstration.
The last one? The last one like me? Or the last little girl? Her father hadn’t been wrong.
Wait. Her mind tracked back. Demonstration?
Current poured into her like acid, ate down into her flesh from the electrode pads, and then spread. Her body arched, straining against the restraints holding her flat. It had the battery acid, electric burn, white heat of a grounding with none of the protections offered by the Dust. The raw current seared down and out, arcing through every part of her skin in contact with the table beneath her.
Then it was gone. Her teeth unclenched, and she found her voice, a hiccupping negative moan so raw it echoed back down at her from the ceiling. Her arms and legs and neck trembled with the memory of the spasms. She tried to catch her breath. She failed.
It took time for her to regain awareness and the moan to fade to ragged sobs. The men stood around her bed in silence. She opened her eyes, feeling the heat of tears tracking back into her hair.
Reyes stood over her, his face a mask of detachment but for one tiny muscle that jumped at the back of his jaw.
None of the other men, however, were remotely detached. The ox man, Hernandez, wore an expression of anticipation, expecting that whatever he wanted from her, he would have. The men to either side of him wore nearly identical expressions of pleasure. Lucas’s face was a study in vengeful satisfaction, and the Councilor….
Lena squeezed her eyelids tight. Bright, raw lust lit the Councilor’s face, and his chest heaved. Had he been this excited when his men murdered her father?
Her hands clenched and unclenched. Her father had tried to protect her. He’d raised her in hiding, taught her to live a lie to keep her out of the clutches of the Council. But even the loss of her childhood hadn’t been enough. He had been as unable to keep her safe as he had been to keep himself alive. He hadn’t been powerful.
But she was. She was so powerful, so different, that her father had been willing to die to keep her hidden. He had paid the price in pain. So could she. Her breathing calmed. Her hands relaxed. The tears still flowed, but they were for her father. She could do this.
She opened her eyes.
As if he’d been waiting, Reyes finally spoke, his voice hushed. “Councilor Three, I would like to reiterate my protest for the record. This is unnecessary. If you would allow me to use my methods, I could discover what you need to know without damage to her trust.”
“Oh, please, stop with the trust.” Lucas had clearly had enough. “Like it’s going to matter where she’ll be?”
“Sir, we don’t have to lose her to use her.” Reyes’s face was bleak, as if it pained him to say the words.
That, or even he didn’t believe his words would move the Councilor. Why did he bother? He had her in custody. He’d achieved what he’d set out to do. So let them have her, and enough with the charade of charm and caring.
The Councilor turned to Lucas then, the heat in his expression tamped down. “What would you do, young Agent Brayer? You are the one who lured her to us, after all.”
“He’s the one who endangered everyone in the building, you mean!”
The Councilor managed to raise his voice over Reyes without increasing his volume. “Yes, Alejandro, I know. And your quick thinking saved us from his irresponsible actions. But were you never a junior agent with more enthusiasm than sense?”
“No, sir.” Reyes’s denial came quickly, flat and final.
“I value enthusiasm, Agent Reyes. I’ve already said I think an enthusiastic agent should be allowed a moment of redemption.” He turned back to Lucas. “Tell me, Agent Brayer, would you like a further opportunity to salvage this situation?”
Reyes was still. Disbelief flared in his eyes.
“I would, very much, sir.”
The Councilor nodded firmly. “You’ll have it, then. Do what you must to get what we want. You have full authority.”
Hernandez nodded his agreement. The Councilor clapped his hands once. Reyes made a suspicious survey of the other three men, lightning fast, before dropping his gaze back to her. He seemed confused and angry. Had he fallen from favor? Good.
The Councilor’s gaze raked over Lena once more before he left them, his satisfaction evident in the angle of his chin and the gleam in his eye.
Reyes managed to catch her eye. He held her, staring down as if trying to impart something to her without words. She wasn’t interested. She returned his gaze, feeding him all of the rage and betrayal that she felt in one hateful look. His lips parted. He took a step back, then turned and walked away to a corner of the room, outside her field of vision.
Lucas, smug, tracked him. “What are you doing?”
Reyes’s low voice rasped out. “You want to salvage. So salvage. Don’t worry about me.”
“You’re not leaving?”
His brief laugh slashed across the room at the younger man. “No. I’m not leaving, Lucas. I’m witnessing. And I’m waiting for the inevitable fuck-up.”
If not for the current creating burning static through her body and her mind, Lena might have laughed.
Lucas curled his lip. He turned his back to Reyes and breathed in through his nostrils. After a moment, he reached into his pocket and removed a small folded packet of papers. After tearing off a square, he carefully refolded and pocketed the packet. He crossed to one of the agents guarding the door and passed him the slip of paper. “Go to this address. Ask the woman there to accompany you back.”
Reyes snapped, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought you were going to salvage the situation, not compound it.�
�
Hernandez spoke up, too. “Agent Brayer? What are you doing? We have everything we need here.”
Lucas turned his head back and spoke to the Councilor’s Director of Security coolly. “The Councilor gave me his authority. I’ll be doing it my way. Do you understand?”
Hernandez blinked his displeasure, but shrugged and crossed his arms. He said nothing. Lena held tight to the threads of her concentration. Why was Lucas allowed to speak to a superior like that? Why had he been given another chance? She didn’t think Reyes knew, either.
After the agent who’d been sent to retrieve the mystery woman had gone, Lena tried to work through the puzzle of who could be coming to assist Lucas, but her mind began to fuzz out again.
Lucas put his hands into his pockets and wandered back to his place beside Lena. He looked down at her with a broad smile. “Look at her,” he said to Hernandez. “She’s already recovered. They have incredible recovery from pain, even more than the average Spark. It would be amazing if they weren’t such monstrosities.” He shook his head and glanced over at the larger man. “Your current may be keeping her from zapping us. But it won’t work again to hurt her. She’ll adapt. She’s trying to figure out how right now, if she hasn’t already. She’ll make herself immune to the pain.”
Hernandez’s eyes narrowed. His hand moved on the slender handle before him.
Current sliced through her again. She was ready. She couldn’t focus enough to talk to their Dust, no. But she could get her own to act, even if only sluggishly through the interference in her head. She’d already moved thin insulating layers of Dust between her skin and the eight pads. Electricity still arced through her, heated pain pouring through her flesh and blood and bones and then out into the surface behind her. She could bear it. It wasn’t even a grounding.
The current abruptly stopped. Hernandez ground his teeth together loudly in the silence that followed.
“And how is it,” Reyes’s voice grated from the corner, “that you know so much about this, Junior Agent Brayer?”
A gloating smile ghosted across the younger agent’s face. “Because there’s a lot you don’t know, Reyes. Now you’re the junior, and I’m the master. You see that much, right?” Lucas said. He walked toward her head, searching her face as she gasped in recovery. “She adapted, just like I said. But there’s pain. And then there’s pain. It’s time to do things the Brayer way.” He grinned suddenly, the tight skin of his face pulling down with his leer. He purred the next words like a promise. “Because there are some things for which there’s no immunity.”
8
What was Lucas waiting for?
He perched next to Lena on the bed, one leg dangling, in obscene parody of a concerned friend visiting a patient. He didn’t ask her any questions. He didn’t speak at all. He waited.
Hernandez leaned against the wall to her left, hands clasped across his broad front. She assumed Reyes still stood in the corner.
She tried to figure out what Lucas had meant with his pain comment and who he’d called in as back-up. Someone better at causing her pain? What kind of pain? Her current-addled brain couldn’t hold onto the start of a circular thought long enough for her to come back around and begin to analyze it. She had to let it go.
Pain is pain is pain, and I have the advantage. She had managed to regain even more control over her own Dust, both that which lived inside of her and that living on her skin. Lucas could do little to hurt her now. She only wished she could hurt him.
She couldn’t send commands out beyond her body. She’d tried. Oh, how she’d tried, staring at Lucas sitting smugly beside her, to force her thoughts and will to pulse out at him in the gaps of focus between waves of static. It simply hadn’t been enough. It hadn’t been enough to work on the generator or Hernandez the Ox’s charge-producing machine, either.
If she could gather enough Dust both above and beneath her skin at each electrode point and ask the Dust to send out a quick pulse of energy at each point, she might be able to short them out. The trick would be to do it not once, but eight times. Once she’d done that and regained the ability to focus….
She turned her eyes to look at Lucas. He stared at the wall behind her, face relaxed, hands loose in his lap as he meditated. Focused on how best to hurt her? Why?
She pursed her lips to ask him. The static made her lips buzz, and the word came out heavy with a buzzing wwhhhh that overpowered the long “I” sound of the end.
Nonetheless, Lucas’s gaze moved from the wall to focus down on her face. A restless shuffling from the corner of the room was the only sound in the long pause as he examined her.
“Why?” Lucas repeated her question in a voice so soft she had to strain to hear.
It would be impossible for the others to hear his soft words.
He made a small sound of amusement, but his lips were twisted. “Good question. I’ve asked it myself. Every time I ground, I ask why. Every time I think about how I am the only one in my family to be cursed with the Spark, I ask why. Every time I think about being less human than my brothers, I ask why. I grew up asking why—why did I have to be the spawn of the men who caused our destruction, a living reminder of those who ruined us all?”
The first Sparks? The soldiers? She blinked, trying to find her way through the static. The people had been dying. The Sparks brought them out of the dark. Hadn’t they? She tried to follow through, but could only remember that Lucas blamed Sparks. But he was an agent?
Lena swallowed. A feral light bloomed across his face. No, more than feral. Rabid. She tried again to make sense of his words, but her mind turned and fuzzed out. It made no sense. If Lucas hated being a Spark, why become an agent?
Lucas pitched his voice for her ears only. “I learned long ago that asking why is pointless. We must follow where the Council leads and do what the Council compels without question and without complaint. That’s how we earn the right to l—” He stopped to swallow spasmodically. He looked at her, expression icy. “We earn the right to live and contribute as citizens.” His lip curled in disgust. “Even you. I begged him to let me kill the aberrations. The world would be a safer place with none of you bitches in it. It would be cleaner. Would you like to know what he told me?”
She stared back at him, silent, stunned as much by the rictus of hatred that contorted his face as the electricity that buzzed through her. He? He, who?
“He told me that even things like you have a purpose. For now, you can be used for testing, for twisting, for helping us learn to protect human citizens against your kind. And someday, soon, you get to be the catalyst that ignites the world and cleanses it of the powered filth who would make us servants.” His eyes widened, and his fingers, hidden in his lap from the other men, made an exploding motion.
He’s crazy. She licked her lips, but it did nothing to relieve the taste of ashes in her mouth. “How can you…?” The question drifted away. She managed to pull it back in. “You’re like me?”
Lucas leaned in. His voice rose as he spat each word at her. “I am nothing like you.”
She held his crazed stare, refusing to back down. She would not give him the satisfaction. If she could help it, she wouldn’t give any of them any satisfaction at all.
Lucas’s hand curled into a fist in his lap. She could see the hint of the movement.
The door opened. Lucas looked up, his hand uncurling, and smiled. “Thank you, Agent.” Delight colored his voice. His gaze shifted and moved up and down, taking the measure of someone hesitating in the entry. “Welcome.”
Did he intend for his voice to be a sinister purr?
“Please.” Lucas gestured to the area beside him as he stood. “Come in.”
Three hesitant steps lightly tapped the floor as the person came closer. They stopped on the sound of a quickly indrawn breath. Lena’s heart twisted when the woman spoke.
“Magdalena?” Her mother’s voice, filled with despair.
He’d brought her mother to help them break her.
Her mind refused to acknowledge how.
“Come.” Lucas gestured her over with a beckoning motion from his fingers. “You can come closer.”
Those light tapping footsteps brought her mother near.
Lena turned away from Lucas’s gloating face and stared up at the ceiling. If she didn’t look, if she didn’t see her mother standing at her bedside, then maybe Mama wouldn’t be there.
She swallowed. There is pain, and then there is pain. He’d promised her pain from which she wasn’t immune. She had to look.
Her mother’s face was drawn, her smaller bloom a bright halo around her, as if she hadn’t grounded in far too long. Her skin seemed yellow and thin. Most Sparks wouldn’t ground if they were sick or over-tired. It was too hard on their bodies. It made the Spark hangover much worse, even dangerous. Most also wouldn’t charge when they were ill, making sure not to build up a dangerous amount of feedback energy.
Lena had never known her mother to go more than a week—her job at the Council plant required regular discharges. She had never seen her mother glow this bright before. Had she been sick? And still working every day?
She felt a pulse of guilt at how long it had been since she’d made her way into Relo-Azcon to see her mother. She always told herself she stayed away due to the danger to them. She just couldn’t stand the guilt. She’d broken her family. Everything that had happened was Lena’s fault.
As was this.
“I’m sorry, Mama.” Her voice shook.
Her mother reached out a hand. As soon as her fingers touched Lena, a spark leaped between them, and her mother yanked her hand back with a cry. When she spoke, her voice still shook. “No, Magdalena. I’m sorry.” Her throat moved spasmodically as she swallowed back tears. “We always knew it would end like this. The three of us tried to protect you.” Her mother shook her head. “From the moment we realized what you were, we tried to spare you this.”
Three of them? Spare me this? Her heart stuttered. “Mama…?”
Her mother continued. “We hoped when they came for us, it would be after you had made your own way. We wanted you to be safe, Magdalena. I thought you were safe now. We always wanted you to be safe.”
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