Deadly Genesis (Boomers Book 2) (10 page)

Simon?

The land trembled around her. Her heart picked up pace and pain spiked through her mind.

Simon?
She wobbled. Pain flared and the landscape around her split apart, earth shoving up like mountains being born. The click-clanging of the MRI shuddered through her like a cell door being snapped shut.

Program activated.

The words came from everywhere and nowhere. Fragments of letters slapped together like magazine cutouts on a bad ransom note.
Escape and return.

Escape what? Return where? But the questions floundered like flotsam tossed about on stormy seas. The landscape continued to crumble and the ocean rushed in—straight through Simon. The stars above vortexed, spinning away like meteors crashing into the earth. She needed to fly—she had to get off the broken landscape before the ocean swept her under.

Power surged through her, an incandescent light, and she heated up her skin. Flight took her time to learn, but it was like riding a bike. The superheated air around the surface of her skin made her lighter and she pushed upwards. The land exploded around her and she fought to get airborne. Debris slashed at her and she blasted it away. Metal sheared, screaming and twisting under the assault and, finally, she was free. She soared up.

Stop!

Simon’s voice cut through the maelstrom, and she whirled. He stood at the foot of the stairs.

Stairs?

Where had the stairs come from? His hand outstretched, she could feel him probing along the edges of the cyclone storming through her mind. She raised her own hand, power surging up. Two men flanked him, and they stared at her with hard expressions. They didn’t want to help her. They wanted to lock her back up in that box.

Escape. Return.
The alien words formed again across her mind, and she dragged her attention away from the men blocking her path. No direct route to the sky appeared in the offing, so she’d have to blast her way out. Gravity pulled at her, but she focused her will and energy flamed around her hands.

Amanda…don’t listen to that voice. Do you hear me? Don’t listen to it. Focus on me.
The landscape inside snapped back into place. Simon was in her mind. She glared at him, she could blast him into oblivion and take her freedom.

No more cages.

You weren’t in a cage, sweetheart. You were in an MRI. It was a test—a simple, painless procedure. Look around you. See where you are and what you’re doing.

The urgent desire to flee flooded through her again. The words repeating themselves over and over, the letters stacked and re-stacked. The driving force said
go and go now
, but she paused. Power buffeted through her blood. Warmth flamed in her soul and she turned slowly. A twisted heap of metal and sparking wires stood where the MRI had been.

MRI.

The doc wanted to do an MRI to check on her brain. She dropped slowly back to land. Glass cut her foot, but she barely felt it. Simon rushed into her mind and the seas receded, the stars stabilized and the landscape firmed under her mental feet. Heart thundering in her ears, she couldn’t believe the level of destruction.

“Ilsa…” she whispered.

“Is okay.” The doctor’s voice shook, but she sounded well enough. Amanda turned to find her picking her way across the room. “I saw the surge and managed to duck before everything went.”

Garrett plowed across the room and picked the doctor up. His forbidding expression eased with tenderness. Embarrassed by the raw emotion, Amanda looked away and swallowed. Simon’s shadow fell over her, and she pulled away when he would have touched her.

“I didn’t mean to blow it up.” Finding the words was a struggle, but she fought to push them out.

“I know. I got distracted—”

“You got distracted, so I blew it up and nearly killed her?” Horror wound her insides up in knots. It was one thing to know Simon was in her mind, helping her, and something else entirely that a moment’s distraction could turn her into a weapon of mass destruction.

Escape. Return.

The letters shimmered against her closed eyelids, and she jerked around. “What is that?”

Simon brushed his fingers down her arm. The heat in her body receded, transmuting to something far more pleasurable. “I don’t know. But don’t listen to it.”

“What is what?” Ilsa extracted herself from Garrett and made her way around the debris.

“We don’t have time for this.” Michael’s voice lashed through the room. “Simon, put her out and we need to move.”

Put me out?
Her eyes narrowed. Michael’s hostility lashed the air around him.

“She’s fine now.” Simon didn’t spare him a look. His eyes unfocused, but his fingers curled around her upper arm. She moved closer to him and fought the urge to hide against his shoulder. She didn’t need a man to protect her. But he would.

Of course I will. Shh, for just a moment.
The reassurance helped, and she swallowed back her next set of questions. Ilsa arrived in front of her then glanced first to the telepath and then to her.

“What did he want you to ignore?” The doctor’s voice hushed as though she heard Simon’s mental admonition.

“Words. I keep seeing the words
escape and return
. Do you know what it means?” Someone needed to know. Despite Simon’s presence, the words flickered intermittently, accompanied by an almost inexorable pull to flee and obey them. If not for the telepath, she would likely be doing just that.

“They’re secure, Michael, and on their way back.
Everyone
is fine—and they have a prisoner.”
What the hell are we going to do with a prisoner?

“Have them take him to the warehouse in the city. I don’t want this location compromised any more than it has been.” The cold tone, clipped words and barely veiled contempt irritated Amanda.
Who the hell is he to talk to you like that?

He’s worried about Rory.
The distracted response didn’t make her feel better.

What happened?

I’ll fill you in. Just be patient. I need to communicate with them now.
His mental attention turned away, but the physical contact increased and he wrapped an arm around her. She sighed and laid her head against his shoulder, giving in to the exhaustion weighing on her.

“Just those two words? Anything else with them?” Ilsa pointed Garrett toward the debris near the MRI. “I need that drive, if it’s still intact.”

“Of course you do.” Garrett muttered, but he began shifting the pieces around to get to it.

“Garrett, keep an eye on them. I’m going in to meet the others.” Michael’s absence would not make her heart grow fonder, but it certainly eased the tension in the room when he strode away.

“No other words. Wait—” Amanda lifted her head. “There was something else, an almost metallic voice saying ‘program activated.’”

Ilsa sighed. “A kill switch. Dammit, that chip must still be in there—even a microscopic piece of it—and it’s still trying to function.”

“I thought you said she destroyed her chip.” Garrett pulled a small black device from within the machinery. He passed it to the doctor. Ilsa picked her way over to another workstation and plugged it in with two cords.

“She did. She melted it, but the basis for the chip was longevity and programming. If even a piece of hardware survived, it could be trying to work with her neural receptors and complete its task. Worse, it could have left neural programming impressions on her cerebral cortex.”

Was that English?
Amanda bit her lip as Ilsa rattled off a complex series of sentences, most of which didn’t make sense.

Perhaps. The microchips were designed to be interactive with the mind, providing data and data storage. The one they implanted in your brain was a crude version, based on Ilsa’s early work. The lack of organic material allowed your body to reject it.

That made a fraction more sense than Ilsa’s long explanation.
Do you have any idea how insane chip implantation sounds? It’s like an invasion of the body and mind.
The thought sparked something in her. The lack of fade to the color in her hair, the lack of root growth, the missing months and lost time—the purpose of the chip was like the last puzzle piece slotting into place.

“How functional was that chip?” Her throat went raw, strangling on taut emotion.

“I have no idea. It was almost slag by the time I could remove it.” Ilsa focused on her, fingers hovering above the keyboard. “We assumed that the implantation failed…”

“It didn’t. It may have failed later, but you don’t know when they did what they did to me. The scar on my head, how old is it?”

Simon stared at her and Garrett paused in moving debris aside to glance at the doctor. Ilsa tapped her fingers against the desk. “Old enough to be completely faded.”

Oh my God.
She wanted to vomit. Ice leeched all the heat from her body and she wasn’t just leaning on Simon anymore. He had to hold her up.

We don’t know anything yet.
How could he be so calm?

“If they were successful then they controlled me for months…”

We don’t know that.

“We don’t know that.” Ilsa echoed Simon’s mental sentiment. “And I don’t even know a test for it.”

“I do.” Garrett tossed a cracked monitor into the trashcan. Everyone looked at him and the poisoner gave them an unpleasant smile.

“How?” Ilsa asked, giving voice to the question tumbling through Amanda’s mind.

“If they controlled her, it’s because they wanted to use her—which means as a weapon. Somewhere, somehow, I would gamble that you’re on surveillance. We hack it and find it.” He looked at Simon. “The same way we started tracking Rory when we first went looking.”

The telepath nodded slowly. “That could work. Too many distractions right now…”

Simon, I have to know.

He rubbed her arm soothingly and picked her up as though she weighed next to nothing.
And you will. But right now I need to make sure the others are secure. I have a prisoner to interrogate, and Michael to keep off the warpath. Can you keep it together long enough to let me do that? We can start The Program searching, but it may yield nothing.

Yes, she could do that—maybe. “Knock me out.”

No.

“That’s not a bad idea.” Garrett agreed with her, but Ilsa looked like she wanted to protest.

“Yes, Simon. Knock me out. If you’re distracted keeping me together, put me out. Then you can fix the other things. I don’t want to hurt anyone.” She swallowed. The urge to flee rebounded in her soul. Simon scowled at her.

You won’t. I know what I did wrong. It won’t happen again.

Dammit, why didn’t he understand? If she couldn’t function without him holding the pieces together, she was just a ticking time bomb.

Nothing she said could compel him to put her out. Instead, Simon carried her into the hospital room then helped her get dressed before taking her out of the damaged medlab. The house’s other patients needed tending, and he left that to Garrett and Ilsa. The five survivors of R.E.X. labs were not doing well. If anything, their condition deteriorated no matter what Ilsa did, but she remained determined to try and the Boomers wanted to support her efforts for as long as possible.

Frankly, everything she learned about the experiments could provide them with another kernel of insight. Amanda drifted along behind him, a bright, blue-frosted shadow trailing in his wake. He led her through the house into the private office and beyond to the control room. Michael wouldn’t be pleased to see her inside the room with its massive wall of computer monitors and data collection systems.

For once, he didn’t care. Dragging a chair over, he pointed to it and Amanda perched on its edge like a bird. The oversized sweater she wore dwarfed her too-thin frame. She really needed to eat more. Booting up the system, Simon typed in the password and the monitors came to life. He took a photo of her from the historical database—an image provided by Rory from some party or other. The two women had their arms around each other’s shoulders and beamed at the camera. The sassy smile curving Amanda’s luscious lips teased Simon.

He wanted to see that happiness in her expression again.

A Boolean search would do the trick, particularly in a day and age when the average person posted images of their morning danish to share with the world. If Amanda appeared in any surveillance or standard images, The Program would find her. Search sent. He brought up the monitoring systems at the warehouse. The upper bank displayed the perimeter, while the lower four gave him a window into their base of operations. The battered and bruised team was already in residence. A black-garbed soldier, shackled to a chair and blindfolded, sat in the center. None of the others spoke. Drake and Rex stood on either side of the soldier, ready to act at the first sign of resistance.

Rory stood between the holding room and an ancillary cell. Josh lay unconscious on one of the beds. Curtis stood somewhere between his teammates and Simon’s. They waited.

For Michael.

“What happened?” Amanda rolled her chair forward, hands clenched together.

“Soldiers—at least we’re presuming they’re soldiers, based on uniforms and activities—attacked your team while they worked to put out a fire in Stuytown.” He kept his eyes focused on the screens and observed her mental reactions. Anger. Outrage. Guilt.

The guilt puzzled him.

“I should have been there.”

He sighed. “You’re not ready to be in the field yet.”

“No, but they need me, and I’m here falling apart like some energy shellacked humpty dumpty. This isn’t right.” Frustration resonated in the words. “If I could just…”

A flicker of an image skated across her consciousness. A dance club—pulsating music, heat, laughter—Amanda shook her head slowly. Simon resisted the urge to push her. Memory fragmented for a reason and her trauma, physical or emotional, could be exacerbated if he drove her to the answers she longed for.