by Kelly Oram
His warning pissed me off. Mostly because he was right. “This, coming from the King of Cocky?”
Ryan shut his eyes and took a few breaths. I’d learned his mom was very into yoga and meditation. The breathing was a technique she’d taught him when he was young to help him deal with his real father, who, as far as I could tell, was the only person capable of making Ryan lose his temper. Other than, apparently, me.
With a shake of his head, he whispered, “I’m not feeling cocky right now, babe.” When he opened his eyes again, they held so much emotion that I sucked in a gasp. “I’m scared. Terrified.”
The whole room froze, as mesmerized by his emotion as I was. People had been stunned watching me argue with Major Wilks, but this was different. It was as if Ryan were slaying us. He was most certainly piercing me. My chest ached as I drowned in the despair his eyes held. “I lost you this way once before, Jamie. To the very same man you’re talking about facing now. The situation was almost exactly the same. Your friend was in trouble, and you charged off without a solid plan and no backup for if things went wrong. This time, Donovan will only be even more prepared for you.”
I shook my head, desperate to fend off his argument. I couldn’t let him talk me out of this. “I won’t be alone this time. I’ll have you and the ACEs to back me up.”
“You hope. But we can’t guarantee that. And a squad of human soldiers against how many superthugs? You don’t know what you’re up against.”
I felt bad for him. I really did. I understood why he was being so sensitive about this. But I also had a feeling he would be against even the most foolproof plan. I got out of my seat and rounded the table to where he sat. When I stood, he followed my lead and met me halfway. “Don’t do this.”
I took his hands in mine and tried to sound as reassuring as possible when I said, “I’ll be careful. I don’t know exactly what to expect, but I’m much better prepared than last time.”
“That’s not good enough, babe. Not this time. This plan you’ve thought up, it’ll be exactly what Donovan is expecting. You’ll be walking into a trap.”
“I know that.”
Ryan’s whole demeanor changed. In a split second he went from desperate, fearful, loving boyfriend to angry and hurt. He pulled his hands out of my grip and took a small step back. “You know that,” he repeated. His jaw clenched. “You just don’t care.”
I started to deny it, but he was right. I didn’t care. I was walking into a trap and it didn’t matter. Donovan was the only person in the world who could restore my memory. If it took putting myself in his hands and figuring out a way to escape later in order to remember my life, then so be it.
Ryan read the truth in my eyes. “Your memories are that important to you? That you’d risk your safety? Your freedom?”
“Yours are that important to you, too,” I said. “You just don’t realize it because you have them. I have to do this, Ryan. This is my only chance. It’s worth the risk.”
“Why?” Ryan walked away from me, raking his hands through his hair. After a moment, he whirled back around, nailing me to the wall with his desperation. “Why is this not good enough for you? You know the truth. You have your family back. The ACEs. You have a future. Why can’t that be enough? Why can’t you accept it?”
I knew what he was really asking. I didn’t think he’d say it, but then he did. “I used to be enough for you. What’s changed, Jamie? How come you can’t accept my love anymore? Why is the past more important than what’s standing right in front of you?”
He was killing me. Teddy had lost his temper out of frustration like this so many times, and it always hurt. But this…this was so much worse. This was devastating. Ryan’s heart was breaking right now, but so was mine. “I don’t know what to say,” I whispered. The flickering lights above our head gave away my feelings despite the tears I refused to shed. “You don’t understand. You can’t possibly understand what it’s like.”
“You’re right. I can’t.” Ryan’s voice became clipped. Bitter. “I don’t.”
He started to storm out of the room and both my mother and Becky went to him, stopping him from leaving. I watched as they both took him in their arms, offering him words of comfort. Giving him sympathy and encouragement. The sight was as heartbreaking as the situation itself. My mother saw us both hurting, and she’d gone to him. She hadn’t even hesitated. I didn’t blame her for being on his side in this argument. She loved him. She understood what he was going through because she was experiencing it, too. But just because I understood didn’t mean a part of me didn’t feel betrayed that she cared more about him than her own daughter. My father saw the way I watched my mother comfort Ryan and seemed to understand how much it hurt me. “Sweetheart,” he murmured, jumping up from his chair.
He tried to come to me, but I threw my hands up, warding him off. “No!” I backed away from him. “I don’t want your pity.”
My father’s face cracked, and his eyes misted over. My father, a bear of a man, had tears in his eyes. “It’s not pity, baby. We love you. We’re not choosing sides.”
My mom gasped, finally realizing how her actions had looked to me. She jumped away from Ryan and joined my father. “Sweetheart, no.” She curled into my father’s side when he wrapped his arm around her. “Of course not. I love Ryan like a son, but I could never choose him over you. That’s not what I was doing.”
I shook my head. “Not on purpose. But you can’t help it. You love him. You know him. You understand what he’s going through. I’m the outsider here. The stranger you can’t relate to.”
Ryan and Becky joined my parents, both shaking their heads as if denying my words. Whether they believed it or not, the truth was right there for everyone in the room to see as they all stood, huddled together, facing me. There was a line in this struggle—two different sides. I was alone on one side, and they were all on the other. I understood, but it hurt all the same. And it only solidified my resolve. I couldn’t live like this, with this divide between us.
“Don’t you get it?” My voice faltered and I waved at the space between us. “If I don’t get my memories back, we’ll never get past this. It’ll always be all of you against me. Maybe you guys can accept that, but I can’t. I can’t live the rest of my life competing with a ghost, a memory that I don’t even have. You guys don’t love me. You love her. You want her back. But I’m not her.”
My mom shook her head, sniffling. “Jamie, sweetheart, why are you acting like this? This isn’t you.”
“EXACTLY!” I shouted, finally losing my temper. “I’M. NOT. THAT. JAMIE. ANYMORE!”
The lights flicked out and stayed out, making the only light in the room the soft glow of my eyes. There were a few heartbeats of tense silence, and then the power came back on. Tyson slowly got up from his chair and held his hand out to me. “Whoever you are now, you aren’t alone.”
I clasped his offered hand, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. When I opened my eyes again, I looked around at all the uncomfortable soldiers and then met Major Wilks’s eyes. His steady presence grounded me. I shook my head at Ryan, Becky, and my parents. “Right now I’m just Angel, and I’ve got a job to do. I’m going after Donovan, and if you can’t deal with that, then please leave. Having you here is very distracting for me. I can’t deal with it yet.”
My mom turned into my father’s chest and broke into sobs. My father sent me one last desperate glance over the top of her head and then guided her out of the room. Becky watched them go and cast me a look of hurt and disappointment. “You’re right,” she whispered. “You’re really not her anymore.”
Her words didn’t cut me the way I think she meant them to, because I’d shut down emotionally. There was too much to deal with. Too much confusion and pain. If I wanted to function, I had to shut it out. She was a stranger to me. So were my parents. I didn’t need them to understand my decision or approve of it. They would forgive me if I was successful and got my memory back. And if I didn’t, well,
chances were our relationship wasn’t going to survive, anyway.
After Becky stormed out, Ryan remained, angrily staring down the other ACEs. “Jamie is stubborn and self-sacrificing,” he said. “She’ll use Teddy and the other PACs, and the threat of Donovan to talk herself into doing something that she shouldn’t do. She isn’t trained the way you guys are. She doesn’t know better. But you do. This is a flawed mission. You know that. If she weren’t the Angel, you wouldn’t be letting her do it.”
He moved his gaze to the major and pulled his shoulders back. “Major, sir, I urge you to think really hard about this. Jamie’s an amazingly gifted and powerful woman, but you’re putting too much faith in her abilities.”
He wasn’t even looking at me now. He no longer cared to convince me. He was going over my head. He called me stubborn, but I wasn’t the only one. “We shouldn’t go without more intel. She may not think her life is worth the risk, but you and I both know it is. Please, sir. Don’t encourage her to do this.”
Once his speech ended, the tension left him and he sort of collapsed in on himself. He looked exhausted. “Major?” he asked quietly. “Permission to go check on the Bakers and Becky?”
“Now?” Major Wilks asked quietly. He sounded surprised but understanding as well.
Ryan glanced my way before nodding at his commanding officer. “I could use the break, sir.”
Major Wilks studied Ryan a moment before nodding. “Very well; permission granted. Eyes will find you and fill you in after we’re finished here.”
Swallowing hard, Ryan nodded, saluted the major, and turned on his heel. He never glanced my direction again before leaving the room, and it lanced my heart. Having him angry with me hurt much more than I’d thought it would. As the door clicked shut behind him, I wondered if I’d made a mistake. It was possible that, if I pushed him enough, I could lose Ryan. I realized right then that I didn’t want that to happen. I may have only known him for a few days, but I cared about him. A lot.
“Romeo’s right, sir.”
My head whipped around to meet Johnny G’s confident stare. He gave me a shrug and shook his head at Major Wilks. “This is not one of our better plans. You know I’ll respect your decision either way, but I don’t like it. It’s too big of a risk. Not just for the Angel, but for the entire team. Donovan knows us. He knows we have the Angel, and he’ll be planning on us finding a way to follow her. It’s not just going to be a trap for her. We’ll all be walking into a trap. Donovan won’t care to spare our lives. As this team’s leader, I am responsible for my men in the field, and if it were up to me, this is one mission I wouldn’t send them on.”
My stomach sank. He was right. I couldn’t ask his team to take that kind of risk. I was willing to sacrifice myself for my memories easily enough. Donovan didn’t want to hurt or kill me. He wanted to control me. To study me. And I wasn’t as defenseless as my companions. I had powers they didn’t. I was confident that I could find a way to get in there, help the other PACs, and get out somehow. But the ACEs would be lambs to the slaughter against an army of superthugs who knew they were coming.
Hissing a curse, I sat back down and stared at the table, trying not to feel bitter that all of my hopes had just been dashed.
“I’m sorry, Angel,” Johnny G said. “I know how important this is to you, and I’m all for helping you, but not at the expense of my men.”
I continued to stare at the table, but I nodded to show I understood. “No, you’re right. I hadn’t thought about that, and I wouldn’t risk them, either. I can’t ask you all to come on this mission without knowing more.”
“So we wait a while,” Tex offered. “Gather more intelligence, and go in when we know what we’re up against.”
“How?” Geek’s frustrated voice rang out. “There’s no way to gather intelligence. Donovan and his entire organization are impossible to find. We’ve extinguished all our resources. That’s why we were even willing to consider this alternative in the first place.”
“Everyone makes a mistake eventually,” Smut offered. “We’ll just keep doing what we’ve been doing, and one of these days we’ll get him. With the Angel on our team, we’ve got new resources at our disposal. And maybe Geek will eventually crack those microchips.”
Geek’s sigh suggested his doubt, but he still nodded and said, “I’ll keep trying.”
“What about the superthugs?” Tyson said. “We have part of Donovan’s retrieval team in our holding cells.”
My head snapped up as I caught another glimmer of hope. “He’s right. Those men have to know something. They have to at least know where the place is. Maybe they won’t know Donovan’s plans, but they could at least tell us more about his security and his numbers. They were part of the superthug army. They must know how many others were like them, and what their weaknesses are.”
Everyone recognized the hope in my voice. Several of the other ACEs shared it. Abiodun shook his head. His low, soft voice drifted over the table with a sympathetic tone. “They haven’t spoken so far.”
“But they’ve been going through major withdrawals,” Dr. Haggerty said, trying to offer me some hope when I frowned. “They’ve been too sick to really interrogate, but they’re doing much better now. We could try again.”
“Won’t do you any good,” Tex argued. He sounded certain. He and Abiodun had spent the most time guarding the prisoners. “We’ve tried several times, and withdrawals aside, whenever we question them about Donovan or anything related to him, they zone out.”
“It’s strange,” Abiodun agreed.
“It’s as if they physically can’t answer,” Tex said. “Like they have an off switch in their brain and they shut down when we interrogate them.”
I gasped. “Not an off switch.” I jumped to my feet, excitement bursting out of me in a wave of energy that everyone felt. It couldn’t be that simple. “It’s nanobots!”
“Of course,” Blake and Geek muttered simultaneously.
Geek pounced out of his chair next, sharing my excitement. “They’re being compelled to not answer!”
An evil grin stretched across my face, and I held up my hands. “And lucky us, thanks to Invisidude, we know how to stop the nanobots.”
I sent Tyson a wink, and he grinned proudly back.
“You think?” Geek asked.
I shrugged. “Worked on me, didn’t it?”
“You said they’re just robots. Anything electronic can be short-circuited.”
“You’re right. It could work.”
“Assuming we can cook the robots without frying their brains along with them,” Shortstop warned.
Dang it. He had a point, too. “What about the man I zapped in the motel? I fried him pretty good. Can we check to see if there are nanobots in his brain and if they’re still active?”
The room went quiet again. I knew by the looks on their faces that there was more bad news that I hadn’t been made aware of. They let Major Wilks do the honors. “He didn’t survive, Angel. We lost him while we were in Boston.”
I blanched. “He’s dead?” I’d killed him? I was going to be sick.
“It wasn’t you, Angel,” Major Wilks promised when he noticed my face turn green. “It was the serum.”
“You’re sure?”
“We’re sure,” Dr. Haggerty promised. “His heart gave out, but it wasn’t from the shock you gave him. It was the withdrawals. It was too worn down already to handle the stress. His liver and kidneys were giving out, too.”
“He was a dead man walking before he ever found you,” Johnny G said.
“We nearly lost one of the others as well,” Dr. Haggerty continued. “But I believe he’s out of the woods now. I expect both of the remaining prisoners to make full recoveries.”
That was good enough for me. “Sweet. Let’s go scramble their brains a little, then.”
Mouths dropped all around the conference table, except Major Wilks’s; his curved up into a smirk. “What?” I rolled my eyes at my team. Was
my attitude really so shocking? “I’m not talking about torturing them. Not really. Well, not enough to make me lose any sleep over those jerks. We’ll just give ’em a good, healthy zap to clear their heads. It’ll sting for sure, but trust me: I know what it feels like to be mindjacked. They’ll thank me in the long run.”
It took a moment for everyone to snap out of their shock, and it started with a snicker from Smut. Shortstop was next, with an obnoxious snort. Then Eyes let out a real laugh, and the entire team lost it. “Remind me never to piss you off,” Smut said.
“No kidding,” Tex added.
“Definitely a motto to live by,” I agreed. “Now can we go extract some information from some superthugs, or what?”
They laughed even harder, but got up from their chairs and led the way out of the room. Major Wilks caught me by the shoulder as we entered the hallway. “Are you sure you’re up to this right now?”
I nodded. “I’ll be fine. The electricity’s not a problem.”
“It can wait, though, if you’d like to go find your parents first.”
“I appreciate that, sir, but honestly, I need the break from them as much as they do from me. It’s going to take a long time for me to sort out my feelings there, and now isn’t that time.”
Major Wilks gave me a proud smile as he waved for me to start walking. “Deny it all you want, Angel,” he said as we headed for the holding cells, “but you’re an ACE at heart.”
The stockade on base was nothing fancy—just a few standard jail cells like you’d see on TV with a twin-size bunk and a toilet in the corner of each. Then there was another cell at the end of the hall that was more of a hospital room behind bars. One of the soldiers was in a regular cell—the nastier one, Lorenz—and, the other was handcuffed to a bed in the hospital-looking cell. Dr. Haggerty was outside his cell, monitoring his vitals.