Wicked Attraction (The Protector)

  In the cafeteria, Nina loads her tray with food without so much as a dollop of pudding. She takes a seat near the window overlooking the parking lot, noticing as always the mesh on the inside of the glass. The bars on the outside.

  “It’s not to keep us in, you know,” says an unfamiliar voice. Low, hoarse, and yet somehow soft at the same time. “It’s to keep other people out.”

  The person sitting across from Nina at the cafeteria’s narrow table has short, white-blond hair in a crew cut that accentuates the matching pale brows above ice-green eyes. The curves and bumps beneath the black athletic gear, the same as what Nina wears, would suggest the stranger is female. She’s got an androgyne star tattooed on the spot between her thumb and forefinger, though, which means that her gender identity is fluid.

  “I’m Allegra Chastain. Al,” the other person says. “You’re one of us, huh? The enhanced.”

  Nina slices into a hunk of synthbeef, wishing for the days when she’d first awoken and they’d fed her the real stuff. The food here isn’t . . . bad. But it’s far from good. “Nina Bronson. Yeah. I guess you are, too?”

  “First time they’ve let us in here at the same time.” Al looks around and stabs her fork into the air at nothing Nina can see. “I wonder why?”

  “I don’t know, but it seems like a lot of effort at scheduling, if that’s what they’ve been doing. It’s been months since I woke up. How about you?”

  Al shrugs. “About that, yeah. I think we all got fixed around the same time. I heard one of the docs saying they had to get everything done before the laws got changed.”

  “Laws?” Nina pauses in chewing. Her stomach is slightly full, but she’s no less hungry.

  “That’s supposed to be healthier for us, you know? That synthbeef. Grown with extra protein and nutrients, less fat, all that. Doesn’t taste the same. If they can do everything else to it, why not keep the flavor?” Al doesn’t have any synthbeef on her tray. She’s got piles of sautéed veg, some rice, pasta. Bread with synthbutter.

  “The law,” Nina reminded, wondering if Al was playing some sort of mind game on purpose or if she were naturally flighty.

  Al nodded. “Right. I guess they’re passing some laws to make the procedures we had illegal.”

  “Why?” Nina slices more food, tucks it into her mouth. Chews. She’s more interested in feeding her body than enjoying the food, which makes her suddenly sad enough to put her fork down. When there’s no joy in eating, why bother? She might as well be fed through a tube directly into her gut.

  “No idea. I just want to get out of here. I’ve had about enough of this.” Al plunges her fork into the pile of pasta on her tray and slurps some so that a saucy noodle leaves spatters of pink on her cheeks.

  Nina echoes that sentiment, for sure. She looks again at the windows. “Who are they trying to keep out?”

  “Anyone who wants in here.” Al must see Nina’s confusion in her expression, because she laughs. “There’s a whole bunch of angry people out there who want us dead.”

  “We’re soldiers. What’s different about that?”

  “These are our own people,” Al says.

  Nina shakes her head, taking another bite and chewing slowly. “Anyone who wants me dead isn’t my own people.”

  “Well, whoever they are, they’d gladly see us all as dead as we all should have been,” Al says, “and while I won’t deny there haven’t been days when I’m not sure I don’t wish the same thing, I sure as all the random hells would prefer that to be left up to me and not them.”

  * * *

  Nina woke with a start, eyes wide and staring into the soft pale glow of moonlight coming in through the window. She turned on her side, a hand curled under her cheek. It would be a long time before she got back to sleep, she could tell that already.

  Too much to think about.

  With a groan, Nina rolled onto her back again. She lifted her personal comm, noting the time. Too many hours until morning, and she didn’t think there’d be any more sleep for her.

  She could hear Ewan from all the way down the hall, if she tried to listen. The soft whistle of his breathing. The rustle of his body against the sheets.

  She thought about this afternoon. Kissing him in the transpo. His mouth on her. They would have made love if she hadn’t had that glitch. No, she reminded herself. Not made love. They would have fucked, she thought, although she couldn’t convince herself that was all it was.

  The pain in her head and behind her eye had faded hours ago, but she touched her temple anyway. Although there were only thirteen of them left, the enhanced didn’t tend to keep in touch with one another. They didn’t have a forum to chat in, or a group ping or anything like that. Nina knew them all, of course, some better than others, but they tended to keep to themselves. Still, it would be helpful to know if any of them had been experiencing the kinds of glitches that she’d been having. She thumbed a message on her comm to Al, not mentioning the dream at all, because that would be kind of weird. Instead, Nina briefly described the glitches, the pinpricks of blankness in her memories, the other effects. She didn’t expect an answer right away, seeing as how it was the middle of the night, but the light on her comm flashed with a message almost immediately.

  Nothing like that for me, sorry, Al replied. Have you asked anyone else?

  Nina typed quickly. No.

  She waited, but nothing more came through after that, and she set the comm on the nightstand with an uneasy sigh. It didn’t have to mean anything, she thought. Al might be having glitches that manifested differently, that’s all, if her tech hadn’t degraded in the same way.

  But what if it was something only happening to Nina? She frowned, restless, discontented. She sat up, finally, pressing her fingertips to her temples.

  The tech didn’t operate like a computer program. It responded to her body’s natural resources, but she couldn’t feel it working or force it into action. She didn’t have to think about listening for sounds that would normally have been too quiet to hear, she just heard them. She didn’t have to think about her lungs taking in more oxygen, they simply did.

  Just as she didn’t have to force her heart to love Ewan—she loved him as easily and simply as her heart beat faster when she needed it to. She could no more stop herself from loving and wanting him than she could force herself not to hear or smell or breathe.

  Nina got out of bed.

  * * *

  Of all the things Ewan had missed about Nina, hearing the sound of her breathing soothing him to sleep had been the hardest to get past. He’d never been a man who enjoyed sharing space with another person, particularly his bed. He liked to stretch out, roll around. The feeling of someone’s breath on his face in the night had always irritated and in fact disgusted him. Somewhere along the way though, with Nina, he’d become more than accustomed to the weight of her dipping the mattress beside him, and the soft in-out huff of her sleeping inhalations and exhalations. He’d grown to crave the sweet, distinctive scent of her breath and the exact temperature of her bare skin next to his.

  Now he ached with missing her, because although she was in the room right down the hall from his, she might as well have been on the moon’s abandoned space station. He shifted under the weight of his blankets, kicking them off only to pull them back up over him in the next moment. He punched his pillow, then again, not to shape it but because the act of punching it was a kind of relief.

  Sleep would not come.

  He should have been used to that by now. He’d invested in sleeptech, but hated himself for relying on a small chip implanted in the shallowest layer of his skin. If using that to put him under was all right, he could hear Nina saying, why couldn’t he accept and support her enhancements?

  The bedroom door creaked on its hinges, and if there’d been any hint of sleep before that, it vanished in a second. It had a while since any kind of threats had been made against him, but maybe he’d been stupid to move here to this house without on-site perso
nal security other than Nina.

  In the next moment, he relaxed. “Hey.”

  She didn’t answer him, but the bed dipped when she climbed in beside him. Her naked warmth pressed him as she nudged him firmly onto his side, facing away from her. He shivered a little at the tickle of her breath on the nape of his neck. Her breasts pressed his back. Her groin nudged his rear. Her hand slipped around to lay flat on his belly.

  Ewan breathed in, a stirring erection beginning to throb at her touch. He waited, holding his breath, for her to grip him. To stroke. His hips bumped forward of their own accord.

  “Hush,” Nina murmured against him. “Sleep.”

  It was both what he craved and what he didn’t want at the same time. Yet as soon as she spoke, he relaxed against her. Their breathing synced. He wanted to face her, to kiss her, but instead Ewan let her hold him until he could no longer fight the heaviness in his eyes.

  In the morning, she was gone, without even the heat of her on his pillow to prove she’d ever been there at all.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The dream from last night lingered with Nina even now, the morning after, as she pushed her body to its limits. She’d gone to Ewan’s bed knowing it was stupid, but in the middle of the night it was always easier to make bad decisions than good ones. She’d left him still sleeping and come downstairs to exercise in the small room Ewan had designated as a home gym. With one wall of mirrors and a padded floor, along with a few pieces of simple but effective equipment, it was a good workout space even if it wasn’t very big. She didn’t need a huge room. She needed to concentrate . . . and doing that was more difficult right now than she wanted to admit.

  She kept thinking about the dream and about her time training in the research facility after the surgeries. She hadn’t thought much about those days for a long time. Her memories of those months were littered with a multitude of blank spots because of the testing they’d done to see how well the tech worked as a security measure. They’d been able to program it very specifically, which was what had allowed her to be reset after confidential jobs, losing the ability to recall what had happened during the gig but nothing from before or after.

  What was starting to happen to her now was different from that. Being reset was deliberate, pointed, structured. Yes, it left her with blank spaces in her memories, but the blanks all had clear and specific boundary lines directly related to the job. The glitches, on the other hand, swept her brain like a broom clearing cobwebs, taking everything and leaving behind jagged, dangling shreds.

  Waking up in the hospital, she hadn’t known right away what, exactly, had been done to her. It was enough to understand that she was alive, that something had been done to her in order for her to be opening her eyes in the first place. As the extent of her injuries had become more apparent to her, so had the magnitude of what the tech had fixed and what it would continue to control. If Nina had ever regretted signing the forms that had allowed her to be used in such a way, she’d blocked out those memories, or they’d also been erased. What she remembered with utter clarity was the med team’s repeated assurances that the chips and wires in her brain were only ever going to help her. Never harm.

  Of course, as the lawsuits had started coming in, the public opinion about the “super soldiers” turned, much of that due to Ewan’s efforts and making the tech illegal to use. Then had come the realization that the tech in their heads was, indeed, going to need upgrades the same way every other piece of tech that had ever been invented had. What that had meant, exactly, nobody had ever seemed willing to say, and although Nina had done research into the possibilities, nothing had ever been confirmed.

  Because she was able to monitor her body’s natural functions with such precision, it was easy to tell that her recent spate of headaches and dizziness was related to spikes in her blood pressure. What was more concerning to her was not only that she’d been unable to regulate those spikes, but that they’d affected her so strongly. Now, she was pushing herself extra hard to see if she could cause a spike, but no matter how many crunches she did, or pull-ups, or how fast she ran on the treadmill, everything continued working exactly as it was supposed to. It was actually impossible for her to spike her blood pressure, because her body, aided by the tech, worked too efficiently.

  Sweating, breathing hard, she jumped off the treadmill and hit the mats to do some push-ups. She closed her eyes, concentrating, but while her muscles ached from the exertion, it was the sort of delicious pain she always felt after a really great workout. Nothing out of the ordinary, certainly no blinding headaches, and when she leaped to her feet to study her reflection, she saw no hints of crimson in either of her eyes.

  She closed them both, concentrating the way she’d taught herself in the hospital and after, ticking off details in her memories so she could pay attention to the exact places where she was blank. She could find nothing new gone missing, no new silences.

  When her personal comm pinged, she answered at once without looking to see who it was. She’d assumed it would be Al again, maybe with an update about similar glitches. It was Leona, and with a sigh, Nina answered.

  “You haven’t checked in,” Leona said.

  Nina took a long pull from the bottle of water she’d picked up from the floor. “Nothing to report.”

  “There’s always something to report.”

  Nina laughed and shook her head at her boss’s transparency. “Uh-huh. Well, there’s nothing professional to report. How about that? And I’m not obligated to report anything personal.”

  “So there is something personal!” Leona’s grin faded after a few seconds. She tilted her head to peer more closely at Nina through the viddy screen. “You look . . . weird.”

  “I’m all right.” Nina drank more water and swiped at some sweat on the back of her neck. “Working out, that’s all. There’s not much else to do here. Very quiet.”

  “His payments keep coming in on time, so you must be doing something right.” Leona’s voice was light, but her expression remained concerned. “What else is going on?”

  Nina hesitated, uncertain if she wanted to confide in Leona about the glitches. It felt bad enough that she’d shared with Al, who also worked for Leona but was not likely to have spilled any of Nina’s concerns to her. Still, the glitches did have the potential to affect her job performance. Leona had the right to know.

  “I’ve been having some issues with the tech,” Nina said, giving up the struggle.

  Today, Leona’s hair was bright orange with blue tips, and she ran a hand through the shaggy style now to push it off her face as she frowned. “What kind of issues? Are they related to the job? The client is not allowed to do any resetting until after the contract is finished, and then only within the contracted parameters. If he’s messing with your head . . .”

  “No. It’s not like that.”

  Leona’s frown didn’t ease, and her gaze grew steely. She’d thrown down with clients before. Her first priority was always the safety of her employees. “Is he messing with your head, Nina?”

  “Not like that,” Nina repeated.

  “Is he messing with your heart?”

  Nina didn’t want to discuss this any more than she wanted to talk about the glitches, but it seemed easier to admit out loud that she was having problems with her tech rather than the fact she hadn’t walked out on Ewan, even though she should have. Could have. Didn’t. Couldn’t. With a small sigh that became a groan, she finished the water and tossed the empty bottle into the recycling bin in the corner of the room.

  “How about we pass the Bechdel-Wallace test and change the topic. Has anyone else come to you with any issues?” Nina asked bluntly. She had no idea how many of the other enhanced were working for ProtectCorps, because it wasn’t her business and had never mattered before, but if Leona had contact with others, she might have heard about similar issues.

  “With the tech?”

  Nina nodded. “Headaches. Some broken blood vessels in my eye last
night. My blood pressure keeps trying to rise, too.”

  “I thought the tech regulated your blood pressure.”

  “It’s supposed to,” Nina said. “If there’s a problem with it, though, it could be messing with the blood pressure. Which could lead to headaches. Broken blood vessels. I suppose in severe cases, it could lead to patches of memory loss.”

  “What?” Leona sounded shocked.

  Nina sighed. “Memory loss, specifically, unrelated to the job.”

  “Have you seen a doc?”

  “I had a regular checkup before I started this gig, and there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. It’s the tech, degrading. What else could it be?” Nina said.

  Leona looked concerned but not convinced. “Could it just be . . . normal health-related problems?”

  “The tech would regulate anything out of the ordinary, unless the tech is going bad,” Nina told her. “In which case, even if I’m just suffering from run-of-the-mill getting older and having high blood pressure–type things, the tech is still not regulating it the way it should.”

  “It could be stress,” Leona said after a second’s brief hesitation. “I mean, I hate to bring it back around, but you are living with and working for a man you were romantically involved with. That would be enough to send my blood pressure soaring. Hell, the last few weeks before I got my ex to move out, I just about had an aneurysm listening to the sound of him chewing.”

  “It’s nothing like that,” Nina said. And I can’t recreate the problem. That troubles me.”

  Leona frowned. “What do you think that means?”

  “At the baseline, that whatever’s going on is out of my control,” Nina said.

  “And you can’t stand that.”

  “No,” Nina said with an irritated scowl. “Should I stand it, Leona?”

  Leona shook her head and made a placating gesture toward the screen. “No, of course not. I didn’t mean that how it sounds. I just meant that the fact you can’t control it could also be a reason why it’s happening. Stress.”