When Good Toys Go Bad (5 page)

The stillness outside was spooky. The usually unheard mechanical click of the traffic lights as they went from green, to amber, to red and back to green again reverberated in the silence. I didn’t dare take my parents’ tram—it would be too easily tracked. I set out on foot. Sticking to the shadows, I walked light-footed between the residential pods, my senses at the ready for anything that may have been following me.

The residential silence gave way to the bustling of the city center. I had to chance going through because going around would have been an extra twenty-five kilometers and I couldn’t waste the time. Besides, it was easier to hide in plain sight. I felt less exposed as I navigated the crowds than I did when I was alone on the residential streets. As I walked the boulevard, I imagined my parents’ faces when they found my room empty. The thought made me cringe. How disappointed they must be in me. I must have looked distressed because an older woman coming toward me stopped to ask if I was okay.

After holding my breath for twenty minutes, I finally reached the outer edge of the city. I had never been out in the developing areas at night. The good thing was there was nothing for kilometers to block my view, and I could see nothing was following me. The bad thing was the dark made it hard to plot a course to my destination.

I mumbled an unintentional “hallelujah” when I finally found the entrance to the cave.

“I second that.” Kai’s baritone voice floated out from somewhere in the darkness.

“I can’t see anything,” I whispered into the cave.

A glow erupted in front of me, and in defiance of modern convention, I walked toward the light to find my own piece of heaven at the other end.

Kai wrapped me up in his arms and locked his mouth on mine. “Missed…you,” he sputtered between kisses.

“I missed you too,” I eked out when he finally allowed me to come up for air.

Kai had kept himself busy while I was gone. He’d fashioned a bed from a piece of rock jutting out from the wall, and chairs from boulders. A mattress formed from a soft cradle of sand lay on top of the rock, and old clothes were masterfully bundled into pillows. I knew he did all of this for me. After all, he didn’t need to sit, sleep or eat. Kai leaned me back on the bed. The sand was unexpectedly cozy. He crawled in behind me. As much as I hungered for him, he hungered for information. I forgot he’d sat alone in this cave while I dealt with the outside world.

“Tell me absolutely everything,” he said, drawing me into a spooning position.

I told him in detail of how they arrested me, my doubts about Brynn, the confrontation with my parents and suspicion of the connection between the police and The Consortium. He listened patiently and drew me in even closer. The tension of the day escaped in the form of tears. Kai didn’t say anything, holding me and stroking my hair.

After a while the blubbering stopped, replaced by that strange post-cry breathing stutter. Kai took my shoulders gently and guided me from lying on my right side in our spooning position to lying on my left side facing him. He wiped the tears from my eyes and kissed me, gentle and comforting at first but more passionate when I responded.

Kai broke the kiss and, after throwing me a cheeky grin, shimmied down the sand and stood at the end of the makeshift bed. As he had done many times before, Kai performed for me. I had told him once how much pleasure I derived from watching him undress. Since then, the show had grown better and better each time until in its perfection, he made me so wet my panties clung to me.

Inch by excruciating inch he peeled off his tight silver T-shirt, revealing the eight ab muscles two at a time. He stopped below his pecs, teasing me and drawing my attention upward to his sexy half smile. Kai’s eyes, usually bright and cheerful, were now hooded and heavy with desire.

“Oh come on,” I chastised him, “I don’t have the energy for this. It’s been a long day.”

Kai smiled and pulled the shirt the rest of the way over his head, mussing his perfect coif.

Normally I would wait for him to do the honors of undressing me, but it seemed during his show I had been reflexively shedding the unwanted barrier between us myself. By the time he discarded his final sock, I was naked, kicking my panties off the bed and grabbing at the air between us like that would pull him closer.

“Playing hard to get, are you?” Kai laughed, climbing on top of me. His mouth found mine, and the familiar warmth spread through me as he kissed me hard and deep.

He nipped and licked his way down to my torso. I closed my eyes and focused my whole consciousness on his touch.

“What’s this?” His voice dragged me from my ecstasy-induced stupor.

“What’s what?”

“Right here.” He pointed to a red patch on my stomach.

“I don’t know. I must be allergic to something.” I grabbed at him, trying to get back to where we were.

“There’s another one.” He rolled me over, and I let out an exasperated sigh.

“So I have a rash, so what?”

“This isn’t a normal rash, Dar. Look at this.” He shoved the back of my hand in front of my face, and I saw what he meant. This wasn’t like any rash I’d ever had. There were small blisters encircled with a white patch which itself was surrounded by a deep red.

“Motherfuckers! Get dressed!” I rolled over underneath Kai and shoved him off me.

“What is it?”

“They knew I would figure out a way to hide your tracking device, so they used me to find you.”

“What are you talking about?” Kai asked as he stepped into his pants, doing exactly as I said, never questioning that I knew what I was talking about.

“The damn jumpsuit they made me put on.” My voice shook with the anger. “They laced it with something. Probably a carbon isotope. They wouldn’t want to risk radiation poisoning.”

“English, please, for those of us who weren’t programmed for science.”

“Isotopes, when they decay, let off a radiation that can be tracked, like leaving breadcrumbs for a trail.”

We were both dressed, and Kai led us down the passage to the entrance of the tunnel. To me it was pitch black, but he was equipped with night vision. That was a lot of foresight for the engineers who created him.

“So, they put these isotopes on your jumpsuit when you were in jail. Now they will be able to track us?” Kai asked when we reached the open air.

“Exactly, and we probably don’t have a lot of time. The alpha radiation will start to degrade and they’ll lose their chance, so I’m assuming they’re not too far behind us.”

“Which way should we go?” Kai asked.

“Away from that.” I pointed to the light off in the distance.

We started running across the empty expanse, the light chasing us right back toward the city. In the darkness, I stumbled on the uneven ground. Kai picked me up without missing a beat, and we continued our forward motion away from the light, which grew bigger at an alarming rate.

“What’s that?” I pointed to our right. Off in the distance was yet another light, and this one was moving even faster.

Kai jogged to the right. We were now on a diagonal from the first light and being chased by the second. My heart pounded out of my chest. Kai ran with such power and speed that each time his foot hit the ground, it knocked the wind out of me.

I couldn’t help but think of him as heroic as he charged forward, the two lights closing in on us. Which one would get to us first and what fate waited in that light? It was going to be close. The two lights were on a collision course, and we were going to be ground zero.

“Get in!” a voice screamed to us from a tram as one of the blinding lights overtook us.

“What should we do?” Kai asked, still running, his voice steady. I guess they didn’t program him for out of breath.

“I don’t know.” I glanced around frantically for an out, practically twisting my head off.

The tram overtook us and, in a blur of dust, slid around forty-five degrees and stopped in front of us.

Kai leapfrogged over the moving vehicle and kept running.

The tram started moving again toward us, fast. The other light, which I had almost forgotten about, was now gaining on us too.

“Get in!” a familiar voice commanded as the first tram caught up with us again.

This time I recognized the voice. “Stop!” I yelled, and Kai obeyed with such a sudden break, my heart surged into my throat. The tram shot past us, screeching to a halt a few meters away. The passenger hatch swung up.

“Go,” I commanded. The other tram was seconds away.

Kai moved so fast everything blurred. One moment we were outside, the next we were in the tram and he was pulling the hatch closed.

“Here, you’ll need this. It’s a lead-lined coat from the lab. It took me a while, but I figured out what they were doing.”

I took the jacket from Brynn. “You always were the smart one. You better move it—they’re gaining on us.”

“Mom always did say I drove too fast.” Brynn punched the accelerator and the tram jolted forward. If Kai hadn’t been holding on to me, I would have flown through the front.

I scanned behind us to check on our pursuer’s progress.

“Don’t worry about them,” Brynn quipped. “My engine is about three generations ahead of theirs.”

“You never did like to buy anything off the rack.”

Kai’s face contorted in confusion as he transferred his gaze between Brynn and me.

“It’s okay. She’s on our side.” I turned to Brynn. “You are, aren’t you?”

“Let’s get you somewhere safe where we can talk. I’ve been doing some digging, and you’ll never believe what I found out.”

Chapter Five

“You’ll need this too.” Brynn took one hand off the controls and reached into a compartment between the seats. She handed me a laser screwdriver and a handheld infopad.

I fumbled with the handheld. It was less than a centimeter thin but weighed much more than I expected. The model was one I had never seen before. The exterior was metallic and cold to the touch, instead of the usual nonconducting polymer. On the screen was a schematic of Kai’s body. A blue dot differentiated the tracking device from the rest of his anatomy.

“Take off your shirt,” I commanded. As usual, Kai obeyed. At the beginning, he used to do everything I told him to, because that’s what he was programmed to do. Now trust overrode his programming.

I showed him the schematic, and Kai nodded his understanding.

“Are you sure this won’t hurt you?”

“I wasn’t programmed to experience pain.”

“Yeah—well, you weren’t supposed to feel love either.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Brynn interjected. “If it hurts, there’s some anesthetic in the medkit.”

“Just start slow and we’ll see how it goes.” Kai’s lips curved into enough of a smile to reassure me.

My hand shook when I lifted the laser.

“A small cut here will do the trick.” He pointed to a spot under his left pec. “There should be a contact to open the panel you’re trying to reach.”

With the laser end of the instrument, I made a small incision. No blood flowed out, but Kai did make a sound I’d never heard before, something between a moan and a growl.

“Are you okay?”

“So that’s what pain is—interesting.”

I read his expression. He was still calm and stoic. The reassuring smile still plastered to his face telling me the pain wasn’t too horrible. With a cringe, I stuck my finger in the gap to search around for the contact. His inside wasn’t the same consistency as the outside. Whatever gave his flesh warmth must have been in his skin, because the layers beneath were cool. There was an odd texture to the tissue under his skin, like a dry jelly. I pushed farther into the viscous and found something hard, cool and metal. I turned the device around and pushed the button on the top to set the polarity, according to the specifications on the handheld.

The moment the screwdriver touched the contact, his entire left breast lifted with a faint ripping sound, almost like the Velcro we played with at the history museum.

I pulled the screwdriver out and let it fall to the floor. “I’m so sorry. Does that feel as nasty as it looks?”

“Don’t worry, Darra. It’s bit peculiar, but nothing unpleasant.” He reached down and grabbed the screwdriver from the floor, handing the small instrument to me. “You need to finish what you started.”

“Okay, but you’ll tell me if I hurt you.”

“Probably not—it needs to be done. They’re still following us.”

I looked back to see the lights of the second tram.

“And they’re gaining on us,” Brynn added.

I inhaled a lungful of courage and, with as much cold determination as I could muster, used the laser to cut a swath of breast tissue. The incision revealed a pea-sized titanium sphere with a blinking green light. “Got it,” I cried out in triumph.

Again I forced my finger through the gelatinous material which served as Kai’s muscle. I touched the transponder at the end of my finger. “Are you sure this doesn’t hurt?” I asked, projecting my own discomfort as I forced a second finger through his breast tissue.

“No. I have no sensation.”