by Susan Grant
His father had lifted a brow. “If hindsight is twenty-twenty, then foresight is a brand-new pair of Buschnell-Irwin binoculars.” He finished his drink. “Best on the planet. Unfortunately, too few people own a pair.” The older man rose, more slowly than usual, as if bearing the weight of years and responsibility on his shoulders. “Goodnight, Ty.”
That conversation had happened many months ago, but Ty still thought of it. “Ax” Armstrong, many called the general—for his decisive, incisive, but sometimes bloody strategies of fighting terrorism and controlling the UCE’s colonies. Others said he was a dove clothed in hawk armor, using the largest military in the world to further his personal vision of peace. Still others claimed he’d like to oust the president and turn the UCE into a military dictatorship. Sometimes Ty thought the less he knew about his sire the better.
Would the UCE weather the coming storm?
It was Ty’s duty as a military officer and his father’s son to make sure it did. Crouched by the cryopod, he studied his gloved hands, clenched into fists, until Banzai’s vital signs strengthened. When her pulse was steady and she breathed on her own, he opened the lid and prepared to slip a breather over her face. It was time to move out. They had no seconds to waste.
Gently, he undid her restraints. Her eyes flickered open—two slits appearing where her lids had been swollen shut. Her irises were brilliant green, though he knew the drugs in her body were responsible for the hue. As the meds wore off, the irises of her eyes would fade to a less intense color. How much less, he’d have to wait and see. What would those eyes think of the twenty-second century?
What would they think of him?
Maybe he should have shaved.
“Up we go,” he told her. “Departure time is now.” He slipped a hand behind her head and lifted her upper body off the pod bed. Her eyes widened, dazedly searching his face. He cradled her head as he wondered if she could process what she saw. “Welcome back, Sleeping Beauty,” he murmured, and fastened the breather over her lips.
Then his gauntlet comm bleeped in warning. Something had set off the Early Warning Transmitters.
Ty heard water splashing at the entrance of the cave. Adrenaline shot through his body. Angry shouts erupted, coming closer. Kyber’s men, Ty thought. Who else would they be?
He had a split second to decide whether to drag Banzai with him or leave her in the cryopod. He decided that she’d be better off with him.
A dozen hulking soldiers stormed in dressed in black body armor and toting the best weapons money could buy.
“You there—halt!” they shouted in Hannish, the Kingdom of Asia’s adopted and meticulously honed dialect of English. Their accent sounded too polite for the circumstances, but they were anything but cordial when they saw him pull Banzai into his arms and swing away from the cryopod. He dove with her behind a pile of rocks and rubble.
There, he ducked down and cocked his pistol. “I’m armed!”
Instantly, violent concussions ricocheted off the stones. Lasers and bullets were everywhere. So much for his warning, he thought, and threw himself sideways and into an adjacent blockade of rubble, leaving Banzai lying hidden on the stone floor. He wanted to be the target, not her.
On his belly between piles of rubble, he returned fire until he’d emptied a clip. Discarding it, he replaced it with another.
The firefight was intense. With every passing second, the soldiers gained ground. Ty hadn’t brought enough ammo to outlast this kind of battle. Salty sweat ran in rivers down his temples. He swiped it out of his eyes, fired, and took down a couple of his attackers. Wounded, they writhed on the ground. He aimed again...and heard empty clicks. He was out of ammo.
It didn’t take long for the soldiers to figure it out.
They pulled him out from behind the rocks, greeted him with a hailstorm of kicks. Then he was down, rolled into a tight ball, a last-ditch protective position to keep steel-toed boots from crushing his skull. Unfortunately, that left his kidneys wide open.
Bright lights flashed behind his eyes as their assault caught him in the back, ribs, and gut. Pain lanced deep. The agony was especially vivid when they found the same place twice, which seemed to be on purpose.
He’d heard that when you were beaten like this, shock deadened the pain. Bullshit. The next guy who told him that was dead meat.
His next thought was of Banzai, lying groggy and vulnerable behind the rubble. What would happen to her? Was she all right?
He held a picture in his mind, of her green eyes, full of wonder yet barely open. She could be dead already. He hoped she was, if Kyber’s monsters meant to turn on her next. Soldiers could be brutes. A woman was always at the mercy of...
As Ty slipped out of consciousness, his mind centered on the irony of it all. He’d found the ultimate treasure, only to give her up to barbarian soldiers of the world’s most powerful dictator: the very people who’d appreciate her least.
Chapter Six
“... blood pressure falling.. “
“Temperature low...”
“I need vasoconstrictors...now.”
“Introducing nanovasoconstrictors, Dr. Park.”
“Watch the pressure.”
“Watching...”
Bree listened to the voices, not sure how long she’d been aware of them. She’d been drifting, for what amount of time she didn’t know. Forever. A billowing marshmallow dream...
Strong hands gripped her upper arms, lifting her and pulling her up. She would have fallen backward, but he didn’t let her.
“Sleeping Beauty…”
The familiar voice resonated inside her mind, luring her out of the fog. The soft white clouds floating all around her disintegrated. She glimpsed startling blue eyes, white teeth. “Welcome back.”
From where? Had she been gone long? He seemed happy to have her back, though. A sweetly poignant and inexplicable certainty told her that she already knew this man, though she seemed to be having some trouble remembering who he was. It didn’t seem to stop her from wanting to kiss him. His mouth moved closer; warm breath whispered against her cheek. As longing flared inside her, she hungered to complete the contact. But white clouds enveloped her before she could.
A cold hand swatted her on the cheek. “No sleep,” a person ordered as if training a dog. “Eyes open.”
“... consequences of stasis…too long asleep ...”
“Some of them never wake up...”
“Keep her alive.” A new voice, also male. But this one came from the room, not her mind. “Banzai Maguire must not die.”
Must not die? Was she dying? Was this what it felt like?
Something draped over her mouth, wet and cold. It felt like she was underwater. Bree arched her back and tried to breathe…to reach the surface. She couldn’t find it! No air! A coil of panic wrapped around her and yanked tight. She fought the feeling of suffocation, struggled. No!
She sucked in a breath and jerked awake. Gasping, she lay there, eyes fluttering, like a grounded fish.
“She is awake!”
“Pulse eighty-five. Respiration rising rapidly!”
“Keep it down!”
“Sedative?”
A woman answered in a British accent. Her voice was the most familiar. “No. Too soon. I want her to stabilize. Her body must remember how.”
Time passed, but not in linear fashion. Reality skipped forward from one scene to the next like a movie on a scratched DVD.
A while later—how long, Bree didn’t know—a gentle hand brushed her cheek. “How do you feel?”
Been better. Her lungs hurt. Her arms and legs tingled with a million stabbing needles, which grew worse if she tried to move. She quickly figured out that wasn’t something she wanted to do.
She’d rather sleep. Turning away from the prodding and poking, she tried to press her head into her pillow. Her throat was sore, and her mouth was cotton-dry. Her joints ached. Holy Christmas, it was whiplash, a nightmare hangover, and the flu all rolled into on
e!
Knuckles brushed her cheek. A woman’s hand. “Do you hear me? Do you understand? You must not sleep.”
Why? Outside, there were poking hands and frantic orders. Inside her head, there was undemanding tranquility. Peace. It wasn’t hard to choose between the two worlds...
“If you dip back into slumber I may not be able to bring you back.” The woman’s tone turned officious. “The prince will be very unhappy if you allow that to happen.”
“Very,” a deeper male voice said. Him, again. “Keep her alive. Banzai Maguire must not die.”
Good man, she thought drowsily. She liked his philosophy.
The male voice triggered another memory, until only a fragment of a dream. “Welcome back…” He was her rescuer. She must have opened her eyes for a moment, and seen him, a muscled hunk with a marine haircut, high cheekbones, and those bracing blue eyes. He’d had a little scar on his upper lip; she remembered that now, too. But that was all. He must be with the Special Forces. When she was better, she’d find out who he was, and thank him…
* * *
Someone was tapping on the cheek again. “Please. There is only so much we can do, Captain Maguire. The rest must come from you.”
Captain…Captain Maguire.
Bree Maguire.
Banzai.
Bree’s eyes shot open. She’d been captured, tortured. Now, apparently, she was in the hands of rescuers. She remembered little of it, and none of how she got here.
Where was “here”? Bree had trouble focusing at first. It was as if she had a piece of gauze laminated to each eye. When her vision finally cleared, she lifted her head. Mistake. Trying to move reminded her of being back in the cockpit of the F-16, battling nine g’s worth of force.
Lying flat on her back, she looked around. Her hospital room was enormous, furnished sparely but luxuriously with ultramodern furniture that looked like it belonged on a cover of Architectural Digest. Integrated into and almost blending with the wall closest to her bed were computers, or medical monitors. This place had cost some money. It definitely wasn’t a military hospital.
As her vision improved, Bree turned her gaze toward the source of the voice she’d heard most often, the one she sensed had been talking to her in her dreams for the past few…was it hours? Days? She’d lost track of time.
The woman smiled at her, radiating warmth and genuine concern. She was Asian and fashion-model gorgeous, maybe in her late thirties or early forties. Her folded arms and white outfit shouted “physician.” But her sultry, British-accented English, the huge black pearls in her ears, her flawless skin hinted at luxurious living. “I am Dr. Park,” she said, sensing Bree’s question. “Dae Park.”
A Korean name, Bree noted. They must have brought her back to Seoul.
A woman walked up to Dr. Park and handed her what looked like a pocket-sized computer. She was younger, younger than Bree, but she, too, wore the white clothes of a physician, and was tall, beautiful, and sophisticated like Dr. Park. If it weren’t for her earrings, huge opals that seemed to glow from within, Bree would have thought the new woman was Dr. Park.
Other women moved around the room, too, farther away and busy with various tasks. All four were dressed in simple dove-gray scrubs.
And all four were younger replicas of Dr. Park.
Bree squeezed her eyes shut. Opened them. Seeing double was one thing, but this was ridiculous. Yet the other women were poorer “copies” of the original: They were shorter, their clothes further down on the scale of quality, their skin and eyes duller; some, their mouths slack. They appeared suited to their menial tasks, in contrast to the two—no, three—women dressed in white. Yet another “sister” glided past Bree’s bedside to confer with Dr. Park. She, too, was dressed in white and wore expensive jewelry. In all, there were seven women. Seven sisters. Impossible.
Bree closed her eyes to erase the hallucination, and marshmallow softness enveloped her.
* * *
“I gave you a little more for the pain, Captain.”
Bree jolted back to awareness. Dr. Park’s voice came from a different direction. She must have blacked out again. “It will help,” the doctor said. “Tell me if it does not.”
Bree didn’t care. All she wanted to do was return to the big powdery-soft marshmallows. She didn’t even like raw marshmallows. Burned to a crisp over a campfire was the only way to go. But these were big mothers, spongy and inviting. All she had to do was fall. . . deep . . . deep . . . deep…
The voices started to shout again. “Keep her up. Up!”
Reality fast-forwarded again, and she woke to more chaos. This was a hospital. What was so wrong about a patient wanting to take a nap? She heard the loud thumps of boots crossing the room. Strong hands lifted Bree, forcing her to her feet.
“Your Highness!” one of the women gasped in astonishment.
Your Highness? Even if this was a civilian hospital in Seoul—where the air force might have sent her for specialized care that the military hospitals couldn’t provide, care that Bree for some reason needed before they could airlift her home—South Korea didn’t have a monarchy, or even the ceremonial trappings of one like England. Or did they?
“You say she will not stay awake? I will keep her awake.” He pulled Bree to his side. “It is something I am good at.” He swept her close.
Bree stretched out her hand and flattened it atop an abdomen as hard as his thick belt, which pressed into her ribs. She twisted her head to see the man behind the voice, but she was too close and he was too tall, giving her only the quickest glimpse of a hard jaw and broad shoulders. He wore black, all black. She, on the other hand, wore beige pajamas, a thin, formfitting outfit that somehow kept her warm.
“You are a stubborn creature,” he said in her ear.
It took Bree a moment to realize that the man was talking to her. No guy had ever called her a “creature” and made it sound like an endearment.
“Come, you can do better.”
“Trying...” Her voice was raspy, almost a whisper. Maybe she’d screamed during the torture that she didn’t remember and shredded her vocal cords.
He supported her while forcing her to walk, his big hand cupping her elbow, her other arm sandwiched by their bodies, as if she were a drunk who needed sobering up. Maybe he’d feed her coffee. That would help. How long had it been since she’d had caffeine? Too long was the only answer. She was twenty-eight. She felt eighty-eight.
But the longer Bree held her eyes open, the better she felt. Taking a deep breath—it felt somehow good to stretch her lungs to capacity—she noted that smells were starting to come back to her. They’d been absent before. The air was clean and dry, filtered, like airplane air. Dr. Park smelled like flowers. The man smelled like leather and warm skin, a masculine scent that she liked, layered with a faint, sweet soapy aroma.
“So, she wants to sleep?” the man prompted Dr. Park.
The physician replied with a wry smile. “I’d rather she didn’t, Prince Kyber, and told her so.”
The man gave Bree’s shoulder a squeeze. “You will soon learn to listen to Dae. There are many physicians, but there are none better than she.”
Dr. Park was so fair that it was easy to see the man’s praise coloring her cheeks.
“I have not heard from you for hours. Give me an update,” he demanded.
“There has been atrophy, of course. But we’ve already begun treating it. In addition to pulse stimulation, she’ll need strength training.”
“Good. We will start it now. Step, step, step,” he urged.
Bree stumbled, then caught the rhythm by watching their feet. His: polished black boots. Hers: white slippers. Again, she craned her head to glimpse his face, but poor balance said no to sightseeing and walking at the same time. Her coordination was nonexistent, and she couldn’t get her legs to hold any appreciable weight. What had the North Koreans done to her? “I have to think about every move I make.” Her voice was scratchy, but understandable. “It�
�s like I’m learning to use my body all over again.”
“You have survived an incredible ordeal, Captain Maguire. But you will get well. I hope you will have as much patience in your recovery as we have confidence in it,” Dr. Park added in a tone that made it easy for Bree to believe her. “Our medical science is the most advanced in the world. Every day will see you stronger. We’ve regenerated some of your lost muscle mass already, and what physical damage remains will heal.”
Bree’s neck ached. Her head, too, now that she thought about it. But the pain had a dull edge, as if some medication worked equally hard to keep her from feeling its full force. Please, not a head injury. A bad CAT scan was the kiss of death for a pilot. She would rather have flown anonymously for an entire career than lose her wings for war-hero status.
Bree cleared her throat. “What about my head? My brain? Will the damage be permanent?”
Will I fly again? That’s what she wanted to ask, but she wasn’t ready to hear the word “no.” For someone who had never expected to wake up again, she sounded a wee bit ungrateful about surviving. But all she’d ever wanted to be was an air force pilot. If she couldn’t do that anymore...what would she do with the rest of her life?
“We won’t know what effects are permanent, if any, for some time,” replied Dr. Park. “Your greatest challenges lie ahead, as we continue with your physical and emotional therapy.” The physician and her white-coated twins watched Bree with pride. “But look at you already. You are walking.”
Hardly. Bree’s legs trembled under her weight, her heart straining. “It’s like I haven’t worked out for a hundred years.”
There was a bit of awkward silence, which her escort quickly filled. “One hundred and seventy.”
Bree groaned. “It sure feels like it.”
“Prince Kyber!” Dr. Park scolded him in a shocked tone and brought her finger to her lips.