Gemini Cell: A Shadow Ops Novel (Shadow Ops series Book 4) (17 page)

Schweitzer looked at the caption below the photo.
That’s Iran. Enemies. A mad priest rules there.

Ninip nodded.
Does this mad priest honor us? Are we remembered?

I don’t know. I don’t think so.

I would go and see.

We keep running ops for the US, you’ll likely get your chance. But this is my body, so I get first crack. We close the loop on whoever did this to my family, then next stop is Tehran
.

Ninip was silent then, and Schweitzer, tired of reading, explored his new senses. He marveled at the control he had over them, able to feel the surface of the floor beneath them with a clarity he’d never known. He could feel subtle gradations in temperature through the tile, in the air around them, colder nearer the vents that pushed the chill air into the room. He could shift spectrums by squinting their eyes, see the cold as dark blue cones descending from the vents, even catch a human-shaped outline of heat through the thick surface of the door.

You did all this . . . in the storm?

Ninip shrugged.
I did nothing in the storm. All of this is . . . new. It is what we are together.

Schweitzer closed their eyes, pushed all his attention out into their ears, focused on listening. At first, the thrumming of the chillers drowned out all sound, but after a moment, he found he could adjust their hearing as he adjusted their vision, focusing it deeper on other sounds. The chillers faded into a thematic buzz as Schweitzer dialed in on the low hum of the electrical wiring in the walls, which eventually receded into the distance, giving way to the gurgling of liquid moving through pipes.

Then, voices. The guard outside was talking to someone. Schweitzer focused on the speech.

Soft, whispers, but graduating to murmurs a moment later. He found his ability worked too well, locking in on the specificity of tone, letting the words hum by. As Schweitzer tried to adjust, the speaking stopped, replaced by what sounded like slurping. Were they eating?

A sucking, popping sound. Not eating. Kissing.

Schweitzer’s amusement roused Ninip to at least pay attention. Here he was, a living corpse in one of the most secret programs in the American military, and his guards were making out on shift. People were people, anywhere you went. He’d never forget the day Chang got caught fooling around with one of the corpsmen assigned to the sub they were to deploy on. The skipper knew SEALs played by different rules, but it was one of his own, and he was ready to go to general quarters over it.

Chang had sat on the edge of his rack while Ahmad had grilled him, reminded him of the consequences of that kind of breach of discipline. At the end of the tirade, Chang had shrugged. “What do you want, Chief?” he’d said. “We’re about to spend God knows how long dragging ass through the Horn of Africa while a bunch of . . . misguided but well-intentioned religious devotees try to kill us. Might be the last chance to get my dick wet ever. You’re just mad because I got the shot and you didn’t.”

Schweitzer had laughed his ass off. Chang had even managed to crack a smile out of Ahmad’s normally iron visage. She’d gone to talk to the skipper, and that was the last they heard of the matter. The corpsman stayed on the pier. As far as Schweitzer knew, Chang never talked to her again.

Put monkeys with needs in charge of a secret and highly dangerous government program, and they still acted like monkeys with needs.

Ninip was paying attention now, his own reaction shifting between amusement and rising arousal. Whatever else might bore him about humanity, base lust was a thing he understood. Schweitzer felt the jinn’s filter begin to slide over their vision, pushed it back. He knew how Ninip saw the world when he was hungry for blood. He didn’t want to think about how it looked when he was turned on.

But even if he had more control, Schweitzer still had a monkey’s soul. He justified the eavesdropping by practicing fine-tuning of their hearing, sliding along the spectrum of high and low sounds, through the popping of lips coming together and parting to the low rustle of hands sliding over clothing, of breathing going ragged, of the sharp clacking as weapons slapped against the wall.

Man, they were really going at it. He’d lost track of time, but this had to mean it was in the wee hours, and there was no one else around. Schweitzer had seen it before, guards turned on by the prospect of making out at work. It would be an intense burst, followed by pushing away, shaking of heads, then walking along like everything was normal. Hell, he’d practically done it with Sarah in a Victoria’s Secret dressing room once with the sales attendant just outside the door.

Ninip was pressed into their shared body now, asserting himself in the tension of their limbs. Schweitzer could feel the claws beginning to extend slightly, their tongue swelling again. There was a line between lust for blood and lust for sex, but it was a thin one even for the living, and it seemed to have all but vanished for the jinn.

Before Schweitzer knew it, they were standing, the book sliding off their lap and landing with a muffled thud on the floor. He could feel the jinn’s agitated presence all around him, as nasty and inappropriately intimate as when his fellow nonrates watched porn together in their liberty hours at the end of boot camp.

The ragged breathing broke with the smack of wet skin parting, and Schweitzer heard the flat rustling sounds that heralded the pushing away he’d known would come. Now, soft words of devotion, or maybe promises of what would come later, and one of them would walk off. Schweitzer tuned their hearing lower, guessing at the softness with which they would be uttered, tried to poise himself to catch them.

But what came was at a much higher register, a woman’s voice raised in anger. Schweitzer ran their hearing up to the higher frequency, then dampened it as the voice grew louder, was answered by a man’s. He caught only a single word, “smothering.” This tryst wasn’t a moment of shared passion, it was a moment of weakness, regretted and now going sour.

He sniffed the air, caught the sick, bitter scent of fear. The voices came more quickly now, the man’s low tones. Cursing. A slap ringing out, loud as a gunshot to Schweitzer’s augmented hearing.

Before he knew what he was doing, Schweitzer had moved them to the shutters, begun clawing at the seams between them.

Ninip frowned, annoyed at having his voyeuristic thrill interrupted. He pulled their shared hands back.
What are you doing? This is their affair. Let them have at it.

There’s nobody to break it up. Someone is going to get hurt.

Ninip only looked at him, and Schweitzer saw the situation as he knew the jinn saw it, a couple of peasant foot soldiers, squabbling over something beneath his notice. The event was only notable in its capacity to amuse.

But the shouting and scuffling was growing louder. He’d seen lover’s tiffs spin out of control, ruin careers, lives. There was a dull thump which he knew was a human head rebounding off the wall. This was going ugly, fast.

Schweitzer tried to wrench their limbs back to their work on the shutters. He wouldn’t be able to get there fast enough if he had to fight Ninip the whole way.

Fortunately, the jinn was nothing if not predictable.

Schweitzer dug in his mind for the worst images he could imagine, a male soldier murdering a female, knocking her head into the hard floor until her brains leaked out her ears. Screaming, blood, eyes wide in horror.

Ninip surged. The jinn abruptly reversed course, pouring his energy into their shared body, Schweitzer’s purpose suddenly going from half to double.

He drove them at the shutters, getting the bone spikes of their claws into the seams, yanking down with all the big muscles in their arms, feeling the metal joint in their shoulder engaging, the stitches pulling taut. The doctors had done their work well, the limb held as they strained. The metal was strong, stronger than anything Schweitzer had encountered before. They pulled, felt their muscles engage, lock, straining the tendons and bones beneath. At last, he felt something break in the mechanism as their magical strength overcame the strength of the metal, bending it aside with a shriek.

An alarm sounded, a low trumpeting behind a machine-woman’s voice, calmly issuing instructions. Through the transparent panel revealed by the parted metal, Schweitzer could see lights flashing from metal cages set into the ceiling, spinning their orange warnings across the white paint of the walls.

Schweitzer stopped to consider the transparent pane, definitely not glass, palladium most likely. He wondered if they could break through the thickness, but Ninip had no time for such cares. The jinn threw their shared body into it, magically enhanced bones reverberating at the impact, sending them shuddering back. The jinn charged forward again, driving with the horns this time, and Schweitzer felt the impact almost snap their neck.

Calm the fuck down! We’re not going to . . .

But as the jinn pulled their shared body back for another charge, Schweitzer could see the faintest white spiderweb of cracks in the transparent material. He let Ninip have his head. It would be a fight to control the jinn once they got through, but it was better than letting whatever was going on outside escalate into something worse.

Even as he battered them against the palladium pane, felt it begin to give under the repeated blows, a part of Schweitzer echoed Ninip’s doubt. These people were his resurrectors, but also his jailers. Any obligations he’d had were absolved when the bullet had gone up through his chin and sheared off the back of his head.

But that wasn’t right. Ninip had talked about roots and branches. He’d said that combat was the root of the warrior. But Schweitzer’s instinct reminded him that it was something more. Any thug could be a warrior. Schweitzer’s wars were sanctified. His roots ran deep in soil called paladin, guardian. The roots told Schweitzer’s branches to preserve, to defend.

So he did.

A final blow and the pane gave, the fragments holding together as they punched through, leaving a shattered cone of an ovipositor that birthed them onto the hard floor of the corridor outside their cell. The chill fog followed them out, dissolving in the warmth of the free air.

Schweitzer had been partially right. His guard had been a female. Her uniform was rumpled, her carbine sling twisted around her back, hung up in her magazine punches, the weapon wedged uselessly between her legs. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth, a bruise already forming over one eye. She looked dazed.

The man was a civilian. His khaki pants were unbuttoned, his white shirt rumpled beneath a skewed tie. An ID badge, much like Eldredge’s, was clipped over his pocket.

His eyes were already going wide with terror, face drained of color. The guard was fumbling with her weapon, desperately trying to haul it into use, succeeding only in getting the stock stuck under the lip of her body armor. Ninip’s filter snapped into place, and Schweitzer saw them as they appeared to the jinn, tiny, weak, ripe for the hunt.

He reversed course, dug in with everything he had, hauled back against the jinn. Ninip howled and fought back, beating Schweitzer senseless against the walls of the darkness they shared. His vision went red, then black, then white, his hearing filled with an inhuman scream that he belatedly realized was issuing from their own mouth.

But Schweitzer hung on. Ninip raged, pushed like a tidal wave, but only succeeded in holding their shared body crouching on all fours, tongue reaching, darting in and out of the distended jaw, gnashing dagger teeth.

And then the jinn turned inward, slamming Schweitzer up against the perimeter of the space they shared, forcing him through it. He felt the void gaping behind once again, heard the boiling chorus of screams. He turned his attention from controlling their shared body and refocused on remaining inside it.

But the jinn was strong enough to multitask. He occupied Schweitzer with half his attention. With the other half, Ninip took control of their limbs, rose, turned toward the guard and her assailant.

Schweitzer managed a brief foray at their shared mouth, uttering a single word. “Run.”

But they weren’t listening. Their eyes were cast over Schweitzer and Ninip’s shoulder. Ninip followed the direction of their gaze, saw Mr. Axe and Mr. Flamethrower barreling toward them. Axe hung back while Flamethrower took a knee, leveling the nozzle, blue pilot light blazing malevolently below. Schweitzer watched Mr. Flamethrower’s finger drop down to the trigger and begin to tense.

Ninip howled again, too lost in the swell of predatory lust to understand what was about to happen. There was no way to reach them in time. Ninip was in the cattle chute of his own senseless rage, but Schweitzer knew the fuel gel moving through that nozzle would heat the air around them to twelve hundred degrees in an instant.

It couldn’t kill them. As far as Schweitzer knew, nothing could.

But reducing their shared body to ash would do the trick. He thought of the void, the swirling storm of souls, and shuddered.

Ninip gathered himself to spring, and Schweitzer redoubled his efforts to hold him back. Mr. Flamethrower was just doing his job. If they were to be destroyed, it wouldn’t be in the act of hurting innocent men following orders.

Ninip turned to fight him, and Schweitzer turned to the darkness. Maybe, somehow, he could find Sarah and Patrick again in that tangled hell.

A sharp voice. No heat. Tension slowly leaking out of the corridor.

Schweitzer looked up. Eldredge stood beside Mr. Flamethrower, one hand on the weapon’s barrel, gently pushing it down. His eyes were fixed on Schweitzer, but he was speaking to the soldier in low, gentle tones.

The jinn battered him again and again, shoving him to the limits of their shared space. Schweitzer dug in his memories, thrusting images at Ninip, napalm reducing jungles to ash, fuel air bombs bursting over Afghan villages, metal turned to dust in seconds. Humans screaming, burning, dying. Over and over again. He sent the images, felt Ninip’s attack lessen in response, until the jinn finally took his meaning, dialed back his madness, until the slow ebb of his passion left them on all fours again, shaking in the corridor while Eldredge and his men looked on.