Wicked Attraction (The Protector) Read online

  It meant something.

  She couldn’t remember what.

  Furious with herself and a little anxious that the memories were still eluding her, Nina forced her mind to focus on the series of exercises she was running through. By the time she’d worked up a sweat, she was hungry again. She pressed a few buttons on the tablet. Sometime later the portal door pinged and slid open, and her food was there. Still naked, she ate it in front of a program about dolphins that seemed more fiction than fact.

  She remembered dolphins. Swimming. Blue water. Crystal bubbles of air.

  Dolphins.

  * * *

  “You’d think they wouldn’t need warning signs for people to keep their hands out of the shark tanks.” Nina’s voice bubbles like air released underwater. All around her is the wavering blue and green of the sea. The sound of it soothes her.

  She is not afraid.

  “People will do dumb things. Get bitten reaching for stuff they don’t have a right to touch.” The male voice is behind her, and she turns.

  A man in the shadows. Figure, silhouetted. She knows him. She ought to know him, at least. His voice. The way he stands. If she could only see his face, Nina thinks, reaching toward him.

  Reaching for something she doesn’t have the right to touch.

  In front of her, a tank. Inside the tank, a pair of cavorting dolphins. One centers itself in front of the glass, its mouth grinning. Bubbles burst in clear, domed shapes from the top of its head. She can’t hear them through the glass itself, but a speaker must be transmitting their noises, because the distinctive skree-skree-eek surrounds her.

  “You’re in a cage,” the dolphin in front of her says. The words are metallic, robotic.

  The sign on the wall says these dolphins were part of an experiment in which they were raised as human children. Taught to speak using a translator box. The dolphin spins in the water, then swims away.

  “You’re in a cage,” the shadow man tells her without moving into the light. “I want to get you out of it. I want to save you.”

  “I’m the one who does the saving.”

  The man’s voice fades as he speaks. “Not this time . . .”

  Nina spins the way the dolphin did, her arms out. A slow circle. The floor beneath her feet is soft and warm; it has become sand. She is underwater, but she can breathe.

  She has become the dolphin.

  * * *

  Nina blinked. The fork was halfway to her mouth, and she finished taking the bite. The food was cold. Everything on the plate was cold, too. Her foot had fallen asleep.

  The viddy had not paused, but something about the program seemed wrong. On the screen, flowers bloomed and died in a series of time-lapse scenes while a soft-voiced narrator of indeterminate gender droned on about the life cycle of pollinating insects. Nina put aside her plate, not caring that the fork slid onto the white comforter, and leaned toward the viddy screen.

  Many species of pollinating insects had gone nearly extinct, according to the narrator, but several programs devoted to the reintegration of them had been successful in establishing new colonies of honeybees resistant to the diseases that had formerly almost wiped them out.

  Nina got out of bed. She went to the viddy screen. Staring. Trying to think why this meant so much to her. She spun in a slow circle, looking around the room, noticing the places that certainly hid surveillance equipment that she didn’t have to see to believe was there. The viddy screen went black, although she hadn’t touched the remote or even spoken aloud anything that might have been misconstrued as a voice command to stop the program.

  She closed her eyes, pushing her bare toes firmly against the chilly floor tiles. She centered herself. Breathing in. Breathing out.

  This was not a spa. It was not a normal hospital. This was someplace different, someplace other. She did not know why she was here, but she knew she was being watched.

  Something on that viddy program was a clue. She hadn’t been meant to see it. She focused on that. Flowers. Insects. The glimmer of a memory tried to surface and faded before she could dig into it.

  Be quiet.

  Get into bed.

  Go to sleep.

  Forget.

  “No,” she said aloud. “Get out of my head.”

  The sound of the door opening turned her toward it. A man in white entered. He didn’t look familiar, but something about the way he stared at her made it seem as though he should be.

  “Who are you?”

  “Get into bed,” he said. “Go to sleep.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Ewan’s team had come up with a series of possible locations for Jordie Dev, and therefore Nina, based on information they’d been able to strip from the data stamps on Jordie’s viddy message. Ewan had also gone to a different sort of source. Katrinka Dev looked at him now with wide eyes and a thin, grim smile.

  “I have no idea. I truly don’t. You have to understand, Ewan, Jordie and I have not been . . . close. Not for the past few years.” Katrinka’s hand shook so much the tea in her fancy china cup sloshed a little. She put it down without sipping and clutched her hands together, wet fingers linked tight. She looked haggard.

  Ewan had considered her more of a friend than an acquaintance, but now he didn’t have much sympathy for her. “Is there anything you can do to help us? Please. I have my team working on tracing the origins and location of his message, but it was encrypted. Your son was very talented with coding, Katrinka. I believe he might have been one of the brightest kids I ever worked with. I know he could fool my team on purpose to send us on a wild-goose chase. I can’t waste that time. I need to find him.”

  Katrinka looked at Al, who stood silently next to Ewan. Her hands were hooked into her belt, which was hung with weapons. She hadn’t spoken since their arrival, declining Katrinka’s offer of refreshments with only a shake of her head.

  “When you find them,” Katrinka said, “please promise me you won’t hurt him.”

  Ewan shook his head. “I can’t promise that.”

  Al said nothing.

  Katrinka’s eyes glittered with tears. “Promise you won’t kill him, then. Surely you can guarantee that.”

  “I can’t promise anything.” Al spoke up, finally, her voice firm but not belligerent. “But I’ll do my best.”

  “If you know where he might be . . .” Ewan repeated.

  “I don’t, I swear to the Onegod, I don’t.” Katrinka shook her head, but then sighed. Her shoulders slouched. “He has an identity chip.”

  She’d said the last words in a voice so low Ewan wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. “What?”

  “He’s chipped,” Katrinka said, louder this time. Almost defiantly, she looked at Ewan. “We had him chipped in utero.”

  A grim triumph filled him. “So he’s trackable.”

  “You know they disabled the GPS functions on those chips years ago. Too many problems. Jordie’s hasn’t been functional since he was a young child.”

  The in utero identity chips had been touted as the wave of the future, a permanent way to prevent identity theft, child abductions, and a slew of other dangers. Instead, they’d caused personality disorders, brain tumors, and a multitude of behavioral and health problems. Although it was impossible to remove the chips, the regulatory networks had all been disabled. It was illegal to discriminate against someone who’d been chipped, but it was also illegal not to disclose it.

  “I had no idea,” Ewan said. “Damn it, Katrinka.”

  “You wouldn’t have taken him on as an apprentice if he’d disclosed it. I know,” Katrinka added sharply before Ewan could reply. “You’re not allowed to refuse someone because of the chip. But you wouldn’t have taken him into your program, Ewan. You’d have found an excuse to pick someone else. What did you want me to do, tell him to be honest when I knew it would keep him from pursuing his dreams? I might be an excremental one, but I’m still a mother.”

  Ewan burned with a thin, fruitless anger. “