Forbidden Stranger

It didn’t matter. She would find out later. Right now, Nina rounded the corner of the house and headed for the airtranspo as fast as she could run.

  Ready to fight.

  * * *

  Land and air transpos all operated by automatic pilot, but the one Ewan could hear landing in the front of the house had been flying too erratically for that. Nina had taken off running toward it, ignoring his shouts, and so Ewan pushed himself after her. He wasn’t as fast, but with the adrenaline rushing through him from almost falling to his death, he made good time.

  He rounded the corner to find the airtranspo askew in the landing area. The passenger door hung open. A black-clad figure was on the ground in front of it, with Nina on top, at least for a minute before the battle shifted and the intruder rolled them both to gain the upper hand.

  Ewan had seen Nina fight before, but never like this. Neither had weapons except their hands, feet, teeth. Ferocious and savage, both used everything they had. Blood flew. All he could do was watch in horror and admiration.

  A glimpse of white-blond hair cropped short made him realize who Nina was fighting. Shouting Nina’s name, he moved toward them both. Neither paid attention to him. The solid crunch of Al’s fist against Nina’s jaw sent her tumbling backward, and Ewan took the chance to again distract them from destroying one another.

  Al did not take the chance to dive to the ground and continue her assault. She stepped back, fists raised in defense, but shouted Nina’s name and added, “It’s me! It’s Al! Stop hitting me so I can stop trying to kill you!”

  Nina had already made it back onto her feet, but Al’s shout stopped her. She spat a mouthful of crimson to the side but didn’t advance. “Al?”

  “Yeah, it’s me.” Al didn’t lower her fists, but her voice softened. “Don’t come at me again.”

  Nina drew in a coughing breath and spit again. She put her hands on her hips. Breathing hard, she hung her head for a moment before looking up at Al, then Ewan. Her expression twisted, furious, but she gave them both a bloodstained grimace. When Ewan moved toward her, she gave him a warning glare that stopped him immediately.

  “Are we good?” Al asked Nina.

  Nina nodded. “I know who you are.”

  Al shot Ewan a triumphant look. “Good. Are you going to invite me in for tea and crumpets, or should we stand around bleeding on the lawn?”

  * * *

  Nina had insisted Al take a shower and change her clothes before there could be any grand revelations. Nina did the same before they met up in the kitchen where Al raided the fridge without self-consciousness and helped herself to a truly impressive amount of food. For once, Nina had little appetite. She took a plate but only picked at the array of leftovers Al had defrosted.

  Ewan had shown up in the kitchen with fresh clothes and damp hair, too, but like Nina, he hadn’t helped himself to anything to eat. She hadn’t said a word to him the entire time. He, wisely, hadn’t tried to start a conversation with her.

  “Your security is pretty good,” Al said around a mouthful of pasta and potatoes.

  Ewan poured himself a mug of coffee, along with one for Nina that he set in front of her without asking if she wanted any. “You still got through.”

  “Barely. Had a hairy scary couple of minutes at the end,” Al said, adding, “sorry about the fly-by. I was trying not to crash into the house.”

  Nina had not realized how much she wanted coffee until Ewan gave her some, but instead of drinking she merely warmed her hands on the mug. The person across the table from her was Al. Nina remembered the haircut, the voice. The androgyne star tattoo between Al’s thumb and forefinger. She remembered the hospital.

  She remembered being a soldier.

  There was no single moment she could pinpoint when recognition had started to return completely, but it had begun when Ewan fell off the cliff and she’d been strong enough to pull him to safety. The long months of navigating all the holes in her memory didn’t simply fade away. She had no trouble recalling the times when she’d pulled up blankness in the places now filled with images, scents, sounds . . . emotions. She wasn’t sure what she knew and what she didn’t, though. Only that where there had been nothing, now there were many other things.

  Nina did not look at Ewan, afraid she would not be able to control herself the way she wanted to. Rage. Grief. An onslaught of emotions she wasn’t sure how to handle and truthfully was furious that she had to.

  She didn’t know all the details about the island’s security, but she could put the pieces together and make a good guess about the extent of it and why it was in place. Ewan’s home, Woodhaven, had been outfitted with top security. The mountain cabin, not so much—but she didn’t want to think about that cabin here and now. It was the place she’d painted. Where they’d fallen in love the first time. It had also been the place where he’d betrayed her the first time.

  When was she going to stop letting him do that to her?

  “You could have killed us,” Ewan said sharply.

  Al rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well, trust me, Donahue. If I had wanted to do that, I’d have tried something a little less likely to also end up with me squashed all over the place.”

  “You stole an airtranspo,” Nina said.

  “Borrowed,” Al corrected with a grin. “They’re going to get it back, and in generally the same condition it was in when I took it.”

  “I’m not going to ask how you managed it, but I do want to know why.” Ewan sipped coffee slowly.

  Al’s grin faded into seriousness. She shoveled a few more bites of food into her mouth, chewed and swallowed, then said, “Katrinka Dev outfitted her son with experimental tech and programming that she’s claiming fixes the self-termination problem. In the meantime, we’re down to six of us left—”

  “Six of us what?” Nina interrupted.

  “Enhanced,” Al said quietly.

  Nina frowned as a new light of understanding gleamed inside her. She had once been one of fifteen. They’d lost Hendricks to his own darkness. Nina had killed Blakely in self-defense. So much had come back to her. Some of it, she wished had stayed unknown.

  She posed the question to Al. “What do you mean, only six left?”

  “More than Gonzalez and Smith?” Ewan put in before Al could answer. He sounded sick.

  Nina turned to finally address him. “What happened to Gonzalez and Smith?”

  “Offed themselves,” Al said. “And yes. Three more in the past as many days.”

  Ewan flinched and rested his face in his hands, fingers threading through his dark hair. “All confirmed? Not like Chang?”

  “What happened to Chang?” Nina demanded. “What happened to all of them?”

  Al got up to pour herself a mug of coffee. “Riley tried to kill the governor of New Mexico and slit her own throat when security stopped her. Chang had a suspicious car accident. Gonzalez and Smith both jumped. But yeah. The others . . . it’s pretty clear they did it on purpose.”

  “No.” Stunned, reeling, Nina pushed back from the table. She wanted to run but settled for pacing, hands on her hips. She’d dressed in comfortable, familiar black leggings and a matching shirt, and for the first time since she could remember, she actively missed the weight of her harness and gear and understood exactly what she was missing. “Who?”

  Al and Ewan shared a look that pissed Nina off enough to clench her jaw. They knew things she didn’t, and not because of her fucked-up memory. She slammed her palm against the table hard enough to rattle the dishes.

  “Who was it?” she demanded.

  Al gave a shuddering sigh, all bravado and sarcasm gone from her voice when she answered. “Xia Saller. Lan Michelakis. Dietrich Naumov.”

  Ewan made a horrified noise. “All dead?”

  “Yes.” Al cleared her throat.

  Nina did not ask what each of them had done. It didn’t matter. They were gone forever. She turned her gaze on Ewan. Unyielding. “You knew this?”

  “Not about the last thre
e, but the others. Yes,” he admitted. “Zulik told me about Gonzalez and Smith.”

  Nina closed her eyes for a moment against the horror. She hadn’t known Xia or Dietrich very well, but she and Lan had worked together a few times. He’d been close with Hendricks. She’d gone to dinner with him once, swapping stories. Lan had drunk too much, ended up on her couch. She hadn’t seen him after that.

  “Why?” she asked.

  Al opened her mouth to speak but looked at Ewan to continue. He drew in a long, deep breath, then shook his head. Nina waited, but neither of them said anything.

  “I’m so tired of being lied to,” she said. Ewan frowned, but she cut him off when he tried to reply. “You can stop. Shut your mouth, unless you’re going to be honest with me. If you’re not, I don’t care what you have to say.”

  “Tell her,” Al said abruptly. “I’m here, in case . . . well. Just in case.”

  Nina turned on her. “What in every hell does that mean? What exactly do you think I’m going to do?”

  “You might try to kill yourself,” Ewan said bluntly.

  Nina recoiled. “What? Why? No, I wouldn’t. That’s insane.”

  But was it? A curling, twisting knot of darkness tightened in her gut. It had been awhile since there’d been any pain in her head, yet she braced herself for it anyway. Nothing but a dull ache filtered through her skull, as likely to be from how hard she clenched her jaw as anything else.

  “It’s something we all got stuck inside us during the initial enhancement operations,” Al shot out. “It wasn’t enough that they could erase confidential info, or entirely reset us so we couldn’t share things we’d seen and heard while protecting their dumb asses. Nope, some set of bastards decided it would be just shiny fucking fine to make sure that in the event of some super colossal secret business that we weren’t supposed to reveal, all of us could be activated into self-termination mode to prevent said info from getting ripped out of our brains by someone else who wasn’t supposed to have it.”

  Nina’s mind whirled. “I never knew that.”

  “None of us knew it,” Al said.

  “It wasn’t part of the original programming.” Ewan’s tone was agonized. His gaze, pleading. “Believe me, Nina. It wasn’t part of anything I ever intended. I was never informed. They kept it entirely secret.”

  She believed him, but what difference did that make? It had still been done to her, to Al. To the others. She thought of Hendricks and a small, rasping sob slipped out of her as she turned away from both Al and Ewan. Once she’d wished she was able to experience the highs and lows of emotions, but oh, how she would have been happy now not to suffer them.

  “How did you find out about it?” she asked.

  Ewan’s chair scraped against the floor. She felt him behind her, but he was smart enough not to try to touch her. Nina wasn’t sure she’d have broken his hand if he tried, but she wasn’t convinced she wouldn’t have thought about it.

  “Everyone but Al got the upgrades.”

  Nina reeled, not staggering back against the counter but turning to put both hands on it so she could keep herself from punching the wall. Or something. Or someone.

  “We got the updated tech? It was approved?”

  “Yes,” Ewan said. “And then we found out about the secret programming after Jordie Dev was arrested. Interrogation about his part in your kidnapping and his collusion with the League of Humanity triggered his programming—”

  “Wait, what?” she demanded. “Jordie Dev was a sugarhead who worked in your lab. He wasn’t enhanced.”

  Ewan coughed into his fist. “They put it in him. Unregistered, unsupervised, hell, it’s possible the operation wasn’t even done under sanitary conditions. They gave him the enhancement tech, including the self-termination programming, and they linked it to anything he could reveal about them. The same thing they did to you.”

  Flashes of a hospital room, not the same place where she’d met Al, pounded Nina’s mind. Ugly pajamas, she thought without knowing why. A health spa that had not been about health.

  “ . . . what they did to me,” she whispered.

  She’d been trying to protect Ewan, but someone had targeted her. Nina ran her hands over her body, thinking of the scars. She pressed her fingertips to her temples as images flooded her, threatening to send her to her knees. Her sister. Patrice. Nina had gone to see her. Someone had taken her. Kept her.

  “They tried to get it out of me, but I wouldn’t tell them.” Her voice sounded shocked, even to her. She looked at Ewan for confirmation.

  He nodded. “By all accounts, you resisted them. When Al and I found you—”

  “I remember,” Nina cut in hoarsely. “I thought I was going to die without ever seeing you again.”

  Ewan moved toward her, but she held up a hand to keep him at bay. Just because she could recall her desperate desire to see him once more before she closed her eyes forever, that didn’t mean she was ready for anything from him right now but his words.

  “When we found you,” he continued gently, “you’d been put through a lot. You’d been reset, over and over. We didn’t know what the LOH had connected to your memories, only that anything could have been designated as classified. Anything could have set you off. I had to lie to you—”

  She barked out incredulous laughter that even now he thought he could excuse what he’d done. “Of course. Justify it, the way you always have. Tell yourself you know better than I do, Ewan. Like I’m some kind of child you need to coddle!”

  “I never meant that,” he began, but she wasn’t having any of it.

  “I’m a soldier. I can take care of myself!”

  Al scowled. “It’s not a joke, Nina. Go ahead and be as pissed off with him as you want, but he was trying to protect you. Considering how many of us have already died, you should count yourself lucky you had someone who cared enough about you to try and keep you safe until we could figure out a way to deactivate it.”

  Nina gave Al a long, steady look. “This isn’t any of your business.”

  “Wrong,” Al countered with a hard glare. “Until we are guaranteed that we’ll be safe, every single one of us that’s left, it’s all of our business. I stole a fucking airtranspo and braved Donahue’s security to get here, so I could make sure he knew that he had to get you the new programming, whatever it is. Before something bad could happen.”

  “You were afraid I’d try to kill myself. I would never try that.”

  “You did try,” Ewan told her. “You jumped off the cliffs.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Nina let out a long, low, and horrified groan. Her shoulders shook. Ewan tried to put his arms around her, but she stepped neatly out of his embrace.

  “I’m sorry.” He knew it wasn’t going to be anywhere near enough.

  Al stood, pushing her chair back from the table. “Katrinka Dev was trying to outrun Donahue’s team to get patches made for all of us, and it looks like she made it first.”

  “She was unethical,” Ewan spat.

  Al sneered. “Like that matters? Her team came up with something that seems to have worked, at least for that crazy fuck Jordie. So far nothing’s been released, but eventually everyone’s going to get called in to have their heads messed with. Again. So I came to get you, before something could happen to you.”

  “You could have called first,” Ewan told her. “At the least I’d have given you access codes.”

  Al’s eyebrows flew up. “Really? You’re going to scold me about that? Did it occur to you that I tried and got no answer? I thought something excremental might be going down here in your little island paradise, Donahue. Forgive me for being concerned. It’s not like nobody’s ever tried to hammer your ass in the past, or Nina’s.”

  “Both of you, stop bickering.” Nina turned from the counter. She crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m not going to jump off a cliff. Or anything like that. I’m fine.”

  “You don’t have to rush to the mainland to get
your head messed with, either,” Ewan said. “Especially with something Katrinka Dev came up with. There’s no way of knowing if it’s going to work, or if it’s just going to set off another round of problems. We have to be sure before we do anything.”

  Al snorted rough, derisive laughter. “That’s rich, coming from the bro who kept insisting I get the upgrades even when I said I didn’t want to.”

  “I don’t trust Katrinka Dev,” Ewan said flatly. “You shouldn’t, either. I wouldn’t put it past her to have an ulterior motive.”

  Nina shook her head. “What motive could she have?”

  Ewan thought of Katrinka’s threats. “Revenge for getting her son arrested and thrown in a prison for the insane.”

  “That has nothing to do with the rest of us,” Nina said.

  “That doesn’t necessarily matter.”

  “Yeah, well, all I know is that I’ve been watching my fellow enhanced go off the deep end, and I don’t want there to be any more. I don’t want to be one of them,” Al retorted. “I told you, Donahue, if and when I go, I want it to be my damned choice, not because some bunch of sphincters decided long ago they had the right to decide for me. I’ll take the upgrades and whatever Katrinka’s team came up with.”

  “Just because it worked on Jordie doesn’t mean it could work on you!” Ewan shouted. “He didn’t have a standard install, there hasn’t been any real testing, he was barking mad before—”

  Nina stepped forward. “Enough. Both of you.”

  Al waved a dismissive hand and went back to her chair to finish eating. Ewan waited for Nina to say something. She was quiet for a long time.

  “I don’t remember everything, but there’s enough there for me to know I’m on the way back. All the way back,” she added with a glance at Ewan. “But right now, all of this is overwhelming. I’m not sure what to think about any of it.”

  Al scraped her fork along her plate and pushed back once more from the table with a low belch and a pat of her lean belly. She approached Nina, who went into a defensive stance. Al tilted her head to look her over.

  “We already beat each other to a pulp. I’m not trying to do that again,” she said. Her ice-green gaze pierced Nina’s own. “You and I have been friends a long time. Been through a bunch of stuff nobody else could really understand, not anyone else in this room anyway. I came here to make sure you were taken care of, because I care. Yeah, I know. Gross.”