Trance (26 page)

“I don’t think he’ll attack you here again,” Seward said. “He has to know you’ll be planning for it. He may wait until you’re off-site. He’s got time on his side, as well as the element of surprise. He can wait while we sit and squirm.”

“What if you’re wrong?” Renee asked.

Seward shrugged. “Then, I’m wrong. This isn’t an exact science, Flex. We can’t predict the future.”

“I agree with Dr. Seward,” Gage said. “Specter knows he hurt us and must realize we’ve kicked up security measures. He’ll wait.”

“Agreed,” I said. “And it’s another good reason to keep this interview location and time as guarded as possible. A studio full of innocent people is no place for a brawl.”

“I have a short list of locations,” McNally said. She sounded startled, as if she hadn’t expected me to still do the interview. “Six networks on standby until tomorrow evening. No one knows what’s going on until half an hour before we show up with you and Ms. Perkins.”

“Good.” I gave her a cold look. “Until then, any suggestions on tracking Specter will be greatly appreciated. As long as they don’t involve self-sacrifice.”

Ethan ignored me. No one had suggestions.

The meeting adjourned.

At lunch, we learned that the interview was planned for early the next morning. Five o’clock was torture, but secrecy came with minor sacrifices, and sleep was one of them. Gage and William volunteered to go with me. Renee mumbled something about beauty sleep, so I let her off the hook. I just wanted it over.

Gage had suggested he drive up to Fairview and do some sniffing around. It seemed like a good idea, until McNally informed him that the site of the fire had already been cleaned out, post–police investigation. Nothing was left. So the day passed uneventfully. No more shocking revelations. No attacks. No great epiphanies about Specter, either. We were in a frustrating holding pattern.

With nothing else to do, Renee, William and I decided to spend the early evening in the gym. Keeping fit wasn’t difficult, given the vast array of exercise equipment available in the Base.

I decided to start simple and set myself up on a stationary bike. Working three jobs and eating when I could afford it meant I looked good in tight leather, but it didn’t mean much for proper muscle tone and endurance.

Renee and William attacked a bizarre-looking resistance
machine called a Flexmaster 5000. It had rows of bowed metal rods that looked like mechanical tentacles, and it took them a while to figure out how they attached to the weight bars. I observed from my bike as they joked and teased with the ease of a couple who’d known each other for years, instead of days, picking up a fifteen-year-old flirtation as if no time had passed. Just like me, Renee had faced her fear, and I was glad for them. After thirty minutes, I switched to a stair climber, and they moved to the free weights.

Marco and Gage wandered in a while later. In sweatpants and a loose shirt, Gage was obviously there for a workout, and my irritation level soared. He’d been slammed in the chest with a block of ice the day before and he had a bruise the size of a small child to prove it.

“Hey, guys!” Renee said, waving.

Marco waved back, then stepped to the side. He leaned against the wall to watch—which I appreciated, since his arm was still in a sling and three fingers still broken. Apparently Gage had less sense, because he headed straight for one of the weight benches.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked, stepping off the stair climber.

Gage froze mid-stride, every muscle going rigid. Okay, maybe I could have phrased my question more diplomatically and used a gentler tone. He turned his head and gave me a funny look I couldn’t decipher.

“Working out with everyone else,” he said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Which it was, and that was the problem. “No, you’re not.”

“I’m not?”

“You’re injured, Gage, and you should be taking it easy.”

His indecipherable expression shifted squarely into anger. “I don’t see you taking it easy.”

“I didn’t get knocked unconscious by a chunk of ice.”

“Teresa—”

“No, Gage, you are not working out with us.”

And there it was—the shuttered, cut-off Gage I was so good at producing. He squared his shoulders, pivoted neatly on one foot, and marched out of the gym.

I watched the door swing shut and heard the bang. I didn’t chase him, though I wanted to. I wanted to grab him and apologize for doing that in front of the others. I’d just embarrassed the hell out of him, and I wasn’t even sure why. Hello, overreaction.

Renee and William quickly returned to their work on the free weights. Marco shuffled his feet and fixed his attention on the floor. I ignored them all, flabbergasted and furious. Flabbergasted at his walking out on me, and furious for thinking a few hours of sex could bridge the emotional wall he’d kept carefully between us since we met. Even more furious for not trusting Gage to know his own limits when it came to injury and personal training. For letting my worry and my feelings for him affect my judgment so badly.

Dr. Seward was right.

Shit.

If Gage were ever under Specter’s influence, I couldn’t deliver the killing shot. I knew I couldn’t when Seward asked me, and I knew it again in the gymnasium. I would rather let
Gage/Specter kill me than watch him, or my other friends, die at my hands. It created a liability on the team: me. A bad position for a leader to be in.

“Teresa?” Marco had wandered away from the wall, concern furrowing his brow.

“I’m fine,” I said, shrugging it off and hoping I managed a nonchalant smile. “I’m going to get out of here. You guys enjoy your workout.”

I scooted before they had a chance to argue. I needed space.

Hoping a shower would clear my head, I returned to the Housing Unit. It felt odd being in the bathrooms alone and able to see. The memories of my shower with Gage were still so fresh, I thought I could feel him standing behind me. Watching me intently, memorizing my curves and flaws.

No. I refocused my attention on Specter. He could attack at any moment, through anyone in the complex whose mind was weak enough to exploit. His victims so far, from the greasy blonde to a near-comatose Janel, had been compromised, whether from drugs and liquor or from injury. We were vulnerable to him, and I hated it. I also didn’t know what the hell to do about it.

I turned and let the water cascade through my hair.

The door squeaked. Gage appeared in the shower archway moments later, a towel cinched around his waist. The bruise on his chest still stood out like a splash of blue and black paint; it didn’t seen to bother him. Those haunted shadows were back beneath his eyes.

“Hey,” he said, surprised.

“Hey.” I wiped water from my eyes. “By the way you ran out of the gym, I thought you’d be halfway to Long Beach by now.”

“I’m sorry I acted like that.”

I blinked. I was the one who was supposed to be doing the apologizing. “I had no right, Gage.”

“You were just doing your job.”

I planted both hands on my hips, almost wishing he was angry with me. It would be easier if he was angry. Angry Gage was less likely to shut down than Quiet Contemplative Gage. “You drive me batshit, you do realize this.”

He smiled. “My sinister plan is working, then.”

“That wasn’t a compliment.” His smile stayed, though its intensity faded. I continued, falling headfirst into my frustration. “You get angry with me for good reason, then apologize for it. You seem to want to be with me, but you won’t talk to me. You’re standing there in a towel, and all I want to do is rip it off and rerun last night with my eyes wide open, but what happens after? We go back to being Cipher and Trance and forget the rest?”

Utter bewilderment telegraphed across his face. My words stayed in the air, an invisible barrier between us. Many long seconds passed, marked by the constant spray of water against my back. Bewilderment slowly faded to resignation. He padded toward me.

No. Past me. Crap.

One of the scars on his abdomen stood out, contrasting sharply with the bruised skin. It definitely wasn’t an appendix scar. He’d never mentioned how he got them; I never thought
he’d tell me if I asked, and now I wanted to know more than almost anything. I was desperate to know
him
. To prove that last night hadn’t been a huge mistake.

“Tell me something truthful, Gage.”

He stopped in front of my stall. “Like what?”

“I don’t care. Something I don’t know about you, as long as it’s honest.”

“You don’t think I’ve been honest with you?”

“I think you tell me only as much as makes you comfortable, and you know what? Relationships are uncomfortable. They’re hard, and they only work when two people are open with each other. And given what we’re up against right now and the sheer odds against us winning …”

“What, Teresa? Say it.”

“I can’t invest in a casual relationship with you when I know it’s going to affect my judgment. It will, because it has already, and it should stop right here where it began.”

He narrowed his eyes. “This started before last night. For me it started the moment I saw you in Bakersfield.”

I shivered under the powerful emotion in his voice. He continued to stand in front of my stall. Indecision played across his face, until something finally won. “I didn’t move to Portland to help a friend. I moved there to try and save my brother.”

His … brother? “Jasper died in the War.”

“My foster brother, Nathan. He was two years younger than me, already with the family I was first fostered with.” A sad smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Nate was a good guy who made a lot of bad choices over the years.
He got mixed up with the wrong people in Portland. Disappeared. I went to look for him. He turned up in a Dumpster two months later.” Anger and grief flashed briefly across his face—a look with which I was all too familiar. “I was too late to save him.”

Gage stepped into the next stall and turned on the faucet. He adjusted the temperature of the spray, testing it with his fingers. I watched his slow, deliberate movements. I wanted to go to him, hold him, console him. I didn’t. If he’d wanted that, he wouldn’t have put a six-inch-thick, four-foot-tall tile barrier between us.

“But you stayed anyway,” I said, hoping to keep the conversation going, break a few bricks out of his wall now that it was showing some cracks.

“St. Louis was never my home, so I had no reason to go back,” he said to the water. “I met a guy who lived across the hall from the apartment I was renting. He ran a teen work release facility, and he got me in touch with some people.” He flexed his shoulders, as though buying time before saying the rest. “I joined a corrections officer training program.”

I stared, not sure I’d heard him right over the roar of the showerheads. Corrections officer. That explained some things.

“It fit,” he said. “I never would have thought of it on my own, and yet being a CO worked. It was damned hard, don’t get me wrong, even working with juveniles. But if one kid got out and stayed out, we considered it worthwhile.”

The irony that he’d been a corrections officer was not lost on me. Nor was the weight of his story—the familiar search for a job that meant something, and finding one that gave
him a sense of purpose. He’d found something in corrections I’d never managed to find as a waitress.

My gaze dropped to the pale lines cutting across his back and abdomen. “Is that how you got those scars?”

Gage closed his eyes and put his face directly under the spray. He stayed there for almost a full minute, until I decided he wasn’t going to answer. Then he pulled back, blinked water from his eyes, and turned to face me.

“A couple of years ago, some kids on my block thought I ratted them out to another CO. After they got out of solitary, they cornered me in the gym. I was always a good fighter, but it was four to one.” Even though he recounted the event without details or emotion, I saw it clearly in my mind. Felt the accompanying fear and rage, and wanted to smash those four teenage offenders into pulp for hurting Gage.

He continued: “I spent a week in the hospital and was back to work a month later. I kept my guard up for a long, long time. I didn’t want to be distracted ever again, to be cornered like that because I wasn’t paying attention to my job.” He paused. “It’s one reason I’ve held back from you. The way you spin me around scares me.”

I was struck dumb by the confession, and since all I could do was stare at him, he returned to his shower. I watched him soap up a washcloth and get to work, while his words tumbled around in my head. “One reason?”

He quirked an eyebrow. “What?”

“I was a distraction, one reason you held back. What was the other?”

“Doesn’t matter now.”

“No?”

“No, because you’re not a distraction, Teresa. None of that old shit should matter anymore.”

He was right. Our personal neuroses would never be far from reach—they were too much a part of ourselves. We didn’t have to let them control us, though. We could be more than the sum of our parts, by accepting what we were and how we felt, instead of denying it. Use it to our advantage.

“What are you thinking so hard about?” he asked.

“Our next move.”

“Which is?”

“Specter, as always.” I reached for my own washcloth. “I keep trying to puzzle out ways to capture him or locate his physical body, and I always come back to Ethan’s suggestion.”

“Using bait?”

“Yes. Not Ethan, though, he’s too weak. I doubt Specter would go for him even if Ethan let his guard down long enough. That isn’t even the big problem.”

“What is the big problem?”

“Holding onto Specter’s mind once we’ve got it.” I squeezed the washcloth, watching suds form. I liked this—talking out the problem with Gage and getting his input. “Even if I could make a force field to hold his consciousness, I couldn’t keep it up long enough to make a difference. We need a more permanent solution, some way to get both Specter and his host into stasis or something.”

“Stasis?”

“Or something. We just need to keep him in one place, away from his physical body while we search for it.”