by Toby Minton
Michael didn’t get it. Nikki did this all the time, and she almost always got a sense of satisfaction out of it. Maybe he needed more practice.
“That’s not what Savior wanted, mate,” Corso replied. “Like I said, he offered me a fat stack to find you and Nikki. He never said a word about any Gideon or this place you’re holed up in. He wanted you.”
“Why?”
“I’d tell you if I knew,” Corso replied. “Look, if you’d let me out of here, I could—”
“That’s not going to happen,” Michael replied with a shake of his head. He didn’t have a solid reason though. “At least not until Elias and Gideon decide it’s safe.”
“I’m not convinced it’s safe,” Elias said from the doorway, “but it looks like you’re getting out of here today.”
Michael turned to watch Elias step through the doorway with Kate close behind.
“What do you mean?” Michael asked.
“Kate’s onto something with the…” Elias trailed off as Kate bounded past him and talked right over him.
“I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before,” she said, her voice echoing the excitement in her eyes. “I guess because it was too simple. No challenge really.”
“What’s too simple?” Michael and Corso said at the same time.
Michael looked at Corso, who closed his mouth with a pained smile and nodded back, raising his hands to cede the floor. Michael felt a smile of his own trying to form and had to hold it back. He could feel a sort of kinship forming with the taller man—perhaps what had made him trust the thief in the first place—but he wasn’t too happy about it. Trust the man, he might, for some crazy instinctive reason. Like him, not a chance.
Kate didn’t pay any attention to their silent exchange. She went right on. “With the locator disabled, there’s no way I can find who was tracking it. But if they start tracking it again, I can.”
“You can what?”
“I can find the finder,” she said. She was smiling, her eyes sparkling with her victory. “I can trace the signal to the tracker. I just need to turn it back on first, and get them to track it, of course.”
“Are you serious?” Michael asked. He looked at Elias, who nodded. “But that will lead Savior right to us.”
“That’s why we won’t be here when we turn it on,” Elias said. “We’ll take a team out far enough away and let Kate do her work.”
Michael didn’t see what this had to do with Corso. He looked over, but Corso was nodding like his role made perfect sense.
“I missed it at first,” Kate said, drawing Michael’s eyes back to her. “Like an idiot. I should have seen right away that the locator had too much transmission bandwidth for a simple tracking signal. It has about the same power as our com units. It sends audio too. Whatever you say into it gets picked up at the other end.”
Michael nodded. That made sense, but he still didn’t see Corso’s role. “So what does this plan have to do with him?” he asked, pointing to Corso, who was already on his feet.
“I’ve got to sell it, mate,” Corso answered before Elias or Kate. “They need me to convince Savior’s boys I have you in hand,” he said with a crooked smile.
Chapter 29
Nikki
Nikki was so groggy when the soldiers came to get her that she couldn’t have fought them if her life had depended on it, which it might have as far as she knew. The walk to the lab helped her shed some of the drug-induced lethargy, but she still wasn’t feeling ready for a fight by the time they reached the tank Savior had mentioned.
The tank turned out to be a huge transparent cylinder with oversized restraints inside and all manner of wires and machinery on top and bottom. When the soldiers fastened the thickly padded restraints around Nikki’s wrists and ankles, she felt like she was stuck in mid jumping jack, her arms and legs spread out in a big X. She also felt like she was about to be tortured for some high tech bondage vid.
The skimpy outfit they’d put her in while she slept didn’t help. It was one of those minimal surgical getups that resembled an old fashioned and very unflattering two-piece bathing suit—the top a drab off-white band around her chest, the bottom a wide boy-cut bikini of the same stretchy material. If she’d been a little less out of it, she would have been pissed. Or she might have found the whole situation ridiculous and funny. Foggy as she was, she was having trouble keeping a handle on the fear that was steadily increasing with each hour she spent separated from Michael.
After her ride on the skimmer with Sam, Nikki thought she’d mastered her fear of being away from her brother. She’d gone the whole night with only passing thoughts for the empty place inside where her awareness of Michael should have been. After that ride, she thought she’d finally healed her emotional scars from Chicago. Well, not healed really, but at least found a way to work around the scar tissue that caused her night terrors and the crippling panic that took over when she found herself alone and helpless. But all her progress had crumbled when she woke up here—wherever here was—in the clutches of the man who had created her—and apparently tried to kill her at least once.
The soldiers finished securing the restraints and stepped clear, and a technician in a lab coat swung the front of the cylinder closed. He latched it in place, sealing Nikki inside. Then he did something that started a whine Nikki could feel in her brain. The whine got higher and fainter, but the pressure in Nikki’s ears made her cry out. Just when she thought her head was going to explode, the pressure eased, the pain fading with it.
“Sorry about that,” the technician said, his voice coming through a speaker over her head as he spoke into a box beside the cylinder. “We’re still getting used to this new equipment. Does that feel better?”
Nikki nodded and looked at the kid, which was exactly what this lab coat looked like. His skin and eyes told her he was Asian of some flavor, but Nikki couldn’t narrow it further than that. With his messy spiked hair, large-framed glasses, and look of nervous dismay on top of his youthful features, Nikki would swear he was her age, if not younger. His bedside manner was practically a toddler's. Telling her he didn’t know what the hell he was doing was not the best way to make her feel at ease, assuming that was his goal. This was her first bondage torture experience after all.
On the plus side, the brain squeeze he’d just put her through seemed to have cleared her head a little more. She didn’t feel as foggy. She felt more connected to her body, more aware of herself.
On the negative side, she felt more connected to her body, more aware of herself, so she felt the full force of the fear that had been building, apparently even while she’d slept after they’d doped her. Her heart was racing, her mouth drying out with each hurried breath.
Stop it, Nikki! she ordered herself. Michael’s not here, and he’s not coming if he has half a brain—maybe not the best argument to make herself calm down, but she pressed on anyway.
You got yourself into this mess. You have to get yourself out. And shaking like a bitch is NOT going to do it!
That helped, a little. She laughed at herself on the inside for her angry pep talk, and got at least a half smile from her outside. Progress. Her heart was still beating hard enough to feel, but she was relatively new to emergency self-therapy. She couldn’t expect perfection on her first try. Besides, she could always pretend her heart was pounding in preparation for beating ass. That got a full smile.
The smile surprised Kid Technician. His eyes widened and his own mouth started into a twitchy smile, until he looked up at her eyes. When he saw the hardness there, his face stumbled through a rapid series of emotions that resulted in his taking a few steps back, starting back forward, fumbling his tablet, nearly losing his glasses, and finally scurrying in retreat to a workstation farther into the room.
Nikki laughed aloud at that. Nothing like scaring a teenage Asian kid to give a girl a boost. She could do this. She wasn’t eleven years old anymore. She wasn’t helpless. She was Nikki Badass Flux. Nothing could
stop her. Nothing would stop her. Especially not a giant test tube and a bunch of frightened lab coats.
Her smile reached her eyes this time as she took stock of her surroundings beyond the test tube. The room was big, bigger than anything back at the bunker. So Savior had that on Gideon, at least. It was also shinier and even more computery than Kate’s nerd lair.
Nikki’s tube was centered back against one wall, flanked by blocky machines she couldn’t see around. In front of her, complex looking workstations and monitoring systems were arranged in orderly rows for maybe two thirds of the room, all facing a recessed area in the final third. In the recess, which was dimly lit with no overhead lights, a crazy collection of boxy machines connected with heavy tubes and wires whirred and hummed against the three walls, leaving the center of the recess clear for one device. It was a heavy arch, like an oversized, curved doorframe with filaments and thick cables wrapped around it and snaking off to the machines along the walls.
Nikki’s eyes started to move on then snapped back to the device. No way that’s what I think it is.
She’d never seen any pictures of the Gateway device that had caused the Event, and she’d imagined something a little different when Gideon had described it, but looking at the thick, arched frame in front of her, she could see Gideon’s words fitting it exactly.
Savior’s top secret project didn’t have anything to do with Michael and her. It had to do with the Gateway. He’d rebuilt the damn Gateway.
“What kind of idiot would rebuild that thing?” she said, her voice sounding much louder than she’d intended in the sealed tank.
As if her thought had been a summons, Savior walked into the room with his number one flunky at his heels. The darker man, Price, she’d heard him called, scanned the whole room with his restless eyes before letting them settle on Nikki. The look he gave her made her too aware of the fear she hadn’t quite banished, but she forced a smile at him anyway. The shiner under his right eye had darkened nicely since this morning, as had his attitude toward her, it seemed.
She didn’t blame him. She’d be mad too if the prisoner she’d gone to wake up had feigned sleep to get her close and then slapped her so hard she cracked her cheekbone on the metal bedframe. Yep, she’d look at herself just about like Price was right now if it had happened to her.
Price gave the room another once over and then went back to stand by the door, and Nikki’s eyes shifted back to Savior. He looked as good to her as he always had, but now that she knew more about who he was and what he had done, she was more awed and disturbed than attracted. Still, the man was giving his fitted long-sleeve T-shirt and dark slacks the happiest day of their lives.
Savior spoke, and although Nikki had no idea what he said—she could hear only the muted buzz of his words through the tank—the technicians in the room started scurrying with extra gusto. He either said something impressive to inspire a doubling of efforts, or his staff was more afraid of him than Nikki was. They hurried to their various workstations, and the monitors that Nikki could see came to life and filled up with numbers, moving bars, and shifting graphs that made no sense at all.
Savior turned and walked toward her. His eyes roved over her as he came closer, but there was no interest in them, at least not in the man-checking-out-a-woman sense. His look was clinical.
He pressed a button on the box Kid Technician had used to speak to her, and the sounds of the busy room suddenly filled the tank.
“Are you feeling better?” he asked her, his scientific gaze holding hers as he waited for her response.
“I guess,” she replied. “If you think pissed and confused is better. Why am in this thing? Why am I even here? If you want help with your experiments, you got the wrong twin. Michael’s the one who thinks he’s an engineer.”
Savior smiled, sort of. “You underestimate yourself, Nikki,” he said. “You have exactly what I need.” He paused then said, “Is the collector online?” which Nikki assumed wasn’t for her.
“Yes, sir,” Kid Technician said, turning to look at Savior’s back. His eyes shifted to Nikki, and he swallowed hard enough for her to see it. But he didn’t look scared of her this time. He looked…concerned.
“Flood the tank,” Savior said, and almost immediately thick gel started pouring onto Nikki’s feet from wide openings on either side of the tank.
The gel was cold enough to make Nikki flinch when it touched her feet, cold enough to send a shiver up her back as the gel rapidly rose up her legs. Nikki’s barely suppressed fear rose with the gel, becoming almost suffocating as the gel covered her hips, her stomach, her chest—
“Stop,” Savior said.
The gel stopped rising halfway up her neck, and even though Nikki could tell it wasn’t getting any higher, she couldn’t help lifting her chin and stretching her neck as high as she could as she struggled to slow her breathing.
“This is BioGel,” Savior said, “a future product from Generation. Once heated—” He nodded to the side, and Nikki felt a pulse travel through the gel. In a heartbeat, the gel warmed enough to take her breath. When she got it back, she couldn’t stop a groan of pleasure at the warm liquid surrounding her—and liquid it was. The gel had thinned to a consistency that felt even lighter than regular water. It felt like it was passing all the way through her body, carrying the soothing warmth with it.
“—it becomes the perfect carrier. Thin enough to easily travel through the pores of your skin, BioGel can transport a variety of pharmaceuticals directly into your system. It minimizes absorption time by taking advantage of maximum surface area for transmission. In simple terms, it is a nearly perfect delivery system.”
Nikki started to fade. Her pounding heart had slowed, her breathing with it. She felt calmer than she had since first waking up in this nightmare, and even though her situation was still far from ideal, the warmth surrounding her and flowing through her made it hard for her to feel anything but calm.
“As such,” Savior went on, “it is also a perfect conductor, as you no doubt can feel.” He paused for a minute, or maybe he switched the sound off again. Nikki didn’t know which, and she didn’t care. He’d lost her at “heated.” She was floating on a wave of relaxation the likes of which she hadn’t felt in…ever.
“I apologize for causing you pain, Nikki,” he said, which seemed to her a pretty retarded thing to say while she was surrounded by bliss. “You could be my finest creation,” he continued. “If there were any other way…”
“Huh?” Nikki said, opening her eyes. The look in Saviors was almost as coldly scientific as before, but there was a speck of something else in his blue eyes, something almost like regret.
“Begin,” he said simply.
Pain ripped through Nikki. Every muscle in her body clenched at once. She would have screamed, but her throat was clenched too tightly for anything but the thinnest stream of air to hiss through. The excruciating current gripped her body for five seconds of eternity. Then it disappeared as quickly as it had come.
Nikki would have collapsed if the restraints had let her. Manacled as she was, she could only sag enough for her chin to touch the warm fluid. The soothing warmth surrounded her again, comforting her after the agony, leeching the pain away from her skin.
Outside the tank, Savior turned to Kid Technician. “Report.”
The kid was staring at his monitors and switching them between various displays. When he turned back to Savior, he had the look of surprised delight in his eyes of a kid who’d been told all his life what fresh fruit tasted like but had never experienced it for himself until this moment. Nikki had seen that look many times in the free zones.
“It worked! She really generated the energy! The collector is registering zero point seven percent. That’s well below projections, but it worked.” His eyes shifted to Nikki, and his face fell as he met her gaze and remembered how exactly his success had come about.
The kid turned away, and Nikki raised her gaze to Savior’s. He stood stiffly, still sta
ring into the tank, into Nikki, one of his hands outstretched to rest on a conduit coming off the tank. In his eyes, Nikki thought she saw a faint flicker of white light in the black of his pupils, but that could have been her imagination, or the pain memory playing with her vision.
Savior took a long breath then said softly, “Again.”
Chapter 30
Michael
“I hate this plan,” Michael said.
“We know, mate,” Corso replied. “You’ve been singing that song since we got here.”
Michael tossed away the rock he’d been rolling in his hands and grunted. He and Corso were standing at the foot of the transport’s ramp in a clearing in the foothills of the Olympics roughly a half-hour’s low-altitude ride west of Seattle. Elias and Mos were nearby, watching the perimeter with weapons at the ready. Coop and Kate were on the transport, Coop in the cockpit keeping an eye on the radar for any sign of trouble, Kate at the top of the ramp making a few last-minute adjustments to her booster and tracking gear.
“What are you scared of?” Corso asked. “You think I’m going to bring Savior’s grunts straight to us? You know that’s round about the goal, right?”
“You’re not helping.”
“Wasn’t aiming to, mate. I’m just tired of the complaining. We all are.”
Michael gave him a look, but Corso was already laughing at him.
“Just playing with you. Relax. Your lady seems to know what she’s doing.”
“I think I’m ready over here,” Kate said from the transport.
“Speak of the lovely devil,” Corso said, throwing Kate a wink as he turned and started up the ramp.
Michael fell in beside him, watching Corso eye Kate and wondering why his instincts kept telling him to trust the man.
“You ready for this?” Corso asked, glancing over at Michael when they stopped next to where Kate was still fiddling with the controls of the signal booster she and Coop had patched into the transport’s systems.
