Secret Worlds (458 page)

Stop stop stop stop stop.

Her mother came to her, pushed her father gently away and stroked Lena’s hair away from her face. Her mother had been the patient one, the one who’d reassured her when her father’s insistence made her cry. She had a gentle touch, like her smell—rain in the desert, sky and earth, clean water. Mama had been as soothing as cool water before Lena’s father died. Before Mama began to blame Lena.

Mama I want to go back. I want to go home. I want to go back. I want to go home. I want to go home.

A moan filled the air. She listened, rigid and still, straining to hear beyond the soft static. Had it been her own voice crying the words aloud? In the wash of shame and fear following the realization, there came another sound from outside her own body. Voices.

Lena closed her eyes to the bright light and her mind to the static. She breathed deep once, twice, calming the hysteria-tinged hiccupping breaths. She listened. Yes. Voices. The low rumble of men talking outside the room. Not talking. Arguing.

Reyes.

A stab of hatred arrowed through her, so pure and strong that it almost felt good. Trust him, he’d said. He’d get her to safety, he’d said. Lies. She’d believed them, too, just before he betrayed her. She’d wanted to believe them. She’d looked for a reason to. And now she was strapped naked to a table in Council custody.

The voices ebbed in volume. She strained to hear them, to pick out intelligible words from the stream of low sound, but she failed. After a moment, a lock turned over behind her and to the right. Footsteps shuffled on the floor as several people entered the room. The door closed again.

Lena waited. She held her breath, paralyzed, only her hammering heart reminding her that she lived. For a moment no one moved. They stood outside her limited field of vision. One, then another, walked crisply across the floor. Blinded by the lights shining upon her face, she still couldn’t see them. Dark shadows examined her.

Slow steps came from her right. An arm reached across and snapped off each lamp in turn. She blinked in the sudden absence of light. By the time her eyes adjusted, Lucas had pushed each lamp back and up, away from her face, and then retreated to the side near her knees.

Another man joined him, moving in from the corner to flank her on the other side of the bed. He was older, his hair mostly grey except for an odd pocket of black along the hairline above his left eye, his face crisscrossed with seamed frown lines. He wore matching pants and shirt, an electric blue flecked with green, and both were prohibitively expensive silk relic-wear. He looked at her as if she were a specimen, a mixture of revulsion and dark fascination on his face. She recognized him.

“You’ve got your second chance, Agent Brayer, so then tell me,” the Councilor of Zone Three said, gesturing to indicate Lena, “how all of this works? You’re sure she’s incapacitated?” His voice had the resonating quality of someone who spoke and expected to be heard.

Agent Brayer? Second chance? Am I the second chance?

Lucas smiled and nodded, opening his mouth as if to answer, but another man stepped forward. He was middle-aged, older than Reyes and Lucas, but not as old as Councilor Three. Tall and broad, his bullish shoulders sloped into a thickly muscled neck. When he reached the end of the bed, he looked at the doorway. His gentle, soft voice surprised her. “Alex? If you’d care to leave the guards and join us?”

Five slow footsteps later, Reyes appeared at her shoulder. “Lena.” The greeting came low and even. His eyes were hooded, eyelids sheltering his expression from the men.

From her angle below him she could see directly into their dark depths to the emotion he seemed to struggle to bury. Disgust? Anger? Regret? Each time she tried to put a name to it, the word skittered away in her mind, driven out by the buzzing that filled her thoughts. She grunted her frustration, the sound barely registering as a huff of air. She swiveled her view from Reyes to focus on the ox at the foot of the bed, already talking.

“Councilor, if you’ll notice the electrode pads at temple, chest, pelvis, and ankles? We have a constant feed of electric current flowing into the subject—”

“Lena,” Reyes interjected. “Her name is Lena.”

The big man’s brows lifted. “Alex. I had no idea you were a sentimentalist.” The corners of his mouth twitched.

Reyes met his stare without flinching. “I’m not, Director Hernandez. But if I’m going to do something for the good of the people, then I will do it without shying away from full knowledge of exactly what it is I am doing and to whom. I take that burden because it is part of the job I believe in. I don’t look away. I don’t close my eyes. And I don’t try to make the weight of it less by dehumanizing the people who suffer for it.”

She glowered at him. Was that all it took for him to excuse his dishonesty?

The thought slid away from her.

What about trust? Broken trust?

“Alejandro.” The Councilor’s voice expressed his oily admiration, even if his words were a rebuke. “Please allow Director Hernandez to continue. I’d rather watch you gentlemen work tonight—” His speculative leer fell upon Lena.

She shivered and shrank back, aware enough to be afraid of the avarice in his gaze. He wanted to see her hurt.

“—but my presence is required elsewhere. This is all the demonstration I will get.”

Reyes extended his head in a nod. “My apologies, Councilor Three. Of course, you’re right.” He waited a beat before speaking again.

She tried to bring her focus back around to his words. But the static in her head crested. She lost his words in the wave of the damn buzzing. She widened her eyes, as if it would help her to understand if she could see them all better, and turned them to look from man to man.

The Councilor preened. The ox was amused. The rims of Lucas’s ears reddened, and his lips compressed into a white line. Reyes was neutral. Always neutral.

Was that part of the burden? The thought snaked away. She clung to it, and the flesh under her skin began stinging again, ant bites spreading. It hurt worse when she tried to cling to understanding. If she let go, hazed out her focus, the burn subsided. By the time she brought herself back to awareness, the ox’s voice filled the room again.

“…began experimenting with different levels of current after a riot at Madisonville.”

She recognized the name of the Council prison reserved for criminal Sparks. It was in Zone Two. No. Zone Four? Yes, it was in Four.

“It was an accident.” The man smiled. “But when even the strongest of our Spark offenders were incapacitated, we realized what we should have known after experiencing the grounding hangover.” The man was pleased, rocking back and forth on his toes. “That happy discovery led to different modes of application. All of the Madisonville prisoners are fitted with electric collars like the shipment we’ve been promised.”

His voice became a buzz again, blending with the buzz in her head.

“…can see it disrupts the critical processes we Sparks use to maintain Dust activity. No focus. No Sparking. It will also reduce her resistance to suggestion. We’d like to find out exactly what she can do, but without the demonstration Agent Brayer got.” He clapped Lucas on the shoulder and laughed.

The Councilor’s leer raked over her again as he spoke. “…like to make sure the current fluctuation will be effective before I go. I’ll be very disappointed if this one—” He broke off and turned a more respectful look to Reyes. “If
Lena
is as big a disappointment as the last one because I could use the prestige of—.”

The last one?
She pulled in her focus sharp and tight, gritting her teeth against the pain. There had been another?

Reyes’s head snapped up though he shifted the movement into a casual back and forth stretch of his neck. The ox immediately spoke over the Councilor, offering reassurances and making a display of sliding up a handle from the end of the bed to prepare the demonstration.

The last one? The last one like me? Or the last little girl?
Her father hadn’t been wrong.

Wait.
Her mind tracked back.
Demonstration?

Current poured into her like acid, ate down into her flesh from the electrode pads, and then spread. Her body arched, straining against the restraints holding her flat. It had the battery acid, electric burn, white heat of a grounding with none of the protections offered by the Dust. The raw current seared down and out, arcing through every part of her skin in contact with the table beneath her.

Then it was gone. Her teeth unclenched, and she found her voice, a hiccupping negative moan so raw it echoed back down at her from the ceiling. Her arms and legs and neck trembled with the memory of the spasms. She tried to catch her breath. She failed.

It took time for her to regain awareness and the moan to fade to ragged sobs. The men stood around her bed in silence. She opened her eyes, feeling the heat of tears tracking back into her hair.

Reyes stood over her, his face a mask of detachment but for one tiny muscle that jumped at the back of his jaw.

None of the other men, however, were remotely detached. The ox man, Hernandez, wore an expression of anticipation, expecting that whatever he wanted from her, he would have. The men to either side of him wore nearly identical expressions of pleasure. Lucas’s face was a study in vengeful satisfaction, and the Councilor….

Lena squeezed her eyelids tight. Bright, raw lust lit the Councilor’s face, and his chest heaved. Had he been this excited when his men murdered her father?

Her hands clenched and unclenched. Her father had tried to protect her. He’d raised her in hiding, taught her to live a lie to keep her out of the clutches of the Council. But even the loss of her childhood hadn’t been enough. He had been as unable to keep her safe as he had been to keep himself alive. He hadn’t been powerful.

But she was. She was so powerful, so different, that her father had been willing to die to keep her hidden. He had paid the price in pain. So could she. Her breathing calmed. Her hands relaxed. The tears still flowed, but they were for her father. She could do this.

She opened her eyes.

As if he’d been waiting, Reyes finally spoke, his voice hushed. “Councilor Three, I would like to reiterate my protest for the record. This is unnecessary. If you would allow me to use my methods, I could discover what you need to know without damage to her trust.”

“Oh, please, stop with the trust.” Lucas had clearly had enough. “Like it’s going to matter where she’ll be?”

“Sir, we don’t have to lose her to use her.” Reyes’s face was bleak, as if it pained him to say the words.

That, or even he didn’t believe his words would move the Councilor. Why did he bother? He had her in custody. He’d achieved what he’d set out to do. So let them have her, and enough with the charade of charm and caring.

The Councilor turned to Lucas then, the heat in his expression tamped down. “What would you do, young Agent Brayer? You are the one who lured her to us, after all.”

“He’s the one who endangered everyone in the building, you mean!”

The Councilor managed to raise his voice over Reyes without increasing his volume. “Yes, Alejandro, I know. And your quick thinking saved us from his irresponsible actions. But were you never a junior agent with more enthusiasm than sense?”

“No, sir.” Reyes’s denial came quickly, flat and final.

“I value enthusiasm, Agent Reyes. I’ve already said I think an enthusiastic agent should be allowed a moment of redemption.” He turned back to Lucas. “Tell me, Agent Brayer, would you like a further opportunity to salvage this situation?”

Reyes was still. Disbelief flared in his eyes.

“I would, very much, sir.”

The Councilor nodded firmly. “You’ll have it, then. Do what you must to get what we want. You have full authority.”

Hernandez nodded his agreement. The Councilor clapped his hands once. Reyes made a suspicious survey of the other three men, lightning fast, before dropping his gaze back to her. He seemed confused and angry. Had he fallen from favor? Good.

The Councilor’s gaze raked over Lena once more before he left them, his satisfaction evident in the angle of his chin and the gleam in his eye.

Reyes managed to catch her eye. He held her, staring down as if trying to impart something to her without words. She wasn’t interested. She returned his gaze, feeding him all of the rage and betrayal that she felt in one hateful look. His lips parted. He took a step back, then turned and walked away to a corner of the room, outside her field of vision.

Lucas, smug, tracked him. “What are you doing?”

Reyes’s low voice rasped out. “You want to salvage. So salvage. Don’t worry about me.”

“You’re not leaving?”

His brief laugh slashed across the room at the younger man. “No. I’m not leaving, Lucas. I’m witnessing. And I’m waiting for the inevitable fuck-up.”

If not for the current creating burning static through her body and her mind, Lena might have laughed.

Lucas curled his lip. He turned his back to Reyes and breathed in through his nostrils. After a moment, he reached into his pocket and removed a small folded packet of papers. After tearing off a square, he carefully refolded and pocketed the packet. He crossed to one of the agents guarding the door and passed him the slip of paper. “Go to this address. Ask the woman there to accompany you back.”

Reyes snapped, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought you were going to salvage the situation, not compound it.”

Hernandez spoke up, too. “Agent Brayer? What are you doing? We have everything we need here.”

Lucas turned his head back and spoke to the Councilor’s Director of Security coolly. “The Councilor gave me his authority. I’ll be doing it my way. Do you understand?”

Hernandez blinked his displeasure, but shrugged and crossed his arms. He said nothing. Lena held tight to the threads of her concentration. Why was Lucas allowed to speak to a superior like that? Why had he been given another chance? She didn’t think Reyes knew, either.

After the agent who’d been sent to retrieve the mystery woman had gone, Lena tried to work through the puzzle of who could be coming to assist Lucas, but her mind began to fuzz out again.