Girl From Above #3: Trapped (3 page)

BOOK: Girl From Above #3: Trapped
13.87Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

The cops ventured closer. I stayed down as I watched the synth calmly oblige. His cooperation didn’t last. He broke into a run and burst through the line of cops at the far end of the hallway. They fired their pulsers, but the synth was fast—faster than they’d expected. Some chased after him. After that, I didn’t much care. He was away from me, and by some fucking miracle, I was still breathing.

“We’ve got a body,” came a shout from my hotel room.

I closed my eyes, willing unconsciousness to scoop me up and carry me away. It didn’t, which was fucking typical. So I suffered through physical agony as I waited for the EMTs to arrive. As for the emotional shit, I didn’t let it touch me. Not yet. First, I had to get the fuck off Lyra so I could take a timeout and think my way out of this mess.

Jesse …
Goddammit. I’d kill that synthetic bastard and make him realize there wouldn’t be a
life-ever-after
for him.

Chapter Two: #1001


I
t’s been too long
,” Commander Brendan Shepperd said, pacing the few short strides from one side of the cargo hold to the other. The sound of his boots on the grating echoed through the empty space.

I’d returned to the late hours of yesterday evening with the credits I’d won, expecting to find Captain Shepperd inside. He’d been at the last table, watching me like the rest of the crowd, but he hadn’t made our scheduled meeting and had yet to return to
Starscream
. With every Lyra hour and every one of his strides, the commander’s anxiety levels spiked, and as if by proxy, so did mine.

“He said to leave if one of us didn’t make it back.”

The commander stopped dead. “Are you prepared to leave my brother here?”

“It was an order,” I replied.

He made a
noise like a frustrated growl. “You know, better than most, that some orders are meant to be disobeyed.”

Brendan loved his brother. He may not have acted like it whenever they were in the same room together, but it was there, in his tight pacing and quick glances at the exit door. They rarely spoke except to bicker, but apparently, that was normal behavior for the Shepperd brothers.

“I got something,” James announced as he entered the hold via the internal door. He handed me a newspad.

One man was arrested and another is still at large after a body was discovered at the Sharline Hotel yesterday evening. The deceased is believed to be a female escort with links to local property and business owner, Bruno Divalsh. The names of the victim and assumed perpetrator are not being released at this time. Reports cannot confirm or deny whether the man in custody has been charged with murder. Lyra Police have asked for anyone who may have overheard an altercation at the hotel to come forward.

“Bruno,” I said. The name echoed around us.

“After what you told me about the events on Ganymede,” James began, sweeping his jacket back to rest his hand on his hip, “Captain Shepperd may be the man in custody or the man at large.”

The commander took the pad from me and skimmed it. “Dammit.”

“It would explain why he’s not here,” James said. “And why he hasn’t contacted us.”

The commander lifted his gaze, his darting eyes searching the hold for answers. “If he’s in custody, the police will be watching this ship. I can’t let them see my face. James?”

The doctor flinched. “What?”

“Go to the Police Department and see if Caleb is there.”

“Me? I … I wouldn’t know—”

“I’ll go,” I said. James was already a bundle of frayed nerves at the suggestion of striding into the police station and lying. My lies were faultless. “I will ascertain who’s there and if the captain is on the run.”

We’d tried his comms with no reply. He’d either abandoned it somewhere so it couldn’t be tracked, or the police had confiscated it.

“Soften your appearance,” Bren ordered in his typical commander tone that crept in when he wanted to distance himself from events. “Like you did for the casinos. The people of Lyra may not immediately recognize a synthetic among them, but the police are a little more perceptive.”

Fifteen minutes later, I was back in my high-end pencil skirt suit, with my hair clipped back—the picture of sophisticated elegance on three-inch heels. James avoided meeting my eyes while I confirmed to the commander and him that I’d report back as soon as I knew where we stood.

I left
Starscream
and caught a shuttle pod to downtown Lyra. Like the rest of the entertainment planet, downtown throbbed with people high on the buzz that infused Lyra’s strips. Even the police department building glowed blue at its edges. Everything on Lyra shone. When we’d first arrived, I’d let the light bathe my senses. But after a few days, the light now burned and grated against my internal processes.

The on-duty officer at the desk barely gave me a second glance. “Sign in.”

I scribbled a nonsense signature that simply said “One”—James’s preferred name for me. “I’m hoping you might be able to help me.”

He lifted his gaze at the sound of my cultured voice and finally noticed me. Something like recognition widened his tired eyes, but his heartbeat remained steady.

“Yes?” he drawled, his Lyra accent sharp and tinny.

“Do you have a man here by the name of Caleb Shepperd?”

He checked behind me at the two people waiting in the plastic chairs. One was a young woman who was picking at her nails, while the other appeared to be asleep. I’m not sure what the officer expected to find, an accomplice perhaps, but when he returned his gaze to me, his suspicion had faded.

“I’ll check for you, ma’am.”

He turned his chair away and tapped a few commands into his holoscreen. His heartbeat remained steady, so I could assume all of this was routine, but the police were trained in dealing with extenuating circumstances. I couldn’t expect his physiological reaction to be the same as a civilian’s. There was every chance he’d recognized me as a synthetic. Fleet usually had a substantial presence in Lyra airspace, although the captain had commented on how their numbers appeared to have thinned. Either way,
Starscream
had already stayed docked too long.

“Yes, he’s being processed. If you’d like to wait a while, you’ll be able to see him.”

“How long?”

He checked his screen. “An hour. Maybe two.”

“It’s just … I’m his wife, and well … I really need to see him.”

His eyebrow arched. Despite delivering my lie with perfect cadence, he didn’t believe me. Something in my act wasn’t right, be it the clothes, or the accent, or me.

“His wife?”

“Yes.” I chewed on my lip and played with the sleeve of my jacket. “We were recently married, as of yesterday …” I added a giggle. “Kinda trick … right?”

He lifted his chin as my lie slipped into place. It had been the accent—too clean for Lyra. I made a mental note to soften my dialect as well as my appearance. “He’ll be out soon enough, ma’am.”

I took a seat and waited, pretending to watch the video stream in the far left-hand corner while surreptitiously watching both the entrance doors and back corridors. I didn’t believe he’d notified fleet, but that didn’t ease my itching restlessness.

I reached behind my neck and touched the slightly raised Chitec brand. It didn’t used to bother me, but I was changing—the way I processed and compartmentalized information, the way I dreamed, and the way I woke and choked on words my internal protocols prohibited me from saying. I wasn’t just a synthetic. I was one more.

A slither of unease moved beneath my polymer skin. The sensation wasn’t synthetic. Nothing in my processes accounted for it. I’d felt it before, when being watched. A quick scan of my surroundings yielded nothing unusual.

Slamming doors lifted me from my roaming thoughts, and I found Caleb Shepperd sauntering down the hall. He sported a medi-strip and bruise above his left eye, and a few scratches about his face. I scanned his vitals. His heart rate had tripled in the space of a few strides, almost as though he were afraid—of me. I hadn’t seen that response in him for a few weeks and believed we’d moved beyond fear. My scans also indicated he was in pain—his lower back, judging by his gait. A few splotches of dark blood marred his white shirt. Caleb Shepperd was a mess, physically and mentally. At my conclusion, a curious twitch of sensory pain darted through me. The pain wasn’t tangible. It didn’t have a direct source and wasn’t something I could dismiss with a simple instruction. It was new and worthy of later study. Human empathy. I shut the sensation away, closed my mental processes around it, and kept it safe before it could escape me, as though I were cupping a butterfly in my hands.

With a breezy, enthusiastic smile, I stood and said, “Honey …”

Captain Shepperd had called women the same often enough, usually in jest.

He blinked and frowned in quick succession—surprise, confusion—then he caught the officer watching us and adopted a smile that mirrored mine. “You came?”

It sounded like a question, and I wasn’t sure if he’d meant it as one. “Sure. I wasn’t gonna leave you here.” My accent gave him pause, but his sideways smile told me he appreciated it.

“Sign here.” The officer dumped an electronic form in front of the captain, who dutifully planted his thumbprint on the document. “This here’s to say you have no intention of leaving Lyra. Should you get any ideas about leaving the entertainment capital of the nine systems, you’ll lose your bail money, and me and the boys get to spend a wild weekend of drinking and gambling on you.”

Shepperd grunted a derogatory term, turned on his heels, and strode through the department doors.

We’d barely descended two steps when he growled, “What the fuck, synth?”

Anger pulled his voice tight, but there was a lot more hidden in its resonance: fear, as well as despair. He tried to hide it, control it, but in doing so, his efforts only further alerted me to their presence, and once I knew they were there, I went hunting for more physical hints.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he continued. “I told you, if anything went wrong, you were to get the fuck off Lyra. Take the credits and go.”

We reached the strip and he hailed a pod. The automated glass bubble veered off its track and rocked to a halt in front of us. Its curved door slid upward.

Cocooned in silence, I sat opposite Shepperd. He slumped in his seat, knee jumping while he stared through the glass dome. His dark eyes reflected Lyra’s lights. He barely blinked and barely moved but for his jittery knee.

I’d gathered enough data to know the basics about the events that had transpired during the past few hours, but I needed to hear his recall to complete the picture. Much about his data didn’t align. I’d spent enough time around the captain to know that if I were a person, my instincts would be telling me that something was off with Caleb Shepperd’s behavior. “What happened?”

“Jesse …” His voice caught. “She turned up at my hotel room. Probably sent by Bruno to keep an eye on me.” He struggled to get the words out, guarding them behind walls and only letting a few through. He still didn’t look at me. “She’s … she was working for him. Again.” His vitals skipped and jumped. “We er …”

There was that hitch again.

“Caleb.”

He darted his gaze to me like I’d slapped him. He didn’t like hearing his name from my lips, but it worked to focus him.

“Are we in any immediate danger?” I asked.

“Fuck yeah. The cops don’t believe me, even though they saw him. They think we were working together, that a threesome got out of hand. They charged me with her fucking murder.” He laughed—an ugly, broken sound. “I didn’t kill her, synth.”

The truth in his words shone like a beacon of confidence through the storm of mixed messages his body was broadcasting. “What man?”

His gaze locked on mine, half-accusatory. The rest of the accusation arrived in his voice. “One of
your
kind.”

My kind?

“A synthetic killed her?” If I’d had a heart, it would have been hammering hard. As it were, countless processes and scenarios spilled into my thoughts. “That’s not possible.”

“Fuck you, synth. That’s what the cops keep telling me. Of course it’s fucking possible. Fucking protocols and bullshit failsafes. They’re all killers, every last one thousand and one of them. Even you. Especially you.”

His words struck at a part of me that didn’t exist in programming, that intangible part where emotions were born, and it hurt. The pain was different this time but as worthy of study as empathy. I swallowed and closed my eyes, regaining control inside of a second. “Did he have a number or call himself by a name?”

“We didn’t have time for proper introductions while he was beating the shit out of me.” Hatred burned through the anger in his eyes. Hatred for me? I tilted my head. No, hatred for my kind, for the others who looked exactly like me, and for what I represented.

“We should return to
Starscream,
” I said, careful to keep my voice leveled and controlled. He couldn’t know how his words hurt, not yet. None of them could know until I’d studied the data and concluded what it meant to be … me.

“No.”

“No?”

He rubbed a hand down his face. “I just … I need to get my shit together. I can’t go back there and face my brother’s questions. I need time—just some time, synth.” He bowed forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and threaded his fingers into his hair. “
Starscream
will never get clearance codes for departure, not with me on bail. The docking umbilical won’t release without those codes. She’s as grounded as I am until I can deal with this.”

“Brendan is worried.”

Caleb bowed his head once more and mumbled, “He should be.”

I had more questions. I wanted to know everything about the synthetic who’d attacked Jesse—what he’d said and what he wanted—but Shepperd was in no condition to withstand a barrage of questions.

We rode in silence. Outside the pod, Lyra’s permanent darkness lightened and the lights faded away as we approached the rim of the entertainment domes. We eventually alighted the pod in a rundown strip where the residential blocks were in the process of being torn down and others rebuilt. Empty high-rises stood like tombstones, reaching toward the concave domes high above. Black windows watched me like a thousand eyes. The unease I’d experienced in the police department hadn’t waned. It crawled across my skin like thousands of tiny pinpricks.

“What is this place?” I could have searched the datacloud but didn’t want to touch it here, as though the cloud itself might flood the insidious sensation through me.

“Nowhere. Sidelined developments from a property boom that never lived up to the dream,” Caleb replied, opening the door to a rundown hotel lobby. So rundown, in fact, that nobody manned the front desk. He leaned over, snatched himself a keycard, left his thumbprint on a dust-covered guestbook, and sauntered toward the elevator.

I eyed the abandoned foyer and the descending elevator numbers with concern. “Considering the state of disrepair, I’d recommend the stairs.”

Caleb huffed a dry laugh and headed for the stairs. “You look shocked, synth.” His voice ricocheted up the stairwell. “And there I was thinking you were the type of girl who’d rough it anywhere.”

BOOK: Girl From Above #3: Trapped
13.87Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Corinthian by Georgette Heyer
El Consejo De Egipto by Leonardo Sciascia
First Semester by Cecil Cross
The Dark Trilogy by Patrick D'Orazio
The Widower's Tale by Julia Glass
Intemperie by Jesús Carrasco