“Moving on…” another voice says, and I mentally roll my eyes. Do they not know they’re giving their positions away with every word they speak? Though they’re doing that anyway, with every footstep and red beam of light.
“Another door on the right,” the guard in the lead says, as the targeting beams flash into the room, inches from my boots. The door swings open slowly, and my heart pounds as three red beams center on my chest. “Got him,” the lead guard says, while I fight an urge to back closer to the bed. To Lilli. Sudden movements could trigger an overreaction. “He’s in full monster-mode, Doc. How do you want us to proceed? Stun him?”
“I want to talk to him first,” Brennan says. “Is the room secure? I’m coming in.”
“One second.” The guard looks right at me. He shifts his pistol into a one-handed grip so he can press a button on his com, and his next words echo into the room, for my benefit. “Captain Sotelo, lie face down on the ground, or I will stun you unconscious.” He obviously has no idea that I heard every word he said to Brennan.
“Help her,” I growl at him, as I slowly back toward the bed, my hands raised at shoulder height. The backs of my thighs bump the mattress.
“Don’t move!” the lead guard shouts.
“I’ll come peacefully.” My voice is so low-pitched I’m not even sure they can hear it. “But she’s coming with me. She needs help.”
“She…?” The guard frowns at me, while several others fan out into the room behind him.
“Sir, there’s a woman on the bed,” the one on the far right says. “Appears to be unconscious.”
“Help her,” I repeat.
“What the fuck, Nelson?” Brennan demands. “Sweep the rest of the building. I’m coming in.”
“The rest of the building is clear, ma’am,” another of the guards says from the hallway. “There are only two other intact rooms, both empty.”
A lighter set of steps heads toward us, crunching on dirt and debris in the hallway. Then Dr. Brennan squeezes her way into the small room. “Captain Sotelo.” Her gaze slides past me, to where Lilli still lies on the bed, unmoving. “What have you done?”
“Help her,” I demand, and the beast’s grip on my voice keeps it low and gravely.
“This is why you turned on the com?” But Brennan makes no move to approach the bed. She isn’t even looking at Lilli.
“Help her,” I repeat.
“Fascinating.” She studies me for another few seconds, then her gaze finally focuses on the bed. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing.”
“Well now, that can’t be true. She’s not wearing any pants, Captain.”
“I didn’t hurt her,” I growl at Brennan. “The men outside tried to take her, and I killed them. I thought they might have hurt her, but I can’t find any injuries, and she won’t wake up.”
“Well, she’s not our concern—”
“Help her, and I’ll come back to the lab with you.”
“You’ll come back anyway.”
“Not without her, I won’t. You help her—bring her with us—or my cooperation is over. You’ll have to knock me out to run all your tests, and that means there will be no more field studies.”
Brennan looks more fascinated than threatened. “I’ll take a look at her on one condition: you voluntarily demonstrate your new skill and fully cooperate in the new branch of study.”
“Fine,” I say, and the doctor’s brows rise over my lack of hesitation. “Just help her. Now.”
“Back out of the way then, and dispense with the weaponry.” She waves me toward the fall wall, and when I comply, she directs three of the guards to follow. “If he so much as moves, knock him out.”
All three of them train red beams on my chest, while I harness the willpower needed to talk my biological accessories into receding into my arm.
Brennan approaches the bed cautiously, while two more guards aim pistols at Lilli’s softly rising and falling chest. “What was she doing when she passed out?”
“Nothing.” I stare at her over one of the guards’ shoulders. “She fell asleep after— She just fell asleep, and now I can’t wake her up.”
“After. You had intercourse with this woman?” Brennan stares across the bed at me. “Voluntarily?” I don’t answer, but she doesn’t seem to need the confirmation. “Fascinating.” She pulls a palm-length cylinder from her pocket and shows me the clear central cavity. “Before you overreact, I’m just drawing blood for a preliminary test.” She presses the cylinder to the inside of Lilli’s left elbow, and it begins to fill with blood.
While she waits for the results, she pulls back Lilli’s eyelids and shines a pen light into her eyes, then presses two fingers to her jugular to take her pulse the old-fashioned way. “Her pulse is fine. No sign of a concussion.” The cylinder beeps, and Brennan pulls it from her pocket. “Slight anemia, which is no surprise out here. Nothing else raises any flags, except…” Brennan presses a button on the end of the cylinder and reads whatever appears on the tiny screen.
“What? What’s wrong?” I demand.
“Nothing. Just a surprising level on a couple of hormones. There isn’t much else I can do without the rest of my equipment.”
“So you’ll bring her?”
“Yes.” Brennan taps something on her wrist com, then she lifts Lilli’s right hand and shines the light from her com on the prisoner number tattooed there. “Justin, we’re headed back to the lab with Sotelo and an unidentified female inmate suffering an unexplained loss of consciousness. Send me everything you can find on prisoner number 4084786 so I can read her file on the way back.”
“I’m on it,” a man’s voice replies.
Brennan motions to the guards at her back. “Get Sotelo loaded and bring a stretcher for…” She turns to me. “Who is this lovely little thing?”
“Lilliana Marie Morgan.” No sense withholding her name. Brennan will know that and much more, as soon as she opens Lilli’s file. “But I’m staying with her.”
Brennan gives me an amused shake of her head. “Knock him out.”
One of the guards discharges his weapon, and fire races through every nerve ending in my body. Lighting me up with pain. As I collapse to the floor, Brennan turns back to Lilli. “Wear gloves when you lift him. Even unconscious, he—”
Then the world goes dark.
“Lilliana!” I wake up with her name on my lips, her face carved into my memory.
“Relax. She’s fine,” Justin says, and I turn my head to find him typing on a tablet at the metal desk by the wall.
Lab B. I haven’t been here in months. There hasn’t been any reason for them to put me in here since Brennan concluded the first phase of medical testing and moved on to field observations.
This isn’t the main lab space. Which means…
I try to sit up and a strap cuts into my chest. Moving my arms reveals that my wrists are similarly restrained. I haven’t been strapped to a lab table in nearly a year.
“Where’s Lilli?”
“Lab A.” Justin points across the room, and I turn to my right to see that the wall between the two labs is currently transparent. I have a full view of Lilli, lying on the table in the next room. She’s strapped down, even though she still appears to be unconscious, while a couple of lab techs work at desks against the wall.
There has to be a reason for the transparent wall. If Brennan’s letting me see Lilli, it’s because she wants to study my reaction. There’s a reason for everything she does, and that reason rarely has anything to do with what I need or want.
Lilli is covered by a sheet. There’s a reason for that, too.
“Let me up,” I demand as the beast prowls around in my head, stomping and cursing in anger. “I need to see her.”
Justin snorts. “You can see her from there.”
“Brennan!” I shout. “Get the fuck in here!”
“That’s not going to—” The door to lab B slides open, and Justin’s mouth snaps shut.
“I don’t take orders from you, Captain Sotelo,” Dr. Brennan declares as she marches into sight, just out of arm’s reach from the table I’m strapped to. As if she doesn’t trust the straps.
“Yet here you are.” In fact, based on the eagerness swimming in her eyes, I’m betting she asked to be called the second either Lilli or I woke up. “What’s wrong with her?”
Instead of answering, Brennan pulls a rolling stool over and sits next to my table, still just out of reach. “What all do you know about Ms. Malone, Captain?” she asks, tapping on the tablet on her lap. The device is transparent, but the print is backward from where I’m lying, and it’s very small.
“Less than you do.” Yet more than enough.
Mine, the beast growls, and I silently assure him that I agree.
“What’s wrong with her?” I repeat.
“Nothing is wrong with her. Absolutely nothing, other than slight anemia, which we’re already treating, and an equally slight level of dehydration. Which we’ve already fixed with intravenous fluids.”
“What about those hormone levels?” I try to glare at her, but there’s just no way to look threatening while you’re strapped to a table, staring up at someone. “What’s wrong with her hormones?”
“Nothing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with her. The levels of a couple her hormones are surprising, but not abnormal. And certainly not indicative of anything wrong. Captain did you have intercourse with that young woman?” I start to tell her that’s none of her business, but she cuts me off. “The more you tell me, the better equipped I am to evaluate her condition.”
“You already know I did,” I growl at her.
“I’d assumed as much, based on the half-dressed state we found her in, and the fact that we found several of your rather distinctive silver hairs on her body. Yet we found no trace of ejaculate, either on her or inside her.”
“Don’t…touch her.” The words are so gravely they seem to scrape my throat on the way out, but Brennan waves off my objection.
“We have to examine her in order to treat her, Captain. I’m sure you understand that. But so far, we have no diagnosis. She’s simply…unconscious. Though there isn’t a scratch or a bruise on her entire body, and there isn’t a thing wrong with her. Did you have unprotected intercourse with that woman, Captain Sotelo?”
Finally, what she’s asking sinks in, and I push past the beast’s outrage in order to answer. “Yes.”
“And you climaxed inside her?”
“I’ve already answered that, Doc.”
“Actually, you haven’t, but I’m going to assume that testy response is in the affirmative. Which only adds another layer to this enigma. The only conclusion I can come up with is that her body seems to have absorbed your biological material. And as inexplicable as it seems, that is the only source I can come up with for the surprising hormone levels in her blood.”
“You’re saying that my semen changed her?”
Brennan taps on her tablet, and the transparent screen goes blank while she aims a frank look down at me. “Captain Sotelo, it doesn’t sound any more likely when you say it than it did when I drew the conclusion in the first place. Especially considering that Lieutenant Dreyer has ingested untold amounts of the same substance and has never had any sort of similar reaction.”
“So…why won’t Lilli wake up?”
“That is the real question, isn’t it? I don’t have an answer for you. But it does seem to me that if she was fine before you slept with her, whatever’s happened to her since then—to include her loss of consciousness—is, for whatever reason, entirely your fault.”
“Sotelo!” Everett Lawrence calls through his transparent cell door as six guards escort me at gunpoint down the hall. I give him a nod, but that’s all I have in me at the moment. I’m so tired I can hardly move. “Guys! Sotelo’s back!”
I nod to each of them as I pass their cells, relieved to see that they all look healthy.
“Man, we weren’t sure you were coming back,” Vaughn Coleman says as the guards lead me into my cell, across the hall from his.
“I wasn’t either, at times,” I tell him as my cell door slides shut. It’s transparent, just like theirs, and that’s the only mercy Brennan’s granted us, even though I’ve given her everything she asked for.
“Eat,” one of the guards demands as he opens the flap in my door. He nods over my shoulder while I slide my hands through the slot, and once my wrists are free of the restraints, I turn to see at least a dozen MRE envelopes stacked up on the floor in one corner of my cell.
“Tell Brennan I want regular updates on Lilli!” I shout as the guards retreat down the hall. They don’t answer. On the other side of the lab, a door closes, and silence descends again.
“Who’s Lilli?” Zamora asks, from the cell to Coleman’s right.
“Where the hell have you been?” Dreyer demands from the breeding room. She’s alone in there now, and through the long transparent front wall of her cell, she can see me, Jamison, and Lawrence, when he stands directly in front of the transparent door of his cell, two down from mine.
“Long story.” I grab the top MRE from the stack as I sink onto my cot, and I rip into it as I talk. “There was a crash, and our shuttle got diverted within minutes of leaving here. I tried to hijack the shuttle, and shit went south, which left me stranded in zone three for weeks.”
I eat as I tell them how I discovered a new ability during my attempted takeover of the shuttle. How I wound up stuck in a sick body and half out of my mind for six weeks. As soon as I finish the first meal packet, I rip open another one.
“Then I saw Lilli, and everything got weird.”
Dreyer snorts. “You don’t think the rest of that shit was weird?”
“Don’t get me wrong. This new ability is on a whole new level of bizarre, even above the rest of the shit they’ve done to us. But what happened with Lilli…” I shrug as I chew a tasteless hunk of soy protein, leaning against the metal wall at the head of my cot. “I’ve never felt anything like it. I knew she was mine the moment I saw her, and Brennan’s going to use that against us.” Maybe against all of us.
“What do you mean, she was yours?” Thiago scoots closer to his cell door. “Who is she?”
“She’s…mine.” I shove my empty MRE packets onto the floor, then I curl up on my side. “I don’t really know how to explain that, but I’ll try after I get some sleep. Sorry guys. I’m beat. That new ability fucking drains me.”
I can hear them still calling out questions as sleep claims me, but I don’t have the strength to answer.
14
LILLI
Bright light shines through my closed eyelids, and I try to pull the sheet over my head, but my arm is caught on something. There’s something gripping my right wrist.
I try to lift my left arm, and it’s caught too.
What the hell?
My eyes fly open, my heart thudding in my ears, and a clean, smooth metal ceiling comes into focus. It’s much better lit than any ceiling in the Sorority, even during the brightest hours of the day. And this light is cold. Bright white. Artificial.
I turn my head and find a man and a woman in white lab coats, tapping on tablets, seated at metal desks built into the wall.
Panic flutters in my chest as the obvious conclusion sinks in. I fight the straps holding me to the bed—the table?—and that’s when I discover that my legs are restrained too. At the ankles. I’m strapped to a fucking lab table!
One of the strangers notices me struggling and stands. The man—his name tag reads “J. Filmore, PhD”— taps something on his tablet, then speaks into it. “Dr. Brennan, she’s awake.”
“Thanks, Justin. On my way,” a woman’s voice replies.
“Where am I?” I ask, but the people in lab coats only stare at me. “Hey. Who are you? Is this zone X?”
“I’m sorry. We’re not authorized to give you any information without Dr. Brennan’s direct approval,” the woman say
s.
Brennan. I know that name. This is zone X. Carson’s scientists took me. They just fucking—
“How did I get here?” I think back, without taking my focus from the woman in the lab coat, trying to remember what led up to this.
Carson. He killed the men who tried to take me, then we…
We had sex. Again. I must have fallen asleep. Or maybe he…did something to me? I don’t think he would hurt me on purpose, but none of this makes sense.
How did Brennan find us? Why would she take me? I’m not a super-soldier.
“Where’s Carson?” I demand, and I can’t seem to make my arms stop fighting the straps. My wrists already burn from the friction, as if I’ve been struggling against my restraints for a long time. In my sleep. “How long have I been here? How long was I out?”
“Seventy-six hours,” a new voice says, and I roll my head to the other side to see another woman in a lab coat standing in the doorway of the metal-walled lab. The name tag on her coat reads, “M. Brennan, PhD. Project Director.”
Dr. Brennan steps into the room and walks past a long countertop stocked with medical equipment and instruments. “At least, that’s how long you’ve been here. I’m not sure how long you were unconscious before that.”
“Seventy-six…? That’s more than three days!”
“Yes, and despite the fact that our tests all say there is nothing wrong with you, we were starting to worry.”
Dr. Brennan grabs a stool and rolls it toward the table I’m strapped to. She uses a lever to raise it, then she sits. “I am Dr. Maryann Brennan. I run Project Vetus. I’m assuming, considering the time you evidently spent with Captain Sotelo, that you know what that is?”
“I didn’t spend much time with him. But yes, he told me about your…project.”
“This is Justin Filmore, the project’s assistant director, and Lena Baker, our lab assistant.”
“Why am I here?”
Escape (Project Vetus Book 1) Page 16