by Nalini Singh
Dex's, appropriately enough, was 1111.
"There's Tansy five hours ago," Kaia murmured. "She usually takes a quick ten-minute peek each morning at how things are progressing before heading over to the growing bins. That's her entering again just before she called Atalina."
There were only three entries after Tansy's morning inspection and before her recent reentry. "Anyone who doesn't belong?" he asked Kaia.
"I don't know what George was doing there--he's not involved in that study. He must've been looking for Atalina or Tansy. The other two are the most senior scientists on the station. Atalina's their protegee and they're like proud papas. They'd never harm her work."
Bo didn't have as much faith in human nature, but what he did have was evidence. "Those two also entered and exited within seconds of one another. And they would've noticed the damage if it had been there when they arrived." Which left only one possibility. "We need to talk to George."
Chapter 49
Demons, monsters, nightmares.
Three dread horsemen of the abyss.
--Adina Mercant, poet (b. 1832, d. 1901)
"GEORGE?" KAIA SHOOK her head. "No, he wouldn't do that to us."
Us. Family. Ohana.
"It's possible someone slipped in behind him and managed to stay concealed until after he left," Bo said, though that was stretching the realm of possibility. The lab was open-plan, with no useful pools of shadow.
"Do you have any idea where he is now?" Bo was already scanning the security system in case it held the answer to his question, but the surveillance cameras only covered a limited number of critical areas. Likely because the station was home to hundreds of people and Malachai hadn't wanted to spy on them.
There was a fine line between protection and autocratic control.
Arms folded, Kaia said, "If it was George and he's decided to destroy Attie's research work, then the next step would be her personal lab."
They left the security station with the same stealth they'd used to enter it, and made their way quickly to Dr. Kahananui's laboratory. The door had locked automatically when they left, and Kaia scanned them in. "Who has access to this lab?" Bo asked.
"Other than Dex and Sera--Atalina, George, Tansy, and me." Kaia glanced around the lab. "I have entry privileges because Attie forgets to eat. Makes it easier if I can just walk in with a tray for her."
Bo took in the scene.
Nothing had been smashed up, nothing destroyed.
Going to the back of the lab, Kaia placed her palm against a scanpad. "It runs on the same security protocol as the door," she explained.
Which meant the same people had access.
The scanpad went green, was followed by a small snick of sound. Bending, Kaia opened the door to the medical cooler in which Bo assumed Dr. Kahananui kept samples or chemicals.
"It's all gone." Kaia shut the door on those oddly toneless words.
"What?"
She strode to the computer instead of answering. "I have access," she muttered. "Attie wanted me to be able to get her any data she needed if she was put on bedrest for the last part of her pregnancy. Instation connections can get iffy at times."
"Why not ask George?"
"Even Attie isn't pragmatic enough to want any man but Dex in her bedroom while she's in her pj's."
The screen cleared and Kaia began to work.
The blood drained from her face moments later. "The data's been erased." Fisted hands, white lines bracketing her mouth. "We have to fix this."
"She'll have backups," Bo reminded her. "Mal told me about the weekly manual backups. Dr. Kahananui will only have lost a few days' worth of data."
"George was the one in charge of the manual backups." Gritting her teeth, she drew in a short, hard breath. "He could've filled the data packets with anything he wanted. No one upside would have any idea. They don't look at the information--they just check to make sure it hasn't been corrupted."
Shit.
"How long has George been working for Dr. Kahananui?"
"Three years. Attie trusted him with everything. She had no reason not to trust him."
Right now, Bo didn't care about George's motives. "He can't have gotten far." Not with data crystals and whatever he'd taken from the cooler--and Bo had a bad feeling about exactly what the other man had stolen. "He took the compound?"
"Every last ounce."
Brain already running with ice-cold precision, Bo put his hands on his hips. "The submersibles come up and down on a regular schedule. If he's caught one, he'll be stuck inside. Or, he's still on the station."
But Kaia was shaking her head. "George is extremely comfortable in the black--I think he'd live there permanently if he could do his scientific work in the wet. All he would've had to do was put everything into a pressure-proof container and swim out."
"Dr. Kahananui was able to flash all the screens around the station with my name when she was looking for me," he said. "Do you know how to activate that system?"
Kaia showed him a symbol on her cousin's computer. "All senior personnel have access to it, including me." Logging out her cousin, she logged herself in so that her profile image would show up alongside the text. "What should I say?"
"Ask if anyone's seen George." People liked being helpful if your query was a neutral request that didn't force them to take sides. "Say it's critical you find him and pass on some news."
Kaia's phone buzzed only seconds after she sent the message. "Oleanna, you've seen George?" she said, putting the call on speaker so Bo could hear the other woman's answer.
"You'll have to wait for him to surface--I spotted him at one of the exit pools. He had a case with him, like he was going up to the city. I hope the news isn't too bad."
"He's not going to surface on Lantia," Kaia said after Oleanna hung up; she gripped the back of Dr. Kahananui's chair with one hand, her bones pushing up against the warm hue of her skin. "I don't want to believe it, but for whatever reason, George has deliberately sabotaged years of work."
Bo zeroed in on the most important fact. "I know the compound is rare, but can BlackSea source enough for the final injection?" At least the third injection gave him a chance at life, even if that chance was a mere five percent--a chance to take the Alliance into the future, to be there for his friends and family, but most of all to love his siren and find out who he could become with her laughter in his life.
Without the compound, the likelihood of death was a hundred percent.
Pressing her palm to his chest, Kaia curled her fingers into his shirt. "Even if we could source the compound, George has erased the complex distillation process it took Attie weeks to work out."
Bo closed his hand over hers, and he wondered if she'd always have that habit of listening to his heartbeat with her palm. "I thought it was a wholly natural product."
"It is, but only part of it is active. Attie had to figure out a way to separate that active ingredient from the rest--undistilled, the compound is a glowing blue sludge so thick it'd overwhelm your brain." She pushed back a lock of his hair that had fallen across his forehead. "It took Attie something like two hundred iterations to find the solution."
"How much of that will she have in her head? Could she reconstruct it?"
"Attie's brilliant, but we're talking minor changes in temperature, measurements in micrograms, times down to the second." Nails digging into his chest. "No one could repeat that entire process in under two days--but she'll break herself trying if she finds out what's happened."
And Dr. Atalina Kahananui had already miscarried three babies, was only days away from delivering a healthy child. Fuck. "Then we find George," Bo said flatly. "Dex will have to cover for us, make sure Dr. Kahananui doesn't learn the truth."
Kaia got a gleam in her eye. "I'll tell him to loop in our healer, get him to put her on strict bedrest, no work permitted. It'll drive her stir-crazy, but she'll be safe."
"What about the scans she's been taking of my brain? Won't it concern he
r to not have those prior to the final op?"
"No, she has all the data she actually needs--she told me she was being overcautious with monitoring you because you're the first recipient of the compound."
"Good. Let's figure out how to fix this."
Her hand trembled. "Bo."
Shaking his head, he squeezed her hand. "We can't think about anything but success." Even if the clock was counting down louder and louder with every second that passed.
Kaia's jaw worked, but she nodded.
"Is there a financial value to what George stole?" They needed a starting place, a way to track the thin man with pale hazel eyes. "Could George sell the research to an unscrupulous pharmaceutical company, for example?"
"I wouldn't think so. Attie and Tansy's research is in the early stages and the reason the disease hasn't really been studied is that not enough people have it. No possibility of mass-market profits."
Taking Hex out of her pocket, she absently stroked her pet. "But, having said that, the disease affects proportionately more humans than Psy or changelings." No accusation in her tone, just thoughtfulness. "Do you think it might be the same person who told your ships to breach our waters and take our people?"
"Two weeks ago, I'd have said a categorical no, but now I have no idea what the fuck is going on." He rubbed both hands over his face, trying to figure out why Heenali or anyone else would want to steal an incomplete cure to a rare disease and coming up blank.
"It doesn't make sense, does it?" Kaia leaned the side of her body against his, the heat of her soaking through his clothing to caress him deep within. "The same applies to the compound. Attie was already giving it to you--what use is it to anyone before the experiment is complete and we know the outcome?"
Weaving his fingers into her hair, the scent of coconut and tiare flowers teasing his nose, Bo went to press his lips to her temple in an act of need as much as an attempt to comfort, when the door opened and Seraphina walked in. The assistant station supervisor held a piece of notepaper. "You're looking for George?" she asked Kaia, deep grooves forming on her forehead.
"He's gone out an exit pool." Kaia put Hex in her pocket but didn't move from Bowen's side. "Why?"
"I just found this exceptionally odd note slipped under the door to my quarters--went back to grab a forgotten organizer and it was lying there."
Bowen's mind flashed to those silent minutes with George this morning as he ran his eyes over the note Seraphina passed across to Kaia.
Dear Seraphina,
I'm conscious this is an unexpected message, but I hope you know it's from the heart. You're the most extraordinary, beautiful, and intelligent woman I've ever met. I wish I could've been a different man, a man who was good enough for you. But I'm not. And so I could never bring myself to approach you. Now there's no more time but I can't go without telling you.
I love you and I always will.
You'll hear terrible things about me after I'm gone, and some of them will be true. I've betrayed us all, but BlackSea betrayed me first. I was never protected as a clan always promises to protect. I was left to suffer on my own. Why is BlackSea helping the Alliance when it can't even help its own people?
What I'm doing, it's for our benefit. BlackSea needs to focus on itself instead of extending the hand of friendship to another race.
I never meant to be a traitor, but BlackSea made me into one. I don't know if I'll ever get to come home again, but then, I've never had a home. At least with the money I'm going to be paid for what I've taken, I'll be able to have a good life somewhere else, in a faraway ocean where I can keep my distance from those who would call themselves my people and yet have never supported me.
I'll watch for you, Seraphina. If you can forgive me, then perhaps one day we'll meet again.
Your servant,
George
Beside Bo, Kaia stared wide-eyed at her friend. "Tansy was right about George having a thing for you."
Seraphina threw up her hands. "He's barely spoken two words to me since he first set foot on Ryujin!" Blowing a curl out of her eye, she jerked her head at the note. "What's he talking about when he says he's betraying BlackSea? What's he done?"
"Stolen things," Kaia said simply. "Can we keep this letter?"
Her friend nodded. "You need any assistance from me or Dex?"
"I think this is Malachai's domain--there doesn't appear to be any risk to Ryujin itself." Bo had no doubts that BlackSea's security chief would brief Dex and Seraphina on what was going on, but Bo had some things he needed to say to the other man first.
Seraphina raised an eyebrow. "Careful, or I'll start to think you want my job."
"I already have the job I was born to do." He felt Kaia stiffen beside him, ran his hand down her spine in a gentling caress.
His siren was a creature of the deep, Bowen a man bound to land.
Even if he won that five percent chance at life, where would they find common ground?
Chapter 50
"I like your island, Bebe."
"That's because it's safe and warm. But it's not home for you, child. You're meant to fly free, a wild and laughing creature."
--Bebe to Kaia (10)
FOCUSING ON THE here and now to deal with her visceral rejection of losing Bowen to the land that was his natural ecosystem, Kaia said, "Something is very wrong with George," after Sera left the room.
Bowen continued to pet her back in slow, warm strokes that made her want to cry. "That letter definitely wasn't from a cold-blooded saboteur. This sounds personal."
"I only know bits and pieces about him." Kaia had tried with George, learning the foods he liked and providing those for him as she did with all her clanmates, but he'd always maintained a wall of remoteness she couldn't cross. "The most personal thing he ever told me was that he was an orphan, too--he grew up with his mother's family as I did with mine."
Bo frowned. "Your father's family?"
"Oh, my paternal grandparents are wonderful." Kaia loved them to pieces and it had nothing to do with the fact that they'd paid for her training as a chef--no, it was because they deeply understood the artistic heart of her, the same heart as had lived in their son. "But they're older, and my father was their only child. The entire extended family decided I'd be better off growing up in an active young family."
Bo nodded. "George said nothing else?"
"I have a feeling I'm forgetting something," Kaia murmured, "but I can't put my finger on it." A frustrating will-o'-the-wisp just out of reach. "Malachai might know more. He would've run a security check before George came to work on Ryujin."
But her cousin scowled when she told him what George had done, then read out his note to Sera. "There's nothing in George's records to hint that he might have an issue with the clan," he said, his eyes the clear sunlight of his other self and his body swaying.
Kaia didn't have to ask to know he was on a ship caught in a heavy swell.
"There's been another vanishing," Bowen said without warning.
Malachai's mouth tightened before he gave a curt nod.
Fingers trembling, Kaia lifted her hand to her mouth. She never forgot Hugo and the others, not even when she smiled, but she'd hoped they'd lose no more people to this evil. "Who?" she whispered.
"Not a clanmate you know," Mal said gently, but his next words were far harder. "They made a mistake this time around and left a witness. We have a scent."
"I don't think that's a coincidence." Bowen folded his arms, his feet set apart and his voice holding the same hard edge. "And I don't think they made a mistake."
Malachai braced himself against a swell as his eyes became even less human, his pupils nearly as light as his irises. "The ones behind this wanted me out of the way so I couldn't go after George." His shoulder muscles bunched. "Their fucking timing was perfect. I'm fast but even if I was willing to abandon our taken clanmate"--an act of which Kaia knew Malachai was incapable--"I'm not fast enough to get back to Ryujin in time to follow George."
"Do you have anyone else who can track him through water?" Bowen asked Mal, and in that moment, they were two sides of the same coin. One human. One changeling. Both with minds that could think with cold clarity even when in the grip of furious anger.
"Tracking through water is difficult at the best of times. It'll be impossible if George is determined not to be found. The ocean is in constant flux and water holds no footprints, keeps no traces."
"Then this is mine, Mal." Bowen held Kaia's cousin's eyes, the space between them humming with a dark masculine power. "I won't touch George if I find him, but he's holding my life and the lives of my people hostage. Even if I have to steal a fucking submersible, I won't be sitting on my hands."
Forty-three and a half hours.
Kaia's brain kept counting down, relentless and unwavering. "I'm going with Bo," she said before she could surrender to the fear that lurked always at the back of her mind.
"Kaia." Malachai shook his head. "You--"
"I'm going." With her tone, she told him not to say another word, not to betray the secret she couldn't bring herself to tell Bowen. "And Bo is right--this is his life. If you use BlackSea's power to keep him trapped on Ryujin, you're no better than those who are stealing our people."
Malachai flinched. "We have no confirmation he wasn't involved with the movements of the Alliance Fleet."
"You have my word." She knew the truth deep inside in a way that was painful to look at, the promise there one that would never be fulfilled. But she could use that knowledge to make sure Bowen got out of Ryujin.
Unlike most members of BlackSea, Kaia had an advantage with Malachai--she could stand up to his dominance because he let her. Older than her by three years, he was used to treating her as a younger sibling . . . and he'd been there when she'd come in, broken and lost.
He'd never hurt her.
"Kaia." It came out a growl from two male throats.
Turning, she glared at Bowen. "Stop it."
"This is my fight." His eyes flashed fire at her.
Narrowing her own, Kaia poked him in the chest. "No. It's ours."
"Shit." Wrapping an arm around her shoulders, he hauled her close. "Ours then, Siren." His next words were to Malachai. "We're going to do this with or without your authorization." Not a challenge, simple fact.
