Meara turned away and started walking again. “Aja makes threats when she’s stressed and I make jokes. I mean no harm by my teasing though sometimes it works out that way.”
“But why did you…” His question drifted off along with his courage when her eyes crinkled at the corners. Meara suddenly became a giggling ninja. It rendered him speechless that she could laugh while also being so much on guard. The woman was an enigma to him.
“It’s okay, Will. Ya don’t have to name our ‘sins of the flesh’ as Father Jacob used to call any form of sex when I was growing up in the church. I did what I did to ya because I wanted to and ya needed me to. It’s pretty much that simple.”
Will reached out and stopped her walk. “It was like coming back to life. It wasn’t simple for me.”
Meara snorted. “Well, it should be, along with other things I hope ya realize ya can do again any time the mood strikes. I’ll not be spreading yer secret around so ya don’t have to worry about a line forming or anything. I didn’t even tell Aja how big ya were and that’s the first interesting thing I’ve kept from her in years.”
Will really liked knowing the chatterbox had a boundary—was really, really glad actually. His embarrassment with Meara was bad enough to handle. He didn’t need to be uncomfortable about Aja too.
He sighed as he stared at Meara. “So those other things I can likely do now, what’s your interest in those? Do you have any?”
Meara snickered. “That may be the strangest way I’ve ever heard a man ask me if I wanted to feck him.”
Will winced at her directness. “Crude, but I suppose that is the general translation of my question,” he admitted, feeling completely out of his comfort zone. “You’re all I’ve thought about since you came to my apartment. Every two seconds I’m reliving what you did. I’m not even mad that you drugged me, which is the most illogical thought I’ve allowed myself in a long damn time.”
“Ah, now listen to ya. That’s the true power of oral sex. A woman should never underestimate it,” Meara said with a laugh.
“Hell, I want a lot more than that from you,” Will said firmly, the quiet words rushing out but ringing true. His heart pounded as Meara looked at him with genuine consideration in her gaze. “I know you think I want my wife back, but I don’t…” His stomach plummeted when Meara looked away. “What? What did I say?”
Meara sighed and shook her head. “William, William. Goddess knows I’m a patient woman, but ya really need to get a fecking grip and listen to yerself when ya talk about her.”
Will dropped his gaze and recounted what he’d said until realization hit. “I didn’t mean wife literally.”
“Ya probably didn’t mean it consciously either, but I think yer subconscious human self might not be in strict agreement with yer cyborg logic. Yer living a complicated human life now.”
Will sighed heavily. “Human? I don’t feel very human.”
“Well, yar acting like one, so it must be true,” Meara said firmly. “And we humans are strange about emotional matters. We’re back and forth and all over about what we’re thinking until we get things straight inside us. It’s why females don’t make good cyborgs. My gender can only handle so much fecking logic before our brains call bullshit. I can’t tell ya how pissed I get when my fecking processor tries to override my instincts. If I’d let logic run my life, I’d be dead by now.”
Will ran a black-gloved hand over his black facemask. “You’re losing me again, Meara. I’m a straightforward male. Are you saying you’re interested in sleeping with me or not?”
Meara sighed and shook her head, giving up on getting Will to understand her. Having liberated themselves, she and Aja had lived a decade more of freedom than most cyber soldiers. It wasn’t fair to expect a cyborg as messed up as Will to figure things out in any less time.
“Yer offer to bed me is very tempting, but yar obviously not in touch with yer true feelings which means there’s nothing in yer pants truly meant for Meara. If I get desperate enough for a quick tumble, I’ll be sure and give ya a call. Right now, Mother Nature is calling me to take care of her business. Wait here. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Meara felt Will staring hard at her back as she stomped off.
Going to relieve herself had been the quickest and handiest excuse to escape talking to Will after she’d rejected his half-ass offer to sleep with her. Still mad that he was so obtuse about her feelings for him, Meara paced among the ancient trees until she heard a twig snap. She swung toward the sound. Her field knife was in her hand and almost thrown before she’d even identified who her attacker was.
Meara gave the female her best stink-eyed look. “I thought we’d settled that this eavesdropping habit of yers was too dangerous for ya to keep doing it around me,” she hissed in a whisper. “It was almost the death of ya this time, Aja. I was aiming for yer fecking human eye.”
Aja approached her with both hands in the air. “Sorry. I… I couldn’t just leave because William Talon told me to. I needed to know you were going to be okay.”
“Aja Kapur,” Meara said in irritation, working the stealth covering off her nose and mouth. “Ya should have been far away by now. We need the others. Ya know we do.”
“I know. I know,” Aja said in mock apology, still pondering the conversation she’d heard. “Are you involved with Captain Talon, Meara?”
Snorting, Meara put her face covering back into place. “I told ya this already. The man’s still in love with his wife. Cassandra’s moved on, but I think hell will freeze over before Will does.”
“That’s not what I’m asking,” Aja said low. “Have you been sexually intimate with him?”
Meara turned her back. “Why are ya making me remind ya of the obvious? At the end of the day, what I do with William Talon is none of yer fecking business—or anyone else’s for that matter.”
Aja swore in Hindi. “I’m not interfering nor would I try to stop you. I’m only asking these questions because I care about you, Meara. Now be honest with me. Are you in love with the man?”
“No,” Meara denied tiredly. “Perhaps I could be if things were different, but I’m not going to be the third side of a weird love triangle with his wife. Hell, he and Rio Sanchez already do that with her in another triangle that’s got nothing to do with me. Loving Will would be… I don’t know… pathetic at the very least. I’m choosing not to be that if I can help it. I might get desperate and give the man a ride to scratch my own itch one day, but love? Not bloody likely.”
“I’m not concerned about his wife. I’m concerned about you. You read Kyra’s theories about him, Meara. Captain Talon’s mental issues extend beyond his repressed grief for losing his family. That cyborg is violent and dangerous. You need to use extreme discretion with him. If he goes rogue, you’re the one who could get hurt.”
Meara frowned under her face covering. “Rogue. We got called that many times, didn’t we? And Kyra is a cyber scientist, not a headshrinker. That’s why she referred to her observations as a theory. The actual headshrinker merely said Will had developed some significant coping mechanisms which you and I both know means he’s going to have the occasional meltdown. It happens to every cyborg that gets restored. We all lie to keep from explaining it.”
“I know that but…”
“Did ya come back only to badger me with eejit questions?” Meara demanded.
Aja sighed. “No. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“Well, I’m as okay as I can be. Now go get fecking help for us so we can get this over with.”
8
Will suspected Meara was avoiding him. They hadn’t talked much after that initial conversation. The silence between them felt strange because Meara had talked nearly non-stop to him since he met her. He hoped her quiet wasn’t because of their earlier conversation. She’d pushed to drop the personal discussion and he had done so… for now at least.
To walk off his worried mood, he’d circled around the place on his own a c
ouple of times but had found nothing more than Meara and Aja had.
His footsteps were silent until he was beside Meara. Outside of a slight flinch, she didn’t react to his presence. Once again, Will couldn’t help wondering if Meara was more upset at him than she was sharing. Deciding that waiting her out was for the best, Will said nothing as she continued to watch the building for another ten minutes before speaking to him.
“When I was a child, I got moved to a church-run orphanage for a time. They kept an army of cats around to fight the mouse militia who thought they owned the place. The cats got to be quite the mousers. They practiced by pouncing unexpectedly and making us scream. As ya can imagine, this made our sneaking around behind Father Jacob’s back quite the challenge. We eventually put tiny bells on the cats so we wouldn’t get startled by them and call out.”
Will’s processor spun madly trying to figure out why the hell Meara was telling him a story about cats. It took him a full two minutes to formulate even one idea. “Am I the cat in your story because you don’t hear me coming up on you?”
Meara nodded. “Without our neural connection being there all the time, I’m thinking ya need to be wearing a fecking bell. I’d hate to kill ya accidentally and have to explain it to Peyton and Kyra.”
“What makes you so sure you’d manage to kill me?”
Meara turned to meet Will’s questioning gaze. Her confidence over the matter wasn’t in question. “All the females in my unit were trained to be assassins just like you were. I know over a hundred ways to cause yer death. And unlike you, no one brainwashed them away from me. I haven’t forgotten any of them… nor will I ever. I use them when necessary for my survival and feel no remorse. My trainers weren’t all that worried about what I’d do to them. Their arrogance and their physical abuse of us only made the killing all that much easier.”
Will frowned beneath his face mask, but eventually asked the question he dwelled on most. “Do you know how many people you’ve killed?”
Meara looked away. “I don’t, but Aja does right down to the very last one. She kept track of her own and of mine since I couldn’t do the calculations properly. I kept breaking free of the New World Companion code. During one of my earliest tweaks, they destroyed the part of it that they suspected was causing my leak-throughs. They failed in the long run, but their brain hacking removed the part does math. I later found out that it wasn’t an accidental slip of the cyber knife. They diminished my intelligence on purpose. Ya see, I was considered too smart and they were doing all they could to dumb me down.”
Snorting, Will shook his head. “They failed miserably. You’re smarter than most cyborgs I know.”
“Oh, ya might be surprised,” Meara said, pushing away the sadness. “My personal cyborg hacker, Nero, couldn’t give what they took back to me, not even with the latest upgrade. He’s given me something else as a consolation prize, but from my understanding, it’s not even hooked to my processor. It activates without my permission and gives me a fecking headache when it does. Whatever the bloody thing’s doing in my upgraded brain, it’s not math in the normal sense. I still don’t have the ability to do simple calculations when I want to.”
Will frowned as he thought. “How do you shoot your weapon with being able to adequately measure distance?”
“I make a good guess.”
“You guess? Like all the time?”
Meara shrugged. “Yeah, but my guesses are better than most. I consider it a Goddess-given gift that I’m as accurate as I am. It took me three or four years to get really good. Aja helped me by telling me how far off I was until I learned my own tricks for figuring it out. Aja and I used to take out police bots for practice. They were causing the general public grief in most cases so no harm was done to the living.”
Will lifted his eyebrow—not that Meara could see it. His mind couldn’t even conceive of being a soldier who guessed at everything.
Chuckling softly, Meara turned his way. “I know ya think I talk a lot, but I have a reason. Doing so occupies my cyborg processor, which lets my human instincts fully take over my mind. Most things I do with my humanity and that includes all the killing. The only other cyborg I know who does that is Eric.”
Will nodded. For the first time ever, he appreciated the mental oblivion his tormentor had made sure he had. “I’m sorry you remember so much. I don’t think I could.”
Meara lifted a shoulder. “Oh, ya’d probably surprise yerself. Sure, acting with free will gives me memories that sometimes keep me awake at night, but at least I can outright refuse to kill a person if I choose. That’s more than you’ve been able to do, Will. Knowing ya has given me a new appreciation for having escaped our cyber hell as early as I did.”
Will frowned harder under his face mask. She was nowhere near as shallow as he’d pegged her. His judgment of her character had been totally off base. “All I’ve done is think badly of you. I’m sorry I judged what I didn’t understand, Meara.”
“Oh, go on with ya,” Meara said, blinking her suddenly hot eyes for drawing a sincere apology from him under duress. The last thing she wanted from William Talon was pity. “Ya weren’t the first to ever think I was a chatterbox. Doubt ya will be the last either. Put all that out of yer mind.”
Will watched Meara’s eyes clear of her deep thoughts. His urge to sigh in relief made him nearly chuckle. He’d been worried about having hurt her feelings and hadn’t known how much until now. “Your resilience is admirable. You don’t hold grudges long, do you?”
“Goddess, no. When ya live every day knowing ya could die tomorrow, how could it not rid ya of grudge holding… and a whole slew of other negative habits? Perhaps it helps that despite what I’ve done in my life I consider myself as much a saint as a sinner. The church certainly wouldn’t consider my Happy Cyborg Juice drinking technically a sin. Outside of the assassin thing, I’d probably be a model citizen of the world if it weren’t for my fecking language and my appropriating.”
“Appropriating?” Will chuckled softly at the word. “Sounds very military of you.”
Meara laughed softly in reply. “Yeah… Aja calls it stealing. I call it back pay… or I did. I recently bought a fecking com station the size of our apartment wall and spent a bloody fortune on it. Can’t say as I feel any more righteous for having spent real cash.”
“Well, at least it’s a more legal transaction,” Will said dryly, watching her face for signs of teasing. Surely she wasn’t serious about the stealing, was she?
“Though it’s not half as much fun, I suppose being legal is better,” Meara answered sadly. “It’s just that I hate my fecking blood money. It makes me feel beholden to those UCN bastards.”
Will nodded. “I get that totally. I feel the same. That’s why I spent most of it on a place to live.”
“I hate the UCN. I’d give anything to take out a few of those conniving chancellors. No sleep would be lost on them. I’m praying every day to get the chance. They’re the problem, Will. No one can find out how, but inside me, I know they’re paying that Creator Omega bastard to do what he’s doing.”
Their conversation was cut off by activity as several men in white coats exited the building. Behind them, two women trotted in their heels to keep up.
“How long has Aja been gone now?” Meara asked.
“Six hours, thirty-five minutes, and seven seconds.”
Meara turned to Will. “Not enough time for a return trip. I don’t want to let those bastards take those two away from here. Want to help me get them?”
Will searched the perimeter but saw no one else outside except a few guard bots. “What are we going to do once we have them?”
“Tie up the scientists and knock them out if necessary. I’m more worried about the New World Companions. The moment they’re apprehended they’ll report that being the case—even if we knock them out. It would be better to get control of them.”
“How do we do that? Our neural processors are blocked.”
“
Until we can move our targets beyond the jamming border, we need to nab the scientists and get them to order the New World Companions to behave,” Meara said.
“Not the best idea, but I don’t have a better plan.”
Meara lifted a shoulder and dropped it. “Aja usually does our planning. We could wait for her return with the others, but I don’t want the scientists to disappear with those poor women.”
Will watched them moving slowly, but deliberately to the vehicle. “Me neither,” he finally said. “Let’s go get them.”
“Can ya create a distraction?” Meara asked. “If you can do that, I’ll make sure their transport goes nowhere.”
“You know mechanics?” Will asked.
Meara shook her head and chuckled softly. “Not really, no, but I’m really good at all kinds of quiet destruction. Watch your arse while yar doing it, Captain Serious. I’m used to working with a partner who knows me better.”
Will pressed lips together under his mask, nodded, and headed off to get closer. Before jogging away, he saw Meara had gone in a longer direction. She was probably getting a feel for how much resistance might happen.
Too late Will remembered they had no way to communicate outside their neural network.
“She’s going to be guessing and I’m going to be screwed,” he muttered to himself, his gaze scanning the perimeter for something he could do to draw their attention.
Meara muttered when she saw Will’s body lying on the ground in transport parking area. One of the scientists smacked the other on the chest and pointed to Will. She heard the one speaking in German and was grateful it was a language she’d been programmed for.
The first one ordered the New World Companions to stay and walked off toward Will. The other hung back and waited with the females. Will must have been convincing because the second scientist eventually ran to help the original one when he was called. It took Will all of two seconds to grab both men by the throats and drag them back to the transport. Best of all, the scientists were too stunned to call out for help.
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