UnSouled (46 page)

She hears voices—whispers—and she locks onto them, hoping something they say can give her an advantage.

“You three around back,” the team leader whispers. “Wait for the signal.”

Then someone else whispers, “He’s here. I can almost smell him.”

Suddenly Grace knows all she needs to know.

She bursts out of the room to see Risa and Connor in the midst of that kiss she knew they’d take.

“Grace!” says Risa “What are you—”

But before she can finish, they all hear the double crash of both the back and front doors being kicked in. She pushes them into Cam and Connor’s room, closing the door behind her. Cam leaps to his feet fully awake, as Grace knew he would
be. She takes control, knowing they don’t have much time. She knows this particular brand of salvation is only a fifty-fifty chance at best.

“Risa!” she whispers. “Get under the bed. Connor—facedown in your pillow. Now!” Then she turns to Cam. “And you—stay exactly where you are!”

Cam stares at her in disbelief “Are you nuts? They know we’re here!”

Pounding footsteps on the stairs. Only seconds now.

“No,” Grace tells him, just before she squeezes beneath the bed with Risa. “They know
you’re
here.”

64 • Cam

Two men in black armed with silenced tranq Magnums burst into the room. One aims his weapon at Cam, and Cam reflexively puts his hands up, furious to be caught so easily, but he knows that resisting will only get him tranq’d.

The second attacker doesn’t hesitate, however, in tranq’ing the kid on the bed. Connor flinches from the shot and goes limp.

“You’re a hard man to find, Mr. Comprix,” says the guard with the weapon aimed squarely at Cam’s chest. It almost makes him laugh.

“Me? Do you have any idea who you just tranq’d?”

“We don’t care about the SlotMongers you’ve been slumming with,” he says. “We’re here for you.”

Cam stares at him in amazement—and suddenly he realizes the awful and awesome power he’s been handed. The power to save and to destroy. He instantly knows now that even in capture he will be a hero no matter what he does. The question is what kind of hero does he want to be? And to whom?

65 • Roberta

She does not enter the house until she’s been given the all clear by the team leader. Inside, the men continue in high alert, even though their quarry has been caught. The shrill cries of a small child blare like a car alarm.

“We tranq’d the mother,” the team leader tells her, “but we’re worried about tranq’ing the kid. The dosage might kill it.”

“Good call,” says Roberta. “We lost neither our element of surprise, nor our humanity tonight.” Still, the crying child is a nuisance. “Close its door. I’m sure it will cry itself back to sleep.”

She follows the team leader upstairs, where two more of Proactive Citizenry’s takedown force have Cam pushed up against a wall in a dark bedroom and are in the process of handcuffing him behind his back. She reaches over and flicks on the light.

“Must these things always be done in the dark?”

Once the handcuffs are snapped shut, she approaches him slowly. “Turn him to face me.”

He’s turned toward her, and she looks him over. He says nothing. “You don’t look much worse for the wear,” she says.

He glares at her. “The fugitive life suits me.”

“That’s a matter of opinion.”

“So how did you find me?”

She runs her fingers through his hair, knowing he hates when she does that but also knowing he can’t stop her while handcuffed. “You had already disappeared off the standard grid by the time I realized you were gone. I had thought you left the country, but you were far more clever than that. It
never occurred to me that you’d take refuge on a ChanceFolk reservation—or that they’d even give you refuge. But People of Chance are an unpredictable lot, aren’t they? In the end your thumbprint—or should I say Wil Tashi’ne’s thumbprint—came up when the ID of someone named Bees-Neb Hebííte was scanned at an iMotel.”

He grimaces, probably remembering the exact time and place he touched that ID, thereby leaving the incriminating print.

Roberta clicks her tongue at him. “Really, Cam, an iMotel? You were made for Fairmonts and Ritz-Carltons.”

“Now what am I made for?”

“Undecided.” She looks at the unconscious young man lying on the bed. “Can I assume I have the pleasure of meeting Mr. Hebííte?”

A pause, and then Cam says, “Yep. That’s him.”

She sits down on the bed, not even bothering to inspect the unconscious kid. “He must have been the star of the reservation parading you around there,” Roberta says, mostly just to get a rise out of Cam. “If you stayed there, you might have evaded us for a good long time. Why didn’t you?”

Cam shrugs and finally gives her his famous grin. “Phileas Fogg,” he says. “I wanted to see the world.”

“Well, you didn’t quite make eighty days, but I hope it was sufficient.” She turns to the team leader. “Time to wrap this up.”

“Do we take the others?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Roberta chides. “We’ve gotten what we came for. I have no desire to complicate things with kidnapping.”

“But taking me—that’s not kidnapping?” Cam asks.

“No,” Roberta says, happy to take the bait. “According to the law, it would be considered the retrieval of stolen property.
In fact, I could press charges against everyone in this house, but I won’t. I’ve no need to be vindictive.”

They haul him out to the car, but gently so, by Roberta’s orders. Upstairs the child continues to cry, but the sound is greatly muffled when they pull the fractured front door closed. The mother, whoever she is, and the rest of this unseemly crew will eventually regain consciousness to take care of the irascible toddler. If not by morning, then a few hours later.

They drive off with Cam seated in the back of the sedan next to Roberta, handcuffs still on, although he’s not struggling against them. Now that Cam has freed his grin, he won’t stop. She has to admit it’s a bit unnerving.

“I assume the senator and the general were fuming when I left.”

“On the contrary,” Roberta tells him happily. “They never knew that you left. I told them that you and I were going back to Hawaii for a few weeks before you reported to them. That you wished to spend some time at the clinic for a motivational makeover. And, of course, that’s where we’re now going. So that you can have some mild cortical retuning.”

“Cortical retuning . . . ,” he echoes.

“Only to be expected,” Roberta tells him. “You’ve been prone to quite a lot of wrongful thinking ever since you were first rewound. But I’m happy to tell you that I have an effective way of taking what’s wrong within that wonderful mind of yours . . . and making it right.”

Roberta can’t help but take pleasure in her victory as she watches the grin finally leave his face.

66 • Connor

Connor opens his eyes to the same room and the same bed he had been traq’d in. He knows this can’t be right. They came for them, didn’t they?
No,
he thinks.
Grace knew better. They came for Cam.

“Welcome back from Tranqistan.”

He turns his head to see Sonia sitting in a chair beside him. He tries to push himself up, but feels dizzy, so he lets his elbows slide out from under him, and his head hits the pillow, his brain clanging inside him like the clapper of a bell.

“Easy now. I’d think with all the times you’ve been tranq’d, you know to take it slow.”

He’s about to ask where Risa is, but then she appears at the door. “Is he awake?”

“Barely.” Sonia grabs her cane and rises with a grunt, vacating the seat for Risa. “It’s almost noon. Time to open up shop, or the crowds may bust the door down.” But before she leaves the room, she pats Connor comfortingly on the leg. “We’ll talk later. I’ll tell you everything you want to know about my husband. Or at least what this fool brain of mine still remembers.”

Connor smiles at that. “I’m sure you remember things back to the Stone Age.”

“Don’t be a wiseass.”

Then she waddles out, and Risa takes the seat. She also takes Connor’s hand. He squeezes back, and unlike the day before, he does it wholeheartedly.

“I’m glad we let you sleep it off without waking you. You needed it.”

“You don’t get rest during tranq sleep. You just go away.” He clears his throat, to remove a persistent frog. “So what happened?”

Risa explains how she and Grace were never even found under the bed and how Cam was collared, then taken away. Connor is amazed with their luck—but maybe he shouldn’t be. If the mission of that task force was to simply capture Cam, they couldn’t care less about his travel companions. Get in, get out. Their mission was accomplished, and they had no idea the forest they had missed for the tree.

“Cam could have turned us all in, but he didn’t,” Risa says. “He sacrificed himself for us.”

“He was going down anyway,” Connor points out. “It wasn’t exactly a sacrifice.”

“Give him some credit—by turning us in he would have bought himself some serious bargaining power.” She thinks for a moment, her grip on Connor’s hand loosening slightly. “He’s not the monster you think he is.”

She waits for Connor to respond to that, but he’s still too tired and cranky from the tranquilizer to agree with her. And he might agree—after all, Cam had given them the information on Proactive Citizenry. Still, his motives seem to have too many layers to be anything but cloudy.

“Cam saved us, Connor—at least give him that.”

He gives her something that could, from a certain angle, be considered a reluctant nod. “What do you think they’ll do with him?”

“He’s their golden child,” Risa says. “They’ll clean up the tarnish and make him shine again.” Then she smiles, her thoughts drifting off to him. “Of course, Cam would point out that gold doesn’t tarnish.”

That smile is a little too warm, and although Connor knows he’s playing with fire, he dares to say, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were in love with him.”

She holds his gaze, a little coolly. “Do you really want to go there?”

“No,” Connor admits.

But Risa takes him there anyway. “I love what he did for us. I love that his heart is purer than anyone else believes. I love that he’s far more innocent than he is jaded, but doesn’t even know it.”

“And you love that he’s completely infatuated with you.”

Risa smiles and tosses her hair like a shampoo model. “Well, that goes without saying.” The move is so unlike her, it makes them both laugh.

Connor sits up, his head no longer spinning when he does. “I’m glad you chose me before they came for him.”

“I didn’t chose anything,” Risa says, just the slightest bit annoyed.

“Well, I’m just glad,” says Connor gently. “That’s all.” He touches her face with Roland’s hand, the shark only inches away, but finally realizes that it will never be close enough to bite.

•   •   •

Sonia, still downstairs, decides that taking a tranq for the team is more than enough to ask of Hannah. She can’t ask Hannah to keep fugitives in her home after last night’s attack.

“I’m sorry—but I’ve got Dierdre to think about now,” Hannah tells them with tears in her eyes. Holding the toddler in her arms, she wishes them all Godspeed. Connor finds he has a lump in his throat for the storked baby he saved and will never see again.

Sonia drives him, Risa, and Grace back to her shop in her dark-windowed Suburban. She decides to keep the shop closed today, and there in the back room, the five of them talk of issues weighty enough, it seems, to collapse the floor beneath them. Connor insists that Grace be included because, although she
bounces her knees impatiently and appears to have little interest in the conversation, all of Grace’s appearances are deceiving.

“A reliable source working with Proactive Citizenry told me a very interesting story,” Connor begins. He has no idea if Trace Neuhauser even survived the crash in the Salton Sea. He thinks not, because Trace would never have allowed the massacres that Starkey is now orchestrating in the name of freedom. But at least Trace was able to pass what he knew on to Connor before he was forced to pilot that plane for Starkey. “My source talked about how the name of Janson Rheinschild still strikes fear into the hearts of Proactive Citizenry’s inner circle.”

Sonia gives a satisfied and somewhat sinister laugh. “Glad to hear it. I hope he’s always the ghost in their lousy machine.”

“So it’s true that they”—Connor tries to choose his words carefully, but realizes there’s no delicate way to say it—“that they took him out?”

“They didn’t have to,” Sonia says. “When you tear a man down to his roots, it doesn’t leave much behind. Janson died a broken man. He willed himself to die along with his dreams, and I couldn’t stop him.”

Risa, who’s hearing all this for the first time, asks, “Who was he?”

“My husband, dear.” And then Sonia heaves a sorrowful sigh. “And my partner in crime.”

That gets Grace’s attention, although she doesn’t say anything just yet.

“Proactive Citizenry wiped him from their history,” Connor says.

“
Their
history? They wiped him from
world
history! Did you know we won the Nobel Prize?”

Risa just stares at her dumbfounded, and her expression makes Sonia laugh.

“Bioscience, dear. Back then antiquing was just my hobby.”

“This was before the Heartland War?” she asks.

Sonia nods. “Wars have a way of reinventing people. And making too many things disappear.”

Connor’s chair scrapes on the wooden floor as he pulls it forward. “Lev and I looked for his name everywhere online. Totally gone. But there was one article that misspelled it—that was the only way we found him.” Then Connor adds, “Your picture was in the photo. That’s how we knew you were somehow involved.”

Sonia turns to spit on the ground. “Deleting us from history was the ultimate insult. But it made it easier for me to disappear from them. From everyone.”

“We know you started Proactive Citizenry,” Connor says, noting Risa’s jaw drop again.

“
That
was Janson. I was out of it by then. I saw the writing on the wall and knew it was in blood—but he was an idealist. His finest trait and his deepest flaw.” Her eyes get moist and she points to a tissue box on the cluttered desk. Grace hands it to her. She blots her eyes once, then doesn’t tear up again.