Prototype (27 page)

P
lasma shots drive into my crowd of attackers. One of my HKs is long gone, but my left is holstered and I snatch it free. I shoot up and behind at the man who has me by the hair. Upon release, I fall forward, trying to ignore the pain screaming behind my eyes and the exhaustion coursing through my body. Miles comes into view and bodies fall dead around me.

Miles kneels and pushes my hair back. “You look a little worse for wear, Wade.”

I try to smile. “Admit it. This is how you prefer your women.”

He puts an arm around my waist and hauls me to my feet. “You know me too well.”

“Seven minutes,”
Noah says in the com. I wonder if anyone else can hear the near imperceptible quiver in his tone.

I peer over the railing. Noah, like so many others, wears a mask pulled down tight to hide his face. He stands near the bottom of the stairs looking up at us and waves us down in a frantic gesture. Straggling remains of our team run past him.

The overhead lights in the building flicker and dim. Heavy footsteps pound the carpeted floor from the hallway behind us. I spin to face them but am unprepared for who stands there.

Declan.

Miles’s arm tightens around my waist. The two of us raise our guns to the large crowd of men aiming at us.

Declan’s gaze drops to where Miles slides his arm out from behind me to steady his gun. “You must be the husband I’ve heard so much about.”

Miles jerks his chin up. Grins. Stupid, brave Miles. “Damn right. Gets under your skin a little bit, too, I’m guessing.”

Declan motions to the men. “Get their guns.”

There must be twenty of them rushing forward to surround us, rifles and HKs aimed at our heads. They snatch our weapons from our hands. Declan strolls forward and takes what used to be my gun. He turns it over in his palm. Back and forth. Studying.

When he looks up, it is with an intense, focused glare on Miles. My breath catches in my throat. I need no words to confirm the thoughts running through Declan’s mind. The gun rises in a swift arc and the shot is off before I have a chance to say a word.

Miles drops heavily at my feet and I follow, stupidly intending to cushion the fall he will never feel. I hit the floor with his limp body, pain ripping up from my knees.

I cup his still face. “Miles!”

I shake him, waiting for that grin to tilt up. A joke to spill forth. A wink. Anything to tell me this is a fabrication on his part. But he only stares straight up, jaw slack. Blackened skin surrounds a hole in his forehead.

A scream freezes in my throat. My head feels too heavy. My chest too tight. Hot tears blur my vision, blessedly hiding the fatal wound.

“You killed him.”

My fault. All my fault.

Declan believed Miles was my husband. What if this had been Noah?
Really
Noah? There had been zero hesitation. No thought. No time. And now one of my closest friends is dead over this case of mistaken identity.

This could have been Noah.

Plasma fire floods the second-floor landing from the stairwell. I look past Miles to the small group in black kneeling on the stairs and firing at Declan and his team of security.

“Emma,”
Noah’s voice fills my head.
“We have five minutes to get to minimum safe distance. Get up. You have to leave him.”

But I cannot get up. Grief crushes me and I cannot feel my legs.

“Get the fuck up, Wade.”
Foster’s demand holds no room for argument and is the fire I need to wake up. The building is going to blow. Miles cannot have died for nothing.

I lean close to Miles’s body and surreptitiously drag my hands down his eerily still chest until I feel the hard bump. The data-slip container in his pocket. I fumble with the zipper and retrieve the item that ultimately brought us to this point.

A harsh grip yanks me to my feet. Declan forces me to face him, his fingers digging into my biceps. The blue-green of his eyes blazes. “Competition’s over.”

Plasma fire flies too close to Declan’s head. His men rush forward to cover us.

Declan pulls me toward the hallway. Dragging my feet, I twist and tug to get free.

“Emma!”
Noah’s frantic call forces me to look toward the stairs. Though his face is covered, I recognize him rushing toward us.

Declan aims the gun, only this time I am prepared. I slam a knee in his gut. He doubles over but comes back swinging. A backhand to my cheek sends me flying to the floor. Declan aims again.

Panic sweeps through me like a brush fire. I jump to my feet and rush forward, putting myself in the bullet’s path. “No!”

“Emma, what are you doing?”
Noah asks. His voice is barely audible in my com.

“Get out of the way,” Declan warns in a near growl.

“I will go with you,” I tell him, tears thickening in my throat. “Just stop this. No more. Please.”

He searches me for a trick but will not find one. I watched him kill Miles. I will not watch him kill Noah too. Finally, he reaches a hand out. The test I will not fail. I lay my hand in his. He leads me toward the hallway and I twist around to find Noah fighting another member of the security.

“Get out of here,” I say. “There is no time.” After everything, if the building blows up with him inside . . .

Noah looks up and starts for me. Declan’s focus is on a room ahead, so I throw the container holding the data-slip, and Noah catches it easily.

Declan turns into an office and shuts the door. He punches a code on a keypad, and a click sounds the lock mechanism.

A fist pounds on the door outside.
“Emma . . . shit . . . hold on.”

I stare at the door, the breath still in my chest. “Go,” I whisper.

“I’m coming,”
Noah says.
“I’m coming for you.”

“I know.” I could not stop him if I wanted to.

Declan searches one of my ears, then the other, finding my com. He drops the device and stomps on it. He turns me toward a private teleporter. “Time to go.”

 • • • 

We go straight to the cloning facility in Colorado. Declan remains silent as he leads me down a sterile white hallway. Windows face a parking lot lit by fluorescent lamps and beyond that, a dark, unknown landscape.

Opposite the windows are opaque doors under rectangular alcoves with curved corners. On the wall inside every recess, a touch-screen computer hangs above cubbyholes filled with various supplies. The ceilings and walls are a smooth white tile, but the floors are a grayish brown. The high sheen reflects the thin strip of lights above.

Red coats stroll behind us, arms tucked behind their backs. Yellow-scrubbed orderlies nod as they pass. Blue-coated botanists pass without so much as a glance up from their tablet computers. Then there is Dr. Travista in his white coat, stopped in the middle of the hallway, hands deep in his pockets.

He gives me a tight smile, and when we reach him, he says, “No fight today?”

“I killed her husband,” Declan says beside me.

Bile burns my throat, and tears sting the backs of my eyes. Poor Miles. Why did he have to lie?

Dr. Travista scans me. “Probably in shock.” To me, he says, “Why don’t I show you to your room so you can get cleaned up and changed?”

I glance back in the direction of the teleporter room, wondering how long until Noah will come through those doors. Do I even want him to? If Declan finds out he killed the wrong man . . .

My stomach wrenches remembering how the light had just
vanished
from Miles’s eyes. It happened so fast. An eyeblink. Gone. That cannot happen to Noah. I have to get out of here before he shows up.

Declan nudges me forward. “Let’s go, love.”

I throw a punch at his jaw that very well could have broken my knuckles for all the pain radiating up my arm. I am quick to follow up with an elbow to save from breaking my hand. The force I put behind the strike takes him to a knee.

As I prepare to kick, two red coats rush in and twist my arms up behind my back. An upsurge of panic sets my blood on fire. I have to get out of here. I have to. Noah cannot come after me.

“Hold her still,” Dr. Travista says.

The needle appears in my periphery. Not enough time has passed for me to forget the effects of his sedative. If he sticks me again, this is over.

I stomp on one man’s instep and blindly piston my head back, hoping to connect. I clip a jaw, I think, but nothing serious enough to get free.

The two red coats lift me off my feet and slam me chest first to the ground, driving the air from my lungs. The needle stings going into my neck, and cold spreads under my skin.

 • • • 

Dr. Travista leans straight-armed on the bed, gripping the steel sides, and watches me through glasses that sit near the edge of his bulbous nose. His smile is genuine yet small as he says, “Good morning, Emma. How do you feel?”

Morning? I squint into the sunlit hospital room. Large, square windows face a mountainous landscape. Very,
very
far in the distance, the tops of skyscrapers in Boulder, Colorado, glint in the sun.

Heavy blankets lie up to my chest. Someone has cleaned and dressed me in white scrubs. My stomach turns. Who would have done that? Declan? Dr. Travista? His favorite nurse, Randall? It does not matter. A violation has occurred.

I twist my bound wrists until they burn. An IV has been inserted, taped to the inside of my elbow, though nothing is connected. The smallest movement of my forehead tells me I have electrodes attached, and I see the slopes of more under my scrub top.

A hand comes to rest on my shoulder from the opposite side of the bed. Declan.

“Take your hand off me,” I say.

He combs hair away from my face. “It’ll be over today.”

Dr. Travista pats my hand. “In an hour you’ll be perfect.” He looks up at Declan. “I think we can save some of her earlier memories. Save from starting completely over.”

Declan shakes his head. “Too risky. We don’t know when she started to remember.”

“Stop talking about me like I am not here. You have to stop this. I have a daughter, Declan. She needs me.”

He gives me a sad smile. “I’ll find her just like I found you. We’ll raise her together, love.”

The words are a weight on my chest. “You will never lay a hand on her. Never.” My threat must sound empty to him, because what he does not understand is that Noah will kill him first.

“That may be true, but in the end, will it matter? You won’t know she exists, and our own children will fill any void that remains.”

I jerk upward, wishing I could hurt him. “I did not want your children even when I loved you. Not that you could produce any. You were sterile.”

He blinks. “How did you know?”

“Does it matter? You do not have that problem anymore, do you?”

Dr. Travista smiles beside me. “No, he doesn’t. Thanks to you.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I’d been trying to talk Declan into the procedure for months, but he was reluctant. When you brought him to the brink of death—I’d just gotten to him in time to save his full memory—you forced his hand.” He gives us both a placating smile. “You two will make beautiful children together.”

“You both make me sick,” I say. “You made me believe for months I was to blame for never becoming pregnant, when all along it was Declan.”

“It’s of no concern now.” Dr. Travista moves to the end of my bed. “We should get started.”

He looks at the wall behind me and I glance back, curious about what he looks at. The space behind me is one large monitor, showing my vitals.

“There’s some interference in her brain activity,” the doctor says. “Could cause some issues with the wipe.”

“What sort of interference?” Declan asks.

“Electrical.” He eyes me for a long moment. “Nanorobotics if I had to guess.”

I look away, refusing to give him an answer one way or the other.

“Nothing concerning,” he says, “and shouldn’t affect the DMT.”

Declan nods as if understanding exactly what Dr. Travista said. But I am confused.

“DMT?” I ask.

“Dimethyltryptamine,” Dr. Travista says, pulling a prepared syringe from his pocket. “Medical grade. Fifteen minutes after injection, you’ll be as good as new. No more bad dreams.”

Declan shivers beside me. His hands tighten around the rail to my bed.

“Are you sure this is safe?” I ask.

Dr. Travista gives me a condescending chuckle. “It’s quite safe when administered by a professional. Dimethyltryptamine is a simple compound found in nature. Mystics believe this hormone actually facilitates the entering and exiting of the soul. We all produce it naturally, but under stress, the pineal gland can produce too much or too little, creating an imbalance.”

So Dr. Malcolm was right. Whatever is happening starts and ends in the pineal gland.

“I will give you an injection,” Dr. Travista continues, “and when you come back down, everything will stabilize.”

Declan releases a breath. “You’ll feel it happen. It’s like someone hit a reset switch.”

“We shock a heart to get a normal rhythm,” Dr. Travista says. “This is essentially no different.”

He takes the cap off the syringe and I do the only thing I can. Squirm as far in the opposite direction as I can go. Declan reaches over me to steady my arm so Dr. Travista can insert the needle into my IV.

Security alarms go off as the word “no” sits poised on my tongue.

Declan’s attention slings to the door. “What the hell?”

Dr. Travista pulls the syringe out and looks up at the thin strip of lights above. The white glow flashes red with a blue outline. “That’s the bomb sensor.” He rushes to the wall and presses a call button. “Evacuate the building.”

Moments later, a computerized male voice sounds over the loudspeaker. “This is not a drill. For your safety and the safety of others, follow the evacuation procedure. Remain calm. This is not a drill.”

The pounding of running boots fills the corridor outside, as does the occasional pitch of plasma fire and screams. Chaos approaches this room, where, under the wail of the alarm, time has frozen. No one moves to even breathe.