Silver Bound (11 page)

“I can’t do that. I don’t use her that way.”

The doctor’s mouth opened slightly before he cleared his throat. “All right. I’m sure there’s a story there. Later.” He shook his head, as if to clear it. “Tell her to take off her gloves and mentally embellish it as an order she can’t refuse.”

“Jewel, take off your gloves.” He thought with force, demanding, putting a little threat behind it that he might use with a delinquent on his way to Juvea Farms. A green light flashed from his wrist, blinking wildly before going back to unrelenting red.

Jewel’s eyes opened wide and her hand flew to her collar before she winced. With a frantic haste, she removed her gloves as if they burned her flesh.

His gut contracted as if sucker-punched. He’d caused pain where he’d promised to protect. He’d rather face the business end of a phaser than hurt her, but using the command element of the collar must’ve caused some painful compulsion.

“What the hell?” He reacted on instinct and punched Wells. Right on the chin with a bruising uppercut.

The doctor fell on his ass, sprawled on the decking, and his eyes rolled back in his head.

“Damn.” Guy shook out his fist and ran to Jewel.

“I’m fine.” She panted as sweat rolled down her temples.

“You’ll stay fine, too. Let’s go, sweetheart. I’ll find us a room before I come back and have a heart-to-heart with the good doctor.” He helped her from her chair and supported her when her legs buckled. The weight of her against him, soft and warm, sent a pulse of desire through him. She gave a throaty moan, and he tensed, cursing himself as a damn fool. He had to keep his randy hands off her.

“I’ll make sure he helps you, and without the pain. Come on, almost to the door.”

From behind, a low groan and rustle of cloth reassured him he hadn’t put the doctor in a coma. He was relieved, really he was, because they needed the help, but his jaw set against the urge to punch the man again.

The door slid open. Before he could take another step, the doctor called from behind him.

“If you leave, she will die. Memory leaks cause severe and irreparable brain damage.”

He froze but couldn’t speak. Icy fingers cascaded over his chest.

The doctor continued speaking as if he hadn’t delivered Jewel’s death sentence. “Come, sit down. We have much to discuss.”

Jewel’s heart raced and a blinding wash of black covered her vision. For long moments she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. The few precious memories she’d gathered, almost all of them related to Guy, flashed before her like a scattershot vid ad, but the hated peek at her ex-husband overrode them all. Repeating, over and over.

It’s like watching you with another man.

A foreign weight compressed the wall in her head. The bulging dam threatened to crack from the pinpoint, while shock and primal urges to protect radiated out from Guy through her collar.

Guy feared for her.

She opened her eyes and stepped out of herself, out of her self-indulgent concern for her memories, and ached to hold and soothe him. With a hard grip that’d leave marks, he held her arm as if anchored to her, as if she’d walk through the door and never come back. The emotions rolling off him were not passionate in the least, but she needed to kiss him, to draw him back to her. His eyes shone stark and empty. Face creased in worried lines, and his beautiful lips turned down, he halted in the doorway, ignoring the doctor’s instructions to go into to the examination room.

A gentle yank didn’t dislodge his hold. She turned into him and tucked their arms between them. On tiptoes, she pressed her mouth to his, a gentle reassurance. When she pulled back, they both breathed heavily. Gold flicked through the light brown striations of his irises. Long ebony lashes swept down, trembled on his pale cheek and opened wide. He licked his lips. The panic screaming from her collar receded to a dull whisper.

“You’ll be okay.” His voice shook. “I promised I’d take care of you.”

“I know you’ll take care of me.” She gripped his silky shirt. “There’s no choice now. The block has to go, one way or another.”

From within, her deep well of confidence in Guy stretched to include herself. If he cared this much for her, and she understood his morality and protectiveness as incorruptible, then she would live up to him. Whatever she remembered of herself, she’d have to face it since all other options had fled. She laid her head against Guy’s chest, cradling their arms between them, and softened against his sinewy chest, his heart beating time with her own.

From the doorway leading into the research area, Dr. Wells spoke over the rhythm of Guy’s heartbeat. He gestured them into the exam room. “You must listen to me. I’m sure you’ve suffered no permanent damage, but any memory pulled beyond the barrier can be the one that creates an unmendable rift. The next memory could rip open your mind, or it could be a memory you gain three years from now. There’s no way to predict.”

“I’m right behind you.” She followed Dr. Wells through the door. For the first time, she led Guy, tugging him behind her.

A short hallway gleamed white and clean. Six doors, three on each side, lined the way, with ident-pads and display panels beside each one. At the end, a double door with small windows remained closed, a table stacked with comp parts visible on the other side.

Wells tapped on the U-panel of the first door and it clicked open. He motioned her to an exam table that filled half the room, then sat on a stool in front of a small desk. “I’ll need her Broker.”

A grim expression and tone came from Guy. “It’s been destroyed.”

The doctor sagged in his chair before he pulled himself straight again. “Sit. Both of you.”

She sat on the edge of the surprisingly warm table, but Guy paced.

Dr. Wells spoke to her as if a teacher to a student while he ignored the class troublemaker in the back of the room. With one last flick of his brow and a glance at Guy over his shoulder, he lectured for a few long minutes. Though he could have talked over her head, he explained in layman’s terms. “The memory dam is an electrical construction that blocks certain long-term memories from a specific portion of the brain.”

She nodded. So far, she was with him.

Wells leaned toward her enough to reassure, but far enough away she could still see Guy pacing.

“Something the Terraloft keep within their ranks—silver-tips with memory blocks degrade. The barrier is hit with electrical zaps when neurons try to access memories that should be there. There’s no way to know exactly which little zap will break the barrier, but eventually it will. While most of us have a life expectancy of one hundred and fifty or so, from the time of programming, a silver-tip usually has only, at the utmost, ten or twenty years. There are some who live such a small, sheltered life, well guarded and protected, they may live in such a way their memories aren’t accessed as frequently. They can have the same expectancy as anyone. Since you’re already trying to reach inside yourself, you won’t have even ten years. It’s difficult to say, since it’s like a game of chance, but you might have five, at the outside.”

Guy swore, long and harsh.

The strong emotions from Guy resonated in her, but the fear had been outweighed by an anger that matched her own. Now able to process the difference, she felt his as waves radiating along her skin, prodding her emotional centers with aggression. Her responses, tinged with emotion from within, weren’t just the stimulated reactions of her body. The distinction was tangible. The collar emulated, vibrated along her surface and a little deeper at her silver-tipped areas. Her own emotions resonated, thrummed inside.

While she paused to process it all, the doctor waited, expressionless. When she brought her attention back to him, he gave her a reassuring smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

“The extreme electrical activity when the barrier collapses causes what is colloquially known as a stroke. A severe one. The silver-tip industry basically creates a nonentity of the humans they change. There’s no regulation over them or civil tracking as on planet. There’s been no publicizing of the short life expectancy. The entire injustice is unspoken, unacknowledged.”

“I had no idea.” She scoffed at herself. How could she have known? Her life began a few days ago, but an intuition spoke to her. She didn’t think she’d even known of silver-tips before. At that moment she realized she’d always been sheltered.

“Most folk on Grassland don’t know about silver-tips.” Guy verified her suspicions without a pause in his pacing. “Governmental officials do, of course. There are regs forbidding them, but the laws are written in obfuscation. Unless a commoner went off-world, or had dealings with a Terraloft who spoke of it, there’d be no exposure. No reason to know of the practice, much less how slaves are treated.”

“Understood.” Wells had shown a few signs of surprise at her predicament, but he hadn’t revealed much sympathy, and yet she sensed it in the way he treated her so gently. “Since your barrier is breaking down, it’s best we go ahead and get rid of it in a controlled environment. It’s not such a difficult procedure. I just happen to be the only doctor who’s ever done it. You have to be willing to take the risk. I can negate much of the electrical storm, but enough could leak to cause you damage or death. You must weigh the twenty percent chance of ill fate today versus a hundred percent chance of death, but that death could be in years. You could have days, weeks, months of good health if you leave now, none the worse for your memories.”

“I’ll take the chance,” she blurted out when Guy opened his mouth.

He snapped it shut with a click and started pacing again.

“Your memories could cause you emotional damage and grief.” The doctor’s earnest expression, as if he needed to convince her of those dire circumstances, told her all she needed to know.

“You’ve helped someone before, and the memories she retrieved hurt her, didn’t they?”

His eyebrows rose, then he sat back on the stool and looked at the floor. “Something like that.”

“I’ll take the chance.” She angled her brows and stared meaningly at Guy, willing him to understand. She’d take the chance her memories might hurt them, both of them, but she’d also take the chance to hold onto him with all her heart.

Guy didn’t say a word, didn’t look at her, and the stillness from her collar astounded her. He’d blocked his emotions so effectively he didn’t seem to be feeling anything at the moment. Strangely, though she understood he was trying to protect her, she was adrift, hurt he didn’t share his responses with her.

The doctor didn’t turn to Guy or ask his opinion before he continued. “We have to do this without your Broker, which would’ve made it easier on the sheriff over there.” Dr. Wells nodded behind him where Guy prowled with a fierce expression that threatened he might hit the doctor again. “Lie back on the table and relax.”

“Easy for you to say,” Guy muttered, his exasperation written on every tight line of his body. Small pulses of the turbulence inside him spoke through her collar again. Though he was clearly agitated, relief that he still cared made her slouch, grip the edge of the table on either side of her thighs, but she didn’t lie down yet.

Just thinking of the strength of his desires only a day ago, the collar vibrating with his urgency, she held the edge of the table tighter, itching to hold him. Even now, with Guy too angry to feel the passion that usually zinged between them, she blushed hot. Angry and lethal, he was more handsome, more desirable than any man she’d ever met.

The doctor ignored the impatient man pacing the small examination area and kept an assessing stare on her.

She shifted to alleviate the heat building beneath, around, inside her.

“After an hour in your company I can see that your connection to him is strong, and not because of the silver-tipping. That will help, I think. During recovery. As I explained, the procedure will take much longer to remove than it did to plant, and it will hurt as much as the initial process. To give you warning, it’ll give you a killer headache. In the initial placement, they removed the memory of the pain from you, but I’m sure you can understand that I cannot.”

A pained hiss from Guy filled the room for a brief second. He jerked to a halt and leaned face first against the wall. After thunking his head twice, the hollow reverb echoing, he kept himself pressed to the paneled divider between the research lab’s patient rooms. His question was muffled. “You said it’d take hours?”

“I can give you a tranq.” Dr. Wells glared at Guy.

“No. I don’t use enhancers.”

The doctor ignored the response and turned back to her. She reached up and cupped her neck, her fingers seeking below the silver collar and finding nothing but smooth skin. Without volition, her legs shifted on the table, a nervous tap from her foot on the floor nearly silent beneath her slipper.

“Jewel, you have specific programming to respond to the sheriff’s sexual urges.”

A prickling blush ran up her neck and heated her hand, still pressed there. She gulped, unable to speak.

The doctor continued in a soothing low monotone. “Other than that, you only feel his strong emotions, or when you’re connected, you can sense even the subtle ones.”

“Yes.” Despite her embarrassment, she steeled her spine and faced the doctor head on, even if this trail of thought didn’t seem pertinent.

“Are you feeling his tenseness and worry?”

Guy pushed away from the wall and folded his hands across his chest, speaking in exasperation to the ceiling. “Fine. Give me the damn tranq. Just be sure I can respond if there’s any danger to her.”

Dr. Wells scowled at Guy over his shoulder. “There will be no danger, other than through the procedure. Nothing your pacing and fretting can help.”

The two men eyed each other, clearly bristling like two range dogs vying for territory.

She took a deep breath and rolled her shoulders. “Do you need to put me under, or do I stay awake?”

“I’ll put you under, otherwise the memories will stream in all at once. Coming out of anesthesia slowly will ameliorate the effects.”

“Let’s get this done.” She put all the confidence she could muster into her voice.

Inside, she wasn’t sure at all.

***

With an effort not to compare his wife to the woman under anesthesia on the table, Montgomery helped the sheriff sit in a corner. The man’s face paled as he collapsed from his visibly shaken legs.

Then Montgomery shelved any concern for the man. He focused on the screen with the patient’s cranial imaging displayed. He’d created a program to seek the block. There it was, her silver-tip memory code highlighted in bright blue. Hers had degraded past the point of Lady Wells’s. Jewel had been brought to him none too soon. The net surrounding her brain had chinks in the chain. The medial temporal lobe, which should’ve had a more concentrated meshing to block memories, had holes in the net.

“She retains her semantic memory, for the most part, her knowledge of the world and how to live in it.”

The sheriff didn’t respond, most likely because the tranq had relaxed him into a near doze. Montgomery continued his lecture, both to keep himself grounded in the procedure and to let the sheriff understand what he was doing to the woman he so clearly adored.

“The memory that’s been tampered with is called episodic. The net you can see on the screen blocks these older memories. What I’m going to do now is remove the net.”

Montgomery kept his attention away from his patient’s face, brushed away the images of his wife, his love, pale on the table, and the fear that’d made his fingers tremble. His hand rock steady today, he double-checked the probes attached to the patient. With everything set, he lowered a hood over her upper body. The hood contained precision lasers which would perform the operation he’d programmed, already run on Lady Wells, and in all likelihood would perform without flaw again.

Despite the earlier success, Montgomery held his breath when he started the program. The procedure took seconds. A neutralizing net, colored yellow in the display, covered the bright blue. He scanned the data, a more accurate test than the display watched with his naked eye.

The blue netting disappeared in a wink. No flare-ups.

Montgomery released his breath as the yellow faded without so much as a flicker or spark.

It looked good. Textbook.

Now all they had to do was wait and see.