The Devil You Know

by Kit Rocha

  He could help her. He needed to help her.

  “Have you ever seen the ocean?” He pulled her hand away from her wrist before she could hurt herself and kept talking. “It’s a hell of a thing. Different everywhere you go. Down in Florida, the beaches are all soft sand, and the water is blue and green. But when you travel up the coast, everything turns to rock. And the water gets dark.”

  Her fingers flexed in his. She took a shuddering breath in and closed her eyes, tilting her head back against the boxes. “How far north have you been?”

  “I drove all the way up to the Canadian Territories once.” He kept his voice even and low. “I would have kept going, but they turned me back at the border.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Cold.”

  She nudged him with her elbow. “Tell me more. About other places.”

  So he did. He told her about flying through the Heartlands, looking down on the perfect, irrigated circles of the big agriculture co-ops as well as the tiny family farms. About the Mississippi River, how it was a whole mile wide in some places, which didn’t sound like a lot but sure as hell looked like an uncrossable chasm when you were staring out at the swift, turbulent currents. He told her about the mountains and valleys of east Tennessee, where some of the more insular communities had given up completely on modern technology. Being there was like stepping back in time, all simple wood cabins and oil lamps and livestock, and if the world ended again, Gray wasn’t sure they’d even notice.

  As he spoke, the tension slowly bled out of her. The line of her clenched jaw relaxed, and her hand closed around his. And it wasn’t a desperate bid to ground herself but a point of contact, of communion.

  Eventually, her eyes fluttered open. “Thank you.”

  “Anytime.” It sounded like a deflection, a casual, meaningless platitude, so he tried again. “Whenever you need anything, I’m here, okay?”

  Her lips quirked. “Watch out. I might take you up on that, and then you’ll have to tell me stories until I fall asleep every night.”

  She said it as if it were a ridiculous request, but if it gave her good things to hear as she drifted off, a way to stave off the nightmares, he’d do it. “Deal.”

  That won him a real smile before she rested her head against his shoulder, her hand still clutching his. “Is Mace okay?”

  The easy answer, the calming one, was right there on his tongue, But what tripped out instead was, “He stabbed Knox. Dani had to hop a table and sedate him for everyone’s safety, including his.” Gray sighed. “I don’t know what Richter did to him, but no. He’s not okay. Not yet.”

  “Dani probably has an idea what Richter did to him.” Maya’s voice dropped to a whisper. “So do I.”

  It explained a lot. “He’s the reason this happens to you?”

  She leaned into him, as if grounding herself against him. “There’s a thing about data couriers. We know all these secrets, right? Corporate espionage–level experimental tech, and all the skeletons in the Board’s closet. We’d be a massive liability if you could strap us to a chair and torture it all out of us.”

  “How do they keep that from happening?”

  “Too much sensory overload and I just…” She flicked the fingers of her free hand. “My brain goes offline. Full system reboot. It has to be pretty extreme to trigger a complete shutdown, but getting tortured is pretty extreme.”

  He managed to suppress a wince, but nothing could stop his shiver of revulsion. “They did it to you on purpose. Altered your brain so it’s harder for you to deal with stress.”

  “They did a lot of bad things to a lot of people on purpose. Including you.” She sighed and closed her eyes. “I know all of the horrible things they did. That’s one of the reasons Richter needed to break me. So many people were working with Birgitte. Passing her all the dirty secrets, undermining leadership from the inside. He had to make me talk.”

  “He would have done it anyway.” Even if Maya had known nothing about Birgitte’s rebellion, Tobias Richter would have broken her down into pieces so small and so scattered that putting them back together was a question of if, not when. It was what he did. “How?”

  Maya didn’t answer for a long time. When she did, her voice was a sad whisper. “His name was Simon. He was too young to be in Executive Security, but his dad was loyal to Birgitte, so she trusted him. And she was a VP. Nobody could tell her no when it came to staffing her own office.”

  She swallowed hard. “My only friend was another data courier a few years older than me. Cara. But she was Richter’s courier, and Birgitte hated that. She encouraged me to spend time with Simon instead. It was just the three of us most of the time, and Birgitte was so much older than us. And Simon was…” She sighed. “Young. Like me.”

  The truth, the part she wasn’t saying, trembled between her words. “You loved him.”

  “Maybe?” Her tiny laugh broke his heart. “I was nineteen. Maybe everything feels like love when you’re nineteen and it’s the first time. But he mattered. And I mattered to him. After Richter shot Birgitte, he pointed a gun at my head. Simon went with him without a fight. And spent the next three weeks getting tortured in my place.”

  Cold fury prickled over Gray. “What a dumbass move.”

  Maya went still against him. “What?”

  “You heard me.” Gray eased her away just enough to peer down into her confused eyes. “He blew it. If Richter needed intel that he couldn’t torture out of you, and he’d already killed Birgitte, then Simon was all he had left. That situation was only headed in one direction, and it wasn’t a good one. The kid should have taken a stand. At least he would’ve gone down fighting.”

  “But—”

  “And you wouldn’t have these memories.” He traced his thumb over her lower lip, stilling its fine tremor. “He was always going to die. But he could have saved you from this.”

  Tears filled her eyes. “I could have stopped it. I could have just told Richter what he wanted to know.”

  “You know better. It wouldn’t have saved him, just doomed dozens of other people, too.” Gray cupped her jaw, his fingers sliding under her ear, under the warm fall of her braids. “I will never let myself be used as a weapon against you, Maya. I swear it.”

  “I can’t think about it like that. I can’t—” The tears spilled over. She squeezed her eyes shut and turned her face into his hand. “How can I be mad at them when they’re dead and I’m fine?”

  “Being angry doesn’t mean you’re not sad or that you don’t love them anymore. Your feelings don’t have to be fair.” He pulled her closer again. “Hell, I’m mad at Mace right now. How fucked up is that? But I still love him, and I’m glad he’s here, and I’m going to do everything I fucking can to help him. If I can hold all that inside me, you’ve got room for a little resentment.”

  Maya buried her face against his chest, her arms going around him. Her shoulders trembled. “I hate being helpless when people are hurting.”

  He couldn’t do a damn thing about her past except comfort her when the memories grew claws and teeth and threatened to rip her apart. But the future was a different story, a clean slate yet to have any tragedy scribbled on it.

  “Okay.” He put on his most commanding voice, the one that made Knox roll his eyes and Rafe chuckle and everyone else in the world jump to follow his orders. “So we won’t let you be helpless, then.”

  She pulled back, wiping her eyes with shaking fingers. “Do I get to shoot things again?”

  “Even better.” He pointed at his face. “You get to punch me.”

  KNOX

  Knox couldn’t sleep.

  It wasn’t the fact that he’d been stabbed. The wound in his shoulder was inconsequential, all things considered. Instinct and experience had helped him there—Knox knew all the least harmful places to take a blade or a bullet, and Mace hadn’t exactly been aiming for maximum damage.

  Regeneration tech had already taken care of the issue. His shoulder itche
d, but Knox had long ago learned how to block out the singular discomfort of artificially healed wounds.

  Nina wasn’t keeping him awake, either. She was a warmth at his side, her chin pillowed on his uninjured arm, one of her long legs tossed absently over his. He liked the reassuring weight of her, the tickle of her hair over his skin when she shifted, her slow, even breaths.

  He’d never imagined that sharing a bed with someone could be peaceful, not after a lifetime of light sleep and combat awareness. But it was hard not to feel safe snuggled up next to a woman who could fight anyone into the ground. Including him.

  No, it wasn’t the stab wound, and it wasn’t Nina. Knox couldn’t sleep because Tobias Richter was winning.

  Mace was a perfectly honed weapon aimed at Knox’s most vulnerable spots. He didn’t even have to stab Knox to make him bleed. All he had to do was hurt, and he was doing plenty of that.

  Knox flexed his fingers. Most days, he forgot they were flesh over alloy and polymer. But he’d shattered his own bones trying to claw his way to Mace’s side as the medic lay dying. Knox’s dedication to his team was well-known, but after that performance, he’d given Richter a road map to his heart.

  Mace was in pain again. There wasn’t even a wall between them this time, but Knox still couldn’t fix it.

  And he couldn’t end it. Richter had known that, too. Mace could stick a dozen knives in him, and Knox would still hesitate to act.

  He’d already watched Mace die once. He’d die himself before killing him.

  Nina stirred, rubbing her cheek against his shoulder. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Knox lifted a hand to stroke her hair. “Am I keeping you awake?”

  “No.” She propped herself up on her elbow and leaned over him. “I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

  She wasn’t asking about his shoulder. Nina knew him too well. “This is what Richter counted on. Whether Mace escaped or was released doesn’t matter. This was the whole point—to turn him into a threat I can’t bring myself to neutralize.”

  “Well, then.” Nina hummed softly and placed her hand on his cheek. “It’s a good thing we have experience with those.”

  He turned his face into her palm and closed his eyes. “Am I doing the right thing?” he asked softly. “Mace is our family. We can take the risk. But you, and Dani, and Maya. If he hurt Maya—”

  “We’re practicing risk mitigation, Garrett. So far, he’s stayed far away from Luna, Ivonne, and Rainbow. Maya is never alone with him, and the rest of us are on our guard.” She brushed her lips over his forehead. “He’s your family, which makes him mine, too.”

  Knox slipped his fingers through her hair and tugged her down for a lingering kiss. “Thank you,” he whispered against her lips. “Thank you for saving us.”

  “You were worth it,” she said simply. “So is Mace.”

  To her, it would always be that simple. Nina believed in giving people a chance to be their best selves, even if they stumbled along the way. She was everything the TechCorps wasn’t. Open, generous, compassionate. Strong enough to give people a chance to disappoint her.

  All the instincts Richter had counted on when he’d unleashed an assassin on them. “How?” he asked, settling her against his side once more. “How do we fight someone who weaponizes all of our best impulses against us?”

  She was silent for a moment, then sighed. “You just answered your own question—you fight them. Literally.”

  “Can we? They control most of the food, the electricity, the fresh water. They have the tech. The weapons. Between the Protectorate and Executive Security, that’s two private armies, and God only knows how many classified experiments.” Knox closed his eyes. “How do you fight something like that?”

  “We don’t have the manpower or resources for a frontal assault, no. It would have to be a guerrilla campaign—quick, dirty strikes at carefully chosen targets. With the proper strategy and enough time, we could wear them down.”

  He let himself consider it. Not even the practicality of it, but the tactical possibilities. For all their shiny public relations, the TechCorps was hardly a happy family. Internal political wrangling for status and power could be brutal. More than one Protectorate squad had been swept up in those power struggles, only to be sacrificed in the name of someone’s next promotion.

  Knox’s skills as a captain had insulated the Silver Devils from the worst of it. But he’d seen the fractures. The Board sat so far above the daily grind of the rest of humanity that they’d practically evolved into a new species, incapable of comprehending the needs and desires of the rabble. The executive-level staff fought one another bitterly to ascend to that final pinnacle. And every person beneath them was just waiting for an opening.

  It seemed rife for exploitation, but that only went so far. Because as much as they craved power, as much as they laid traps and scrabbled for status or stabbed each other in the back, they all had one thing in common.

  They were terrified of the vice president of Security.

  “Richter’s the key,” Knox said finally. “If you could take him out, it would leave them vulnerable on at least a dozen fronts. But he’s the one person I can’t imagine getting to. You’d have to lure him off the Hill somehow.”

  “Don’t even think it,” she whispered. “You will not use yourself as bait. That’s one chance I’m not willing to take.”

  He stroked her hair soothingly again but didn’t deny the accusation. She did know him too well. “Even if I were tempted, I wouldn’t. We have too many people to protect. I can’t do that if I’m dead.”

  Nina sat up again, the scant light limning the bare curve of her back. “Ava would throw in with us, but it wouldn’t be enough. If we had more help—locals, people motivated to fight the TechCorps. Savitri, maybe, and Jaden Montgomery. That’s resources and manpower, right there. But we’d still need one more person.”

  She didn’t want to say it. He didn’t, either. But one of them had to. “Maya.”

  “I can’t ask her to do it, Garrett.” Nina’s voice held a rare note of pleading. “It’d be like you locking Mace away. I can’t, and I won’t.”

  “Hey.” Knox sat up and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her into his embrace. “I would never risk Maya. Never. She’s my family, too, now. Right?”

  “Right.” She shuddered and pressed closer. “We’ll bide our time. Make our plans and wait for our moment.”

  “There’s plenty we can do in the meantime,” he reminded her. “Get the clinic open. Prepare the shelters for winter. The TechCorps only win if people are hopeless, right? We can take that from them.”

  She tipped her face up to his. “It’s a start.”

  May 21st, 2078

  I thought limiting her would protect her and my hope for this revolution. What if I was wrong all along? What if she is the hope for this revolution, and I’ve stripped her of the tools she would need to win?

  The Recovered Journal of Birgitte Skovgaard

  SIXTEEN

  This time, Maya was ready for the blindfold.

  Still, she waited while Gray went through his recitation again—if it bothered her, if she started to freak out, it would all stop. Every single thing, immediately.

  Maya loved him a little for it.

  She held her breath as Gray gently tied the black silk in place. Pleasure tingled over her scalp as his hands smoothed her braids back over her shoulders, and she didn’t fight it this time. So few things felt good in this world. This? This she wanted to keep.

  She tucked it safely into her memory, along with the protective warmth of him at her back and the kiss of his breath against her temple. Next to the memory of his thumb grazing her lower lip and how safe she felt when he wrapped his arms around her and promised to protect her heart.

  That memory she held closest of all.

  Gray had already put her through the boring part of training. Ten minutes of watching him circle her on the padded sparring mats, fixing e
very sound into her memory with a visual to match. Except now that she understood what he was doing, she didn’t have to try. Her whole life had been a desperate struggle to absorb as little as possible of the world around her, to stave off sensory overload by disconnecting. No wonder she’d never realized the potential of her perfect memory.

  Noticing things really was a superpower.

  By the fifth minute, Maya could have closed her eyes and reconstructed the space so perfectly she could have found a pin dropped at ten meters. But she let Gray go for another five because she liked watching him move. He was graceful and deadly, every flex of muscle perfectly controlled, every movement planned with calm deliberation and executed with precision.

  She couldn’t see him now, but she could feel him.

  “The hardest part of fighting in the dark is finding your opponents,” he told her—conversationally, as if discussing the weather. “The faster you can locate them, the more of an advantage you’ll have.”

  Her instinct was to turn toward his voice. She could visualize him easily … a fraction of a meter behind her, slightly to the left. She could also remember how fast the Silver Devils moved. Maybe not quite Dani’s speed, but they could give Nina a challenge in a footrace, and Maya was never going to be on that level.

  But she could be sneaky. She tilted her head to the right, as if listening. “What do I do when I find them?”

  “What do you—?”

  She moved like Nina had taught her. No winding up, no tells. She lunged as fast as she could to where she knew Gray would be, using the momentum of her body’s turn to launch a punch from the hip.

  She hit air as Gray danced around her. “Good. Answering your own question.”

  His voice was close, but she didn’t swing again. A moment later she heard it—the whisper of his feet against the mat. Soft, barely audible … but she’d fought a hundred battles across this room. She knew the sounds of it in her beating heart, in her bones. She tracked him on instinct, keeping her hands up as she turned her body. “You know, it’s not fair for me to have to chase you around when you’re not blindfolded.”