by Kit Rocha
Their concern was well-meant and terrifying. The more they petted and hovered and tried to make her feel better, the more it felt like disaster was imminent. By hour five, her nerves were raw. By hour seven, she wanted to scream.
Nine hours in, she snapped.
But while her flight to the roof freed her from their solicitous concern, nothing let her outrun the anxiety.
Two percent. The number throbbed in her head, despite her best efforts to banish it. She settled cross-legged on the walkway and glared up at the TechCorps. Night had fallen at some point, and the bright glow on the Hill burned into her sleep-deprived eyes.
Little lights darted around the main building like nervous fireflies. Cars, carrying people to late-night meetings. Did they know Tobias Richter had gone rogue, yet? Did they know he was dead? The aftershocks of what had happened would rip through the TechCorps, eroding their foundation. They’d be vulnerable.
Two percent.
Maya squeezed her eyes shut.
Two percent wasn’t that low. The chances of drawing three of a kind in poker was barely over 2 percent, and she’d done that a ton of times. Only 0.2 percent for a flush, and she’d taken Rafe’s entire stash of fancy chocolates a few weeks ago after pulling one of those.
Four of a kind was 0.02 percent. Conall had won his way free of his bar tab at Clem’s with four kings a month back and had almost gotten into a fight over cheating—which he had not been doing—and counting cards—which Maya definitely had. She’d ended the night with a straight flush of bleeding hearts and only defused the fraught situation by using her winnings to buy everyone drinks.
A straight flush wasn’t even 0.002 percent.
There were so many numbers in her head. She worked her way through them, buying herself hope with blackjack, praying with poker, cataloging every long odd and lightning strike in TechCorps history.
Her eyes burned with the lack of sleep and her body coiled tighter and tighter, a spring that exploded into startled movement when the door opened at the far end of the walkway.
Maya lurched upright, so wobbly she had to grab at the railing to steady herself. Savitri stepped out onto the walkway in a pair of scrubs and strode to Maya, her lips moving.
Sound came slower, through an endless tunnel. Her blood was pounding in her ears so hard she couldn’t make sense of the words. Didn’t know if she wanted to make sense of them. If this was the moment she found out the worst—
Savitri touched Maya’s shoulder. Her mouth moved again, and this time the words slammed into Maya and knocked the breath out of her. “He made it through surgery.”
She struggled to inhale. To get enough air to ask the only question that mattered. “Did it work?”
“I replaced his implant, and I made some modifications to the interface, so rejection shouldn’t be an issue.” She held up a hand. “But complications can and do happen. We won’t know much more until he wakes up.”
Maya swallowed around sudden tears. “Will he wake up?”
Savitri smiled gently. “Obviously I can’t say for sure. But I think so. The surgery went smoothly. Your medic is very skilled. I have a good feeling.”
Maybe 2 percent was enough.
Relief surged through her body, sapping the last lingering strength adrenaline had given her. Maya gripped the railing until her fingers ached, and her words cracked. “Thank you. Thank you, Savitri.”
“Here.” Savitri gently pried her hand free and steadied her. “Sit. Before you pitch over the edge and crack your head open. I just operated for ten hours and I’m not young enough to enjoy back-to-back brain surgeries anymore.”
Maya sank obediently to the catwalk, her knees feeling like rubber. “I should have taken a nap. I just…”
“Couldn’t.” Savitri leaned against the opposite railing. The city rose behind her, framing her with its shimmering glow like a halo. For a giddy moment, Maya thought she looked like an angel.
Her words, however, were far more pragmatic. “You must love the man a great deal, to hand a person like me a secret like yours.”
No, definitely not an angel. Savitri might be dressed in scrubs with her hair in a plain ponytail, but her dangerous charisma hadn’t been all manufactured by makeup and expensive clothing. Even like this she was lethally beautiful, her light-brown skin flawless, her cheekbones sharp enough to cut, those dark-brown eyes watching Maya with a scary kind of brilliance.
Savitri’s full lips curled into a knowing smile. “Ah, yes. There’s the look. You made a hasty promise in a moment of weakness, and now you’re regretting the debt you incurred.”
“No,” Maya countered. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat, if it means Gray lives. But I’m not stupid. I know you could fuck up my life.”
“I could,” Savitri agreed. “And you could be a tremendously useful asset to me. Especially in a world without Tobias Richter. But here’s the thing, Maya. I don’t want your grudging acquiescence. I want your gleeful participation. Which is why I’m going to forgive this debt. I saved your man’s life, and you don’t owe me anything in return.”
Oh, like that didn’t sound too good to be true. “Sure.”
“Really.” Savitri tilted her head, a superior little smile curving her lips. “And since you trusted me with your secret, perhaps the quickest path to a mutually beneficial arrangement is to trust you with mine.”
The smart move was silence. She could let Savitri play out her little game and not let her know that the condescension was getting under Maya’s skin. She’d lived her entire life like that—pulling inward, making herself small. Pretending she wasn’t as smart as anyone else in the room.
Pretending she wasn’t smarter.
It was exhausting. Another thing she’d been holding in, and Maya couldn’t see the point. Tobias Richter was dead. He’d done his worst, and she’d beaten him. With help from her family, admittedly, but wasn’t that the damn point?
Maya wasn’t alone. She didn’t have to hide.
And she was tired of all the predators assuming she was easy prey. “Which secret is that?” she drawled. “We’ve already established that I know who you are. Nikita Novak, former lead researcher on the Guardian Project. And that Adam’s name is actually Ryan Lemieux.”
Savitri narrowed her eyes. Her patronizing smile slipped.
“We also know that Ryan Lemieux is supposed to be dead,” Maya continued. “Though to be fair, who here isn’t supposed to be dead? I assume you faked his death somehow.”
“I didn’t,” Savitri replied. “Ryan Lemieux is quite dead.” Her expression was still a pleasant mask, but her eyes … Oh hell, her eyes.
Pain. Rage. Loss.
Those could have been Maya’s own eyes, during those first horrible days after she’d escaped the Hill and was still grieving Simon’s loss. They might have been her eyes again if Savitri hadn’t come to a warehouse in Southside and used her skill and talent to give Gray a second chance at life.
Maya had too many emotional bruises to take pleasure in poking someone else’s. “You don’t have to tell me,” she said gently. “Your secrets aren’t my business.”
“No, I deserved it.” Savitri’s mouth quirked in a sad little smile. “I’m not used to sparring with people on my level.”
“It’s a pretty impressive level,” Maya acknowledged. “Level One specialist at twenty-seven.”
“Youngest in company history.”
“And the Guardian Project?”
Savitri shifted her weight against the railing and stared past Maya. “Do you know what the Protectorate’s problem is?”
Maya couldn’t hold back a rude noise. “They only have one?”
“Depends on who you ask. But if you ask the people in charge, the main problem is that smart men are hard to control and the ones who aren’t smart aren’t very useful. Take your Captain Knox—undeniably one of the Protectorate’s most talented recruits. They worked hard to keep him in a patriotic bubble in an attempt to secure his loyalties. Breaking
him would stunt the skills they found so useful, but he did have that terrible habit of thinking for himself, didn’t he?”
Confusion knotted Maya’s brow. “How do you know so much about Knox?”
“Because my job was to fix the problem he represented.” Savitri met Maya’s gaze squarely. “I was designing the next iteration of the Protectorate. Soldiers who wouldn’t suffer Knox’s fatal flaw.”
“Guardians,” Maya whispered. It was so like the TechCorps. A shiny name wrapped around a brutal lie. “But how would they…”
Savitri’s file flashed through her memory, the words dropping like stones in a pond.
Father, Dimitri Novak. L2 scientist, Bioengineering. Mother, Jaya Novak. L1 specialist, Neural Networks.
Her brain made one of its leaps. Endless rows of data, thousands of personnel files. All those TechCorps secrets that she could never escape. She knew almost every project undertaken involving neural networks. She knew most of the jobs that required a top-tier bioengineer.
She knew what sat at their intersection.
“You were making supersoldiers.” Maya could barely get the words out around her horror. “Ones who couldn’t disobey.”
“There’s no need to hide your disgust.” Savitri gripped the railing on either side of her body, the only indication she wasn’t as calm as her voice sounded. “Trust me. I’ve come to understand the full implications of what I was dabbling with.”
Maya doubted she could have hidden her disgust. Not from her face, or from her eyes, or from her voice. “Some sort of control implant.”
“Integrated Artificial Intelligence.” Savitri’s laugh held little mirth. “Of course, it wasn’t supposed to be AI the way most people think of it. After all, the last thing the TechCorps wanted to grapple with was true artificial sentience. But with sufficient behavior training, the theory was that we could create the perfect soldiers without all those pesky human flaws.”
They would have taken men like Gray. Like Knox and Rafe. Turned them into soldiers, only this time the TechCorps wouldn’t have needed the constant threat of a kill switch to keep them in line. Just some fancy little program hardwired into their brain that stripped them of the will to think, to want, to be.
It was worse than what they’d done to the Devils. Worse than what they’d done to Dani or Maya. Maybe even worse than what they’d done to Mace, because at least he could still fight.
This was worse than death. Worse than anything.
And Savitri had tried to make it a reality.
For one horrible moment, Maya wished the railing behind Savitri would crumble and send her on a thirty-foot tumble. In the next, she reminded herself of the truth—Savitri clearly hadn’t done it. And she was outside the TechCorps now, undermining them with gleeful regularity.
It still took effort to swallow down bile. “I don’t understand how Adam fits into it.”
“Most people don’t.” Savitri pushed off the railing and stared down at Maya. “Ryan took a bullet meant for me. They declared him brain-dead. But I know more about the human brain than anyone, so I decided to save him.”
Maya wet her lips. “I thought you said Ryan Lemieux died.”
“He did,” Savitri said just as softly. “But I’d trained my AI using his insights and personality. Ryan was my protector. The most brilliant, courageous, and compassionate warrior I had ever met. A true guardian.”
The impossibility of the implication was almost dizzying. Maya opened her mouth to ask the question, then closed it. Then opened it again. It was ridiculous. It was insane.
“Are you saying…” Maya hesitated. Tried again. “Is Adam…?”
“Adam is everything I made him to be.” Savitri smiled. “But more importantly, everything he chooses to be.”
Holy shit.
Savitri tugged her ponytail down and ran her fingers through her hair as she started for the walkway door. She paused with one hand on the handle, looking back at Maya. “Now we’re even. I’ll keep your secrets. You keep mine.”
Oh, sure. Maya was a runaway filing cabinet for corporate espionage, and Savitri had just admitted to creating life, but they were even. Totally even.
Except … that wasn’t all Maya was. She was the anchor of her community. An invaluable resource, not just because of what she knew but how she’d learned to use it. She made people’s lives better every day in big ways and small. She used the big, wild brain she’d been given to build a better world that undermined the dominance of the TechCorps at every turn.
And she was the heir to Birgitte’s revolution. The secrets in her head could bring down the TechCorps, applied properly. Savitri was looking at her like someone eager to apply a few of those secrets in places that would make the TechCorps hurt.
Maya wanted to make them hurt.
Plus, now if Maya got trapped in a room with any bad guys, she could just shoot out the lights and take them all out. Because she was a fucking superhero. She didn’t even need a renegade AI bodyguard.
But she’d have a protector. Her own guardian, who didn’t have to be coerced into battle. Gray would fight for her because it was what he wanted to do. To keep her safe. To help her achieve her dreams.
To love her.
Maya’s lips curled in a slow smile. “Yes. We’re even. Thank you, Savitri.”
“You’re welcome, Maya.”
Maya sat for a while after she was gone, watching the lights on the Hill as they flashed and sparkled and glowed in the night. She breathed in the scent of honeysuckle and kudzu, and it was peaceful and familiar, but it wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted soap and coffee and sweat and sawdust and the sound of Gray’s even breaths, each one a promise that there would be thousands more of them.
They would have time. Maya wasn’t going to waste a second of it. So she climbed to her feet and went downstairs to wait for her future to wake up.
NINA
The kids were breaking Nina’s heart.
She watched them as they sat around the table for dinner. Ivonne had prepared a thick, savory cazuela with chicken and butternut squash. Some of their guests were already halfway through devouring their meals, while others were still eyeing their bowls—and everything else—with suspicion.
At least they were properly clothed now. A quick canvass of the neighborhood had yielded enough secondhand garments to get them out of their identical, purely utilitarian jumpsuits. The clothes were a bit mismatched, but they were clean and warm.
When Ivonne joined her in the kitchen, Nina asked softly, “Are they all right?”
“Who would be?” Ivonne sighed. “They’ll be fine, Nina.”
Eventually—the word hung between them, unspoken but understood. “Thank you for taking point with them. I just…”
“You’ve been busy.” Ivonne patted her arm. “How is Gray? Awake yet?”
“No, not yet. But he will be soon.” Nina knew that much. Mace had been walking around since the surgery with a mildly stunned look on his face, as if he couldn’t believe they’d actually pulled it off, and that had to count for something.
“And Conall?”
“Don’t worry, Mace and Dr. Wells finished his regeneration therapy already. He’s on his feet, and he’ll probably be over here for a bowl or three of your cazuela soon.”
Ivonne smiled, clearly pleased, though the expression quickly melted into a troubled frown. “The girl—Rainbow? I couldn’t find her for dinner. Earlier, she seemed … sad.”
There was no telling what she was going through. She’d definitely come out of her shell since her arrival, but seeing the other children, the ones she’d been imprisoned with …
It would be enough to send anyone spinning. “I’ll look for her now. Thank you, Ivonne.”
She didn’t have to search for Knox. She found him exactly where she’d known he would be—hovering outside the tiny room that was serving as Gray’s recovery suite.
Nina leaned against Knox’s back, relishing his solid, steady warmth. “Any change
?”
“Not yet.” He slid his hand over hers, twining their fingers together. “Rafe found a cot for Maya, and I convinced her to eat and try to get some sleep. Maybe she will, if she doesn’t have to leave him.”
Nina peered past him. The narrow cot had been placed close to one side of Gray’s bed, close enough that Maya could reach out and touch him if she needed to reassure herself he was still there. Whether that was purposeful or a side effect of the cramped quarters, Nina didn’t know. But she suspected the former.
“Poor Maya.” At least she was actually resting, if only for now. The last day—Jesus, had it only been a day?—had been rough for everyone, but for Maya most of all. If she’d brought Gray this far, through an absolutely impossible surgery, only for him not to make it now …
Nina closed her eyes, as if she could block out the thought. “Rainbow’s around here somewhere. Can you help me look for her?”
“Have you checked the warehouse?” He turned and wrapped his arms around her, pressing his lips to her temple. “I know she’s been curious about the books.”
“No, I came here first. I wanted to check on Gray, Maya … and you.”
His soft sigh tickled her ear. “I’ll be better when he’s awake.”
She looked over to where Maya’s hand lay, curled halfway into a fist, so close to Gray’s. “I know.”
They walked, hand in hand, around to the back entrance of the warehouse, where Knox’s instincts once again proved accurate. Rainbow sat on a high stool, her thin shoulders hunched over the 3D scanner.
She looked so fragile that it made Nina’s throat ache.
Knox squeezed her hand in silent understanding. “Hey, kiddo,” he said gently. Rainbow’s shoulders stiffened, but Knox continued, his voice soft and soothing. “You need any help?”
“I won’t break it.” Rainbow didn’t turn, all of her focus on adjusting a book until it was perfectly lined up. “Maya showed me how.”
“We’re not worried about that,” Nina hurried to assure her. “Are you hungry? The other kids are having dinner.”