by Wyatt Kane
She loomed over him with her fists clenched and anger coming off her in waves. He knew that she was looking for a reason to take that anger out on him. But he still did nothing to defend himself. He just shook his head.
“Tempest, I don’t know what happened. How could I be in league with Bain? I was just passing when I saw him fighting Zach. Bain threatened to kill me for the device I now wear.”
Tempest wasn’t convinced. Her rage had blinded her. “How do I know you weren’t with Bain when the fight started? How do I know this isn’t all a complex plot to get all of our devices?”
Again, Ty shook his head. Yet he responded calmly, with confidence. “Tempest, it’s not true. I don’t know how Bain found your home. But it wasn’t me.” He cast about, looking for ways to prove himself. All he could come up with was the device on his wrist. As quickly as he could, he brought up his profile screen. “Look. Neutral Good. It hasn’t changed.”
As Tempest looked at the holographic screen, Ty could sense her resolve wavering. This was evidence that he was telling the truth. Yet she still wasn’t convinced.
“Neutral Good alignment can still do the wrong thing if they believe in what they are doing.”
“But why would I lie about it? The first time I saw Bain was when he murdered Zach in the alley. The only other time I saw him was when he came to my apartment with his henchmen.” Ty shrugged. “Tempest, I don’t know what’s going on. Tell me what happened to Dinah.”
It was finally enough. Whether she believed the device or the legitimate desperation in Ty’s plea, he didn’t know. All he knew was that the last of Tempest’s anger crumbled and she burst into tears.
Ty climbed slowly back to his feet. Carefully, not completely sure how she would react, he reached for her and drew her into a hug.
It seemed that she wasn’t sure how to respond either. For a moment, she stiffened. Then, as if dismissing any last doubts she still harbored, she collapsed against him, holding onto him as tightly as he held her.
Ty still didn’t know what was happening, but he knew that she needed him. “It’s going to be all right. We’ll sort this out, whatever it is. You’ll see.”
30: Message
He held her for long minutes, murmuring words of comfort and stroking her hair. He cared about her more than he wanted to admit and would have done anything to help. Tempest just cried into his chest.
Then, abruptly, she drew away. “I’m sorry,” she sniffed. “I just don’t know what to think.”
“It’s all right,” Ty responded. “But please, tell me what happened. How did you know to come here? How did you know Bain wasn’t at the club?”
Tempest nodded. But instead of immediately starting to speak, she looked about and sat down on the same sofa they had shared the previous evening.
“I received a hologram message on my device. From Bain, although how he managed that, I don’t know. The device’s communication facility is supposed to be secure and encrypted. But he did it.” She looked both angry and worried at the same time, and frustrated by her inability to do anything about it.
“He was laughing through the screen. Gloating. He said he had taken Dinah and was holding her to ransom. Of course, I didn’t believe him. But then he showed me. He had his hand around her neck. She looked terrified.”
Ty was more than shocked. It was worse than he had imagined. Yet he still needed to know more. “What did he want?”
“The same thing as always. Our devices. Not just yours. Look, I saved the message. Watch it for yourself.”
Without waiting for Ty’s response, Tempest indicated that he should sit, then brought up her device’s communication panel. Ty did as she suggested, and in moments he was staring at the brutal face of Bain sneering at him through the holographic screen.
The image wasn’t as clear as it had been when Tempest contacted him. But it was clear enough, as were Bain’s words.
“I have your pretty friend,” he said, and it was exactly as Tempest had described. The loathsome monster was grinning, almost laughing as he said it, as if it was all a big joke. “Your deerkin. Such a fine splice job, if you go for that sort of thing. If I’d known she was so pretty, I wouldn’t have wasted so much time on your boyfriend.”
The vile man sneered as he spoke, and Ty, not normally a violent person at all, wanted to pound that horrible face with his fists. There was something about Bain that inspired hate and revulsion, and it came through over the hologram just as powerfully as it did in person.
“Prove it,” came Tempest’s voice. To Ty, she sounded both defiant and strong. There was no fear in her voice at all.
Yet Bain was up to the challenge. He laughed out loud, then turned and barked an order to someone off-screen. Moments later, he faced the camera again. “Here is your proof, woman!” With that, he hauled Dinah into view.
It was as Tempest had said. Beautiful Dinah, her hair in disarray and her eyes glowing with defiance and terror. Bain’s massive hand was about her throat, and Ty knew that the brute could have snapped her neck in an instant.
Ty had never known such instant rage combined with helplessness. He understood at that moment something he hadn’t thought about before. He had known Dinah for only a day and a half, yet she had become precious to him in ways he couldn’t express. She was his family, just as Tempest was, and he would do anything he could to protect her.
He would have dived through the hologram then and there if he could have, and fought Bain one-on-one with everything he had. Anything to get Dinah back.
The hologram wasn’t finished.
“Dinah!” came Tempest’s recorded voice.
But the monstrous villain gave them no time to talk. With casual cruelty, he cast Dinah roughly aside and filled the holographic screen with his own brutal face. He was grinning as if he knew he had won.
“You will not hurt her!” Tempest said. Her voice was hard, flat, and filled with such threats and loathing that Ty knew she felt the same as he did.
Bain just gave a mocking laugh. “I will do whatever I wish!”
“If Dinah is not returned to us unharmed, I swear I’ll remove your head from your shoulders!” Tempest raged. And perhaps the threat got through. Bain was monstrously powerful, a beast of a man who had nothing to fear from most others. But Tempest wasn’t most others. She was powerful as well, and was perhaps the only person alive who could actually carry out her threat.
And Ty knew that if it came down to it, he would help her. Even though the only person he’d ever consciously hurt until then was the intruder at his apartment.
In any event, the monstrous man relented somewhat. “I will not hurt her. You have my word.” Yet his superior smirk remained firmly in place. “But you will have to give me something in return.”
“What do you want?” Tempest said.
“Your devices. Of course.”
The recording of Tempest snorted. “Unacceptable. The devices can’t come off while we live.”
Bain laughed into the camera. “Think about it,” he sneered. “I could have killed your pretty friend already and given her device to someone with a more useful potential. I know where you live. How do you think you and your puny boyfriend would fare against me and a second powerful device-wearer?”
The thought alone was enough to make Ty’s heart lurch in his chest. Bain was right. He could do exactly what he said.
Why had he not?
“Instead, I’m giving you this chance to live.” Bain’s snarl became a brief grimace and Ty couldn’t help but feel that maybe Bain wasn’t acting out of choice. Letting them live seemed to go against his core nature.
As if the conversation was no longer fun, Bain brought it to a close. “This is the deal. In exchange for your pretty friend’s life, you and your boyfriend will meet me at a time and place of my choosing, where I will remove your devices before letting you crawl away to whatever miserable existence you can scavenge for yourselves. If you fail to show, I will return your pretty frien
d to you one piece at a time. You will hear from me.”
And that was it. Bain broke the connection and the holographic image returned to the communication menu page.
Tempest shut off the display and looked at Ty with a distraught expression. Ty was beyond horrified. To see Dinah under Bain’s control was like a knife to his own heart. It was barely tolerable.
“I’ll do it. I’ll give him my device if it will get Dinah back,” he blurted.
But Tempest shook her head. “It won’t be that easy,” she said.
“Huh?”
“We can’t trust Bain. No matter what he said, Dinah’s life is in terrible danger.”
Ty knew she was probably right, but he didn’t want to believe it. “Then why would he bother to go through all this?” he asked. “You heard him. He could kill her, take her device, give it to someone else and attack us before we knew what was happening.”
“I don’t know,” Tempest replied.
But Ty thought he did. “He has to be taking orders from someone,” he said.
Tempest looked at him. For a moment, she seemed uncertain. Then she nodded. “Yes. That makes sense.” Then her expression hardened. “But that doesn’t mean he’s any less of a monster. We can’t trust him.”
She was right. Ty took a deep breath and let it out all at once. He looked around, seeking inspiration about what to do, and a worrying thought occurred. “Are we safe here?” he asked.
He could see Tempest’s mind working. “Bain knows where we are.” She shrugged. “He could have been waiting for us.”
Ty nodded. Again, she was right. But that didn’t mean they could relax.
“I could rig up some sort of security devices. But not quickly.” Ty frowned and stopped talking, aware that security wasn’t the priority right at that moment. Dinah was.
All at once, he knew what he had to do. Abruptly, he stood. “I have to start work,” he muttered.
Tempest looked at him in confusion. “You can’t be thinking of going back to the Club now?” she said.
“No. Not the Club. Downstairs, to the workshop.”
She still didn’t understand what he was saying.
“Look, we know what Bain is after, and we know that we can’t trust him. His actions are therefore predictable. Am I right?” Ty didn’t wait for her to respond. “He is preparing to face us. To face you. But he still doesn’t know what I can do.”
For the first time since receiving Bain’s message, Tempest gave a tentative smile.
But Ty hadn’t finished. “If I do nothing except wait for him to tell us where to go, I might as well be as powerless as I was a couple of days ago. But I’m not powerless. I can do things that can help, and right now I’m wasting time.”
“What are you going to do?” Tempest asked.
It was Ty’s turn to grin. “I have a couple of ideas that might help,” he said.
Tempest’s smile grew broader. She might not have understood exactly what Ty had in mind, but she trusted him. “Then let’s get to it,” she said.
31: Preparations
Ty and Tempest worked long into the night. Ty had a plan but had to make several things to have any hope of pulling it off.
It wasn’t easy. When he made his mesh suit and adapted his blaster, he had been largely relaxed, enjoying the process with Tempest and Dinah by his side. This time he was under more pressure. Bain could contact Tempest at any moment. They might have to drop everything and go.
If that happened, all Ty’s planning would come to nothing. He needed to finish what he was working on if they were to have any chance.
Of course, there were no guarantees even then. Bain could negate everything Ty was doing if he just thought to meet in a Faraday cage. Yet Bain didn’t know that Ty could work magic with technology. The monster had no inkling that a Faraday cage would be useful.
By the time he found out, Ty promised himself, it would be too late.
At some point during the night, Gremlin wandered into the workshop. Even she seemed to sense Ty’s mood of desperation and worry. She sat on the workbench in among holographic images, but instead of playing with them as if they were real, she just watched Ty and Tempest work with a concerned expression.
Ordinarily, Ty would have taken time out to comfort her. To scratch behind her ears and tell her everything was fine. But he was sweating. He needed to get this done. He couldn’t afford to think of anything else.
Tempest was a godsend. Although she didn’t have the same understanding as Ty did, she was willing and just as determined as he. Whenever he needed a hand, she stepped in and did whatever he asked.
And, finally, at about the same time Ty might have finished his shift and started walking home, he was done.
“Fabricate,” Ty said, and the last piece of the puzzle took shape before him. It was no more than a simple sensor, as big as his smallest fingernail and connected to nothing. Yet it was the key to everything. It was a remote control, and it was the most important part of his plan.
“What if they take it from you?” Tempest asked.
Ty had thought of this. He didn’t expect to get anywhere near Bain without being searched.
“They won’t find it,” he replied. With that, he reached for one of the tools he had set out earlier. It was a scalpel. As Tempest saw what he had in mind, she drew a sharp breath. But she also understood and didn’t try to stop him.
Moving swiftly so that he wouldn’t second-guess himself, Ty pushed his shirt sleeve and the sleeve of his mesh suit up as high as they could easily go, exposing his arm up to the elbow. Then he sliced open the skin on his forearm, back from the device on his wrist. It hurt far more than he expected, and blood started to seep.
Ty gritted his teeth against the pain, placed the scalpel back on the table, and dabbed the area with a cloth. Then he picked up the sensor.
“Wait,” Tempest said. Ty looked at her. “We have a medical kit. There is a spray that acts as an anesthetic.”
Ty gaped at her. He hadn’t even thought of using anything like that.
“Yeah, that would be good,” he said, grinning foolishly. He had been so single-minded in what he was doing that his own discomfort had never entered the equation.
Tempest disappeared for a few minutes before returning with the medical kit. Ty’s forearm was starting to throb, so it was a relief when Tempest found the spray and applied it liberally to the area. Almost at once, his arm became comfortably numb.
“Thank you,” Ty said, then turned back to his task.
It still wasn’t pleasant. He had to make a sort of pocket under his skin for the sensor to fit in. It was messy and uncomfortable even with the anesthetic, but he finally got it done. The sensor was in, and it wouldn’t come out without effort. He dabbed the blood away again, then took a Band-Aid and covered the cut over.
“Done,” he said, breathing a sigh of relief. “Now what?”
Bain still hadn’t made contact. Tempest looked tired, drawn, and stressed beyond measure. Ty fully expected that he looked the same. Yet in his mind, there was nothing more they could do.
“Now we try to get some sleep,” Tempest said. “We don’t want to face Bain at less than our peak.”
Ty was wired, yet he could feel the edges of exhaustion as well. Sleep would be welcome.
“Here?” he asked.
Tempest hesitated. “No. Somewhere Bain doesn’t know about. The safe house. Where I took you after Zach died.”
Ty nodded. “Right. Let’s go.”
There was little to pack. Tempest was already carrying one of the items Ty had worked on, and the others all fit neatly into his backpack. When he’d gathered them up, he checked the workshop one last time to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything and nodded, satisfied.
He patted Gremlin on the head. “Look after the place, will you Furball?” he said. “We’ll be back before you know it.”
As he said it, he wondered if it was true.
◆◆◆
They
reached the safe house within a few minutes. It was just as he remembered it, a dull, windowless room with little more than a bed, a couple of chairs and a side table, with an adjoining bathroom off to one side. It was an okay place to stay for a while, but a massive step down from the penthouse Ty was already growing used to.
As he lowered his backpack to the floor, Ty promised himself that he would figure out a way to protect Tempest’s home from any further attack once they had Dinah back with them.
Assuming that everything worked out with Bain, of course.
It was either very late at night or very early in the morning, and there wasn’t much left to do than go to bed. Nor was there any of the playfulness and laughter of the previous night. Yet despite everything that had happened, Ty couldn’t help but watch as Tempest peeled off her clothes.
In moments, she stood in front of him in all her naked glory. As before, he found the sight of her perfection mesmerizing. The breath caught in his throat and all thoughts fled from his mind.
Tempest didn’t smile, but she acknowledged Ty’s appreciative stare by raising her hands high above her head and turning slowly around so he could see every inch of her, just as she’d done the first time, on top of the boulder in the lake.
Ty swallowed hard. He would have watched her do that forever. But once she’d completed a full revolution, she stopped, lowered her arms, and tilted her head to the side while staring at him.
“Your turn,” she said. Already, it had become a sort of ritual between them.
Despite the lack of playfulness in the air, Ty still felt a powerful connection to Tempest. It was like there were sparks between them, perhaps not dancing, but vibrating with energy. Somehow, the drab little room had gained an aura of magic, and it was all to do with how Ty felt about this woman.
He had to remember to breathe. Tempest kept looking at him, expecting him to follow her lead, and when at last his neurons started firing again, he did so.
Ty took off his shoes, his shirt, and his trousers and socks, leaving his mesh onesie exposed. He stripped that off as well, and his undershirt next, and faced Tempest in nothing but his boxers.