by Kit Rocha
But he hadn’t beaten her. He was the one lying dead on a floor, not her.
And not Gray. His heart was still beating. Too fast, too weak, but it was beating.
Sure enough, after that, it started right up again.
Tobias Richter was dead.
Tobias Richter was dead.
It was too big a thought to absorb all at once. Trying to process it hurt, like the pins and needles of a limb waking up, only everywhere. The numbness cracked as she let the full impact wash over her.
Tobias Richter had gathered power into his own two hands for decades. His lieutenants were nothing but glorified henchmen. He’d never trained a replacement because he hadn’t trusted that replacement not to supplant him. It would take five people, minimum, to even attempt to do his job—five people working at cross-purposes, jockeying for position and power.
Maya had evaded discovery by Richter at the height of his influence. No one left at TechCorps HQ had a chance of outthinking her. Cara had escaped, and if she was smart, she’d keep running. But if she wasn’t, Maya would be facing off against an enemy she knew all too well. A grim part of her savored the challenge. A more vicious part anticipated certain victory.
No one left at the TechCorps scared her the same way Richter had.
And she knew those bastards’ secrets. Oh God, so many secrets. The vices of Board members. Their hidden vulnerabilities. Their second families. The sins they’d do anything to keep private. The people who were hungry to betray them.
Push a few buttons—the right buttons—and she could have half the Board at war with the other half.
Maya wasn’t poison. She was power. That’s why they wanted her so badly.
She could ruin their sweet little world.
Like it had never stopped.
The world snapped back into place, vivid and bright. Painful. Maya scanned the furious activity around her, her mind absorbing the chaos and sorting through it as if hungry for stimulation after its brief deprivation.
The ringing faded. Sound came back in patches. Her own breathing first, harsh and unsteady. Then Mace, calling out a command to Ava. “Keep him steady.”
Gray was still silent. Someone had wrapped the worst of his wounds, but there was nothing else Mace could do for him. Conall had problems the medic knew how to solve, so he had prioritized.
Maya had to prioritize, too.
Gently, she released Gray’s wrist and folded his hands over his chest. His too-long hair had fallen over his forehead again, so she tenderly stroked it back before leaning down to brush a kiss to his forehead. “You protected my heart,” she whispered to him. “Now it’s my turn.”
She let go of the world again, but this time she wasn’t in the eye of the hurricane.
This time, she was the hurricane.
Somewhere inside her vast and endless memories and her sprawling network of contacts was a chance for Gray. Maybe a remote one. Maybe a desperate one. But she’d scour the earth bare and sweep away anything in her path on her way to finding it.
And then she’d fight for him. Whatever the cost.
MACE
Mace had slipped back into the comforting detachment of running a trauma.
It wasn’t fun for him—nothing about this situation was—but it was familiar. He knew how to pivot from one patient to the next, putting out fires. Emergency triage had rules, and there was never enough time to linger over decisions so long they became painful to make.
Being in the clinic helped. It wasn’t finished yet, but he recognized it in his bones, the colors and smells, even the way the noises from the telemetry equipment echoed off the unfinished floors and bare walls.
This was what he knew. Where he did his best work.
The frantic drive back to the warehouse had passed in a blur of blood and desperation. He could have used Rafe’s help, but Rafe was busy keeping a hot-wired truck full of cloned children calm. Mace had managed to stabilize Conall on his own, but keeping him that way had taken all his focus.
And then there was Gray.
He’d had another seizure. It had subsided, and he was awake, but Mace would never go as far as to call him alert. He could move, but would only do so when guided, and he didn’t even blink at painful stimuli. His body was running on pure, adrenaline-fueled autopilot.
What Mace didn’t know—what scared the absolute shit out of him—was how hard Gray would crash once the adrenaline faded.
But that was a problem for five minutes from now. Maybe an hour, if they were lucky.
With Conall finally on a monitor, Mace studied the display. “Keep an eye on his blood pressure,” he instructed Luna. “If it starts to drop, it might mean he has another bleed. When Dr. Wells—”
Rafe ducked his head through the empty doorway, terror painted across his face. “Gray’s not breathing.”
Fuck. He immediately started for the door, but called back over his shoulder, “I want to know the second Wells gets here.”
Gray was lying on a gurney in the main lobby area. Nina stood over him, rhythmically squeezing air into his lungs through a mask secured over his face. Rafe had already set out most of what he’d need to intubate—laryngoscopes, tubes, paralytic drugs.
Mace checked his pulse, half of his attention on the reedy thumps in Gray’s wrist … and the other half on Knox. “It’s time to make the call, Garrett.”
“Which one?” Knox demanded.
“Do we put him on a vent,” Mace clarified, quiet but firm, “or do we let him go?”
Knox closed his eyes, his face stricken. “Can you fix him? Is there any chance at all?”
“No.” It was the only honest answer. “But intubation buys us time.”
Dani was leaning against the far wall, but her whispered question carried easily in the tense silence. “Time for what?”
Mace eased Nina to Gray’s left side, pulled the intubation tray closer, and started assembling the laryngoscope. “To figure out how to say goodbye.”
“Do it.” Maya stood in the doorway, her expression blank and her dark eyes unfathomable. She hadn’t allowed anyone to touch the wounds at her wrists, or even wash Gray’s blood from her hands and cheek. She looked fragile, dwarfed by Rafe’s sweatshirt, but her eyes were pure steel. “Put him on the vent. We’re going to try to replace his implant. He’d want to try.”
Mace didn’t wait for Knox to confirm her words. She had as much right to make the call as either of them; more, because she was the closest thing Gray had to a next of kin.
He nodded to Rafe. “All right, you heard the lady. Push the paralytic. We’re gonna go down fighting.”
The intubation was swift, smooth. Once Mace had confirmed the tube’s placement and hooked up the ventilator, he turned back to Maya.
“What’s next?” she asked.
“You and me? Later, we have a long, hard talk about Gray’s odds. I don’t lie, and I don’t give false hope. Before we go one step further, I want you to understand what we’re up against with this surgery.”
She returned his gaze, unblinking. Unflinching. “I have half of the bad outcomes in TechCorps history shoved into my head. I know the odds are almost impossible. Tell me who could help you. A TechCorps neurosurgeon? An implant specialist? A bioengineer?”
“If you’re offering, I’ll take all three.”
“How about Nikita Novak?”
The stress of the situation made his words sharper and shorter than he would have liked. “Yeah, sure. Bring me her, too. And maybe a unicorn while you’re at it.”
She gestured. “Dani—come with me?”
He moved on, already focused on the next thing on his mental checklist. It took him a moment, but he finally spotted Ava hovering just outside the room. “You. You’re rich, right?”
She stepped closer. “By most people’s reckoning, yes.”
“I need to outfit an OR. Will you help me?”
She looked at Nina. They stood there, facing one another like mirror images locked in silent communication. Final
ly, Ava answered. “Give me a list.”
All he could do now was wait. The tape securing Gray’s endotracheal tube had peeled up on one edge, and Mace carefully smoothed it back into place.
Beside him, Knox sighed roughly. “Are you ready for Maya to come back dragging Nikita Novak behind her? Because she will, you know.”
“Good.” If she managed to pull that off, she just might get her miracle after all.
TECHCORPS PROPRIETARY DATA, L2 SECURITY CLEARANCE
This is 66–793’s tenth psychological workup in nine years. His results consistently place him among the Protectorate’s most reliable and stable assets. But something about him continues to bother me.
I know he’s lying to me. What I don’t know is why.
Recruit Analysis, April 2075
TWENTY-SEVEN
The VIP ring worked like magic.
Dani flashed it at the guards, and they parted in silence. The party was still raging, even with dawn fast approaching. Maya barely noticed the tangle of bodies on the balcony this time. The music was a distant, annoying buzz. She was wrapped in a dozen layers of cotton, floating through a world that didn’t feel real.
This time, Dani didn’t wait to be acknowledged, and she wasn’t laying on the charm. She stopped in front of the dais, folded her arms over her chest, and announced, “We need the room.”
Savitri glanced at Adam, who stepped forward. “Come on,” he rasped. “Out.”
Dani ignored the command. “In my experience, it takes a while to break up an orgy, so you might want to get cracking.”
Adam sighed. “I will remove you, if necessary.”
Dani finally looked at him. “You can certainly try.”
He reached for her. Instead of dodging his grasp, she grabbed him, her slender fingers locking around his wrist. The move seemed to stun him—not so much the speed of it, but the audacity.
Her words were quiet, a whispered warning. “Consider your next move very carefully, Ryan.”
Savitri surged from her seat, but her expression was frozen. The abrupt movement drew attention from all over the room, a ripple that drifted through the crowd as heads turned and whispers started.
She clapped her hands together once. And people began to scatter.
Maya had to admire the swiftness of it. It turned out Dani was wrong—it didn’t take long to break up an orgy. No doubt the tension on the dais urged anyone with sense to run for cover. Savitri stood like a statue carved from ice, her eyes promising chilly death to anyone who crossed her. Adam and Dani were frozen in a silent battle, both fairly vibrating with the promise of sudden violence.
When the door had shut behind the final partier, Savitri resumed her seat. She crossed her legs, leaned back, and murmured one word. “Adam.”
It sounded like an instruction. “How?” he asked.
Dani released him slowly. “I recognized you.”
The set of his shoulders relaxed the tiniest bit. “Executive Security?”
She nodded. “Databases can be manipulated. But people remember.” She looked over at Savitri. “We always remember.”
“People,” Savitri said coldly, “can be made to forget.”
As threats went, it was far from idle. But all of their cards were on the table now.
Almost all of their cards.
Maya stepped forward, and for the first time met Savitri’s gaze head-on. She refused to be cowed by the power staring back at her. She had her own kind of power. “Do you remember Birgitte Skovgaard?”
Savitri’s brow furrowed. “The TechCorps VP of Behavior? Vaguely. I heard she was promoted to lead her own facility a few years back.”
“Yes, that’s the story.” Maya took a deep breath. Saying this out loud felt like handing Savitri a stick of live dynamite with a half-inch fuse. “Birgitte was the head of a reformist rebellion within the TechCorps. It spanned all seventeen departments and included everyone from VPs to janitorial staff. Tobias Richter found out about it and executed her. Personally.”
Savitri’s perfectly shaped eyebrow arched. Her gaze raked over Maya. “You’re what, twenty years old, at most? How could you possibly know that?”
“I’m twenty-four. And I signed my first executive-level contract with the TechCorps sixteen years ago.” Maya channeled the data courier Birgitte had raised. Ice cold, confident, fully aware of her precarious—but powerful—place in her world. How ironic that it was Cara who had taught her the true value of this haughty, fearless facade.
Maya didn’t care. She’d use the tools she had. “I didn’t introduce myself properly last time,” she said, the easy rhythm of Southside’s more casual speech gone. She made every word crisp and sharp enough for a boardroom on the Hill. “I am DC-031, former data courier to the vice president of Behavior and Analysis.”
Theatrical, perhaps, but Savitri rewarded her with a sharply indrawn breath—the first real reaction Maya had ever seen her make. Savitri leaned forward, eyes alight with naked avarice. “A data courier,” she whispered. “Out in the wild, and apparently no worse for the wear. Remarkable. I bet your brain is something to see.”
“No doubt it is,” Maya replied, refusing to back down. “And I’ll let you scan it until you’re thoroughly tired of looking at it. I’ll give you dirt on any TechCorps exec you want. I’ll owe you a dozen favors. But you have to come with me and try to save Gray. Now.”
“Gray?” Savitri sat back, her game face settling back into place. “The quiet one who was with you last time? What’s wrong with him?”
“Delayed implant rejection.”
“Delayed for how long?”
“Almost twenty years.”
“And his current status?”
“On life support.”
Savitri frowned. “He didn’t seem too far gone. What precipitated the abrupt decline?”
Maya dragged in a deep breath. It wouldn’t be a secret for long. Even if the TechCorps covered it up, rumors of Richter’s disappearance would tear through the criminal underworld. But speaking the words barely felt real.
“He was tortured,” she said softly. “By Tobias Richter. Gray killed him before collapsing.”
The words provoked the expected reaction. Savitri came out of her chair again, voice shivering with excitement. “Tobias Richter is dead?”
“Extremely.” Savitri’s bright-eyed anticipation only underscored the depth of Maya’s distraction. Without a doubt, this was the most pivotal turning point in Atlanta since the Flares. It was the realization of one of Birgitte’s most cherished goals. The monster from Maya’s nightmares had been slain.
But she had a new nightmare now. A worse one. Darker and real and digging loss into her heart as she laced her trembling fingers together to hide their sudden shaking. “I’ll tell you everything about it. Anything you want. Just please. Come help him.”
Savitri exchanged a look with Adam. Some sort of silent communication seemed to pass between them. Maybe it was actual silent communication. Maya wouldn’t put it past them to have subvocal comms or something even wilder. After a moment, Adam tilted his head. “Two percent.”
“Two percent,” Savitri said, turning back to Maya. “That’s the probable chance of survival for that sort of procedure, even with my considerable skills and experience. Will you still offer me brain scans and secrets and favors and anything I want for two percent, DC-031?”
Her designation left Savitri’s lips with a chilly precision that turned the query into a test. Savitri was probing for weakness, prodding to see how far she could push Maya. A political game endemic to the Hill and a sharp contrast to the blunt honesty of Southside, but Maya couldn’t be intimidated.
Not this time. Numbness had some benefits.
She lifted her chin and answered without hesitation. “If there’s even a fraction of a fraction of a percent, I’ll offer you the damn world. Just come. Now.”
Maya waited. For seconds. For years. Time had lost meaning the moment Gray started seizing. She waited as Savit
ri turned toward Adam again, waited as the two of them assessed risk or odds or maybe just drew out the moment for the drama of it all.
Then Savitri stepped off the dais. “Take me to him.”
TECHCORPS PROPRIETARY DATA, L2 SECURITY CLEARANCE
Recruit 66–793 is our top sniper. His marksmanship is unmatched. We are aware of Behavior’s continuing concerns about his emotional reticence, but we submit that if fourteen years of aggressive monitoring has uncovered neither troubling pathologies nor questions of loyalty, the issue should be considered resolved pending further developments.
He’s an extremely useful tool, Birgitte. Stop trying to throw him away because he creeps you out.
Recruit Analysis, May 2075
TWENTY-EIGHT
“I’ll take care of him,” Savitri promised, squeezing Maya’s shoulder briefly as Mace rolled Gray into the operating room. “You’ve given him the best chance possible.”
The best chance possible. Two percent of a chance.
“Come on.” It was Nina, warm and gentle at her side, coaxing her away. She followed because doing otherwise would require thinking, and she couldn’t do that. She couldn’t allow herself to think.
Unfortunately, it was the one thing she had never been able to avoid. Her brain, overwhelmed from the chaos of the past twenty-four hours, taunted her with endless worst-case scenarios. God knew she had enough of them shoved into her memory, an endless litany of the TechCorps’ experiments gone horribly wrong. Neurological experiments, physical augmentations, xenotransplants, tissue replacement—
After the ninth hour of surgery, Maya fled for the roof.
Unlimited resources and access to a genius had done their work. By noon, Ava and Mace had constructed a cutting-edge operating room. Savitri took confident control, conscripting Rafe and Ava to assist. She and Mace disappeared into it with Gray, while Dr. Wells hovered over an unconscious Conall.
There’d been nothing left for Maya to do but wait. Wait, pacing anxiously, while Dani tried to convince her to eat and Nina tried to convince her to sleep and Knox channeled all of his obvious panic into fretting over Maya.