Winter Halo

by Keri Arthur

  Which meant any possibility of doing a search of that building via the rift was now out of the question. Not that I actually thought the children were being kept at Government House, despite the fact that the Carleen ghosts had said the government ATV that had collected them from Carleen had been headed toward Central.

  “Did they talk about anything else?”

  She asked about the dissections.

  I blinked, even as a sick feeling began to churn my gut. “What dissections?”

  Neither spoke. They simply showed me. On the twenty-ninth floor, there was a room that held six gleaming metal tables. On each of these lay an orange-haired woman. They were all hooked up to mediscan units that were now acting as their hearts and their lungs. Each woman had had her skull removed and a series of electrodes and probes attached directly to her brain. They were all dead; it was only the machines keeping their bodies alive.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath. I knew well enough just how the déchet had been created; knew because I’d witnessed scenes not unlike this in the lead-up to the war, as human scientists extracted and then refined the cells and neurons responsible for both shifting and psychic skills.

  But that had been well over a hundred years ago, and it was a sight I’d hoped had been relegated to pages of history and long forgotten.

  If it was happening here, in Central, then it all but confirmed that at least one of Sal’s partners had been a scientist working on the déchet program. There was no other way they could have gotten to the extraction point so quickly.

  “Were there only six of them?”

  On the tables, yes, Cat said. There were five others in holding cells.

  “Alive?”

  Yes, but they looked drugged. And there was one empty cell.

  Which meant those five were probably awaiting their turn for dissection. It also explained the somewhat random pattern of attacks. They obviously only went after a fresh subject when there was space freed either in the cells or on the tables.

  “What about the rest of that floor? Any more horrors?”

  More laboratories, but none of the machines that helped make us, either on that floor or others.

  Meaning no in vitro equipment or incubators. And that meant if they were creating new beings, they were doing it off-site. Which was damn frustrating, but not unexpected. Nuri had already theorized as much.

  “So, what was on the rest of the top floor?”

  Once again, they didn’t reply; they just showed me.

  The rest of the floor was empty, except for the existence of two not-so-minor items.

  The biggest false rifts I’d seen yet.

  Chapter 9

  I suppose it wasn’t really surprising that there were other false rifts in Winter Halo, especially when they had one inside the bowels of Government House.

  But the sheer size of these two was terrifying; you could, literally, drive a truck through them.

  And maybe that was the whole idea.

  “Did you notice a freight elevator on that floor anywhere?” I asked.

  It was a somewhat random question. While it wasn’t unusual for military bases to have industrial truck elevators, I wouldn’t have thought them necessary in cities such as Central. Not given that the VTOLs—short-hop vertical takeoff and landing vehicles—meant goods could basically be delivered closer to the required floor rather than to a catchall basement. Their size also meant landing bays could be much, much smaller. There were often three or four in most of the taller nonresidential buildings.

  Yes, Bear said. There are exit points on the fifteenth and thirtieth floors. It appears there were also access points on the lower floors, but they have been sealed.

  Which was understandable if what they were mostly transporting in and out of the building were stolen kids and vampires. It could also be the reason why Sal and his partners had chosen to infiltrate Winter Halo rather than the many other pharmaceutical companies that worked out of Central. Bringing in cargo they didn’t want anyone else to see would definitely be easier in a freight elevator capable of holding a sealed truck rather than a smaller, catchall VTOL bay.

  I scrubbed a hand across my eyes. If things went according to plan, then I’d be promoted upstairs when I returned to work in two days. The only problem with that was the fact that I now knew I could be as affected by modern drugs as anyone else. Which meant I had today and tomorrow to get into Winter Halo and investigate those rifts. They surely couldn’t retune those two—not if they were using them to transport the children and Rhea only knows what else.

  There is another problem, Cat said.

  As if we didn’t already have enough. “What?”

  Once again, she simply showed me. And what I saw was Sal. On a table, attached to machines that were pumping his blood and keeping his flesh alive, even as other machines dissected his body and his brain.

  I didn’t know what to feel or how to react. The Humanoid Development Project—the project which all déchet had come from—had had a waste not, want not philosophy in place; those embryos that failed to develop into mature life were dissected and studied in an effort to understand what had gone wrong.

  But I hadn’t expected Sal to fall foul of the same philosophy—which was stupid on my part, if only because Sal was a rare survivor. The in-tube death rate in the grays program had been even higher than that of the lures—only five had ever made it to full maturity. If one of his partners had been an HDP scientist, then it would be natural for him to want to understand why Sal had survived when so many others had died.

  And while part of me believed Sal had gotten exactly what he’d deserved—in both the manner of his death and what was now happening to his body—the part that had mourned the passing of a friend wanted to stop it.

  But there was also a practical reason for doing the latter—none of us could afford these people unlocking the secrets of Sal’s success in reaching maturity and apply them to their own creations.

  I glanced at the time and swore. It was already close to eleven. Given that I was supposed to meet Charles at one thirty, that didn’t give me a whole lot of time to report back to Jonas and get things organized. “Could you two go back into Winter Halo and see if you can uncover the entry point into the freight elevator? But for Rhea’s sake, be careful.”

  You keep saying that, Bear mused. Even though we always are on missions such as this.

  “That’s because I don’t trust the people we’re dealing with, so just humor me with a ‘Yes, we’ll be careful.’”

  Yes, we’ll be careful, they both intoned solemnly, and promptly shattered the illusion by giggling merrily as they left to investigate.

  I walked over to the bed to put on my boots, and then quickly altered my form, becoming myself once again. And Rhea, it felt good.

  I took a deep breath, let it filter through every part of me to sweep out the remnants of those other identities, then wrapped a light shield around myself and clambered out the window. No one was in the small walkway, and there were no faces peering out the windows of the nearby apartments that I could see. I relaxed a little but didn’t release the shield. The museum was officially out-of-bounds, so I couldn’t risk being spotted walking to the place.

  It didn’t take me long to get there. I rapped on the metal door as hard as I dared and then waited.

  Footsteps echoed as Jonas approached. “Who is it?”

  “Me.”

  He didn’t reply, but a heartbeat later the door was pushed open. I swept inside and released the shield with a sigh of relief. The little ones buzzed around me excitedly, some of them dropping tingly kisses on my cheeks and others patting my arms. Relief that I’d returned was uppermost in their energy, even though they’d had fun following Jonas about as he investigated both the tower and the pile of rubble. It made me feel guilty about having to return to Central
so soon.

  “Tough night?” Jonas left the doors open and walked over to the autocook, ordering two coffees.

  “Yeah, but only because I was bored out of my brain.” I followed him across, then leaned a shoulder against the museum’s outer wall and watched the autocook fill two mugs. “Sharran was attacked, just as we’d thought.”

  His gaze briefly scanned my length, then rose and lingered on my neck. I hadn’t bothered healing the wound, so it was still red and puffy looking. And while my attacker might have had access to a spray that had healed the needle’s entry point, the medical center doc had declared it was a waste of resources to use it on the neck wound and that it’d heal just fine. Obviously, the financial problems Charles had mentioned were hitting all departments.

  “Were you able to see who it was?” He handed me a mug and motioned me toward the table.

  I took a sip, then gave him a brief description. “It was Rath Winter. Or, rather, the imposter who has usurped his life.”

  “I’m a little surprised he’s doing his own dirty work. In an organization that large, he’d surely have people he could completely trust.”

  “Obviously, given the dissections they’re doing upstairs.”

  He just about choked on his coffee. “They’re what?”

  I updated him on everything my ghosts had seen, then grimaced and added, “The fact that they’re drugging the women in the holding cells creates a major problem, however.”

  “One that means we might have to get you in there tonight rather than wait for Sharran to be promoted upstairs.” He began to pace instead of sitting at the table with me, his strides long, powerful, and filled with frustration. “Our only obvious chance of doing that is via the freight elevator, which is another problem, given we had no idea it existed until now. And I’m not sure Nuri’s family can risk pulling up any information about it without raising alarms in the wrong quarters.”

  “They don’t need to. I’ve got Cat and Bear trying to find the entry point at the moment.”

  Amusement momentarily broke the tension radiating from him. “They’re very handy allies, these ghosts of yours.”

  “They’re not my allies. They’re my friends.”

  He paused, his gaze on mine and his expression . . . odd. Odd in a way that had the hairs at the back of my neck rising and my pulse racing. But it wasn’t fear. It was something far baser than that.

  “What sort of life did you have here?” he asked.

  I took another sip of coffee, pretending to consider the question as I tried to get my reactions under some semblance of control. Which, as usual, seemed damn near impossible in the presence of this man. “You’ve read the texts, haven’t you? Surely you can guess.”

  He came back to the table and sat opposite me. “I’ve guessed many things about you, and all but one have been wrong.”

  A smile touched my lips. “That one thing being the fact that I’m déchet?”

  “Yes. And I killed my fair share of you during the war and never once did I see the spark that I see in you.”

  I raised an eyebrow and tried to ignore the internal havoc his comment caused. “And what spark might that be?”

  “Life,” he said. “Humanity.”

  I couldn’t help the contemptuous snort that escaped, even though I’d promised to curtail such reactions. “As I’ve said before, being born in a tube doesn’t make me any less human than those who created us or those who destroyed us.”

  “Perhaps that is true of you and the little ghosts you’ve gathered around you, but can you honestly look me in the eye and say the same about those who were frontline fighters?”

  “We’re all a product of our upbringing, Jonas. Those who were bred to be fighters were only doing as they were taught, and were both chemically and emotionally castrated. They didn’t know any different. If you want to blame anyone for what they did in the war, blame those who created and trained them.”

  “You were trained to kill, weren’t you?”

  “To seduce and then kill, yes, but as a lure, I had to be able to understand and respond to emotional cues. They couldn’t do to us what they did to the fighters.” I hesitated. “Why all the sudden interest?”

  “I’m just trying to figure you out.”

  How could I respond to a statement like that? No one, not in all the years I’d been alive, had ever made any attempt at knowing the person inside—the real me. Those who’d created us had never thought it necessary, and even Sal, who’d been my friend and the only adult I’d really been close to, had never truly known me. If he had, he wouldn’t have underestimated me the way he did in our final meeting.

  I drank some coffee; it didn’t help ease either the sudden dryness in my throat or the erratic pounding of my pulse. “Why? We both know you’re only here because you need me to help rescue those kids.”

  A somewhat wry smile touched his lips. “While that is totally true, it has nothing to do with my reasons for trying to unravel the conundrum you present.”

  “And why would you even want to do that? Once those kids are rescued, we go our separate ways.” Either that or I’d be dead.

  “Perhaps,” he agreed. “But in understanding you, I might also understand the reason why I am so attracted to someone I should logically hate with every inch of my being.”

  So there it was: confirmation that I wasn’t reading him wrong. That he was indeed as attracted to me as I was to him. And I didn’t know whether to dance with joy or run as far and fast as I could from the man.

  Because mutual attraction didn’t make him any less dangerous, even if that danger was now more emotional than physical.

  Presuming, of course, I was capable of a deeper emotional connection. Having never been in the state of love, I really couldn’t say. But this thing between Jonas and me was already far different from anything I’d felt before, and we’d only just stopped snarling at each other.

  “Attraction is a given, I’m afraid. I’m a lure, bred to be nigh on irresistible to cat shifters.” Once I would have added “when I chose to be,” but Jonas’s presence in my life had certainly knocked that notion on the head.

  Amusement danced in the rich depths of his green eyes, even if little of it showed in his somewhat serious expression. “So lures capture attention by doing their utmost to avoid any admittance of attraction as well as all physical contact, however slight?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “I am—was—a ranger,” he cut in. “We’re trained to read people—not just through what is said and done, but in the giveaway signs few are aware of. You have been fighting this every bit as much as I have.”

  “And we both know why.”

  He nodded. “Because neither of us trusted the other.”

  “And still don’t, to some extent.”

  “Given that you were bred to kill my kind, and I was trained to erase yours, that’s to be expected.”

  “So what’s the point of bringing all this up, Jonas? It’s not going to change anything anytime soon, is it?”

  His smile held an edge I didn’t quite understand. “Maybe not. But I learned the hard way that avoiding issues is never a good idea when you’re working closely with someone. Confronting them, and talking through them as a team, is always the most efficient method of problem-solving.”

  “So is that what this is?” What I was? “A problem you need to solve?”

  “Oh, I think this thing between us is probably a whole lot more than just a problem. But that is neither here nor there, given it is the female of our species who decides which males can or can’t court her.”

  I couldn’t help my sudden grin. “You’ll have to excuse my amusement, but it’s hard to imagine you actually courting anyone.”

  He raised an eyebrow again and leaned back in his chair. “I’ll have you know that it was a rare day when I didn’t wi
n a female’s favor.”

  Which almost sounded like a warning. Shame my hormones weren’t actually listening—not that they were going to get satisfaction anytime soon. Not with Jonas, anyway.

  “Meaning there’s a tribe of little Jonases running around in the Broken Mountains right now?”

  “They’re not exactly little, given I lost fertility when the rift altered my nature and most of them are now well into their twilight years. But yes, I have children and grandchildren.”

  My smile faded. “At least you had the chance to have offspring, even if it has subsequently been taken from you. I never even had the choice.”

  The little ones crowded around me at that, all of them hugging me, kissing me, making my skin twitch with their tingly energy. Reminding me that while I was not by birth their mother, I was the only one who’d cared, the only one who’d shown them laughter and happiness. The only one who’d tried to save them when the gas came. If that was what being a mom meant, then I was theirs.

  I blinked back tears and gave them all a mental hug. They laughed in pleasure and danced around me, their energy so bright the air sparkled.

  Cat and Bear chose that moment to return. They happily joined in the dance for several seconds, then asked the younger ones to quiet down so that they could make their report. Silence didn’t exactly fall, but they did at least tone it down a little.

  Images began to scroll through my mind. The first bit of bad news was the fact that the elevator shaft was filled with lights that had been set into concrete at regular levels. The second was that there were sensors along the entire length of the shaft. Any movement beyond that of the elevator would undoubtedly set them off.

  And was the exit at ground level or deeper? I asked.

  Ground, but it wasn’t in that building, Cat said. It was in the parking area of a Seventh Street building that backs hard up against it. It is hidden from the public who use the area, but a truck arrived when we were there and we saw where the sensor was.