by Alisa Woods
It sucked him right in. Who hurt you, Mercy Strange?
She was only now, hours later, settling into having the normal sexual-attraction response. That he liked it… was a danger sign. He was never attracted to an assignment himself—he made a strict point of not being so—but Mercy had him hanging on her every word, her every emotion, trying to sort the mystery of her… and scrambling for how he could hide that from his handler when he reported in.
Shit, he had missed what she was saying.
“—you can totally find someone else, I mean, that doesn’t even make sense.”
He took a guess, based on her agitation thrumming the air. “Are you worried they will be intimidated by you?”
“What? No.” She leaned back and eyed him like she was reassessing his intelligence.
Oops. “You’re worried they won’t agree to it just because a daughter of the Strange family walked in the door.”
She doubled down on the frown. “No, I’m sure they’ll take in an intern on my recommendation. I’m just saying, I’ll set it up on email. Or text. There’s no need for me to…” She waved her hands at him, some vague gesture at the totality of his being. “Be present.”
He held back the smile. She was trying to get rid of him. Which meant he was wearing her down. Maybe the constant attraction—that didn’t seem to settle—or maybe it was something else. She was all over the map emotionally—fear, some kind of self-disgust, still the attraction, and a high-pitched annoyance with all of it.
But the discordant twang of fear struck him the most. What scares you, Mercy Strange?
He gave her a pinched look. “That’s odd.”
His sudden change in tone knocked her off guard. “What’s odd?” The fear spiked as she pressed her lips together. Definitely hiding something. Maybe ten things.
“I thought you’d want to be there.” He cocked his head, soaking in her every reaction. “These are the people who experimented on your father.”
She looked away and stared at her screen. Avoidance. But everything else flat-lined. The attraction. The fear. Even that overlaying annoyance. All of it zeroed out with a hot flash of rage.
He waited. Honestly, he was caught up in the intensity of it. Like how a siren blast can arrest your attention in a pure, visceral kind of shock.
Finally, she turned back to him. Her eyes were a brilliant blue, like sparkling gems caught in the charcoal and electric purple spiderweb of her makeup. “I want them caught. I want them to pay for what they did.” The intensity of her rage blinked, right along with her eyes. “But I don’t know if it’s… best… if I’m there when it happens.”
“Why?” She had all of his attention now. Would she just tell him? He could make her confess, but the very idea of it made a shudder run down his back. He was done with that work, and he didn’t want to go back.
She dropped her gaze, and like a trumpet crushed in a landslide, her anger was buried in a torrential sludge of self-disgust, fear, and the harsh buzz of irritation again. But she didn’t explain, just shook her head, then looked back to her screen. “Is there anything else you need because…” When she looked back to him, her face was composed. The air sang of her torment, but none of it showed. “I think we’re probably done here. You’re not going to remember half of this anyway.”
He tried to hide his disappointment. He shouldn’t even be disappointed. Holy crap, he was so easily wrapped up in the intensity of this witch. “I’m sorry,” he said and meant it.
She blinked again, surprised. “Sorry for what?”
“I shouldn’t have pried.” He leaned forward and peered into those eyes. “If I’d almost lost my father, I’d want a bit of vengeance, too.” A complete and utter lie—he’d be more likely to throw a party—but he told the lie convincingly, judging by the softening of the spiderweb lines around her eyes. “Tell me a bit about the research you do with him. Please. It’ll help with the cover, and I promise not to forget any of it.” He wasn’t using his Talent, just the regular non-magickal con-man tricks he learned from his parents and uncles and cousins—all the grifters, hustlers, swindlers, and outright criminals that filled his family tree. Make the play: create rapport, empathy for the emotional sore spot of the mark. It was the first step, the one he excelled at, even before he discovered his Talent.
Mercy was mulling his request.
So he went a little softer and led out with the rope: a bit of logic to hook her in. He’d already seen that work before when he was listing off his supposed resume. “The cover would make more sense if I were a personal friend. Maybe someone you knew from school that you’d brought into your lab. Then, even if I’m completely incompetent, they’d hesitate to toss me out. I’ll just need a few key tech details on top of your personal recommendation to cement the deal. Then I’ll have the freedom to move around the lab and figure out where they’re keeping the data—and who has access. Plus I need to know what to look for.”
Her concerns were evaporating as he rambled. Finally, she said, “Okay. I’ll try to keep it light. Top level stuff.”
“I appreciate that.” Even more, he appreciated her eagerness vibrating the air. Mercy Strange was insanely smart, and her file at the FBI said she had extensive healing Talents, but she lacked the arrogance of many less intelligent adepts he’d met.
“My father and I have been searching for a genetic key for years.” She pulled up a new genome—he couldn’t tell the difference from the others. “A key that would unlock Talents. We thought we’d found it in a 19th Century saint, a witch performing miracles in the time before High Magick. Her name was Eliza Cleary, and she saved her people from starvation during the potato famine.”
“This is the lead we have in the oncology ward,” Swift interrupted her.
Mercy nodded. “An intern there told my dad about Eliza. But we had to track the saint’s relics down ourselves. And now, I guess, the intern’s gone missing? I haven’t kept up on that part.”
“Not missing—simply non-existent to begin with.” Swift shrugged. “No one can recall an intern other than your father, and there’s no trace of her in your employment records.” Which threw her father into the possible suspects category, but Swift didn’t say that. “Your dad’s agreed to a memory scrying to get us a sketch.”
Mercy wrinkled up her nose. “Memory scrying.”
“It’s not pleasant.” Swift knew that all too well. “We appreciate his cooperation.”
Mercy scowled. “Anyway… my father found the relic, and we were just getting started with analyzing Eliza’s genome when he supposedly “died” from the overdose—and the relic went missing.”
Swift nodded—he knew this part of the story. “And then the relic ended up with the stash of gene-modifying drugs.”
“They stole it for a reason.” Mercy waved her hand at the data on her screen. “I’ve been analyzing her genome to see what key it might have provided—but they had to be well along in their research before this piece of the puzzle came along, just as we were.”
“So, you and your father were close to finding the genes that controlled how Talents were expressed?” All the more reason to suspect them if someone else had gotten there first.
She frowned again. “Not really. It’s tremendously complex. But these gene drives—the ones in the recovered drugs—are obviously on the right track. You understand how gene drives work, right?”
“Not exactly.” He gave her a sheepish smile. They’d been talking about these things all afternoon—he just figured he’d research that on his own.
She slumped back in her chair and crossed her arms, tapping a finger to her chin. But the hum of frustration was gone from the air. Now that she was in her element, deep in thought about her gen-magick, all the agitation seemed to have dropped from her body. After a moment, she snapped her fingers and leaned forward again, a shine in her eyes. “Okay, I have an analogy for you.”
“Great.” The smiles were easy with her like this—open and eager. He was already h
aving a hard time picturing her as an evil scientist somehow involved in the back end of this—the part where the gen-magick research she’d been ardently pursuing was conducted by kidnapping people and subjecting them to medical horrors. But she obviously was hiding something so he couldn’t discount it entirely. He hoped it wasn’t true—he was starting to like her.
Another danger sign… one he ignored as he was swept into her explanation.
“So gene drives are a system that causes genetic changes. In the pills we have, there are over twenty different types of gene drives. They contain enzymes that act like tiny train engines crawling along the track of the genome.” Mercy illustrated with fingers floating down her screen of DNA data. “Each enzyme is designed to look for one particular sequence. When it finds the piece of track that it wants, it stops and performs some operation.”
“That’s where it edits the genes?” He surprised himself by actually understanding this part.
“That’s one possibility.” She brought both hands to the screen, making scissor motions. “One enzyme might be designed to clip out that sequence and swap in another. Another might be designed to activate that sequence—turn it on.”
“Or turn it off.” The light was genuinely going on in his head now.
“Yes!” Her enthusiasm thrummed the air. “Like a switch. Or possibly the enzyme simply installs the switch but doesn’t activate it. Then some external factor would be required to activate the sequence.”
His shoulders dropped. “Okay, you lost me.”
“Sorry, my bad.” She bit her lip, and he made the mistake of wondering what that purple lipstick might taste like. What? He physically shook that thought from his head while she was lost in her own thoughts, chewing her lip, trying to figure out how to distill complex gen-magick knowledge down for the high school dropout sitting next to her—not that she even knew that part.
Focus, Swift. “It’s like a switch…” he prompted, since that was about where he got lost.
“Okay, I got it.” She waved her hands like she was keeping him from leaving—as if he was going anywhere. “So our tiny gene drive enzyme is crawling along the track of the genome. It has one and only one sequence it’s looking for.” She was back to crawling her fingers along the screen. “When it finds it, it stops, lines up, and installs a switch that can either activate or deactivate the track. If that section of track is active, some magick Talent is turned on. If it’s inactive, the Talent is off. But the switch has a remote control on it. So something else has to flip the switch. Something separate from the whole system.”
Swift frowned and leaned back. “A remote control?”
“Yes!” Mercy was still deep in her excitement about her med-magick, but dread was leaking into Swift’s stomach. “The gene drives install a switch but activating that switch would be controlled by something else. At least, that seems to be what these drives do. There’s only one problem.”
“Only one?” He could think of a dozen problems with someone remote controlling the magitek in these drugs.
“Okay, more than one.” She counted them on her fingers. “First—as far as I can tell, these gene drives don’t have a programmed sequence they’re searching for. At least not a physical one that I can discern. And second—if they don’t know what sequence they’re searching for, they’re entirely useless. In fact, that’s a huge stumbling block in all gen-magick research—it’s nowhere near clear which sequences control which Talents. Magick expression is tremendously complex. It’s like intelligence. What makes someone smart? What kind of smart? Good at people stuff or good at numbers?”
“Adepts come in all kinds of flavors.” His mind was still gripped by the idea of someone controlling Talents. For fuck’s sake—what if someone could turn on his Talent in anyone? In a hundred anyones?
He could feel the blood draining from his face.
Mercy kept going. “Exactly! How does the gene drive know which sequence to install the switch on? It could be a dozen sequences working in concert. And third—and this is the problem with all gen-magick—how do you make sure you don’t get the wrong sequence? Everyone’s genome is slightly different, not just in that my eyes are blue and yours are brown, but you and I have a hundred—thousands—of small mutations. Every cell. All the time. It’s a radically imperfect system. How do you make sure these little engines driving down the genome track don’t stop at the wrong station and do… magick knows what?” Now some concern was vibrating the air around her, finally matching the dread filling him from the inside out.
It was horrible enough if this stuff actually worked—what if it went wrong?
“Which brings me to the fourth thing—magick.” At his quizzical look, she quickly continued. “This is just the physical mechanics of the genetics. But I can already tell there’s sophisticated magick in how the pill itself is constructed—the delivery system is magick stabilized. Normally, it’s extremely difficult to embed magick in a pill because magick works differently on everyone—body size, type, genetic conditions, age, active Talents… a hundred different things can interact with a spell. That’s why magick enhancers rarely work—or can be deadly. But what if the magick wasn’t intended to act on the person but on the drug?” Her eyes dilated, and excitement sped up her breathing. The thrill of this for her—this science revelation—had the same effect he’d seen on people high on magick. It was a wonder to behold.
“You’re saying the magick isn’t the drug, it’s the delivery system?” He was quickly losing the thread on this in the symphony of watching her.
“That’s my current theory.” She nodded, several short bobs. “Rather than embedding magick that’s a spell which acts on people, maybe they’ve used magick to control the drug. Like a spell to make the drug work properly. It would be genius!” she exclaimed, spreading her hands wide. “It solves all the problems at once.”
He just blinked. He was definitely not the genius here. “Come again?”
“The gene drives are like little train engines, right?”
“I got that part.” He scowled.
“Well, what if magick was embedded in the engines that allowed them to find the right sequence?” she continued, undaunted. “Every time? What if a magick signature spell allowed them to find all the sequences, every one involved in a certain Talent? And with no mistakes?”
“Then it would install the switches, correctly, in all the spots every time.”
“Yes.” She took a deep breath. “It’s incredibly sophisticated magick, but it’s a… breakthrough. I can’t really describe it, but if this is how these pills work, then we’re up against some formidable science. And magick. The kind that could change everything.”
He nodded, somewhat dazed. He actually understood… and it scared the hell out of him. “This is just your theory right now, right?”
“Yeah. But it’s a leap—a huge leap—from the research my father, and I have been doing. We’ve been mired in basic techniques, nothing like this. This is the work of someone with unparalleled vision.”
“So we’re looking for a mad genius?” He tried a small smile. The whole thing was freaking him out.
She didn’t come close to returning his smile. “Evil mad genius. Or geniuses. Not just in figuring out how to do this, but what they’ve already done with it. Swift, we have to stop these people. Before they let this loose on the public. Best case is that it works as planned.”
“Worst case is much worse.” That he fully understood. “People are already panicking, you know.”
“Yeah. I’ve been reading the papers.” She looked him square in the eyes. “You can do this, right? You understand what we’re up against?”
He smiled for real. “Thanks to you.”
The fluster as she dropped her gaze then fussed with smoothing her skirts was gratifying. Especially with the flush of attraction that came with it. He definitely would be checking in with her later, after she’d gotten him in the door—
A knock at her office door disr
upted that thought. Which was probably for the best.
“Hey.” A tall and breathtakingly beautiful Black woman stood at the door. Behind her stood Asher Strange, Mercy’s father, who Swift recognized from his photo in the FBI files he studied before taking this assignment. The woman he didn’t recognize.
“Hey, Nia.” Mercy frowned. “What’s up?”
Nia flicked a look at him and stepped inside the tiny office with Mercy’s father following behind. “Sorry to interrupt, but they finished the memory scry to get a picture of our mysterious oncology intern.”
“You okay, Dad?” Mercy was halfway out of her chair before he could answer. Swift had to rise to back out of the way, making room for her and all her skirts of black lace.
“I’m fine.” Her father was lying. The crinkles around his eyes showed it even if Swift couldn’t sense the flat notes of deception thrumming the air—the headache might not be as severe with just a short, image-memory scry, but there were always effects. “It was nothing.”
“It was not nothing,” Nia chastised him. She was much younger than the elder Strange—probably Mercy’s age—but she carried herself like someone trained for combat. Swift recognized the type. He’d ostensibly served, although not exactly voluntarily—and the soldiers he’d worked on weren’t volunteers either. Nia swung her scowl to Mercy. “But I made sure they didn’t take it too far. No neural damage as far as the tests can show.”