by Kyla Stone
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She jerked her knife out of the wall and slammed it back into its sheath. She remained there for a moment, both hands flattened against the wall, her back stiff, her shoulders quaking. A sound escaped her, so soft he almost didn’t hear it. A low moan, the terrified cry of a trapped animal.
He wasn’t sure what to say. Micah was always better at this stuff. He wanted to help her, even though he knew his words were useless. “I’m sorry about your mother.”
“What do you know?” She turned and faced him. She attempted a smirk, but her lips quivered, the mask she always wore slipping. Cleo was hard, tough, a soldier willing to do whatever it took to get the job done. She was a skilled liar, fighter, and killer. She was dangerous.
She was also a daughter with a dying mother.
“I lost both of my parents, too.”
She looked at him with hollowed eyes. “Did you know she’s not really my mother? Not biologically, I mean.”
He had noticed that Cleo was Indian while her mother was African-American, but he had no idea who her father was. These days, families came in so many shades it hadn’t really even registered. “I didn’t know.”
“My brother and I were foster kids, just products of a broken system. My dad was a mean drunk, and my mom was just mean.” Her lips curled back from her teeth. She gestured at her face. “Bet you wondered where I got this.”
“It’s none of my business.”
“Damn right, it isn’t. But it’s your lucky day. Most people here think it’s a war wound from one of the homemade bombs we used to blow up government buildings. I let them think that. They don’t want to know that truth. Nobody wants to know that my dad believed in corporal punishment, that he thought pouring boiling water on his seven-year-old daughter’s face was a reasonable discipline for sass. They don’t want to know it was my mom who held me down and let him do it.” She glared at him, the burned side of her face shiny in the florescent lighting, challenging him. “The truth is a lot less glamorous, a lot more ugly. Like me.”
Gabriel’s chest tightened. No wonder she was so hard. She’d had to be. It sickened him, all the cruel ways parents could destroy their own children.
But she didn’t want pity. So he didn’t give it to her. “What happened?”
“The state took me and my brother away. But group homes aren’t exactly an improvement. The government didn’t give enough stipend to cover adequate food, let alone clothes and toys and whatever else kids are supposed to have. Hell if I know. We fought over food. Only the meanest had full bellies at night. I always made sure me and my brother had something to eat, no matter what.
“The workers were as broken as we were. You don’t want to know what happened there. I ran away five times.”
“Did they catch you?”
“My brother, he—my mother pushed him down the stairs when he was four. Broke both his legs. They never healed properly. So he couldn’t run away with me. I never got caught. Each time, I came crawling back on my own. Couldn’t bear to leave my brother.”
Gabriel nodded. That, he understood. Cleo might act like a sociopath, but she was capable of love. She clearly loved her brother, had sacrificed and suffered for him. Gabriel felt the same ferocious, protective love for his brother. He’d do anything for Micah.
“I was twelve when this woman comes in,” Cleo continued. “Short, middle-aged, but she’s got this presence, you know? You notice her. One of the older boys said she’d adopted two kids a few years ago. She took her time, talking to the workers and visiting with every kid, all of them acting sweet as sugar even though they were really monsters.
“I didn’t like her. I didn’t trust her. When it was my turn, I didn’t act any way but myself. No nice old lady was ever going to pick a scarred, ugly girl with bruises and scratches all over her arms and face from fighting.
“But then she came up to me and looked real hard at me without saying anything for a moment. She asked me how often I won. I said, ‘As often as I need to.’ She laughed. Then she said, ‘I’m looking for troublemakers who will grow up to make trouble, to change how things are, to make them better. Are you a troublemaker?’ And I said, ‘You can see that for yourself.’
“So she chose me. She picked me, out of all of them. I said I’d go with her, but not without my brother. She said that was an acceptable arrangement, and went to fill out the paperwork.
“That was over a decade ago.” She gave a rueful smile, her expression sharp-edged as a knife. “My mother is tough. But so am I. I haven’t lost her. Not yet.”
She pushed off the wall and ran her hands through her purple braids, shoving them over one shoulder with a heavy sigh. The hem of her jacket slipped down her arm, revealing a line of scars, each about an inch long, laddered from her wrist to her forearm. Some were bunchy and white, others an angry purple, a few red—fresh cuts, not yet scars.
She caught him looking. Her face hardened, the mask slipping back into place. “To track my kills.”
“What for?”
“To remember,” she said with a snort, “that no one gets in my way. No one.” She strode forward until she was inches from Gabriel. He could feel the body heat pouring off her—an unquenchable fire of hatred, fury, and conviction. “We can’t wait. We have to take the cure by force. We have to attack the Sanctuary now.”
16
Amelia
Hot water streamed over Amelia’s head, neck, and shoulders. She turned the temperature so high it was nearly scalding. Steam billowed all around her. It was her first hot shower since…since the Grand Voyager, she realized with a small shock. It felt like years.
The walk-in shower was tiled in intricate patterns of teal, aqua, and shades of blue, from palest egg-shell to the deepest cerulean hues of the ocean. Twelve sprayers massaged her body from the sides, while overhead, a rain shower head spilled a hot waterfall over her head and shoulders. The personalized scent of honeysuckle and jasmine—her mother’s favorite flowers—infused the steaming room.
After months of cold and caked dirt and sweat, with only a few lightning-fast showers in freezing water, she finally felt clean for the first time since the Grand Voyager. How desperately she’d missed this—warmth, cleanliness, comfort, and beautiful, sumptuous surroundings.
Weariness filled her bones like cement. She was so tired. Tired of always looking over her shoulder, perpetually tense and anxious, unable to sleep, fear her constant companion.
She raised her head and closed her eyes as rivulets of warm, soapy water ran down her face. For all those years, she’d misjudged her mother, believing she’d stayed with Declan for money, prestige, power. Amelia hadn’t valued safety because she already had it. She’d never had to feel its lack. But safety was a powerful thing, a precious thing.
She understood this now as she stood beneath the warm, soothing rain, tears pricking the backs of her eyelids, in a way she’d never understood before.
How much would she give to stay here? To never have to go back to the cold, the discomfort, the dirt and the hunger, the constant danger and fear and death?
How much was safety worth?
But you’re not safe here.
She leaned against the tile wall, her eyes still closed. The powerful massage sprayers pummeled her stomach and thighs, so strong it almost hurt.
With all the worrying she’d done over the last months, she should have been prepared. But she wasn’t. She felt the shock of it in every cell of her body, in her bones.
Her father was alive. Somehow, someway, he’d escaped from the international terrorist syndicate that had abducted him from the Grand Voyager.
Her father was here.
And she would be forced to face him.
Her father, whose cold and calculating manipulations brooked no weakness. Her father, who used shame as a tool to humiliate and control. Her father, who exploited her beauty and charm as a tool to beguile his political allies.
She had spent years checking m
irrors compulsively, ensuring she was perfect enough, good enough, for her father. But whatever she did, it was never enough.
It wasn’t until his final rejection on the Grand Voyager’s bridge that Amelia finally understood that her father might be incapable of loving her.
Despite everything he’d done to her, he was also her savior. He was the one who had introduced her to the violin, who’d glowed with pride at her concerts and competitions. And he was the one who had saved her from brain damage and certain death with the illegal medication he’d developed for her deadly form of epilepsy.
A cold, dull dread stole over her. She wasn’t ready. She had thought she was, but she wasn’t.
Her knees buckled. She collapsed hard, slipping to the wet, slick tile. She dragged in harsh, rasping breaths. Her belly cramped, her knees knocking against each other, her shoulders shaking, her whole body trembling.
She drew her legs to her stomach and wrapped her arms around her shins. She rocked back and forth, numb and terrified and alone. Water pounded her head and back, pooling around her feet.
Fear and despair clawed at her. Beneath it all, beneath the slow-burning shame and betrayal and anger, there was a terrible kind of devotion. She both feared and hated her father—and loved him. How could she possibly reconcile such competing, disparate emotions inside her without being torn apart?
How was she possibly going to do this?
When the first tears came, she barely noticed them. They blended with the water pouring down her face. They came harder and faster, until she was sobbing, heaving, unable to stop them. Unable to stop anything.
It might have been an hour before the grief wrenched every tear from her body. The warm water never ran out.
Numbly, she unfolded her limbs and forced herself to stand.
She waved her hand over the dryer sensor. The sprayers retracted, replaced by the auto-dryers. Billowing clouds of heat enveloped her, wicking the liquid from her body. In moments, she was dry from head to toe, even her hair.
The temperature was warm as she stepped into the bedroom. She nearly fell into the opulent, king-sized sleep pod. The curved lid of the sleek, egg-shaped pod was open, beckoning to her to lay down, to succumb to her exhaustion. With the pod’s simulations, she could choose to sleep on decadent silks and furs, luxurious feather-soft velvet, or drift in a calm, moonlight-drenched ocean. The advanced haptics and pressurized air nodules could replicate the weightlessness of floating in outer space. In the sensory deprivation of a sleep pod, she could sleep for three days straight.
Her gaze was drawn to the velvet box wrapped in a bow laying in the cushioned center of the sleep pod. She unwrapped it to find a simple pair of powder-blue underwear and a bra. Hope this is your size! Dinner is at six! Love, Vera! read the attached digital card.
She couldn’t let herself rest yet.
Amelia stepped behind the discrete privacy shield in front of the closet. She waved her SmartFlex over the body scanner. Nothing happened.
If it were working, the scanner would have scanned her height, weight, and measurements and projected the latest runway fashions over a rotating holographic image of her body. Through a chute in the wall, her selection would be delivered in a lavender-scented box.
But that was the old world. Or, that was the old world of the elites. She knew better now.
The closet was barely visible but for the rectangular cracks in the sleek white wall. “Open closet,” she said.
The door slid open, revealing a pre-selected dress draped on the single hanger. Of course. That was why the scanner hadn’t worked. Her father had chosen for her.
Carefully, slowly, she slipped into the supple, indigo-blue asymmetrical gown. It rippled above her knees, silky as gossamer, but hung loosely at her chest and hips. She’d lost weight from the Hydra virus, from the weeks and months scavenging to survive. She wasn’t willowy like Celeste or sturdy and muscular like Willow. She looked sickly.
She wrapped a luxurious sable shrug around her bony shoulders and glanced down. A delicate, midnight-blue clutch lay on the vanity next to a familiar-looking benitoite necklace gilded with diamonds. The rich indigo facets of the rare jewel glinted bright and fiery in the light.
Amelia sucked in her breath. She’d worn this necklace—or one eerily similar—on the Grand Voyager. Like everything else, her father had picked it for her.
Her hand hovered above the necklace, trembling. He wanted her to wear it. He would be upset if she didn’t.
She took one last glance in the mirror. Her hair was a ragged mess, cut in jagged chunks around her ears.
She didn’t miss her long hair. Cutting it short had been symbolic of so many things. It had freed her from the gilded prison of perfection her father had forced on her. She no longer needed to be beautiful and graceful and articulate and utterly dazzling.
Until now.
Now, she was right back inside that gilded cage. Her hair hadn’t made a mote of difference. The cool air against her bare neck made her feel exposed. Her heart was cold as a block of ice. Her mouth was dry, her palms damp.
No. She didn’t have to be afraid anymore. Don’t forget who you are.
Even though Declan Black was still alive, she wasn’t his daughter anymore, not the one he knew. She wasn’t the scared, weak little girl he expected. She was someone else now. Better, stronger, braver.
She grasped the diamond charm bracelet still bound to the leather thong around her neck. She pressed her index finger against the point of the violin charm. It didn’t fit her elegant dress. She would wear it anyway.
Someone knocked on the door. “Vera Castillo-Longoria is here to see you,” the room AI purred in a rich, sophisticated voice.
Amelia left the blue benitoite necklace on the vanity and went to meet her father.
17
Gabriel
Fear stuck in Gabriel’s throat like a hook. He stared at Cleo in horrified disbelief. “You can’t do that! You can’t attack the Sanctuary now! Amelia is going to smuggle the cure out, just like she promised. You have to give her time! You have to—”
“I don’t have time!” Cleo’s dark eyes glittered. “Did you not just hear me? My mother is infected! She’s dying!”
It was too dangerous. She was insane. They couldn’t put Amelia, Micah, and Silas at risk like this. “And Amelia and my brother?” he roared.
“We’ll be careful. We won’t hurt the labs, the scientists, or Amelia. We’ll take over, and the scientists will get us the cure.”
“What about anti-virals?” Gabriel asked, scrambling for ideas. “Don’t they hold off the symptoms and delay the onset indefinitely?”
“Only for a month or two at most,” Cleo said. “The Sanctuary lied. Big surprise. Besides, we don’t have any. I already asked Cerberus—and checked their supplies for veracity. They’re out. They’d planned to stock up when they reached the Sanctuary. We prevented that.”
“So we find a way to get more. We have what—almost two weeks before the final stage of the disease?”
Cleo shook her head. “The anti-virals only work if taken before the coughing starts, within the first forty-eight hours.”
Gabriel thought of Harmony. She’d betrayed them to the Headhunters for a case of anti-virals for her infected, dying nephew. Her nephew, who had already suffered through the advanced stages—the incredibly high fever, the bleeding from the nose, mouth, and ears.
A sharp, bitter pain flared in his chest. Harmony had betrayed them for absolutely nothing. The anti-virals wouldn’t have worked. Her nephew died anyway. Nadira was killed for nothing.
Something shriveled inside him. It was all so crushingly pointless. He blinked back the stinging in his eyes.
“I will not let my mother die,” Cleo said. She patted her breast pocket for a fresh cigar and growled in frustration when she found it empty. “We move up our plans. We attack the Sanctuary and get the cure now.”
He felt sickened, dread coiling in his gut. “What about the rest of
the Patriots’ leadership? They won’t agree with such a rash action. You’re putting too much at risk!”
Her eyes flashed. “I’ll make them agree.”
Something crashed behind them. Gabriel and Cleo spun, yanking their guns from their holsters and aiming into the shadows of the garage. Something—or someone—was hiding around the corner five yards to their rear, in the hallway that led to a pair of offices, bathrooms, and a back door.
Gabriel’s heart hammered against his ribs as he inched forward silently, Cleo right beside him. He and Cleo crept to the wall, then swiftly rounded the corner. The hallway was empty but for a metal shelving unit containing packs of paper towels, microfiber clothes, and cleaning supplies. A bottle of industrial cleaner had fallen to the floor. Gabriel prodded it with his foot.
Cleo nudged his shoulder, tilting her chin at something at the other end of the hallway. The steel-reinforced back door was wide open, daylight forming a long rectangle on the concrete floor.
“Damn it,” Cleo whispered. They rushed through the hallway to the doorway. Outside, the sun peeked through a raft of gray clouds. A strong breeze whipped the bare trees and kicked up a swirl of dead leaves in the patches of ground where the snow had melted.
The sounds of children laughing and screaming as they played soccer drifted from the rec yard. A kitchen worker escorted a hovercart filled with potatoes freshly harvested from the greenhouse thirty yards to their left. To their right, two military Jeeps were parked in the empty, weed-infested lot beside the garage.
They checked the Jeeps, but found exactly what they were expecting—nothing at all. Whoever had been spying on them had gotten away. Who was it? And what were they going to do about what they’d just heard?
