Born to Darkness (60 page)

Stephen nodded. “Personally, I prefer the Davy versus Goliath analogy.” He smiled at Elliot. “Or Ewoks versus the Empire.”

Elliot laughed, but he sobered quickly. “This is what we’re up against,” he told Anna. “As soon as we try to get into the building, alarms
will
go off.”

“So sneaking Nika out of there isn’t an option, either,” Stephen surmised. “Analysis reports that they’re not scanning in the holding rooms, but as soon as Dr. Bach walks Nika’s body out into the hall? With their combined integration levels? Alarm bells.”

“But if Joseph can protect her …?”

“To a limit,” Elliot said. “He’s powerful, that’s true, and the guards won’t be able to shoot Nika, because Bach can shield her from their bullets. But enough of them could overwhelm her. Remember,
Bach’s going to be in
her
body, limited by her physical strength.”

“She’ll be the baddest, most kickass thirteen-year-old in the world,” Stephen told Anna, “but not even Dr. Bach can make her invincible.”

“So … that means we need to shut down their med scanners,” Anna concluded.

“Analysis already rejected that,” Elliot said. “The scanners work off a wireless self-contained system that’s unhackable.”

“Well, it’s probably hackable,” Stephen corrected him. “We just haven’t figured out how to do it.”

“Which, for the sake of this discussion,” Elliot said, “makes it unhackable. I mean, we’re looking to get Nika out ASAP, not after seven months of research and experimentation, right?”

“Then ignore the med scanners,” Anna suggested. “And the alarms. Let’s go back to the idea of sending in a big enough group of Greater-Thans to meet Bach and protect Nika.”

“Just blow past ’em.” Stephen answered his own question by shaking his head, no.

Elliot chimed in with, “Twenty-five Greater-Thans, marching up the Org’s ass? In theory, it’s beautiful. But the problem with
that
is we’re back to these alarms. The bad guys have ample warning—and all kinds of escape routes that are not on these plans. We’ll take out some of their guards and grunts, sure, and we’ll rescue some of their prisoners. But they’re going to take all of the girls like Nika—their
fountains
—and boogie out of Dodge.”

“So we’re back to figuring out a way to shut down their med scanners,” Anna persisted.

“Which can only be done from the inside,” Elliot said, making an adjustment to the computer screen, to show a mazelike layout of rooms and hallways. He pointed to one of the rooms. “Here’s where their scanning system is housed—smack in the middle of the main security floor.”

They sat in silence for a moment, as Anna tried not to be overwhelmed by the apparent impossibility of the situation. She
thought about Nika, who was really only marginally safer now that Bach was with her. Because, as Stephen and Elliot had made clear, there
were
limits to his ability to protect her.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath and then another, because she refused to accept that saving her sister was impossible. She thought of Bach’s calm and she embraced the techniques he’d used to try to teach Nika to achieve the control she’d needed to unlock the powers of her mind.

And Anna could practically feel his warmth and power inside of her head again as, in a flash, she saw the answer.

“I’ll go in,” she said, opening her eyes to look across the table. Stephen didn’t understand, but Elliot did—she could see both his surprise and then the glimmer of excited hope in his eyes, as she explained to Stephen, “I’m a fraction. I can go into the building, be scanned, and not set off a single alarm. Joseph can implant whatever knowledge I need directly into my head. He taught me self-defense that way. He can teach me how to breach their scanning system, the same way. He can teach me to climb up the elevator shaft if he has to.” She said it again. “So I’ll do it.
I’ll
go.”

Bach could feel Nika’s heart racing as the scar-faced man repeated his question. “Which one will it be?”

Don’t answer
, Bach told her.
Burst into tears—can you do that?

She could, and she did. Quite effectively.

“Touching,” the man said, his words slightly slurred from his inability to move the badly scarred muscles on that one side of his face. “I feel similar grief for a missing friend. Of course, just because he’s not here, doesn’t mean the game won’t be played.”

Caine. He was talking about Devon Caine. That was his missing friend. It was all Bach could do not to recoil. He’d hoped, because Caine had disappeared, that Nika wouldn’t be forced to do this terrible thing, but he’d been wrong.

“So the girl you pick won’t get to … enjoy my friend’s company before she shuffles off this mortal coil. But I’ll do the killing in his name. Now, pick one—or I’ll slaughter five.”

Bach focused, finding his inner calm, despite Nika’s sobs and the other girls’ screams. He wasn’t certain he could do this, considering he was using a large portion of his own power to possess Nika, but he tapped into her raw power, too, and …

It worked.

He reached out to the man, careful to leave Nika safely behind, as he pushed his way into the dark cavern of the scarred man’s mind, planting ideas that he hoped would stick and grow.

She’s frightened enough—just by this threat
.

Her adrenaline levels are high enough
.

There’s no need to damage one of the other girls. They’re all providing excellent product
.

But they weren’t, Bach saw, feeling his own adrenaline levels rise just from being privy to this man’s hideous thoughts, his foul memories of his many years here. This creature—Cristopher was his name—loved his work a little too much.

And he’d recently found out, from blood samples taken, that three of the girls in this room—Stacy, Mandy, and Brianna—were performing miserably, their blood sub-satisfactory to the point of barely usable. Their usefulness was at an end. Brianna had been showing signs of dehydration and shock, and was at death’s door. She was no longer worth keeping. She occupied a bed that should and would be filled by a newer girl. He’d been ordered to remove her today.

Not today
, Bach suggested.
Today the threat is enough. Just take the blood and go
.

The girl is frightened enough
.

She’s frightened enough
.

Her adrenaline levels are high enough
.

The man turned away, and still Bach focused and would continue focusing until he was out that door. But then the man stopped—he moved with a peculiar shuffling gait—and he tipped his misshapen head to one side.

Bach leaned on the idea.
The girl is frightened enough. Time to go. Time to leave
.

“Are you trying to mind-control me?” the man said, turning
back to look at Nika, and Bach immediately pulled out. “What a clever girl. Perhaps too clever for your own good.”

He came shuffling back, and Bach didn’t dare try again. This time this man would be ready, he’d be expecting it. And this time,
if
Bach tried again, the man would know it wasn’t Nika alone who’d put those thoughts into his mind.

And Bach couldn’t risk him finding out that Nika was no longer alone.

“Pick. One,” the man said again, his voice steely.

And Nika spoke up before Bach could stop her, her chin held high in defiance, even as she continued to cry. “Me,” she said. “I pick
me
.”

Nika, no
.

Too late
, she told Bach.
I can’t do it—I
won’t
do it. I won’t pick someone else
.

“That’s not acceptable,” the scar-faced man said. “You’re too valuable to your new owner.”

Nika, I know this is hard to understand, but in a way, he’s right. Your power is unprecedented—

“Well, that’s too bad, because I picked,” Nika answered them both.

“Pick again,” the man said.

“No.”

Nika
, Joseph told her.
I’m going to push you away, push you far back into your mind, into a happy memory, where you won’t see and you won’t hear—

Joseph, no, I
won’t
do this!

Don’t fight me
. But she did fight him, her will sharp and strong, despite her days of abuse and captivity.

The man’s knife came out. “Pick again, girl, or I’ll kill five, right here, right now. And if you still don’t pick, I’ll kill five more.”

He was going to do it. Bach knew that he would, just from the brief amount of time he’d spent in the man’s ugly mind.

“I can’t do this!” Nika cried, as Bach pushed her away from this nightmare.

Nika, go, and you won’t have to
, he told her, and in a rush, he could feel her understand what he was doing and why. But still she fought—this time for him.

Joseph, no, I can’t let you do this for me!

Go. GO
. He was stronger than she was—at least for now. In years to come, that would probably change—provided she survived the next few days. But here and now, Bach pushed her back, pushed her down, and then pushed her even further, even more deeply into her own unconscious mind, so she would not witness and therefore have no memory of the awfulness that was to come.

“I’m going to count to three,” the scar-faced man told Nika, who was no longer there. It was all Bach now, in Nika’s body. “One.”

Bach closed his eyes. God help him.

“Two.”

Nika wasn’t going to do this, but
he
was. He looked up and he spoke in Nika’s voice, because, really, that was the only voice he had access to, right before the man said,
Three
.

“Brianna,” Bach said.

And it was harder to get the name out than he’d imagined, even knowing what he knew—that the little girl was already doomed to die.

He wanted to throw up, and it was possible that his true body did just that—back in the safety of OI.

But here, as Nika, he shut his mouth, and didn’t say aloud,
Know this, now: If you hurt this girl? I will fucking kill you. I will follow you to the ends of the earth. I will personally hunt you down and end the toxic poison that is you
.

To Bach’s horror and despair, the man didn’t shuffle out the door. Instead, he turned and made his way toward one of the few girls who weren’t screaming, one of the few whose eyes were glazed, whose voices were silent.

And he lifted his knife and slashed.

And Bach could have stopped it. He could have taken that knife
from the man’s hand. He could have forced the man to turn the knife on himself, to slash his own, scarred neck. Or he could have slammed the man against the wall, broken his back, broken his neck, crushed the life and the rotting evil out of him.

But then Nika’s other captors would know. And they would kill Nika, or move her far away, or lock her in a room where, when the time came, Bach wouldn’t be able to help her get free.

His team wasn’t ready yet, and the Organization’s defenses were too strong, so this little girl that he’d named had died.

Bach heard himself screaming, heard his voice, ragged and raw as her blood sprayed, as for the first time in decades his anger nearly owned him. For the first time in decades, he allowed himself to hate.

But for Nika’s sake, and for Anna’s sake, and for the sake of all of the other girls in this godforsaken hell of a place, he buried it all inside of himself. He locked it up—all except his grief.

That, he tried to release as he wept—but he knew it would never, ever leave him.

“Anna, thank you,” Elliot said. “You’re brilliant, you are. But it’s not going to be you. It doesn’t have to be you. It shouldn’t be.”

“But she’s
my
sister,” Anna pointed out, even as Elliot turned and looked at Stephen.

“Raise your hand if you know a former Navy SEAL, who also happens to be a fraction,” Elliot said, lifting his hand.

“Shane Laughlin?” Anna said the man’s name in unison with Stephen.

“Oh, that’s good,” Stephen added. “That’s
really
good, El.”

“But why would he do it?” Anna asked. “Going in there? It’s a huge risk.”