After waving at the nurse/security camera, Mike silently stepped closer to the still figure on the hospital bad.
The kid did look like him. He recognized his thick black brows and crooked nose, but there was no stubble on the square chin. Either the nurses were shaving Gabriel, or his beard hadn’t come in yet. Mike rubbed his own cheek, trying to remember at what age he’d started shaving.
He’d expected the kid to appear to sleeping, but he seemed too still. Every breath had an aura of suspense, as if it might be his last.
Which couldn’t be the case or he’d be hooked up to a machine. But still, it was creepy.
Having a clone, a copy of himself, was creepy period. And a little sad. Mike caught himself wondering if he’d ever have a chance to speak to Gabriel, this younger brother/other self. What would they say?
They’d probably hate each other on sight, like Angel and Devon. Yeah, he wasn’t missing anything, and the boy in the bed was just a stranger wearing his face.
Mike glanced up at the security camera again in irritation. Shouldn’t they have sent someone to check him out? Sloppy. If Angel had been in charge of security she would’ve had guards outside the room of the victim of an assassination attack.
It’s not like Mike had any past history or familial feeling for the poor schmuck on the bed. Security shouldn’t assume Mike meant no harm just because they shared a genetic code.
And now he was getting worked up on behalf of his clone’s safety.
He paused, took a deep breath. He wasn’t accomplishing anything here. Time to leave. Turning, Mike saw the door edge open.
Instinctively, he flattened his body against the wall behind a cabinet. If security had finally shown up, he’d give them a little lecture. If it was Devon, he’d jump out and scare her. Juvenile, but she deserved it.
When the blinking green lights revealed the visitor to be Catherine Berringer instead, Mike paused, stymied.
He watched in silence as she crossed over to the bed, brushed back Gabriel’s hair and then took his hand.
He ought to reveal himself, but he hesitated, weirdly off-balance as if he’d taken a punch to the gut. He felt almost betrayed. What was she doing here? Catherine had been Mike’s surrogate mother, not Gabriel’s. She shared neither DNA nor nine months experience with Gabriel.
Not that he was jealous, just disgusted by her inconsistent logic.
Had she known Gabriel before his coma? Had she stalked him the way she’d pursued Mike?
Was Gabriel the son that Mike refused to be?
No skin off his nose if Gabriel wanted to be mothered. In fact, he’d be downright relieved to get Catherine off his back. Let her recruit Gabriel and Devon to be her Save the World superheroes.
“Poor boy,” she murmured, turning. “Oh!” Her hand flew to her throat as she spotted Mike. “What are you doing here? You startled me.”
Mike shrugged. “I was curious about Devon’s partner.”
“Let’s talk in the hall,” Catherine said, opening the door.
“Why bother?” Mike asked as he followed her outside. “It’s not like waking him up would be a bad thing.”
Catherine shot him an exasperated glance. She waited for the door to shut before speaking. “People in comas sometimes remember things they hear while unconscious. I don’t want to upset Gabriel.”
“I didn’t do anything that upsetting, but whatever.” His feet itched to hoof it down the hall. Away from her and the kid with his face.
“You’re Gabriel’s clone, his progenitor and, in some senses, his brother.” She ticked the items off on her fingers. “And you don’t think a visit from you might disturb him?”
“He’s not my brother.”
She became very still, then her shoulders slumped. “Of course not. You don’t want a brother any more than you do a mother. You’d rather be alone.”
“I’m not alone. I have Angel,” Mike protested.
“Angel’s your girlfriend. Your only friend as far as I can tell.”
Ouch. Mike got along well with his teammates, but they were just pals. He hadn’t trusted any of them with the secret of his genetic engineering. Stung, he went on the attack. “You have something against Angel?”
Catherine shook her head, serene. “No. I think Angel’s the best thing that ever happened to you. She loves you, and you obviously love her. But most people have more than one person in their support system, Michael. Angel has her parents and Wendy and other friends. Would it be so bad to let me in? Or Gabriel when he wakes?”
Mike backed away, because in truth he couldn’t refute her words. The three weeks Angel spent in the Historical Immersion with Maryanne had been agonizing because he’d been terrified he’d lose her. And if they broke up, not only would he no longer have Angel as part of his life—to talk to and spar with and match him wit for wit—he would be utterly alone.
“I—” Mike wasn’t sure what he might have said because just then he heard approaching footsteps and clammed up.
Devon whipped around the corner, then stopped short when she saw them. No mistaking the dismay in her eyes.
She covered the emotion with anger. “What’s going on?” One hand slid into her pocket, hiding something.
Mike’s interest sharpened.
“Nothing’s going on,” Catherine soothed. “Michael just wanted to meet Gabriel. I’m sure you can understand why.”
Devon glared at them both. “You promised not to tell him Gabriel was here.”
“Michael figured it out on his own. I told you I wouldn’t lie to him,” Catherine said calmly.
“You should have told me. You had no right to bring him here behind my back.” Dev spoke with heat.
“You’re right. I’m sorry,” Catherine apologized, then offered more soothing phrases.
Mike calculated if he could grab what Devon had hidden in her pocket. But if he did, he risked turning Catherine against him. Right now she’d implied that they’d visited Gabriel together. Why?
Then he noticed how she stood slightly in front of him, protecting him. He’d seen Angel’s mom do the same thing. The realization stunned him.
Even though Catherine disapproved of what he’d done, she’d acted automatically to deflect Devon’s anger onto herself. Catherine could easily have stayed neutral. Instead she’d behaved as if they were a team.
If her purpose truly was to recruit violet-eyes to work for her foundation and Save the World, then she ought to be just as concerned with currying Devon’s good favour. In fact Devon was the better choice: younger, more tractable, and with better test scores.
Yet she’d chosen to support him.
His last bit of cynicism crumbled. Catherine truly believed she was his mother. He could reject her from now until doomsday and it wouldn’t make any difference to her. In her mind she was his mother already.
For the first time his own mind was uncertain.
“I don’t want Michael seeing Gabriel without me again,” Devon said icily. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to visit my partner. Alone.”
“Of course.” Catherine steered Mike down the hall and around the corner. He heard the click of a door opening and shutting as Devon entered Gabriel’s room.
“She’s up to something,” Mike announced, happy to stop the soul-searching and focus on something concrete.
Catherine shifted from foot to foot. “She’s just edgy, that’s all.”
Mike raised an eyebrow. “She hid something in her pocket. Don’t you want to know what it is? What if she’s so desperate to wake him, she plans to try some quack procedure that might harm him?”
Catherine sighed. “You’re blowing this out of proportion.” But she led him three doors down to the nursing station.
The male nurse had his head down on the desk, snoring.
Catherine cleared her throat. He didn’t stir.
Mike snorted. “Give up.” He turned the security monitor around. “Dear little Devon probably dosed him with Knockout.” God k
nows, she seemed to have an endless supply of the drug.
“We don’t know that,” Catherine said.
He ignored her feeble defense. “Aha.” On the screen Devon removed something from her pocket. Not a syringe, after all. The device was odd: the size of a pen, but with square sides.
“What’s she doing?” Catherine leaned forward.
Devon’s body blocked the camera lens, but she appeared to be holding the device to Gabriel’s ear.
Devon picked up her partner’s hand. Her mouth moved. Mike thought she might be saying, “Come on, come on.”
Thirty seconds later Coma Boy opened his eyes.
Well, well, well. How interesting. Mike bared his teeth.
“Can we turn on the sound?” He half-expected Catherine to protest that they shouldn’t invade Devon’s privacy, but apparently Devon had earned some mistrust, because Catherine typed in a password and the audio came on.
“Gabe, you have to tell me where you are.” Tears thickened Devon’s voice. “We don’t have much time. Please.”
“Dev, is that you?” Gabriel asked. His eyelids fluttered closed. “I can’t see you. Where’ve you been?”
She shook his shoulder. “Wake up! Tell me where you are. Are you still in the dragon scenario?”
“I can barely hear you. Dev, you’ve got to come get me. I’m stuck on this stupid beach. I can’t get out… the shoreline just wraps around. And the exit commands don’t work.”
“Where’s the beach? Is anyone else there?”
He didn’t respond. His body slackened, falling back into a coma. She shook him repeatedly until she almost pulled out the I.V. then collapsed against the wall, sobbing.
Catherine moved toward the door, stricken. “I should go to her.”
Mike felt a little sick himself. He caught Catherine’s wrist. “Don’t tell her we saw. She’ll react badly if cornered.”
Catherine studied him for a second, then nodded. “As you wish.”
At loose ends, Mike returned to his own room, but Devon’s devastated reaction kept playing in his mind. Unwilling sympathy stirred. Now he knew why she’d colluded with Nations Against: they’d promised her a way to contact her partner in his unnatural coma. She must know they’d never willingly give her the cure, but if they could wake Gabriel for two minutes, they could wake him all the way up. Knowing they had a cure made for a powerful carrot.
Mike pitied her, but he didn’t kid himself. Devon’s desperation made her dangerous. She’d sold him and Angel out once. She would do it again in a heartbeat.
Chapter Fourteen
ANGEL
Over two hours passed before I returned to the data entry floor. Heads lifted.
“What happened?” Gerry mouthed.
I just shook my head. “Later.” After listening to my full story, Ms. Rodriguez had taken my accusation of attempted murder seriously enough to review the cafeteria security tapes. Since I’d thrown up in the washroom, I had no proof of my own illness except a certain pallor, but it had been enough for Ms. Rodriguez to order a search of Jordan’s room, which had turned up a knife and a possible poison. He was now under arrest. But if I told Gerry about Jordan, I’d have to get into why he’d done it, and I didn’t feel up to the explanation right now.
I’d barely typed in a dozen names when Tad brushed by my desk, ostensibly to pick up a runaway pen. “Your numbers are through the roof,” he whispered.
I nodded thanks for the information, but I didn’t like the speculative look in his eye, as if he thought I’d planned Em’s dramatic rescue.
Two hours and still no word on her condition. My fingers made a typo and had to backup and fix it. I prayed she was okay, that they’d flushed the poison out of her system. And I hoped Jordan and his compatriots rotted in hell. He’d watched her eat the cinnamon bun, apparently considering her life well lost on the off-chance that I’d kick it, too.
Nations Against had rocketed to the top of my Hit List. Devon would have to settle for second place.
I’d just managed to turn my brain off enough to achieve a good typing rhythm when Mr. Pinchot, looking extremely constipated, called my name. “Angel Eastland, please go to the conference room.”
“Is it about Emily?” Oh, God, were they taking me aside to tell me bad news?
He looked surprised, then irritated. “You’ll find out when you get there.”
Not about Em, then. My muscles relaxed. Which meant it was about the other thing. “Just me? What about the others?”
He blew out a breath, harassed. “Fine. Jazzy, Sahan, Ron, Gerry, you can accompany her.”
“And Tad,” I said.
Mr. Pinchot’s lips set. “I’ll have to get authorization for that.”
Another ten minutes dragged by, before Pinchot grudgingly granted us permission to leave the floor. Jazzy’s eyes snapped with excitement. Ron and Gerry exchanged puzzled glances with one another then turned to me.
“I think my lawyer may have found that loophole,” I lied. I wasn’t about to risk getting disqualified at the last minute for something as stupid as breaking character.
Mr. Pinchot led us to a conference room on the main floor where Ms. Rodriguez and Brunette, the NextStep representative, were waiting. “Good riddance to troublemakers,” Mr. Pinchot muttered on his way out.
I latched onto Ms. Rodriguez first. “Any word on Emily?”
“Yes.” Ms. Rodriguez smiled warmly. “The poison is out of her system and she’s recovering.”
A load of tension evaporated from my shoulders. I closed my eyes for a brief moment and inhaled. It felt like the first deep breath I’d taken in hours. Okay, on to the next priority.
I addressed Brunette. Today she wore an orange suit and had dancing flames in her contacts. “What’s my point total?”
“575. Your combined total is 713.”
I relaxed. There were seven people in my party.
“What’s going on?” Ron asked.
Ms. Rodriguez gestured to me. “Angel, this is your show. I’ll be on hand to answer legal questions afterward.” I couldn’t tell from her expression if she was impressed or merely bemused.
“Ever heard of the Golden Ticket Event?” I launched into my spiel: Kenneth Jones’s soon-to-be unveiled NextStep, the Golden Ticket promotional event where celebrity contestants would compete with code-breakers like Sahan and Jazzy, the Culling we’d just undergone— Ron and Gerry gaped at me. -–and how I’d risked my own promotion to the NextStep Immersion to win places for them, my new teammates.
“But why?” Ron demanded, flabbergasted. “You barely know us.”
Why? The question stymied me. I didn’t want to reveal my real reason, and in truth I could’ve achieved my goal in a less round-about way. The NextStep officials had annoyed me, so I’d treated them like the enemy scientists of my childhood, twisting their rules so I could win on my own terms.
“Because this prison sucks.” The words came from deep within me. “Because it’s wrong for you to be detained here. Your government should be investing in your future, not loan-sharking you money with one hand and slipping handcuffs on you with the other. How does that earn your patriotism and loyalty? How does that encourage people to learn more? All it does is make people afraid to dream. It’s a short-sighted, stupid policy.” One that had affected my parents, forcing them into a situation where they had to choose between tolerating a horrible infringement of privacy or giving up the adopted child of their heart—me.
“I can’t make your government smarten up, but I can spring you out of here today. None of you deserve to be in prison.”
Ron and Gerry nodded enthusiastically, but Jazzy inhaled sharply, appalled at this sedition.
She stood up. “Look, that all sounds very nice and fine and noble, but you haven’t thought this through. A team of six—
“Seven,” I corrected firmly, thinking of Emily.
“Seven is way too big to be effective,” Jazzy said. “Look, I admit I underestimated you. You’re a
gamesman, and you know how to appeal to the viewers. Sahan and I can handle the puzzle aspects for you—though, frankly, our talents overlap—but the rest of your ‘team’ here is deadweight.” Jazzy stopped pacing and grimaced at Ron and Gerry. “Sorry, but it’s true.”
Gerry flapped a hand as if to say he agreed.
“If you want to help pay their debt, that’s fine, that’s generous of you, but first we need to win, and a smaller team will help with that.”
I shook my head, bemused. “Jazzy,” I said as gently as I could, “the only person in this room I even considered cutting was you.”
Her mouth fell open.
“You’re smart, but as you said, your skills overlap with Sahan’s. You’re here because someone in your family is ill and I felt sorry for you.” And I’d spent time getting viewers invested in a romance between her and Sahan.
Her nostrils flared. She sputtered. “Because I said my mom had cancer? How do you know it’s even true? It could be just a cover story.”
“Is it?”
She bit her lip. “No.” She sat down.
Moving on. “How about you, Tad? Are you in?”
Tad shook his head. “You’re nuts, but I’ll take any way out of this hellhole that I can get.”
“It’s not a hellhole,” Ms. Rodriguez objected, lines of distress forming on her face.
I cut her off. “Tad lives online. Being cut off from the outside world is worse than slaving in a salt mine for him.” Except Tad had found a way to hack into online feeds, perhaps through an Augment? Something to ask about later.
I turned back to the group. “So that’s the offer. Team up with me for a chance to pay off your debt and win your freedom early.”
Jazzy made a scoffing noise.
“Jazzy’s a pessimist,” I said breezily. “But I think we’ve got a shot. Worst case scenario? You get a few days’ vacation. Paid vacation, right?” I asked Brunette.
“Uh,” she tapped her ear, obviously listening to someone else. Her eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Yes. They’ll receive a two-day credit toward their debt.”
Angel Eyes Page 14
