Chapter 10
Reception is notoriously unreliable at this location for reasons of geography even the most sophisticated modern technology can’t fully ameliorate. I appreciate your patience and apologize in advance for any delays in getting back to you.
—Dr. Atalina Kahananui in a confidential message to M-Psy Ashaya Aleine, regarding the status of their mutual subject Bowen Knight
ENDING THE CALL with Lily, Bo slid his phone into a pocket, then dug in the duffel to pull out a pair of socks and the scuffed brown boots he wore as often as not. It didn’t take him long to pull them on.
His stomach grumbled, the sound insistent.
It was time to track Kaia to her lair and see if he could talk her into feeding him.
Pulse quickening, he put his hand on the scanpad beside the door, and the door slid smoothly back to reveal a wall approximately five feet away. Painted a smooth off-white, it revealed absolutely nothing of his wider surroundings. Bo listened hard before he took a step outside. One glance and it was obvious he was alone in an internal corridor.
His room was located at the very end, nothing to his left but another wall.
He headed right, leaning on the cane as necessary but doing everything he could to support his own weight. The quicker his muscles fully rehabilitated, the better. Challenging a certain angry changeling would go much better for him if he could duck any projectiles she decided to throw at his head.
Bowen’s lips tugged up; truth was, he’d prefer such volcanic anger to cold distance—instinct whispered that Kaia wasn’t a cold or unfeeling creature. Because someone had turned up the temperature in his room, and only two people were authorized to access the data panel that controlled everything in the suite: Dr. Atalina Kahananui and Kaia Luna.
Bo had noted the names when he glanced at the panel. It made sense to him that a panel made for medical use would have that information out in the open—it functioned the same way as a hospital chart, albeit with more data. Which was also why he’d been able to see that the last access had been a few minutes after he’d fallen asleep—by Kaia.
The woman who treated him as the enemy had also kept him warm while he slept.
Fascinated though he was by the mystery of her, Bo never lost awareness of his surroundings. If this was a clinic, it was an atypical one. First of all, it was silent, with no calls over the public comm, no nurses rushing by, no beeps from other rooms. He could actually only see one other door that might lead to a room and it was situated halfway down the corridor.
As for the left wall, the majority of it was covered in a vivid mural of water shot with light, in the background of which swam a dark shadow—he could swear the creature was a sinuous water dragon. Intricately painted, the brushstrokes smooth, the mural wouldn’t have looked out of place in an art gallery or a museum . . . but there was a youth to it, too. A sense of unfettered life. So maybe not anywhere as formal as a gallery or museum.
Sounds finally slivered into the quiet after he passed the other door, were at first echoes he felt rather than heard. A few more steps and he could nearly make out distinct words. Multiple people talking—not a crowd, but more than two. However, he’d still not heard a single announcement over the comm system.
It solidified his growing belief that this installation was a private clinic. Probably the only patients were experi—
“Jesus.” Bowen froze.
The corridor had poured him out into a thickly carpeted atrium set up as a lounge area, complete with small tables and comfortable-appearing chairs and sofas—some with backs, others without. Beyond the generous open-plan space was a curving wall of what looked like glass.
And what lay on the other side of that glasslike material was water. Deep blue-green water lit by lights that must have been attached to the building in which he stood. “Venice,” Bo whispered to himself, his skin settling back into place. He had to be in Venice. The lower level of Alliance HQ also boasted transparent walls that looked out into the water.
He didn’t know how BlackSea had managed to build an installation this big right under Bowen’s nose, but what mattered at this instant was that he was close to home.
Walking through the currently sparsely populated atrium, he ignored the eyes aimed his way as he went to stand directly in front of the transparent wall. Murmurs sounded from behind him, but no one approached. Not even the hard-jawed man with dark blond hair whose expression had gone cold and flat when Bo appeared out of the corridor.
Tall and wide, the other man probably thought he could take Bo, but he moved with a heaviness that said graceful movement wasn’t his default. Neither was it Bo’s at present, but he’d already calculated how he could use the cane and a table or a nearby chair to incapacitate the male. The strongest man in the room didn’t always win the fight.
Not if the other party used his brains.
Bo made sure to keep the possible threat in his peripheral vision as he drank in the sight of the waters of home. Except . . . He frowned. Nothing looked as it did from the Alliance building. There was no sign of the piles that anchored Venice, or the remnants of buildings that had sunk prior to the building of the network of below-the-waterline biospheres that kept Venice a thriving city even as the waters rose. And, beyond the diffuse glow of the lights, the water appeared deeper and infinitely darker than in the Venetian lagoon.
Could it be an illusion caused by the way this structure had been constructed? Or a shield of some kind?
Bo had barely begun to consider that idea when a battle-scarred humpback whale swam by on the other side of the transparent wall, one huge eye looking balefully at Bo before the mammoth being disappeared into the endless darkness.
“Not Venice.” It came out more as air than sound.