It’s satisfying in a way I feel no guilt for whatsoever.
And Jiaying—if I ever get to tell her about this—will never have to worry about these two again. As a parting gift, I jack in and plant a sim of her terrors, the ones I saw all too clearly in the flashbacks she suffered. I plant it deep inside both their minds so they can’t escape it, can’t erase it, can’t ignore it.
Seems fair.
“Are you done?” Anna’s voice wrenches my attention away from the pathetic pair two cells down from her.
“You have a plan?” I ask her.
Her eyes are locked on mine now. “How far can you go with this new talent of yours?”
She’s avoiding saying it, which is good—we’re on the same thought wave with that. “It’s more like how much I can tolerate—” A buzz-click sounds from the end of the cell block, cutting me short. The door down there slides open, and a whole garrison of helmeted prison guards hustle through.
Crap. I shoot a look to Anna.
“Helmets?” she asks, gripping the bars of her cell door. As in, can you break them?
“Maybe.” I whip my focus back to the guards, but they’re nearly to my cell. I surround one and try to get hold, but it’s even more slippery than the cell shielding. Still—I give a quick jerk, disable that, then jack in and turn him against his fellow prison guards. He pulls his stun-launcher and zaps the guy next to him. That one goes down, and there’s a moment of chaos, but the one I’m jacking quickly gets taken down.
Now there are a half dozen guards standing outside my cell with jack-tasers pointed at my chest.
I raise my hands and ease back. I flick a look at Anna, but she’s also targeted. She gives a small shake of her head. And I guess we can’t break out if I’m unconscious.
Then a tap-tapping sound tells me someone else is following on the heels of the guards.
I shouldn’t be surprised when Wright strolls up to my cell… but I still am.
“Mr. MacCay,” she says in that cool, slightly-British accent. “If you can manage to restrain yourself, I believe I have something you want.”
With Wright, no matter what she says, she always wants something from me.
“What’s that?”
“Your father.”
My eyebrows lift.
“You’re entirely too dangerous to be left alive, Mr. MacCay,” she says, voice flat but with a subtle arch of her eyebrow for the half-dozen stun weapons pointed in my direction. “I recommend you make the right choice. And quickly.”
“You’re getting me out of here?” I’m trying to keep up. What is her real play here?
She casts a disdainful look at Rutkowski & Son, whose thoughts she must be able to hear—she’s a reader. And unhelmeted. Just as they are now.
She looks back. “Your talents are wasted here.”
Of course. Wright told me she’d come for me before, back in Tiller’s estate. Be ready when I come for you. I’ll require your services soon.
I guess now is that time.
I lower my hands and lift my chin to Anna across the way. “She comes with me.”
Wright tips her head. Her ready agreement makes me even more queasy than breaking anti-jacker shields.
In less than a minute, Anna and I are handcuffed, helmeted, and being loaded into an unmarked van in a dock behind the Jacker Detention Center. As we pull away, I can only pray I haven’t gotten myself—and Anna—into even worse trouble.
The handcuffs and helmets are gone, but Anna and I are still prisoners.
Wright marches us through a maze of hallways, flanked by three military guards—one next to her and two behind us. They’re helmeted and armed with guns holstered to their sides. Not stun weapons or tranq darts, either. The van carried us deep inside DARPA’s secret research facility at the Great Lakes Naval Base, but now we’re somewhere in the bowels of an enormous, industrial building. Anna keeps flicking looks at me like she’s ready to spring into action at any second. We both have impenetrable minds, so it’s either talk out loud or use body language.
My scowl is probably the only thing keeping her from jacking Wright.
The director of Jacker Technologies is unhelmeted and unarmed, but jacking her would be a disaster all around. We might break free and even get off the base, but Wright would quickly hunt us down and probably just kill us—that’s assuming her mini militia doesn’t shoot us at the first sign she’s been jacked. Which I’m sure they will. Plus Wright has my dad, and this is probably the last chance I’ll have to break him free.
Wright brings us around two more turns before we reach a large double door with a security pass scanner. Wright enters handprint and voice signatures, and we’re hustled inside by our retinue of guards. The temperature drops ten degrees inside the brightly-lit room, and it smells of hydrocar oil and the kind of preservatives you use for dead things. It’s maybe twenty-five feet on a side, and looks like a cross between a morgue and a research lab—screens with data entry stations line one side, but the floor space is taken up by a dozen coffin-sized black boxes lined up in rows. They’re elevated off the floor by unseen legs, and a small screen on the side of each mirrors the data traces that pulse on the main screens.
The hairs on the back of my neck rise, and not because it’s cold. Anna dashes me a questioning look, but I just shake my head. Whatever this is, I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough.
Wright steps over to the large screens, ignoring us and tapping through the data. Then she waves off the security detail. To my surprise, they march out the door. The instant they’re gone, I sense a shield go up at the door—a quick sweep shows the room is blanketed with it.
Okay then. Not sure if Wright realizes I can bust through that if I need to—she knows I can break the helmets of the guards who are no doubt still outside.
Wright finishes up with the screen and turns to face me. “The SecDef will be here soon. Before he arrives, I suggest you acquire the frame of mind to cooperate, Mr. MacCay.”
“Cooperate in what, exactly?” Anna asks.
Wright flicks a look of disgust her way, then ignores her and turns back to me. “In whatever is asked of you. That is if you want to see your father again.”
“How about we jack you and get what we want?” Anna asks tersely. Everything in me tightens. She looks to me. “Then we get the hell out.”
Wright’s kill-jack-level glare has no effect on Anna.
Meanwhile, my eyelid’s starting to twitch. We may have to bust out, but that’s our last option—and I’m not sure it’s even a survivable one. Wright doesn’t do anything she doesn’t have absolutely locked-down and in-control.
“We should just do what she says,” I say to Anna. Her suspicion is plain on her face… and directed at me. “It’ll go better for us that way,” I elaborate.
“Yes, it will.” Wright’s purr makes me flinch.
I focus my twitchy anger on her. “Where’s my father? This doesn’t go any further until I see him.”
“You may not like what you see… but go ahead and take a look.” She holds my gaze, inviting me to peek in her head.
I grimace—Wright’s head is the last place I want to be—but I tentatively link in. She’s playing a memory where she’s standing over a crate filled with Tiller’s orbs. My father’s at her side. They’re mind-talking while he taps away at a screen. It’s clear he’s fully conversant in the tech—he’s explaining it to Wright.
The rock-hard tightness in my stomach squeezes tighter.
This is a lie, I blare through Wright’s mind.
She doesn’t even flinch. He helped design them.
“No!” I bark out loud, yanking out of her mind before I have to watch anymore. I close my eyes and press my fist to my forehead. Wright would lie all day long if it served her purposes—she’s capable of it—but she’s just as likely to use the truth as a knife to my chest.
“Whatever she showed you…” Anna’s by my side, hands up, fists clenched, like she’s ready to give Wrigh
t a physical beat down. “It’s a lie, Zeph.”
“Is it? Zephyr?” Wright’s oily smugness reaches down to churn my stomach. “Is it so implausible that your father, a brilliant scientist, might want to use his skills in the lab once more? Of course, it helped that we held his wife and daughter in our custody. You did know he was one of us originally, didn’t you? A young man at the peak of his career, brought in to do ground-breaking research to protect the people from a dangerous menace. He was a very willing executor on many of the original trials. And now, all these years later… believe me, it wasn’t hard to convince him that jackers had become a threat that had to be dealt with, one way or another—and that the development of a safe, effective tool for converting them to readers was in the best interests of everyone involved. Including his wayward son, who had run away… and was no doubt a jacker. Probably a powerful and dangerous one.”
I want to block the words out. I want unhear what Wright is saying. But I can’t.
“Is that so unbelievable, Zephyr?” she asks again. The cruel grin on her face twists the knife a little more.
Anna is aghast, flicking looks between Wright and me.
“I don’t care.” It’s a whisper. I am not crying in front of Wright, even if it feels like everything’s been emptied out of me. I clear my throat, and say more loudly, “I still want to see him.”
“I thought you might.” But it’s clear she takes pleasure in this. “But first, you need to show me what you can do, Mr. MacCay.”
I struggle to pull myself together, then squint at her, legit not sure which ability she’s talking about this time. My newfound technique for breaking shields and helmet fields? Or the other one that grabbed her notice—my ability to kill her assassin jacker-drone? “You’ll have to be more specific.”
Wright arches an eyebrow. “Specifically… your ability to—how did you put it?—break my favorite special projects.”
“I’ll break as many as you like.” I figure these people can’t have any quality of life—not that I take life casually, but if I were a mindless drone serving Wright’s evil plans, I’d want somebody to put me down.
Wright casually strolls to the closest coffin-like black box. “I don’t want you to break them, Mr. MacCay. But if you can do that…” She trails a hand along the top of the box, almost lovingly, then she turns back to me. “Then you should be able to make one as well.”
“What?” Has Wright lost it entirely? “I have no idea how you make your meat drones.”
“Well, then, let me educate you.”
Anna’s eyeing the door and sending me suspicious looks. She’s probably wondering if I’m hopelessly compromised, and she should just take her chances and break out. And honestly, I wouldn’t stop her if she did. I wanted to break her free of the Detention Center, not mire her in my problems. Family problems.
The lump in my throat just isn’t going away.
Wright circles around the coffin-box, her pale fingers stroking the dull black surface like it’s a pet. She reaches the small screen embedded in the front and taps a few times.
Then she returns her focus to me. “Do you know the inhibitor’s original purpose?” She’s relishing this little quiz-time.
But I’ve got nothing—it’s like my mind has been emptied of all thought save one. My dad’s working for Wright. It wipes away everything else. I blink, trying to focus. “The inhibitors. A crazy guy—rogue FBI agent—created them to destroy jackers.”
“Agent Kestrel wanted to erase their jack ability, yes.”
“But it didn’t work.” I peer at Wright—does she know Kira was the one who actually put them in the water? It doesn’t seem so.
“On the contrary.” She smiles. “The inhibitors worked spectacularly well. There were just a few unexpected side effects.”
“Like turning the demens into super jackers.” My brain’s still working on rebooting.
“And readers as well.” She taps on the screen again. “But our research didn’t end simply because Agent Kestrel was anxious to see the fruits of his experiments. He rushed through the protocols. His focus was relentlessly on subduing the public directly. I, on the other hand, saw the greater purpose for this gene-cocktail weapon.”
“A greater purpose than destroying all jacker minds?” Anna has stopped making eyes at the door and is now keenly focused on Wright, who is still ignoring her.
“Why destroy something if you can harness it?” Wright says to me, her normally stolid face lit with mania—I’d say it’s glee, but that’s a terrifying emotion on the face of someone like Wright.
She taps the screen of the coffin-box again, and this time it hisses and pops. The top of it rises, a lid lifting and sliding to the side, revealing a body floating in dark liquid. It’s a man, clothed only in brief shorts, eyes closed as he rocks slightly with the movement of the lid. The stench of preservatives and machine oil is even stronger now.
Anna steps back, and I step forward, putting myself between her and the box. I reach out mentally, but I’m utterly unsurprised to find his mindbarrier slippery and smooth—he’s one of Wright’s meat drones. But this liquidy crate? Super creepy even by Wright’s standards.
She taps the screen again, and an electric snapping jolts the body.
I flinch, and Anna sucks in a breath, then we both lurch back as the body comes to life. It thrashes in the liquid, slopping the dark slime over the edge as it climbs from its coffin. The movement is horrifyingly mechanical, and the man—the thing—is slick with oily black film.
It stands barefoot next to the box.
Impassive. Waiting. Naked and dripping dark fluids on the floor.
Wright’s eyes shine with stomach-wrenching delight.
A single rivulet of dark liquid snakes across the floor. I can’t tear my eyes away as it winds along, travels just under the edge of another coffin, then finds its way to the floor drain. My gaze flits over the other boxes. So many.
“You keep them here?” It’s even more of a nightmare existence than I supposed.
“Oh no,” Wright gushes. “These are just the latest batch.”
Batch? The feeling of choking returns. Anna presses the back of her hand to her mouth.
Wright makes an effort to temper her delight like it’s merely naughty to be so excited about such horrors. Somehow that repressed grin is worse.
“When the inhibitors were released into the public waterways,” she says, her lips twitching with the effort to be serious, “they were diluted a billion-fold. In my labs, we experimented with higher dosages. Too high, and the subject’s mind is obliterated.” She snaps her fingers, making me jolt.
Anna edges up next to me. Her loathing for Wright goes unnoticed, but the way Anna’s gaze flicks over the boxes—she must be casting out her mindfield, feeling the smooth wreckage of the minds therein. The anger on her face just grows.
Wright continues. “Too low of a dosage, and there’s simply no effect. But in a wide range in the middle… well, the effects are varied and interesting. But at one particular dosage, tuned in a steady drip tailored for each jacker, their minds become something… extraordinary.” The glow is back. “Extremely suggestible, yet impossibly strong. You experienced it first hand, Zephyr. The extraordinary strength, the melding of reader touch sensitivity and jacker mindfield control…”
“It’s a hybrid.” The reality finally clicks in my head. “The inhibitors make them both super jackers and readers.”
“Yes, quite.” Her lips tremble like she can barely contain her love for this horrific thing she’s done. “That ability to crack open the toughest jacker mind? Only because of the touch-sensitivity of their reader side. The ability to read thoughts but with a mindbarrier too hard to be jacked? That’s the jacker side revealed. Given the right conditioning, they become a perfectly suggestible reader impervious to jacking, yet also a jacker stronger than any other. However, suggestible does not mean controllable. Even after extensive, repeated treatments with the inhibitors, painstakin
gly approaching that perfect state of union between reader and jacker abilities, such a weapon still needs to be thoroughly constrained.” She runs a loving look over the nearly-naked meat drone in front of her. “The isolation tank and its rigorous mental conditioning program is the final step. The result you see before you is a perfectly controllable specimen, keyed to my thoughts and mine alone.”
The man lurches forward, his dripping wet hands reaching toward us.
“Wright!” I shove Anna behind me again and reach out mentally to surround the meat drone’s slippery mindfield. I sense Anna trying to assault him with her mind, but she’ll get nowhere with that.
Wright’s horrible experiment stops a few feet from us and drops his hands. He stares at nothing, some infinitesimal spot over my shoulder.
I step back, bringing Anna with me, just to be sure.
Wright casually eases forward, admiring her creation. “He’s perfectly obedient. Perfectly powerful.”
That Wright finds so much to love in this empty husk of a person sends a full-body shudder running through me. The chill of the torture-lab, the smell of the chemicals wafting up from the tank—it’s seeping into my skin, my lungs, coating me with its stink of death.
Her eyes lose a little of that shine when they turn to me. “Unfortunately, there’s a high loss rate in producing these wondrous creatures. But you, Mr. MacCay—you turn readers into jackers. And jackers into readers. And even this…” She gestures to her meat puppet. “Even this mind is not too slippery for you to hold.” She pulls in a breath. “I’m confident you have the ability to create this meat drone as you so indelicately put it. I want you to study this one. And then you need to demonstrate that ability. For the SecDef.”
“What? Like now?” I send a furtive glance to the door.
Wright slips her phone out of her pocket and taps something quickly, then re-pockets it. “I don’t think you quite understand your situation, Mr. MacCay.” All delight is gone as she drills me with those icy blue eyes. “You are privy to a certain operation that needs to remain classified—and I don’t mean the Obedience program we have here.” She glances at Anna.
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