In My Skin

by Shannon McKenna

  He was so angry at himself. Dickhead moron. That assault on his brain last night had made him soft. Rolling around in bed fucking while they should have been on the road speeding toward safety. Jesus. He almost deserved this for being so sloppy.

  “Lift him up,” someone ordered. “Let me have a look at him.”

  Where was Dani?

  He was seized on both sides and hauled upright, still in that goddamn position, like an action figure or a plastic toy soldier frozen into place. Chin up, gun up, taking aim. Only his eyes could move, and his lungs. Somewhat. Not well. He could barely drag enough air into them to stay conscious.

  The smirking guy in front of him was no one Luke had ever seen before. A beefy, thick-necked, red-faced bull of a man with buzzed hair, cold eyes and flat, pale lips. He looked pleased with himself. In charge. Convinced of his own superiority because he’d designed and engineered it himself. Prick.

  Whereas the guys holding him were modded slave soldier grunts, as he had been. They had the tight facial mask he remembered from his own younger face, and still felt in his stress flashbacks. From the bad old days, back when every thought or feeling had to stay small and secret, huddled in the dark to avoid punishment or discovery.

  “Hello, D-14,” the bull asshole said. “My name is Hale. Interesting that your control code still works so well after…how long has it been? Before my time, that’s for sure. The powers that be can’t wait to know about your life. Where you’ve been, what you’ve done. Where your friends are located.”

  Luke let his mind detach. Months of torture, first with Mark, then with Braxton, had trained him. His body could be pounded into jelly, but he could simply float away.

  But when they started pumping their drugs into him, they would all be fucked.

  Maybe he could reinstate the memory block. How fucking ironic. Hours after he’d shattered it, he needed it again. It took immense concentration to construct and activate.

  Maybe a second time it would go more quickly. Or, more probably, the strain would rupture his brain. Which was a solution in itself. If it came to that, he could just plant an analog bomb in his mind and detonate it.

  If he survived at all, he’d be a drooling vegetable. Interrogate that, fuckheads.

  But Dani.

  The slave soldiers clapped an oxygen mask over his nose before trying, violently, to cram him into the travel pod. It was painful, being forced into a container meant for a slave soldier when he was lying like a marble effigy, arms down, legs straight.

  Coded in action, Luke didn’t fit.

  “Stop it,” Hale sounded disgusted. “There’s no point. You’ll just break his bones.” The guy leaned over him. “Listen to me carefully,” he said. “Four of my operatives will hold you to the ground. When I say your release code, you will straighten your arms and legs. If you resist, one of my operatives instantly fires a bullet into the head of your woman friend. We have no use for her otherwise.” He looked up at his slave soldiers. “Hold him down now.”

  Four huge guys practically sat on him. From the corner of his eye, he saw the one holding the gun under Dani’s chin.

  “Jaguar. Lava. Talon,” Hale said loudly.

  Luke’s contracted muscles released. He straightened out, as the man had ordered.

  “Good,” Hale said. “I see you can be reasonable. Calliope! Banner! Ibex!”

  Frozen again. This time they heaved him up and tossed him into the pod like a mannequin. They were dragging Dani away. He felt the vibrations of her kicking and thrashing. Blows, thudding into flesh. Dani, puffing out air. Trying not to cry out.

  Bastards.

  “Settle down, you dumb bitch.” Hale was speaking, but Luke could no longer see outside the pod, except for a rectangle of gray sky. “Cuff her and put her in the van. Give her a shot. I don’t want to be bothered with her until we’re back at High Mesa.”

  Luke followed the ragged sound of Dani’s breathing for as long as he could.

  Hale crouched over his pod, peering down at him. “Would’ve been a shame to break your arms when the lid came down,” he said. “Not that I care, but the big boys are coming to see you in all your glory, and they reserved the pleasure of breaking you for themselves. That prick Metzer gets to go first. He’s hot for revenge since you drone-decapitated his son the other day. Something tells me he’s going to enjoy hurting you a lot.”

  He grinned widely at Luke as the lid came down.

  * * * *

  Zade felt heaviness in the air the instant he got out of his car at the mountain chalet. The gate had hung wide open, which was strange in itself, and the silence was dead flat. No buzz of activity, heartbeats, footsteps, voices, vibrations. The subtle hum of sound that his enhanced sensors were reaching for just wasn’t there. Only quiet emptiness.

  It made him sick with dread. Luke wouldn’t have left here when he knew Zade was coming. No way. And the black Porsche Cayenne parked there was the same one the Goforth clerk had reported seeing. That was Luke’s car.

  Something bad had gone down. He felt its bitter residue in the air. A large vehicle had pumped out exhaust here recently. He put his hand on the hood of the Porsche.

  Stone cold. Not this one. He fought down a primal howl of frustration.

  Zade thumbed his phone to the app for today’s group chat. The others were almost here. After his phone call, Hannah had bullied her brother Asa into flying the Seattle gang down to the closest local airport in Asa’s own private plane. Too many people for Luke to deal with all at once, in Zade’s opinion, but there was no stopping Hannah. She was too excited to see Luke again, like a little kid. Not like he could blame her.

  Their group policy was to hide in plain sight, and their online chats were no different. Today’s venue was the comment thread of Chrissy Honeywell’s vlog. Chrissy was a reality TV star building her brand with videos of her day-to-day adventures. Currently live-streaming, Chrissy’s pussy wax at The Dare To Bare Salon. From what he could hear, Chrissy was not enjoying the process. There were already 532 comments on the thread, ranging from fawning muff divers to run-of-the-mill trolls.

  He swiftly filtered to pinpoint the Midlanders handles. Hannah popped up first. She’d chosen the tasteful handle ‘FackToy78.’ FackToy78 had written hey chrissy u done pullin weedz in the ladygarden? Stop squeakin like a little bitch and show us ur landing strip. Hannah was impatient for news, and she liked to play the troll.

  Zade tapped in a comment from HungHenry69. dont let the h8trs get u down chrissy they’re not worth it cuz nobody’s home in there, the dumb f*cks. Stay smooth chrissy u r so BAD!

  Let them chew on that. ‘Nobody home’ and ‘BAD!’ was enough to put the group on their guard even if something should stop him from messaging again.

  He walked slowly toward the house, his senses reaching out in all directions. The front door was locked, but a stroll around the place brought him to a terrace overlooking the lake, where a huge picture window had been left wide open.

  He stared around himself, guts sinking ever deeper. There had been a struggle. Lawn furniture overturned, a barbecue on its side. A coffee mug, handle snapped off, lay on the wooden planks around a splatter of spilled coffee.

  He crouched down to touch it. The splatter was still wet. It smelled of cream. Luke took his coffee black. The new girlfriend’s coffee, then. So they had taken her, too.

  He moved silently into the house and crept from room to room, gun in hand, piecing together his brother’s morning from visual and olfactory clues. They had eaten over an hour ago, judging from the lingering bacon and coffee odors, the residual heat of the stovetop. He smelled sweat, fear hormones, metabolized drugs.

  He walked up the stairs. Found a bedroom with a rumpled bed, steel shackles on the bedframe and the familiar smell of stim sickness. Short hairs clung to the side of the bathroom sink from when Luke shaved his head. Scratch marks on
the wrought iron from the shackles. Blood, smeared on the bedclothes, the pillows.

  Down the hall was another bedroom, another rumpled bed that smelled like sex.

  Maybe Luke’s phone call had tipped Obsidian off somehow. Rage and grief were building up inside Zade. Too fucking much. Obsidian had snatched his brother less than a half hour ago.

  Then he heard it. The whirr of a lightweight stealth drone, approaching fast.

  He pulled out his gun, crouching, back to the wall—

  “Gargoyle! Magpie! Vortex!” a staticky male voice blared out of a speaker.

  Holy shit. That was his damn stun code. He doubled over, gasping at the sharp pain—and straightened up again, making a swift decision.

  His stun code had been deactivated after Simone’s scrub treatments. Being coded gave him a stomach-turning cramp, but it passed. If he were running, he might trip but probably wouldn’t fall. Same with the kill code. His heart hiccupped, and then found its rhythm again.

  But Obsidian didn’t know that. They thought they had him cold. It was a weak spot in their armor. Probably the only one he’d ever find.

  They’d be all over him any moment now. He wished there was time to text something to Simone. So sorry. Didn’t mean to do this to you. I love you.

  But his thumbs were already tapping out a swift comment to the thread from HungHenry69 to warn the gang off:

  u shriveled-d*ck pr*cks u lv poor sore chrissy alone cuz if u c me comin u btr RUN RUN RUN cuz its DOOMSDAY4U GAMEOVER gdbye s*ckrs

  He pried open the phone, pulled out the SIM card. Tossed it into a vase of dried flowers that sat on the vanity and sent the phone skittering under the rumpled, unmade bed.

  Just in time. He froze into a statue just as the drone drifted in front of the window and hovered there, observing him through its tiny, unfriendly red eye.

  “Hello, D-13,” the blaring speaker said. “So glad you decided to join us.” That same voice that had coded him.

  Oh man. He was gonna hate the butthead who owned that voice so hard.

  Chapter 24

  Asa studied the group of Midlanders huddled in the space between his parked Lexus LX and Zoe’s black Jag in their strip mall rendezvous point, just a few miles from the address Zade had sent them. All scowling down at Zade’s apocalyptic message on their phones.

  As usual with this crowd, he felt six steps removed. They fascinated him, but to them he was just a clueless unmod, incapable of understanding their big fat fucking issues.

  Too damn bad that all those Midlander modifieds tended toward self-importance, his big brother Noah included. Even though Asa had saved their collective asses a couple months ago in the fight against their archenemy, Mark Olund, he still wasn’t a veteran of their famous rebellion day, he wasn’t in their inner secret circle, he hadn’t gone through the terrible ring of fire, blah blah blah. And they never let him forget it.

  But there was Hannah, his baby sister. He’d lost her to Obsidian’s secret research program when she was ten. She and his older brother Noah had been sucked into that black hole together. It took Asa over a decade of searching to find them again.

  They were all still getting to know each other again. Slow, prickly work, but Hannah was his baby sister and he was sticking with it. Which meant that her problems were his problems.

  This was evidently a big motherfucking problem, judging by the way Hannah’s freckles stood out. Asa had flown her, Sisko and Simone down to California in one of his planes right after they got the call from Zade, arranging for someone to meet them with an SUV to save time. All because Hannah was so desperate to see the famous Luke.

  Great. Another modified Midlander brother for Asa to love.

  True to form for this crowd, it had all gone to shit. No more happy reunion. And now Zade had been abducted too. Asa liked the guy, but for fuck’s sake, seriously? Zade should’ve been more careful. He’d always thought the guy had a few screws loose.

  Sucked for Simone, though. She thought the sun rose and set on Zade, and they had only been married for a few weeks. Simone hadn’t even spoken since Zade’s warning showed up on the vlog thread. She just stared down at her phone’s screen, looking more or less like she’d just been found frozen solid in a snowbank. He felt bad for her.

  She needed to get warmed up. Have something with some sugar in it, maybe.

  “I don’t suppose we could go to that coffee place on the corner, and talk about this over something hot,” Asa suggested, without much hope. “It’s fucking cold in this wind.”

  Zoe spun around to face him. For some reason, that woman had it in for him, which was a shame because she was ridiculously beautiful. Strong, curvy body, flawless golden skin, tilted dark cat eyes, luscious red lips. She looked like a hot and deadly assassin in her black leather coat and black jeans and high heeled boots, her long, glossy black hair whipping in the wind.

  She hated his guts, for some reason. And yet he went rock hard whenever he caught her eye. Which admittedly was not often. She disdained him. He wasn’t worthy of so much as a glance from up there on her lofty high horse. Maybe he had some kinky masochistic thing happening in his brain that made him switch on for that.

  If so, he didn’t really want to know more. Some things were better left unobserved.

  “Maybe you don’t understand.” Zoe enunciated like she was speaking to someone who was cognitively impaired. “Didn’t you read what he said? And you’re whining about the cold? You want to, what? Grab a fucking pumpkin chai and a scone?”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” he said evenly. “No matter what happened to your people, we still have to eat and stay caffeinated.”

  Zoe made a sound of disgust and turned her back on him, providing an ideal opportunity to ogle her ass. With some effort, he tuned back into the general conversation.

  “…the doomsday plan,” Hannah was saying. “I’m just not ready to think it’s come to that. Not yet. We can’t just leave them and run.”

  “If they’ve both been taken, you know what comes next.” Sisko’s voice was bleak.

  “Wait, wait. Hold on,” Asa said. “What’s this about running?”

  Sisko turned to look at him. “Zade said ‘run,’ and ‘doomsday.’ Obsidian has them both, and they’ll extract every detail about us. Noah worked out a contingency plan for this. If anyone gets retaken, the others scatter. We have secret passports and a hiding place not known by the rest of the group, so names and locations can’t be drugged or tortured out of us.”

  For fuck’s sake. He’d had enough of this tormented, apocalyptic crap. Asa turned to his sister. “You’re not flying off to the ends of the earth without telling me where.”

  “I agree,” Hannah said. “I won’t do it.”

  “If one of us is taken, we run,” Sisko repeated.

  “Luke’s been gone for a year, and you guys didn’t dissolve your group,” Asa said.

  “We weren’t sure it was Obsidian,” Sisko said. “We didn’t want to throw away our homes and livelihoods for nothing. This time, we know for sure that it’s them. We put the doomsday mechanism in place years ago and Zade just pulled the switch.”

  “Fuck the switch,” Zoe said rebelliously. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Sisko said harshly. “It’s a trap, and Zade just dove in.”

  “So go,” Zoe said. “All of you. Go. Scatter. Do the doomsday plan, but just write me out of it. If they’ve got Zade and Luke already, what does it matter if I walk into Obsidian’s open mouth? They won’t find anything different about you in my memory archives than what they already have. And I have a kill pill, like the one Zade wears. I can stick it right onto my back molar. I can make it all stop whenever I need to.”

  “Used to wear.” Simone’s voice was hollow. “He stopped wearing it. For me.”

  “Oh. Did he now.” Zoe looked at Simone’
s pale face, started to speak, and stopped herself. “Whatever. The house might have clues. Something that could lead me to them.”

  “Obsidian will lead you to them,” Sisko said. “In chains. It’s a fucking trap.”

  “So let me fall into it! Maybe I could see her, once I’m inside. Maybe I’ll have a chance to talk to her. Besides, it’s a done deal. Nothing changes for anyone if I go in, too.”

  “Like hell,” Sisko growled. “It changes for you. It changes for all of us.”

  “Wait. You lost me.” Asa held up his hand. “See who? Talk to who? What are you guys talking about?”

  “Zoe’s little sister,” Sisko said. “She’s still inside Obsidian. She never escaped.”

  “She was younger,” Hannah said. “Even younger than me, so they sorted her into a junior group and sent her to another facility before the rebellion. She was nine.”

  “Not quite,” Zoe said. “She had a couple of months to go. And she had a name.”

  “Jada,” Hannah said softly. “We remember it.”

  “Hold on,” Asa said. “I thought we were looking for Luke and Zade.”

  “We are, but Luke saw Jada, when he was fighting with them and he told Zade about it,” Sisko said. “So Zoe’s been in full blown freak-out mode ever since she heard.”

  Zoe made an impatient sound and stalked away, staring out onto the busy road that fronted the strip mall.

  Asa grunted. “I wonder if there’s anything left of her sister in the thing Luke saw.”

  Sisko grunted. “Don’t let Zoe hear you say that.”

  “Too late,” Zoe called. “I have augmented hearing. Fuck you both.”

  Zoe was posed against the roiling sky, hair flying like a banner. Wow. She was something else. He wondered if that glossy hair was as satiny as it looked. He wanted to wind some of it around his fist and find out.