Judgement 8 (Subject Alpha #1) (5 page)

“HEY.” THE SOFTNESS OF his voice echoed in my head. I slowly prised my eyes open. He sat on the floor beside the sofa where I’d curled up and fallen asleep. “Feeling better?”

I didn’t answer. Was I feeling better? If I was honest, the answer would be no, and not wanting to sound like a whinger, I remained silent. He nodded in understanding.

“I brought you supper.” He waved a plate at me with what looked like a cheese sandwich on top.

“Thank you.” Sitting up, I took the plate from him and placed it on my lap, not really hungry.

“You didn’t have to clean,” he said, moving to the kitchen. He opened the fridge and pulled out two bottles of beer, making me wince when he used his teeth to uncap them, then walked back and handed me one before settling at the other end of the sofa.

I shrugged and took a reluctant bite from the sandwich, my stomach growling with appreciation, even if it did flip when the cheese hit the bile.

“It helps me relax,” I replied without looking his way. Placing the plate on the now tidy table in front of me, I greedily gulped down the entire bottle, deciding I needed to get drunk; very drunk.

He watched me silently as I placed the empty bottle on the kitchen counter and pulled another bottle from the fridge. Opening numerous drawers, I turned to him and scowled when I couldn’t find a bottle opener. Without even having to ask, he held out his hand. I gave him the bottle, wincing again when he popped the cap and handed it back. “I’m surprised you have any teeth left doing that shit.”

He shrugged. It was my turn to watch him when he walked back into the kitchen, grabbed two glasses from a cupboard and a bottle of vodka from the freezer.

“You wanna get drunk, then drink like you mean it.” He took the bottle of beer from me and exchanged it for a glass, then filled half of it with vodka and settled back into the sofa, leaning into the plumpness of the luxurious cushions.

“You have a lovely place.” I copied his pose, leaning back and taking a few mouthfuls of the alcohol before continuing. “Although, I find the décor a little . . . cold.”

“Don’t need no girly shit. It’s my place and it’s me.” I wasn’t sure if he was annoyed with me but he completely changed the subject. “How old are you?”

I took a sip of vodka and regarded him over the rim of my glass. “Twenty three.”

He nodded slowly as if figuring something out. “And how long you been with Judgement?”

I didn’t like where this was going. I remained silent but he leaned further into me, his eyes now angry with my wariness. “You want me to help you, Elina, then swallow your stubbornness and let me help you.” His voice didn’t match the temper in his eyes; it was soft, almost pleading.

I sighed. “Two years.”

He tipped his head to the side for a moment, then budged his body closer. I stared, my eyes widening when he gripped the hem of my t-shirt and lifted it. My heart raced, and although my belly heated, I scuttled back when he yanked at the waistline of my trousers and pulled them down to my hip.

He tapped the symbol embedded into my skin and shook his head. “Don’t lie to me, little girl. You’ve been with them longer than two years. Your tag reckons at least ten years or more.”

I looked away, screwing my eyes closed. Panic set in and I stood up, moving away from him and his touch that seemed to burn my skin.

“Be honest with me for once, Elina, or I can’t help you. And if
I’m
honest, right now, you need my fucking help!”

“You already hate me so what the hell? My name is Elina Rowe.” His eyes widened, his jaw dropped and he gawped at me. “And I’m Janice’s daughter.”

I didn’t like the way he froze, the steel of his eyes burrowing deep, so I carried on.

“I was born specifically for her to ‘experiment’ with,” I told him, using finger quotations. “You wanted honesty, Reid. Then that’s exactly what you’re gonna get.”

I grabbed the vodka, refilled my glass and sat back down, refusing to look at him as I stared down at my glass and told him my story.

“Janice was always unusual. Science, according to her, had always intrigued her. She was obsessed with the senses and the energy both in the air and from generated sources. She met another scientist when she was working as an apprentice in the late eighties. They had a wild fling; he was married but their minds and their beliefs were one and the same. They played around with power. I don’t know, I’m shit with stuff like that. She only ever explained it to me in tech talk, but from what I managed to translate, during one experiment, they found that while a cell was being created, if it was met with a bolt of electricity at an exact moment, it manipulated the foundation of said cell. They fucked, wired the fuck up to the national grid. Fucking like rabbits is this time changed to fucking like Energizer bunnies. Freaky bastards. I still don’t know how they even survived that. Anyway, here I am. The prototype that created you.”

He just stared up at me, his eyes soft and his teeth gnawing at his bottom lip.

I shrugged, it was my life, my story. It wasn’t unusual to me. It was normal. It still hurt though, that I was created specifically for the benefit of science and not love.

“I was four when she first started to inject me with stuff and hook me up to different apparatus. She’d surge my little body with voltages whilst experimenting with each of my senses. Luckily I don’t remember too much from then.”

He pulled in a deep breath, snatched the vodka and filled us both up. The room was starting to spin, but I smiled, enjoying the feeling and allowing it to loosen me up.

“I didn’t live like normal kids until I was around ten or eleven. One of our neighbours reported me to the authorities. It was no great surprise that she hadn’t even registered my birth. From then on, I had to live as ‘normally’ as possible, although I was far from normal. I’d noticed some specific things; how my hair was way too static, much more than the other girls.’ My skin tingled constantly and I’d always notice the lights dip faintly when I walked into a room. I managed to hide this from Janice, or she’d have strapped me to the nearest table and killed me with more invasive tests. I started my periods at six, the shock to my system triggering puberty, and ending in the menopause at eighteen.”

I flinched. Children had always been something I craved, but she’d even taken that from me. Reid swallowed heavily, his expression softening. His pity annoyed me so I ventured on.

“And then, when I was about fourteen, it all changed. Nothing had worked, she was still categorising me as ‘normal’ and growing extremely annoyed with me. She upped the game, changed the drugs and altered the voltage, wiring something different into my brain this one particular time. She gave me a blast and my long hair suddenly leapt for the sky. I honestly looked like I’d been tipped upside down. It just stayed there, straight up, me looking like a cardboard cut-out in a hairdresser’s window that had been stuck on upside down.” My heart sank, remembering my life from then on. It all changed and not for the better. “If it had been up to her, she would have dragged me into her basement and refused me the light of day ever again. But I stood my ground, refused her any more unless she allowed me to finish school. It was the only thing that was normal for me. I’d made friends, found out I was quite clever, and I enjoyed that other side of my life, a life away from wires and tests and constant fucking agony.”

My body sighed at the influence of the alcohol and I lifted my feet, curling them under me on the sofa, and finally found the courage to look at him. “She didn’t give me complete control though. To be able to carry on studying, I was to be all hers at the weekends and during school holidays, and when I hit twenty one, I was hers, lock, stock and barrel. All of me. It was enough though. Well, it was then.”

“Elina.” His voice was quiet, his eyes full of sadness and pity. I shook my head, not allowing his sympathy in.

“What you need to understand, Reid, is that she is my mother. She was all I had. She gave me life. Yes, I know it was a fucked up life, but she granted it to me. The air I breathed, each laugh, each smile, they were all because she created me.”

I blinked and lowered my eyes when he slid his hand over mine and linked his fingers through my own. The warmth of him clogged my throat and I snatched my hand back. The pain from that simple act hurt more than anything. Sympathy was nothing; understanding was more important, and I was confused as to which he was offering so I didn’t allow any.

“What I didn’t know at the time was that she’d sent every single report to my father, who had presented them to the defence secretary. Aren’t we lucky we have such a caring government?” I spat with intense hatred. “They couldn’t fund Janice enough, pushing grant after grant at her and finally giving her the resources to develop a controlled testing centre. A lab for all her little robots to be created.”

“Judgement,” he acknowledged quietly.

“The one and only.” I looked at him, narrowing my eyes and wondering how much he was actually aware of. “You do know the government was funding her to build them an army?”

“Yes,” he confirmed, his eyes studying my inner hatred.

I snorted bitterly. “And it still grieves her after all this time, all this funding and all the experiments that she’s only managed to actually
manufacture
eight of us. She can’t understand why certain ones don’t make it, and the eight of us did. Plus the fact all eight of us used our ‘abilities’ to break out of that damn place, taking away all her hard work.” I laughed, picturing her anger every time one of us had escaped.

She hated the fact that for some unknown reason, we could link minds, like the software that had been planted in our brains was connected to some sort of Wi-Fi only the eight of us could access, in the same way as you can link all your home PCs via your home broadband network. So she taught us how to block each other. She wasn’t sure if anyone could gain entry into our minds, and she was scared someone would find out what each of us were, therefore putting us at risk—or so she’d said. I never knew whether to believe her, but I was more than aware of her selfishness. I wondered if that bond had sensed Reid near me when I ran, and had brought me to him subconsciously.

Lowering my eyes to the floor, I gulped. “I’m so sorry.”

“Why?”

“Well, if I’d given her what she wanted, me twenty-four-seven, she wouldn’t have used you and the others to test on.”

“Bullshit!” he barked, making me jump. “You know damn well, you’d never have been enough.”

“Story of my life, Reid.”

His brows puckered. “What?”

“Nothing, ignore me.”

I pressed my hands into the sofa to push myself off, realising quite suddenly, I needed the bathroom. I moved at the same time as the floor did—well I like to think it was the floor that moved and not the fact that I was legless that affected my ability to stand up. My body side-skipped to the left, my right knee bent, flinging my foot in the air as I rather elegantly dove sideways, the whole left side of my body hitting the floor with a sexy thump.

I lay still, blinking, wondering how the fuck I had managed to go from standing to laid on the floor within 0.4 seconds then cringed when I heard a strangled snigger from Reid. I rolled onto my back and groaned. “Maybe I should have eaten that sandwich.”

He laughed harder and peered over the edge of the sofa, a huge grin on his face, one that completely transformed his usual stark fury. “When was the last time you drank?”

I tucked my hands behind my head and pursed my lips in thought. “Around six months into my Judgement residency. Janice told me about . . .” I coughed, covering up my slip up. “I snuck into her private quarters one night, in a mood. I trashed her place and found her bottle of gin. Needless to say, I had a thoroughly enjoyable night.”

His grin turned into a soft smile, his eyes warming but holding a deep sadness. He was silent for a moment, just watching me. I slid my eyes to his, flinching when the connection fooled my mind into thinking it wanted company, the tell-tale shot of warmth alerting me that someone wanted in. I blinked, blocking him and causing him to sigh in frustration.

“You’ll let me inside you one day, Elina.”

I smiled properly at him, a huge mischievous grin erupting as I quirked an eyebrow. “Now that’s a statement that could be taken the wrong way.”

His mouth popped open. Another wide smile gave me a flash of his white teeth. “Little girl,” he whispered in that low gruff voice that sent my stomach into my nether regions. “Maybe I didn’t mean it in the wrong way. Maybe I meant it completely and utterly in the right way.”

It was my turn to still, my eyes widening before he slipped off the sofa and onto the floor beside me. I lost the use of all my organs when he straddled my thighs and dropped his hands to either side of my face with a heavy thud. My breath caught when he leaned in towards me, bringing the tip of his nose to mine. His breath was warm with a subtle trace of cigarette smoke, and strangely, freshly cooked bread. My body decided it liked those scents, warmth spreading throughout my lower belly and my nipples hardening. All the moisture left my mouth and made its way south, making me wonder if it was something scientific, like a portal in your body that took something from one place and delivered it where it was needed. I gulped back a moan when my arousal extended to a completely new degree.