The Devil You Know

by Kit Rocha

  Nina went still. “You know about me.”

  He went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “It’s not the cloning, mind you. They had that down from the start. But the engineering … That took them a while.” He laughed, a mirthless sound that made Maya shiver beside Gray.

  Gray had to stop himself from echoing the gesture.

  The man pulled off his heavy-rimmed glasses and tossed them aside. Their absence seemed to change more than the look of his face. He squared his shoulders and stood a little taller, his stance shifting into a posture more suited to combat than conversation.

  Then he held out his hand. “I should introduce myself properly. JH-Gen2.”

  Nina exploded into motion, slapping his hand away and drawing her pistol in one motion. “Designation?”

  The genetic research facility where Nina and her cloned sisters had been born—made?—followed strict and efficient naming conventions for their subjects that could be broken down and decoded. Nina, for example, was HS-Gen16-A. HS, those were the initials of the long-dead person who’d provided the DNA material that made the Center’s work possible. Gen16 denoted that she was part of the sixteenth iteration of that particular DNA strain. And her A meant that Nina was a soldier, a warrior, engineered to fight.

  Her sister Ava’s designation was B, indicating that she was a strategist. She could analyze patterns, account for all possible outcomes, and plan operations with the deft skill of an experienced military general. And there had been a C once, a third clone named Zoey who had died during an op. Nina still spoke of her with sad, shining eyes, describing her vast kindness and deep empathy.

  The Professor hadn’t offered a letter.

  “I don’t have one,” he explained, the words casual and conversational, as if he wasn’t staring down the barrel of a pistol. “I don’t have a cluster, either. Back then, the Center was still trying to make each of us … well. All things to everyone, I suppose.”

  Gray’s skin crawled. “They gave you all the modifications.”

  “Yes.” Slowly, the man smiled. It should have been a horrible expression, ironic and dull, but it was utterly sincere. It was only creepy because of how out of place it was. “It didn’t work out as they planned.”

  “Made you crazy, didn’t it?” Conall’s tone was light, but he watched the Professor with the same wary attention he usually reserved for venomous animals. “The TechCorps tried that, too. Didn’t end so hot for them.”

  “You’d like that explanation, wouldn’t you? It’s simple. Easy. Makes you feel safe.” He shook his head and turned his attention back to Nina. “It worked, perhaps too well.” His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “It made us impossible to control.”

  Nina sucked in a sharp breath. “So you broke out.”

  “We didn’t have to. We’d convinced the scientists that we wanted to be there. We bided our time, and eventually we just … walked out.” He paused. “It was beautiful, actually.”

  “I guess they learned from their mistakes.” Her finger tightened on the trigger. “I spent my entire childhood being treated like a criminal. Locked up like an animal. Is that part beautiful, too?”

  “Nina.” Knox took a step forward, the movement putting him in position to intervene—or take down the Professor with a flying tackle. “The girl.”

  That wiped the smile from the Professor’s face. “That was my miscalculation, leaving behind my DNA. It wasn’t important enough to include in my plans. I didn’t realize it would ever matter.” He gestured to a chair at the end of the table. “May I?”

  “This isn’t a fucking tea party,” Maya muttered under her breath.

  But Knox was already nodding curtly. “Sit,” he ordered. “And talk. No more vague rambling. Tell us what the hell you got us into.”

  The man took the chair, swung it around, and sat without taking his gaze from Knox’s face. The movement displayed perfect awareness and somatic control, a lazy grace that could turn lethal in a heartbeat.

  If Gray ever had to kill this motherfucker, he wanted to be half a mile away with his favorite rifle and clear line of sight.

  “My strain was one of the first to be decommissioned,” he said flatly. “You have some experience with that, don’t you, Nina? They learned that early, too—if you have problems with your subjects, you discard them and start over. The fault must be in the DNA. It’s bullshit, of course, but I understand the impulse. Anything to regain some measure of control.”

  Nina stared at him with growing horror.

  “Decommissioned DNA is wasteful. Maintaining it uses up valuable resources, but they can’t simply throw it away. Just in case.”

  “So they sell it,” Nina breathed.

  He nodded. “To other research centers, hospitals, biotech companies. Even private concerns.”

  Gray clenched his fists. “Anything to make a buck.”

  “You have no idea, Sergeant Gray.” He reached inside his jacket, prompting a warning growl from Knox. The Professor raised both eyebrows and slowed his movements in a placating gesture.

  Then he pulled out a cigarette case and tossed it to Gray.

  He caught it reflexively, then immediately wanted to drop it. The man knew Gray wanted a smoke. It didn’t matter if he’d found the information in a dossier, talked to an old acquaintance of his, or plucked the knowledge out of the fucking air based on nothing more than intuition or a lucky guess.

  Gray didn’t like it.

  He threw the case back with more force than strictly necessary. “No, thanks.”

  “Suit yourself.” The Professor tucked the case back into his jacket’s inner pocket. “Emerge BioCore Systems has been buying decommissioned strains from the Center for a while now.”

  “Why?” Slowly, Nina holstered her weapon. “What’s their game?”

  “Children.” The word fell into the room like a flash-bang grenade. “Full customization, with a wide range of alterations.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Any? All?” He shrugged. “I’m quite sure they don’t ask. But they do a brisk business. The facility you hit tonight is a final handling point. They do outbound shipping. That’s why I had to convince you to do it, Nina. It was my last chance to retrieve the girl.”

  It was good that Nina had put her gun away, because her hands were shaking. “You should have told us, John.”

  “You already said you wouldn’t have done it.”

  “I wouldn’t kidnap a child,” she countered. “But this? This was a fucking rescue mission.”

  He blinked at her. “There’s a difference?”

  She turned away with an exasperated groan.

  The man rose. “In that case, you should know that Emerge is shipping additional cargo through that facility—”

  Gray moved. It wasn’t one of those things where he didn’t mean to or he was so full of righteous anger that he didn’t realize he was going to until it happened. He planned it, and he meant it.

  The plan, however, was to grab the man by his jacket and haul him to his feet. Instead, Gray locked a hand around his throat and lifted him.

  “They’re not cargo,” he growled. “They’re kids. And you’re just now telling us there were more of them locked in those cells?”

  John stared at him, unperturbed by the violent threat inherent in Gray’s grip on his throat. “My mistake.”

  “How many?” Knox asked flatly.

  “According to my intelligence, at least five others in this shipment.”

  Motherfucker.

  Nina gripped the edge of the table. “Let him go, Gray.”

  “I don’t particularly want to, Nina.”

  “Do it anyway.”

  Slowly, millimeter by millimeter, Gray relaxed his fingers. Instead of scrambling back, the Professor stood there until Gray dropped his hand.

  Nina turned. “Get out, John.”

  His brows drew together in a stormy frown. “The girl—”

  “You can’t have her.”

&nb
sp; He glanced around the room, his gaze lingering on each of them with calculation so plain Gray could almost hear it echoing in his head. He was wondering if he could take them all down before they managed to get him.

  “Try it,” Gray murmured. “I’m begging you.”

  The man’s jaw clenched—the first real emotion the bastard had shown since his arrival. He straightened his jacket with a sharp snap, then turned and left without another word.

  Knox exhaled sharply. “Conall—”

  “I’ll make sure he’s gone,” Conall promised, clutching his tablet. “And check Emerge’s feeds. They may not have locked me out yet.”

  “Do what you can.” Conall rushed from the warehouse, and Knox drove his fingers through his hair before glancing at Nina. “Is she safe upstairs if he comes back?”

  “He won’t come back.”

  “How do you—?” Gray’s words cut off as another wave of dizziness hit him. This time, it wasn’t mild enough to lock his knees and grit his teeth through it. It crashed over him, nearly driving him to the floor. His muscles cramped, and hot bile rose in his throat as agony joined the nausea.

  “Gray?” Maya’s voice was laced with worry. “Gray!”

  He slumped to the floor, and black nothingness rushed up to greet him.

  CONTRACT FOR EXECUTIVE EMPLOYMENT

  Page 1/371

  Employee Name: DC-031

  Position: Data Courier

  Executive: Birgitte Skovgaard

  Start Date: May 21st, 2070

  Compensation: 1000/month stipend in credits, yearly executive profit sharing options to be held in trust by Birgitte Skovgaard until DC-031’s 21st birthday (May 21st, 2083).

  Duties: (Listed pages 2–371)

  Signatures

  DC-031

  Employee

  Birgitte Skovgaard

  VP Behavior and Analysis

  THREE

  Maya was usually better in a crisis.

  Lord knew she’d seen her share. Jobs gone wrong, Protectorate raids, bar fights, and shoot-outs—and that was after she’d escaped from the TechCorps.

  Maya had learned to keep her cool. After all, she’d already been through the worst life could throw at her. She’d been helpless and alone, caught in the sadistic clutches of the TechCorps’ VP of Security. And she’d survived.

  Gray hitting the floor in an unexpected seizure shouldn’t have rattled her brain so hard it fritzed out.

  Luna arrived from the upstairs apartment she shared with her aunt at a dead run, her T-shirt inside-out and her ponytail listing on her head. She may have dressed in a hurry, but she wore an expression of utter confidence as she used her tablet to connect to Gray’s implant—and for good reason. The biohacker was an expert in TechCorps implant maintenance, a literal prodigy when it came to the delicate neural interface that controlled all of the Silver Devils’ artificial enhancements. She’d been keeping them all steady for months now. She would fix this.

  Maya believed it. She just couldn’t stop panicking.

  This was Gray. Solid, implacable Gray. He was like an ancient oak tree in the middle of a raging storm. Nothing shook him. Sometimes it seemed like nothing even touched him. She’d stared at him for what felt like hours, trying to figure out what was going on behind those delightfully brooding eyes. For a while, she’d tried to attribute her attention to good old-fashioned self-preservation. An apex predator had moved in, after all, and she’d always had well-honed instincts for danger.

  But the awareness that prickled over her when he entered a room wasn’t fear. And Maya had never been very good at lying to herself.

  The seizure had subsided, helped along by Knox administering some sort of drug up his nose. Now, Gray was dreadfully still, his forehead covered with a sick sheen of sweat.

  “Got it.” Luna’s brows drew together as her gaze raced over the tablet’s screen. “This can’t be right.”

  Knox’s voice scraped over Maya’s raw nerve endings like his words were coated with gravel. “What is it? What’s happening?”

  Luna barely glanced up. “I can’t adjust his implant. According to this diagnostic, it doesn’t need maintenance. Everything is normal.”

  “This is not normal,” Nina insisted.

  “No, I know.” Luna drove a hand through her hair, dislodging the ponytail and tangling the white streaks she’d bleached into the dark brown. “But whatever the problem is, it’s not his implant.”

  Maya’s stomach flipped. Her brain skittered in too many directions at once, words tumbling over one another—medical assessments and proprietary experimental data and all the scary Latin names for things that might be slowly killing someone with Gray’s biochem implant. But she couldn’t latch on to a thread and pull it free because there was too fucking much, and she didn’t even know where to start.

  What the fuck good was having what felt like half the knowledge of the known freaking universe throbbing in your head if you had to just stand there and helplessly watch someone die?

  Luna was still speaking. “Without more information, I can’t narrow it down. We need a proper doctor.”

  Nina exhaled sharply. “A neuroengineer?”

  “Preferably a TechCorps-trained one.”

  “No,” Gray croaked. “We don’t.”

  “Gray.” Knox gripped his shoulder gently. “You need help. We can find someone.”

  “There’s nothing they can do, Captain.” Gray’s expression was calm, almost serene. “I’m rejecting my implant.”

  The words tumbling end over end through Maya’s aching head zeroed in on chilling specifics. Elevated ICP and inflammatory fibrosis and foreign body response. The pressure was unbearable, and her lips parted before she could stop them.

  Her dispassionate recitation fell into uncomfortable silence, the words crisp and clipped, a perfect re-creation of the posh British accent of the scientist who’d issued the report to Birgitte. “‘In a certain percentage of recruits, implant rejection is immediate—and fatal. In a smaller subset, rejection may be delayed by a matter of months or even years. It is unknown what, exactly, triggers this belated response, but it seems to be linked to difficulties with neural interface installation.’”

  Knox’s expression tightened. “Delayed rejection happens, but I’ve never heard of it happening after twenty years.”

  “What can I say?” Gray struggled into a sitting position, waving Knox away when he reached for him to help. “I’m an overachiever.”

  Nina eyed him dubiously. “None of this was in your medical paperwork.”

  He didn’t seem to question that of course Nina had reviewed his charts. “One of the techs told me while I was in recovery after my implant procedure. The surgeon had trouble, but he told them not to mark it down.” Gray grinned. “Guess he didn’t want me fucking up the bonus linked to his success rate.”

  Little flares of pain shivered up Maya’s arms. She looked down and saw that she’d clenched her hands into fists so tight that her nails were cutting into her palms.

  It made too much sense. It was everything Birgitte had loathed about the TechCorps, everything she’d been fighting to tear down. There were soldiers like Knox and Gray, people who lived twenty-plus years with their Protectorate implants, but even they couldn’t pull the average life expectancy up over eight years.

  Most soldiers were dead by year five.

  Of course they’d lied on Gray’s medical charts. The odds of Gray being killed in action before rejection ever became an issue had been in the surgeon’s favor.

  Fuck that guy.

  At least the rage helped burn away her panic. “I know specialists,” she told Gray. “Defectors. I can find someone to help you.”

  His smile vanished, and a look of remorse flitted across his features. “I’m sorry. If it was that easy, Maya, I’d do it.”

  There was nothing easy about tapping into her network of failed revolutionaries. They spanned the city and beyond, living quiet, careful lives. Scientists and analy
sts and administrators, people who’d once held access to the deepest, darkest corners of the TechCorps. People who knew about doctored files and acceptable losses and all the exploitative corruption that had driven Birgitte to rebellion.

  Of course, Gray couldn’t know about her network. The rebellion had been put down swiftly and silently. As far as most of their less seditious coworkers knew, Birgitte had been promoted to lead a satellite facility, and Maya had escaped during the transition, only to turn up dead in a ditch within the year. The TechCorps liked to keep things tidy. Dani and Nina were the only people who knew the full, ugly truth. Everyone else only knew bits and pieces of it, fractions of the whole.

  But her contacts knew she was alive. And every time Maya reached out to one of them, she risked betraying her continued existence to Tobias Richter, the head of TechCorps security—and a man who featured prominently in her darkest nightmares.

  For this, she would chance it.

  She gathered her courage and parted her lips, ready to explain—

  Conall burst into the room, trailing curses. “God fucking damn it, Emerge is on the move.”

  He tossed a tablet to Nina. She flipped through the screens, but every camera showed the same thing—empty rooms and deserted hallways.

  She breathed a curse. “Damn John, anyway. If we’d known, we could have at least planted trackers on their vehicles.”

  Knox agreed. “Now we’ll have to do this the hard way.”

  “We need to roll out now,” Conall said. “Scour the place top to bottom. I’ll check the satellite feeds.”

  “Tia Ivonne can look after the child.” Nina turned to Maya. “Will you stay here with Gray?”

  A deceptively simple question—and a terrifying one. Staying here to run their community library on her own should have been a breeze compared to strapping on armor and going out to chase mad scientists across the decaying wilds outside Atlanta. But retrieval jobs never felt that dangerous with Dani and Nina around.