by Tamara Hogan
Alka shrugged fatalistically. “Carl always said that math might be the closest thing we have to a universal language.”
Though Council Humanity Chair Carl Sagan had died before Lorin took her own Council seat, she’d spent many happy hours simply sitting at his feet as he’d examined the petroglyphs up at Isabella. “I miss Carl,” she said. “I could really use his counsel right about now.”
“So could we all,” her mother said, reaching into the bag. “So tell me how things are going up at the dig. Did the site winter well? How is the crew this year?”
As they munched, Lorin updated her mother on the significant happenings up at the dig, telling her about the capsule Nathan had unearthed, and the odd, metal-flecked trees she and Gabe had found. She didn’t reveal to her mother just what she and Gabe had been doing at the time of discovery. “And Paige has a boyfriend.”
“Really? Did Mike finally make a move?”
“Nope. Dude’s a vamp she met at Tubby’s.” Lorin shrugged. “I’m not sure Mike quite knows what to think. I don’t know what to think either. We don’t know anything about this guy.”
“They’re adults with their own lives,” Alka gently reminded her. “There’s a line.”
“Yeah. Speaking of which…” Reaching into her lower desk drawer, Lorin withdrew a bag of fun-sized Snickers and tore it open, scattering candy bars over the top of her desk. “Why didn’t you say anything about Gabe’s eyes, his macular degeneration?”
“Lorin, his medical condition is none of my business, unless it influences his job performance. It’s his news to share, or not.” A pause. “Damn it,” Alka muttered, snatching a candy bar. “I know he had an appointment with his retinologist this week. How did it go?”
“Mom, he hasn’t said anything at all—and we’ve worked together in that damn lab, alone, for two days straight. He’s had every chance in the world to bring it up, and he hasn’t. What I do know, I heard from Andi.” As she told her mother about Gabe’s cataract diagnosis, she kept her hands busy unwrapping candy bars. How in the world could anyone call these microscopic tidbits fun-sized? They were way too small. “His family seems to have a lot of health problems.”
Alka sighed. “It’s a problem for the wolves in general. If they bonded and bred outside their species more often, their genetic line would grow more resilient, but Krispin—gah.” She threw up her hands. “There’s no talking to the man.”
“Nope.” Lorin tossed a candy bar into her mouth and chewed. Though not codified by any law, Krispin Woolf, and generations of alphas before him, had made their strong preference for wolf/wolf mating bonds crystal clear.
“Speaking of mating, how are you and Gabriel getting along?”
Lorin coughed on her candy bar then held up a hand as she choked it down. “Geez, Mom.”
“If that clinch I interrupted down in the lab is anything to go by, I’d say very well indeed. His quiet strength, your exuberance. I knew you two would be a good match.”
“A good match? Mother, we fight like lions in a cage.” At her comment, Alka laughed—so hard that she reached for a tissue to wipe tears from her eyes. “I’m so glad I amuse you.”
“My poor, deluded darling. Lorin, the sexual tension between the two of you has been brewing for ages. So, have you done anything about it?”
“Mom. Not going there.”
Alka fanned herself with her hand. “Those wolves. Even the betas are such… vigorous lovers.”
Up against a tree. On the pine needles carpeting the forest floor. On her firm mattress. Vigorous? Hell, yes. “Mother…”
“Ha! No denials from you.”
How could she explain all the factors at play? “Mom, it’s… complicated.”
“Most worthwhile things are,” her mother said serenely. “So, you’re a problem-solver. What do you want to achieve, and what’s the biggest obstacle standing in your way?”
“What do I want?” Her mother’s question had a very simple answer: Gabe. She wanted Gabe. What did she want from him? More. The word jumped into her head, no thought required. More than a working relationship, more than a sexual relationship. She wanted… more.
Ah, damn, Andi was right. Her feelings were involved. She raised a hand to her suddenly queasy stomach.
“It’ll be okay, Lorin.”
Her mother’s voice didn’t soothe. How would it be okay? “I have no idea whether he wants the same thing. Hell, I know he doesn’t. He might want me sexually, but this is Gabe we’re talking about. He doesn’t think it’s ethical to get involved with a subordinate.”
Alka frowned. “But—your reporting relationship is a formality. You’re peers. You handle the site work, he handles the paperwork.”
“Gabe doesn’t see it that way. I still don’t know what caused him to change his mind about us sleeping together, but he did. We—” Her cheeks flushed again. “We were having what I thought was a mutually satisfying physical relationship, but just before we came back south, he ended it. Now?” She shrugged. “He seems like he might be interested again. I just don’t know what’s going on in his head.”
Alka smiled. “I think this is the first time I’ve heard you express interest in what a lover might be thinking and feeling.”
“Physical’s always been enough in the past,” Lorin groused. “I don’t like this… emotional stuff. I don’t understand it. It makes me feel really… off-balance.”
Alka laughed merrily, and Lorin heard not one whiff of sympathy. “I envy you, my darling. Though I’ve known some fascinating men in my life, I’ve never come close to falling in love again since your father.”
Love? Freyja help me. “Ugh.” She shoved the candy bars away with a groan. Her wrist bumped her mouse, deactivating her screen saver, revealing a small window on her desktop that hadn’t been open when she’d last looked at it.
Instant messages. From Gabe.
And she’d slept through them all.
Chapter 14
Inside the containment hood, something nudged Gabe’s wrist.
“Shit,” he blurted, yanking his hands out of the integrated gloves. He stared, openmouthed, as the blocky assemblage at one end of the capsule—the end he’d just finished measuring, using what he thought had been a very delicate touch—pivoted on a hidden axis, rotating away from the body of the unit.
An inner compartment slid out, exposing approximately two dozen slim, translucent vials.
“Holy…” His gaze flicked to the recording equipment to ensure it was functioning. Was the unit mechanical? Pneumatic? It hadn’t made a sound, not one that he could hear, at any rate. Two of the vials were clearly damaged, their contents dried and brown. One vial’s protective lid had cracked off entirely.
He leaned in with a squint as the biohood’s ventilation system hissed and pumped, carrying the potentially contaminated air up and away, capturing it for later study. His glove, thankfully, appeared intact. He now knew exactly how Lorin had felt when she’d accidentally opened the box up at the Isabella site.
“Cameras running, containment intact,” Anna Mae Whitman confirmed from the other side of the table as she studied the readout on the monitor adjacent to the hood. “Look at that CO2 level, and organic matter in the tubes. Ain’t that a fine howdy-do.”
And Lorin had transported the thing here in a freaking messenger bag. Jesus. It was sheer dumb luck that the capsule hadn’t opened, leaving her breathing potentially tainted air.
“No toxins—that we have tests for, at any rate. Containment’s still holding.” Slipping her hands back into her set of integrated gloves, Anna Mae lightly touched one of the unbroken cylinders. “Come over here. Look at this.”
He rounded the table. Once he looked at the vials from Anna Mae’s vantage point, he saw what she did. Each vial sported a set of characters—or were they symbols?—he couldn’t decipher. “A label of some type?” he theorized.
Anna Mae nodded. “We’re gonna need linguistic anthro.”
His poor project p
lan was already into triple-digit revisions, and he’d revised it again late last night, after his meeting with Elliott was over and Lorin hadn’t responded to his instant messages. Given yesterday afternoon’s technological misadventure, Bailey Brown’s task list ran nearly two pages on its own—and now, with a single touch, a silent slide, he’d need linguistics, biochem, and probably mechanical engineering.
Managing this project had somehow turned into two full-time jobs.
“I should be able to determine the biochemical composition of what’s in those vials pretty quickly, but for mechanical, you’ll want Elliott.” She removed her hands from the gloves again, smiling. “Let’s get him down here.”
Gabe blinked, quickly following as she walked toward the phone hanging next to the door separating the biohazard lab from the air lock and changing room. “You can’t just dial him up, Dr. Whitman.” Between his responsibilities as the CEO of Sebastiani Labs and his Council presidency, Elliott Sebastiani’s schedule was so tight it squeaked.
“Sure I can,” she said. “I do it all the time. Believe me, he’ll want to see this for himself.”
She was right. Not fifteen minutes later, Gabe watched, bemused, as Elliott Sebastiani arrived, already slipping off his suit coat. Opening a locker—his own?—he extracted a lab coat and shrugged into it. After slipping shoe coverings over his Italian loafers, he dipped his hand into the lab coat’s right pocket, snagging a black elastic band, which he used to lash back his hair.
“Gabe.” Elliott greeted him with a handshake and a slap on the shoulder. “Just what kind of shenanigans have you and Anna Mae been up to this afternoon?” They approached the brightly lit table. “Well.” Elliott walked around all four sides of the table, carefully assessing the tightly hooded tableau, and then glanced at the monitor. “Interesting CO2 reading,” he commented to Anna Mae.
She nodded. “Especially given how little atmosphere was released from the capsule in the first place.”
The hair stood up on Gabe’s forearms as he finally comprehended the implications of Anna Mae’s previous comment. The atmosphere released from the capsule had changed the composition of the air in the biohood.
The atmosphere in the capsule could be Earth’s, from over a thousand years ago.
Or it could be from someplace else entirely.
The hours passed without notice. Elliott and Anna Mae worked like a well-oiled machine, analyzing the capsule, its contents, and the atmospheric data with plenty of theorizing and debate. Gabe, after initially feeling pretty damn useless, was the one to discover the ingenious touch pad that opened and closed the capsule. While he took close-up photos of the vials and their labels, he heard a muffled pounding at the lab door.
From the changing room, the intercom crackled. “Elliott. I need a word. Now.”
Alka. Alka and Lorin, standing at her mother’s side. Arms crossed over their chests, standing tall, the Schlessinger women looked battle-ready and bent on vengeance. Without quite understanding why, Gabe lifted the camera and clicked.
What were they doing here? Alka had told him earlier in the day that she and Lorin were going to be busy with Council matters. Now, Lorin scoured the lab’s ceiling and corners with hard, flat eyes.
Elliott stood ramrod straight. The relaxed lab partner Gabe had spent the afternoon working with transformed into his CEO and Council president between one breath and the next. “Start shutting down,” he ordered, stripping off his lab coat as he strode to the door.
“Shit’s hit the fan,” Anna Mae murmured.
Alka and Elliott talked in the changing room, their heads close together as they examined a sheet of paper Alka held. Suddenly, Lorin waved her arms overhead to get his attention—as if his attention had ever really left her in the first place. Geez, with her arms raised like that, how could he look anywhere other than—
Lorin rolled her eyes, pointing to her own head in a classic “eyes up here, buddy” gesture, but he noticed her amusement—dare he think it was pleasure?—for just a moment before she rested her upraised forefinger over her own lips.
The universal signal for silence. What the hell…?
She twirled her finger, indicating the lab.
Then mouthed “bugged.”
***
“How the hell did this happen?” With a clack of keys, Elliott retrieved the email Krispin Woolf had sent to every member of the Underworld Council not an hour before—the same email that had sent Alka and Lorin hightailing downstairs to the lab—and displayed it on the large monitor mounted on his office wall near the conference table.
“Don’t know yet.” Lukas’s voice was controlled, locked down tight. “A team is tearing the lab apart as we speak.”
Lorin stared at Krispin’s email. She and her mother had been reviewing their presentation for tomorrow’s Council meeting when Krispin’s demand for an updated agenda had arrived. The command box and its contents were nothing new—every member of the Council had watched her accidentally open the box at their last meeting—but the potential breach of their network by the tech unit? The discovery of a metal capsule, a capsule that had unexpectedly opened, potentially exposing toxic organic material? That was information that even she didn’t have. She’d hightailed down to the lab with her mother to make sure Gabe was okay. She’d never been so relieved to have her rack ogled in her life.
So how the hell had Krispin come by his information? That was the question that had ratchetted everyone up to DEFCON 1.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” she murmured to Gabe, sitting next to her on Elliott’s sleek leather love seat. She touched his chino-covered thigh just above the knee. He felt solid, reassuringly warm. Alive. Hearing that the capsule had opened while he worked with it, exposing cracked vials filled with gawd knew what, chilled her blood.
“It opened under the hood,” he responded, covering her hand with his own. “I’m fine.”
She stared at their joined hands. Did he realize what he’d just done? In front of her mother? In front of Elliott?
He twined their fingers together, sandwiching her chilly digits in blessed warmth. “Hey, at least I’m not dialing into this meeting from quarantine.”
“Not funny.”
“Sorry. Bad joke. It’s just sheer dumb luck that the capsule opened where and when it did, and not when Nathan was excavating, when Mike was cataloguing, or when you transported it down here in your messenger bag. Keeping the crew in the dark is making me very uncomfortable.”
Nodding her agreement, she gestured to the screen where Krispin’s email mocked them. “So much for confidentiality.”
Lukas looked spitting mad. His sweeps hadn’t picked up any monitoring devices, and there had to be one somewhere. Thank Freyja that she and Gabe had never actually made love down in the lab. It was disgusting enough to think that Krispin Woolf had probably watched them touch each other fully clothed.
“Can we watch our recording again, please?” Alka asked from her seat at the small conference table.
With a couple of clicks of keys, Krispin’s email disappeared, replaced by nine squares, one for each camera, displayed in classic Tic-Tac-Toe formation, recording every action that took place at the work surfaces, biohood, and entryways. Very few blind spots, Lorin noted with a sinking stomach. The capabilities and location of Krispin’s monitoring equipment was still a wild card, but it seemed highly likely that at least one of their own cameras had recorded the… extracurricular encounters she’d had with Gabe.
It was way too easy to forget about the damn cameras.
Elliot selected one of the boxes, enlarged it, and with a couple of clicks, there was Gabe, earlier in the day. As Elliott fast-forwarded, Gabe pulled at his hair, wrote on a clipboard, and punched data into a handheld computer like Speedy Gonzales. Lorin glanced at her mother, then Elliott. Had either of them noticed how often Gabe removed his glasses to rub his eyes?
“Gabe, can you walk us through?” Elliott asked.
“Sure.”
Lorin gave his hand a quick squeeze.
The timestamp in the corner showed a little after 1:00 p.m., barely three hours ago. On-screen, she watched Gabe and Anna Mae work—carefully, and following biohazard protocol to the letter. Beside her, Gabe’s body tensed, telegraphing what was coming. Even though she knew what to expect, Lorin gasped as she watched the blocky end of the capsule slowly rotate, nudging an unsuspecting Gabe on his gloved hand. On-screen, he jumped. Swore. Stared in awe as an inner compartment slid smoothly from the capsule’s outer covering.
Translucent vials, standing upright. Two of them brown and crusty, clearly breached.
“Thank Freyja the capsule was under the hood,” her mother said.
They watched as the on-screen Gabe talked with Anna Mae Whitman, and as Anna Mae crossed the room to call Elliott.
Elliott paused the playback. “After I came down, we worked for—oh, two hours?” He looked to Gabe for verification of his estimate. Gabe nodded. “And before you ask, Lukas,” Elliott continued, “no one left the lab, even to use the bathroom. We didn’t leave each other’s sight. None of us could have contacted Krispin.”
At her side, Gabe stilled.
She twisted around in her seat to stare at Lukas, who leaned against the wall by the door, arms crossed over his chest, studying Gabe like he was a smear under a microscope. Krispin Woolf was Gabe’s alpha, and Lukas’s job was to be a suspicious son of a bitch.
Gabe gestured to the screen. “You can roll the playback to confirm,” he said evenly.
“I will,” Lukas said without apology.
“Lukas, Gabe couldn’t have contacted anyone if he wanted to,” Lorin snapped. “Bailey took our phones last night.” Turning to Gabe, she asked, “Have you replaced your phone yet?”
“No. I fell asleep in my office last night. I haven’t left the building since yesterday morning.”
The IMs he’d sent—the messages she’d stupidly slept through—had asked her to join him there. Though the words had been circumspect enough, they’d shimmered with intent. He’d wanted her. She hadn’t responded. And now, here they were, holding hands, tense as two kids at their first dance.