by C. G. Hatton
She reached a hand up to his forehead, thinking he was hurt but reassessing and deciding it wasn’t as bad as it looked. “How did we not see it coming?”
“Tanzi,” he said, swatting her away. “Tierney’s tech guy. Sceznei must have targeted him as the easy way in. Tanzi was always nervous as hell. LC said it and Duncan said it. They didn’t think anything was amiss when he started freaking out because he was always freaking out. But yeah, I know, I should have seen it.”
Voices were yelling.
“We need to get out of here,” Martinez sent.
They had probably about three or four minutes before the Wintrans started bombing the crap out of the town. They didn’t have time to get clear.
He started to say something, lost track of his train of thought and closed his eyes. There was something about the shouting that was grinding at his nerves but he couldn’t make out the words.
‘Can’t you feel the fear? That’s Anderton’s little whore. He’s dying in her arms. How poetic.’
NG turned towards the shouting, towards what must have been the centre of the blast, shutting out the pounding in his head and narrowing his focus. He could sense DiMarco, struggling, trapped, and a girl who was unharmed, scared and screaming for help. There was one other there, fading so fast he could hardly sense the lifesigns. LC.
Climbing through the rubble, NG shut out the noise and chaos and told Hil to bug out, get clear and wait for further instructions. Martinez was cursing constantly at his side, torn between wanting him safe and wanting LC out of there.
‘Anderton is dead. Why are you bothering?’
As they reached what was left of the back of the building, Tierney’s people were pulling DiMarco clear. The pilot was swearing. LC looked like shit. The girl had one hand pressed against his chest, red oozing through her fingers, the other held against his head as if she could hold him together with sheer willpower.
NG turned to Martinez and muttered, “Get us some privacy.” He walked forward and knelt, placing a hand on LC’s neck. His breathing was shallow, hair matted with blood, skin burning up as the organism worked overtime.
The girl whispered, “I can’t stop the bleeding.”
‘Let him die,’ Sebastian hissed, squirming with hate.
NG ignored him and concentrated on LC. Head wounds could be tricky and the kid was balancing precariously right on the edge of a dark abyss. Just bringing him back from that brink was going to be tough.
‘Let me help, I’ll sort him out.’
NG ignored the sarcasm and dug two vials from a pocket with one hand, keeping the other on LC. He bit the caps off both ampoules and pressed one against the kid’s neck, juggling the other and stabbing it against his own. The Epizin wasn’t the instant pick-me-up it would be for anyone else but the hit of extra energy wouldn’t go amiss.
LC didn’t move.
The girl was staring at him.
“What’s your name?” NG asked, voice still ringing slightly in his ears as he spoke.
He shifted his weight to get comfortable, tucking one hand gently up against LC’s shoulder and assessing the damage. It felt like the kid’s collarbone was broken, a scattering of deep shrapnel wounds compounding the danger as the organism struggled to deal with the internal bleeding. It was weird to sense the living entity that was swarming throughout LC’s body, shutting down non-essentials and focusing its frenzied activity to protect the vitals as it healed cell by cell. It was struggling and it snatched at the energy NG fed into it with a pull that threatened to overwhelm.
“Yoshi,” she said. “Is he going to be okay?”
“Yeah.” So long as they weren’t disturbed because it felt like this could take a while.
The girl was looking at LC lying there motionless, willing him to wake up, thinking back to the night they’d met and the two men who had attacked her. Luka had floored them both. NG listened in with a half smile. They trained their operatives well but LC was something else. She was thinking that he’d saved her again, pushed her into cover when they’d all realised what Tanzi was about to do. He’d taken the brunt of the explosion and shielded her from it. She was also wondering who NG was and what he was doing here. She had a sharp mind. And there was something else there, something curious.
NG looked at her. “Do you want to help?”
She nodded without hesitation.
NG covered her hand with his. She was trembling but she was surprisingly strong. She didn’t resist, trusting him completely. It would have been easy to drain her and take every last ounce of her essence.
‘You shock me, Nikolai,’ Sebastian teased maliciously. ‘Not so long ago, that thought would not have even crossed your mind.’
She was watching with fascination.
NG turned his attention to the shrapnel wounds. He’d never tried this before but if he could throw a fully armoured man to the ground at twenty feet, he should be able to pull a tiny piece of metal from a body he was touching.
He closed his eyes, felt the piece he was concentrating on shift and set about painstakingly drawing each shard of metal out of the kid’s flesh and fixing the damage as much as he could. It was hard to be subtle about it and he was struggling to achieve any finesse here but it was working, the organism responding to his manipulations to eject each foreign body from its midst.
It was tough going. Hard to stop the bleeding from so many wounds. He could feel LC fading.
‘I don’t understand why you are even bothering to try to save him. What has he ever done for you?’
Yoshi whimpered softly. Done. She was exhausted but fighting to stay awake. She was a good kid, the kind of waif and stray that Mendhel used to snap up. “Go,” he said gently and glanced around. The strain on his already depleted reserves was taking its toll. If it took too much longer, he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to stay conscious himself. “Angel, I need a hand here.”
Yoshi backed away reluctantly and Martinez crouched beside him. “Is he going to be okay?”
“Yeah,” NG said again because they didn’t need to hear any different. “You have to trust me.”
There was a hesitant nod.
“I need physical contact,” he said, admitting that out loud to someone for the first time in his life. Christ, he might as well put a sign on his head, freak show this way. “Take hold of his arm.”
They sat quietly then and he took energy from Martinez faster than was probably safe for any of them.
She stared at him as he did it and it was disconcerting as hell to work with an audience. He felt exposed. His whole life had been shrouded in secrecy, need to know only. Arturo was the closest confidant he’d ever had aside from the Man and even then the old guy had never pried. Now it was starting to feel like the whole galaxy knew what he was.
‘You don’t even know what you are,’ Sebastian said maliciously, writhing inside, and wanting nothing more than to send a vicious spike of agony lancing into LC.
NG didn’t rise to it. He felt LC stir slightly beneath his hand.
Martinez muttered something as a roar of engines overhead was followed by a rapid sequence of deep rumbles. She was talking to Hilyer and Elliott, he realised, as the Wintran attack began, and he hadn’t even noticed. He’d never healed anyone else like this before and it was hard, draining.
‘What are we even doing here, Nikolai? You want to leave the guild, go. Let’s go find Zang and offer him a deal. He couldn’t possibly treat you any worse than your precious Thieves’ Guild.’
He had no idea what he wanted. But offering a deal to Zang wasn’t it. Shooting the bastard in the head might be.
Sebastian laughed.
NG pushed it, aware he was rushing, and felt another shift in LC’s energy. He wanted the kid awake and gradually eased him back to consciousness, taking as much of the pain as he could manage.
LC murmured, starting to come round, the edge of a nightmare still clawing scratches into his mind. He jerked awake and the headache that motion sparked se
nt a spike of shared pain searing into them both. A swirl of concussion sent the room spinning away, the kid gasped and passed out cold.
NG sat back. LC was alive but he wasn’t in any fit state to run a tab.
He sat quietly, back against the ruins of a wall, sipping at a bottle of beer, listening in as Elliott gave updates of Wintran positions through an open link on the Senson. Two of the guys from Security were standing a discrete distance away, securing the area, giving him some space.
He rested the cold bottle against his forehead and closed his eyes. He was goosed. If he was honest with himself, he didn’t know what he was doing here. What any of them were doing here.
‘You’re going to get me killed here, is what you’re doing.’
He was vaguely aware of Martinez approaching and didn’t react as she squeezed his shoulder gently and sat beside him. “Are you alright?”
NG nodded. He wasn’t. He was tired.
She was trying to figure out what the Man would want her to do. He’d never realised how much they worked to the Man’s agenda, and not his.
‘You have realised it,’ Sebastian whispered, scathingly, hatefully. ‘Again, the Man always wiped your memory.’
“They’ve got him stabilised,” she said, “not that they have any decent medical facilities here. I left a couple of Security watching over him.” She took a deep breath. “Duncan wants to see you. I asked him to give us a few minutes. What do we do now?”
“Elliott said it will take two of us to do what he needs.”
She stared for an instant then realised what he was saying. “No.”
“We don’t have much choice. And the only way to get on that battle cruiser now is to hand ourselves in.”
“No. I’m not going to let you get yourself killed. Like it or not, NG, I care about you too much.”
‘She’s not what you think she is.’
NG opened his eyes and turned to face her, a cold spot inside sparking in defiance.
“You care about protecting me,” he said quietly, “because the Man programmed you to care about me. Don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s any more than that.”
It was surprising to hear her laugh. “You think you can shock me? NG, I know exactly what the Man did to me. And Banks.”
She sat back, heart pounding as memories surfaced.
NG shut them out. He wasn’t interested.
‘Don’t lie to yourself.’
Martinez glared at him. Her expression was dark, the thoughts flitting over the surface of her mind even darker. “NG, do you know where I’m from?”
He stared back at her. “Angel, I don’t even know where I’m from.”
Her eyes glinted.
“I was on death row, NG. Banks too. I killed people for money, he killed people for kicks, a lot of people on a lot of planets.” She laughed and dragged a hand back over her hair. “I hadn’t slept in years when the Man took me out of that cess pit of a jail. I used to enjoy it, you know, the killing, but then they started coming back, at night. The faces. Every last one of them. Do you know what that feels like?”
Sebastian was a cold spot writhing inside. Of course he knew what it felt like.
He didn’t reply. This woman had been tasked with watching over him, had been at his side for years, and she was right, he knew nothing about her.
She leaned forward, every muscle tense. “Banks died for you. I would die for you. You know why? Because the Man rescued us from that. Banks told me once he used to wake up screaming in pain and the only way that pain would go was if he inflicted more pain on someone else.”
She pulled out her gun and started checking it, clicking out the magazine and clicking it back in, obsessively and automatically. “I am loyal to the Man,” she said quietly without looking at him. “And he wants you alive. And like it or not, I do care about you.”
He’d never heard her like this before. He kept his voice low. “You don’t know what I am, Angel.”
“No, I don’t but I know exactly what I am,” she fired straight back at him, “and I know where I came from. The Man saved me from that and I am not going back. He can programme me to think and do whatever the hell he wants.” She glared at him defiantly. “What the fuck did he do to you?”
‘Be sure you want to cross that line before you say another word, Nikolai,’ Sebastian whispered maliciously.
He was already way past that line.
NG closed his eyes again and leaned his head back against the rough surface of the wall. “He created me,” he said. “I don’t exist.”
Chapter 27
He raised the goblet and paused with it a finger’s breadth from his lips, breathing in the heady aroma.
She was staring at him, not sure what to say.
“It is done,” he said. “It cannot be undone. Nikolai knows all there is to know. And he knows what he is capable of. Good and bad.”
“You feel a loss?”
He frowned and shook his head, tipping the goblet to drink and wondering if that was a lie.
“You have nurtured him for a long time.”
“I always hoped that he would be strong enough to withstand Sebastian and remain true to himself, that is all.”
•
There was another deep rumble as Wintran bombs hit the town. NG could sense Martinez frowning and said abruptly, “My real name is Sebastian and he’s a vicious son of a bitch.”
“With blue eyes,” she said softly. “NG, I’ve seen it. Everyone has a side of themselves…”
He laughed bitterly and took another mouthful of the beer. “Angel, I’m tired. Just humour me. I’m going up there.”
She stared at him, knowing fine well why he was so tired, thinking about the state LC had been in and what it had taken out of NG to keep him alive. She wanted to ask, desperately wanted to know how he’d healed the kid and wanted to ask why he couldn’t have done that for Banks.
“I wish I could have,” he said quietly.
Martinez turned her head, staring straight ahead. “So what do you see when you read my mind, NG?”
She wasn’t angry or scared. There was no accusation there, just a genuine curiosity. And she needed him to know that she knew. That there was no need for secrets any more.
“I don’t see your past,” he said.
She smiled. “Or the future?”
He shook his head. “I’m a telepathic empath, not a fortune teller.”
“Are you human?”
“As far as I know.”
“You don’t have this virus or whatever it is?”
Another shake of the head. “Born like this.”
“Did Devon know?”
A lump formed in his throat. “Not until the end.”
She was thinking that he looked more vulnerable than she’d ever seen him and catching herself thinking it, thinking that if he could read her mind, he could hear every thought.
He’d never seen her blush.
She looked away. She knew deep down that there hadn’t been time in that damned freezing cold alley on Redgate.
“I couldn’t save Devon either.”
“I’ve always known you heal fast,” she said, looking back at him intently. “Those drones in the Maze? Evelyn told me that poison should have killed you. And someone cut your throat. Jesus, normal people don’t survive stuff like that. But I didn’t realise you could…” She trailed off, not sure what to say.
He reached to touch her hand and stroked his thumb across a gash on her knuckles, taking out the heat of the infection that was setting in, numbing the pain, healing the minor wound easily.
“How…?”
He pulled the bullet out of his pocket and tossed it into the air, no idea if he could do it, but freezing it there in front of them in mid-air as easily as if he was holding it. It felt good, as if he was harnessing something deep down that he’d always been able to do but just hadn’t realised. “Telekinesis, manipulating matter. Healing is just doing the same but to flesh and blood.”
>
She leaned forward, transfixed by it, hanging there in the air. “My god. NG.”
“I don’t think God has a lot to do with it.” He let it fall.
She clenched her fist slowly, still not quite believing what he’d done. “I know you can take care of yourself,” she said. “But you’re not alone here. Don’t forget that. Whoever the hell you are.” She squeezed his hand. “I’ll let you go hand yourself in on one condition…”
He wasn’t in the mood for bargaining, and he was going anyway, but he raised his eyes, questioning.
“Tell me why you quit.”
NG shook his head vaguely. He couldn’t explain, even to Martinez who knew the Man apparently, maybe even better than he did. The guild had been his whole life and it was a lie.
“Well, if you won’t tell me that, at least tell me how you are planning to escape once you’re on the Expedience. These guys aren’t stupid. They’ll have the prisoners locked down tight. Sheer numbers isn’t going to change that.”
He could feel her frustration. She was thinking it might be easy for Hil or LC to slip out of custody, they did stuff like that all the time, but NG wasn’t a field-op.
He reached and retrieved the bullet. “I worked as a field operative for fifteen years.”
“When?”
“A long time ago.”
She looked at him, eyebrows raised. “A long time ago?”
He shrugged. “It’ll be easier to skip out from the infirmary. It’ll need to be something serious. I don’t think a grazed knee will cut it. I’ll need something like a gunshot wound so they’ll take me in then ignore me.”
She sucked in an exasperated breath. “If anyone is going to shoot you, it’s gonna be me.”
He smiled.
“Seriously, NG…”
“My name’s Nikolai,” he said suddenly. “I’m not Sebastian.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ve seen both sides of you and this you is not that you. Personally, I prefer this one.”
Elliott interrupted with a sharp, “NG. You have about one hour thirty before Zang and UM flood the town with troops. I hope you have a new plan.”