Meet Abby Banks VOLUMES: 1-3

by J. A. Cipriano

  “You can see why this is a little weird for me. I recognize that you could, in fact, be my father. But I rather like my foster parents. I have no problems with them. They’re good to me.” She shrugged. “I would have never known I was adopted.”

  “You’re not supposed to know you’re adopted. That’s sort of the whole point,” Roberto said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Either way, you need to get in the car so we can get out of here before agents show back up, and we’re forced to blow up this lovely gas station.” He shrugged and shot a sideways grin at me. “Though I am a fan of blowing stuff up.”

  Tom nodded, releasing Lisa’s hand and swinging the back door open. The inside of the car was nice. Not just nicer than I’d have expected, but capital-N-nice. It looked like it had to have cost a hundred times what the outside of the junk heap did.

  When Lisa made no move to get in, I reached out and took her hand. I squeezed it once and sort of pulled her into the backseat with me. “At least I know where you get your fondness for crappy cars,” I said, helping her buckle in because she was still staring at Tom so hard I thought he might burst into flames.

  “My car is not crappy,” both her and her father said in unison. It was a little eerie.

  “Of course,” Roberto said, reaching over and shaking Tom by the shoulder. It was a little weird because his hand was pretty much the size of Tom. As I watched the exchange, I wondered why Roberto was helping me. Hadn’t I offed his boss when I killed Gabriella? Shouldn’t he want revenge on me? Or was he working for someone else, and if so, who?

  Admittedly, that thought made me want to run off on my own, but I really didn’t have a better idea of what to do. Maybe Roberto did? Either way, I wasn’t sure I could trust him. I’d have to keep an eye on him, just to make sure he didn’t try anything suspicious.

  I glanced around, careful to take everything in as Tom turned the key, and the car roared to life. I’d just have to rely on my super-spy skills to keep both Lisa and I alive if Roberto or Tom tried something. Still, as far as I knew, they were on the Agency’s hit list. What was that saying, the enemy of my enemy?

  Deep bass rumbled through the back seat as the car shot forward into the street. The world outside the windows was a blur of scenery. Tom shifted, throwing the wheel to the right as we skidded around a semi-truck and fishtailed for a second before tearing down the road in a squeal of rubber.

  “Abby, you’re hurting me,” Lisa said, tugging her hand free of mine.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled, putting my hand in my lap as the car lurched again.

  Lisa smiled at me and shook her head. “He is not where I get my driving from either.”

  I smirked and tried to relax in my seat. I wasn’t quite sure where we were going, but the chances of Tom being as bad as Gabriella were slim, right? And so what if he was just as bad. As long as he was on our side, I could use a little bad…

  I swallowed as a sudden thought popped into my mind.

  “It’s okay, you can say it, Abby. I won’t tell,” Donovan’s voice leered in my ear like he was sitting next to me. I stared out the window, watching sandy hills roll by like ocean waves and shook my head.

  “Abby, is something wrong?” Lisa asked, reaching out and putting her hand on mine. I looked down and stared at our hands as Donovan appeared outside the window, his face stretched into a smile that seemed to loom over me.

  “No,” I murmured, squeezing her hand, though I wasn’t sure why.

  “Go on, tell her,” Donovan said, his stupid teeth perfect and gleaming in the moonlight. “Tell her you wish Gabriella was alive so she could help you take down the Agency. Tell her you were wrong and Gabriella was right. Tell Lisa Ann that if you had to do it again, you’d help Gabriella take over the world, that you’d press the button. That you’d kill everyone if it meant taking down the Agency. Tell her the truth, Abby.”

  “No,” I repeated because I hoped Donovan wasn’t one hundred percent right, and Lisa squeezed my hand back.

  12

  I wasn’t sure how long we’d been driving when we pulled behind a big red semi with a bright silver crate on its back. It was weird because Tom had been going out of his way to swerve around traffic, even though it was pitch black outside and the road was mostly one lane. So why was he trailing behind a semi, now? Especially since this one was going way slower than we had been.

  The back door of the semi slid open and a ramp fell down, crashing into the asphalt and throwing up sparks. A guy in a white jumpsuit stood just inside the cargo hold, and he waved at us, signaling for us to what? Drive inside? That was crazy, right?

  Tom revved the engine, and my heart felt like it exploded in my chest. He wasn’t seriously going to… We shot forward. The car hit the ramp with a jolt, and for a moment, the tires spun in midair before we lurched up into the back of the truck. The guy in the jumpsuit hit a button, and the door behind us hissed shut, sealing us inside.

  Halogen lights came on, bathing us in hostile white light as Tom unbuckled his seatbelt and spun around to look at us. “Pretty cool, right?” He smiled so broadly that he reminded me of a teenager who had just jumped a gorge on his bike. I was unimpressed. While cool, I wasn’t sure it had been necessary. Couldn’t we have just stopped the car and driven inside? It’s not like we were under attack right now.

  “That was cool, I guess,” Lisa Ann said, looking up from her circuit board and staring at him for a long while.

  “Thanks,” Tom said, reaching out, his fingers extended toward her before thinking better of it. Lisa watched his hand, her cool brown eyes taking in every movement as he pulled his hand back and turned in his seat. He sat there in silence for so long I was beginning to think he’d forgotten we were in a hurry. After what felt like a year, he swung open his door. “Let’s go,” Tom huffed, getting out of the car and opening Lisa’s door. “Welcome to my mobile lab.”

  “So, uh, who is driving?” I asked, trying to decide whether or not I wanted to risk taking off my seatbelt. I wasn’t sure it’d actually help, but I wasn’t exactly inclined to give up my faux-safety just yet. Besides, for all I knew, this car was invincible.

  “The truck’s fully automated,” the man in the jumpsuit said. His voice was so deep it damn near rattled my stomach. “Want a tour?” I glanced at him as he opened my door for me and held out his hand to help me up. He was a lot taller than me, standing well over six feet and was as thin as a flagpole. His skin was so dark it reminded me of melted chocolate.

  A strange smile crossed my lips as I let him pull me out of the vehicle. It was immediately followed by an outpouring guilt that somehow, despite Stephen trying to kill Lisa and me, I was doing something wrong. I tried to shake off the feeling, but there it was. Guilt that I hadn’t saved Stephen from the Agency, that still, somehow he had been mind-controlled, and there I was, smiling at attractive men only a couple hours later.

  “Troy, want to get Roberto and Abby some refreshments? I want to show my darling daughter the lab. Then maybe she’ll pretend to like me.” Tom threw a look at Roberto who was just getting out of the car that said, “please just go with this.”

  “Sure thing,” Roberto replied, walking up to Troy and physically pushing him out of the way so he was standing between us. “Where’s dinner? I’m starved.”

  “Um…” Troy said, biting his lip and looking around for help, but Tom was already disappearing up some stairs with Lisa in tow. She hadn’t even said goodbye. What a traitor… then again, how would I have acted if our situations were reversed? Probably pretty much the same only with a lot more whining. I remembered how angry and betrayed I’d felt upon meeting Gabriella, but in my case, most of my vitriol had been directed largely at my foster mother, Esmeralda.

  Lisa’s anger seemed focused for the time being, at least, on her father. It made me wonder what she’d do if our situations had been swapped. Would she have left me in the dark so I could keep living my crummy, ordinary life? Except that was the difference between us. As unspecial a
s my life had been pre-spy-mode, Lisa’s had bordered on the extraordinary. Sure, she’d been relegated to the loser table like me, but she’d long been hailed as Folsom High’s class smarty pants and had a whole host of college classes and awards under her belt.

  Unlike my post-high school plans of working in my foster mom’s restaurant before buying a bunch of cats and lounging in a too-small bathtub with a whole bottle of wine, Lisa’s plans had started with choosing between MIT, Stanford, and whatever other colleges she’d decided to set her sights on. Hell, I’d heard she’d already been approached by some tech companies to skip college altogether and just start working…

  “Um is not a destination, Troy,” Roberto said, looking the man up and down. “My daughter needs a meal. Do you want her to starve?”

  My world sort of spun, twisting out from under me as my breath whooshed out of me. “What?” I squealed, grabbing Roberto’s hand and pulling him toward me so I could stare into his face. “What did you just say?”

  Roberto smiled, his face stretching into a broad grin, before wrapping me in a hug that swallowed my entire body. “I’ve been wanting to tell you for a while, Abby, but Gabriella didn’t feel it was best.” He kissed my cheek. “But since she’s gone, I figured it couldn’t hurt things.”

  “So, wait,” I said as another thought struck me. “You had sex with Gabriella?” I asked, raising one eyebrow at him. “I mean, I know that’s how kids are made, but I always assumed she sort of duplicated herself via mitosis, or ate her mate like a black widow.”

  “We did not have sex,” Roberto replied, a grimace spreading across his face. “I hate to say this, Abby, but you were conceived in a lab. Hope that doesn’t ruin the romance for you.”

  I shrugged because I had no response to that. Somehow, I wasn’t really surprised I’d been a lab baby.

  “I’ll, uh…” Troy cleared his throat, “take you to get something to eat.” He spun on his heel and began walking toward the front of the cavernous semi, which was weird because I hadn’t remembered it being this big from the outside. Then again, for all I knew, we were in a huge base that only looked like a semi from the outside. Maybe they had tech to actually make it bigger on the inside. Hell maybe we were flying through the air… maybe we’d docked with some super-stealth way-station in the clouds. At this point, I was willing to believe pretty much anything.

  “So you were basically a sperm donor,” I said as Roberto took my hand and led me after Troy. His grip faltered for a second as he glanced at me, but when he saw the smirk on my face, he relaxed.

  “I guess you could say that, but you don’t realize the honor it is to be your father, Abby.” He grinned at me. “I’m so proud of you.”

  I swallowed, my world slipping off its access and hitting the ground and bouncing a couple times. When I finally recovered, we were in another room altogether. There was a weird looking vending machine in the corner and a couple plush blue leather couches, and not a whole lot of anything else.

  “Why are you proud of me?” I squeaked, turning to look up at Roberto. “I mean, it’s not that I don’t want you to be proud of me, but I haven’t exactly done a whole lot.”

  “I could just say that you’re my daughter and that alone would be enough,” Roberto replied, smiling at me as he led me over to the vending machine. “But somehow, I don’t think you’ll feel like that’s a valid response.” He gestured at the vending machine. “Now what do you want, I’ll buy.”

  “Um, everything in here is free,” Troy said from his perch on one of the couches. I hadn’t even managed to make it to the vending machine in the time it had taken for him to make himself comfortable. I didn’t see how it was possible, but there he was, slouched over the side like a lanky spider, sipping Coke through a straw he’d shoved into the can’s pop top.

  “Don’t ruin my moment, Troy,” Roberto replied in a voice that made me shiver. “Or I’ll throw you off the back of this truck… again.” Roberto smiled, and Troy deflated. Had Roberto thrown Troy from the semi before? It sure seemed so… hopefully it wasn’t moving at the time. Either way, I couldn’t forget that Roberto was a bad guy.

  “I want you to answer my question.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “And also I’d like chocolate cream pie.” I glanced over the machine but couldn’t make any sense of it. “Does this thing have that?”

  “Yeah, it cooks stuff. You just put in what you want, and assuming it has the ingredients inside, it just makes whatever you ask for.” Roberto punched some buttons into the front of the machine. It began to whir and make a sort of horrible grinding noise that reminded me of a car with bad brakes. “There used to be an issue with recipes, but by now it has a lot in its database.”

  Of course they had a super-vending machine capable of cooking anything. Typical. Now if only my old high school cafeteria had one of these things…

  “So, uh about the being proud of me.” I smiled up at him, and he shook his head.

  “You’re really not letting that go, are you?” Roberto rubbed his face with one giant hand. “I’m proud of you because even after everything you’ve been through, you haven’t turned bad. It’d be easy for you to become Gabriella, but you didn’t. Hell, you blew up the base and escaped, and even with all her power at your fingertips, you haven’t used it to say drop a bomb on Washington DC.” He smacked one fist into the palm of his hand. “Do you know how many people would have already done something like that?”

  “Um… a lot?” I replied, biting my lip as my world crashed to the ground and shattered for the third time in an hour. Hadn’t that been exactly what I had been trying to do? Hadn’t that been why I’d infiltrated the Agency’s base? I’d wanted to gain control of Gabriella’s resources. The only thing that had stopped me was I’d been thwarted trying to destroy the flit. If I’d stuck to my original plan, I’d have left without even trying to blow up the flit’s mainframe. I’d be sitting in an underground base ready to laugh maniacally and stroke my cat. Hell, that had been where I’d been heading when Roberto had saved me.

  Great. Just freaking great. I’d had a dad all of thirty minutes, and I’d already managed to disappoint him and dash his vision of me as the perfect angel to shards. Fan-freaking-tastic.

  “What’s wrong, Abby?” Roberto asked, staring at me as thoughts swam through his large dark eyes. “Did I say something wrong?” He shot me a weak smile. “I’m not exactly good at the whole father thing, but I’m going to try.”

  “Why didn’t you come for me sooner?” I asked. I hadn’t meant to say the words, but they’d just come out on their own like little venomous daggers. When in doubt about your own feelings, attack angrily, I guess…

  “What?” Roberto asked, taken aback. He opened his mouth to say something else when the vending machine beeped, and a door slid open. Sitting there inside the small empty cube was a slice of chocolate cream pie with whipped cream and little bits of shaved chocolate sprinkled over the top. Roberto reached in and lifted up the paper plate and offered it to me. “Here’s your pie, Abby.”

  “I don’t want the damn pie. I want to know why you didn’t try to find me. Or better yet, why you didn’t tell me who you were when we first met…” I fixed him with my best glare.

  Roberto stood there with a plate of pie in his hand for a long time before setting it down and keying in some commands on the machine. It began to chug and whir again as he turned back toward me and sighed. “I told you Gabriella wouldn’t let me. As to why I didn’t find you? I tried, but you weren’t exactly making it easy to find you, Abby. It’s not like I had access to all my resources. Ever since Gabriella died, all of her bases have been locked down, waiting for you to unlock them.”

  “You mean that’s true?” I asked, ignoring the puppy-dog look on his face. “About my biometrics unlocking the keys to her kingdom?”

  “Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be? Gabriella was going to die either way. Even if she couldn’t get herself implanted in your brain, she still wanted you to have acces
s to all her tech. That’s part of the reason why the Agency wants you so badly. It isn’t just because you were a ‘success.’ They want Gabriella’s tech. Even though they know where her bases are, they can’t get anything out of them very easily. If they had you, well, it’d be a hell of a lot easier.”

  “So what’s to stop me from phoning the Agency and offering them everything in exchange for leaving me alone?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at him and putting my hands on my hips.

  “Not a whole lot,” Roberto replied, staring at me very carefully. “All things considered it isn’t a bad plan as long as you don’t mind leaving all of Gabriella’s resources in the hands of an evil government agency.” His statement sobered me because I was being bratty. Then again, Gabriella had been evil too. Would putting all her tech in the hands of the Agency be that bad? I wasn’t sure, but while some part of me told me yes, I just wasn’t sure it was true. There had to be others out there that were worse than Gabriella, right? Others that the Agency was trying to protect us from… Maybe giving them her tech wasn’t a bad idea. Maybe it would save a lot of lives…

  The machine beeped, and the door slid open again to reveal a plate teeming with steak, creamed corn, and mashed potatoes. My stomach rumbled as I stared at the plate. It smelled so good I couldn’t even see past it as Roberto pulled it out. He took it and my pie off toward the couch. I followed behind him like a dog begging for scraps and sat down next to him on the blue couch. It was so plush, I nearly sank into it up to my eyeballs.

  Roberto laughed as he watched me watch him cut up his steak. “Do you want some?”

  “Yes,” I replied, licking my lips. Originally dessert had sounded like a great idea, but as I stared at the steak, the smell of it wafting into my nose, I knew that had been a bad idea because I couldn’t even remember the last time I had eaten something that didn’t come out of an easy open package.