by Kit Rocha
“I have no doubts,” he assured her. Rafe and Dani were still arguing, though they’d moved past combativeness into laughter and now were working their way around again. “Come on, let’s hurry back. It’s gonna be one hell of a debriefing tonight.”
March 30th, 2077
Richter’s data courier has continued to cultivate Marjorie as a friend. No creature raised by Tobias Richter could be anything but broken inside. He taints everything he touches. I have no doubts he’s using the girl to spy on me.
I need to find a way to separate Marjorie from DC-025.
The Recovered Journal of Birgitte Skovgaard
TWELVE
Maya couldn’t get the music out of her head.
Hours after everyone else had gone to bed, she climbed toward the roof and stepped out onto the walkway that connected their building to the one the Silver Devils had purchased. Kudzu had climbed the side of the warehouse to twine around the metal bars of the waist-length railing, but Maya always kept a space clear right in the center of the catwalk.
The view was perfect from here. She settled down, sitting cross-legged with her back braced against the warm metal. The night had begun to cool, but it was still humid enough that sweat dotted her temples, even though she’d stripped to a tank top and her pajama shorts before realizing sleep was impossible.
The Hill stretched out in the distance, a perfect, shining beacon. Towers of glass and steel pierced the night, climbing two hundred stories or more at their tallest. Tiny, blinking lights zipped between them in spite of the late hour. Even before the Flares, the people on the Hill had given up such barbaric notions as cars. Automated AirLifts carried the rich and privileged of Atlanta from rooftop to rooftop in elegant luxury. Their feet never had to touch the ground upon which the peasants strode unless they found walking among the less privileged charmingly retro.
It was a stomach-churning indulgence when babies in Five Points went to bed hungry and parents tried to make a handful of credits stretch for a week. Sometimes Maya stared at the flickering lights and felt sick with the memory of how often she’d lounged on cooled leather seats as Birgitte traveled between meetings. A VP of the TechCorps lived well, on the Hill, and so did her data courier.
Until they didn’t.
Maya stared at the glowing lights until her eyes burned, but memories of the Hill didn’t overtake her. Convergence still throbbed inside her skull. The low beat of the music. The scents: sweat, cologne, liquor, dry ice. Gray’s hand at the small of her back, a burning warmth she couldn’t stop feeling.
That was new. Her memory had always been focused primarily on auditory retention, and she’d been trained ruthlessly to ignore her other senses and focus on her duty. There were exceptions, of course. Moments she relived with such piercing clarity she couldn’t always tell memory from reality. But that was usually the bad shit. Trauma etched into her neurons with blood and tears and fear.
Gray’s touch was different. Gentle and sweet. Warm.
Good.
Closing her eyes, Maya thudded her head lightly back against the iron railing. It didn’t help. Too much had happened in the past forty-eight hours. In the past, she would have stretched out somewhere quiet and ruthlessly forced her mind back into disciplined order using one of the dozens of meditation tricks Birgitte had drilled into her.
It’s survival, Marjorie. You must stay in control at all times. They watch data couriers for signs of instability. Showing weakness could be fatal.
For years, Maya had struggled against what felt like the inevitable, terrified that if she slipped for even a second, she’d hasten her own downfall. Because that was the secret Birgitte had told her, the one data couriers weren’t supposed to know. Eventually, the stress on her brain would break her. Her only strategy to prolong sanity was rigid training, the cultivation of absolute control, and to avoid using the full extent of her gifts any more than absolutely necessary.
Maya had never questioned her. She’d never had a reason to question her. For all of Birgitte’s flaws, the last thing she would have done was endanger Maya in any way. Not out of affection but practicality—Maya had been the heart of Birgitte’s rebellion. The only reason the organization had even been possible. Maya’s stability and functionality had been her primary goal.
At least, Maya had thought it was.
With her eyes closed, Maya re-created that moment in the warehouse. The feel of the gun in her hands. The darkness behind the mask. The giddy feeling of her mind stretching, as if she’d kept it locked in a too-small box for years and it was finally getting the chance to move. An ever-present ache had vanished in those few precious moments when she’d just … let go. She hadn’t realized how much she was holding in until she stopped. And now she didn’t know how to go back.
She didn’t know if she wanted to go back.
A trip to Convergence should have put her flat on her back, especially after the stress and chaos of Mace’s unexpected arrival on top of two days of handling everything on her own. But as jumbled as her mind felt, it didn’t hurt. Maybe because she wasn’t fighting it.
Or maybe the hurt was coming, and it would prove Birgitte right. Maybe she’d fall the fuck apart.
Nina’s boots echoed on the walkway as she approached. “Okay, I left a message with Jaden’s people. He and Dakota are out on a run, so it could be a few days before we hear back.”
Maya opened her eyes slowly, half expecting the world to swim the way it sometimes did when she felt overwhelmed. But she just saw Nina, still dressed in jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt, looking ready to face down the world.
Everything was always a little less scary with Nina around. “That’s good,” Maya said, tilting her head in invitation to sit. “You think Jaden’s gonna be an ass about it?”
“I doubt it.” The corner of Nina’s mouth ticked up as she slid down next to Maya. “He may not like that Dakota and I had a thing, but he’s a stand-up guy. He doesn’t want a place like Emerge BioCore operating any more than we do.”
“No, definitely not.” Maya grinned. “Maybe he’ll try to poach me again to run his books. His last offer wasn’t bad.”
Nina laughed. “Apparently it wasn’t very good, either.”
“I like the benefits package here.” Maya’s smile faded as she tilted her head to rest on Nina’s shoulder. “Can I ask you something?”
“Always.”
“How do you know when they lied to you? The Franklin Center? How do you even start to untangle it?”
Nina didn’t answer right away. Instead, she looked up at the night sky, which was strangely light—and blank. There were never many stars this close to the Hill; the lights and skyscrapers tended to drown and blot them out. But a few remained, too bright and insistent to be ignored.
Finally, she spoke. “Honestly? I have no idea. Memory’s a tricky thing anyway, and when you throw in lies on top of that, shit gets muddled fast.” She turned her head and met Maya’s gaze. “Most of the time, I rely on things I know to be true now. Not just about the Center, but about myself.”
“That’s the part I’m not sure about.” Maya rubbed a hand over her chest, as if she could soothe away the tightness there. “I never even considered that Birgitte might lie about what they did to me. She was brutally honest, especially about herself and our situation. She was there to get a job done and to use me however she could.”
Nina waited.
“She told me so many hard truths.” Maya swallowed hard. “But that doesn’t mean she never lied, does it?”
“No.” Nina sighed. “Not all lies are as pretty as you’d think.”
Maya closed her eyes. “The first thing I remember them telling me is that the outside would be dangerous for me. That the sensory input would be overwhelming. They even discouraged us from learning any more than we had to for our jobs. It was basically, ‘don’t worry your pretty little heads,’ but they always made it sound like a perk. We didn’t have to do the boring schoolwork everyone else did. We got
to watch movies and shop instead.”
How many times had the TechCorps blocked one of Maya’s requests for advanced courses of study as unnecessary to her core function? How many times had Maya gone to Birgitte, pleading, every part of her itching with the need to learn more? Birgitte had always found a way to justify the additional education, but she’d never let Maya forget—she could have her education, but she had to be unremarkable. Silent, efficient, and, as far as anyone else knew, placidly content with her place in the hierarchy.
A happy, cosseted pet, just like the others.
Maya shivered. “After Birgitte told me that most data couriers break under the strain eventually, I always figured everything they told us was true, more or less. They wanted to preserve our usefulness for as long as possible, and what’s the point of teaching us things that will just clutter up our brain and use it up that much faster?”
Exhaling shakily, she admitted the thing Nina knew, the thing that lurked in silence between them every time Maya came downstairs with shadows beneath her eyes from another sleepless night. “I’ve been holding on so tight. Walking this damn tightrope … Trying not to burn out, trying to stay in control. But I want to live, Nina. And sometimes it feels like holding it all in hurts more than the world ever could.”
“Ah. You know, there’s something Knox told me—about when we met.” Nina shifted position, crossing her legs and taking Maya’s hand in hers. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he’s a terrible liar. Just abysmal.”
Maya fought a smile. “I think we’ve all noticed.”
“Exactly. But he still had to convince us to walk into a trap. He said Rafe coached him, and his biggest piece of advice was to lie with the truth.” Nina squeezed her hand. “Misrepresentation, Maya. For you, control likely is super important. But there’s more than one way to have control over yourself and over your abilities.”
Maya gripped Nina’s hand like a lifeline. Rely on the things you know to be true.
She knew Birgitte was a skilled, efficient liar.
She knew Birgitte would have done anything to protect her rebellion. Not needlessly or cruelly. She had been neither of those things. But ruthless? Willing to sacrifice her own happiness and well-being, and Maya’s, if it advanced her goal?
In a heartbeat.
Maya knew some nights she climbed into bed and dug furrows into her palms with her fingernails as the ghosts of other people’s words chased themselves around the inside of her skull in an incoherent Möbius strip of overlapping voices.
She knew some nights a listless nervousness drove her from bed in search of anything that would soothe that intangible itch inside her head. She’d pick up tasks and discard them, unable to focus long enough to find a cure for her restlessness.
She knew that it wasn’t getting better. But it wasn’t getting worse, either. And if being out in the Big Bad World was going to crack her head like an egg, wouldn’t it have happened by now?
That, she didn’t know.
“I have to throw it all out, don’t I?” She glanced at Nina. “Everything the TechCorps told me. Everything Birgitte told me. All of it.”
“Not all of what they told you is false,” Nina answered matter-of-factly. “But it’s all unreliable. Every goddamn word.”
It was almost as freeing as the moment in the warehouse. Maya tilted her head back and closed her eyes. “So … I guess I just start flexing my brain and see what happens, huh?”
“And remember—” Nina’s hand closed around hers again. “We’re all here for you, no matter what.”
“You always are.” Maya smiled gently. “And speaking of no matter what … How’s Knox doing? Did y’all get Mace settled in?”
“He’s next door, in a secure place. Knox is staying over there with him tonight.”
Maya trusted that Conall had blocked any potential signals from trackers, but she couldn’t stop from shifting nervously as her gaze drifted back to the Hill. In one of those shining buildings, Tobias Richter was sitting at his desk, no doubt gleeful at the knowledge he’d unleashed the cruelest weapon imaginable on the man who had escaped his grasp.
“Just answer the question, Marjorie, and this will all stop.”
Ice trickled down her spine as Maya scrambled to fill her mind with the music from Convergence. Or some nice, vacant FlowMac Pop. Anything but his voice.
When that didn’t work, she grasped for a distraction. “Does he seem … okay? Mace, I mean. Because he was their medic, right? A TechCorps-trained doctor. And if anyone can help Gray…”
“Honestly?” Nina exhaled sharply. “I don’t know yet. We have no idea what he’s been through, but he was almost certainly tortured. He may never be okay again. But I have to hope. For Knox’s sake.”
Wrong distraction. The memory surged like a rogue wave threatening to sweep her under. Rope bit into the already-raw skin at her wrists. Crueler than the plastic zip ties somehow as the rough abrasion pushed her toward sensory overload. She tasted blood. Just a little—Richter hadn’t dared do more than backhand her once, barely hard enough to split her lip. But the metallic scent of it overwhelmed her. Not her blood.
His.
Maya stumbled to her feet, locking her hands around the metal railing on the walkway. It bit into her palms, grounding her. She dragged in a breath, as deep as she could, and there was no blood, no sterile air cooled by the air-conditioning. Just a muggy Atlanta night, the air perfumed by the honeysuckle climbing up alongside the kudzu.
Nina didn’t touch her, but Maya could feel the hand hovering just shy of her back. “Maya?”
Another breath. A third. Maya managed to form words. “Are you up for some late-night training?”
A hesitation, then Nina relented. “Sure. Pick your poison.”
Maya pushed upright and managed a smile. “Hand-to-hand. Rafe’s taught me some new tricks. I might surprise you.”
Nina’s smile was readier, brighter. “I welcome the challenge.”
She needed to move. Sweat. She needed to feel strong enough to face any ghosts that showed up. After all, Tobias Richter was the monster from her nightmares …
But he was just a man. A human. No special abilities, no inherent strength. Take him off the Hill, where he had power, and he was just another bully.
And she wasn’t a scared little girl anymore.
TECHCORPS INTERNAL EXECUTIVE COMMUNICATION
From: JOHNSON, J
To: RICHTER, T
Date: 2066–07–03
Why the hell did you let Skovgaard lay four fucking years of paper trail on this guy? Your tamed killer snapped, and now we have an entire Protectorate squad that was massacred by one of their own, two dozen civilian bodies to explain, and the VP of R&D is burying her favorite grandson tomorrow.
Someone is going down for this. You’d best decide quickly who it’s going to be.
From: RICHTER, T
To: JOHNSON, J
Date: 2066–07–03
It’s being taken care of.
THIRTEEN
Mace was in the kitchen.
More precisely, he was sitting at the ladies’ dining table, a steaming mug in front of him. Gray paused in the back doorway, struck by how fucking normal a picture he presented.
Nothing had been normal about Mace since his miraculous return from the dead. He wouldn’t sleep in the warehouse, barracks-style, with the rest of the Devils. He’d insisted on being separated, so Knox had given him the one private room they’d already finished. It had been meant for Knox, but seeing as how he spent most of his nights in Nina’s bed, he’d been more than willing to give it up.
He’d drawn the line at locking Mace in, however. And no amount of argument from their recently resurrected medic had been able to change his mind on that subject.
So Mace had locked himself in. He’d asked Rafe to find him a giant mag bolt, the quick-deploying kind you used when you were running out of a job hot and you needed to put a few precious seconds of space between you and y
our pursuers. Then he’d slapped that thing on his brand-new bedroom door and disappeared behind the wood.
The metallic rasp of such a lock engaging had always been a nothing sound to Gray—muted, inoffensive, easily ignored—but now it was seared into his brain. It had haunted his dreams the previous night, displacing more welcome things, like images of flashing neon lights reflected off Maya’s full lips.
Gray shook himself. He couldn’t stand there forever, with uncertainty pinning him in the open doorway. So he took a careful step forward—slow, deliberate. Loud enough to be heard.
Mace’s fingers tightened around the earthenware mug. Then the tension spread throughout his body, as if he was poised to spring from his chair and flee.
“Stay,” Gray urged quietly. “Please. We haven’t had a chance to talk since … Since…” He couldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence.
So Mace did it for him, with a wry twist to his lips that almost looked like a smile. Almost. “Since I tried to stab you in the head?”
Gray managed not to flinch. He tried to think of a reply, but nothing about the subject seemed safe enough to broach with his stilted, awkward words. Mace had been tortured, for fuck’s sake, then sent out into the city to find and eliminate the Silver Devils. Discussing it in such a mundane, domestic setting—at the kitchen table over morning coffee—seemed too bizarre, almost surreal.
So he took the coward’s way out—he changed the subject. “How did you sleep?”
“Fine.”
Gray snagged a mug from the rack near the sink. “Do you like your room?”
“It’s fine.”
Fine. Suddenly, the thought of coffee made Gray’s stomach roil. He abandoned the mug on the counter, sat down across from Mace, and just looked at him.
Mostly, he looked the same—blue eyes, sharp features, dark, spiky hair. Sure, he bore a pallor over his already-light skin, and his eyes were rimmed with red, but his face was the same one Gray had always known.