In the Devil's Nebula (Phoenix Adventures #2) (20 page)

Ria circled him and went down on her knees.
“I’m here, Zayn. You aren’t alone to deal with this. What happened
wasn’t your fault. When are you going to realize that?”

His gaze was on that metal table, his eyes
stark. Then he looked at Ria and frowned. “Vik? I’m sorry. Can you
ever forgive me?”

Ria felt an uncomfortable roll in her
stomach. Words didn’t come, only hurt.

“Shit.” Zayn rubbed his eyes. “Ria. I know
you’re Ria.”

“It’s okay.” Except her heart was breaking.
Deep down, he would always see another woman when he looked at
her.

“No.” He gripped her shoulders. “I see you,
Ria. I like your style. Your courage. I respect the hell out of you
for taking on the Guild and fighting for your freedom. Yes, you
look like Vik, but you aren’t her. You’re different.”

With a sigh, Ria pressed her forehead
against his. He’d just had a bad moment, in the place that had
haunted him for years. She couldn’t hold his confusion against
him.

“When we get out of here and you’ve dealt
with the Guild. You’re coming home with me.” There was an intensity
in his eyes. Or maybe desperation. “Maybe we’ll take a vacation
first. Ever been to Duna? The water is azure blue and the sands as
white as sugar. I’ll teach you to surf, we’ll skinny dip at night
and make love in the waves.”

“Sounds magical.” It did. Ria wanted that.
She wanted him. She’d been fighting to find something worthwhile in
her life. She now suspected loving this man was that thing.

“After a rest, we’ll head out on a hunt.
There are so many places I want to show you. You’ll make a damn
good treasure hunter.”

She smiled. “I’d like to give it a try.”

He smiled now. It was a little wobbly but
she could see he was getting his confidence back.

“We have to go now.” She wedged an arm under
his shoulder and they helped each other stand. “We have to walk
through more rooms like this and God knows what else we’ll
see.”

His jaw tightened. “I can do it.”

They skirted the table. Zayn paused for a
second, his fingers brushing the metal surface. “Goodbye,
Viktoria.”

Ria swallowed the lump in her throat and
opened the next door. They passed through another room with
multiple chains attached to the walls. Then another with trays full
of implements of torture.

Then they made it into another hallway. This
one was stark, blinding white.

Ria glanced at her Sync. “That way.” She
pointed to a set of doors near the end of the hall. There was a
strong scent in the hall. One that reminded her of Medical where
they got patched up after a mission.

At the doors, she saw the symbol carved on
the front. A small dagger inside a circle. She gasped.

“What is it?” he asked.

She stroked the symbol. “This is the
children’s area.” She swallowed. She’d always wondered what was
behind here, her own memories dimmed by time. Could she handle
seeing the small children in training, babies learning how to kill?
Could she see them and know that right now, she couldn’t help
them?

“We have to go through here,” she said.

“We’ll come back. Once we’re out of here,
we’ll work on finding a way to stop what the Guild does to
children.”

Ria looked up at the man she suspected she
was falling in love with. She had no experience with love, but if
the jumble of bright feelings and possibilities inside her wasn’t
love, she couldn’t imagine anything stronger. “Thank you.”

This time Zayn pushed the door open.

Ria walked in and frowned.

Long rows of large, clear tanks lined the
long room. Tubes snaked from the top of the tanks up to the roof,
all filled with different colored fluids.

There were bodies floating in all the
tanks.

She walked to the first tank. A young woman
floated in there, her dark hair streaming up in the water like an
inky cloud. The tubes entered her body at various places.

“Where are the kids?” Ria looked at Zayn.
“What the hell is this?”

Zayn didn’t like this. Not one bit.

A bad feeling sank over him like a
suffocating blanket. He stared at the tanks and the bodies inside.
He couldn’t even tell if the occupants were alive.

He wiped the back of his hand over his
mouth. He still felt a little shaky from seeing the interrogation
room, that small dank place that he hated so much. He felt like he
had no solid footing. Then he looked at Ria and everything
steadied.

She pressed a hand to the glass of a tank
housing a tall, young man. Suddenly the man’s eyes snapped open.
Ria took a hasty step back.

Zayn moved closer. The man didn’t seem like
he could see them. His eyes were a milky white, unaware. His chest
was a mass of laser burns.

“You think he’s dead?” Ria asked.

“Can’t survive a wound like that, even with
a medscope.”

She looked down the row of tanks. “You think
this is some sort of medical research? Maybe the Guild is testing
enhancement procedures and drugs.”

“Maybe.” It still didn’t feel right and
every good pilot knew you had to trust your instinct. He spied a
computer terminal ahead. The desk had three curved screens
suspended above it. Each screen held an image of a flame-haired
woman in a tank. He glanced over and saw the woman in the
neighboring tank.

In the first image, the woman looked human.
In the second, he could see her facial features were changing,
morphing. In the last, she had a tiny row of ridges down the side
of her face. He frowned. She looked like she was Pictori, like
Ria.

“Hey! Hey, you can’t be in here.”

The voice echoed from the center of the lab.
Zayn and Ria turned and saw a man hurrying toward them. He wore a
white lab coat and had surgical goggles pushed up on his head. The
cranial ridge on his forehead and lack of hair pronounced him a
Weent. A race known to have some of the quickest minds and highest
intelligence rates in the galaxy.

“Out.” He made a shooing move with his arms.
“You need to get out now. I won’t have—”

Ria reached out and slammed the man against
the nearest tank. “I want some answers. Now.”

The man blinked. “You can’t—”

“Where are the babies?”

“B-babies?”

“Future assassins.”

“There aren’t any babies.” The doctor
focused on her. “You’re Pictori.”

“Yes.”

“So you’re an assassin, then.”

“Consider me retired. Who are you?”

The man shifted nervously. “Dr. Wendell
D’aarn. I work for the Guild.” He tilted his head. “You were
created here.”

Ria looked over his shoulder at the tank.
Zayn felt his gut-deep dread solidify.

“I just told you, I’m Pictori.”

D’aarn shook his head. “The Pictori are a
species I created.”

The pride in the man’s voice made Zayn want
to slam a fist into the man’s face.

Ria’s eyes narrowed. “Like I said, I’m
Pictori, from the Devil’s Nebula.”

“Ever met a Pictori outside the Guild?” the
doctor asked.

Ria frowned. Then she slammed the doctor
against the tank again. He gave a yelp.

“Dr. D’aarn,” Zayn said. “I think you better
give her those answers now.” Zayn kept his gaze on Ria and her pale
face.

“You’re saying the Guild makes babies in
this…lab?” Ria asked.

D’aarn shook his head. “Gosh, no. They make
assassins.”

Zayn and Ria traded a look. The guy was
making no sense.

“All these people—” he waved a hand at the
tanks “—they’re all adults. I’m morphing them into assassins. I
manipulate their DNA, wipe their memories, add new ones. Some,
whose original identities need to be hidden, are morphed into
Pictori. I also add subliminal assassin training. They wake with
all the basic skills an assassin needs. They need far less physical
training before they’re ready for the field.”

Zayn watched Ria rub the scar on her arm.
“Master Tarr broke my arm in training when I was eight.”

The doctor shook his head. “A created
memory. We found that regenerated subjects are more settled if they
remember a childhood…even a fake one. And it decreases memory spill
from their…previous existence.”

Jesus.
Zayn didn’t know what to think
about this Frankenstein lab.

Ria let the doctor go and he slumped back
against the tank. Zayn grabbed her wrist. “Ria, babe, you okay?” He
felt the wild drum of her pulse under his thumb.

“Previous existence?” she said the words
without a single inflection of emotion. One hand moved to rub her
ridges.

“Yes,” D’aarn said. “All these subjects.
They’re dead. Empty shells I can regenerate. It’s ingenious
technology, even if I do say so myself.”

Zayn’s horror increased. How could they do
that to people? Desecrate dead bodies, steal their lives?

Ria’s knees buckled and Zayn caught her,
sliding an arm around her waist. He wanted her to lean on him but
her spine stayed stubbornly stiff.

“I was…a dead body.”

“Yes. All assassins start that way. We
implant new DNA and cause a rebirth. Regeneration.”

Her gaze was on the tanks. “You bring people
back from the dead.”

“No.” D’aarn shook his head vehemently. “The
host is most definitely dead. We just use the remains to make an
entirely new person. The new generation has no memory of their
previous incarnation.”

“Who am I?” Ria said with lethal
quietness.

Zayn tightened his hold on her. “Ria—”

“I need to know.” She looked up at him, her
eyes pleading. “
We
need to know.”

D’aarn cleared his throat. “You are exactly
who you are now. You are no longer whoever came before.”

“Who. Am. I.”

The doctor shifted nervously. “I’ll have to
check the records.”

Zayn watched the man tap at the computer
console. His gut was so tight and Ria was so still in his arms.
Under his palm, he felt her heart bounding.

“I recall your face, actually,” D’aarn said.
“You weren’t regenerated that long ago. About two years, I
think.”

Oh, God.
Zayn saw Ria’s face blanch.
“Ria.” He ran a hand down her back in a soothing stroke. “It’s
okay.”

Her hand gripped his, like she was using him
to hold onto her sanity. “It’s not okay. We both know that.”

“Here you go.” D’aarn touched the screen,
sliding until a file appeared. “Subject AG9173.”

Ria and Zayn stared at the photos. One of
herself in her Guild robes. One of a woman who looked like her
floating in one of the tanks. Her golden hair streaked upward, her
skin pale white and a bullet wound in the center of her
forehead.

Zayn looked at the last photo and a noise
escaped his chest.

The last photo showed a woman with her
blonde hair pulled back into a tight bun, scowling at the camera in
her navy Strike Wing uniform.

“Vik,” he whispered.

***

Ria closed her eyes, her world crashing down
around her feet.

She wasn’t who she thought she was.

Her entire life was a lie.

She pushed away from Zayn, trying to draw
air into her lungs. She couldn’t look at him.

D’aarn sat heavily on a stool. He pointed to
Viktoria’s photo. “You aren’t that woman anymore.”

“I don’t know who I am.” Ria felt a rush of
desolation fill her insides. The mission. She grabbed onto that.
She had to focus on the mission.

Whoever she was, she had even more incentive
now to be free of the Guild. Free of the organization that had
stolen her life and her death. They’d taken her very identity.

Hot anger choked her. “Let’s get out of
here.” She speared the doctor with a look. “Is there a quick way
out?”

“Delivery door in back. It’s where the
bodies are brought in.”

Ria strode away.

Zayn jogged up beside her. “Ria, we need to
talk.”

“Not now.” She still couldn’t bring herself
to look at him. She’d truly believed he was starting to see her,
not the past. She was falling in love with him, and she’d hoped
there was a chance he might one day feel something for her. For
Ria. But now she
was
Viktoria. God, what a mess. “Not now,
okay?”

He sighed. “Okay.”

There was a set of sliding frosted-glass
doors. As they approached, they slid open.

The delivery area brought her up short.
Metal tables lined one wall, all covered in dead bodies shrouded by
white sheets. Poor souls waiting for their turn in the tanks.

The boiling sensations in Ria bubbled over.
She strode to the first body and ripped off the sheet. The man was
an Argylian, in the prime of his life before someone had slit his
throat.

She wouldn’t let these people’s remains be
desecrated. Wouldn’t let them live a lie, their existence stolen
from them.

She spun, studying the room. In the corner,
she spied the industrial incinerator. As she neared, she felt the
heat pouring off it. She guessed some bodies didn’t make the
cut—either too damaged or not possessing the right physical
characteristics to make a perfect assassin.

Ria wrenched open the incinerator door and a
wave of heat rushed out. The hungry flames burned a neon green,
chemically enhanced to burn very hot.

Next she moved to the table holding the
Argylian, gripped his body under the arms and heaved him off the
table.

He was heavy and it took all her strength to
drag him across the floor. Then Zayn was there, grabbing the man’s
feet.

“You’re sure about this?”

She looked at Zayn now and saw nothing but
sympathy on his handsome face. He had a right to be upset and angry
as well, but instead he just looked worried.

“I’m not going to let these people become
puppets for the Guild.” God, her body had been in here, naked,
covered by a sheet. “They died, they deserve to rest in peace.”

With a nod, Zayn hefted the man’s feet. They
slid him into the incinerator.