by K. M. Ruiz
Quinton went for their bags. “You think he can handle it? He dosed himself pretty heavily with that stuff back in Buffalo.”
“If he passes out, she dies.”
Quinton came back with not one dose of Adrenalin, but a dozen.
Lucas pressed the hypospray against Jason’s throat and administered the dose. Jason shuddered, leaning heavily against the biotank. Lucas helped him sit down, back to the machine. He was pale-faced and breathing quickly, sweat beading along his brow.
“Jason?” Quinton said, closing his eyes against the sudden pull at the back of his mind.
“I’ve got her,” Jason repeated like a mantra. “I’ve got her.”
A biotank could force cellular regeneration to happen faster than the human body could do so alone, building off a patient’s own stem cells through the persistence of nanites. With enough time and training, Jason might one day accomplish the same on his own in minutes, not hours or days, but he still didn’t know what he was capable of. As things stood, he was barely holding Threnody together, his power slip-sliding through cellular levels, chasing after nanites. He tried to recall through remembered agony what he had done on the flight out of Buffalo. Jason forced himself to concentrate on the shape of Threnody’s cells to get a feel for her DNA and build off the genetic blueprint of her body.
Quinton looked at Jason, feeling the other man’s power pulling at the back of his mind through the permanent bond they shared. He winced at what felt like an itch on the inside of his skull and tried to ignore it. Quinton pressed his hand against the dusty, dirty plasglass and didn’t take his eyes off Threnody.
[NINE]
SEPTEMBER 2379
INVERCARGILL, NEW ZEALAND
She took a breath.
Then another. Deeper.
It was cold; wet.
Fluid was in her lungs. In her mouth.
Threnody cracked open her eyes to a world made of light. Fractured light, seen through the heavy, curved plasglass of a biotank and the thick, undulating fluid that breathed for her. She closed her eyes. Opened them again. The world didn’t change.
Shadows moved around her outside the biotank. She could hear the soft, constant beeping of a monitor, the sound deep and distant through the fluid. She tried to move her hand, felt her fingers get tangled in tiny wires, so many attached to the length of her body. They didn’t hurt.
She did.
Who am I?
Go to sleep, someone answered. The voice was clear, accented, sounding like those who hailed from London. Stretched in a way she felt in her bones. In her nerves.
Who am I?
Threnody Corwin. Now go to sleep. We aren’t finished.
She was dragged under by waves of water and light, a riptide of power that took her to the depths of the ocean. Which was impossible, for this wasn’t any ocean found in the world.
She slept.
When she regained consciousness, it was to cold air blowing across bare skin and pressure in her chest. She struggled to cough up the thick fluid in her lungs and replace it with oxygen. Strong arms held her steady, a deep, familiar voice filling her ears and not her mind.
“That’s it, Thren,” Quinton said. “Like that. Keep coughing. It’s almost all out.”
His skin was dark against her own, his grip solid as she heaved and jerked in his support, coughing out every last minuscule bit of the perfluorocarbons that she didn’t remember swallowing.
“Hate this part,” Threnody rasped as her body shuddered through the motions.
“I know. You’re almost there.”
When she was breathing air and not fluid, he picked her up from the cold metal floor and carried her to a portable sterilization tent. The plastic walls smelled too sharp in her nose. She thought she could taste it. Wires were stuck to her skin, in her veins, dangling like long-dead vines made of plastic and metal.
“Ready?” a voice asked.
She opened her eyes, watched as Jason came into blurry focus at the entrance to the small tent.
“Ready,” Quinton answered for the both of them.
Jason sealed the inner layer shut, then the outer. The soft hiss of the sterilization process starting up echoed in her ears, vaporizing the viscous fluid sticking to her body. Threnody held one hand close to her face, struggling to focus. Her hand shook, but with no spastic jerk to the movement of her muscles. Just exhaustion, nothing more complicated than that.
“Should be dead,” Threnody murmured, letting her head drop onto Quinton’s shoulder. Gravity pulled her hand down, arm swinging in the air.
“Go to sleep, Thren,” Quinton said, voice rough.
“Did we make it inside the seed bank?”
“Yeah.” He swallowed. “Yeah, we made it.”
She took a breath, felt air flow into her lungs; sterile and cold. Unconsciousness took her once more. When Threnody woke again, she was lying on a flight deck, wrapped in thermal blankets and clean clothes. It was silent, and the person watching over her this time wasn’t Quinton.
“Where are we?” she asked, her voice dry, tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth.
Lucas looked up from the datapad in his hands and whatever report he was familiarizing himself with. The bruise from when Quinton had punched him in the mouth was gone. “New Zealand.”
Threnody’s eyebrows drew together in confusion, thin creases lining her forehead. “I thought—the Arctic?”
“Mm.” Lucas set aside the datapad. “You’ve been unconscious since frying the seed-bank doors.”
“How long?”
“We spent two days in the Arctic. It took half another day to get down here with everything we stole, and we’ve been here for almost two days since we landed so Jason could work on you. You weren’t going to make it to Antarctica, so we took a detour.”
“Antarctica,” she echoed, fingers curling against her palms. Her skin felt new and it itched, but the burning pain she remembered from the power plant and the seed bank was gone. Threnody sucked in a deep breath, her mind unfolding those memories easily enough. “I feel like I should be dead.”
“You don’t die here.”
“Here is relative.”
Lucas smiled at her, the look full of some twisted understanding, as if he knew what secrets she kept. He probably did.
Threnody pushed at the blankets until she was free of them and could sit up, putting her back against the bulkhead. A faint twinge from her right hand made her look down. A small bruise surrounded the entrance point of the IV there. She eyed the tubing that connected her to the mostly empty bag hanging off the pilot’s seat.
“So we succeeded in the Arctic. Did everyone make it off Spitsbergen?”
“I love that you distrust me so thoroughly. It’s refreshing, to say the least.”
Threnody gave Lucas a cool look, blue eyes slightly narrowed. Her black hair was a tangled mess, she needed a shower, and she had no idea what had transpired between the Arctic and now. She wanted answers. “If you’re not going to tell me what’s going on, I’ll find someone who will.”
Lucas got to his feet, looking down at her. “Who else would have the answers you need?”
Threnody curled her hands around her knees and glared. “Just give me what I want, Lucas. You already have my support. You don’t need me to beg.”
“It’s so interesting when you do.” Lucas shrugged his ambivalence and ran a hand through his pale blond hair. “We didn’t leave anyone behind, if that’s what you’re worried about. None of our people, at least.”
“Have our actions been discovered yet?”
“The government isn’t going to announce what happened on a news stream. If they haven’t discovered the discrepancy by now, then they will within the next twenty-four hours. We can’t confirm where they stand right now without risking our position and that’s not something I’ll do.”
Threnody had more questions, but Lucas was already leaving. Before the hatch closed, Quinton stepped inside, scowling faintly at Lucas’s
back.
Threnody glanced at Quinton, taking stock of how he moved, needing to assure herself that he was all right. Then his attention was on her, some of the worry leaving his brown eyes. She swallowed a sudden surge of relief as Quinton knelt beside her. She dimly recalled moments from her time in the biotank that made no sense to her. Dreams, maybe. Or possibly nightmares. But always, always, he was there.
“Brought you another insulated skinsuit,” Quinton said as he set the pile near her knees. “You’ll need it where we’re going.”
“Antarctica, I know. Lucas told me we’re still heading there.” She slid the IV out of her hand and reached for the skinsuit. “Thank you.”
Quinton moved to sit in the navigator’s seat. It was habit to take care of each other, the only family they’d had for years. There had never been anything sexual between them, and privacy wasn’t something they had ever received. They lost their right to it the moment the neurotrackers were grafted to their brains. When you fought in the crowded streets of dying cities and along the boundaries of deadzones, privacy was a luxury you weren’t allowed.
When she finished dressing, Threnody carefully stood. Quinton knew better than to help her, but from the way he held himself, she knew he would catch her if she fell.
The biotank had regenerated her nervous system, fixing the massive, self-inflicted damage she’d caused while fighting Jin Li at the power plant, and the further damage from pushing herself in the Arctic. It couldn’t do anything about exhaustion. She stared at her palms and fingers, at the healed flesh that felt too new. Taking a deep breath, Threnody accessed her power and tried not to flinch as it sizzled through her nerves with a new sharpness.
Blue electricity crawled across the skin of her hands, dancing over her fingernails. It sputtered and sparked, tiny lines of power that was all her. It made her a little dizzy, but she had no other way to discover if she could still function as a psion.
A warm hand curved over her elbow, holding her steady as she absorbed that power back into her body. Still a Class III electrokinetic. Still everything she was born to be. Jin Li tried, but he hadn’t been able to take that from her.
“Everything working right?” Quinton asked.
“Yeah,” she said, even if it wasn’t really true. Threnody felt his fingers tighten on her arm. She didn’t fight when he pulled her into a hard hug.
“You pull that shit again, I’ll kick your goddamn ass.”
Threnody let out a strangled little laugh, turning her face against his neck and giving herself a moment—one fucking moment—to be human.
It was a minute or two before they separated. Threnody ran both hands through her hair, irritated when her fingers caught on tangled knots. “Heard we got the seeds and everything else that was on Spitsbergen. Half of it, at least.”
Quinton nodded, rubbed at the back of his head, wincing. “Yeah. We got it. Jays did a lot of the heavy lifting both there and here. He’s sleeping it off now.”
Threnody froze when she heard that familial diminutive come out of Quinton’s mouth. Only Kerr had ever been allowed to use it. She thought back to the fight at the outpost in Longyearbyen, the name Jason had called her in that hallway. She and Quinton had spent too many years living in each other’s personal space for her not to know when something was wrong.
“Quinton? You’ve never called Jason by that name before.”
He looked away from her, out the windshield over her left shoulder. His silence was unnerving. Threnody sighed and framed his face with hands that shook only slightly, forcing Quinton to look at her.
“Lucas wasn’t very forthcoming with details,” she said. “Did something else happen in the seed bank? Tell me what I need to know.”
The Strykers mind-set would take years to break, years they didn’t have. She was in charge, he would always see their partnership that way. When Threnody gave an order, she, like Lucas, expected to be obeyed.
“It didn’t happen in the seed bank,” Quinton said.
Threnody steeled herself for his report, knowing she wasn’t going to like it. “What didn’t happen?”
“You were dying. I didn’t want to lose you, so I made a deal with Lucas.” He pulled her hands away, putting distance between them. “Gideon Serca broke my arms at the power plant. Broke my face. I think he would have broken every last bone in my body if Samantha hadn’t stopped him. I wasn’t in any condition to save you back in Buffalo.”
Threnody’s gaze dropped to his hands. She ran her fingers over his forearm, feeling only muscle and not the ridges of biotubes. “Lucas keeps saying that he needs me. He would have saved me anyway without you asking him to.”
“It’s more than that. It has to do with Kristen.”
“I know she’s dysfunctional,” Threnody said. “I don’t know what she does in order to gain sanity. Quinton, what are you saying?”
“She broke Jason’s shields. She was the only one who could. His natal shields are completely gone. That’s why he was able to save you.”
“I assumed it was Lucas’s doing, that he found some way to merge with Jason.”
“No, it was Kristen. Because of her, Jason’s finally got his secondary shields and full access to his power. He—” Quinton broke off, voice cracking a bit.
Threnody didn’t even know she was reaching for him until her hand was gripping his shoulder. “Quinton. What happened?”
“You were dying,” he said, struggling to speak. “Jason’s mind was opening up to all that power. He’s a Class 0 now, Thren. Lucas was right. Microtelekinesis all the fucking way, but it was too much. His mind needed more room, which he didn’t have.”
“The bond,” Threnody guessed. “With Kerr.”
“Kerr isn’t a ’kinetic-oriented psion,” Quinton said very, very softly. “He couldn’t handle the overload. Their brain patterns wouldn’t match.”
She stared up into his face, a curious rushing sound filling her ears. “No.”
“Lucas made the connection. He took the bond out of Kerr and put it in my mind. It’s permanent.” Quinton gave her a careful, broken smile as he brushed his knuckles over her cheek. “You lived.”
Threnody didn’t know what to say. She opened her mouth; closed it again. Shaking her head, she finally found her voice. “I would never have asked that of you. Ever.”
“You weren’t in any condition to argue.”
“Consider yourself lucky.” Threnody took in a deep breath and straightened her shoulders, hiding the pain with long practice. “Jason and I need to have a talk.”
Quinton blinked at her, startled into laughter. “Even with Jason having all that power, I’d put my credit on you.”
The hatch slid open and Matron stepped inside, the older woman eyeing Threnody. “So you’re finally awake. You missed all the fun.”
“I doubt that,” Threnody said.
Matron jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Go strap in. We’re launching in five and I don’t need you underfoot.”
Quinton put a hand on Threnody’s shoulder and guided her out of the flight deck, back into the cold of the cargo bay.
[TEN]
SEPTEMBER 2379
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Dawn broke over London, late-summer sunlight piercing through a haze of thin, gray clouds. The air was hot and muggy, the breeze coming from the north only marginally cooler. The people who called the winding, ruined streets home were beginning to wake up and start another day while those who worked the night went to ground. People lived in cycles and this was only one of many.
Main city towers spanned both sides of the polluted deluge that was the Thames River, with others spread out around them. Clustered in the central zone, with foundations anchored deep into the ground, the city towers were covered in hologrids, with adverts that scrolled down their sides. The Serca Syndicate called a main city tower home, and Nathan Serca sat with his back to the view from his office. He’d seen it all before and was more interested in what his own CMO had to say
.
Victoria Montoya, a Class III telepath, hadn’t slept much in the past few days and it showed in the stiff way she carried herself, the way stress lined her eyes and mouth.
“We lost forty-nine Warhounds in Buffalo,” Victoria reported, studying her datapad. “Of the total, Jin Li Zhang was the most critical loss. Fifty-two other Warhounds are currently off the active-duty roster and under medical care ranging from a few days to a few weeks. Most won’t be ready for immediate field missions. That’s almost a sixth of our total ranks. We still don’t know the location of your daughters.”
Nathan’s expression didn’t change as Victoria tallied up their losses. He already knew the few major ones, the losses that involved his children; these numbers made it all worse. His fury at the betrayal of his children was difficult to hide, but he was adept at censoring himself. Nathan was supposed to be human, but as a Class I triad psion, he had more than enough power at his disposal to change an adversary’s mind. He rarely used his powers, choosing instead to act through subordinates in order to extend his life span. It was how he’d survived to reach fifty-one when most psions were lucky to reach thirty.
“And my son?” Nathan leaned back in his chair and curled his hands over the armrests. “What about Gideon?”
His youngest son was the only successor he had left. Lucas defected first. Now, with Samantha gone, her absence would cause problems Nathan had never thought he’d have to deal with. She’d been taking on public duties for two years, and her disappearance wouldn’t go unnoticed. Kristen had been kept hidden away, never even put into the Registry. The continuing loss of his chosen successors would, however, be impossible to hide.
“Gideon is stable,” Victoria said after a moment’s hesitation. “Physically, he wasn’t hurt that badly. Mentally? It’s been rough.”
Stable wasn’t enough. Nathan required a functioning heir. “Fix his mind, Victoria. I need Gideon conscious for a mission while I attend a scheduled meeting with the Syndicate’s subsidiaries.”