The Devil You Know

by Kit Rocha

  Gray made her judgement suspect.

  But Gray wasn’t the reason she wanted to do it again. And even her out-of-control hormones couldn’t entirely drown out the remembered freedom of that moment when she’d really let her brain off the leash. The reckless joy of it. Like she’d flexed a muscle she hadn’t known was there, one that had been stiff and aching from neglect.

  She’d been waiting for the crash all afternoon, but the usual ache at the base of her skull was gone. So was the restless itch under her skin, the pressure that came from everywhere and nowhere. And the jittery energy setting her leg to bouncing didn’t feel like impending sensory overload.

  It felt like … anticipation. Excitement.

  Like maybe she could kiss Gray, and her brain might not explode after all.

  Nina was still watching her with those serious, concerned eyes. Maya forced herself to stop thinking about Gray’s lips. “I didn’t know I was interested in training like that, either,” Maya promised her. “It’s not how they taught me to think about myself. Other people have the superpowers. I’m just … trivia girl.”

  “Bullshit,” Dani protested.

  But Nina’s expression had darkened, and she spoke haltingly. “Have we made you feel that way, too?”

  “No.” Maya reached out to grip Nina’s wrist. “Nina, no. You’ve always been the opposite. Hell, remember when you first took me in? I was scared to leave the damn house. You two taught me how to take care of myself.”

  “Sure,” Nina agreed. “But I should have seen that you needed more.”

  “How? I didn’t know I needed more.” Maya leaned forward, bracing her elbows on her knees. “But it felt good to use those parts of my brain. It felt like I’ve been pulling my punches my whole life, and I finally just got to swing.”

  “Then keep swinging.” Dani dropped across the bed. “What other kind of magic tricks can you do?”

  “Fuck if I know.” She grinned at Dani. “Got any ideas?”

  “Hmm.” The look Dani gave her was pure innocence. “Maybe we should ask Gray.”

  Maya lunged toward Nina. “Give me the pillow back. I’m going to hit her this time.”

  “Try it, baby,” Dani taunted.

  “No.” Nina held Maya back and pinned Dani with a mock severe look. “You two want to duel, we do it properly.”

  “Fuck that,” Maya muttered. “If she wants to duel, I’m gonna tell Rafe she doodled his name in her diary with hearts around it.”

  Dani gasped. “Lies.”

  “Yeah, I took that too far,” Maya admitted. “You would never keep a diary. You’d probably just carve his initials into trees with one of the five thousand knives you had on you.”

  “He wishes.”

  “Yeah. He really does.” Maya leaned into Nina’s side, relieved that the tactile contact didn’t overwhelm her. Sometimes she just needed a damn hug. “Okay, I will consider the possibility of kissing.”

  “Don’t worry,” Dani said immediately. “I won’t tease you.”

  “Yes, you will. And you’re the only one who gets to.” Maya wrapped her arm around Nina’s waist, leaning into her embrace. Tears stung her eyes. “Have I mentioned lately that I love you both, even when you make me do cardio?”

  “It’s always nice to hear it again.”

  “Yes, yes, love all around.” Dani rested her chin on her hands. “I want to hear more about this superpower Maya has. Spare absolutely no ballistic detail, please.”

  Maya laughed. And then she obeyed, because she had never been able to deny Dani or Nina anything.

  They were the only family she’d ever had.

  TECHCORPS PROPRIETARY DATA, L1 SECURITY CLEARANCE

  Our current aptitude and assessment criteria for recruitment to Protectorate sniper training overwhelmingly selects for candidates who show significant antisocial behavior. Attached, please find my full analysis, which is based on data compiled over the last two decades.

  I believe that continuing to overlook these warning signs will result in tragedy.

  Internal Memo, June 2065

  NINE

  Gray was a light sleeper.

  Some people assumed that was a habit all soldiers shared. And it was true that years of military life and fieldwork had shaped Gray’s sleep patterns. But some Protectorate recruits in his class had slept like logs, and not even the harshest punishments levied by the drill instructors had been able to break them of it.

  It had always baffled Gray. How could anyone lie there, snoring and drooling, insensate to the activity around them, much less blaring alarms? If he’d ever slept like that in the group home, he’d have had all his belongings stolen—or worse.

  He’d gotten a little better over the years. He no longer jerked awake at distant noises, his heart thudding painfully, but the barest whisper of footsteps would still rouse him. He’d open his eyes, lying still and alert as he assessed the potential danger of the situation.

  He didn’t get the chance this time. There was no noise, no warning, only steely fingers that locked around his throat. They pressed in on either side of his neck, cutting off the blood flow to his brain.

  Most people assumed that effective strangulation was about being unable to breathe. But it took over thirty pounds of pressure to completely occlude the trachea—you really had to use an arm or a knee, and fucking commit. But a fraction of that pressure applied precisely to the major blood vessels of the neck?

  Your target would lose consciousness in as few as ten short, easy seconds.

  Instinct kicked in. Gray bucked, attempting to break free of his assailant’s grip, but whoever it was held tight. A heavy weight dropped onto Gray, pressing him into the cot, quelling his struggles.

  But not trapping his hands. He lashed out at the shadowy figure on top of him, a flurry of blows that should have landed. But his attacker ducked and bobbed his head, somehow managing to avoid Gray’s fists.

  A gentle rasp cut through the pounding of the blood in Gray’s ears, the sound as familiar as it was deadly—a knife clearing a ballistic nylon sheath.

  Shit.

  Gray twisted his body as the blade slammed down, tearing through his pillow. The second blow sliced across the top of Gray’s shoulder, and he gritted his teeth against the searing pain. His assailant was already adapting to Gray’s evasive maneuvers, which meant the next thrust wouldn’t miss.

  With a mighty heave, Gray shoved hard at his attacker, spilling them both from the bed to the floor. His slashed shoulder hit the concrete with an agonizing jolt that made his vision go white. A roar filled his ears, so loud he almost missed the sound of the knife skidding across the floor. He pushed through the pain and rolled, struggling to pin his attacker.

  He couldn’t make it stick. Their murderous intruder was well-trained, maybe even as well as Gray himself. They struggled, crashing about his little area of the makeshift barracks, slamming into boxes and knocking them over. Once, the would-be killer—because that’s what this was, no doubt, an attempted assassination—managed to grab hold of Gray’s hair and smack his head against the floor.

  The world imploded. An inky blackness darker than the room began to dance before Gray’s eyes, and he kicked out. His foot grazed the heavy metal footlocker at the end of his cot, and Gray almost laughed.

  He might not be at full fighting trim, but he’d grown up hard, and he wasn’t afraid to fight dirty.

  He clutched the front of his attacker’s jacket and rolled again, using their joint momentum to pick up speed. He calculated the distance automatically, adding force at just the right time to whack his uninvited guest’s head against the footlocker.

  The resulting grunt of pain startled Gray. Before he could pause to figure out why, the man surged up, and Gray hit him with a hard right to the jaw. The force of the blow reverberated up Gray’s arm, and he drew back for a second, harder swing. Rule of twos—one to stun, and one to end the fight for good.

  “Go on, kid. Do it.”

  The low wor
ds scraped at Gray’s brain, and he froze, his fist upraised, his heart in his throat. The roar of blood in his ears was back, filling his head until there was no room for anything else. No action, no thought, just still, icy horror.

  Vaguely, he heard yelling. Heavy, running footsteps. Then the overheads switched on, flooding the barracks with feverish, blinding light.

  Conall’s voice. Rafe’s. The sounds flowed over Gray, past him, without penetrating his consciousness. Every single cell of his being was focused on the impossible, bleeding man beneath him.

  Gray’s stomach lurched, and his lips formed the name in a barely audible whisper, one that ricocheted through his chest like a low-velocity bullet tumbling around inside his rib cage.

  “Mace.”

  KNOX

  The cool edge of metal biting into Knox’s fingers was the only thing that felt real.

  He tightened his grip on the dog tag, holding it until he swore he could feel the raised text on it burning its way into his palm.

  James Mason. MD-701. Silver Devils.

  A memento of a dead man. A dead man who was currently zip-tied to a chair on the far side of the room, enduring Rafe’s patient interrogation with a blank expression. Dani hovered nearby, her body coiled with readiness. At Mace’s slightest twitch she’d pounce, protecting Rafe from attack.

  Mace didn’t look like a man planning on twitching.

  Hell, Mace didn’t look like a man planning on surviving.

  “I don’t get it,” Conall whispered fiercely. He had a tablet gripped in one hand, his fingers a blur as they danced across its surface. “We have a back door into Security. I have read everything that mentions us. There’s nothing about Mace still being alive. Or even some plan to impersonate him.”

  “Richter has a shit ton of latitude inside the TechCorps,” Maya replied, her gaze fixed on Mace. “Sometimes he runs projects off the books. They don’t care as long as he gets results and doesn’t exceed his budget.”

  In an uncharacteristic explosion of temper, Conall pitched his tablet into the wall. The screen cracked as it crashed to the floor. “Then what the fuck good is it?”

  “Hey.” Maya squeezed Conall’s shoulder. “You knew this was a possibility. That’s why people like me exist, to keep track of the secrets they won’t even put in their own systems. This isn’t your fault.”

  Knox stared at the spiderwebbed cracks on the tablet’s face, his thoughts every bit as fractured. He should be the one comforting Conall. The pain in the younger man’s voice cut deep, but not as deep as the guilt.

  Mace was alive. Mace was alive.

  And while the rest of the Silver Devils—his brothers—had been settling into their soft life of freedom, tiling bathrooms and building a clinic in Mace’s honor, he’d been locked in some dank, forgotten hole in the depths of the TechCorps, tortured and alone.

  Tortured and abandoned. Knox had left a man behind.

  Nina wrapped her fingers around his hand and squeezed firmly, forcing him to meet her gaze. “Don’t. If Richter’s behind this, this is part of his plan. You, blaming yourself. So don’t.”

  She was right. Knox knew she was right. But the only thing worse than the guilt gnawing him from the inside out was how easily his brain still clicked over into clear-eyed assessment of the situation.

  It shouldn’t be so easy to view a friend as a security threat.

  “Conall.” He used his captain voice, and it worked its subconscious magic on Conall. He straightened, ready for orders, and Knox provided them. “Get your equipment so you can scan him again for tracking devices. Make sure we didn’t miss anything. And see if you can connect to his implant and verify the serial number.”

  “Got it.” Conall picked up his shattered tablet and stalked from the room.

  “Let’s run it down,” Nina said quietly once he was gone. “Number one question is obvious: is it even really him?”

  “It’s Mace,” Gray countered. No hesitation, no doubt.

  Nina eyed him with gentle sympathy that almost hurt to look at. “I know you want it to be. We all do. But everyone in this room has been bioengineered, Gray. You know what the TechCorps can do with cosmetic surgery—”

  “It’s him.” Gray turned to Knox. “When we were fighting, even before I realized it was Mace, it felt … familiar. He was using moves you taught him, Knox. Stuff I watched you teach him.”

  Like Conall, Mace hadn’t come to the Silver Devils with the same basic combat training Gray and Rafe had received. As a medic whose augmentations tilted toward the mental over the physical, he’d needed a different style. Devious. Abrupt. Brutal. So Knox had taught him how to end a fight fast and dirty.

  “Assume it’s him, Maya,” Knox said. “He showed up trying real hard to kill Gray. What would you guess?”

  Maya tilted her head, her gaze growing distant. “I don’t know. Brainwashing, maybe?”

  “Brainwashing?”

  “Reprogramming.” Her voice had taken on that slightly detached tone, sliding from her usual warm drawl to clipped enunciation. “Even with the advances in neural reconditioning, success rates have been limited. Anyone can be broken with sufficient application of pain, but the results are unpredictable and the process is time-consuming.”

  “So why bother? It’s a gamble, at best. If Richter suspects you’re all still alive…” Nina shook her head. “There are easier ways to remedy the situation.”

  “Because it’s not just about killing us anymore,” Gray rasped. “He wants it to hurt like hell. It’s personal now.”

  It always had been. Knox’s knuckles ached with phantom pain, a reminder of those brutal days when Richter had kept them locked up in a forgotten TechCorps basement.

  How carefully he’d designed that prison and its five cells. Unbreakable polycarbonate walls. They’d all watched in horror as the kill-switch hidden in every Protectorate implant kicked into gear and Mace began to decline. Without biochemical adjustment, his death had been too fast, and still so agonizingly slow.

  Knox had shattered his hands against the wall between them, unable to tolerate the agony of watching his soldier—his friend—die alone.

  “It’s more than that,” Knox said quietly. “He’s the only weapon Richter knows I would never destroy.”

  Maya’s eyes tightened, her body tensed as if in remembered pain. “Fucking with your head would definitely be a bonus. Richter’s the kind of sadist who goes all in. Especially if he feels like you made him look stupid.”

  “Psychological warfare,” Nina whispered.

  “You have no idea.” Her voice trembled, just a little, and Knox didn’t want to know what Richter had done to put that dread in her usually warm gaze.

  Knox didn’t have to know. He could imagine. Richter’s reputation for brutality was unparalleled, even in the relatively coldhearted ranks of TechCorps executives.

  And Mace had been in his hands for months.

  A chair scraped across concrete on the far side of the room. Rafe rose, his expression too relaxed, too easy. He strode toward Knox with Dani stalking at his side, a perfect foil of barely contained agitation.

  “Well?” Knox asked when they reached the group.

  Rafe exhaled roughly. Up close, Knox could see the stress lines creasing his forehead. “It sounds like him, but he’s not really talking.”

  Dani snorted. “And when he does, he’s not making any damn sense.”

  Rafe winced but didn’t disagree. “You’d think if someone was impersonating him, they’d have shown up armed with enough knowledge to answer basic questions. But he’s not even trying.”

  Plans of action unfolded before Knox, a dozen possibilities, each hampered by the lack of solid intelligence. “Stay here,” he murmured to Rafe and Gray. “Keep an eye on Conall when he gets back.”

  Gray nodded. “Don’t worry. We won’t let him spin out.”

  Knox pivoted and started toward Mace, assessing him physically as he came closer. He was leaner than he’d been before. H
is dark hair was longer than usual and unkempt, and though Mace had always been pale, there was an unhealthy pallor to his skin.

  Like Knox, Mace was in his early forties. Unlike Knox, he no longer looked a decade younger. Pain had left its mark on his face. His nose had been broken at least once and left to heal crooked.

  The harshest change was his eyes. The warm, blue gaze that had set the injured and sick at ease was gone. Mace watched him approach with dead eyes carved from ice.

  Pain sliced through Knox’s palm. He eased his grip on the dog tag, but when he opened his fingers, blood stained its silver edge.

  That seemed appropriate.

  Knox stopped a few feet away from the chair. Mace could break free of the zip ties with one good heave of muscle—but they’d slow him down enough for Knox to have time to react. “Mace.”

  The answer was automatic, chilling, with the flat affect of recitation. “Mason, James. Medic. Designation MD-701.”

  Knox’s heart seized. “Mace—”

  “Knox, Garrett. Captain. Designation 66–615.”

  Knox crouched down to be at eye level with Mace. “Yes. I’m Garrett Knox.”

  “Gray, Matthew. Sniper. Designation 66–793.”

  Reciting his own designation was the standard training in this sort of situation. Reciting the rest of them … It was as off as the tone of his voice. Wrong. Terrifying.

  “Morales, Rafael.” A hint of desperation crept into Mace’s eyes. “Intelligence. Designation 66–942.”

  “Quinn, Conall,” Knox finished for him softly. “Tech. Designation TE-815.”

  Mace turned his head, his gaze darting wildly as he strained against the plastic ties binding his wrists.

  If he tugged much harder, he’d snap them, and the situation could easily escalate into violence. Knox lowered his voice, but the words still rasped out around the lump in his throat. “C’mon, old man. You and me are the only things standing between these puppies and certain death.”