Born to Darkness (66 page)

“Who’s going to go with you to China, Michelle? Is it going to be Anna or Nika …?”

“Nika,” Anna said. “It’s going to be Nika.”

Mac looked over at her, her gaze hard, a nearly palpable warning. “Number two, it’s not your choice,” she told Anna almost sternly, then turned to the girl, Rayonna. Somehow Anna knew that the pregnant girl’s name was Rayonna. “Number one, don’t call me Michelle, little girl. You can address me as Dr. Mackenzie.”

“The choice is yours,” Rayonna said. “Dr. Mackenzie.” Her tone was taunting, but Mac had scored a minor psychological victory of sorts.

“I choose them both,” Mac said. “They
both
come with me.”

“Anna’s not worth the jet fuel,” Rayonna said. “If you insist on both, then they’ll both die.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Mac said. “Nika’s too valuable.”

“She’s powerful, which makes her dangerous,” Rayonna said. “They’re working, right now, on figuring out a way to put her into stasis—suspended animation. If she lives, they’ll do the same for you, Dr. Mackenzie. So you see the need for leverage, as you call it, is only temporary. I’m afraid you won’t get to see much of China, since you’ll live out the remainder of your life in a stasis tank, fighting off drug-induced nightmares.”

Dear God. “Kill her, Mac,” Anna said fiercely. “Just kill this bitch now and try to save yourself!”

Something’s happening
.

Nika looked over at Joseph who was still sitting beside her in the shielded area he’d created in her mind. His head was tilted slightly, as if he were listening to something, hard. He stood up in one swift motion, letting loose a string of words Nika had never heard in that order before. And he didn’t apologize afterward.

Instead, he turned to her.
They’ve activated your drug pump. They’re trying to knock you out
.

She stood up, too.
Oh, my God—they did that before—it works so fast. You should go. Now! Before it—

I’m keeping it from circulating into your bloodstream
, Joseph told her.
But I can’t do that for very long. Your body will absorb the drug in other ways. We’ve got about … three minutes, tops
.

Oh, God.
Do they know?
Nika asked him.
That we’re planning to …
Escape. She still didn’t want to think the word, in case they were somehow reading her thoughts.

Joseph didn’t sugarcoat his answer.
They might
. He looked into the distance, and she’d learned that meant he was accessing information via his own physical body.
The illegal med scanners are still operational and the power grid’s still up. That’s not good
.

He turned back to her and gazed down into her eyes.
Nika, if I stay, this drug in your system will impact me. It shouldn’t happen that way, I know, but it does
.

Then you should go
, she told him, unable to keep her eyes from welling with tears.
You
have
to go!

He didn’t want to—she could see it on his face, in his eyes.

And God, what if, after he left, he was no longer able to get back to her? What if they moved her, somewhere far away, someplace where their connection couldn’t activate?

What if he couldn’t find her?

She didn’t have to voice her thoughts, Joseph knew exactly what she was thinking, and he pulled her, hard, into his arms and hugged her tightly.
I will find you
, he told her.
Whatever happens, wherever they take you—believe this, Nika: I WILL FIND YOU
.

I do believe you
. Nika wrapped her arms around him, hugging him back just as tightly. And she knew they weren’t really hugging. Their physical selves were in two different places. But he felt solid and real as he rested his cheek against the top of her head.

And she wanted this moment—this somehow dangerously dizzying feeling of closeness and belonging and deeply abiding trust—never to end.

I’m so sorry
, he said.
I promised I’d stay with you and … What the hell?

Joseph pulled away from her, enough to look down at her with an expression of total surprise, his hands still on her shoulders. “What are you doing?” She saw and heard him so clearly, it was as if he’d spoken aloud.

“I’m not doing anything,” she answered.

“Oh, no,” he said. “Nika, you are. You have access to significantly more of your power right now. I can feel it. It’s … unreal …”

“But it’s good, right?” she asked him, gazing up at him.

Joseph smiled, and her heart leaped. “Sweetheart, it’s fantastic. I don’t know what you’re doing, but … Keep doing it, for as long as you can.”

Nika nodded as she looked up at him, but his smile faded as he swayed slightly.

“Neek,” he started and she knew that, even though she didn’t feel it yet, the drug was starting to affect him.

“Go,” she told him, forcing herself not to cry. She lifted her chin. “I’ll be okay.”

Joseph touched her hair, her cheek, his fingers warm against her face. “I’ll see you soon,” he promised, and with a shimmer of light, he disappeared.

The pregnant girl just laughed at Anna’s vehement request for Mac to wreak havoc, and Mac knew, without a doubt, that any attempt she made to appeal to the girl’s humanity was going to fail.

And as the girl turned back to Mac and said again, “Anna or
Nika?” Adding, “And if you say
both
again, I’ll open the door, and Cristopher will come in and kill this one right here and now.” She smiled tightly. “Of course, if you say
Nika
he’ll do the same. And if you say
Anna
, someone else will go into Nika’s room and—”

Anna was ready to die. Mac could feel the intense emotion radiating off of her, along with waves of her love for her little sister.

Little sister …

“How about if I don’t say
both
, but I also don’t pick Anna
or
Nika?” Mac said. “How about, instead, I let you know a little something about my so-called worthless friend here? What if I told you that Nika’s not Anna’s sister.” She paused for dramatic effect. “Nika is Anna’s daughter.”

Anna made a sound of surprise, but she was a smart young woman, and she understood why Mac should lie like that—that it would buy them at least nine months of time—because she added, “It’s true. I was … raped when I was, um,
twelve
and my mother claimed Nika as her own.”

Mac put it into plain English, in the event that the pregnant girl—ironically—couldn’t put two and two together. “If Anna’s had one child as special as Nika, it’s likely that she’ll have another, even though she herself is not a fountain.” She tried not to choke on the word, it was so repugnant.

But the girl got it. The look on her face was one of pure horror and disgust. “You
want
to be a breeder? I’d rather be dead!”

She started toward Anna with such burning hatred in her eyes, that Anna said, “Mac?”

But the door opened, and a voice called out, sharply, “Rayonna!”

The girl stopped, but she stood there for a moment, just staring at Anna, her chest heaving with each ragged breath she took. And now the anguish that was pouring forth from her was so intense, Mac had to cling to the bed, for fear of pulling herself free and tearing the hooks from her wrists.

“Rayonna.”

“You poor thing,” she whispered to Anna, before she turned and hurried out of the room.

It was only then, as the man closed the door behind her, that Mac turned to look at him.

“You!” Anna breathed. She turned to Mac. “It’s the man from Nika’s dream!”

He was hideously scarred, but even worse, his emotional grid was similar to that of Devon Caine. With one exception. He knew
exactly
what it was that he did.

He was evil, incarnate, and he made Mac’s skin crawl.

“So you wish to be one of our breeders?” he asked Anna in his oddly slurred speech. “We can certainly arrange that—consider it done.”

And he took what looked like a hand control out of the pocket of his bloodstained lab coat and pressed a button.

“Whoa!” Anna said, as her hospital bed adjusted, releasing her legs from their restraints but then strapping her feet down into what looked like OB-GYN examination stirrups, as her knees were pushed up …

“Wait,” Mac said. “You need to scan her. Find out when she’s ovulating.” She looked at Anna. She had been certain that the time that she’d bought them included a week—or more—of medical tests.

“That’s not the way we do it here,” the scar-faced man said with a grimace that was meant to be a smile.

Bach opened his eyes to find himself in the back of an OI van, parked just down the street from the Organization’s Washington Street building.

For a moment, he was confused. He’d been having an impossibly vivid dream, in which beautiful Anna Taylor had been laughing and naked and pulling him down onto the bed in the room where he’d slept for most of his childhood. She’d kissed him and …

Ho-kay.
That
had been extremely realistic, but it was still just a dream, induced by the powerful drug that had been shot through Nika’s system.

And it wasn’t even
his
dream—it was a memory of the dream Anna had had—the one that he’d stood there watching, as if his feet had been glued to the floor.

Still he had to exhale hard as he sat up, which scared the hell out of Charlie, who’d been assigned to feed information to his seemingly unconscious form.

“Holy shit,” Charlie said, quickly adding, “sir! Is everything all right?”

Bach had no idea how much time had passed, so he checked the clock on the computer screen. He hadn’t been trapped in that dream for too long, thank God. “Nika’s been drugged—I think they’re planning on moving her. I had to get out—it was affecting me and … I need a current sit-rep,” he ordered.

“The med scanners and power grid are both still operational,” Charlie reported. “There’s been no change.”

“Any luck locating Mac and Anna?”

Charlie shook his head, no. “We only know they were brought to the Washington Street building—we tracked the helicopter to their roof port—it’s still there.”

“Tell Analysis to keep searching,” Bach ordered. “Give me something good here, Charlie. Any word from Shane Laughlin?”

“None, sir,” Charlie said. “But he
is
inside. Last report has him in the elevator, which is
very
good and—holy shit! Sir, apologies, you were looking a little green, so I just checked your jot scan? And you’re integrating at eighty-one percent.”

What?

Bach scrambled to look at the computer over Charlie’s shoulder and
holy shit
was right. He’d spiked—and was continuing to hang there at that higher level.

“With all due respect, sir,” Charlie said, “that’s nine percent higher than your usual seventy-two. That’s a
massive
increase. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone—
ever
—clocking in above seventy-eight.” He turned and looked at Bach, his eyes wide. “What exactly did you do?”

“We’ll worry about that later,” Bach said, even though he suspected he knew. What he’d
done
was Anna Taylor—if only in his
drug-induced dreams. Imagine that. Mac and Diaz were right about sex raising one’s integration levels. “Right now, I’m going to see if I can use it—to make telepathic contact with either Anna or Mac.” He had no idea if he was close enough to either of them, but he was going to try. “Do me a favor, Charlie, and put in a call to Elliot. I want him to know what’s going on.”