Out of Chances (Taken by the Panther, #2) (3 page)

“Of course I did, Beany baby,” she said in a reproachful voice. “What do you take me for? All medical, government, and school records for the past six years. Haven’t gotten to social media yet.”

She tapped a few keys at her workstation, and windows cascaded across one of Chay’s shared screens.

“Everything since she turned eighteen, just like you asked,” Annie said.

Chay poked through her medical records first. Tara was right—she had been vaccinated for practically every disease in existence. Flu vaccines every year since she had graduated high school. When she was eighteen, she’d gotten vaccinated against yellow fever, meningitis, typhoid, Hepatitis A, and had gotten another polio booster. At twenty, she’d added Japanese encephalitis and rabies. At twenty-two a Tdap booster. In all, he counted eleven different opportunities for her to be injected with shifter factor.

He felt the first warning twinge of a huge headache coming on.

“Are you sure there hasn’t been an outbreak of panther shifters anywhere?” Chay asked, clicking through the records of different clinics and doctors’ offices in a desultory fashion.

Annie chuckled. “You know that’s Ophelia’s department, not mine, but surely we would have heard something if schools were breaking out in a rash of panthers.”

“So that means one of two things,” Chay said. “Either she was targeted specifically, or the other people who are infected haven’t turned yet.”

“Or the other ones just didn’t take,” Annie added.

Chay frowned. Even that was possible, with an older military strain. Everything was speculation at this point, and he wasn’t happy about that. But finding answers sure wasn’t going to be easy.

He poked through Tara’s other records—not just government but school, too. Nothing unusual there. Very few driving incidents, which made sense because as far as he could tell, she didn’t own a car. No arrests. Passport records had her going in and out of the country a number of times over the past few years, which matched up with her time in Sudan and backpacking around the world.

Tara had a small merit-based scholarship, reserved for older students who had “significantly contributed to the wellbeing of his or her local, national, or global community.” Solid grades at a 3.5 GPA. No college debt, though he wasn’t sure whether her parents were paying or she was.

“Financial records, coming at you,” Annie chirped, and more windows appeared on his screen.

Tara had a part-time job manning the desk at a 24-hour fitness center in the early mornings. With three hundred dollars in the bank and one hundred due on her credit card, she was skating by on income, but that wasn’t unusual for a student. No records of plasma donations or anything of that sort that might give someone the opportunity to dose her.

With a slightly guilty twinge for all his snooping, Chay paid off her credit card with a stroke of a key. She didn’t need to have fines for missed payments on top of everything else.

“I’ll grab the social media,” he told Annie.

“Aw, that’s the easy part, anyway,” she said, flipping her hair dismissively before wandering over to the refrigerator and riffling through it.

Whatever had happened, Chay needed to go back farther, before her college years, to see if something in her past had set her on her current path. Tara had an Instagram account that she set to post to Facebook. Most of her Facebook photos seemed to come from there, so he suspected that Instagram was her older account. Taking note of her user name, he switched over, and sure enough, her Instagram was fully public, like most people’s were.

He scrolled through the college photos—selfies with friends in dorms and apartments, at restaurants and college parties, all the normal sorts of things he’d never experienced. He felt like an anthropologist, peering into a foreign culture. He was able to identify her closest friends quickly—Sylvie and Olivia, Piper and Katriona.

Farther back, the occasional glasses of beer or martinis disappeared from the party pictures, and then, abruptly, there was a picture of her standing in a driveway next to a sedan, a pile of luggage around her as she held up a pennant from William and Mary. “Off to #college!” the caption read. “#WilliamandMary #collegerocks #worldsoldestfreshman.”

There were dozens of likes and comments on it—more than any before or since. He stared at it for a moment, trying to see the bright-eyed, grinning girl in the woman with the haunted expression that he now had in his custody. Shaking his head, he scrolled back farther.

And then he groaned as he read the tags. She hadn’t just done the basic European backpacking tour that so many teens dreamed about. She’d gone frakking everywhere. #Kualalumpur. #Marrakech. #GreatWall. #MachuPicchu. She’d clearly horded whatever small income she’d made from working for the NGO at the refugee camp and had used it for a spin around the world.

Which, he admitted, had been pretty appealing to him at the same age, too—though he’d signed up to “travel the world, meet interesting people, and kill them,” as the joke about the military went.

But her whirlwind around-the-world-in-360-days tour meant that he had no idea where to begin finding out where she’d been dosed, if it had even happened then.

Before that, there were other pictures, ones from Sudan. Some consisted of her working in a clinic with patients—cleaning wounds, giving out food, packing supplies. Others were the kind of thing that any teenager would post, selfies with friends, silly poses, bedroom shots. It just so happened that the bedroom was a large tent, and the shots often had a muddy refugee camp in the background. She often looked tired in those pictures despite the smile on her face, but she also looked satisfied. And then there were those of her with another man—a very definitely older man, identified in her photos as Tom.

In the later photos, they were often casually embracing in a way that wasn’t quite overly flirtatious, but they left no doubt in Chay’s mind about the nature of their relationship. He narrowed his eyes reflexively at the sandy-haired man with the short-cropped beard, then called the panther inside him to heel.

But all his prying did nothing but give him an unaccustomed sense of being a peeping Tom, for all that such background checks were routine for him.

Yeah, but I usually haven’t just screwed the person I’m checking up on.

He shrugged off that thought—nothing he could do about it now. But really, the whole thing was an exercise in futility. Nothing he found gave him any hint as to how she’d been dosed—or even how many others might be out there, because if someone had taken the trouble to dose one teenager or twenty-something without her knowledge, he would bet a good chunk of his considerable fortune that she was far from the only one.

How many others were there? And what kind of ticking time bombs were they?

But Chay couldn’t dwell on that thought because his messenger app pinged with three requests at once. He checked the time—10 p.m., a full two hours before he normally went on duty. He sighed and rolled his shoulders.

He’d slept when Tara had, on the way back from Andrews Air Force, wedged into the corner of the van with her head on his lap, then caught a couple of hours in his room before she showed signs of stirring again. But four hours wasn’t enough to be at his peak for a night of hacking—much less to deal with all the crap that came from being nominally in charge of the loose community that was Black Mesa.

He checked his messages. One was from Jen Hardison, in charge of the kitchen, a pissy, snippy one-liner about using frozen vegetables again. Chay snorted. Maybe some people cared. He really didn’t. Frozen kept longer, meant fewer trips to meet the greengrocer’s truck and fewer possible questions about what they were doing and where they were from.

The next was a question about supplies that had somehow not had their RFID tags properly entered and were now missing somewhere in the warehouse caves. He shook his head and forwarded it to the supply manager.

Then there came an update from Torrhanin about the so-called “mind-net” he’d been developing—almost ready, he said, just like he’d said for the past three weeks—plus a request for a meeting about Tara. And that was a request that Chay couldn’t ignore or delegate. With a frown, he pushed back from the table. He wasn’t quite comfortable with Torrhanin coming into the spook shop except when absolutely necessary. He trusted the doctor as far as he trusted any elf, but that wasn’t saying much.

“I’m off to Narnia,” he told Annie.

“We’ll still be here when you come back,” she said cheerfully. “Unless of course time accelerates suddenly and we’re all dead because two hundred years have passed.”

“Right,” he agreed, and then he left to see what the elf wanted.

T
ara fluttered back out of unconsciousness and opened her eyes against the great weight that seemed to drag at them. The world seemed strange, distorted, as if she were looking at it through a thick piece of warped glass, and the sounds came to her ears both muffled and too loud at once.

She was moving, but she was lying down on some sort of bed. A gurney, she realized. The ceiling above her was white and curved like the interior of an egg, except that it glowed. With great difficultly, she made herself concentrate on the voices around her.

“An IUD. If that had perforated the wall of her uterus—” a light female voice said.

“Well, it didn’t, now, did it? And the problem’s solved.” This voice was also female, though a little deeper.

“What doctor would do an insertion on a shifter? It’s criminal negligence,” the first voice said, tinged with outrage.

“A human one, Rho,” said the second voice patiently. “The chances that he or she had any idea of what the shifter was or what that meant are almost none.”

“Humans and their damned worthless degrees—”

“She’ll be coming out of sedation now,” the second voice said. “Everything’s fine now. Let’s not upset her.”

Suddenly, a face leaned over Tara, coming into her field of view. It was a woman with the peculiar slanting eyes and pale blue-tinged skin of Dr. Torrhanin. Oh, and pointy ears. Those were pretty hard to miss. She was wearing a circlet much like his except that the jewel or whatever it was in the center of her forehead was a darker shade of blue.

“Can you hear me? Blink twice for yes,” she asked in her light voice.

With great difficulty, Tara blinked—once, twice.

“Excellent! I am Lady Rhohanashim, First Doctor of the Order of the Lily.” The capital letters slotted into place. “Most among you call me Dr. Rho, and that will be sufficient for informal address. Dr. Torrhanin told me that you requested a female doctor, and so I performed the procedure that you requested and gave you your prophylactic injection. Everything went perfectly. If you understand what I said, I’d like you to give me a little nod.”

Tara debated for a moment before even trying to nod. First Doctor? Order of what? But she did nod because she figured that Dr. Rho was asking whether she heard all the words rather than whether she understood the more obscure references. Her head moved fractionally.

“Excellent!” Dr. Rho said again. “Dr. Marishataen here took over your sedation, and you should find that you are not as queasy as you were during your arrival.” She seemed to choose the word
sedation
diplomatically. “We couldn’t risk a shift during the procedure, and we understand that you are under a great deal of stress at the moment, so it was best for all concerned that you be sedated one more time. It shouldn’t be necessary to do it again.”

Tara found that her throat was working again, too. “Good,” she said thickly. No matter what their intentions, being stabbed with needles and sprays and knocked unconscious wasn’t exactly a great way to lower her overall anxiety level.

The gurney that she was on stopped, and there was a flurry of movement beyond her range of vision as Dr. Rho clasped one of her hands in both of her own. Tara had a moment of confusion before she realized that the doctor was removing an IV from the back of her hand, pressing a piece of gauze over it as she did so. Then she rubbed the spot with her thumb through the gauze once, twice, and when she lifted her hand, only a fading bruise remained as evidence.

The doctor made the gauze disappear into a yellow biohazard bag that she pulled from the folds of her robe. And it was a robe, an open-fronted white robe instead of a regular lab coat.

Because even that had to be weird, Tara thought.

The gurney started to move again, and Tara realized that it must have stopped for a door to open because they went through the doorway from the brilliant white corridor to one that was the same slightly dingy battleship gray as her cell at Black Mesa. After the brightness of where she’d just been, her new surroundings seemed almost depressingly dark. And as she heard the sound of the door shut behind her, she suddenly realized that in the other place, there had been the sound of singing, so very faint and far away that she hadn’t noticed it until it was gone.

The effects of the sedation were continuing to fade, and she turned her head to get a look at Dr. Marishataen. Her hair was honey-colored next to Dr. Rho’s silvery blond, and though both their faces were perfectly unlined, Dr. Marishataen had a softness about hers that made her seem younger. They were each keeping pace on either side of the gurney, and as Tara craned her neck, she realized that no one was actually pushing it along.

“Um,” she said. “You have robot beds here?”

Dr. Rho raised an eyebrow, but Dr. Marishataen cracked a smile. “Robot beds. Two hundred years ago, you would have called it magic.”

“Uh, thanks?” Tara hazarded.

“Not robot,” Dr. Marishataen said as the gurney’s back raised so that Tara was in a semi-sitting position. “It is what you might call science, not magic, but it is a science that is unlike yours.”

“Okay,” Tara said, for lack of anything else to say. She was, after all, being wheeled down a corridor in a secret facility by two elves on a self-powered gurney.

Either that or she was crazy. The second seemed more and more likely by the moment.