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YOU’VE SEEN ALL OF ME
ROMEO-THREE
Pain is curious.
It’s an essential warning system that keeps us alive. If we felt no pain, we’d be open, subject to a thousand tiny threats without even knowing we should take protection. Pain alerts us if we’re bleeding or if we have a broken bone. It stops us from doing further damage. Pain is a defense mechanism. Pain tells us to stop what we are doing and tend to our bodies. Pain stops us from killing ourselves.
We need pain.
Sometimes, we have no choice but to keep going through it. That’s the part that interested the She-Bitch and Dr. Martin Burke Jones. They wanted their super-soldiers to have the warning system that would keep them alive, but the power to push through it. An override.
Usually, I can use that. Override the pain, focus on what’s necessary, register the pain with half my brain while the other half stays free to finish my mission, achieve my goal. The pain is relegated to where it belongs, in the recesses of my consciousness.
They sent us on a mission when we were seventeen. Dropped us in on gliders with a directive to take out a foreign politician who was having a winter vacation in the Byrranga mountains north of Siberia, skiing with his family.
We landed in the frozen tundra and hiked to his remote mountain house. We were lashed together, a five-person Sierra crew. Nova was running point. Then Dolce. I was third, which everyone thought was funny. Three is third, they’d ragged in a chant. Followed up by Fuzzy and Quatro.
On an uphill climb, Nova hit an ice slide and skidded right over a thirty-foot drop.
Took Dolce with him. Fuzzy and Quatro got their ice axes in fast, and right as I got sucked over the edge, I got my hand around a tree branch jutting out from the cliff. Held on for all I was worth in a single jarring motion right at the shoulder. My own two-hundred and twenty-pound bulk, plus Nova and Dolce and all our packs. Close to eight hundred pounds plus the velocity of our fall, wrenched right at that one joint.
Took Fuz and Quatro three and a half minutes to get us up, and that whole time I had our weight on that one arm.
It didn’t really work after that, but I figured I’d pulled something and used my left hand. It was about forty-five minutes later when we were in the house, staring at a pile of dead Russians, wondering what the fuck we were supposed to do with the kids that I realized my shoulder had dislocated.
Fuzzy could probably have set it. She’s got the most medical training, but I didn’t want to take the time. We hiked all the way back to the meet, flew all the way across the Pacific.
Eight hours with a dislocated shoulder.
Setting it was bad.
But even then, I functioned through pain. It was nothing I couldn’t handle.
But whatever Tierney Jones just did to me, is in a whole separate league. It’s like someone took one of those frozen ice-axes and drove it straight through the center of my brain, and then smacked it so the metal vibrated and whined in my head like a tuning fork.
There’s no separation. All I feel is pure white pain, blinding and nauseating. There’s no thinking or functioning through it. It’s debilitating and endless ... until ... suddenly it’s not.
It goes away as fast as it came on. And I’m left sweating and gasping—and eternally grateful that I didn’t just shit the gurney right in front of her.
I look down at her, to find her fingers wrapped around my forearm in a death grip, her face frozen in a rictus, a bead of sweat sliding down her brow, and she whimpers, body collapsing forward into the gurney, onto me. And then, with a shudder so robust I’m surprised it doesn’t break her bones, it ends, and she’s left gasping and shaking on top of me.
Her whiskey eyes go wide and brimming, brows drawn together with concern or compassion or shame, her puffy lips trembling like she wants to cry. When she sees the pain is gone, she touches my face. “Three? Are you okay? I’m so sorry.”
“What the fuck did you just do? You felt it too?” My voice is hoarse and raw, and in the shackles, down on the gurney, my hands are shaking like I’ve just aged seventy years. Maybe I have.
“Maybe? I think so. I don’t know. I’m so sorry.” A tear slides out, skitters down her cheek leaving a wet track.
I wiggle my hands and toes, try to shake my head right. “Jesus. Fuck, is my hair white? Yours isn’t. Why can you feel my pain?”
“I don’t know. It shouldn’t hav—” She glances back at the feed, hands all over her mouth, studying the black shape of the chip like she can unmake them, and the three little tentacles that just stirred up my brain. “I’m sorry. So sorry. I can’t believe it worked.”
She looks so disappointed at her success that a raw laugh moves in my chest. I close my eyes in exhaustion. “Come back.”
I want to touch her, feel her hands on me. The intimacy from before has evaporated. And I want it back.
But she doesn’t. Slapping away tears, she moves to the keypad and taps away, manipulating the image, rotating it so she can see the tentacles that have spread.
With a sigh, she takes something off the counter under the screen. Finally, she comes back to me, perches on the edge of the gurney, her warm hip pressing against my ribs.
I sigh when she touches my face. I want to ask her about it. I want to hear her admit it. Say the words aloud. “Did you like doing that, little one?”
“Hurting you? No. God, no.”
“Not that. Before.”
She purses her lips, and peers into my eyes, presumably to check if I’m lucid. She flashes a penlight at them, making me see stars in a room dark but for the lighted screen showing my squid of a nanochip.
“You can admit it.” I raise my hand to touch her face, forgetting about the shackles, and curse. I’d trade anything to touch her now, just to comfort her.
She nibbles on that fat pink lower lip. As she shifts, the buttons on her blouse pull and the fabric ripples and I get a single, glorious glimpse of her tits in a lacy white bra. It only lasts a second, but I burn that image into my brain.
Something moves behind her eyes. “I’ve never liked it before.”
That was not what I had hoped to hear. I hate the image of her with some other man’s cock in her mouth. “It’s rude to mention former lovers.”
She raises her brows. “Because you’ve never had one?”
“No one that matters.”
“As I said, I’ve never liked it before.” Her eyes dart upward, meet mine, dart away. “But yes, I enjoyed doing that for you.”
She glances at the sheet, and I swear she blushes. She just swallowed me down, moaning while she did it, tortured me like a mad-scientist, and now she’s blushing. She’s a mess of contradictions, my Tierney Jones. She’s spent her whole life under the thumb of this government, and she’s only now starting to break free. I cannot imagine what she could be like if she were truly free. Outlaw. Away from this cesspool called Chicago in the open, surrounded by real trees and bright ocean.
I press back into the gurney, too tired now to hold my head up, but not ready for her to wheel me away from her. “Then tell me about your work. How did you feel my pain?”
“I have no idea. Maybe I just imagined it?”
“Or your chip is talking to my chip?”
Her face changes at that, gaze shifting into the distance, like she’s seeing million questions all at once.
“Don’t take me back to the cell yet. You just hurt my head. I need to be comforted.”
She chews her lip. She seems nervous still, her hands flexing at her sides, her feet tapping. “I’m sorry, Three.” She trails her fingers through my hair and my eyes roll back. “I hate this.”
“You didn’t mastermind this situation. Come hold my hand. Just for a minute.”
She takes my hand in hers. It’s clammy and cold.
“How close are you?”
Her neck tightens. “Close to what?”
“To inventing mind control.”
“They just want to be able to override your resistance to sexual activities.”
“If you believe that, you’re stupid.” And she’s not stupid.
She knows.
She clicks a button on the penlight in her fingers and the light goes off, but she doesn’t move. Just sits there, staring down at me, her body pressed in close, her smaller softer hand in mine, leaning over me. Her chin wobbles. “I hoped it wouldn’t work.”
“What did you do?”
She tilts her head at the screen. “The chips were equipped with augmentation capabilities ... spare parts. I just gained access to more regions in your brain.”
“Can you control my mind, Tierney Jones?”
Her brows draw together. “Not yet.”
That last word lingers on the air. Not yet. But she will.
“How long until you will be?”
“I don’t know. Weeks. Months, if I go slowly. Accessing the brain is a long way from controlling it. The first part was easy. The company equipped the chips to do it. The hard part will be getting the programming right. That will take a long time.”
A long time. We’ll be gone, but what of her? Is she so good distance won’t matter and she’ll be able to access my chip, my sibling’s chips from afar? The thought stills my blood. “I wish you were worse at your job.”
“Me too. I can’t not do it, Three.” She clamps her lips between her teeth, flattening them into what looks like a painful flat line. “I don’t want to, but ... if I refuse, they’ll turn me Outlaw. Swann would be all alone here—and I’ll be Outlaw. Out there.”
“You say out there as if it’s some fearsome thing.”
She stares up at the screen, chewing that fat lower lip like it’s to blame for this mess. “Isn’t it?”
“No. It’s glorious out there. How is she sick, Swann?”
She swallows. “She always struggled with ... mood swings.” The way she says it I can tell it’s an understatement. “It got worse as she got older. And then after mom died and dad ... She just lost it. Wandered into downtown, screaming at the top of her lungs. Horrible things that ... at the time they didn’t seem possible. But now?” She shrugs, a tiny gesture that speaks to her powerlessness in the face of the enormity that is the combined prowess of IdentityCorps and the government. “They took her away to a ward. It took me over a year to get her back, and now ... it’s like she lost part of her ability to reason. She’s ...” She shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
Except it does. The timing of it all is so ... coincidental. In the same year that Oct and Delilah met and fell in love, and we escaped, Tierney Jones’ mother dies unexpectedly, her father—the man who created us—rebels, and her sister goes mad.
“Was your mother part of the Sierra program?” I never saw her, but that means little.
She lifts her shoulders. “I don’t know.”
Surrounded by liars, flanked by doubts, abandoned by family, and yet she kept her sister safe. I respect loyalty. “You’ve done well, Tierney Jones. Your parents, much as I hated them, would be proud.”
That earns me a wet laugh.
“You know what they really want, right?”
“Yes.”
“You know it won’t stop with us?”
“Yes.”
“You know they won’t stop at arousal and sleep controls?”
“Yes.” She looks so sad. I hate seeing that look on her face.
“You know ... you really want to show me your tits.”
She laughs. Truly laughs. I haven’t seen it before. It’s high-pitched and throaty. Surprised and shocked. Her chin tilts up, her eyes close. It makes me laugh too because this moment of happiness on her face, unguarded and uncontrolled, is vivid and bright. This is the Tierney Jones behind the outwardly calm mask she shows the rest of the world. This is the woman inside her who calls to the man in me.
I raise my brows. “Come on. Just one flash.”
“No.”
“You’ve seen all of me.”
She rolls her eyes because I’m ridiculous and she knows it.
When she smiles like that, she’s got these dimples in her cheeks, her eyes squint up, and all that soft curly night-dark hair, shining with a thousand ultraviolet rainbow-glimmers like the wings of a crow, bounces on her shoulders. Tierney Jones is beautiful when she’s sad and those big eyes melt, and when she’s annoyed and those slashing brows lower, and when her cheeks hollow as she takes me deep into her mouth, and when she’s thinking and she chews those fat lips. But she is the most beautiful when she smiles like this, and I can forget that we are in hell and imagine that we are free together someplace bright and fresh, outside, under a sunny sky with the ocean-wind in our faces.
“Okay, okay. Compromise. Just a little glimpse of cleavage.”
“No.” She pushes away and her warm body leaves mine, but the memory stays with me.
I’m going to miss her. She makes me almost want to stay.
“I’m sorry for hurting you,” she says from back at her keypad.
“It was worth it.”
She tucks a curl behind her ear, and I can see they’re pink. She thinks I mean the blowjob.
I don’t, though I will carry to my death the image of her mouth full of me, eyes wide and just shy of imploring. The knowledge that she has a belly full of my seed gives me immense pleasure.
But that isn’t what I mean, either.
I mean the laugh.
The pain is already forgotten, but that happy trill is a sound I’ll remember forever.
Long after we leave this place, and the piece of my soul, now forever hers, behind.