Deadly Genesis (Boomers Book 2) (7 page)

She could live with that.
Deal.
Besides, it was kind of nice to have him in her head where she could pick on him.

Glad to hear it…
His dry humor amused her. She was still smiling when the door closed behind him and she was alone with her team.

Finally.

“What are you doing with these people, Roar?” Amanda walked slowly. They’d decided to walk outside and use the sound of the surf, and the wind courtesy of Josh, to muffle their conversation. The air seemed almost too cold to Amanda, and she fisted her hands inside the jacket pockets.

“It’s a really long story, and we can trust them—”

“The way he talked to you and the way you were glaring at him?” She shook her head slowly. “It doesn’t look like it from here.”

“Eh, they’re okay.” Hell of an endorsement coming from Josh. “A moodier bunch of bastards than you’ll ever meet, but they try.” He flicked a stone out toward the surf and it glided through the wave and kept bouncing on the water, blown by an unnatural breeze.

“I’m still wrapping my mind around the time travel thing. It sounds like a bunch of…” Something. She couldn’t quite wrap her tongue around the word. Rubbing a hand against her face, she looked up at the sunshine. “What about Ronan? Do we know anything about where he is?”

Curtis shook his head, a solemn pall drifting over the group. “Not a peep. We searched the place in Russia, but it was abandoned. Rory hit the server farm in Canada, but the information is still decrypting.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure they’ve decrypted it, but Michael’s still trying to decide on the data before he shares.” Rory stared at the ocean, her mouth a flat, thin line.

“Why are you with him?” Amanda couldn’t take it anymore. “He’s a prick.”

“Leave it alone,” Josh advised, but Rory held up a hand.

“It’s okay. He’s not as bad as he seems and, trust me, he’s a pussycat right now compared to how he was when we met. He’s got a lot on his plate. The future weighs on him every single moment of every single day. A future he wants to stop from happening and is so freaking obsessed by that I don’t think he can appreciate the moments.” She looked at Amanda then, her blue-violet eyes so dark they went purple. “But I trust him without reservation. I don’t intentionally keep things from him to hurt him or prevent his mission. I believe in it, and I believe in him. I wish I could explain it better.”

“The possibility of him?” No one really understood Rory’s abilities. Not even their years in The Program found a way to quantify it. Most of the time, her mind just worked faster than theirs, processing all the pieces of data—from her impressions, to noticing how someone breathed, to the angle of the sun—all of it in a few seconds before she produced an answer or a plan.

Most of the time she was right.

Rory nodded once. “But enough about me. What happened to you? You haven’t said anything, and I’m assuming that’s because you don’t know how much you can reveal to them?”

“I couldn’t hide that from Simon if I tried. He’s in here, remember?” She tapped her head. It should make her uncomfortable. Even thirty yards from the Hamptons house, she could feel him—observing quietly. It was like having a personal bodyguard standing at attention, but his back was to her. Present, but not quite involved. “And I haven’t said anything because I don’t remember. I remember…fragments, procedures. Being trapped and struggling. I remember screaming.” Her voice softened. “And I remember pain. But then it fades to gray nothingness. Like my mind has this film playing on a loop, only there are holes in it. The doc says that could be the result of the metal poisoning from the chip or shoddy surgery or the fact that mercury was in retrograde the day you rescued me.”

She liked Ilsa. Her genuine frustration at being unable to just fix Amanda actually made her feel better.

“All right, then what’s our plan?” Curtis slid his hands into the pockets of his jeans. From the beginning, he had been the calmest member of their group of five. He took his time about making decisions and remained slow to anger. But once he set on a course, it was hard to deter him.

“We keep looking for Ronan. I know it may not fit with their plan and their tasks, but we don’t stop until we’re all together again. That has to be our priority.” Rory transferred her gaze to Amanda. “Your priority is to get better. If Simon can help, we go that route. But if you’re not comfortable…”

“No. I’m fine. I don’t know about the others so much, but Simon’s okay. He has a sense of humor under all that unflappableness.”
Is unflappable even a word?

It is very difficult to afford you your privacy when you ask questions.
Amusement tinged his response.

Then apparently I’m not all that worried about privacy. I do feel a little weird though.
Her brain tingled—like a foot or hand that fell asleep and all the blood was rushing back into the nerves.

That isn’t exactly what happens when you compress a nerve…

Seriously, a biology lesson?
She rolled her eyes.

Josh coughed, and Amanda flicked a look at him. “Wow, you have that empty headed look down now, Blue.”

They were all staring at her and she sighed. “Sorry, thinking apparently takes effort these days. Fortunately, I have my own hall monitor when I get lost.”

One beat.

Two.

All four started laughing and, for a moment, they weren’t standing outside of some future warrior’s hospital facility, worrying about a missing teammate or Amanda’s hole-punched memory.

Simon stared out the window, watching them laugh, and smiled.

“We have problems.” Rex leaned inside the door frame.

“It’ll be fine. Michael and Rory are just trying to out stubborn each other.” He reluctantly looked away from Amanda’s smiling face. The attractive woman was truly stunning when she smiled.

“Not really worried about the Captain’s love life. I’ve decrypted over half of the information Rory snatched.” He passed a data tablet to Simon. The information on the screen looked like tables of numbers and letters. It took him a moment to sort it out.

“Formulas.”

“Yeah. Schematics. Blueprints for some building or facility. Each entry is coded by a type. I think these are drug combinations. The doc will need to look at it for us to be sure.” Rubbing his jaw, the shifter exhaled a long, heavy breath. “But these are experiments.”

“They look like it, but we don’t know for sure if this is a mental exercise or a physical one.”

“Yeah well, the patients upstairs and the one out there tell me it’s more than just a theory.” Rex tapped the pad. “The question is why.”

“Control. Power. Greed. The reasons are always the same.” Sad, but true. “Understanding where power comes from requires two components—replication and control. We know they were working on some kind of gene therapy and they were adapting Ilsa’s chips.”

“That’s my point. This is long term, this isn’t reactionary. We’re running under the assumption that some big event triggered the cascade. What if it isn’t a big one? What if it was the plan all along and someone—” He didn’t say Geiger. He didn’t have to. “Just took advantage and capitalized on it?”

The prospect offered nothing but dread. It would take planning to execute such a strategy, long-term, patient planning. It also offered them little in the way of stopping such a plan. Their nebulous enemy need only wait until all their dominoes were in place to strike. “How much longer until the decryption is complete?”

“A couple of days at least. It’s a seventy-two-bit encryption and it’s taking everything the machines have to work through it. I split it across five different drives but—”

“But it takes time. Then, we wait. Fortunately, we have time. We averted the worst incidents of this year already.” Saving Rory, Rory’s choosing to stay with Michael, the Infinity team’s tacit alliance with the Boomers—they averted potential disasters in New York and Washington D.C. The deadline dates passed without incident. They’d changed their history.

“You realize that’s not the sanest logic. Every time we change something, a dozen other things could go wrong.” The shifter wasn’t usually so gloomy.

“We can’t think that way.” Simon diverted more of his attention from the reunion by the water and focused on his brother. “We can’t. We must focus on the aspects of the mission we can complete. Any other speculating will just drive us insane.”

“You’re suggesting it’s a trip we haven’t already taken. I’m going to take the info into the city and work at the warehouse.”

“Rex?” Placing a hand on his shoulder, Simon studied the shape shifter. “You okay?”

“A little too much romance in the air here. I need a break.” He didn’t have to explain further. Simon gave him a squeeze and said nothing as the man left.

The future he walked away from held a wife and an unborn child. Issues and history haunted them all, but none more so than Rex.

Simon?
Amanda’s mental voice wavered between fatigue and irritation.

Yes?
He glanced out the window.

Just checking. I told a great joke, and you didn’t even respond.

The corner of his mouth quirked up.
Privacy, remember?

Sweat drenched her tank top and oxygen burned in her lungs. She fumbled for the light switch, her gaze darting everywhere in the room. She still slept in the med lab, despite the damaged walls and equipment. A plain wooden door replaced the one she’d apparently destroyed earlier in the week. It was the middle of the night, and the house slept. Heart racing, Amanda tried to catch her breath. She didn’t even know why she woke up or what terrified her.

A gentle knock on the door jerked her around, and she brought her hands up, power revving. The door opened slowly and Simon appeared in the opening. “You okay?” The tousled look of his blond hair, and his rumpled expression told her she’d woke him up.

“I don’t know.” Her heart continued to beat at a manic pace and cold heat flushed over her skin. Turning her hands over, she looked at the faint glow on her palms. “I don’t—I don’t know why I woke up.”

“Bad dream?” Simon nudged the door inward and padded over to the bed. It wasn’t until he stood in the pool of light cast by the bedside lamp that she realized he was shirtless.

Holy hell, he’s ripped.
Leaner than the behemoths he hung out with, chiseled muscle sculpted Simon’s chest, biceps, and abdominals. She barely noticed the hint of scarring along one pectoral or the three painted stripes on his right arm.

“Bad dream?” he repeated patiently as he dragged the chair over to sit down next to the bed. Her tongue seemed to stick to the roof of her mouth.

Was it a bad dream? Curling her fingers into her palms, she tried to calm her wild pulse. The jerky flutter was almost painful. “I can’t remember. I’m sorry I woke you.”

“It’s okay.” He covered her right fist and squeezed gently. “Can you go back to sleep?” After the way she burned him, she would have thought touching her was the last thing on his mind.

“Not really interested in testing the theory at the moment.” Licking her lips, she glanced around for the water bottle. Simon snagged it off the side table and handed it to her.

“Okay. You don’t have to.”

“Maybe we could talk?” Unscrewing the cap, she took a long drink. It helped wet her parched throat and clear away the cottonmouth. Sweat still beaded her skin and she pushed the blankets back to let the air cool her legs.

Squeezing her hand once more, he released her and leaned back into the chair, resting one ankle on the opposite knee. “What would you like to talk about? I know you have questions about us.”

“Yeah, but I think I want to skip the discussion about an apocalyptic future where we’re all fucked. That’s really not going to help me sleep.” She could barely wrap her mind around the present and refused to focus on a future she didn’t want to believe in.

“What then?”

“Have you always been a telepath?” The lame question popped out and she sighed.

“Not always. I remember a time in my childhood when the world was quieter.” He gave her a small smile. “But that requires talking about the future you don’t want to discuss.”

“Yeah, cause your past is my future and the whole idea gives me a headache.” Taking another drink of water, she pulled her legs into a crisscross position. “Can you hear everybody?”

“More or less. It’s difficult not to, but I’ve learned to adapt.” He studied her. “It doesn’t bother you.”

“What, that you can hear inside my head?” It did, a little, but in the few days since she woke from captivity, he’d been the one constant. His presence in her mind helped.

“Yes. Most don’t care for it when I pick up surface thoughts even when they broadcast them. But not you.” The deep yellow glow of the lamp gave his blue eyes an almost unholy gleam. She liked it. It was sexy.

“If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m not that deep. I tend to live on the surface of my skin so… what you hear in my head is just as likely come out of my mouth.” Another drink of the water and she finished the bottle. “You know what this conversation needs?”

“Coffee and chocolate?” He lifted his brows.

“Absolutely. Please tell me future freaks of America keep chocolate stored in the kitchen.” She slid off the bed and Simon rose, catching her elbow to steady her when they collided. Another shiver of heat raced over her skin.

“Of course. Doctor’s orders.” His lips flirted with another smile and she grinned.

“I knew I liked Ilsa.” She padded barefoot in front of him, uncaring that she wore loose pajama bottoms tied at the hips and a midriff baring sports tank. Course, if he went first she could study the shape of his ass in his pajamas.

“I’ll pass, thank you.” The dry humor tickled her, and she darted up the steps. The dark kitchen boasted two nightlights—one under the cabinets illuminating the counters and a second near the entryway to the rest of the house. “Chocolate is in the cupboard next to the refrigerator. I’ll make the coffee.”

She went straight over to the walnut colored cabinet. Surveying the contents, she found a dozen different kinds of chocolate from standard checkout counter lane varieties to exotic imports, her mouth fell open. “I think I just died and went to heaven.” Hopping up onto the counter, she pulled down what had to be a sampler basket and rifled through, looking for her favorites.