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“I’LL GIVE YOU another chance.”
Leo recognized the voice, but her eyes weren’t working, the lids weighted down by heat and pain. When she managed to open them, she found Dr. Kerrigan at her bedside, peering down at her with a blank expression. Her mother.
No. That woman was gone. This was someone else entirely, someone hoping to prey on Leo’s emotions to get what she wanted—what she shouldn’t have.
“I want you to be a part of this,” the woman continued, “and I want it to be on good terms.”
Leo closed her eyes again. The back of her hand itched.
“Help me, Leona. Tell me what I need to know, and I’ll help you out of this.”
She wanted to tell Dr. Kerrigan that she wouldn’t be in this if it wasn’t for the psycho woman—that she wouldn’t need help at all if the woman hadn’t come looking for her in the first place. That was the last thing she’d ever wanted.
“Leo.”
That made her eyes fly open. She hadn’t started calling herself Leo until years after her mother had left. The woman couldn’t possibly have known about the nickname on her own. That meant it was part of the package of information obviously offered willingly by Alex. Leo swallowed the lump in her throat, her cheeks burning with anger.
“Go to hell,” she rasped.
Dr. Kerrigan just looked down at her for a long time, blinked rapidly, and sighed. “That’s that, then. I can’t do anything else for you.” She motioned toward the sliding door, which opened to let in two other people in white lab coats. One of them pushed a stainless-steel cart, and Leo tried as hard as she could not to look at what it carried. “That doesn’t mean I don’t want you to know what’s happening. I’m still going to tell you everything, starting at the beginning, and I’ll try to be as honest as possible.”
Leo felt her breathing quicken against her will when one of the nameless assistants wheeled the metal tray toward the bed, and Dr. Kerrigan picked up a syringe of thick yellow fluid.
“Marcus and I worked together in the beginning, you know.” The woman held the syringe upright and tapped it, gently pressing the plunger until a thin stream oozed from the needle. “That was how we met. Laleopharm’s partnership with MindBlink brought a lot of people together in the name of science and technology. I was on the team that helped develop Pointera, nasty little drug that it became.” Dr. Kerrigan lowered the syringe toward Leo’s side, and Leo realized why her hand was so itchy. Looking down, she saw the medical tape strapping an IV into the back of her hand. She bucked against the restraints, and Dr. Kerrigan only glanced up briefly. “Hold still.” The command was given without any real consideration, as the woman merely picked up the injection site on the IV tube and emptied the syringe into it.
“Your father was a brilliant man,” she continued. “Completely dedicated to his work with those little Infodeos he created. God, was he brilliant. And for a while, Pointera only increased his brilliance, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so in love... with a person or a product.”
The itch in Leo’s hand crawled up her arm, burning like nothing she’d ever felt before. She squeezed her eyes shut and told herself she wouldn’t cry out as the pain quickly spread.
Dr. Kerrigan replaced the syringe on the steel tray and leaned over to press a few buttons on the monitors behind Leo’s bed. “He was also, tragically, one of the first to experience the drug’s hidden pitfalls. Oh, of course, my team had seen the potential for abuse quite clearly from the beginning. That’s what made it so brilliant. It touched places in the human brain no chemical had ever glimpsed before. We figured that, under medical supervision, that potential for abuse would be minuscule. And we were paid an unbelievable price not to publish our findings in that regard.”
Leo choked back a grunt of pain, heat searing through her chest. She blinked rapidly and glared at the ceiling.
“I should never have let myself get so emotionally attached.” Dr. Kerrigan sighed and glanced at the ceiling, rolling what seemed an imaginary kink out of her neck. “That has always been my first rule. Never get too involved in any project. But Marcus and I took our work together to a whole new level. Then the genius of a man went too far. The drug that intensified his brilliance eventually killed every intelligent brain cell he ever had.”
Leo’s father had been a junkie most of her life, but she’d loved him—in some small part that didn’t resent him for stealing her childhood. It was more love than she’d ever held for the insane woman pumping god knew what into her veins. She grunted, realizing she clutched the bedsheets in tight fists.
“It was either stay and clean up his mess, or leave and save my career. And after Pointera’s effects went public, I had to start working on something new. This, here, will redeem the mistakes I made back then.”
“Wh—what did you give me?” Leo croaked. An invisible hand closed around her throat, and her eyes seemed glued to the steel cart as the two men in coats wheeled it out of the room, leaving her alone with Dr. Kerrigan.
The woman leaned in close, studying Leo’s face without meeting her eyes. “We’re calling it Formula S-12, for now,” she said matter-of-factly. “Something I’ve used once or twice on subjects with similar abilities to your own.”
Sweat poured down Leo’s face, stinging her eyes. “Similar...” she rasped, unable to finish the sentence.
“Tell me what you’re experiencing right now.”
“I can’t—” Leo gasped, her blood on fire, a deep, aching pain burrowing into her lower back. Her breath ran shallow, and the image of a fish flopping around on dry land entered her mind. She bucked against the restraints, the bedsheets sticky against her body, and lost consciousness.
––––––––
“...might not be it.”
Alex’s voice brought her back to consciousness. Panic flared in Leo’s chest, and she heaved in agony.
“I’ll be out in just a moment.” Alex sounded worried, forced. A brief silence was followed by footsteps and the sound of the glass door sliding open and then closed. Leo felt her near the bed, and then Alex’s face peered over her, brows drawn down in concern. “How are you feeling?” The question sounded pathetic.
Hatred. That was all Leo felt in the moment, briefly overshadowing the unbelievable throbbing behind her eyes and the tight aching in her joints. She glared back into those blue eyes, wanting to scream at her betrayer but only managing a choked-off grunt.
“Just give her what she wants,” Alex said. “Then this can be over. This is the last thing I want for you.”
Leo moaned, sounding to her own ears like a frightened child. She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling the hot trail of tears run from beneath her lids. There was no way in hell she was going to acknowledge Alex now—no way she was going to give Alex or Dr. Kerrigan anything they asked for. Not after what they’d done—to her, to Sleepwater, to Kaylee.
“Leo... please...”
She turned her head away, laying a clammy cheek against the already sweat-stained sheet beneath her. The sound of Alex leaving the room seemed to take all her tension out with it, and she fell gratefully back into darkness.
––––––––
“...up to one hundred twenty units per liter, please. Oh, you’re back.” Dr. Kerrigan leaned over her, eyes bright with excitement.
Leo didn’t bother fighting against the restraints this time. She felt exhausted, wasted, like someone had pulled the string of her own vitality and completely unraveled it.
“We’re trying something new today,” the woman said, the mad arousal in her voice betraying the cold, calculating way she scanned Leo’s body. “It’s called Birofin. Been on the market a few years already. It’s used to treat seizures, but we’ll be giving you substantially larger doses. It hasn’t worked very well on many other subjects, so I wouldn’t get your hopes up, but I think you have remarkable potential as an exception.” She pushed down the plunger of another syringe and patted Leo’s forearm in a failed gesture of reassurance. Leo didn’t even have the energy to flinch.
“This looks promising.” Dr. Kerrigan fiddled with the monitors again and left the room without another word.
––––––––
Leo woke to the sound of screaming. She wondered what poor fucker was getting tortured in a room next to hers until she realized the screams came from her own throat—dry, cracking. Her brain said it was unnecessary to keep the noise going; the logical part of her felt fine. Her body had other ideas. In a moment of surreal realization, she noticed the separation there between the physical and mental. As if from outside herself, she watched her body buck against the straps holding her to the bed, saw the rash-like flush crawling down her neck and the damp rings of sweat soaking through her white uniform. She still couldn’t quite understand the rush when two assistants burst through the sliding glass door, pushing a metal tray toward her bed as if her life depended on it; it might have. Then she understood how bad it was when the men spoke to one another and she couldn’t process a single word of it.
She mentally catalogued the relief her body must have felt when they delivered more drugs to stop the agony.
––––––––
Time became only an idea. She had no clue how long she’d been here—couldn’t remember how many different drugs they’d pumped through her. How many tests. They must have added liquid feed to her IV, because she hadn’t eaten anything since she’d gotten there, and she didn’t remember being force-fed. Of course, her throat hurt all the time now, but she remembered the raw, frantic sounds of her own screams. They hadn’t changed her clothes, though, after the first time. She stank of sweat and something with which she was all too familiar—desperation. That end-of-the-line, what-the-fuck-do-I-do-now stench bordering between body odor and rankness. And for the first time in her life, Leo began to really believe there was no way out of this.
Dr. Kerrigan entered the room, and Leo stared blankly at the ceiling. The woman hadn’t accomplished her main goal yet, that much was clear, but breaking Leo’s defiance seemed to be the secondary objective, and Leo was on the verge of giving it to her. She was done.
“This has been quite the trial,” the woman said, hands stuck into the pockets of her lab coat. She peered at the monitors. “I have to be honest with you, I felt about ready to give up last night. It bothers me more than I can say to have to put you through this.”
Bullshit. Leo’s eye twitched.
“But then I started thinking of Marcus again, and the idea struck me. We’ve never used Pointera for this particular research. I was so ready to put that failure behind me that I never considered it a viable option in the present. Why not target the superior temporal gyrus one more time? Oh, Leona, I wish I could open your brain and pinpoint exactly where your gift comes from.” She sighed with a noncommittal hum. “But that would end our work, and I still need you.” Dr. Kerrigan pulled one hand from her coat pocket, revealing yet another syringe.
God, it looked just like the needles Leo’s dad had emptied into his own veins—thick, white. Volatile. The shit came in little white pills at the pharmacy, but on the streets, it got crushed and boiled and injected. And it looked like this. She could almost smell the vinegary, astringent stink, having breathed in the same fumes during the years she’d cut and hawked it herself. But she never touched it. Not once.
Dr. Kerrigan handled the syringe with more tenderness than she’d ever shown toward her own daughter. “If only for nostalgia’s sake,” she said, adding it to the IV. She smiled, and Leo’s blood ran cold.