True Born

by L. E. Sterling

  Storm pours me some water, himself some coffee, before launching in.

  “Did you see her being taken?”

  Storm shakes his head. “No, but some of my people were keeping an eye out.” He raises one arched eyebrow at Jared.

  “I don’t understand. I thought you were hired to be remote security.”

  “This is a very particular job we’ve been hired for, Lucy. Your father doesn’t want us to interfere with your lives unless you are in serious danger from…external parties.”

  Jared makes a scoffing noise behind me. I pretend to ignore him. “So we were safe the other day at my school? Those people with the guns—they’re not a threat? I’ve heard it’s a serious uprising.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Who is Father afraid of?”

  There’s a long pause before he answers. “I’m not certain.”

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  Over the rim of his coffee cup, Storm studies me. “As I’m sure you’re aware, Lucy, your father is not the easiest man in the world to work for.”

  Jared snorts. Annoyed, I turn around to glare at him, but I can’t say I disagree with the sentiment. “Do you mind?” I turn back to Storm. “So why did you take the job? It doesn’t look like you’re hurting here.”

  “I took this job for my own reasons.”

  “And those would be?” I know as the question comes out of my mouth that he won’t answer. Still, I’m disappointed when he sits there in stony silence. “Fine. Are we going soon?”

  When he nods in agreement, I sag with relief. “But first we have a few things to discuss, you and I. Don’t we?” It’s clear this isn’t a question. He won’t be ignored. I can’t help curling my hands in my lap, though, and sneaking a look at Jared, who lounges against the wall like a pin-up celebrity. “He’s safe, Lucy.”

  It isn’t so much the gentle way Storm tells me so much as the look in his eye that makes me believe him. Besides, despite what I’ve said, the man has repeatedly pulled me from danger. He may be a horse’s behind but he’s a good merc. And in the end, what choice do I have? Margot is lost somewhere, confused and in pain. To leave her out there, alone for a second longer…

  And I know what Nolan Storm wants to hear.

  “You’re going to have to keep an open mind,” I tell him, unsure of how to begin.

  He laughs and leans in. “You already know I’m not like other people, Lucy,” he says. “And we both know you and Margot aren’t, either. Consider us even.”

  ...

  By the time I finish our story, Margot’s and mine, it seems late and I’m antsy. Jared has hovered like a shadow at the door the entire time. Storm has been mostly quiet, too. He listened like he was recording everything with his mind. Every so often he’d stop me and ask me to explain something. The questions had always been good ones. “How does it feel when Margot is in pain?” he’d asked. “Do you feel it in your head or your body? Do you think the nurse suspected there was something going on with the Protocols?” He seemed to respect my read of a situation, too, like I mattered. That made me even more talkative, and I couldn’t seem to help myself. I’d never had the chance to discuss the strange phenomenon between my twin and me with anyone other than Margot. It felt like a dam bursting: once I’d started there was no stopping it. The moment I’m through I’m swamped with guilt. How could I indulge in this storytelling while Margot is in danger?

  Now as he sits back and stares at me I feel naked and alone. I have nothing else to barter with. I can’t count on his help, and I don’t know what he’ll do with everything I’ve told him. It could cost us everything. Storm surprises me with his next question. “You know she’s at the Splicer Clinic. Do you think you know who has her?”

  I shake my head. “No. But it’s someone she trusts.”

  He sits up straighter, eyes cold and calculating. “What makes you think so?”

  I blush. “She was having fun at first. A lot of fun.” I hear a chuckle behind me that I studiously ignore. “Then everything changed. They drugged her. On the phone she told me she was staying at a friend’s house.”

  Storm cocks his head. “You think she was being fed a script?”

  I’d considered this. But Margot had chosen every word very carefully. She’d called me “little sis,” our parents “Mom and Dad.” The tip-offs were obvious to me, but wouldn’t be to anyone else. “No,” I finally tell him.

  Storm nods. “Okay then. Jared, fetch the others.”

  A heartbeat later I’m alone with Nolan Storm. And before I lose my nerve I need to blurt it out. I’ve figured out his people are all True Borns, even if I don’t know what kind. But what is he?

  “You’re different from them”—I toss my head at the general direction of the door—“but I can’t figure out how.”

  It’s more than the concentrated way he sits, hands clasped together and an elegant elbow resting on a crossed knee. He’s completely relaxed, but I know with every instinct in my body that he could spring in an instant. And though he’s been nothing but gentle with me, I am confident he could rip a man to shreds with his bare hands. But it’s something more, something that hovers just underneath the surface. Violent and dark and throbbing with undisguised power.

  “I am,” he replies after a thoughtful pause. “Suffice it to say, I don’t think now is quite the time for explanations. One day I’ll tell you a story, Lucy.” He stands, offering me his hand. It swallows mine as he lifts me gently off the couch. “And for the record”—he winks—“I suspect you’re as different as they come, too.”

  The “others” Storm alluded to appear. The woman with the Mohawk flings herself onto the couch with an offhand, “Hello, Dolly.” Another man, a boy really, files in, followed by Jared, who grins cockily at me and resumes his guard duty as he shuts the door behind him. I stare him down with the haughtiest look I can muster. He looks away, eyes crinkling with laughter.

  Storm doesn’t waste time. “Routine extraction,” he tells Mohawk and the boy. “Except the cargo here is extremely valuable.”

  “How valuable?” Mohawk arranges her lithe limbs over one arm of the couch.

  “Think of the most precious commodity in Dominion, then up that.” I blink at Storm’s words. Our father is paying him well, and we’re rich, yes. We’re young and well-connected. But precious? The same thought must occur to Mohawk, because she sizes me up and down like she’s measuring me for a plate.

  She runs the tip of her tongue along razor-sharp teeth. “Delicious.”

  Storm shoots her a look that could freeze blood. She squirms and sits up a little straighter. “Torch,” he barks.

  The boy who’s been standing behind the couch stands up straighter. “Sir.” I’d barely noticed him in all the excitement. He has a way of fading into the background, like I usually do. Mouse brown hair. Dark, round brown eyes in a pale face but with the longest, thickest eyelashes I’ve ever seen on a boy. I peg him as a year or two younger than me. He’s tall and rangy, with an awkward look to his limbs, like a tree whose branches have been growing at different speeds.

  “Best way in?”

  “North gate. Light artillery,” he answers.

  A thought dawns on me. “All this time you knew exactly where she was. Why didn’t you go and get her?”

  The room gets tense in a hurry. Jared peels himself off the wall. “Now hold on there, Princess.”

  I ignore him. “You used the situation to get me talking. Are you going to blackmail our father? You’re just like all the rest.” The air around Storm shimmers expectantly, as though something is about to happen.

  “No.” Storm’s voice rumbles deep in his chest, deeper than it had been. Waves of heat or something else roll off him as he ambles over to me. I take an instinctive step back. The hairs on my arms stand up. “I know you’re probably not ready to hear this right now, Lucy, but we’re on your side. You’re in our charge. It would be irresponsible to go into a potentially dangerous kidnapping situation
without knowing as much as possible.”

  I take a moment to appreciate what he’s telling me. “What about me? I’m going too, right?”

  The room is as quiet as a grave. I try to ignore Mohawk’s smirk and Jared’s soft cough until Storm says, “Yes, you are,” just as Jared hollers over top, “Not on your life!”

  I feel a tug inside myself. A pinch. Margot pinches herself right there, right on the fleshy part of the thigh, when she’s trying to get my attention. I lean over my toes, breathing deep, and clench my fingers. Sometimes it seems so unfair that the sensations only go one way.

  “You can’t be serious,” Jared argues with Storm. “She’s like, what—twelve?”

  A twinge of disappointment rings through me. Do I really seem like a baby to him? I’m about to put Jared in his place when Storm beats me to it. “Nearly eighteen. And age has nothing to do with it. As you well know.” He eyes Jared meaningfully. The blond merc stalks back to the wall and hitches one leg up as Storm reasons, “I’m not happy about bringing a client into an extraction, either. Frankly, we don’t know what we’re dealing with, and we don’t know who’s working for whom. She was nearly grabbed today. I doubt that was a coincidence.”

  I’d put it out of my mind as just another attack by hungry street thugs. Somehow hearing about what happened on the street from Storm’s point of view makes my blood run cold. What if it hadn’t been random? What if we are in more danger than we’d thought?

  Mohawk picks at her hair. “Precious cargo is a liability.”

  “Yes,” Storm returns coolly, “but she’ll also be a valuable asset. Lucy’s ability to sense her sister could determine the outcome.” I blush as I feel three sets of eyes assess me with interest. No one has ever known about Margot and me.

  Storm wheels on me as though he’s reading my thoughts. “I know this was not my secret to tell, Lucy. I’m sorry about that. But in the current situation I need to place your safety as well as the safety of my crew above all other concerns. Suffice it to say”—the room grows downright chilly as he surveys his people—“if any of my people so much as hint at what they have learned here today, I’ll put them to death myself.”

  I shiver and realize I believe him. Every word. As three covert glares come my way, I reckon his crew does, too.

  Chapter Six

  The damp, moldy scent of the concrete is overlaid with notes of motor oil and a whiff of garbage. There’s so much dust in the air I want to sneeze. As Jared shoves me up hard against the wall, I finally do, right in his face. Serves him right, I think, trying to ignore the shiver of heat that curls along my spine.

  I’d thought I’d known what I was in for. The second we arrived at the Clinic the team went to work like a well-tuned machine. Mohawk slipped into the shadows to disable the cameras and cut the alarm. Jared got busy tapping on a small keyboard—disrupting phone signals, I was told—while Storm swiped between figures and a glowing floor plan of the place on his intel screen.

  He nodded at Torch. “Now.”

  Every so often the peppery sound of gunshot broke the silence. Fighting in the quarters. I froze each time a gun popped. Storm’s people kept their heads down.

  The gangly boy, Torch, exited the vehicle and walked up to the fence. From my perch I could see current flowing through the wires, the faint sheen of electricity humming through it like the glow of a firefly. In the blink of an eye the current was gone. Torch glanced over his shoulder at Storm as though he liked what he saw. He raised his right hand to the fence, curling his palm around something. Moments later a glow erupted from his palm. Heat shimmered through the dark as the boy blew through the fence with a flame so hot it melted the metal links into puddles in minutes. A gaping archway just shy of my shoulders appeared. Torch peeled it back with a grin. He wasn’t even sweating.

  Then we’d run for cover, and at a nod from Storm, Jared hauled me into the darkness of the delivery bay…where I now linger in purgatory waiting for the extraction to be over so I don’t have the mortal sin of murder on my hands.

  As Jared snarls, “I said stay back,” I wonder if he can tell that I’m dreaming up all the ways I’d like to kill him.

  He’s too close, too hot. I barely form the words, “I heard you,” before he cuts me off with a loud, “Shhh. No talking.” I glare daggers again, wishing he could see me, and try to pry his hand from my chest.

  “I said, shut up,” he says in a loud whisper.

  “I wasn’t talking,” I whisper back, plucking madly at his hand. It might as well be a steel trap for all I’m able to move it. But even though I hate him, I can’t seem to stop my traitorous body from tingling all over at his proximity. His entire length presses up against me, and I can tell from the way his eyes take on a faint sheen, a green I’ve never seen before, that he’s noticing how close he is, too. I say nothing as he blinks and backs an inch away.

  On this side of the Clinic the shadows are thick and impenetrable. Security is tight all around the Clinic but here in the delivery bay, where Storm has parked me and my demon babysitter, no one could hear me even if I scream. Between us and the fence is at least fifty yards of empty parking lot. Past the fence where Storm’s van waits for us is a park whose greenery extends all the way up through the center of the city. We are cocooned in an island of darkness.

  “It wasn’t my idea to be saddled with you, either, you know,” I mumble under my breath. Not that anything I say will matter. It’s clear as glass that Jared feels stuck with me and resents the hell out of it. The thought sends a traitorous pang through me, and I remind myself that a merc doesn’t need to like his clients to protect them.

  Still, despite my babysitter’s issues, it’s quiet, almost peaceful. A soft rain ended not long ago, turning the streets of the city into shiny strips of dark wood. It always smells better in Dominion after a big rain washes away the stench of death. From where I stand I can pull a teasing whiff of clean, cool air mixed with Jared, something dark and mysterious and weirdly comforting, despite the fact that he wants to wring my neck. Every so often he tilts his head and whispers something. He’s communicating with someone—Storm I guess, though I can’t see where he’s hidden his device.

  He turns glittering eyes on me. “Uh huh,” he says to thin air before speaking to me. “They’ve swept the first level and there’s no sign. There are doors they can’t get access to, though. Where do they usually take you when they do the tests?”

  My fingernails bite into the flesh of my hands. “Protocols are done in C wing.”

  “Mid-section?”

  “Yes.”

  He pushes a lock of blond hair from his face with an impatient hand. “Can you maybe use your spooky twin thing to hone in on her, Princess?”

  I ignore the taunt and reach for my sister. Like slipping into her flesh, sinking into her body. Only this time—

  A scream rips from me as my body jerks. Pain pulses through my lower belly, rippling up from the secret part of me to the tips of my fingers. I double up, try to protect myself. In an instant Jared is beside me, holding me up.

  “What’s happening, Lucy?” he asks with dead calm. “What’s happening to Margot?”

  But I can’t breathe, can’t think past the pain and horror. Can’t stop, can’t make it stop. “They’re—don’t know. So awful,” I tell him. “Hurts.” Tears leak down my face and cover his shirt. I look down and pull my fingers away, expecting to see blood. There’s nothing there.

  Jared pulls my head back and makes me look in his face. “Tell me where it hurts. Where are they hurting her?”

  He doesn’t look down to where I’m holding myself, to where my lower belly is being ripped to shreds by invisible knives. He keeps looking into my eyes, a witness to me living through my sister’s torture. But he knows.

  “Okay.” His voice is gentler than I could have imagined. “Turn it off now, Lucy. Just turn it off.”

  My teeth are clenched so tight my jaw is wired shut. “Can’t.”

  I barely feel
his hands cradling my cheeks, pulling damp locks from my eyes. Then there’s only Jared. Jared’s eyes, feral and light. Looking straight into me again. “Come on. Do it.”

  I flick a switch I didn’t even know existed. Margot’s pain shuts down, and I am alone, drowning in need for my sister. He catches me as I slip toward the ground. The only thing pinning me to the here and now is Jared as he grabs hold of my upper arms. The warm rise of his chest as he holds me close to him.

  When I’m able, I lean in close to his ear. “I think she’s in Protocols,” I whisper.

  “What makes you think so?”

  I shrug, unable to put into words the complicated network of signals I share with Margot. He studies me for a moment. Without another word he hoists an arm around my back and hauls me up. I try to shake off my sense of disorientation as we move toward the big ugly cargo bay doors, gray and dented in a dozen places. Jared stops and props me up with a steadying hand and a military look in his eye. Pulling out a smart device he taps in a series of numbers, then holds the phone up to a small black box nestled into the wall next to the door, at the level of my head. A tiny red dot turns green and a snick sounds loudly in the quiet bay. He pulls the door back slowly, positioning me behind his body. Nothing and nobody comes out. So he grabs my hand and we slip inside.

  The hallways are deserted, filled with tinny music. It’s cranked so loud I want to cover my ears. Jared’s hand tightens on mine as he hauls me into a doorway and presses me back.

  “You don’t move until I say so,” he breathes into my ear. “You do what I say, when I say it, or I’m hauling you out of here by your hair.”

  I stare at him. Jared’s face is raw: all bones, pinched nose, and a flat, thin line where his very sensual lips have been pressed together. I expect panic to swamp me, but it isn’t there. Just the thought that, even though I don’t know this man, I trust he won’t do what he’s threatening. At least, he won’t drag me out by my shoulder-length hair. He’ll choose another part of my anatomy. His face tightens as we consider each other.

  “Lucy?” His voice is barely audible. I nod. He nods. Apparently we’ve struck a bargain.