A man in a white lab coat glanced at me, then his gaze found Kori and his eyes narrowed. “Korinne. Didn’t they ban you from the building?” I glimpsed an ID badge hanging just below chest level, but his arms covered most of it when he crossed them, and I could only see his last name. Abbot.
Kori shook her head and clucked her tongue. “There you go thinkin’ small again. I’ve been banned from several buildings. I’m a regular pariah.”
“And who is your partner in exile?” Abbot asked, blocking the doorway with his own body.
“This is Ian Holt, the man whose ass you’re going to be kissing in a few short days. Better practice your pucker.” She shoved him into the room and stalked past him, and I followed when he stomped after her.
“Get out now, or I’ll call security.”
Kori shrugged, half sitting on a table covered in forms and file folders. “Call ’em. And while you’re at it, tell them how you broke security protocol by answering the damn door. Anyone with the clearance to actually be in this room would have his or her own functioning code.” She picked up a clipboard and flipped through the pages clipped to it, too fast to have actually read anything. Then she looked up with her head cocked to one side. “You ever been on Jake’s bad side, Abbot?”
“We all know you have.” He snatched the clipboard from her and tossed it onto another table, then propped his hands on his hips beneath the lab coat, revealing brown slacks and a very poorly chosen button-down shirt. “You fell from grace, and I heard the landing was pretty damn rough. I wasn’t on the guest list, but I heard that you—”
Kori swung before I even saw her pick up a weapon. She grunted with the effort and something I couldn’t focus on slammed into the lab geek’s head. He went down without a sound, out cold, a huge lump already forming on his left temple. “How rough was your landing…?” she mumbled, already squatting next to his still form. And only then did I realize what she’d swung. What had left its manufacturer’s icon imprinted in the skin just below his hairline.
“An ink drum?” I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or back away from her slowly.
“A big ink drum. If Abbot had upgraded his printer when Jake suggested it, he could have saved himself from a concussion.”
“Or maybe a coma.”
Her brows rose in interest. “A coma? You think?” She stopped digging through his pockets long enough to glance critically at his face. “Nice.” Kori stood with a key card in hand. “Bastard deserves that and more.”
“What did he mean?” I asked as she turned toward another door, and Kori went so still I wasn’t sure she was even still breathing. “What did he hear? Why are you persona non grata?”
She clutched the key card like it might disappear if her grip loosened. But she didn’t answer.
“Why do they hate you, Kori?”
“They don’t hate me. Well, some of them hate me. The rest of them…” She turned slowly and looked up at me in shadows too shallow to be useful, thanks to yet another infrared grid. “You know how in school, there’s always one kid who’s just a little better than you at everything? His art gets hung in the hall. He gets to be the line leader, or the door holder, or, if it’s high school, he gets to score the winning touchdown and fuck the cheerleader. You know that kid?”
“Yeah.”
The frown lines across her forehead deepened. “You weren’t that kid, were you? ’Cause that would kinda ruin my metaphor.”
“No. I knew him, though.” I wanted to touch her. I wanted to hold her, or squeeze her hand, but I understood that touching her would make talking harder for her. Might even make her words stop altogether.
“You know how you watch that kid, and you want to be him, but you also kind of want to see him knocked down a peg or two?”
“Yeah.” Why did I have the urge to hold my breath, like that might somehow change the ending to a story we all knew?
“Did you see him fall on his face?” Her voice was harder than I’d ever heard it, and I nodded, feeling guiltier than I had since junior high. “When he fell, did you give him a hand up? Or did you kick him when he was down, to make yourself feel bigger? Or maybe you just watched someone else do that.”
“I…”
“You don’t have to say it, Ian. We’re all grown-ups now. This isn’t high school. But if it was, I’d be that kid, and he’d be the one kicking me.” She glanced at the unconscious lab geek. Abbot. “They all would.”
“And Tower?” I dreaded the answer, even though it wouldn’t tell me anything. She’d painted a vivid picture without giving a single detail. “Who’s he in this metaphor?
“He’s the kid who pushed me down. Hard.” She looked away again and stepped toward a window covered with dusty horizontal blinds ending an inch above the table she’d leaned against earlier.
I didn’t want to ask. Knowing wouldn’t change what I had to do. What I would do. But I wanted to know what had happened to her, and who had done it. I wanted to know if there was anyone I should kill with a little more than the necessary force and pain, when the time came.
“What does that mean, Kori? How hard did he push you?”
She turned slowly, still clutching the key card, and looked right up into my eyes, her pale hair the only spot of light in an otherwise dim room. “There are some questions it’s not okay to ask. You just found one.”
I held her gaze so she could see the truth in mine. “Fine. I can respect that.” She didn’t trust me, and why should she? “But you left out part of the story. In my school, that kid who tripped and fell? Or maybe got pushed? He got back up and fought until there wasn’t another kid left standing, and he didn’t do it out of courage or a need for retribution. He did it because that’s who he was. He was a fighter, and fighters never back down.”
“Fighters die young, Ian.” She sounded older—she looked older—when she said it.
I nodded, watching her, my blood boiling in fury at whoever had hurt her, in spite of the fact that what I’d come prepared to do would hurt her even worse. “Yeah, sometimes,” I agreed. “But they die fighting.” Yet even as the words tumbled from my lips—words I’d been saying to myself for years—I remembered what she’d said earlier.
Sometimes dying is the coward’s way out. Sometimes living takes guts.
She blinked, but her gaze never wavered. “What the hell are you doing here, Ian? You don’t belong here.”
I could see what it cost her to say that—another difficult truth that probably skirted the very edge of what she was allowed to reveal to a potential recruit. “Neither do you.”
Kori frowned and turned away from me, reaching for the chord hanging down one side of the blinds. “This is what you’ll be helping him do,” she said, her voice hard again, as if she’d turned off whatever I’d seen in her. Like flipping a switch. As if it was that easy.
She pulled the chord and the blinds rose, clattering, to reveal a long observation window looking out over row after row of beds. Gurneys, really. Narrow, thinly padded carts on wheels, each of which held a single body. Or patient, as the hospital gowns seemed to suggest.
“What the hell is this?” Why were they all asleep? Or unconscious? The chills running up my back were so cold and ruthless my spine could have been carved from ice. “Who are they?”
They were alive. I could see the closest of them breathing, chests barely rising and falling. And they were all—every single one of them—attached to an IV bag hanging from a stand to the left of each cart.
“They’re donors,” Kori said, and I glanced at her to find her jaw clenched as she stared out at the sea of bodies. “And that’s all I can tell you.” There were dozens of them. Easily one hundred or more cots, and at the far end of the room was a single nurse in green scrubs, checking the IV bags one by one, stopping occasionally to lift an eyelid and check for…something.
“Can he see us?” I asked, staring at the nurse, who didn’t seem to know he was being watched.
“Nope. One-way glass. He c
an’t hear us, either, unless you push that button.” She pointed to an electronic panel on the right side of the window. “So, don’t push that button. This is an observation room. I can’t get us in there.” Kori nodded at the glass. “I never had that kind of clearance, and without Abbot’s password, this is useless.” She dropped the key card on the table.
“Donors…” I couldn’t seem to make sense of what I was seeing. “What are they donating?”
“Look back there. The last two rows.” She pointed, instead of vocalizing what she was obviously forbidden to say. And I looked.
“Carts.” They were no higher than the beds themselves, but the one on the end of the second to last row was unobstructed, because the person on the bed next to him was too small to block the view. I didn’t want to think about what that meant.
I squinted a little more and made out something on the cart. A bag of something dark, with something connecting it to the donor’s right arm. A wire or a tube.
Yes, a tube.
“Blood,” I said softly, horrified by the thought. “They’re donating blood.” Blood was dangerous. Blood was power. Putting any of your blood in someone else’s hands was like turning over the key to your home and inviting the monsters in.
“Not just blood. What comes with blood sometimes?” Kori said, and I had to struggle through a fog of confusion and horror in order to look beyond her words to their meaning.
“They’re donating Skills? How is that even possible? Why the hell would anyone ever donate Skilled blood?”
She lifted both brows in surprise. “I never said they were volunteers.”
Words deserted me. The entire concept was unthinkable. “They’re not… They didn’t…?”
“Wake up one morning and decide to open a vein for Jake Tower? No. They were delivered here, for this specific purpose. After being identified and screened by a staff of specialists.”
The implications were revolutionary and terrifying. The methodology was inhumane and unconscionable. The fact that she was showing me this at all…it made no sense. “Jake will kill you if he finds out you brought me here.” She started to argue, but I spoke over her, whispering, as if the chances of us being overheard had suddenly increased, now that I better understood the stakes of the game. “Don’t bother. I know you’re risking your life by bringing me to see something that would send most recruits fleeing. What made you think I wouldn’t have the same reaction?”
Kori shrugged. “The fact that you kept your cool in the alley, which tells me you’re not easily rattled. The fact that you held your own in that fight, which tells me you don’t run from trouble. And the fact that you need something from Jake, which tells me that you’re here because you want to be here, not because he wanted you here. Don’t get me wrong—he would have gotten you here anyway, but you didn’t even make him work for it.”
She crossed her arms over her chest again and silently challenged me to argue with her. “All of that together tells me that you may be a systems analyst, but you are not a corporate automaton with clean fingernails and an even cleaner conscience. This might shock and disgust you—and I’d be worried if it didn’t—but it won’t scare you away.”
How the hell was I supposed to argue with that? Insist that I was easy to scare? This was why I’d wanted Kenley assigned as my tour guide. Ten minutes alone with her, and the whole thing would have been over. Without the psychoanalysis and flight-risk assessment from her sister. Not to mention the dangerous, top-secret information I was now burdened with.
“You shouldn’t have brought me here,” I insisted.
“I had to bring you here. You had to see what he can do, and that he can get to anyone. You had to understand.”
And suddenly I did. I wasn’t just looking at a collection of human vegetables being milked for the source of their Skills. I was looking at my own future. Kori was trying to tell me without actually telling me that Tower would get what he wanted from me, one way or another. I could serve him, or I could bleed for him.
She wasn’t trying to scare me away. She was trying to scare me into signing, to avoid the alternative.
My head spun. My stomach pitched. But I stood straight and swallowed everything I couldn’t say. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but at least three people have seen us, and if any one of them talks, we’re both screwed.”
Though I hadn’t known about Tower’s pet project when I started this mission, I was fully aware of the risk to my own life. Personal risk I could handle, but I didn’t want her death on my conscience.
Hell, I didn’t want her death at all.
“They’re not going to talk,” Kori insisted. “The receptionist and the security guard don’t even know about this—Jake has half a dozen other projects going on in this one building. There are no cameras in here—” she glanced around the perimeter of the ceiling for emphasis “—because Jake won’t risk the footage being seen by the wrong pair of eyes. Which is also why the staff for this project is smaller than you’d expect. And Abbot can’t report us without getting into serious trouble himself. So as long as we’re gone before his replacement comes on duty, we’re all good. Unless…” Kori frowned and picked up the clipboard Abbot had dropped onto the table. She glanced at it for a second, then set it down again and crossed her arms over her chest. “Nope. No deliveries scheduled for today.”
“Deliveries?” I’d seen a lot of sick stuff both stateside and overseas, but nothing compared to this. To people kept comatose and harvested for their blood. This made me sick. “Are these the deliveries you’re no longer making?” I could hear the anger in my voice, and I could tell from the narrowing of her eyes that she heard it, too.
“I can’t answer that,” she said. “But I can say that I was removed from Jake’s personal security squad about half a dozen times to acquire a few of the more complicated things he required.”
“Because you’re a Traveler.”
“And because I’m a petite woman, which makes me slightly less threatening than your average hulking male goon.” I lifted one brow at her and she shrugged. “At first glance.”
“Why would you do this?” I demanded, my voice lower and harder than I’d intended as I looked out at the neat rows of cots and identically dressed donors. Everything was designed to strip them of identity. To dehumanize them, so the employees wouldn’t be bothered by that pesky sense of decency. Of human compassion.
“If you haven’t figured that out for yourself by next week, you can ask me again, and I’ll answer.”
But the answer was obvious. She’d had no choice. And neither had any of the people she’d taken. Tower had found a new way to rob people of their most basic rights, and as important as my mission was to me, on a personal level, I couldn’t overlook what I was seeing. I couldn’t just walk away from all this when I’d done what I’d come to do.
“Who are they?” I whispered, my voice an echo of the horror roiling inside me.
“They’re people,” Kori said, staring through the glass. “They’re from all over the country. None from this city, and few who would be missed by families or coworkers.”
“Few? So some were missed?”
“That’s inevitable. Some are presumed dead. Some are missed as runaways.”
“And you put them here.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of fact I couldn’t quite believe, and she couldn’t outright confirm.
“That’s how this works, Ian. This is what’s under all the fucking sequins and champagne. Stuff like this, and people like me and you, making it all happen.”
Her voice was sharp, but her expression was empty, and I’d learned that when she looked like that—closed off and unavailable—she wasn’t feeling nothing. She was feeling too much. She was blocking it all out. That was a survival skill, and her still-beating heart was proof that it worked.
“It’s not your fault,” I insisted. “You can’t hold yourself responsible for something someone else made you do. Which would you blame, the g
un that fires the bullet, or the finger that squeezes the trigger?”
For a moment, she was quiet, staring through the one-way glass. Then she exhaled softly. “Doesn’t really matter who you blame, Ian. Either way, I’m his gun, and guns are only good for one thing.”
But even after less than a day spent with her, I knew Kori Daniels was good for much more than what Tower was using her for, even if neither of them could see it.
Nine
Kori
“I need a drink. A strong one,” Ian said. We’d left Jake’s pet project behind two blocks ago, and he was still looking at me like he was disappointed in me. Like he’d started looking at me in the observation room, the moment he’d found out that I’d kidnapped for Jake. That I’d killed for him.
But that was stupid, because he didn’t know me well enough to be disappointed in me.