Eight
Ian
“I…” Kori sputtered, blinking at me like the day was suddenly glaringly bright, leaving her exposed, and I realized that the only thing I enjoyed more than making her spew expletives was leaving her speechless. “What the hell does that mean?” she finally demanded, and I frowned. In my experience, most women love to hear how pretty they are and I’d never once pissed one off by saying so.
“It means exactly what I said. And by the way, the proper response to a compliment is ‘thank you.’”
Her scowl was unrelenting. “You’re not supposed to be complimenting me!”
“I’m not supposed to…?” My frown deepened, and my confusion only grew.
Kori squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head, but when she met my gaze again, she still looked mad, for no reason I could understand. “I mean…you don’t have to do that. It’s not necessary.”
“Necessary for what?” I felt like we were suddenly speaking different languages, and hers was nonsense.
Kori glared at me through narrowed eyes. “This is all a game to you, isn’t it?” she demanded, then rushed on before I could answer. “You better start taking this seriously, Ian, because Jake never loses and I don’t like games.”
“That’s unfortunate, because you play them well.” I snatched a handful of napkins from a pretzel vendor as we passed on the sidewalk and handed one to her, then wiped the bald man’s blood from my hands. One of my knuckles had split open, but I couldn’t have left enough of my blood behind to be of any use to someone else.
“I’m not playing,” she snapped, swiping at the blood on her own fingers without ever slowing her step. “I’m telling you one fucking truth after another, most of which I’ll probably get in serious trouble for, and you’re treating me like some bimbo who can’t see past her own reflection.”
I stared at her, almost as fascinated as I was confused. “How the hell did you manage to twist my compliment into an insult? I think that qualifies as some kind of special skill.”
“We obviously disagree on what qualifies as skill.”
I stopped, and she went several more steps before turning to frown at me. “I don’t understand you.”
“You don’t have to understand me.”
“I do, though.” I wanted to understand her worse than I’d ever wanted to understand anyone in my life, and I couldn’t quite convince myself that my motivation was purely professional. Yes, the better I understood her, the easier it would be to use her to get to her sister. But the more time I spent with Kori, the harder it was to remember that she even had a sister, much less what I’d come into Tower’s territory to do. “We’re going to be spending a lot of time together over the next few days, and I’d like to know where the land mines are buried before I step on the next one.”
“I think your best bet is steel-toed boots.”
I laughed out loud at the thought of boots—any boots—protecting someone from a land mine. Even a metaphorical land mine. Then I wondered again why her landscape was so riddled with them. “Why are you telling me things that could get you in trouble?”
“Because they’re…true.” She shrugged, and her frown deepened as she searched for more of an answer.
“And you like the truth?” Interesting, for a syndicate employee.
“I’d call it more admiration than true enjoyment, but yeah.” Kori frowned and dropped her used tissue in a trash can on the corner. “I guess you could say I like the truth.”
“Why?” Every time I thought I was close to figuring her out, she said something that threw me for another loop, and though I’d given up trying to anticipate the dips and twists in the conversations, I couldn’t help loving the ride.
“Why do I like the truth?” she asked, and I nodded. “I don’t know. Because it’s the truth. Why does anyone like anything? Why do you like coffee?” she demanded, when I glanced into a coffee shop while we waited for the crosswalk light to change.
“Because it wakes me up, it’s warm in my hands and it tastes good. Your turn. Why do you like the truth?”
“I don’t know how to answer that.” And from the stubborn set of her jaw, I could see she didn’t even want to try.
“Yes, you do. You’re smarter than you think you are, Kori.”
“How the hell would you know that?”
“Because I’m smarter than you think I am, too.” I glanced at the crowd gathered around us, waiting for the light, then nodded toward the coffee shop and was relieved when she actually followed me to a rectangle of shade beneath its awning. “Why do you like the truth? Dig deeper.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and thought about it, and for a moment, I was sure she would refuse to answer. But then she met my gaze with a shrug, understating how carefully she’d obviously considered the question. “Because it’s right there for the taking. A lie, you have to think about, but the truth is… The truth is easy.”
“No, it isn’t. In my experience the truth is usually the hardest thing in the world to say. Or to hear.” Or to see, lying on a bed, unmoving, staring at the ceiling with no sign of life.
Her mouth thinned into an angry line. “You don’t want an answer, you want a fight. You’re going to come up with an argument for anything I say, aren’t you? Why does it even matter why I like the truth?”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” I said, my lie as steady as her anger. And I should have left it at that, but I couldn’t help myself. Her steel spine and the occasional glimpse of vulnerability reminded me of Steven, and the bitter truth surged through me, scorching a trail through my veins. The memories. The loss. The rage still burning inside me.
Remembering should have made it easier for me to do what had to be done. But it didn’t. Kori’s mouth and her fiery grit—so different from Steven’s quiet determination—made her real. They made it harder to picture myself destroying Kenley Daniels, if that meant destroying Kori in the process.
“Why you like the truth doesn’t matter to me, but it should matter to you,” I insisted, still trying to sort through it all in my head. “You can’t recruit a man you don’t know, and how are you supposed to get to know me in a matter of days when you don’t even know yourself, after a lifetime in your own skin?”
“I know myself,” she snapped. “And I’m starting to get a pretty damn clear picture of you, too.”
“That first part, maybe.” But she didn’t know me. She couldn’t. And if I was wrong about that, I was as good as dead. “So tell me why you like the truth. The real answer.” I looked right into her eyes, practically daring her.
Kori glared at me, and I watched her, obviously pissing her off with nothing more than the fact that I wasn’t pissed off. “The truth is real, even when nothing else is,” she said at last, whispering so no one else would hear, dragging the words out like she didn’t want to let them go. “It’s steady. It doesn’t change depending on the circumstances. It never changes. The truth will look the same in the dark as it does in broad daylight, and it quacks like the duck it is. That’s a relief—knowing what you’re getting. I like it.”
I smiled. I couldn’t help it. She was fascinating, and she obviously had no idea. Not that it mattered. I couldn’t let myself want her, and I certainly couldn’t have her; she’d want to kill me once I’d killed her sister. And even if by some miracle she could forgive that—though she wouldn’t—she liked the truth, and my entire existence was one big lie. The reasons she had to hate me were too numerous to count and too huge to see around.
“Syndicate life must be hard for someone like you,” I said, trying to drag my thoughts back on target, which proved almost as difficult as dragging my gaze away from her eyes. From her lips, half open, like she’d forgotten what she wanted to say. I wanted to taste her, right there on the sidewalk. Just once. Just for a second. And for one terrifying moment I was suddenly certain I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything else until I’d done exactly that.
Then her frown grew skeptical, like she thought I was baiting her again. “Life is hard, period. Dying when there’s another option is easy, even when it hurts, but that’s the coward’s way out. Sometimes it takes guts to live, and that’s the fucking truth.”
“So it is.” I dropped my soiled napkin into the trash can a few feet away, and her brown-eyed gaze followed me. “Show me something true, Kori. Show me something real about the syndicate, even if it hurts to see.”
Something horrible. I needed to see or hear something so terrible it would drive all other thought from my head and purge the sudden need tugging on my fingers like strings on a puppet. The need to touch her.
“You sure? I could show you lots of pretty lies,” she offered, her voice delicate. Brittle. “You’d know they were lies, but they’d make you smile.” I just watched her, denying myself what I had no right to want, and finally she nodded. “The awful truth it is. Let’s go.”
I followed her into the coffee shop without a word, and Kori pulled me into the ladies’ restroom, then flipped the light switch by the door. Darkness descended and I exhaled slowly, enjoying the sudden calm it brought, like the start of an evening, after a glass of good wine. Everything seemed a little easier in the dark. Even with a strip of light shining from under the door and an emergency light flashing in the far corner.
Something touched my chest, and the breath I sucked in was loud in the silence. Her hand slid along my stomach, slowly, lightly, and I held my breath, wishing for more. I hated myself for that, but denying it would be pointless. I wanted greater pressure from her fingers. Longer contact.
I wanted to pull my shirt off so her hand would trail over my skin and I would know, just once, what her touch felt like.
Her hand kept moving until it reached my arm, then it trailed lower and her fingers intertwined with mine. Her skin was warm and dry, her fingers soft but strong. I wondered if the rest of her could possibly feel so smooth.
“When I squeeze your hand, take three steps forward, then stop. That part’s important, unless you want to walk into a wall.”
I nodded, then realized she couldn’t hear my brain rattle. “Okay.”
“Aren’t you going to ask where we’re going?”
“No. I trust you.” I had no other choice, because I was helpless in that moment, in spite of years spent fighting, training for the inevitable. I was more vulnerable to her touch than I’d ever been to a gun, or a knife, or a fist.
“Don’t,” she whispered, and the words sounded like they hurt. “Don’t trust anyone, Ian. Least of all, me.”
Before I could respond, she squeezed my hand and tugged me forward, farther into the dark restroom. As my foot hit the ground on my third step, the air around us changed. It felt colder and dryer, and more sterile. And everything was dark. Truly dark. There were no shadows, because there was no light to cast them. There was no infrared grid, nor any glow from any kind of power indicator or exit sign. This was real darkness. My kind of dark.
“Darkroom?” I whispered, and the echo of my own voice told me the room was small, the walls not far beyond our shoulders, with us standing side by side.
“Yeah. Hang on, it’s about to get bright.” Her fingers left mine, and my hand felt cold and empty in her absence. Kori took a small step forward, then something clicked and light blazed to life all around us, violent and jarring, like we’d stepped into the middle of a roaring bonfire. There was no actual pain, but after such peaceful darkness, my eyes ached beneath the glare, and the sudden sense of exposure—of vulnerability—was more than enough to set me on edge.
Static hummed in front of me and I squinted into the light to make out a small monitor next to a door with no knob or handle. A moment later, the static on the monitor gave way to a man’s face, scowling at us. “State your name and business,” he ordered, eyes narrowed in irritation, as if he resented having actual work to do at work.
“It’s me, Harkins. Open the door.”
“Kori?” The man’s eyes widened as he studied her face. “Tower said you wouldn’t be making any more deliveries, so just turn off the light and slink back into the shadows before we both get in trouble.”
“I’m not delivering. I’m tour guiding. This is Ian Holt.” She stepped back so Harkins could get a better look at me, and I nodded in greeting. “Jake told me to show him around, so open the fuckin’ door so I can do my job.”
“Tower sent you? Then you won’t mind if I verify that.” He picked up a telephone receiver and held it in front of the camera.
Kori shrugged and crossed her arms over her chest. “He should be sitting down to lunch right about now, so you can probably catch him at the house. With his family.”
Harkins scowled again and lowered the phone. “If there’s trouble to be had from this, I’m aiming it all your way.”
“What else is new?” she mumbled, as he made a show of pressing a button somewhere on the desk in front of him. The door to the darkroom popped open into the hall with the soft whoosh of a seal being broken.
“Stop by the front desk for visitor’s tags,” Harkins ordered, and then the screen went blank again.
“Was that an air lock?” I asked, as she stepped into the hall.
“Yup. So they can gas you without killing anybody else.” She leaned back into the darkroom and pointed up, where two vents were nestled flush with the ceiling, side by side.
“You’re serious?” I said, trying not to imagine why Tower might want to gas someone in his darkroom.
“Serious as gasping your last breath in a pool of your own vomit.”
I frowned and followed her into the hall. “You know, you really have a way with words.”
“I have a way with guns, too,” she said, pushing the door closed behind us. “Let’s hope I don’t need one, because I am drastically under-armed today.”
“Are you expecting another ambush in one of Tower’s own buildings?”
She hesitated, then met my gaze briefly. “I don’t have permission for us to be here, technically.”
“Then why are we here?”
Another shrug as she led the way down the hall. “You wanted to see something true.”
“Should I have specified that I want to survive seeing it?” She wasn’t the only one drastically under-armed. For authenticity in the role of a systems analyst, I’d foregone even my bare essentials for the second day in a row.
Kori twisted to grin at me over her shoulder. “If you wanted boring, you picked the wrong tour guide.”
“I didn’t—” I stopped before I could admit I hadn’t picked her. “I didn’t say I wanted boring. Just nonlethal.” For me, for her, and for whomever I’d have to kill to get my hands on a decent weapon if it came to that.
“Don’t worry. You’re too valuable to shoot.” With that she headed down the long white hallway, and I had no choice but to follow, wondering what Tower was protecting with restricted-access darkrooms and gas vents.
We turned a corner to the left and Kori stopped at a rounded reception desk, where a woman with two green chain links on her exposed left arm handed us a sign-in sheet and slid two visitor’s passes into plastic cases attached to lanyards.
UnSkilled service, I thought, staring at her arm.
Kori handed me a badge and I slid the lanyard over my head, then held the badge up so I could read it.
Heartland Pharmaceuticals
“You wanted to show me a pharmaceutical company?”
Her teasing smile lit a fire low in my gut, where it continued to smolder as long as her gaze held mine. “You got something against pharmaceuticals? You know, they may have a system you could analyze.”
Before I could reply, she turned and crossed the lobby, then led me down another hallway and past several offices to a door with a keypad above the handle. “Wouldn’t they have changed the code, if you’re not supposed to be in here anymore?” I asked, as she started punching buttons.
“Why bother, when I wouldn’t be able to get past the darkroom anyway?” She grinned and when a green light appeared on the keypad, she pressed on the lever and pushed the door open. We stepped into another hallway, identical to the first, as far as I could tell. More white doors with no windows. More featureless white tile floor. Security cameras on both ends, near the ceiling.
“Where are we?” I asked, as our footsteps echoed down the hall. I felt like I should whisper, but she hadn’t, so it seemed stupid for me to.
“I thought you trusted me.”
“I thought you said not to.”
She stopped in front of the last door on the left and turned to look at me. “I don’t know if I can actually get us in here. This one takes an employee-specific security code, and chances are good that they’ve stripped my clearance. Either way, I’m taking a big risk bringing you here.”
“Why?” I said, more worried by what I saw in her eyes than by anything she’d told me so far. “Why would you break into a building you no longer have clearance for, just to show me something Tower obviously doesn’t want me to see?”
Kori glanced at her feet for a second before meeting my gaze again, and again I was astounded by how much I saw in her eyes, and how little of it I understood. “Because I can’t truly balance the scales.”
“I don’t understand.” I felt like a broken record, spouting that same sentence over and over again, but I couldn’t help it. I’d never felt so unsure of anything as I felt when I was with Kori. I didn’t understand her thought process and I couldn’t interpret her body language, because it seemed to constantly broadcast contradictory signals. Her silence seemed louder than her voice, and even when she did speak, I felt like the parts she left out were more important than the things she actually said.
“Now that the syndicates all know about you, you’re going to have to sign with someone, and it’s my job to make sure that someone is Jake Tower. But no matter how badly he wants—or even needs—your services, he’ll still have the upper hand in negotiations. He’ll still have all the power.”
“And you don’t think that’s fair?”
“I think it’s unacceptable. But it’s also inevitable. I can’t give you even footing. The best I can do is arm you with information I haven’t been explicitly forbidden to give you. That way, at least you’ll know what you’re up against. And what you’re in for.”
I studied her, trying to see what lay behind her eyes and hear what hid between her words. “You don’t think I should sign with him, do you?”
She blinked, and her armor slid into place, as easy as if she’d just lifted an actual shield. “I think you have to,” Kori said. “When there are no good choices, you pick—”
“The lesser of all evils?” I said, and she shook her head slowly.
“The evil willing to pay the most for you. You look that evil in the face, and you take it for all it’s worth.”
Was that what she’d done? Had she sacrificed liberty for the almighty dollar? Or was the money merely compensation for work she would have been forced to do, no matter who she signed with?
“But you shouldn’t sign anything until you know exactly what you’re signing on for,” she said, before I could voice my questions. “Even if you can’t change the terms.”
“And what’s behind this door will tell me that? What I’m signing on for?”
Another nod. “This is his most promising new business venture. Top secret. It’s still on the ground floor, but Jake believes it has penthouse potential.”
But she made the word penthouse sound more like a deep, dark dungeon, which made me both tense and incredibly curious. Intel wasn’t my primary mission, but I had no objection to being handed information that could damage Jake Tower even beyond the blow I’d be delivering by killing Kenley Daniels.
“How bad will it be if we get caught?”
“For you? He’ll make you sign a sealed oath swearing you haven’t yet and never will reveal what you learned here.”
“And if I don’t want to sign an oath?”
Her brows rose. “You will want to, because the alternative won’t be as simple or as pleasant.”
I didn’t bother asking what the alternative was. “What about you? What will happen to you?”
Kori’s jaw tightened for just a moment. “Nothing. Because we’re not going to get caught, unless you don’t shut up so I can get us out of this hallway.”
And there it was again—that fear I’d glimpsed earlier. It wasn’t there when she talked about people dying in their own blood and vomit, or when she bluffed her way into a secure building, or when she took down armed men with her bare hands. I couldn’t find any pattern to the things that Kori feared, and I was almost as worried by that as I was fascinated by it.
Kori started punching buttons on the number pad, but I only caught the first five of them. When she was done, the light flashed red. She groaned and let her forehead thump against the door. “Well, that was a lot of buildup for nothing, huh?” Her smile looked forced, but her relief—just a fleeting glimpse of it—was real. But before I could decide what to say, something clicked behind the locked door and it swung open.
A man in a white lab coat glanced at me, then his gaze found Kori and his eyes narrowed. “Korinne. Didn’t they ban you from the building?” I glimpsed an ID badge hanging just below chest level, but his arms covered most of it when he crossed them, and I could only see his last name. Abbot.
Kori shook her head and clucked her tongue. “There you go thinkin’ small again. I’ve been banned from several buildings. I’m a regular pariah.”
“And who is your partner in exile?” Abbot asked, blocking the doorway with his own body.
“This is Ian Holt, the man whose ass you’re going to be kissing in a few short days. Better practice your pucker.” She shoved him into the room and stalked past him, and I followed when he stomped after her.
“Get out now, or I’ll call security.”
Kori shrugged, half sitting on a table covered in forms and file folders. “Call ’em. And while you’re at it, tell them how you broke security protocol by answering the damn door. Anyone with the clearance to actually be in this room would have his or her own functioning code.” She picked up a clipboard and flipped through the pages clipped to it, too fast to have actually read anything. Then she looked up with her head cocked to one side. “You ever been on Jake’s bad side, Abbot?”
“We all know you have.” He snatched the clipboard from her and tossed it onto another table, then propped his hands on his hips beneath the lab coat, revealing brown slacks and a very poorly chosen button-down shirt. “You fell from grace, and I heard the landing was pretty damn rough. I wasn’t on the guest list, but I heard that you—”
Kori swung before I even saw her pick up a weapon. She grunted with the effort and something I couldn’t focus on slammed into the lab geek’s head. He went down without a sound, out cold, a huge lump already forming on his left temple. “How rough was your landing…?” she mumbled, already squatting next to his still form. And only then did I realize what she’d swung. What had left its manufacturer’s icon imprinted in the skin just below his hairline.
“An ink drum?” I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or back away from her slowly.
“A big ink drum. If Abbot had upgraded his printer when Jake suggested it, he could have saved himself from a concussion.”
“Or maybe a coma.”
Her brows rose in interest. “A coma? You think?” She stopped digging through his pockets long enough to glance critically at his face. “Nice.” Kori stood with a key card in hand. “Bastard deserves that and more.”
“What did he mean?” I asked as she turned toward another door, and Kori went so still I wasn’t sure she was even still breathing. “What did he hear? Why are you persona non grata?”
She clutched the key card like it might disappear if her grip loosened. But she didn’t answer.
“Why do they hate you, Kori?”
“They don’t hate me. Well, some of them hate me. The rest of them…” She turned slowly and looked up at me in shadows too shallow to be useful, thanks to yet another infrared grid. “You know how in school, there’s always one kid who’s just a little better than you at everything? His art gets hung in the hall. He gets to be the line leader, or the door holder, or, if it’s high school, he gets to score the winning touchdown and fuck the cheerleader. You know that kid?”
“Yeah.”
The frown lines across her forehead deepened. “You weren’t that kid, were you? ’Cause that would kinda ruin my metaphor.”
“No. I knew him, though.” I wanted to touch her. I wanted to hold her, or squeeze her hand, but I understood that touching her would make talking harder for her. Might even make her words stop altogether.
“You know how you watch that kid, and you want to be him, but you also kind of want to see him knocked down a peg or two?”
“Yeah.” Why did I have the urge to hold my breath, like that might somehow change the ending to a story we all knew?
“Did you see him fall on his face?” Her voice was harder than I’d ever heard it, and I nodded, feeling guiltier than I had since junior high. “When he fell, did you give him a hand up? Or did you kick him when he was down, to make yourself feel bigger? Or maybe you just watched someone else do that.”
“I…”
“You don’t have to say it, Ian. We’re all grown-ups now. This isn’t high school. But if it was, I’d be that kid, and he’d be the one kicking me.” She glanced at the unconscious lab geek. Abbot. “They all would.”
“And Tower?” I dreaded the answer, even though it wouldn’t tell me anything. She’d painted a vivid picture without giving a single detail. “Who’s he in this metaphor?
“He’s the kid who pushed me down. Hard.” She looked away again and stepped toward a window covered with dusty horizontal blinds ending an inch above the table she’d leaned against earlier.
I didn’t want to ask. Knowing wouldn’t change what I had to do. What I would do. But I wanted to know what had happened to her, and who had done it. I wanted to know if there was anyone I should kill with a little more than the necessary force and pain, when the time came.
“What does that mean, Kori? How hard did he push you?”
She turned slowly, still clutching the key card, and looked right up into my eyes, her pale hair the only spot of light in an otherwise dim room. “There are some questions it’s not okay to ask. You just found one.”
I held her gaze so she could see the truth in mine. “Fine. I can respect that.” She didn’t trust me, and why should she? “But you left out part of the story. In my school, that kid who tripped and fell? Or maybe got pushed? He got back up and fought until there wasn’t another kid left standing, and he didn’t do it out of courage or a need for retribution. He did it because that’s who he was. He was a fighter, and fighters never back down.”
“Fighters die young, Ian.” She sounded older—she looked older—when she said it.
I nodded, watching her, my blood boiling in fury at whoever had hurt her, in spite of the fact that what I’d come prepared to do would hurt her even worse. “Yeah, sometimes,” I agreed. “But they die fighting.” Yet even as the words tumbled from my lips—words I’d been saying to myself for years—I remembered what she’d said earlier.
Sometimes dying is the coward’s way out. Sometimes living takes guts.
She blinked, but her gaze never wavered. “What the hell are you doing here, Ian? You don’t belong here.”
I could see what it cost her to say that—another difficult truth that probably skirted the very edge of what she was allowed to reveal to a potential recruit. “Neither do you.”
Kori frowned and turned away from me, reaching for the chord hanging down one side of the blinds. “This is what you’ll be helping him do,” she said, her voice hard again, as if she’d turned off whatever I’d seen in her. Like flipping a switch. As if it was that easy.
She pulled the chord and the blinds rose, clattering, to reveal a long observation window looking out over row after row of beds. Gurneys, really. Narrow, thinly padded carts on wheels, each of which held a single body. Or patient, as the hospital gowns seemed to suggest.
“What the hell is this?” Why were they all asleep? Or unconscious? The chills running up my back were so cold and ruthless my spine could have been carved from ice. “Who are they?”
They were alive. I could see the closest of them breathing, chests barely rising and falling. And they were all—every single one of them—attached to an IV bag hanging from a stand to the left of each cart.
“They’re donors,” Kori said, and I glanced at her to find her jaw clenched as she stared out at the sea of bodies. “And that’s all I can tell you.” There were dozens of them. Easily one hundred or more cots, and at the far end of the room was a single nurse in green scrubs, checking the IV bags one by one, stopping occasionally to lift an eyelid and check for…something.
“Can he see us?” I asked, staring at the nurse, who didn’t seem to know he was being watched.
“Nope. One-way glass. He can’t hear us, either, unless you push that button.” She pointed to an electronic panel on the right side of the window. “So, don’t push that button. This is an observation room. I can’t get us in there.” Kori nodded at the glass. “I never had that kind of clearance, and without Abbot’s password, this is useless.” She dropped the key card on the table.
“Donors…” I couldn’t seem to make sense of what I was seeing. “What are they donating?”
“Look back there. The last two rows.” She pointed, instead of vocalizing what she was obviously forbidden to say. And I looked.
“Carts.” They were no higher than the beds themselves, but the one on the end of the second to last row was unobstructed, because the person on the bed next to him was too small to block the view. I didn’t want to think about what that meant.
I squinted a little more and made out something on the cart. A bag of something dark, with something connecting it to the donor’s right arm. A wire or a tube.
Yes, a tube.
“Blood,” I said softly, horrified by the thought. “They’re donating blood.” Blood was dangerous. Blood was power. Putting any of your blood in someone else’s hands was like turning over the key to your home and inviting the monsters in.
“Not just blood. What comes with blood sometimes?” Kori said, and I had to struggle through a fog of confusion and horror in order to look beyond her words to their meaning.
“They’re donating Skills? How is that even possible? Why the hell would anyone ever donate Skilled blood?”
She lifted both brows in surprise. “I never said they were volunteers.”
Words deserted me. The entire concept was unthinkable. “They’re not… They didn’t…?”
“Wake up one morning and decide to open a vein for Jake Tower? No. They were delivered here, for this specific purpose. After being identified and screened by a staff of specialists.”
The implications were revolutionary and terrifying. The methodology was inhumane and unconscionable. The fact that she was showing me this at all…it made no sense. “Jake will kill you if he finds out you brought me here.” She started to argue, but I spoke over her, whispering, as if the chances of us being overheard had suddenly increased, now that I better understood the stakes of the game. “Don’t bother. I know you’re risking your life by bringing me to see something that would send most recruits fleeing. What made you think I wouldn’t have the same reaction?”
Kori shrugged. “The fact that you kept your cool in the alley, which tells me you’re not easily rattled. The fact that you held your own in that fight, which tells me you don’t run from trouble. And the fact that you need something from Jake, which tells me that you’re here because you want to be here, not because he wanted you here. Don’t get me wrong—he would have gotten you here anyway, but you didn’t even make him work for it.”
She crossed her arms over her chest again and silently challenged me to argue with her. “All of that together tells me that you may be a systems analyst, but you are not a corporate automaton with clean fingernails and an even cleaner conscience. This might shock and disgust you—and I’d be worried if it didn’t—but it won’t scare you away.”
How the hell was I supposed to argue with that? Insist that I was easy to scare? This was why I’d wanted Kenley assigned as my tour guide. Ten minutes alone with her, and the whole thing would have been over. Without the psychoanalysis and flight-risk assessment from her sister. Not to mention the dangerous, top-secret information I was now burdened with.
“You shouldn’t have brought me here,” I insisted.
“I had to bring you here. You had to see what he can do, and that he can get to anyone. You had to understand.”
And suddenly I did. I wasn’t just looking at a collection of human vegetables being milked for the source of their Skills. I was looking at my own future. Kori was trying to tell me without actually telling me that Tower would get what he wanted from me, one way or another. I could serve him, or I could bleed for him.
She wasn’t trying to scare me away. She was trying to scare me into signing, to avoid the alternative.
My head spun. My stomach pitched. But I stood straight and swallowed everything I couldn’t say. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but at least three people have seen us, and if any one of them talks, we’re both screwed.”
Though I hadn’t known about Tower’s pet project when I started this mission, I was fully aware of the risk to my own life. Personal risk I could handle, but I didn’t want her death on my conscience.
Hell, I didn’t want her death at all.
“They’re not going to talk,” Kori insisted. “The receptionist and the security guard don’t even know about this—Jake has half a dozen other projects going on in this one building. There are no cameras in here—” she glanced around the perimeter of the ceiling for emphasis “—because Jake won’t risk the footage being seen by the wrong pair of eyes. Which is also why the staff for this project is smaller than you’d expect. And Abbot can’t report us without getting into serious trouble himself. So as long as we’re gone before his replacement comes on duty, we’re all good. Unless…” Kori frowned and picked up the clipboard Abbot had dropped onto the table. She glanced at it for a second, then set it down again and crossed her arms over her chest. “Nope. No deliveries scheduled for today.”
“Deliveries?” I’d seen a lot of sick stuff both stateside and overseas, but nothing compared to this. To people kept comatose and harvested for their blood. This made me sick. “Are these the deliveries you’re no longer making?” I could hear the anger in my voice, and I could tell from the narrowing of her eyes that she heard it, too.
“I can’t answer that,” she said. “But I can say that I was removed from Jake’s personal security squad about half a dozen times to acquire a few of the more complicated things he required.”
“Because you’re a Traveler.”
“And because I’m a petite woman, which makes me slightly less threatening than your average hulking male goon.” I lifted one brow at her and she shrugged. “At first glance.”
“Why would you do this?” I demanded, my voice lower and harder than I’d intended as I looked out at the neat rows of cots and identically dressed donors. Everything was designed to strip them of identity. To dehumanize them, so the employees wouldn’t be bothered by that pesky sense of decency. Of human compassion.
“If you haven’t figured that out for yourself by next week, you can ask me again, and I’ll answer.”
But the answer was obvious. She’d had no choice. And neither had any of the people she’d taken. Tower had found a new way to rob people of their most basic rights, and as important as my mission was to me, on a personal level, I couldn’t overlook what I was seeing. I couldn’t just walk away from all this when I’d done what I’d come to do.
“Who are they?” I whispered, my voice an echo of the horror roiling inside me.
“They’re people,” Kori said, staring through the glass. “They’re from all over the country. None from this city, and few who would be missed by families or coworkers.”
“Few? So some were missed?”
“That’s inevitable. Some are presumed dead. Some are missed as runaways.”
“And you put them here.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of fact I couldn’t quite believe, and she couldn’t outright confirm.
“That’s how this works, Ian. This is what’s under all the fucking sequins and champagne. Stuff like this, and people like me and you, making it all happen.”
Her voice was sharp, but her expression was empty, and I’d learned that when she looked like that—closed off and unavailable—she wasn’t feeling nothing. She was feeling too much. She was blocking it all out. That was a survival skill, and her still-beating heart was proof that it worked.
“It’s not your fault,” I insisted. “You can’t hold yourself responsible for something someone else made you do. Which would you blame, the gun that fires the bullet, or the finger that squeezes the trigger?”
For a moment, she was quiet, staring through the one-way glass. Then she exhaled softly. “Doesn’t really matter who you blame, Ian. Either way, I’m his gun, and guns are only good for one thing.”
But even after less than a day spent with her, I knew Kori Daniels was good for much more than what Tower was using her for, even if neither of them could see it.