Echo’s hands were gentle as he slid the medical scanner over Taylor’s foot. She watched his progress with a growing sense of dismay. Even though she was lying on the couch with her foot elevated, it was already so swollen, it looked like she didn’t have an ankle. She wasn’t going to be able to walk on it any time soon.
Allana sat on a gel chair not far away. The wall in front of her doubled as a large computer screen, and she flipped through updates from the city’s news channels. She looked bored and beautiful, and kept running her fingers through her silver hair absentmindedly.
Taylor felt an electric tingle from her comlink and smelled pine. Joseph. She unclipped her comlink and read the message. We have a plan in motion to break into the detention center. Have you destroyed the QGPs?
Speaking into her comlink, Taylor said, “I have a plan in motion to destroy them. Let me know when you have Sheridan.” Taylor wanted to tell him about Xavier, and yet at the same time dreaded it, couldn’t do it. She put her comlink back on her belt.
Echo took his attention from the medical scanner long enough to give her a penetrating stare. “You know, sometimes you have to trust people.”
“If you never trust anyone, you’ll never be disappointed.”
He went back to checking her foot. “But you’ll never be happy either.”
Taylor let out a short laugh. “Right now, I’ll settle for cynicism and my sister’s life.”
The medical scanner beeped and Echo read its diagnosis. “Your ankle isn’t broken. You need a shot for swelling and one that reconnects torn ligaments” He put the scanner down and rummaged through the medical bag. Every once in a while he pulled out a vial to check the label. “It will still be—I don’t know—maybe an hour before you’ll be able to walk.”
He was clearly discouraged by this fact, but it seemed miraculous to Taylor. An hour wasn’t that long. And they needed to be hidden out of the way somewhere until Joseph had rescued Sheridan. This place was as good as anywhere else.
Echo found the vials he was looking for. He attached needles to them and then used the scanner to tell him where the medicine needed to go. Taylor’s foot already throbbed so much, she barely felt the needle pricks.
“We’ll need to find some shoes for you,” he said.
“When you say ‘find,’” Taylor asked, “do you mean ‘steal’?”
“Probably,” he said.
Taylor sighed. She just couldn’t seem to stay on the right side of the law in this city.
Echo took the needle out of one side of her ankle and put it into the other. “You can’t walk four kilometers with only one boot.”
Allana clicked on a report about an attempt to disrupt courthouse rulings. The wall showed blurry pictures of the group walking down the hallway on the top floor of the courthouse.
“Enforcers are matching DNA from the scene,” a plaid-haired newscaster said smugly, “and will issue arrest warrants soon.”
Allana scoffed. “Which means they know nothing. Hundreds of people go through that building every day. They’re not going to find DNA that will help them.”
Echo jabbed a needle into a particularly tender spot on Taylor’s ankle. She winced. “Is it good news or bad news that the newsfeeds aren’t mentioning what happened at the Scicenter?”
“Neither,” Echo said, finishing up the shot. “They won’t report damage to equipment that they don’t want people to know about. They’ll try to figure out who we are and how to find us without letting the public know anything about it.”
Finished with her ankle, Echo scooted down the couch to examine Taylor’s hands. He gently turned them over. Streaks of blood ran from her palms to her fingertips, some still fresh. One thumb was swollen. He pulled the lid off a flesh-colored tube, revealing a tip that looked like a paintbrush. “Artificial skin,” he told her. “It will sting.” He dabbed the liquid along her palm.
It didn’t sting; it burned like fire. The stab of pain made Taylor want to jerk her hand away. She didn’t, though. She left it there, trembling, cradled in his hand. “Stinging has apparently become a lot more painful through the centuries.”
He moved the brush to her finger, gliding streaks of pain in that direction. “Did you know,” he said conversationally, “that your fingertips have some of the densest areas of nerve endings in your body?”
“I didn’t,” Taylor said, “or I would have caught myself with my elbows.”
Another finger. More pain. “That would have been tricky,” he said, “but it wouldn’t have surprised me. Not from a girl who walks along ledges backward.” He was trying to distract her from the pain with small talk. She wished it worked better.
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
“Eighteen?” He glanced up at her, surprised. A flash of intrigue went through his eyes.
Taylor realized she shouldn’t have told him anything about herself. He already knew she was from the past and that she and Joseph had come back to Traventon to destroy the QGPs. But he didn’t know that she had also created the QGP and that both the government and the Dakine wanted to capture her.
Echo went back to applying the artificial skin. “You computigate pretty well for an eighteen-year-old.”
“You’re only twenty,” she pointed out. “And you know a lot more about computigating than I do.”
“Yeah. That’s why I know how hard it is to learn.” He finished with her first hand. The pain had already subsided along her palm; it felt almost normal.
Echo looked up at her and did a double take. Then he stared openly at her.
“What?” she asked.
“Your face,” he said. “You look different. You look . . .”
For a moment she was alarmed, and then relaxed when she understood what had happened. “I took a shot to make my face puffy. It was supposed to help disguise me. The shot in my ankle must have gotten rid of the swelling in my face too.”
Echo kept staring at her. It made her feel self-conscious. She wondered if she’d been mistaken and he was staring at her for some other reason.
“What?” she asked, touching her cheek tentatively. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said, and smiled. “I just didn’t realize before how beautiful you are.”
She felt herself blushing and didn’t know what to say.
Taylor had forgotten Allana was in the room until she called out, “Echo, I need your help too. Look.” She held up her left hand to show him. A small scrape ran along her palm. It wasn’t deep, only pink with flecks of blood.
Without glancing at Allana, Echo moved to the scrape on Taylor’s knee. He stroked the brush across the wound. It felt like a burning slash. “Taylor’s injuries are worse than yours. I want to make sure there’s enough artificial skin to cover them.”
Allana let out an irritated huff. “You didn’t even look at mine. How do you know hers are worse?”
“I know,” Echo said calmly, “because if you were hurt worse than this, you would have told us about it repeatedly.”
Allana let out another huff, this one sounding offended. “The medkit has to have more than two tubes of artificial skin.”
The tube Echo had been using ran out. He tossed it onto the couch and opened the second one. “The rest of them fell out in the car.”
That had been Taylor’s fault. She’d spilled things out of the medkit when she was trying to help Xavier.
“Are there pain erasers?” Allana asked.
“If there were, don’t you think I would have given one to Taylor before now?” Echo straightened and took Taylor’s other hand in his. She flinched before he even touched her with the brush. “Are you all right?” he asked patiently.
She nodded. “Just give me a second to catch my breath.”
Allana turned in her chair, coldly surveying Taylor. “Catch your breath?” She laughed in a way that was more mocking than amused. “Is it running away from you?”
“I like the phrase,” Echo said. “It’s either poetic or a very intriguing activity.” He gave Taylor a knowing smile. “You’ll have to show me how to do it sometime.”
He was flirting with her. She wondered if that was solely for Allana’s benefit—Allana had hurt Echo by rejecting him for Joseph, so Echo flirted with Taylor to make Allana jealous.
The strategy was working perfectly. Allana sat tight-lipped on her chair, chin tilted in that angry haughty-couture way.
Taylor smiled back at Echo but didn’t feel it. She didn’t like being used, didn’t want to be discarded after Echo decided he’d punished Allana enough.
“Breath caught?” he asked her.
Taylor nodded. She wasn’t going to flirt back. She would pretend Echo was Joseph and therefore off-limits.
As soon as Echo ran the tube across her hand, pain flamed through her palm. To block it out, she focused on Echo’s face, on the expression of concentration in his blue eyes. The smooth planes of his cheeks. The square jaw. Such a handsome face. Not that she was attracted to him. She was only making an observation. Some people were gorgeous.
Echo glanced at her. She was embarrassed to be caught staring and had a sudden irrational worry that he could read her thoughts. She shifted her weight. “How did you manage to keep from falling when you jumped out of the car?”
“Practice,” he said. “I do a lot of VR adventure programs.”
“Oh.” Taylor took a couple of quick breaths to push away the pain. “I guess I should have spent less time writing computer code and more time flinging myself from moving vehicles.”
He chuckled and leaned over to better see her hand. “People who are smart enough to write computer code generally avoid flinging themselves out of cars. They know too much about force and acceleration principles.”
“It’s not the acceleration that’s the problem,” Taylor said. “It’s the friction that accompanies the sudden deceleration.”
Allana let out a disgusted grunt. “First arcane sayings and now physics discussions. You’re positively the girl version of Echo, aren’t you?”
“I wouldn’t say that.” Echo still didn’t look over at Allana. “I was just thinking that Taylor seems like the responsible type, the kind who can clean up indiscretions.”
Taylor wouldn’t have described herself that way. The words meant something to Allana though. She narrowed her eyes angrily at Echo, then turned away and busied herself by flipping through more news updates.
When Echo finished, he put the lid on the artificial-skin tube and tossed it to Allana. “Give it back when you’re done. I got nicked by some flames in the courthouse.” He turned his arm to check on the wound.
Until then, Taylor hadn’t noticed that one of Echo’s sleeves had a tear. He gingerly pushed the material aside, revealing an inch-long raised welt above his wrist. Not bad, but it had to hurt like crazy. Burns always did.
While Allana, grimacing, spread artificial skin on her wound, Echo unbuckled Taylor’s remaining boot. She felt oddly like a reverse Cinderella.
“I’ll need this,” Echo said, referring to her boot, “so I can find the right size shoes for you. I’ll also need your lock disabler. One of the apartments upstairs must have something you can wear.”
Allana blew on her hand to make the artificial skin dry faster. “How are you going to get past the elevator guard?”
“I’ll find a way.” Echo set the boot down, then sifted through the pack that lay open on the couch. “I might need a sleeping shot.”
“And no one will notice the guard slumped over his desk.” Allana stood up with a martyred sigh and flounced over. She held her hand out for the boot. “Let me do it. I know how to get around elevator guards. I’ll not only get Taylor shoes, I’ll find some clothes we can change into.”
Echo hesitated. His gaze cut over to Taylor. “What do you think?”
“I think you should have given Allana the boot a long time ago.”
Echo smiled, letting her know he’d gotten the double meaning. “All right,” he said, and handed Allana the boot and the lock disabler.
She slipped the disabler onto her belt, examined the boot, then tossed it onto the couch. “This will take a half hour—maybe an hour.” She headed toward the door. “I always chat with the lobby guards for a while before I ask them for favors.” As she went out the door, she shot Echo one last insincere smile. “And sorry about your burn. The artificial skin ran out. I guess you shouldn’t have used so much on Taylor.”
Then she left.
Echo stared at the door. His jaw looked tight, like he was clenching it.
“Does your burn hurt a lot?” Taylor asked.
“No,” Echo said. “I’m just worried she’ll borrow a comlink and call someone.”
“Then why did you let her go off by herself?” Taylor fluttered her hand toward the door. “Go with her. Keep an eye on her.”
Echo shook his head. “I’d rather know right now if we can trust her than find out later when it’s more dangerous.”
Taylor straightened. “I’m injured, we only have two laser boxes, and it won’t take a lot of Enforcers to trap us in this building. How is it going to be more dangerous later?”
Echo kept staring at the door, considering. “Later Joseph and Sheridan will be with us. Their lives will be at stake too.”
Taylor let out a sigh. He had a point.