The operation had been completed without issues. Zulik had not been on the surgical team, but had attended the procedure, and had assured Ewan it was all going to be fine. Nina had been one of the last to finish.
Ewan had been waiting for nearly an hour for her to wake up. She’d stirred slightly a few times, once with a mutter as though she were dreaming. Ewan had tensed, watching her expression twist, but she’d calmed when he laced his fingers through hers and squeezed. He had no idea if the sound of his voice was helping her, but it made him feel better to talk to her, so he’d been doing that, too.
Exhausted, Ewan had been fighting sleep for the past twenty minutes, but now his head dropped onto his chest and he struggled to keep his eyes open. A jaw-cracking yawn rumbled through him, and he let it, thinking it would help him wake up. A few moments later, though, his head was bobbing again. He shifted in his chair. He didn’t want to let go of Nina’s hand or to leave her side in case she returned to consciousness, but maybe if he got up and found some coffee, even a glass of cold water, he might be in better shape.
At the release of his fingers, though, Nina’s hand clutched his. She stirred, the blankets moving as she shifted her feet. Her head tossed from side to side, but she didn’t open her eyes right away. She sighed something, a word he couldn’t make out, but that might have been his name.
“Nina.” Ewan leaned closer. “Baby, wake up. It’s me.”
The soft, repetitive beep of the heart monitor made a single louder beep, then a series of them. Behind her closed lids, Nina’s eyes moved rapidly. Her fingers twitched in his.
“C’mon, baby. Wake up. Talk to me,” Ewan urged.
Nina’s lips parted on a soft puff of air. She breathed in. Her body trembled in a series of minuscule shivers. She blinked her eyes open, but they fluttered closed at once. Then again. At last, she opened her eyes all the way. Her unfocused gaze stared at the ceiling, but as he murmured her name again, she turned her attention to him.
When she shifted on the pillows, he used the bed’s remote to help her sit up. She hadn’t said a word, but her expression was tight and confused. She tugged her hand from his.
“Where am I?”
“You’re in the hospital,” Ewan told her.
Nina frowned. “Nothing hurts.”
“That’s good. Nothing is supposed to hurt.” Ewan scooted closer. “The doc said you’ll be a little groggy for a bit, but you’ll be on your feet again fast.”
“What happened to me?”
Ewan’s heart sank. “You don’t remember?”
“That buzzbike hit me,” Nina said and held up her arms, turning her hands over to look at them. She patted her body. “Why doesn’t anything hurt?”
A buzzbike had hit her, but that had been more than a year ago, before she’d been kidnapped. Zulik had warned him that she was going to be confused, but unlike the last time Ewan had been at her side when she awoke from surgery, he didn’t need to hide anything from her now.
“You recovered from that, Nina. A lot’s happened since then, but we can talk about that later. I’m just so glad to have you back.”
Nina’s frown deepened, but she reached for his hand. “Back? From where? Was I gone?”
It was going to be a lot to explain, but Ewan would make sure he told her everything. No secrets. No lies. No more keeping the truth from her, not ever again.
“You were gone from me for a while, baby. But you’re back now. You’re going to be all right. Better than before,” he said.
She gave him a hesitant smile, clearly still confused. “Really? Better? That’s some trick, seeing as how I was pretty amazing before.”
“Yeah, you were,” he told her, not wanting to alarm her with his reactions but unable to stop the emotions from causing a hitch in his voice. “You still are.”
Nina studied him silently for a moment. “When can I get out of here?”
“As soon as the doc comes in to clear you,” Ewan said. “He should be here soon.”
She nodded as if that made sense. Her fingers tightened in his. She looked at their linked hands, then back at his face.
“Kiss me?”
Ewan hadn’t expected that, but he wasn’t going to turn down the offer. He stood and bent to brush his lips over hers. “Anytime, and gladly.”
She smiled against his mouth and reached up to twist her fingers in the front of his shirt. The kiss deepened. Nina pulled away a little to look at his face, a question in her expression. She started to speak.
That’s when something in the hall exploded.
The noise of it reached them first. Then the rumble, like thunder. The door to Nina’s hospital room remained closed, but the water pitcher, plates, and silverware on the small rolling table next to her bed trembled, clattering.
You’ll see how wonderful it will be when all you are finally able to live the lives you deserve.
Jordie Dev’s words echoed in Ewan’s mind as another low thump shook the floor beneath them. He got to his feet and went to the door, smart enough not to open it immediately. It was a steel fireproof door, so putting a hand on it didn’t do anything. The bleat of the fire alarm had started, though, so that meant there were flames somewhere.
Behind him, he heard the creak of the bed as Nina got out of it. He turned. “Don’t get up. You just had surgery.”
“I feel fine,” she argued. “And if something’s going down, I’m not going to be any help in the bed. Where are my clothes? Never mind. I have them.”
She’d pulled open the small closet and found a pair of leggings and a long-sleeved shirt she pulled on over her nakedness. Any other time Ewan would have taken a long, appreciative look, but this wasn’t the time. Her feet were still bare when a fist pounded on the door and it began to nudge open. Ewan stepped back. Nina crossed the room to take a defensive stance in front of it.
An orderly in mint-green scrubs stuck his head inside. “We’re evacuating. Can you walk, or do you need a wheelchair?”
“What happened?” Ewan asked.
The orderly shook his head. “No clue. Fire on the floor. We need to get out, now. Do you need assistance?”
“No,” Nina said. “Go help someone else. We’re good.”
The orderly nodded without really looking at either one of them and ducked out the door. It was a slow-close, and as it settled back into the door frame, a shriek tore through the air. Nina leaped for the door to yank it open.
Blood puddled on the tiles in front of the door. The stink of smoke filtered in, although the air still appeared clear. No sign of the orderly. Ewan could see only one small part of the hallway outside. An empty wheelchair tilted against the wall. An IV pole lay on the ground, the bag attached at the top leaking clear fluid that mingled with the crimson on the floor.
“Get back,” Nina ordered. “Let me see what’s going on.”
It felt wrong to let her. She’d just woken up from brain surgery—no matter how minor it had been promised to be, or how swift her recovery, Nina had still only been conscious for a few minutes. Even on the island, she’d been strong, but he’d gotten out of the habit of letting her be.
Nina propped the door open and stepped through the doorway, sweeping first left, then right. Left again. Her posture changed immediately. She shouted, leaping out of sight. Ewan followed to see her running toward the end of the hall.
“Stay there!” Nina yelled without turning.
A dark-clad figure stood in the shadows in the cross hall, where the lights had apparently gone out. It moved to the side, out of Ewan’s line of vision, but Nina was almost there when she slid in a patch of more blood and went careening onto one knee.
The lights in this hall flickered and went dark, followed at once by the lighting of the emergency lamps set high along the ceiling. The fire alarms were still going off, but there was still no sign of any fire and no smoke, either. Just the smell. Most of the doors along the hall were open, but other than him and Nina, Ewan saw no-one.
Nina disappeared around the corner.
* * *
Images of the person in front of her had haunted Nina for months, but this was no ghost. He looked more like a monster. Hollowed cheeks. The thin split of a smile, bloodless lips. Despite his emaciated frame, there was no question he was strong.
“Jordie,” Nina called to him.
“Nina Bronson.” Jordie inclined his head like they were meeting at a high tea.
“You’re supposed to be locked up.”
His laugh was razor-edged. “They let me out. Not for good behavior, no, no, I would not say that. But they let me out. Said I’m sane.”
“You,” Nina said, “are nowhere near sane.”
Jordie’s laughter faded. “None of us are sane.”
“I am.”
He shook his head. “No. Nope. All of you are like me now. All of you will see what it was like. What they did to me, how it feels . . . all of you are like me, now.”
Nina hadn’t worn her harness of weapons in a long, long time, but she’d never yearned for it more furiously than she did in this moment. She had her hands, she reminded herself. Feet. Her head was hard and could be used as a battering ram. She had her teeth.
“What did you do?” she demanded.
“I always wanted to program the upgrades, you know that. Mr. Donahue, oh, well. He never wanted me to. I understand why, he had his convictions, but the truth is that he was wrong about everything and I was right, I was so, so right. I was right and he was wrong. I know it’s not polite to say so. But it’s true.”
Jordie took a few mincing steps toward her. He looked like a scarecrow. Dangling arms, disjointed movements. Nina didn’t trust him for a second. He was enhanced, and even if he’d been implanted with substandard tech, he’d still be strong and fast and totally able to take her down if she wasn’t careful.
Shadows coalesced at the end of the corridor behind him. One. Two. Three. Four. The figures stepped into the pool of light from the emergency lamp. Nina knew them all.
Anatoly Nguyen still wore his hospital gown, but he gripped a piece of pipe in one fist. Next to him, Chioma Pagani was dressed in a set of scrubs with a bloody handprint on the shirt and across one thigh. She held up an array of hypodermic needles in each fist. Jewel Koolen, tiny and dainty and beautiful as her name described, took a step toward Nina. Her faded jeans dragged on the ground. She wore no shirt or bra, but tubes crisscrossed her bare chest, making a sort of harness into which she’d jammed what looked like a fire hatchet. When she grinned at Nina, blood grimed her teeth. The last familiar face, Haven Benedetti, wore nothing but gauze bandages wrapped around her wrists and throat.
“Where’s Al?” Nina asked, glad to hear her voice was steady.
Jordie snorted. “Allegra Chastain didn’t take the original set of upgrades to the tech. So she couldn’t get the new programming.”
“But she’s here, in the hospital. She agreed to accept the new tech that’s supposed to eliminate the self-termination feature. She’s here,” Nina insisted, although Jordie hadn’t denied it.
The kid looked angry. “She didn’t get the original upgrades. She refused. She isn’t the same as we are.”
“That doesn’t answer my question. Where is she now?”
“She isn’t one of us,” Jordie said in a tone so thick with disdain and disgust it was clear Nina shouldn’t bother to ask again.
Al could take care of herself. Nina had to hold onto that thought. Because in front of her, shit was going down right here, right now, and she needed to pay attention to that.
Assess, protect, eliminate. Assess, protect, eliminate. The thoughts pushed through Nina’s mind as her heart tried to pound too hard. She breathed. Getting ready for whatever it was the madman in front of her was going to do.
“You should all thank me. Really you should. I figured it was a great, grand thing. Enhancement. I wanted it. Oh, Onegod, I wanted it.” Jordie barked out something that had perhaps been meant as a laugh, but sounded more like a cough. He stepped toward Nina. The others followed, each taking a single step forward. He didn’t look at any of them. He kept his attention fully on Nina. “Then I got it. And I knew, then, what hell meant. You all know, don’t you? The true and awful horror of it, of having someone being able to just . . . reach inside . . . and take.”
Jordie snapped his fingers.
“Like that,” he said. “Reach inside your mind and take it all away. I thought it was a good thing, I wanted it, but when I got it, oh, no, no, no, no, no!”
The last “no” became a shriek. Spittle flew from Jordie’s lips. His fingers hooked into claws. He let his head tip back, back, showing the taut cords and tendons in his neck.
“None of us should have to suffer this!” he screamed and snapped his head up. His voice lowered. “None of us will suffer it any longer. But first, we’re going to make all the rest of them pay, including your precious love, Ewan Donahue.”
Nina had fought more than one opponent many times, but never one against five and never more than a single other enhanced soldier at a time. Without weapons, not even a pipe or a hatchet or a needle, she was going to have to be fast and strong from the start. She would have to get them down before they could use what they had in their hands. Everything slowed around her as she readied herself. This was going to hurt. She might not, she thought, come out alive.
But Jordie had other plans for her.
“S’dacha,” he said. The word rocked her backward, something like a door slamming in her head, but Jordie hadn’t finished. He waved a hand down the hallway. “Now. Go kill him.”
* * *
Ewan didn’t need to worry about Nina. She could take care of herself. He searched instead for signs of the nursing staff, the orderlies, the docs who’d been on this floor. Because of the confidential nature of the procedures the remaining six enhanced soldiers had been undergoing, the staff had been restricted. Still, there should be someone, somewhere.
He found the charge nurse on the floor behind the desk, her arms and legs akimbo. Dark fluid spattered her scrubs. Coffee, he thought. Not blood. She was definitely dead, though, her eyes wide and staring and no pulse when he bent to press his fingertips to her wrist and then her throat.
Other than the chair that had been knocked over and a folder of papers that had been soaked from the overturned mug on the counter, nothing else was out of place. Ewan went around the desk to the elevators. Both the up and down buttons were lit and the overhead sign showing what floor it was on blinked nothing but a row of X’s, but he wasn’t going to try to take either one. If there really was a fire on this floor, the doors weren’t likely to open anyway.
On this end of the hall, a glass-fronted door opened to a small lounge. Empty. A set of heavy fire doors just beyond it remained closed. On the other side of the elevator was a janitorial closet. Inside he found the orderly who’d come to warn them. The orderly wasn’t dead, but the blood pouring from the wound on his head meant he might be soon. Ewan could not rouse him and without medical training, he didn’t dare even do more than wrap a towel from one of the “clean” bags on the shelf around the wound. The man on the ground didn’t so much as blink or make a noise.
There should have been at least two more nurses and possibly a doc or two, but the floor remained empty. Ewan looked down the long corridor to the T junction where Nina had gone. No doors separated it from this hallway. A man’s voice, shouting but incoherent, startled him enough to head that way.
Before he got halfway down the hall, Nina appeared in the doorway. He shouted out her name, his voice snapping off abruptly at the sight of her companions. All four of the remaining enhanced soldiers who’d come here to be fixed, permanently, made a phalanx behind her. Directly beside her, a different form showed itself.
“Jordie,” Ewan muttered, along with a string of barely intelligible curses under his breath. Louder, he shouted, “Where’s your mother?”
“Killed her,” Dev said conversationally and gave an exaggerated shrug. “Stabbed that bitch right in the eye. She’d served her purpose. Got me out of prison. Didn’t need her anymore. Anyway, she was a hag who forgot my birthday. And she never, ever bought me that pony!”
Ewan had been moving toward them but stopped, now. He was a few feet from the puddle of blood left behind from the orderly. “Nina. Come here, baby. Get away from him.”
“Don’t bother trying to talk to her,” Jordie said. “She’s going to kill you the way I killed good old Katrinka.”
Ice crystallized in Ewan’s veins. “No.”
“I’ve already given her the word. S’dacha,” Jordie said. “It means surrender. All those hours of Russian school my mother insisted on me attending paid off, huh? S’dacha, surrender, I gave it to all of them, so they’re all going to do as told, which is to take out anyone who stands in their way. We’re all going out with the biggest bang you can imagine. Think of the publicity, Mr. Donahue. Think of the press. Think of how many people are going to blame my mother for this. Blame you. And they’ll be right, won’t they? Because it’s your fault, in the end, that any of us got our brains fucked with in the beginning. Your fault, and I’m going to really enjoy watching Nina slaughter you. If I were you, Mr. Donahue, I would start running.”
Ewan didn’t run, not at first. He would not believe Nina would come after him. Certainly, he could not believe she would kill him under Jordie Dev’s insane command. As the entire group stepped toward him in unison, however, he did take a step back.
“Nina,” he said again. “You don’t have to listen to him. You don’t have to do this.”
“But she does have to do it, because I made it a part of the code,” Jordie said. “Anyway, even if I hadn’t, I’m not so sure Ms. Bronson couldn’t be convinced. She has to hate you for being such a colossal sphincter to her. I realize you don’t think that’s a swell reason to kill someone, especially yourself. But believe me, Mr. Donahue. It totally is.”
“You don’t have to listen to him,” Ewan repeated.
Nina didn’t answer him. Neither did any of the others. Jordie let out a grinding, humorless laugh.
“Being able to erase someone’s mind is way less useful than being able to implant suggestions into it, huh?”
Another explosion rocked the building, though it didn’t come from this floor. One of the soldiers stepped out from behind Nina. Ewan recognized the man as Anatoly Nguyen.
“I spent a couple of years working in demolition. This entire building is going down in about twenty minutes.” He grinned.
“Just enough time to make a big mess.” Another of the soldiers, a woman naked from the waist up, stepped around Nina. Ewan couldn’t be sure who she was. She pulled the fire ax from her makeshift IV tube harness and slammed it into the wall nearest her. It stuck, but she yanked it out, along with a big portion of the drywall. She hit the wall again, leaving another huge hole. Then again.
Nina had not taken a single step toward him. “He says you’ve got classified information that you’ve been leaking. He says you need to be taken out. Then me. We all have to end.”
“It’s not true, Nina.”
“It is true,” Jordie snapped. “You’re the one who knew all along about the tech, the upgrades, all of it. You held it for years. You’re the one who knows everything about the new tech, too.”
“It’s not classified.” Ewan kept his voice steady, his gaze never leaving Nina’s face, what he could see of it from this distance. “Yes, I’ve been working on some new tech, but it’s not for military use. It will never be, not so long as I can fight it. It’s never going to be used the way the original enhancements were, Nina. I swear to the Onegod and the universe itself.”
“Kill him,” Jordie said with a flick of his hand toward Ewan. “He’s nothing but a liar, and you know it.”
Nina took a reluctant, hesitant step in Ewan’s direction. “You are a liar. I do know it.”
The rest of the soldiers were all heading down the hall, passing her. Hitting the walls. Knocking things over. Jordie hung back, but Ewan braced himself. If any of them mean to attack him, he was as good as dead even if he fought back, so he kept his attention on Nina.
“I’m a liar, yes, absolutely,” he agreed. “I’ve lied to you. Kept secrets. I’ve hidden the truth from you. But I am not lying now.”
She shook her head and took another slow, measured step closer to him. “I have to kill you. I can’t stop myself. I have to do this.”
Not so long ago, Ewan had thought that if he had to die, facing his demise alongside Nina would be the best way for him to go. If he had to perish under her hand, he thought now, then there could be no better way for his life to end. He said that aloud as she came closer.
It stopped her. She drew in a shaking breath. Her entire body trembled. The others had left them behind. Ewan heard some screams and shuddered, not wanting to imagine what the soldiers were doing because of Jordie’s influence.
“Killing me won’t change anything that happened to you, Jordie. It won’t stop what’s going on, it won’t make you better or different,” Ewan said. “It will just prove to everyone that you’re still crazy.”
“I’m. Not!”
Jordie slammed a fist into the wall, leaving a dent. The kid had always been twitchy, especially when high on the legal drugs called candy, but this was different. He was not anything close to sane, no matter what his mother or the docs had claimed. He was not rational.
“It doesn’t matter, Mr. Donahue. It really doesn’t. See, I had to go through all of that to understand what needs to be done. Yeah, that programming messed up my head, got me trying all the time to off myself to satisfy this . . . well, it’s a bone-deep itch. Brain-deep. Soul-deep, I’d say, although I know you’re not a soul-believing sort of bro. Am I right there, Ms. Bronson? You feel it, don’t you? The itch.”
She nodded. “Yes. Brain-deep.”
Jordie stretched out his arms, palms up. “Did you ever have an itch like that, Mr. Donahue? The sort you think you’d scratch your own skin off to get rid of? I bet you didn’t. You don’t know what it’s like. You can’t get rid of it. Nothing helps. Nothing makes it go away. No cream, no powder, no prescription for pills, no shot. This isn’t a rash, Mr. Donahue, this is an itch in my mind, it’s an impulse, a desire, it’s a fucking craving, and it’s not like sugar, no, oh, no, no. It’s so, so much worse than that. There’s only one way to relieve it. By ending it. Everything. All of it.”
“Your mother’s team—” Ewan began, but Jordie cut him off by yelling and slamming his fist into the wall again.
“My mother’s team was a bunch of rejects who didn’t know a string of code from their own assholes. I’m the one who worked that code. I’m the one who figured it out. I’ve always been the one who could make this happen!”
Tremors rocked the building again. Another set of alarms began to blare. Nina’s fists clenched. She moved toward Ewan. Slowly, but inevitably.
She stopped within an arm’s distance of him.