Wicked Attraction (The Protector) Read online

  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