The message blinking on Ewan’s personal comm came from an unrecognized number. The groups that had been threatening his life and livelihood because of his connection to the enhancement tech had all been disbanded or had turned their attentions to some newer, trendier focus, but that didn’t mean he could stop being vigilant. The security team he’d put together to scrub his publicly accessible information and essentially make him a cipher was top-notch, and with Aggie and Jerome here on the island, as well as the island’s defenses, he wasn’t worried about any physical threats coming his way. Still, the unknown number gave him a long pause before he swiped to read it.
Got a new comm. Wondering about Nina. How’s she doing?
The message was from Al, Nina’s friend and the fellow enhanced soldier Ewan had hired when Nina had been taken by the League of Humanity. Ewan didn’t bother typing a message in reply. He thumbed the screen to place a call.
Al answered after a single ping. Her white-blond buzz cut emphasized the hollows of her cheeks. She looked thinner, almost dangerously so, but her icy green eyes flashed with the same strength he remembered. “Donahue. How’s the island?”
“Rainy,” he said.
She laughed. “How’s Nina?”
“She’s about the same.” He looked automatically to his bedroom door, but it was closed and locked.
“Still can’t remember?” Al frowned, and at his nod, added, “That sucks. I’m sorry. I wish I could help.”
“Me, too. How are you?”
Al had not opted to take the upgraded tech. She had her reasons, which were none of Ewan’s business, but after working with her to find Nina, he’d come to think of her as a friend. Knowing that she was going to experience mental and physical deterioration, no matter if it was her choice or not, left him unsettled and feeling guilty.
“Fine. I’m not having any problems, which is the question I know you want to ask but think you shouldn’t ’cuz it would be rude. So just to let you know, everything’s hyper icy with me. I’m all shiny fine, ’til the end of the line.” She paused. “I’m back to work for ProtectCorps.”
The last Ewan had known, Al had been working solo, for private hire. “Yeah?”
“Without Nina, they needed more of us. I’d be bored to death if I didn’t work, and the money sure is nice.” Al grinned, although her gaze looked serious. “I thought you should know, in case you hadn’t heard. About Riley.”
Of the fifteen original enhanced soldiers, Constance Riley had been the only one who’d never taken on any kind of security work after the procedures. She’d quietly retired, far out of the public eye, long before Nina had come to work for Ewan. He recognized her name in the context of talking now to Al, but beyond that, he knew nothing about her. The look on Al’s face didn’t give Ewan any confidence that what she had to tell him was good news.
“What happened to her?”
“She . . .” Al cleared her throat. “She went bad.”
Outside Ewan’s window, gray skies promised rain. That had nothing to do with the rivers of ice suddenly coalescing along his spine. “What do you mean?”
“She’s dead.” Al had always come across as confident, perhaps to the point of arrogance, but now she was clearly struggling to speak.
Ewan swallowed against a sting of bile. “What happened?”
“She tried to assassinate the governor of New Mexico during a political donor dinner. She’d been working for his campaign, and for the governor himself, for the past six years. Not as a protector. She handled his social media. The witnesses at her table said she was smiling and clapping along with everyone else, when all of a sudden she got up and headed for the lectern. She broke a water glass on the way there and tried to slice his throat open with it. When his security team got to her before she could kill him, she used it on herself.” Al shuddered and covered her face with her hands. Her shoulders hunched. “Nobody knows why, at least not anyone who’s able to share. The story made national news. Now there’s a whole bunch of people running off their mouths about us again. It’s not as bad as it was before, but there’ve been some protests. They’re saying we should all be rounded up and put away. You haven’t heard anything about it?”
“I haven’t been keeping up with the news the past few days.” A chill guilt sliced at him. “Nobody can lock you all up unless you’ve done something against the law.”
“They’re talking about turning over the tech legislation to make it illegal, not just upgrades, but the tech itself. Which means owning it would be illegal, which means we’d all be breaking the law. Unless we, you know, dig it out of our brain meat.” Al bit out the words, punctuating each with a shake of her head. “This is a really high-profile situation. Lots and lots of spin on it. Lots of viddy commentary.”
Ewan had spent years of his life working against the tech he’d invented, throwing everything he had into ensuring that nobody else would ever be subjected to being implanted with a device that could essentially wipe away their memories and, in Ewan’s mind, their humanity. What religious people called the soul. Although he’d been accused of it, Ewan had never once believed that any person implanted with the tech was less than human.
Falling in love with Nina had changed his mind about a lot of things, but the necessity of keeping that enhancement tech upgraded for the safety, health, and comfort of those who had it had taken a paramount importance. He’d spent a lot less time but no less of his heart, soul, and determination in making sure that the upgrades necessary to allow them to continue with a quality of life was going to be available to them all until they died.
“It’s not that easy, Al. Not unless the president of the United States herself decides to write an executive order. And even then, you’re still all human beings. You have rights. Nobody can take that away from you.”
“You know as well as me that doesn’t matter,” Al said bitterly. “If they want to round us up and put us in a kennel like we’re dogs, they’ll find a way to do it.”
He wished he could keep denying it, but the ice in the pit of his stomach wouldn’t let him. “I’m not going to let that happen.”
“Nobody’s contacted you about this? Nothing?”
“No.”
“They will,” Al predicted. “You’re the go-to bro, aren’t you? Won’t they come to you to see if it had anything to do with the tech or the upgrades? I know you’ve got security to keep away the viddy reporters, but I wouldn’t put it past some hyper riled reporter to try to get there.”
Ewan thought of Katrinka Dev, and her team’s efforts to bypass the work his team had been doing. He had the resources to prove that rumor true. That meant others would, too, government officials or lobbyists more interested in a potential paycheck than upholding the law. He couldn’t tell Al that he might no longer be the front line choice for tech-related issues.
Before he could answer, Al said, “Did any of the others say no to them? The upgrades?”
“No. You were the only one,” Ewan answered. “And you can have them at any time, Al. Free of charge. I told you, I’d take care of you.”
“I don’t want them. I don’t want anyone else inside there, messing things up. When it’s my time to go, it’s my time,” Al said fiercely. Her fists had clenched. Her gaze bore down on his through the comm screen. “When my mind starts to go, I want to have the option to choose how I end my life.”
Ewan nodded, hating her words but respecting her meaning. “I support your right to do that.”
“What if that’s what Riley was doing?” Al demanded.
Ewan hesitated.
“Maybe she wanted to die,” Al continued before Ewan could say anything.
“If she wanted to end her life, there had to be a better way to do it,” Ewan pointed out. “Maybe someone hired her as an assassin. She had the abilities, the same as any of you. Just because she hadn’t been doing work that used her enhancements publicly doesn’t mean she couldn’t have been doing it in secret. The fact no group has stepped forward to claim it as theirs doesn’t mean anything, either.”
Al shook her head. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see if anyone’s claiming it.”
Ewan pulled up the news browser on his monitor to look at the reports about the attack, but cursed under his breath when it refused to load. “I strangled the ’net on the island, to help keep Nina from accessing anything that might set off the self-termination programming.”
Al was silent for a moment, then said, “How’s that working out for you? That whole keeping-information-from-her business kind of backfired before, if I remember correctly.”
“She’s still alive,” he retorted, her words a fanged bite. “So I guess I haven’t completely screwed it up.”
At that, Al gave him a grin. “Well, I wouldn’t worry too much about that. You have plenty of time.”
* * *
Zulik had recommended Nina take up a hobby, so she’d been trying out some things. Cooking hadn’t gone over so well. Aggie had been happy enough to teach her some things, but the older woman was protective of her kitchen, and Nina was much fonder of eating bread than baking it. She didn’t consider exercise a hobby, not even that weirdly instinctual combination of martial arts and yoga she’d taken to practicing every morning when she was alone. Rock climbing was out, and so was sailing. Even swimming wasn’t going to work, not in that perpetually rough sea around the island.
“What about needlepoint?” Aggie asked her over mugs of sweet, hot tea and a platter of the slightly burned muffins Nina had helped bake. “Sure and enough, that would take up quite a bit of your time.”
Nina winced. “You mean like embroidery? Things you hang up on the wall? What are they called?”
“Samplers,” Aggie said. “You could do a lot of things. Throw pillows, for example. A great auntie of mine was mad for doing curtains. You always knew what would be in your holiday basket, that was for certain. A new throw pillow.”
Nina’s second wince was harder and more like a flinch. “That sounds . . . pretty awful.”
“Nobody liked them very much,” Aggie admitted. “Or her, for that matter. She was a fairly irritating woman. Shiny fine, dolly, so needlepoint isn’t for you. We’ll think of something else.”
A week after that conversation, Nina walked into the attic office to find an easel set up by the window’s natural light. A canvas rested on it. A small table had been set up with an array of paints, brushes, and cleaners. Stunned, she stood in front of it. With one finger, she tentatively touched the blank canvas.
Painting?
Was she a painter? Was she creative at all? Nina crossed her arms over her chest and studied the setup as she shifted from foot to foot. Ewan had done this. She had not asked for it, but Aggie must have told him Nina was looking for a hobby, or maybe it had been Zulik. The idea of Nina’s doc sharing information like that with Ewan didn’t sit well with her.
They’d barely shared a word or two since she’d confronted him about that tracking app. If Nina came into the room where Ewan was, he left shortly after. The meals Aggie had prepared were often left on covered plates in the fridge for him to eat at a different time. Nina had continued working on the files in this very office, but although Ewan had previously made it his habit to work alongside her, he’d been avoiding that, too.
She had no reason to feel bad about any of this, either, Nina told herself as she headed for the stairs to the second floor. She had every right to be angry with him. Didn’t she? He’d done something invasive, without her permission, and it seemed as though he were continuing in that same vein.
Because he wanted to make sure she was all right.
“Gah,” Nina muttered to herself as her fists clenched.
Ewan’s door was open, but a quick glance showed her he wasn’t inside, and the bathroom she glimpsed from the doorway was also open. Unlikely he would be in there, either, not without closing the door. She said his name anyway, short and sharp, but he didn’t answer.
He wasn’t in the kitchen, or the dining room, and also not in the den. Aggie and Jerome’s bedroom door was shut, which meant the older woman was taking her regular afternoon nap. Nina went out the back door and into the garden, then through the patchy grass to the shed along the back of the area. She knocked roughly on the door, waiting for Jerome to open it.
He did after a moment or so, peering out with an expression of surprise. Jerome had never been anything but kind to her, but he and Nina didn’t have the same sort of closeness she had with Aggie. “Miss Nina.”
She’d never actually been inside the garden shed and had assumed it to be full of . . . well, tools. Gardening equipment. The bank of monitors she spied behind Jerome, each of them showing a different scene including something that looked like an aerial view of the house, didn’t look like they had anything to do with growing potatoes and carrots. The desk and chair there, along with the half-eaten sandwich and coffee carafe, showed Jerome spent a lot of time in here.
“I’m looking for Ewan,” she said without pushing farther to see past Jerome, although she made no secret that she could view everything in the shed behind him.
“He’s not in here, Miss. I don’t know where he is.”
Nina took a step to the side to give the shed’s interior a long, pointed look before she focused her attention on Jerome. “I guess gardening is also out.”
He looked confused. “Pardon?”
“Never mind.” Nina shook her head. “Have you seen him at all today?”
“No, Miss.”
Frustrated, she sighed, but an idea occurred to her. “Did he leave on the airtranspo?”
“No, Miss, not that I know of.”
It was an island, and not a big one. None of them could get very far or stay hidden for very long. Irritated again at the idea that Ewan had been keeping track of her every move and now she couldn’t find him when she wanted to, Nina gave Jerome a curt nod and turned on her heel.
He had to be on the beach, because that was the only place left to look. Nina took off at a jog, avoiding the stairs the way she always did and taking the long way around. Today the wind off the water was chill, slicing at her through her clothes and whipping her hair into tangles. By the time she got down to the gravelly beach, though, she’d worked her body into a decent warmth so her teeth didn’t chatter.
Ewan wasn’t there. Nina put her hands on her hips and looked as far as she could see in both directions. He could be on the other side of the island, where the sea crashed against the cliffs in some places and the beach was much harder to access.
“Screw this.” She wasn’t going to chase him all over the place.
Nina looked out over the water, trying to take some comfort from it the way she’d done in the past. The monitors in Jerome’s shed had shown views of the ocean for what looked like miles all around. Empty miles of ocean, nothing even on the horizon. A few had shown closer views she recognized as the beach and base of the cliffs. They were security monitors, Nina realized. Monitoring the entire island as well as a good distance around it.
Assess.
She staggered as though she’d taken a misstep, although she hadn’t so much as moved. For a moment she was convinced there’d been an earthquake or something, so clearly had the ground felt as though it were moving beneath her feet, but when she opened her eyes nothing else was shifting, and she still felt as though she might fall over.
Protect.
Nina went to her hands and knees hard enough to scrape her palms. She let out a low, angry cry at the way her body had betrayed her. She curled her fingers against the stones of the beach, some of them jagged and others smooth. She focused the sensations, willing herself back under control.
Eliminate.
Eliminate.
Eliminate.
“No,” Nina said aloud in a low, fierce growl that hurt her throat. “No, no, no.”
Blinking hard to clear her vision, she got to her feet. The voice in her head, the one she now recognized as her own, did not come back. She waited a moment, breathing hard, her heart thudding but slowing gently. She opened her palms to look at the faint lines of blood from the scrapes.
“No,” she told herself again. “Whatever the hell that is, no more.”