Hidden Steel

by Doranna Durgin

  Mickey wished she’d run into the man alone. She had the feeling they might have come to some kind of wary understanding—if nothing else, a stall. But she hadn’t, and she didn’t look back as she crept right on down the street, along the parked car behind her and to the chained sandwich shop sign board beyond it and then to the modernistic sculpture outside the small, upscale plastic surgery clinic—and then she was up and running, silent and fleet.

  And by then she was thinking, too.

  These people knew about the gym. If they’d been truthful about being separate from those who had taken her, then those people knew about the gym, now, too. The Irhaddanians. And just because Mickey wasn’t there any longer didn’t mean they wouldn’t wreak havoc looking for her at her last confirmed location.

  Go to the gym, possibly lead the nasty people back there on her trail. Or don’t go, don’t warn Steve … and leave him completely unprepared for the kind of people who employed mad scientists, kidnapped those with whom they wanted to converse, and used trickery and violence to get what they wanted.

  Of course, for all she knew, she was that kind of person, too. Certainly the man had held her skills—dubious-sounding skills—in some esteem.

  “Any way you look at it, Steve, you lose.” She muttered it out loud, and in some way it cinched her decision. For even if she felt the weight of truth behind her words, she wasn’t, she discovered, quite smart enough to let the inevitable just simply happen.

  Some day we’ll find it …

  But not today. Today—tonight—she’d see about just keeping them alive.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 11

  Steve swam out of the depths of a foggy, hallucinatory sleep to a foggy, hallucinatory awareness. The bed, he slowly realized, was jiggling. Tiny little bounces.

  Totally atypical of his bed at any time.

  “Ise gaiduri,” he muttered at it.

  The bed giggled. Just a little.

  Okay, that definitely wasn’t right.

  His eyes were reluctant, but he forced them open anyway, and found an almost familiar dark form on the edge of his bed—found too, that the giant space of the warehouse apartment was—barely—lit by the small lamp at the entrance.

  “There you are.” The dark form used an almost familiar voice, too.

  And then quite suddenly the foggy, hallucinatory quality of the moment vanished, and he knew exactly who sat here on his bed. The shock of it jolted him instantly, completely awake. He sat straight up, grabbed the sheet to make sure he stayed covered, and for the first time doubted his habit of sleeping in the nude. “That door was locked!”

  “Not very well,” she said, and sounded apologetic.

  “Oh, I get it. Just another one of those things you do remember. Breaking and entering.”

  She crossed her arms—or he thought she did. Too dark to be sure. “If I’d had any idea you were such a grumpy riser, I’d have thrown something at you from a safe distance.”

  All the pains of the previous day slammed into him as his shock faded. He groaned, put a hand to his so very sore ribs—didn’t dare touch his pounding skull. The details of the past twenty-four hours jammed themselves into his awareness, and he groaned again at the memory of the situation he’d gotten himself into. At the image of a weirdly masked super-heroine coming to his rescue and then spending a gentle night tending him. Aurgh.

  “I thought you might feel that way. I brought you some ibuprofen,” she said. “Boy, do you have a lot of supplements.”

  Of course she’d been through his things. Because that made it all so perfect.

  Mutely, not trusting his tongue, he held out his hand. She placed several small round pills in his palm, her rough fingertips brushing his skin. He would have swallowed them on spit alone, but she reached to his bedside table and came up with a glass of water he hadn’t left there, then settled back on the bed. He glanced at the glow of the clock and found it to be almost midnight. He’d slept most of the afternoon, all of the evening, and still felt like a bear woken in the middle of hibernation.

  The water had ice in it. It felt wonderful on his dry throat.

  He marshaled his thoughts, hunting for the most concise path to coherency. “What’s going on?”

  “I used your computer,” she told him.

  “Again?”

  “Again.” She shifted on the bed. “Just so you know. I don’t want you to think I’m sneaking around. I need your trust right now.”

  He laughed, sudden and irrepressible, and then clenched his teeth on a little yelp of pain.

  “It’ll be better once you move around a little.” She said it as though she thought moving around might be imminent.

  “Just tell me,” he said, teeth still gritted.

  She took a long, slow breath, exhaling just as slowly. He thought it sounded like surrender. “I found some more people who’ve been looking for me. And they—and the Irhaddanians—know for sure that I was here. I think they’ll come looking. I think they’ll expect you to know where I am. I think they’re not going to take no for an answer.”

  “The Irhaddanians?” Steve got stuck on the word, tried to make sense of it. “What the hell do the Irhaddanians want with you?”

  “That’s the part I haven’t figured out yet,” she admitted. “But there’s not much doubt about it. I barely got away—I used your advice. You know, about running away. It worked.”

  “Somehow I don’t think you need my advice.” But the words were just buying time while he tried to make sense of it all. “You think they’ll come after me? The Irhaddanians? The others?”

  “Pretty sure,” she agreed.

  Enough of the darkness. He needed to see her face, to think things through with his eyes wide open. He stretched for the lamp, discovered he’d pushed it aside with the latest hardcover book, and finally reached it.

  The sheet slipped.

  Mickey said, “Oh.”

  It would have destroyed his dignity to snatch for cover, so he kept his movement deliberate. She raised her gaze to smile at him—a strange combination of sweetness and appreciation. And then she said, “I’m afraid they’ll hurt you.” And her smile faded, leaving behind what had been there all along—a newly haunted expression.

  Steve shook his head. “You know, I think I need you to start closer to the beginning. As close as you can get.”

  She hitched herself further onto the bed and faced him, drawing her knees up to rest her chin on them. “There is no beginning, Steve. There’s only being plunged into the middle of it.”

  He squelched his impulse for a crabby response. She was right enough. He rubbed a thoughtful hand over his bruised ribs and said, “You woke up handcuffed to a bed and you had no memory. You were drugged with something experimental and the doctor doesn’t know if you’ll ever remember. And then there’s Naia.” He watched her, found those clear blue eyes slightly widened.

  “You remember that,” she murmured. “Naia … Naia’s the one I have to find.”

  “And now suddenly a country a zillion miles away is part of it. And another group.”

  She seemed to find that easier to deal with. “They said I was one of them. That I should come with them so they could get me sorted out.” She snorted, a clear indication of the probability of that. “For all I know, they’re with the first people and they’re just taking advantage of my memory loss. Though I have to admit they played it pretty well.”

  Steve rolled it all together in his mind a moment, then shook his head. “It doesn’t come together to make much sense.”

  “Except,” Mickey said, raising her chin from her knees and hitting the word with emphasis, “that this latest group knows I was here. And they said the first people—the Irhaddanians—know it too. The man said, ‘Spaneas checked with some places the day they lost you.’” She sent a piercing look his way. “Awfully Greek-sounding, that name. Spaneas.”

  Guilt pierced him right along with that gaze. “I did,” he said, struck by the s
udden understanding of where his standard inquiries had led them. Struck by the sudden realization that he believed her. “I always do, when someone lands here. They know me … they work with me …” The halfway houses, the various low-cost and free clinics, social services …

  Dammit, he believed her.

  She sighed, waved away the apology. “You couldn’t have known. I sure didn’t.”

  He let a moment pass. Not one in which he was thinking about any of it in particular, but in which he was just being. Achy, bruised, and immersed in a strange companionship with a woman who’d broken into his apartment in the middle of the night to sit on his bed. And then, when she did nothing more than rub a finger over her lower lip in what seemed like that same sort of non-thought, he asked, “Where do you go from here?”

  “Naia,” she said. She drew herself together, her arms wrapping around her legs. “She’s in trouble. I don’t know what it is, only that I’m involved, and that the Irhaddanians wanted to know about her. She trusts me. I think … I think I’m somehow responsible for her.” She looked at him, wrinkled her nose in a sudden wince. “God, I hope I haven’t led her to a life of crime or anything. She doesn’t seem the type—” But that notion was apparently too painful, for she dropped it and added, “That’s what I was doing on your computer. Naia. Irhaddan. Guess what? The president’s daughter, Naia Mejjati, is attending school at Stanford. How’s that land on your coincidence scale?”

  Good God. What the hell— “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  She only lifted one corner of her mouth in a wry little smile, one shoulder in a wry little shrug. “Just so you know,” she said. “If I’m really caught up in something international, they’re not going to give up. They’re not going to leave you alone just because you might not know anything.”

  “Turn your back,” Steve told her. At the question on her face, he made a little twirly gesture. “You. Turn your back. If international thugs are going to burst into my home at any moment, I’d really like to be dressed.”

  “Ah,” she said. “That’s a shame.” But she slipped off the bed and turned her back, and he slid free of the covers to snatch up the nearest pair of jeans. At the sound of the zip and snap, she turned to face him, wearing that same sweet, appreciative look at his naked torso.

  Steve plunged his hand in a random drawer and groped for a shirt. “Should I even ask what you were doing this evening in the first place?” She’d met up with the second group—her people?—somehow.

  “Different kind of breaking and entering,” she said. “I went back to where I woke up. It was abandoned …but they—whoever they were—were watching.” She hesitated long enough so he turned, loose cotton weave pullover in hand. She said, “It was all there, by the way. All the parts I remembered.”

  “Okay,” he said, and caught her eye. “I’m in, Mickey. I get it. You’re not off your meds. You’re just the most extraordinary woman I’ve ever met, in the most extraordinary circumstances I never imagined.”

  She exhaled relief. “Then you’ll find a safe place to wait this out. You’ll take your own advice and run away.”

  Wait this out? When he’d seen so much of it? When for once in his life he’d been given a stray who wasn’t doomed simply because of who she was? “I didn’t say that.”

  She tossed her head in annoyance, understanding the implication immediately. “You don’t want to be with me. I’ve got a thing or two to remember before I can move forward. Naia … pottery shelves …” She trailed off, and shook her head again—this time in annoyance at herself. “I’m headed out for another night of harvesting muggers—I’ve got to hurry or I’ll miss prime time. Even if you wanted to be involved in that—in any of it—you’re not up for it.”

  “I can afford a hotel room,” Steve informed her. “Maybe not two of them, but we can find something with two beds—”

  For the first time, she seemed to lose her composure. “It’s not your problem!” And then she whirled away so he saw nothing but her stiff, tense back, her arms at her side and her fists clenched with frustration. “Except of course it is. I’ve made it your problem.”

  “No,” he said, surprising himself. “I mean, yes. But I could go off and find myself a room somewhere, Mickey. I just don’t want to. I want to help. It might not be much, but a good night’s sleep is something—and it might just improve that memory of yours. You can harvest muggers another time.”

  “Why?” The frustrated word sounded torn from her; she still didn’t turn to look at him. “Why would you? Why do you care?”

  That was easy enough. He’d seen the need on her face when she talked of Naia—the need to make things all right. He knew that feeling well enough. He asked, “Why do you?”

  For a moment he thought it was the wrong thing to say. Her shoulders didn’t relax; her fists didn’t unclench. And then quite suddenly it all happened at once, and she walked to his refrigerator as though she owned it. “Let’s bring food, then. We’re too late for room service, and I’m starving.”

  “All right,” he said, and found that he, too, had let go of a tension that had made his bruises ache—found that his voice had softened to a satisfied murmur. “Let’s bring food.”

  * * * * *

  Mickey had her hand on the door—the one she’d found too easy to pick with a cotter pin from an old weight set downstairs—before she heard the brief rustle of noise from downstairs. Steve literally ran into her, laden with tote bags of food and his own version of an overnight bag—a stuffed backpack.

  But the words of question died forming on his lips, and he caught her eye in query. She tipped her head—listen—and he did. It took a moment, but the noise repeated.

  They backed away from the door. “You left the place unlocked?” he asked her, just short of accusation—but he kept his voice low without being warned.

  She shook her head, distracted … her gaze on the wall of the open floor plan that held his practice targets. “You left it unlocked,” she informed him. “I only had to pick my way into your apartment, not the whole gym.”

  He closed his eyes and groaned. “I was so out of it when I got back here …”

  He still looked out of it. And his shirt might cover the bruises on his torso, but she’d seen them only moments before and she knew what he was dealing with. “Think ahead, not behind,” she told him, and then grinned. “Of course, that’s easy for me to say. What do I have but ahead?”

  He stared at her for one taken aback instant, and then returned the favor, taking her completely by surprise when he wrapped one hand around the back of her head and pulled her in to kiss her forehead. While she still blinked, he said, “You’re a breath of … something, Mickey Finn. Let’s think ahead.”

  “Cool.” She nodded at the end of the room with all the pointy things in it. “You as good with that stuff as I think you might be?” Something downstairs crashed; Steve winced. So did Mickey, though she kept it inside. “Guess they haven’t found the light switches. What about it?”

  He shook his head, just once. “I started targeting when I was a kid. After Zander got sick. It was either that or take out my teenage angst on kneading bread dough, and that was too damned close to what they had Zander doing before they took him seriously.”

  “In other words,” she said softly, “you never considered you might use your skills on someone else one day.”

  “No,” he breathed. “I never did.”

  “Can you?” She asked it seriously. “Because I can cover us. But I still need your help to get out of here.”

  “Ohh, yeah,” he said. “They crossed that line when they came onto my personal turf.” He appeared to give it second thought. “Unless it’s a stray cat?”

  She almost laughed. Almost. “We should be so lucky. Grab some gear. And grab me another brace of knives—?”

  He shot her a sharp look, though he’d dropped the tote bags and didn’t hesitate in his silent journey to the other side of the lofty room. Oops. He hadn’t notice
d yet, she supposed, that she’d already been here. Too busy being beaten and sleeping it off. She shrugged and returned to the door, giving the tote bags a regretful glance on the way. She suspected they’d be jettisoned before all was said and done. Probably not even make it out the door.

  The quiet clank of carefully handled metal served as background noise while Mickey listened at the door. Murmurs she couldn’t hear, a few disagreeing words—they’d found the right switch, and the stairwell flooded with light. Yup, they were coming up. Not casually discouraged … not plain old thieves hunting on a pilfer-and-run. She glanced behind, found Steve behind her, already handing her a brace of knives—bigger than those she’d taken the first time. She hefted them. “Sweet,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. He’d strung a bow for himself, and had the quiver hanging off his shoulder. She understood then that if he was going to do this, it wouldn’t be halfway.

  She put her head close to his, her mouth close to his ear. “Move back with me and flank the door. Keep an angle, so we aren’t in each other’s way. Hit ‘em hard and fast—and then go through them.”

  “Shock and awe?” Steve murmured.

  “Shock and awe and run away,” she corrected. She watched him head for position—and then, with footsteps audible on the stairs, she yanked the cord for little lamp—the only light that entry switch controlled.

  “Here,” Steve murmured, anticipating her need to orient on him in the darkness, and she put herself into place—the slingshot unfolded and ready in her back pocket, ball bearings waiting in her lower lip, and the knives in hand. In the darkness, she didn’t expect to cause serious injury …she didn’t want to cause serious injury. But a little chaos would be just the thing—and if it made the intruders think twice about following them, that would be fine, too.

  The footsteps hesitated outside the door; shadows blocked the faint stream of light coming in from outside. Two male voices whispered in hasty conversation … not in accord. Not quite sure of their plan. Stretching the damned moment out.