Chapter 24
“Simone? Simone?”
Zade’s voice finally intruded into her consciousness. The motion of the car jolted the tablet she was studying out of her hand.
He caught it for her. “Hey,” he said gently. “We’re here.”
She looked around, blinking. She felt like her body had just popped back into existence after a trip to another dimension.
The one where she’d spent most of her life.
Zade was looking at her thoughtfully. “You’re incredibly focused.”
“The schematics are complicated,” she said. “I didn’t want to miss anything those bastards might have fucked up. How long have we been driving?”
“Almost three hours.”
It took effort to focus her eyes outward on the deep mountain canyon that surrounded them. Tall trees rose straight up from its steep sides.
Asa waited for them on the porch of a huge A-frame house, arms crossed over his big chest. He turned when they got to the door and led them through the house without a word. When they followed him down the secret staircase off the pantry, she was unsurprised. These guys were heavy into secrets.
They paced behind him through a dimly lit corridor. Asa finally stopped in front of a reinforced door.
“Where’s your team?” Zade asked.
“I told them to leave,” Asa said. “He was getting stronger fast and I didn’t know if I’d be able to keep him contained. Didn’t want to be responsible for anyone else getting hurt.” He looked at Simone. “Brace yourself.”
She nodded.
Asa unfastened several massive bolts and pushed the reinforced door open. They followed him inside.
A transparent barrier divided the room, covered with rusty splotches, some wetter than others. Blood. There was a twisted iron bedframe lying on its side. A foam mattress had been torn apart into ragged chunks. Uneaten food was thrown everywhere. Plastic water bottles also. The bottles were all full.
On the far end, sprawled face downward as if he’d collapsed while crawling, was a huge man, his half-naked body covered with bruises. His back moved with quick, hectic jerks. His legs jittered.
“Seizure,” Asa murmured. “Not the first.”
His head lifted as they watched. His battered face was hardly recognizable as human. But he looked right at them through grotesquely swollen eyelids.
He leaped to his feet, roaring, though they couldn’t hear him through the thick soundproof barrier. She saw tendons straining in his face and neck, his hands fisting, his cracked, dry mouth distorted by rage.
She took an instinctive step backwards as Brenner hoisted the iron bedframe and bashed it against the barrier again and again. Brenner flung the twisted thing away. It hit the wall, then the floor.
Then Brenner hurled his own body into the barrier with bone-crushing force.
“Let’s go,” Asa said. “All three of us in here is too much stimulation for him. He dials it down when he’s on his own.”
They followed him out and stood there in the corridor in dismayed silence.
Asa shook himself with a harsh sigh. “So that’s what I’m dealing with,” he said to Simone. “Ideas?”
“Some,” she said. “After seeing what they did to my wands, I’m not surprised he’s in this condition. They inverted the process I designed it for. Turned it into an instrument of torture.”
Asa nodded impatiently. “Yeah, that much I figured out on my own. But can you help him?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “Certainly not unless I get close to him. I’ll have to attach sensors and hook him up to the neuroscanner to find out more.”
“Good luck with that,” Zade muttered.
Simone shot him an irritated look. “I have to have physical contact.” She turned to Asa. “And ideally, I’ll need a 3-D imager and a scalp sleeve to interface with it. I have a prototype at my Batello lab, but that doesn’t help us much.”
“I’ll show you what we have,” Asa said. “Follow me.”
He led them further into the underground complex, to another room, heavily shielded. It took Asa several minutes to open all the biometric locks on its door.
“If Brenner ever got in here, you could say goodbye to the entire western United States,” Asa said.
“Really? What’s in here?”
“Mark’s weapons hoard,” Zade said as the big door finally swung open. “After Brenner shot him, all we had left was Mark’s truck, loaded up with a ton of evil-ass shit that he stole from Obsidian. All designed to synch directly to a supersoldier’s technokinetic brain implants.”
The lights flicked on. The room was long and deep, lined with industrial-grade shelf units piled with weaponry, instruments, and technical gadgets. Some she could identify at a glance. Others were totally unfamiliar.
“I culled the pieces with your yellow prototype stripes.” Asa pointed to a table in back. “Specs and schematic info are all on that laptop.”
Simone pounced on the table. “Excellent! Mark stole a scalp sleeve. What else?” She poked around. “Yes! A high-magnification 3-D imager. More precise than just the frequency wand alone. That’s perfect.” She paused. “If it hasn’t been fucked with, that is.”
Asa shrugged. “Who knows. Take a look.”
“I’ll check it out. But how do I get close enough to him to do the treatment?”
“I’ve been working on that.” Asa led them behind a row of shelves that hid a massive iron bedstead with a mattress on it. Jumbo-sized handcuffs dangled from each corner, attached by thick chains. Asa looked at Zade. “What do you think?”
Zade looked it over. “Jesus,” he muttered. “Is this what you do for fun?”
“No, actually,” Asa said shortly. “Necessity. Will it hold him?”
Zade yanked at the chained handcuffs. “Can’t say. I’ll test it, but this guy is younger than me, and ultimate gen. And crazy.”
“It’s what we have to work with,” Asa said. “So let’s go with it.”
“What’s Plan B? Ask him nicely and he just lies down on this thing?”
“Zade, don’t be obnoxious,” Simone said.
“Can’t help it,” he said. “It’s my default setting. When I’m tense.”
“Which is always.” Asa smiled faintly. “We drug him first. Zoe sent me something she called ‘whack.’ Never heard of it. Must be new.”
“Who’s Zoe?” Simone asked.
“Another Midlander rebel,” Zade said. “She’s a doctor. Specializes in pharmacological research down in San Francisco.”
“Zoe sent an injectable version and an aerosol to spray into his face,” Asa told her. “A micro-drone hasn’t worked so far when I’ve tried it. He slaps them right out of the air and stomps them. I was thinking maybe we can tag-team him. Two drones.”
“Yeah,” Zade said. “Except we don’t know how resistant he is to the whack, or how long it’ll keep him down. And I’m guessing too much of it will kill him.”
“We have to try. Like, immediately.” Asa’s voice was bleak. “He’s in hell. I’d risk his life to get him out. It’s what I’d want for myself. But it’ll take all three of us. And if we do this for him, we share responsibility for the outcome. Clear?”
Zade stared down at the bedstead with its restraints. “Yes. I’m on the record saying let’s give him a shot.” He looked at Simone. “You?”
“I’m in,” she said. “Let’s do whatever we can for him.”
The energy in the room changed. Asa sighed, as if he’d been holding his breath. “Good,” he said. “Thanks. Let’s try the bed from hell out. No time to lose.”
Zade sat down on it and slowly reclined. His face was a mask of tension.
“Spread ’em, dude.” Asa cuffed him fast when he did.
Sweat gleamed on Zade’s forehead. His breath was fast and shallow. Eyes squeezed shut. He looked queasy.
“Zade?” She placed a hand on his chest. “Are you okay?”
He jerked at her touch. “Don’t distract me. This is hard to do. Gotta concentrate.”
Asa stepped back. “Go for it,” he said. “Shred that filthy motherfucker.”
They jumped back, startled, when Zade let out a deafening roar.
He went crazy. Screaming, writhing, jerking, wrenching. Asa and Simone watched in horror as the heavy bedframe banged and clattered on the concrete floor. Zade fought the restraints so hard, it looked like he’d break his own bones.
“Zade!” she yelled. “Zade, stop it! You’ll hurt yourself!”
He just bellowed, his glassy eyes wild with rage. Not seeing her, no longer knowing where he was. She leaned down over the shaking bed.
“Zade!” she yelled. “You’re at Asa’s house! You’re with me! It’s Simone!”
Her hair tumbled forward, a heavy lock draping across his face. Zade turned his head and buried his nose in it. Inhaling deeply.
“What the hell are you doing?” Asa said sharply. “Simone, back off! He doesn’t see you. He sees those Obsidian fuckers.”
“No,” she said as Zade dragged in more air. “He knows me now.”
Zade’s shaking body was drenched in sweat. Simone started to straighten up, but he made a sharp sound, head straining up as far as he could, trying to follow her.
“No,” he rasped. “Stay.”
He was back. Tears of relief overflowed. She stroked his face.
Asa hurried over. “Hang on, buddy. Getting you out of these.” Asa unlocked the cuffs, muttering with dismay when he found them slippery with blood. “Holy shit, man. Looks like you had a full-on stress flashback.”
Zade looked at his gouged wrists and shrugged wearily. “For once it was good for something.”
“I’m betting this thing will hold Brenner,” Asa said. “At least for a while.”
Asa helped him sit up. Zade wiped his forehead with his sleeve and swung his legs heavily to the ground. The look in his eyes made Simone wrap her arms around him before Asa could tell her not to. He was rigid and damp, stinking of sweat. After a moment, a deep shudder of release went through him.
He slid his arms around her waist and squeezed back. “The smell of your hair brought me back.” His voice was muffled against her chest.
She scoffed, but she had tears in her eyes. “Oh, come on.”
He shook his head stubbornly. “Honeysuckle, right?”
She hugged him tighter. “Yes,” she whispered.
Asa cleared his throat. “Hey. Knock it off, you two.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Zade muttered, but he let go of her. “One more thing. We need something to keep his head immobilized, or else he’ll break his own neck.”
Asa’s mouth tightened. “You’re right. I’ll rig something up. Simone, do you have what you need to get ready?”
“I’m good. I hope.” Simone gestured toward the iron bed. “I know you need to immobilize his head, but I have to be able to make adjustments to the scalp sleeve, so I’m going to need full access from every direction.”
She ignored Zade’s grumbling response and got right to work preparing, checking, and re-checking the equipment. She slipped with practiced ease into a state of profound concentration. She’d spent a lot of her adult life concentrating like that, in an intense fugue state. All brain, all the time.
But after the stim sickness, seismic upheavals, and wild sex, even her deep focus felt different. Her body was in the loop now. A hungry fire deep inside gave her power, sharpening her senses. Her hyper-sensitive skin felt every change in the air currents, every minute shift of temperature. Everything was so vivid and loud.
Her fingers were a blur on the keyboard as she reprogrammed the wrongness those dead-hearted monsters had slipped into her designs and her code. She felt like she was scrubbing out filth.
“Simone? How’s your timeline?”
Zade’s voice made her glance up. “Getting there.” She looked at Asa’s closely cropped hair. “You have clippers and a razor for me, I hope.”
“Yeah, sure. Upstairs. I’ll go get them.”
Asa returned shortly after with both items, and they all piled gear into their arms and made their way to Brenner’s cell.
No one spoke. It felt almost ceremonial. Like a funeral procession, but charged with tension and cautious hope. The stakes were high. Nothing she’d ever done before had been so important.
They filed back into the divided room. Brenner was sprawled limply on the concrete floor, his head in his arms.
“Down, but not out,” Zade muttered. “Let’s do this fast.”
“All the drones in this box are loaded with the aerosol.” Asa pulled the lid off a largish box holding miniature drones wedged into molded foam. “I like this size.” He held up a wasp-sized drone for Zade’s inspection. “Small enough so that it’s hard to swat out of the air, but big enough to carry a mister loaded with a full dose of whack. We’ll take them in through that.” He gestured at a sealed window in the barrier, high up and near the ceiling.
“Looks good,” Zade said. “Let’s give it a shot.”
Asa hit a button on his smartphone and the small window hummed open.
The tiny machines rose into the air. The two men piloted them smoothly until they both hovered before the window. They floated into Brenner’s cell.
Brenner raised his head and stared around wildly, rubbing his swollen eyes.
“Go in from the side,” Zade murmured. “Keep him busy.”
Asa’s drone darted down and then floated back, spinning away from Brenner’s clumsy, lunging grab, hovering above him, just out of reach.
“Stay right there,” Zade said softly. “Keep him right … there.”
Brenner swung at Asa’s drone once again. It zipped back. And around. Asa was making Brenner leap and spin, fully focused on the drone that Asa was piloting.
Brenner smashed it against the barrier like a bug, just as Zade’s drone dropped down from above, blasting the aerosol right into Brenner’s face.
Brenner howled and snatched Zade’s drone out of the air, crushing it in his hands. Then he staggered and fell against the wall. The pulverized drone fell to the floor in fragments. Brenner dropped to his knees, then his hands, back heaving.
Asa scrambled to unlock the door. He and Zade moved together with wordless urgency, hoisting Asa’s bed with the restraints through the door.
Zade looked back over his shoulder as they went through. “Stay out while we cuff him,” he said to Simone. “Bolt it.”
Simone closed the door and peered through the cloudy plastic barrier. The men lugged Brenner’s huge body up onto the prepared bed. Reached for the cuffs.
She gasped as Brenner exploded into movement. He head-butted Asa and slammed his fist into Zade’s face.
Asa reeled backwards and dropped to the ground. The syringe he’d stuck in his pocket bounced and spun. He kicked, sweeping Brenner’s legs out from under him.
Brenner pitched full-length into the iron bedframe he’d demolished, breath knocked out of him by his own weight. Zade stabbed a syringe into Brenner’s muscular neck and stumbled backwards, dazed and bleeding.
Brenner’s mouth fell open. His chest jerked and heaved. He arched backwards and slowly went still.
Asa struggled up onto his feet, clutching the ruined bedframe to drag himself to a more or less standing position, and vomited. He wiped his mouth, and then started helping Zade to extricate Brenner from the deformed bedframe and maneuver his huge, limp body up onto the bed they had brought in. They cuffed him at wrists and ankles, not gently. Then, with more care, they fastened the head brace.
When it was done, Asa collapsed.
Zade crouched down and got his hands under Asa’s armpits and half-carried, half-dragged the other man to the door.
Simone pulled it open for him. “Is he okay?”
“Out cold. Close this door. Lock everything you can figure out how to lock. There’s a room down the hall with a kitchen. A couple of couches.”
She ran ahead opening doors until they found the room he wanted. Zade deposited Asa on a couch and examined his skull. “No fractures I can feel. No blood,” he said. “Hell of a bang, though.” He pulled his smartphone, activated the flashlight beam, and lifted each eyelid, assessing Asa’s response. “No difference in pupil size. Normal constriction to light stimulus. Tough bastard.”
“What about Brenner?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Zade said. “He’s too strong. Much stronger than me. He metabolized that drug ten times faster than I would have. I can’t risk it.”
“What if we—”
“One thing at a time. Let’s deal with Asa now. See if there are any icepacks in that fridge.”
She ran to the refrigerator to check. “No ice. No ice packs.”
“There’s a chest freezer in the storage room at the end of the hall,” he said.
“I’ll go look.” She hurried down the corridor to the storage room and found the ice packs in the chest freezer. She grabbed a couple and hurried back the way she came, but paused in front of the door to Brenner’s cell.
The impulse to push that door open was overwhelming.
She went inside and stood there, staring through the filthy, bloodied plastic barrier at the unconscious man strapped to the bed.
The techniques she would use to help him were stacking up in her mind in sequence. Automatically she weighed the pros and cons of various possibilities, calculating odds, forming a treatment plan.
She wanted to help this guy so badly. With Asa’s stash of equipment, she had a fighting chance of doing it. Slim, maybe. But real.
It got slimmer with every second that ticked by.
Simone marched back to the kitchen. Asa sprawled on the couch, groaning under his breath. Zade kneeled beside him. Asa’s eyes were half-open, his face grayish. She handed him an ice pack. He put it gingerly to his forehead, wincing.
She turned to Zade. “It has to be now,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
Something in her voice made Zade straighten up and Asa’s eyes widen.
Zade was already shaking his head. “No. We can’t. He’s too—”
“I know it’s a risk, but we’ll take it together. He’s still unconscious, so now’s my chance to get the scalp sleeve on and establish the interface. You and Asa cover me. Stand on either side of him with a loaded syringe. Don’t argue with me, okay?”
Asa’s eyebrows shot up, and his face tightened with pain as he clearly regretted it. “Bitch means it,” he murmured in tones of grudging admiration.
“The bitch definitely does,” she said. “So, Zade? Ready to man up?”
“Hey.” His eyes flashed dangerously. “Are you fucking with me?”
“I’ll do whatever I have to do to help that guy,” she said. “And trust me, Zade. I have not even begun to fuck with you.”
Zade just glared at her, speechless.
Asa broke the silence with a whistle. “She’s gonna keep things interesting for you, man.” He braced himself on the couch and began to heave himself upright.
“Hey!” Zade’s arm shot out to block him. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Asa’s swift grin flashed. “Obeying her,” he said. “If you know what’s good for you, do the same.”
* * * *
Zade held the loaded needle carefully against Brenner’s grimy, sweaty neck. The prep process made him fucking tense. Particularly since it involved a straight razor.
“You couldn’t just make do with the clippers?” he complained. “The guy’s lethal.”
“No. I need a razor.” Simone’s voice was cool as she deftly scraped the hair from behind Brenner’s ears. “The scalp sleeve won’t stay put if there’s hair. And somebody get me a table for the laptop and the 3-D imager.”
“I’ll go get one,” Asa said. He looked at Zade. “You stay here with her.”
Simone held out the folded razor when she was done. Zade took it, bemused, and slid it into his pocket while she used a kitchen towel to swab off Brenner’s head and neck. “Hold his head for me so I can adjust the scalp sleeve,” she directed.
So Zade found himself cradling Brenner’s bald, somewhat sticky head in one hand while holding a needle full of whack to the guy’s throat with the other.
He heard the door scrape and turned to see Asa wrestling a small table into the room, smirking at the spectacle Zade made.
Simone set up her equipment quickly, but by now Brenner was stirring. His breath was shallower, hands clenching, heart accelerating.
“He’s waking up,” Zade said. “Not good.”
“Almost there,” Simone murmured, her eyes faraway and focused as she rolled the scalp sleeve onto Brenner. It was a stretchy latex thing, like a transparent bathing cap packed full of colored wires and circuitry. She adjusted it carefully and put on a pair of goggles.
A magnified holographic image of Brenner’s brain appeared inside the imaging box. Simone manipulated the wand inside the box, and whatever she was doing to the thing made Brenner groan and turn his head restlessly.
“Time for another dose of whack,” Zade said.
“No! Not quite yet. Hold off on that for just another second!”
“Simone,” he said, through his teeth. “Goddamnit—”
“Just one more second … ” Her voice trailed off to a whisper. She did something with the wand—and Brenner sucked in a sharp, wheezing breath.
Then his body jerked violently, wrists and ankles pulling against the restraints.
“Don’t use the whack yet!” Simone cried out. “Wait. Look at him, Zade!”
Zade looked at Brenner, and to his surprise, Brenner looked back.
There was an intelligent glint in the narrow slit of eye visible through his puffy purpled eyelids. The look on his face was one of absolute puzzlement.
Zade stared up at Simone. “What the fuck did you do to him?”
“I took a risk,” she said. “Gave him a strong pulse from the blot signaler to the main disturbed area in the brain. Just to give him a breather.”
“Oh,” he muttered. “Is he better now?”
“No, not really. This will only give him a few minutes of relief. The disturbance is already starting to build up again. Now I work with the wand.”
“So you’ve done this before?”
“Procedures like this, yes. For brain lesions, illnesses.”
“You just zapped him?” he said dubiously. “Like electroshock?”
“I’ll explain the theory to you later, Zade,” she said impatiently. “I need to work now.”
“Fine,” he said. “Whatever.”
A long, strange day followed. He stayed right next to her the whole time, needle at the ready, but Simone seemed to have forgotten that he and Asa existed.
She existed only to work on Brenner’s brain. She’d knotted her hair back with string, but a few soft curls wafted up around her face, backlit by the overhead into a halo. His brainy angel, with crazy goggles on her face. Wild.
Simone peered into the imager through her goggles, constantly manipulating the frequency wand. She never relaxed her focus. She only acknowledged Zade’s existence when she was signaling for something that was out of her reach.
He passed the time ogling her. Why not? He was just a fly on the wall.
She just kept at it. Four hours, six. Ten. They had arrived in mid-morning and there was no daylight down here in Asa’s dungeon, but his ASP told him when twilight fell and when evening thickened into night.
Asa brought food down at one point. Zade tried to get Simone to eat. Lost cause. She wasn’t just ignoring him. He could tell, monitoring her physiological reactions with ASP, that she literally didn’t hear him speak or feel his hand tapping her shoulder.
She just perched there on a stool Asa found for her, peering into Brenner’s brain, moving the wand constantly, stopping only to type into the laptop.
Brenner was quiet for the most part. He yelled a few times, writhed occasionally. At one point, he started to sob, tears carving tracks into the bloody grime on his face.
Asa dragged an IV rack in from his hospital suite and set up a glucose drip, the first fluids and nourishment Brenner had taken since he’d come out of his coma. He tried to speak a few times, but only made thick, garbled sounds. Mostly he just gulped air, his body shaking with tension. As if trying to learn how to breathe again.
Sometime around midnight, he drifted into what looked like sleep.
Simone didn’t even look up.
“Simone.” Zade shook her shoulder, as persistent and annoying as only he could be. “Simone. Hey.”
She lifted a hand, making a shushing gesture and went back to her frantic typing. A block of code was pouring out onto the screen.
“Simone,” he said more loudly. “He’s asleep. Take a break now.”
“If I leave him alone, the disturbance will build back up again,” she said. “Stress flashbacks. Nightmares. That could knock him right back to square one.”
Zade grunted. His own sleep, whenever he got any of the real stuff, was always full of suck-ass nightmares. Vicious, bloody, wake-up-screaming nightmares.
“So he can join the club,” he said. “It won’t kill him.”
“He’s been through so much,” Simone said fiercely. “He needs some real sleep. It’s the least I can do.”
“You need rest, too. You’ve been at it for fourteen hours without food or drink. You didn’t sleep last night, either. You were too busy fighting stim sickness.”
Her lips twitched. “Among other things,” she murmured.
He was heartened that she remembered the sex. That was a good sign.
“Look, I’m not going to muscle you around because it doesn’t work and it just pisses you off,” he said. “But if you don’t stop and eat something, you’re going to collapse. Turn some of that incredible focus on yourself for one second.”
She looked down at Brenner’s face. “I don’t want to leave him alone.”
Zade rigged the laptop so that the webcam was pointed at Brenner, synched the video feed to the tablet, and handed it to her. “Keep an eye on him, then. Check him every ten seconds if you want.”
He felt the moment that she gave way to his pleading. He slid an arm around her and he led her, stumbling, through the corridors and back up the stairs. She’d dived so deep, she’d forgotten how to talk. He knew exactly how that felt.
Zade guided her to a chair in Asa’s big kitchen, and pulled open the fridge, taking a quick inventory. “Grilled cheese?”
“I’m not really all that hungry,” Simone said faintly.
He looked her over. She was still in another world and needed to come down to earth.
“Grilled cheese it is,” he said. “Coming right up.”
He got to work and soon was sliding a plate of toasty golden sandwiches in front of her. “Beer to wash it down? He’s got plenty in the fridge.”
“Water’s fine,” she said.
“Tequila’s better.” Asa stood at the entrance to the kitchen, holding a bottle of Patron by the neck.
“How’s Brenner?” Asa asked.
Simone pushed the tablet toward him. “Sleeping,” she said.
Asa went to the table and studied the screen for a few moments. He exhaled slowly and rubbed his eyes as if they stung. “Thank you,” he said.
She waved her hand. “It’s nothing.”
“Hey.” Asa’s voice was a thick rasp of exhaustion. “He’s sleeping. Which means that I can too. For the first time since he woke up four days ago.”
Zade looked at the guy, startled. Really looked at him. They’d all been so focused on Brenner, he hadn’t noticed that Asa looked like shit, too. Caved in and hollow-eyed. A hell of a bruise was forming on his forehead.
Fuck. Like he needed to feel guilty about Asa too.
“I’m glad to help.” Simone held up the glass Zade had given her. “I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “Give me a shot of tequila.”
Asa poured her a generous slosh.
Zade snagged two more glasses from the shelf and held them out. “Sorry I was a dick,” he said awkwardly as the liquor glugged into his glass. “About Brenner, the other day. I wasn’t listening to you.”
Asa took his glass. “You sucked,” he agreed. “But she made it right. So I can afford to be generous.” He lifted his glass. “To Simone. You came through. Against all odds.” He tossed the liquor back.
Zade lifted his glass. “To Simone.” He drank it down.
Simone held her liquor glass like she’d forgotten what to do with it, and blushed.She lifted her glass and gulped it down, sputtering.
Then they heard a faint sound from the tablet on the table.
The sound of rattling chains.