Shepherd (7 page)

“Close your eyes.”

“I can handle it.”

“I can’t. Close them and talk to me, Esme.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” Her breath sucked in as the laser passed the first few millimeters of her flesh. He glanced at her to make sure she was okay. Her head hung back, eyes closed, her lips in a tight line, but her chest was still moving in an easy, steady rhythm.

“How did you get so good at design and concepts?”

“Hmm.” A tiny grunt escaped her sealed lips as the laser delved deeper, the razor-sharp metal tube of the extraction scalpel extending with each millimeter. “My dad had a terrible temper. He shattered a crystal recharger against a wall when I was about five. I picked up the pieces and played with them—connected them like a puzzle.”

“You fixed the recharger?” Not much of a childhood. He could only imagine what such an environment of violence did to a young child, much less one with nothing to amuse herself with other than broken, dangerous scraps.

“No. Evidently, I created a loop element. One that—”

“An energy source, which feeds itself. A predecessor to the dampener components.” He glanced over. Sweat dotted her upper lip, but she remained calm. “Quite an endeavor for a five-year-old.”

Her laugh mutated into a moan as he executed the final retrieval of the Regents’ tracking component and retracted the scalpel.

“All done, Sugar.” He dropped the transmitter on a metal slide and shifted to brush the back of his hand over her brow. She had collapsed, finally, to the table and while she’d given a quick glance toward the transmitter, her stillness gave him time to offer the comfort he couldn’t earlier.

With a jolt, her eyes opened, and she gripped his wrist.

“I know why the transmission isn’t getting through.”

He raised a brow but pressed a hand to her shoulder to keep her from getting up. “I still need to stitch you up. Just lie there and tell me.”

Her brows knitted together, a glimmer of refusal evident. Then some sanity must have intervened, for she remained in position. “The dampener Vier gave you.”

Clay considered it. “It doesn’t explain why they didn’t get you sooner.”

“Maybe because I was close enough, following him.” She hesitated. “Before, I was above the grid. I suppose they didn’t care if I stayed where they put me.”

She wasn’t telling him everything. Fingers fisted in her shirt, his shirt, she refused to meet his gaze. Fine. He gently squeezed the suture glue into the incision on her leg and created an antiseptic patch over the area.

He didn’t push her. Frankly, they’d shared enough secrets for one day.

Slowly, he wound the gaze around her calf and tied it off. “I can test your theory.”

***

The grate on the floor was branding waffle marks onto her butt. Esme shifted and wiggled through several different positions. Finally, she gave up and lay on her back, counting the small ion lights in the ceiling.

He was right. She was tired of sitting on the floor. While she was certain she could find a way out of Clay’s compound and probably skulk her way back to Ty’s house—she wouldn’t. Not because leaving hinged on her finding her shoes, which Clay had taken so she wouldn’t make a run for it. He had negated any discomfort by raising the heat level on the floor so she wouldn’t get cold.

None of those things mattered. She didn’t want to return to life above the grid. As ominous as life Down Below appeared from the video screens around the room, it was real. People might have to hide to protect their families from the Regent inoculation teams, or worse, from the teams seeking viable prepubescent children from whom to harvest uninfected body parts, but both threatening conditions existed above the grid as well.

Here, at least life was raw and honest, and people banded together to help each other. Evidently, given the coded messages she’d witnessed crossing his screens, people like Clay and others on his message lists watched over them. Down Below was a reality she was familiar with and safer than any place she had briefly called home. Esme had no intention of leaving.

She glanced at the mounds of equipment, parts, and potential toys in organized stacks along the walls of Clay’s control center. The temptation to press her luck and start designing would push even his best intentions to their limit. But inactivity was hard. Especially after Clay confirmed her theory that Ty’s dampener was strong enough to silence the emissions of her tracking device. Doing nothing was miserable, and worse, boring.

Two of Clay’s three screens projected images of his compound’s exterior. The cameras shifted, motion-sensitive for every person or rodent within the camera’s range. An additional screen streamed a constant list of messages. He gave brief responses, issued equally brief questions, and then shifted the orientation of a 3-D image projected in the air for notations she couldn’t discern.

This had been going on for the last several hours.

“The New Delphi sewage disposal runs beneath each of the places you’re analyzing.”

A squeak of his chair and a harsh exhale were her only warnings before he stood over her scowling, fists on his hips.

She wrapped her arms over her chest and tried to look offended at his annoyance. A little hard to do from her position on the floor. “What did I do now?”

He didn’t give her time to think but hoisted her upright with a mutinous look and dragged her behind him. Her waffle butt planted into a chair, he swiveled her around to face the translucent image of streets, overlaid with gold lines. His silence behind her encouraged her to lean forward. Instead of touching the circular key panel, she made dots on the screen with her finger. The red flickers awaited a command for action.

Biting her lip, she drew lines between her dots and extended one of them to the edge of New Delphi’s grid. “They all expel over the edge. The intersections are lethal, processing the waste with lasers at each junction.” She drew a small circle at the connection points.

“Where’d you get this intel?” He reached over her shoulder for the keypad. His fingers spun the virtual disc with speed and precision, saving her edits as an additional layer in his file. Her skin reacted with a shiver to his arm’s brush against her, evoking the vivid memory of his exacting care while he had treated her wound.

“My husband.”

His fingers froze.

“He wanted to hold the Regents hostage with the threat of blowing the connections. After they paid his demands, he planned to flood New Delphi anyway.” She almost lost balance in the chair as it spun around, the tip of her nose a hair away from his. Clay’s scowl was the first hint of threat she’d seen since her arrival.

“Where is your husband?”

“The Regents executed him three months ago.”

His natural eye widened. The cyber one whirred but remained shut as he stepped back. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. He wasn’t a nice man. If he’d been born to different parents, he would have made a good Regent.”

His expression grew guarded as he squatted and covered the arms of her chair with his hands. “Sounds like no love lost there.”

“He married me for my abilities, to leverage my expertise, not for love.”

“And you—why would you agree to such an arrangement?”

“You make it sound like I had a choice.”

“No power to choose a marriage, but with the Regents’ execution of your husband, you had the power to walk free above the grid. You can understand my confusion, Sugar.”

“I almost didn’t have that choice.” She looked away for a minute, not quite certain how to proceed. Now would be the perfect time to mention her forced marriage to Vier. Then again, she was fairly certain Clay wouldn’t understand her role as the runaway wife any better than he did her widowhood. “They only released me because they were certain I didn’t have any information. Another execution would have made for good press, but it suited the Regents to make money off of me by brokering my body as a breeder.”

His brow rose in surprise, and then his lips tightened to a thin line as he scrutinized her. “Yet you’re here.”

“I saw a chance to escape, and I took it. My choice to follow your friend might have been a poor one, but at least I wasn’t planning espionage.”

“Says you.” He gestured at the screen with his chin. “Mrs. ‘I’m not a spy’ has excellent information for a woman not in the spy business.”

“I’m not stupid. Just because I didn’t make it my life’s work to think up heinous schemes to extort money from the privileged, doesn’t mean I closed my eyes and ears when others did. I’m good with details.”

“You keep stacking up reasons why you’ll never leave here.”

She looked away first, only enough that she could still see him from the corner of her eye. “You don’t have to trust me to consider the options I’ve shown you.”

The flickering light from an external feed illuminated one side of his face, emphasizing the day’s growth of blond and brown bristles. With the tight press of his lips, the gleam of his metallic eye, and the narrowing of his functioning eye, he looked every bit the pirate from the old stories across the net. Books had died with the reduction of the population after the virus outbreak. However, in the places of harshest conditions, like Down Below, stories and fables persisted. Esme absorbed every one. The images in her mind were as real as the words inspiring the tales.

“Let’s test your theory.” He spun the command pad, launched a new screen, and executed a series of orders with blinding speed. She didn’t catch much of what he’d done, but the word KARMA and a sequence of security levels, all restricted, gave her a clue as to his intent.

“Can—”

“Save overlay to all users. Provision security check on User ID Karma.” He turned her back toward his main control desk and shifted behind her, palming her head. “Hold still for the retinal scan. I’ll keep you from jerking.”

“I can do this myself.”

“Work with me, Esme.”

With a sigh, she allowed him to angle her head to face the crystal tabletop. Several lights blinked with the activation of a circular outline beside a rectangular one on the tabletop. He posed her face over the circle and moved her palm to the rectangle.

“Twenty seconds.”

“Got it.”

“No talking.”

The flash of light made her eyes water, but she focused on fighting the blink reflex. Surprisingly, the hard press of his body behind her and the warmth of his palms on the sides of her head helped her float through the few seconds. He released her the second the light disappeared. Her sense of comfort evaporated with his absence.

“So I can research and help?”

“You can
quietly
search inside my domain and offer suggestions.”

“Those two contradict each other.”

He shook his head and motioned for her to scoot her chair away. Resigned, she moved as directed, projecting a passive acceptance as she scrutinized the several live screens on the wall. One monitored the edge of the Down Below marketplace. Another focused on the lockdown facility Clay had been evaluating. Several others depicted images from above the grid and below.

The final screen swept a circuit around the exterior of Clay’s building. The deep shadows of the girders and the foreboding pile of concrete lent the perfect impression of a demolished and nonfunctional space. No one would guess the brewery ran for several levels below ground and one hundred feet in all directions. She glanced back at the map, where she had drawn her intersections. The New Delphi grid wouldn’t reflect the Down Below potential.

“Are there any maps predating New Delphi for this section of the grid?”

He glanced at her. She moved to key in her request on his console when he shifted farther away with a frown. Despite his distant attitude, he raised a list of surface maps—all dated within the last hundred and fifty years. As he flicked open each one for her perusal, she noted none reflected his current base.

“How did you find this place?”

Frown still furrowed between his brows, he closed the maps and turned his focus on another incoming message. “I was scouting for places and fell through some timbers at the edge of the construction.” He punched up two images, one of rotted wood supported by metal beams and concrete. The other revealed more rotted wooden walls and flooring, along with dozens of stacked circular metal canisters.

“Can you enlarge that last one?”

In spite of her interruption to his process, he brought the image into focus. She knew he had thrown her a temporary distraction, like a toy, to keep her safely occupied on her own. Yet he treated her requests with respect.

“Those are the brewery’s kegs,” he said.

Tilting her head, she evaluated them again. “Empty?”

“Every last one. They predate the outbreak by about forty years.”

“So they don’t hold any contagion.”

“No. I ran scans early on.”

He turned back to his work, bringing the lockdown into closer focus, initiating a sub screen with data related to the mechanics, power, ventilation, and guard shifts for each segment he highlighted. “Where did they keep you, Esme?”

She figured he had forgotten she was there. Closing her eyes for a minute, she drifted back to the first day in chains, when she’d been marshaled unceremoniously from the sealed security van into tunnels, which had run deeper and darker with each step. “A detention cell beneath the New Delphi Justice Building. At least that’s where they took me originally.” She glanced at him to find him staring at her. Perhaps she had taken too long to respond. “I have no real idea where I was taken from there.”