My Next Breath

by Shannon McKenna

  Simone nodded, waiting for more. “So?” she prompted. “Why are you having this conversation with me and not Mark?”

  “Mark’s dead,” Zade said. “He got his brains blown out before I got to interrogate him about where he’d stashed Luke.”

  “I see.” She considered that for a moment. “And how does that make seducing me relevant?”

  “It’s not that simple,” Zade said.

  “Just tell me already,” she said testily. “Stop dancing around it.”

  “In the video, Mark put a device onto Luke,” Zade said. “A headband with a molded attachment that fits right over the scalp. And from what we can tell, it’s one of your biomed designs.” He paused for a cautious moment. “Needless to say, that raised a lot of questions. And the only person who can answer them is you.”

  “My designs?” She straightened up, startled. “That’s not possible. I don’t design weapons of any kind. Never have.”

  Zade pulled out his phone, and pulled up an online Batello prospectus for potential investors. “It looked a lot like this,” he said, holding it out.

  She studied the image on the screen. It was a portable neuroscanner devices. Still in development. She could barely make out the yellow stripes on the casing that marked it as one of her prototypes. “But that’s not even on the market yet.”

  “Noah said he’d seen a prototype,” Zade said.

  “Yes, I showed him a lot of designs I was developing.” She looked him straight in the eyes. “I want to see this video, Zade.”

  He looked dubious. “You sure? The whole thing? Someone gets murdered, Simone. It’s bad.”

  She managed not to react. Gold star for self-control. “Fast-forward it to the part where the prototype is used.”

  Zade tapped his phone a couple of times and gave it to her. “There. It starts right after the close-up.”

  She saw hands, moving around the head of a guy who looked a lot like Zade, but with closely buzzed black hair. The hands adjusted a neuroscan device over top of the black-haired man’s head. She could barely make out the yellow stripes on the device’s casing. Then the owner of the hands, a man in a hooded sweatshirt, stepped back. He touched a few buttons on the neuroscanner and tapped his phone.

  The black-haired guy’s face was a grimace of agonized tension.

  She set it to replay and watched the video several times. “That neuroscanner is for treating people with cerebral damage,” she told him. “It monitors a new biofeedback treatment developed to heighten brain response.”

  Zade nodded.

  Simone’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I just don’t understand how he could be using it to hurt your brother. That’s not what it’s for.”

  He shrugged. “Welcome to the dark side.”

  Simone felt hot and shaky. “But what do you want from me now?” she demanded. “How the hell am I supposed to help if this is really happening? They’ve kept me in the dark all my life.”

  “You might know more than you think you do,” he said. “Help me figure out how they’re retooling your designs. While you’re at it, help me figure out how Mark got his murdering hands on that neuroscanner. Use your awesome brain. Be brilliant for me. We need each other.”

  “I can’t take any more lies,” she said.

  “Never again,” he said. “I promise.”

  “I don’t trust your promises,” she said. “And I’m better off alone.”

  “You might make it,” he said. “You’re smart. Tough. But you’ll have to go underground, and that’s a complicated process. I can keep you safe and hidden. You could use my help.” He hesitated. “And I’m desperate for yours.”

  She couldn’t seem to breathe.

  Air. That was what she needed. The wind against her face. She dragged her eyes away from his compelling gaze and went to the picture window, unlocked the sliding door, and stepped onto the deck which jutted out over a sea of waving trees. She leaned on the railing. The chilly breeze lifted her hair, cooling her hot cheeks.

  Zade left her alone out there for a few minutes. When she turned, she saw him out of the corner of her eye, standing right where she’d left him.

  He followed her out finally and stood behind her quietly for a long moment. “Simone,” he said in a low voice. “What you just saw in that video—it’s not your fault.”

  “That doesn’t let me off the hook,” she replied. “I have to do something.”

  “So do I,” Zade said. “I know that my brother’s probably dead, but I still have to be sure. And if by some miracle he isn’t, then he’s hurting. And that hurts me. Every second of every day, it hurts me.”

  She turned away from the pain in his face. Night was coming on fast. She could barely see the tree line across the canyon. “You know something, Zade?” she said. “Yesterday seems like a really long time ago.”

  “I get that.”

  “Do you? You get that I had a life? That I did work that helped people?”

  Zade was quiet.

  “I believed in that,” she said. “And today I find out everything I’ve done means nothing. I’m a slave unit. Marked for death. It’s a big adjustment. Give me a minute.”

  The wind was picking up. The pointed treetops bent and swished. She pressed both hands to her hot cheeks. She felt so hot. And kind of dizzy.

  “Listen.” His voice was right behind her. He put his hand on her shoulder. “I won’t let those bastards hurt you.”

  She shrugged his hand off. “Of course you won’t. I’m too useful.”

  “Come on, Simone,” he said. “I already groveled about lying to you. I wanted to tell you the truth all along, but I couldn’t. You would’ve thought I was nuts. At least before what you saw today.”

  She shook her head. She was a scientist, trained to look for objective truths. But anger and hurt made the truth so fucking hard to see.

  “I’m sorry I lied to you.” His tone was almost formal. “I’m not proud of it.”

  “Poor you,” she said.

  His silence was eloquent. When it got too long, she spun around and glared at him, reading his mind. It wasn’t difficult. How dare he even think about sex. It came off him like waves of heat.

  “Stop it,” she said. “I’m not buying it and I never will again.”

  “I’m not doing it on purpose. I’ve never felt anything like last night. Never been so close to anyone.”

  “Don’t for one second think that you’ll ever touch me again,” she warned.

  He was smoldering. After everything he’d done to her, he actually had the nerve to stand there and radiate sexual energy in her direction. And something self-destructive inside her still responded to it.

  She tore her gaze away. Her life was a blank screen right now. Everything erased, negated. Future, past, all gone. All lies.

  Only her present was vivid and bright. And Zade, looming behind her with his hot eyes and his strong arms. And his life-destroying revelations.

  She wondered suddenly which of her thoughts, feelings, and impulses were her own and which had been wired into her.

  The only ones she knew were completely her own had led her to Zade.

  For a moment, a ragged window opened in the clouds. One faint star shone briefly through.

  “How do you live with it?” she asked him. “Not knowing if what you’re thinking or doing or saying comes from you, or if it’s someone else’s idea?”

  Zade thought about it. “You never do,” he said. “You just fake it and hope for the best. It’s not all that different for unmods. Different programming mode, same stupid shit. Welcome to the human condition.”

  She laughed softly. “Meet Zade Ryan, greeting card philosopher.”

  “You asked,” he said, not offended. “Your conditioning will work just how they wired it up to work. You’ll use it, because being modded can be really useful. It’s you who can change, if you want. You can detach, not react, choose. You can get bigger than the box they put you in. That’s how you beat it.”r />
  “People always told me I worked like a machine,” she said. “And they said it like it was a good thing.”

  “You’re no machine. You can choose. You pay for that choice, though. Some people pay with pain. Some pay with their life.”

  She frowned. “Aren’t you just a little ray of sunshine.”

  “Look, I seriously doubt that’ll happen to you,” he assured her. “They wouldn’t push the inhibitors that far just for a vanity mod.”

  “How can you be so fucking sure? What do you know that I don’t?”

  “Just this,” he said. “Once you start to fight, Obsidian won’t know what hit them.”

  Out of nowhere, white-hot rage exploded inside her. She slapped his hand violently away.

  She couldn’t gauge his reaction because her eyes didn’t seem to be working. She couldn’t hear him speak over the huge swell of noise. His lips were moving, but she couldn’t hear. Couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. She was so hot.

  Zade wavered in her vision. He looked alarmed, was holding out his arms, saying something urgent. Pretending he cared. Pain stabbed. So … damn … hot.

  She was going up in flames.

  Chapter 20

  Zade lunged to catch her. Her face had flushed red, eyes bright and unfocused, her skin red-hot to his touch.

  He must have said something stupid, to spike her temperature like that. Hit some sort of trigger. He pulled up the last words he’d said to her.

  Once you start to fight, Obsidian won’t know what hit them.

  That was it. Like a fucking idiot, he’d blurted it out. Fight. Obsidian.

  With those two words he’d set off an extreme aversion trigger. Those sneaky bastards. They were more ruthless than he thought. They had used her hard.

  Hell. Simone had severe stim sickness, and he’d raced out here to the middle of nowhere frantic and unprepared after the brawl at her place. Running scared, acting on impulse, not planning ahead.

  She staggered against him, her fever climbing fast, and panic kicked his ASP processor into play. He didn’t have any of Zoe’s custom-designed stim sickness meds. He had an emergency kit with injectable vials, all of them did, but he didn’t haul it around with him anymore. Hadn’t for years now.

  He scooped her up and carried her inside. Laid her gently on the couch. Her hand dangled on the floor, so he lifted her wrist to lay it on the couch. She snatched it away. “No! Don’t put them on me!”

  He knew exactly what she meant. Wrist restraints. “Never. Shhh.”

  An ugly, fear-stained memory rose up. One of his own bouts of stim sickness back in the bad old days. Zoe and Noah’s improvised remedy had involved a filthy flophouse bathtub and big bags of ice stolen from a curbside freezer outside of a convenience store.

  He raced to the bathroom tub. Got the water running cold. Sprinted to the second freezer. He’d loaded it with ice for the last Midlander annual meeting. Two bags left. He hauled them to the bathroom on his shoulders and got soaked by the heaving surge of cold water as the mass of ice cubes sloshed in.

  He found Simone face down on the floor, trying to get to her feet.

  “Simone, let me help you. Let me—”

  She slapped his hand away. “Don’t touch me!”

  Her eyes glittered with a feverish shine. She was getting worse fast. Nothing for it. She had to get dunked with her boots on. He couldn’t wait.

  He picked her up while she yelled and flailed. He had the strength of desperation on top of the Ratcatcher’s monster-strength mods, but by the time he got to the bathroom, it was clear that she didn’t see him at all. Or anything else.

  She was somewhere else, burning up. A thread of blood trickled from her nose. He wiped it away. Dangerously hot, now. He wondered if they’d given her any resistance to temperature extremes, like his. Oh, please, please God.

  He could barely hold her. She was twisting desperately, as if looking for someone. “Mom?” she called.

  Pain twisted in him like a knife. “Sorry, babe,” he said. “Just Zade.”

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “She’s not here, sweetheart. I wish she was here for you.”

  “They said if I was good I could see Mom.”

  “Yeah—”

  “I was good!” Her voice rose to a yell. “Goddamn it! I was good!”

  “I know you were, baby,” he said. “It’s not fair.”

  Sadistic perverted shitheads. Killed her mom and then fucked with her head about it during her brain stim sessions. So fucking wrong.

  She screamed, arched, and fought as he lowered her in. The bathtub was a froth of heaving ice-water, drenching him. He held her in the water, struggling to keep her from injuring herself against the tub as she jackknifed and twisted.

  He felt like the latest monster in a long line of monsters. He wanted to kill someone for doing this to her. Wanted it so bad. But they’d wired him up to have only one all-purpose solution for any fucking problem you could name.

  Just kill someone to make it better. Snap the neck. Pull the trigger.

  She suddenly went limp, sagging down into the water. He hoisted up her head and shoulders to keep them above water as best he could.

  Her temperature plummeted. He listened for her heart. It slowed, hiccupped … and then he heard nothing.

  No. Time stopped. Breath stopped. He just listened …

  To nothing.

  He pulled her up out of the water with a huge dripping slosh and laid her down gently on the swamped floor tiles. Water mixed with blood from her nose.

  He started pumping on her chest. Mouth to mouth, cardiac compressions, more mouth to mouth. “Simone!” he snarled between breaths. “Don’t fucking die!”

  Nothing. Temperature down. No heartbeat. No breathing.

  He kept on, but dread was spreading. Fast and dark like a puddle of blood from a gunshot wound. Fear and cold, setting in. That terrifying silence.

  A minute ticked by. Two. Three. He kept at it.

  He stopped for a few seconds to listen, his own chest heaving—and heard it. The faint stuttering thud of her heart. He didn’t dare let himself believe it.

  Then her eyelids fluttered. She let out a stifled cough … and he could breathe again.

  Her heartbeat steadied, and strengthened. He listened to it intently. His eyes were wet.

  She turned her head toward him. “Zade?” she whispered. “What on earth is your problem?”

  His ASP compulsively kept measuring all her vital signs. Blood pressure, temperature, heartbeat. Numbers flickered, constantly updating themselves.

  “Your heart stopped,” he told her.

  “Oh. Damn.” She lay there for a few moments, staring up at the ceiling, evidently unfazed by that information. Gathering her strength.

  After a moment, she tried to sit up. He slid an arm behind her. “Let me.”

  “I can manage,” she said, but she needed both him and the sink to pull herself up onto her knees. Then her feet.

  She wobbled there on unsteady legs for a moment, still clutching the sink. “Why am I soaked in ice cold water?” she asked. “It’s a freaking lake in here.”

  “You had a high fever,” he said. “It was what we call stim sickness. A reaction to an aversion trigger. Your heart stopped for a few minutes. I thought you were dead. Did cardiac compressions. Mouth to mouth.”

  “Hmmm.” She looked at him quizzically, blinking as if she didn’t quite understand, then hung onto the sink with one hand while she reached down to pull her wet bootlaces loose. She kicked the boots aside. Yanked off her sodden sweatshirt.

  It landed on the floor with a heavy splat. “Strange,” she said. “I don’t feel like I was just dead. Or sick at all. I feel … different.”

  She stood, naked to the waist, her slender body goose bumped in the cold. Her soft, pointed tits high and proud. Nipples tightened to deep pink, startling against her paleness. Her eyes intensely focused on his.

  And he couldn’t stop helplessly staring.
“Uh—”

  “I’m freezing in these.” She shucked her jeans, along with socks and underwear. They hit the floor in a soggy knot by her sweatshirt. Then she lifted her wet hair, twisting it into a rope and squeezing out water, arching her back.

  There were no words for what that did to him.

  She turned away and padded out silently into the main room, a graceful silhouette against the dancing firelight. Seeking its warmth. Ignoring him.

  He followed close behind. Watching as she lifted her arms, stretching as she finger combed her damp hair away from her face, stretching so that her breasts tilted up. She didn’t seem to notice or care that she was naked. That he was watching.

  He had to handle her carefully. The stim sickness might not be over. “Can I find you something to wear?” he asked. “I don’t know what I’ve got that’ll fit you, but there must be something. It’s cold.”

  She glanced down at herself. “But I’m not. At all. Now that I’ve taken those wet clothes off, I feel fine.”

  It was true. He sensed her vital heat against his skin. It felt great.

  “You seem different,” he ventured. “Are you still, uh … the same?”

  Her eyebrows lifted. “What a question,” she said. “But now that you mention it, I’m different now.”

  He braced himself. “How so?”

  Her careless shrug made her tits bounce tenderly. “I just don’t give a fuck.”

  He was wary, but enthralled by the slow, seductive way she shook the wild, damp locks of hair out around her shoulders. “Meaning … ?”

  “Whatever I want it to mean. Anything goes. Fuck them all.”

  This was no time for all the blood from his brain to reroute itself straight to his tingling dick. This was not what he’d expected. “Holy shit,” he muttered.

  “I like the way it feels.” She jerked her chin at him. “You’re the resident expert about all this modified freak stuff. Explain this phenomenon to me.”

  “Well, uh. You had stim sickness,” he said again. “It started as a high fever. Do you remember when it came on? Or how you felt?”

  “No to both questions.”