Forbidden Stranger Read online

  For Katrinka Dev, however, Ewan had a little more pity. Jordie’s mother had been one of Ewan’s strongest longtime supporters, starting with the lobbying efforts to make the original tech and upgrades illegal, and when Ewan had done a complete turnabout, she’d joined him in those efforts, too. Having her only son in a prison for the criminally insane had ended up wrecking her emotionally, and she’d stepped far away from further involvement with anything to do with the enhancement tech. Unfortunately, she’d also taken away all her funding for any future research. Ewan understood, of course. She didn’t want to have anything to do with what had gone on. If he’d had the choice, he’d have done the same.

  It surprised him, therefore, when his personal comm pinged with a message from her. Concerned that it might have something to do with Jordie, which meant it could also affect Nina, Ewan returned the call as soon as it came in. Katrina didn’t answer right away, but as soon as he hung up, she was already pinging him back.

  “I had to step outside,” she told him without any other greeting as soon as the call went through. “I can’t have Jordie around any sort of tech that can access the ’net. It’s against visitation rules, and it gets him extremely worked up, the poor darling.”

  Ewan had heard Katrinka refer to her son using much less pleasant terminology, but he supposed nearly losing him might have changed her mind about her offspring. “What’s going on?”

  “I want him to be fixed. Repaired. Restored, if you will,” Katrinka said in the flat but airy tone of a woman who’s been so used to getting her own way that she couldn’t imagine anything else. “But more. I want the new and improved version. Jordie 2.0. I want him to get the upgrades.”

  Ewan pressed the spot between his eyes, closing them for a moment while he thought about the kindest way to answer this. “Katrinka, you know that’s never going to happen.”

  “My son was fitted with enhancement technology and an entire grab bag of additional, unsupported, and unevaluated software designed to kill him if he tried to give up any information. He had it shoved into his brain by unskilled and brutally determined . . .” Here, she broke off to sob delicately into her handkerchief. The comm in her hand wavered, drifting away from her face to show the background.

  Industrial tile. Harsh lighting. A hint of a barred door in the background.

  “Are you in the prison right now?”

  Katrinka wiped her eyes and glared at Ewan through the screen. “I visit him as often as I can. And it’s a hospital. Because he’s sick.”

  “How is he?” Ewan tried to put some sincerity into his tone, guessing that Katrinka would see right through his false efforts.

  Maybe she was so used to fake sympathies and emotions that she didn’t seem to notice Ewan’s. She sniffed loudly and wiped at her face. Ewan had to admit, this woman had formerly never been seen without cosmetic electives of professional precision. She looked somehow younger than she had with her hair and face all done up. Younger, but harder worn.

  “He has his bad days and his worse days,” she told Ewan, her tone quiet and less blasé. It didn’t tremble with her tears, but at this point she probably had a lot of experience keeping it steady. “As I’m sure you know or can guess, sedatives don’t work on him. They knock him down for a few minutes, and then they’re out of his system. He doesn’t sleep. They don’t feed him enough, although I frankly don’t think they actually can, not enough to keep his body running the way it keeps trying to. He’s emaciated, but still so strong, he . . .”

  More tears, this time harsh and ratcheting. She closed her eyes and shook her head, moving her mouth but incapable, it seemed, of making actual speech. Although Ewan would never have a second’s sympathy for Jordie, who’d done the damage to himself, at least he could have compassion for Katrinka. She might not have been the best mother in the world, and that by her own admission, but she certainly didn’t deserve this level of anguish.

  “He can never be left unchained,” she said finally. “Worse than an animal, I mean at least some beasts can be tamed. They have him in a collar chained to the ground. Cuffs on his wrists and ankles. He’s got enough room to move around his cell, but no more than that. He killed a guard who wasn’t careful enough to stay out of his reach. He’s strong enough to nearly decapitate a man even when he himself is nothing more than skin and bones, and he’s insane enough to want to do it. Not only to himself, but to everyone. Even me. And I understand, Ewan, believe me, that my son might have a number of good reasons why he might want to kill me, but this is different. He’s not himself anymore. You can’t even compare him to an animal, really. He is a monster. But he can’t, no matter how he might try, end his own life, which is what the onedamned tech is forcing him to try to do, over and over. And since they have determined his punishment is life in confinement, all he can do is suffer. All I can do is watch it happen. How is that humane, I ask you? How is that anything resembling fair treatment? No matter what he did, does my son deserve this?”

  Hearing his mother’s description of Jordie’s condition and treatment didn’t temper Ewan’s hatred toward the boy. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “I told you. I want you to give him the upgrades. All the others had them. He deserves to have them, too.”

  “The enhanced were all offered the upgrades to prevent further deterioration of their original tech,” Ewan began, but Katrinka interrupted him with a shout loud enough to make his comm speaker crackle.

  “My son is one of them! He deserves the same upgrades they do!”

  Ewan took a small breath and turned the volume down to be sure nobody in the rest of the house, especially Nina, could overhear this conversation. “Jordie is not one of the enhanced. He was fitted with that tech by a group of people determined to steal the upgrades Wanda Crosson implanted inside Nina’s brain so they could use them for their own gain. They implanted it in him under unapproved conditions, using techniques and surgeries that were not approved for the initial tech implantation. In addition, they fucked with the software and all of the programming. All of it. The only thing Jordie has in common with any of those original fifteen soldiers is the way his body reacts now to physical stresses. What is going on in his head is totally and utterly different.”

  “Not different from all of them. There’s one of them who’s in the same position as my son. Don’t you want to see how to fix her, Ewan?” Katrinka said, her voice no longer shrill but low and sly. “Or are you afraid that once she’s able to remember everything that happened to her, she’ll leave you yet again? And this time, you won’t have any excuses left to get her back?”

  He didn’t answer her at first, unsure if he was even going to be able to find words he could say without tearing Katrinka to shreds. Finally, he replied, “I want to see Nina healthy and happy more than anything in this world. I love her. None of this is about me.”

  “Believe it or not, I also love my son.”

  “The upgrades will not help Jordie, Katrinka. First of all, no judge or jury is ever going to allow it, based on what he did. Second, even if you could get the approval, the upgrades were based on the original enhancement tech and that software. What they did to your son has changed everything. The self-termination programming they put in there was activated when they tried to interrogate him about what happened. Nobody knows exactly how that programming works or what it was tied to, but the damage it did can’t be repaired. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not sorry,” she hissed. Her shoulders hunched, and she looked defeated. “I thought your team was working on a solution for that self-term—that . . . problem.”

  Ewan gave her a suspicious look. “Where did you hear that?”

  “Oh, please. Don’t act as though I don’t have access to everything you do. You think that because you have money, you can get away with anything you want? Well, Ewan, I have more money than you ever had.”

  “What have you been doing?” Ewan asked. “Spying on me? On my team?”

  Katrinka d