by Astrid Amara
“What can I do? What can I do?” Mack cried, looking panicked.
“Make me forget again!” I sobbed. I leaned my head against his chest, and he gripped me to him, tight.
The memories weren’t even the worst part. It was worse hating myself—knowing I’d done so many, many terrible things, for something as small as a fix. Guilt might not be as painful as having my leg blown off—but it still hurt deeply.
“It’s over,” Mack said, uttering soothing words, “whatever happened, it’s over.” But it wasn’t. I couldn’t erase what I’d done, or what I’d been reduced to.
And I was full of their tech, a pawn under their control. God help me, I still wanted the oblivion and ecstasy of a hit of Peak, despite everything.
I ripped at my hair. “Get this shit out of me. I want it out of me!”
Mack grabbed my hands and yanked them to my sides. He cocooned himself around me, solid and strong.
“The code erased all the programming, baby. It’s dead. I can’t rip it from your brain, but it doesn’t have a hold on you any longer.”
I shook in his arms.
“I’m sorry,” Mack whispered. He kissed the top of my head. “I wish I could take this pain for you. I wish I could do something.”
And buried under all those other memories, all that horror, the look of Mack’s face the morning after we’d last made love, all those years ago, in a hotel room on the Beltway. The broken sound of his voice crying my name as I fell.
I squeezed him to me. “I remember you, Mack. I remember.” I sobbed against his chest, solid and real. Alive. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
Mack blinked back his own tears and smiled. “That’s more like it.”
“They kept me in a fucking box,” I hissed into his neck. “They withheld Peak from me until I complied with their wishes, then I would get a hit, kill someone, and was put back in the box.”
Mack tightened his arms around me but he said nothing.
“I killed a little girl, Mack.”
“Trust killed her, not you.”
“My finger, my trigger,” I choked.
Mack pulled back, frowning at me. “Don’t blame yourself for decisions made under duress or drugged control. You were manipulated.”
As memories flooded my brain, I breathed out short and raspy. “Shit. It was Cole.”
“Who?”
“Christophe Cole! He works for Trust, not Calypso. He’s my handler.”
Mack blinked. “You mean… Sargent Cole? Our old CO?”
I nodded. “He’s the one I report to.”
“But how—”
“He told me he arranged my death. Trust needed a sharpshooter, and I fit the bill. I bet he took the grenades out of Ginger’s clip.”
Mack’s expression changed in an instant. Fury racked his features, a vein bulging in his head. “I knew it!” He punched the wall beside his head. “I knew there was no way she’d enter a situation with an unloaded weapon!” He shook his head. “The whole encounter had been suspicious. I hadn’t been informed of a rev attack on the train, and they used to let me know of any possible attacks ahead of time. Back then I thought it had been some rogue revolutionary cell. But it wasn’t revs at all. It was an act.”
“But why?” I asked. “Just to get me on their team?”
“Do you remember the first job you did, under Trust?”
I thought back. It was hard to pick through ten years of new memories, but that one was memorable, given it was my first assassination not under the guise of being a solider.
“I assassinated a visiting senator,” I told him, closing my eyes to visualize it better. “It was a hard shot.”
Mack shrugged. “So they recruited you to do a job no one else could do.”
“To stage a false rev assault on the city center, kill a politician, prearrange an empty grenade launcher, kill me in the fallout, rebuild me with pricey tech, get me hooked on a drug, all to force me to kill one man?” I shook my head. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Mack frowned. I could tell he thought the same thing.
I glanced down at my metal hand, studying it with fresh eyes. I didn’t remember an incident of losing my hand, so they must have built it the first time I was resurrected, along with my spine. But I remembered my knee. I remembered getting shot in the heart. I remembered falling out of a gyropod and breaking an arm.
So much pain, hidden by drugs. So many, many nightmares.
I tried to think of one happy thought, one good memory among the torrent of horrors. The only time I had been truly happy, though, was when I got my hit of Peak. It had consumed my entire life for a decade.
Mack rubbed at the base of my neck, where flesh met metal. “How’s your head?”
I half laughed, half sobbed. “It doesn’t hurt. My heart though…”
He kissed my forehead. “It will heal.”
Tears blurred my sight. “But the things I’ve done—”
“Look, I haven’t been a saint in the years we’ve been apart either,” Mack admitted. He cupped my face. “But we have been given a second chance. We can’t right every wrong, but we can start to try and be better men.”
I turned my hand over. “I don’t even know if I am a man anymore.”
Mack grabbed my hand. “Of course you are.” His mouth curved into a smile. “You definitely were yesterday, if I recall.”
I looked at his beautiful, chiseled face, his bright blue eyes. He had aged well, but now I could see the last ten years on his face. Wrinkles spread out from his eyes, and he’d gotten leaner, drawn.
He held my hand, and I squeezed it back. “Mack.” I didn’t know what else to say, to convey all I had missed, all the time I’d left him on his own. “I’m sorry.”
Mack’s eyes filled with tears. “I have you back. That’s all that matters now, cowboy. We’re a team again.”
My stomach clenched into a knot. Oh fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I’d betrayed him. Even when I knew it was the wrong move, I’d done it anyway. All for the promise of another hit.
“Oh God.” I pulled my hand from his, and covered my face. “I fucked you over.”
“Not today you haven’t,” he joked.
I put my hand on his chest and stared. “No. I fucked your whole team over.”
His smile vanished. His eyes grew wide. I thought of easy ways to break it to him. But when there was something unpleasant to do, it was always best to simply do it. Thinking about it only extended the agony.
“I told them,” I said.
“Told who?”
“Trust. I made contact when we entered the biodome, and followed up with a message last night.”
Mack looked disappointed for only a moment, then sighed. “When are they going to make their move?”
“They’re planning on meeting you and the others at the start of the parade this morning.”
“At ten o’clock?” Mack confirmed.
I nodded. “I’m so sorry. I’m so—”
Mack kissed me. It was so unexpected I sobbed into his mouth. I pulled back, and yanked on his hair. “Did you hear me? Everything you worked for, I just undid it!”
Mack gave me a sad little smile. “Not entirely everything.” He wiped away the tears from my face. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”
I stared at him, mouth open.
He sighed. “I know you, Ivo. Better than you know yourself. Even after all this time.”
“So—”
“So, I knew you were lying. I suspected you would tell your team. We had to meet and discuss options, and we don’t have many secure locations here in Alspree. But I arranged ahead of time to not mention the actual time or location.”
I gaped. “Really?” I felt an irrational surge of betrayal.
Mack laughed. “Sorry, are you disappointed?”
Then reality came back into focus. “No! Thank fucking God!” I tackled him to the floor. Carly took this as a sign we were tussling and started biting my arms.
; We laughed as we wrestled, until Carly bit at Mack’s finger hard, and his mood shifted. “Goddamn dog!”
“Don’t blame her,” I scolded him. “She’s had a rough life.”
Mack rolled his eyes, then threw my combat boots at me. “Get dressed.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re rendezvousing in thirty minutes, not five hours. We gotta go, baby.”
I dressed quickly, feeling better than I expected to feel having betrayed my lover after having forgotten him for ten years.
As we got ready to go, Mack kept stealing glances at me.
“Just ask,” I barked, knowing he hesitated.
“Do you remember your parents?” he asked.
I stiffened. “What?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve always been curious, about what happened to you…before. I knew it was something bad. I wondered…now that you have your memories freed, if you can recall anything about them.”
I shuddered. “No.” My mouth filled with the taste of vomit. “No.”
“It’s okay.” He smiled sadly. “Don’t worry about it.”
But the sense of nausea didn’t go away. I had to keep swallowing to keep from being sick again.
I grabbed my polymesh armor, but Mack shook his head. “Walking around in that will look suspicious. There’ll be armor in the van.”
“What about weapons?” I asked.
“We’ll have plenty, don’t worry.”
“Good. I don’t want to go back.” I shuddered, visualizing the metal crate that I crawled into and lay inside.
I wasn’t sure if, caught, they’d simply execute me for having a faulty chip, or implant a new one and go back to making me their slave sharpshooter, sticking me back in a box. Or worse—be reset. Now I remembered what that meant—it involved shock treatment and massive quantities of Peak—and while the experiences were hazy, I must have gone through them enough to remember the confused, sick, and sycophantic groveling I’d done afterward.
I finished dressing in my new clean clothes, but I felt naked without a gun. As if reading my mind, Mack pulled up the bed mattress and handed over the energy pistol.
“You’ve always been a better shot than me,” he said.
“Must be all that practice sticking my big dick up your little ass.”
Mack laughed. He turned to the door.
I looked back at the bed, where Carly lay, watching us with bright eyes.
Mack sighed. “I’ll…I’ll leave a note with one of the locals. If anything happens to us, someone will fetch her.”
“Thanks.” I swallowed, my throat sore with all the emotion of the last hour. I knelt beside the bed and let Carly lick my face. I whispered to her, wishing I could simply stay here forever. Mack, a dog, a bed…that had always been my idea of paradise, hadn’t it? No responsibilities, no objectives.
But I had nearly ruined something important, and I had to make it up to Mack, even if it meant never seeing Carly again.
“We’ll be back, girl.” I gave her one last pet, then followed Mack out the door. Carly followed and seemed disheartened when I shut the door on her.
Mack didn’t give me a chance to grieve. He gripped my arm, hard, and led me down the corridor. I could tell he communicated with someone on his osys by the way the device on his wrist blinked, but I didn’t know where we were going.
I didn’t care. It was Mack, after all. I’d follow him to the gates of hell. I’m pretty sure I already had.
Chapter Ten
Gotcha Take Two
Mack, the clever, lying bastard, changed more than merely the rendezvous time when discussing plans in front of me.
We weren’t meeting on the Beltway during the parade. We weren’t even leaving the biodome of Alspree.
As we briskly walked to a deserted intersection of roadway, Mack explained that the signal in the transmitter was far too weak to carry over any great distance. “So I’m going to hack into Trust’s server and send it directly to the agents’ brains.”
I didn’t like it. “Trust has very good cybersecurity.”
“I’m very good myself,” Mack said with a wink.
“But this is riskier,” I added. The more I thought about it, the more nervous I got. “You realize they can trace where a signal comes from. As soon as you upload that code, they’ll be onto us. And they have agents standing by in every biodome.”
“It’s the only way to affect the entire agent population, over two hundred men and women, some of whom work off-world. And the agents will be incapacitated once they gain their memories back. It’ll be a cinch, baby.”
I remembered Mack’s casual assurances from before, when we were kids, scheming to do something against the rules. We’d gotten caught half as often as we’d gotten away with something.
“I don’t know…” I cautioned.
“Besides.” Mack squeezed my shoulder. “I’ve got my own bodyguard.”
“I don’t want to kill anyone.” I’d been thinking about it since Mack returned my memories. “If these other agents are like me, they were conscripted against their will. They’re slaves operating on a desperate need for hits, not out of any personal ambition or evil.”
We came to a stop at an intersection. In the dark, early morning hour, only a few vehicles were on the roads, moving silently along the thoroughfare. The clear dome above showcased the endless starscape of Calypso’s celestial scenery.
Mack stared out at the street expectantly. He acted cocky, but his jaw muscle frantically clenched and unclenched.
“Our goal isn’t to kill anyone,” Mack said finally. He didn’t look at me. “It’s to expose the truth. But there are risks involved in this. If you don’t want to be a part, I completely understand.”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be a dick. Of course I’m coming with you.” He turned back with a grin, but I held out my hand. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to shoot anyone in our way.”
Mack’s eyebrow lifted. “It never bothered you before, when we were soldiers. You’re a sharpshooter.”
“Yes.” I closed my eyes. “That’s what Calypso Recon made me. And then that’s what Trust made me. But I’d like to think I’ve learned at least one thing from this whole experience. And what I’ve learned is that the guys doing the shooting are often not operating on their own accord.”
Mack stared at me. “And if your life is in danger?”
“Then I’ll defend myself,” I said. “I’m not suicidal. I’m just not…homicidal. There’s a difference.”
Mack nodded.
A van pulled up alongside the curb, and the auto door slid open to reveal a large compartment with two side benches, a weapons locker, and a front bench where Tiergan and Levi sat. Two other men sat across from where Mack, and I scrambled in. Rosslyn drove. We’d barely sat down before she resumed driving.
“Everything okay?” Rosslyn asked as we took off. She glanced in the rear camera at Mack. “He’s good?”
Mack nodded. “Ivo’s out of their control now.”
Tiergan’s eyes brightened at that, and a crooked smile spread across his face. He was rather handsome, actually, and if I hadn’t been head over heels with Mack, I probably would have tried to make a move.
That brought another thought—had I made a move in the last decade? I couldn’t remember any encounters in the last ten years. I had a suspicion I has been unerringly loyal to Mack, which made me actually feel a little giddy with pride.
Then I looked at Mack. Expecting that he’d remained celibate over the last decade, thinking I was dead, was a ridiculous notion. But my gut churned with the idea of him with other men.
“How do you feel?” Tiergan asked, leaning over the back of the bench seat to stare at me. “Headache? Nausea? Disorientation?”
“My headache is finally gone,” I told him. “Yes to the disorientation. I think the nausea stems from the memories, not the chip.”
He looked excited. “Excellent! How long did it take for the signal to era
se the codes?”
Mack said, “No time at all. Seconds. But that was with the wireless proximity signal. Over the server it could take longer.”
Tiergan and Levi shared a look. I sat next to Mack in the backseat. The whole bench seat vibrated as Mack’s leg bounced up and down in his nervousness.
“Ivo, this is Rhett and Tomas,” Mack said, nodding to the two other men sitting on the side bench. They both nodded back in tandem. I realized they were identical twins, with matching expressions of distaste. At first I thought it was directed to me, but then I realized they gave the same frown to everyone in the van.
Levi turned back to face me. “It would be helpful if I could record a statement from you, regarding your memories and how you were treated.”
I swallowed. “Right now?”
Levi smiled sympathetically. “We can wait until after. Although, if things go badly…”
“No, I can tell you now.” I glanced out the van windows. Although dark, but Sol 10 would be up soon. “How much time do we have?”
Mack glanced up and to the left to activate his osys. “It’ll take us twenty minutes to get to the Fishman Corporation’s offices.”
I didn’t want to talk. I understood its importance, but the idea of telling people what I had done—saying the deeds out loud—made them real. More real than the images in my mind.
As I hesitated, Levi said, “I looked up your contract last night. Do you want to know who paid for a life insurance policy on you?”
I reached out an grabbed Mack’s hand. “Yeah.”
“Andro and Erin Toreli. Your parents.”
The name Andro sent a spiraling sense of sickness through my whole body. I leaned over, clutching my stomach.
Mack squeezed my hand and asked, “When did they take it out on him? As an infant?”
Levi said, “When he was five years old. They got a good deal since he was young.”
I didn’t look up. I was moments from tossing up.
“What happened after?” Mack asked, curiosity plain.
“They apparently died in some accident a year later. I can’t access Ivo’s medical file, only the insurance record.”