Through the Static (8 page)

“Fine.”

“No.” She held on to him tightly. “Are you
all right
?”

There was vulnerability in her thoughts and in her eyes, and her touch was so soft. The pressure inside him eased. Exhaling roughly, he nodded. “I am. Now.”

“That was worse than I thought it would be.” Doubt shadowed the lines of her face. “I'm sorry.”

Her lip trembled, and he couldn't hold in the shakiness that had been threatening to tear him apart since the instant the silence toppled him. He took her back into his arms again, tucking her head beneath his chin, sighing with the relief of holding her.

He closed his eyes tightly, hating to admit even more of his weakness. Still, he choked out, “Please don't ever do that to me again.”

She didn't answer with words. Instead, there was just the fierce grasp of her hands at his spine and in his hair, the steady reassurance of her mind, flooding his with thoughts of safety and caretaking. Images of the two of them entwined.

In so many ways she soothed him. In all ways except one, really. His stomach fell with a low sense of dread. He held her close, his grip strengthened by a sudden premonition of her slipping away.

After what felt like an age, he loosened his hold and pulled back. She gazed up at him, her thoughts still full of nameless, unsatisfying comfort as her eyes flitted down toward his mouth. God, he wanted to be comforted. He didn't resist as she moved forward.

Their lips met softly, like an apology. Like an acceptance. But it was rough, too, with things that neither of them said.

He only let himself kiss her once, though he would have liked to stay there, letting her touch reassure him until there was no more fear and nothing left to need. Instead, he pulled away after a scant few seconds. Taking her hand, he looked behind them.

Sure enough, her EMP had cleared the digital landscape of any sign of their passage. Their pursuers would still be able to pick up their trace with some patience, but it should buy them time.

There was an anxious itch at the back of his mind, borne of her silence and the shuddering memory of being parted from her, even if only for a second. He wanted to put miles between him and this place. Between him and this feeling.

“Come on,” he said, pulling her forward again. “Let's go.”

She studied his eyes for a second before nodding. Keeping in contact with his skin, she led them on, toward her safe house.

He just hoped it would be as safe as she'd said.

Chapter Nine

They were close now. As they walked, Aurelia charted out a slew of different routes through the fringes of the city, toward the little bungalow and the bunker underneath it. They'd be safe there. They had to be. Because if they weren't she didn't know where else they would go.

Gradually, the already receding forest gave way to scattered lots and rundown houses. Abandoned warehouses. Consciously or not, they both picked up their pace. The sun was low in the sky now, and unsavory elements abounded. Even the blank spaces between buildings were not to be trusted. Eyes were easily bought here, and while law enforcement was minimal, one never knew where cameras might be hidden.

With each step, her anxiety rose. She didn't want to linger here, but it was too dangerous to make a beeline for their destination. She gripped Jinx's hand more tightly as she silently showed him the path she planned to take. Tilting her head to the side, she glanced up at him for approval. He gave a barely perceptible nod that reminded her of soldiers in movies. It was sexy to see him in that light, but the military efficiency of it only increased the tension that was already gnawing at her, reinforcing her sense of the danger that surrounded them. He picked up on it immediately.

“Calm down.”
He spoke the words straight into her head, flexing his fingers in her grasp.

She forced herself to relax her hold on him, but his words did nothing to soothe her nerves. Even though Isabel had prepared her for this sort of worst-case scenario, she'd never really expected to find herself in such desperate straits. The gratitude she'd already felt for Jinx's steadiness under fire magnified.

She took a deep breath and shifted so their hands were entwined, gripped equally one in the other.
“Sorry. This isn't exactly a normal day for me
.
”

A low trace of what could have been humor colored the connection between their minds.
“Not for me, either.”

She chuffed. No, she didn't imagine it was. While he was probably plenty accustomed to danger, defecting from an unbreakable bond and running off into the wilderness with a stranger was definitely something new.

The space between their minds was as quiet as the deserted cityscape, humming with only the usual buzz of idle thoughts and musings. Then it crackled, and his voice came through, quiet in its hesitance.

“I read a briefing file about you.”

It was one of the last things she'd been expecting him to say.
“You did?”

He nodded, keeping his eyes on the concrete terrain ahead as he explained.
“Before we were sent into your lab.”
He mentioned it casually enough, but a nervous tickle in the link undercut his words. She stroked her thumb over his, pushing comfort into his mind, trying to tell him it was all right. Now, it was.

He let out a relieved breath.
“It said you were a scientist.”

“I am.”

He smirked in her periphery.
“So what exactly is a scientist doing walking around with an EMP around her neck and a safe house on the edge of the ghetto?”

She almost lost her footing, her head whipped around so fast. The humor was undeniable now in his thoughts.

He, a member of a Three, was
joking
with her.

Would she ever stop marveling at him? So much of her anxiety melted away and a smile bloomed on her face as she stared up at him, watching his smirk turn into a grin. His self-satisfaction at having set her at ease was palpable, but so was his lingering curiosity. He truly wanted to know.

She returned her own gaze to the road, picking up the pace as she tried to figure out how best to answer his question.

“Information is power,”
she said, shrugging.
“And people are always covetous of power.”

“You did research into…our kind? Threes?”

Her smile faded to something wry and sad.
“Before there was such a thing.”
She glanced up at him.
“Most of our early work was just one person talking to another through their neural networks. Connecting.”
She squeezed his hand for emphasis. Sucking in a deep breath, she steeled herself.
“But that work was stolen by someone…close to me.”

Unbidden, the image of Peter standing in the doorway, silhouetted against the light, rose to her mind. With one look, he'd shattered the illusion of their closeness. There had been such disdain on his face that morning he'd left her. Like he didn't know her.

And that was when she'd realized she hadn't really known
him
. Not at all.

A growl rose at the back of Jinx's throat, and she pushed the image away, back into the recesses where it belonged. Forgotten, although the lessons she had learned from it still lingered.

“What did he do?”
Jinx asked.

He'd broken her heart, but that wasn't what Jinx wanted to know. She redirected her thoughts back to the facts.
“He took everything. All the schematics and the prototype for a new kind of chip we'd been working on. And he twisted it. He developed the Threes off what we'd done.”

That was putting it so mildly. Peter had gone further, augmenting the links in unnatural ways, adding loci of control and means of compulsion—methods of incapacitating and meting out discipline through pain. Most heinously of all, he'd realized the essentialness of widening the link to three people. Two formed an intimacy. A bond. Three, though…three needed consensus. Three created chaos. Three bowed to imposed will.

“You sound like you regret it.”
There was a sadness to his internal voice.

No one had ever put it like that before. At its heart, it was true. She regretted letting Peter get so close. Regretted letting him use her and take what she had made in the hopes of bringing people together to destroy them. To destroy their humanity and their will.

“I do,”
she answered shakily
. “What we did was never meant to be used like that. To force people to do things…it was a perversion of everything we were trying to do.”
The usual rage and disgust rose up in her, but she tempered it and forced it down. She could tell he got a hint of it from the way he stiffened, though.

“You hate Threes.”

Pain skittered across her ribs at the dejectedness in his mental voice. Wanting so badly for him to understand, she softened her tone and her posture, stroking her thumb over the backs of his knuckles.
“I hate the people who make Threes. What they do to people. Erasing their personalities and their free will.”

His jaw was still set, his posture tense.
“You're right to hate them.”

Only, she couldn't tell if he was still talking about the members of a Three or about the monsters who made them. And she didn't know how to answer him either way.

She regarded him in psychic silence for a moment before continuing, moderating her thoughts and redirecting them to safer ground—back to his original question.

“Ever since, we've been working to study the kind of link that binds them together. It hasn't always made us popular.”
When he didn't respond, she plowed ahead.
“Several companies who create or contract Threes have been trying to stop us.”

That got a response. He stiffened visibly.
“They've threatened you?”

“Repeatedly. Sometimes in veiled ways. Sometimes less so. We decided we needed to be prepared, just in case. The woman I work with… My mentor…”
Aurelia hesitated as she remembered Isabel's voice, cautioning her against sharing too much. She pushed on anyway.
“Something happened to her. I don't know what. But she's always been paranoid. Rightly so in this case, as it turns out.”
She shivered.
“Last night was the first outright attack, but we'd suspected one would come. Really…”
She thought back on all the signs that had seemed so obvious in hindsight.
“I should have known.”

“Do you know what prompted it? Why now?”

“We were getting ready to go public. Last night's meeting was with a financier who was going to help us. Though now, I don't even know if that was real or just a ploy to get us out in the woods. Alone and vulnerable.”

“Go public about what?”

She looked up, connecting her gaze with his.
“Our findings. We've been studying what that kind of link does to people over the long term. The damage.”

His face softened with understanding.
“That's how you knew about the glitches in our link.”

“Yes. And how to fix them.”

“You really think you can?”

Determination rose in her.
“I'll get you free. Somehow. I promise.”

It didn't seem to reassure him as much as she thought it would.

He stopped cold.
“And if I don't want to be free?”

She rounded on him, almost dropping his hand before he caught her, holding her fingers firmly in his. She couldn't believe what she was hearing.
“You want me to let you go back to them?”

He couldn't. He'd already been chafing so much under their control, and even just in the scant hours he'd been on his own, he'd bloomed so much. He'd been funny and kind and passionate. He couldn't go back. He wouldn't.

He interrupted, his tone harsh.
“That's not what I said.”

He was staring right at her, his gaze dark and earnest as they came to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk, facing each other down. She reached out to probe his mind, searching for what he
was
saying, but his thoughts were closed.

“What do you mean?”
she demanded.

His gaze bored into hers, searching for something. She wanted him to find it, wanted to explain and to understand. But after a long minute, he looked away, the expression on his face heartbreaking, though she didn't know why.

“Come on,”
he said, resigned
. “We're close.”

For the first time since he'd prompted her about her background, she really opened her eyes to their location. Sure enough, he'd steered them in precisely the course she'd set out. They were less than a block away.

“This isn't over,”
she warned.

He didn't respond, just pulled her in closer to the shelter of his body as they navigated the last stretch. On extra-high alert now, she searched the street for anyone watching. There was no sign of movement, but she kept thinking she was seeing curtains shifting or shadows darting around behind the boarded-up windows of abandoned buildings. Finally, they arrived at the deceptively simple chain-link fence surrounding her property.

She reached out with her mind to tap into the security system. To her relief, it told her that no one had accessed it since the last time she'd checked in—that no one had been through this gate or through the door. Still, she checked the little mechanical trap she'd laid at the latch of the gate, designed to indicate if anyone had opened it.

It hadn't been disturbed. They were safe.

Her heart pounded harder now, but at the same time it felt like all her energy was leaking from her skin. Now that they were almost there, the violence of the morning and the terror of flight, the physical exhaustion of crossing miles of dangerous terrain and the ache in her shoulder all caught up to her. She fumbled to disarm the trap and unlatch the gate, then reset it after they'd passed through. At the door to the house, she pressed her hand against the glass security pad and manipulated the grid, entering code after code. Finally, the door opened.

“Is this—?”
Jinx started to ask, but she shook her head.

After locking the door behind them, she led him through the dusty, sparsely furnished rooms of the house to a hallway. She found the loose floorboard, pulled it up and navigated through a whole other set of separate security routines. When she was satisfied, she sprung the trapdoor, revealing the ladder down into her bunker. She turned and gazed at Jinx, flashing him an exhausted smile.

“This,”
she said,
“is my safe house.”

Wincing against the stiffness in her shoulder, she climbed slowly down the ladder and moved a few steps through the darkness to the right. She'd just gotten the switch flipped to turn on the lights when he alit beside her. Together they got the hatch in the ceiling shut.

All the breath rushed out of her the second the latch closed. Letting the exhaustion win, she folded herself into Jinx's arms, giving herself over completely to his strength. His support and warmth.

She let him hold her.

Because it wasn't the house that made her feel safe. It was Jinx's embrace.