Chapter 2
Green eyes wide and dark, she stood with Andrews’s hand around her upper arm. Motionless, since she was too sedated to recognize the danger, trusting Delgado completely.
He wasn’t ready for that.
Pale hair, damp and dark against her forehead. More rain kissing her skin, sliding into Del’s eyes. Stay still. Just stay still. Moving, every muscle strained, every nerve screaming. Until I can get to you.
Andrews sneering, certain he had both of them—but Delgado whirled, throwing the knife. His other hand came up, the weight of the gun strangely familiar. The bullet took out the other Sig as the knife buried itself in Andrews’s shoulder with a meaty thunk. Rowan made a thin noise and swayed again.
He caught her arm. “Are you all right? Goddammit, talk to me…”
Agent Breaker woke up, arm flung across his face and the dream fading into unreality. Again. The metal shelf was hard, and he strained as he did every morning to remember.
It didn’t work. Whatever he’d done to himself seemed permanent. Even the Colonel’s star psions couldn’t reverse it, and the Colonel seemed a little upset. This Price girl, whoever she was, managed to hop one step ahead of every Sigma trick. They seemed to blame Del for that too.
If he’d trained her, he’d done it well.
The door to the concrete cube they called a room slid aside and Del curled up to sitting, a hand closing around a knife hilt.
It was damp and chilly down here, but he didn’t care.
The bed was a single metal shelf, the cube had a drain in one corner; two blankets and a bare light bulb were recently accorded luxuries.
The single metal bar for exercise—pull-ups, inverts, and the like—sliced across the cell, low enough that he had to duck to avoid it.
This room wasn’t made for comfort.
Not like a space he remembered with scarves scattered over the bedstead, books stacked on shelves, and a clean warm perfume in the air.
Sunlight fell through the window and glass door of that room in the most secret corner of his mind.
Del had the idea that if he waited long enough, was still and silent enough, he might catch a glimpse of whoever owned the space—maybe the woman they were so eager to find.
It never happened, but that room had held him during the worst of the beatings, the deepest of the drug-induced questioning sessions.
That room had saved his sanity.
Wheat-blond Andrews leaned against the doorjamb, without Jilssen for once. “Hey.” His deceptively-sleepy blue eyes moved over the concrete cube, as if Del was holding contraband in some corner.
He was, yes, but wasn’t about to let the Colonel’s second-in-command know it.
“Hey,” he returned, the knife lifting, playing through the sequence that would end with it whipping through the air and burying itself in the lean man’s throat.
It would be immensely satisfying to see Andrews’s eyes bug out, hear him choking on steel, maybe with his fingers scrabbling at the hilt while Del moved in on him.
Del could strip him of weapons and grab his magkey, but there were armed guards at either end of every corridor, as well as the security net. And the trackers.
Don’t forget the trackers. Wait for your time, Agent Breaker. Just wait.
Where was Jilssen? The traitorous doctor who had allowed Sigma to take Society Headquarters was coming around less and less—maybe because of the way Del stared, aching to tear the man’s throat out. Didn’t matter—Jilssen was a small problem in the scheme of things.
Sooner or later Del would have his opportunity, of that he was sure. Patience brought a man everything he needed, especially when there was nothing left but endurance and the dream of revenge.
Andrews shrugged under supple, oiled leatherstraps.
Del had copied the Sigma rig pattern for the Society.
He could remember that clearly. He’d altered them to make them easier and lighter, a few material adjustments.
He could even remember buckling a rig on someone, testing it.
She’d been a little shorter than the usual woman, and her nearness had made his hands shake imperceptibly.
Who? His fuzz was cut short now, none of the longhair crap the Society let its members indulge in. Del had never gone for that, but his hair had been longer when he’d come in.
He remembered that, remembered the click and buzz of the electric razor against his scalp. So he’d been growing it out, he guessed. Something to do with the hole in his memory.
His arm itched, the creeping fire of Zed wearing off. They’d drugged him hard, always asking the same question.
Where is Rowan Price? Whoever she was, they wanted her badly.
Which was enough to make Del hope they didn’t find her.
“We’ve got jumpoff in forty; get your ass up, you’re coming topside with me. We’ve got a snatch and grab to do.”
“Fine.” Delgado uncoiled and noticed Andrews tense, his muscled shoulders rolling under a black T-shirt. “Who we grabbing?”
Andrews stepped back. He might look lazy, but he was ready. Del wondered if the man’s shoulder was hurting from the old knife wound.
The blond man’s lip curled as he inspected the inside of the concrete cube once more. Del didn’t rate even a mattress pad yet; he might never. They were confusing his inability to remember with stubbornness.
If he’d had a choice, it would have been stubbornness.
“Some psion the freaks have been courting. We’ve got a shot to bring in a whole busload of them. Including the golden girl who’s been running me around the goddamn country.”
Del let one corner of his mouth tilt into a smile. He seemed to remember a time when the expression had started to feel natural.
But he was back in Sigma now. Every twitch, the most minute of facial tics, was a weapon or a betrayal. You never knew who was watching, who would report what, or when the fist would come down hard.
I never really thought I’d escape, he realized, as he did every day. I was just waiting for them to scoop me back up. Deep down, I knew this would happen.
“She’s been putting you through your paces, huh?” The more I hear about this woman, the more I like her.
“Oh, yeah. It’s almost like hunting you, sarcastic fucker. Come on, we’ve got to kit you out.” Andrews didn’t sound happy.
Of course not. For months this Price had been eluding him, slipping through his fingers like water.
Sigma couldn’t exterminate the last few vestiges of the Society no matter how hard they tried—and Delgado’s knowledge of the ragtag assortment of psions and their usual procedures hadn’t helped as much as Colonel Anton had hoped.
No, despite picking his brain for every scrap of information that could be gotten out while a cocktail of Zed and sodium pentothal was forcibly pumped into Del’s veins, the Colonel was no closer to eradicating the persistent thorn in Sigma’s side.
The Society had even started, incredibly, to fight back.
A whole Sigma snatch team had disappeared off the map a month after Del’s recapture.
Civilian psions Sigma had targeted for acquisition suddenly vanished, reappearing fitted out like Society members, recruiting new psions and damaging Sigma with a persistent guerrilla war.
Slowly, incredibly, the Society had managed to stay together and fight the massive tentacles of a well-funded black-ops government agency.
Del kept his face a mask and silently cheered.
He gave all the information he could—he had no choice, not if he wanted to end up anything other than a brainwiped Zed-shattered hulk.
The beatings hadn’t helped. Andrews was sadistic, and his trained bullyboys not much better.
Del didn’t want to give them any more reason to bark at him.
He’d just barely gotten over the last goddamn thrashing they’d given him.
So Anton was letting Delgado out to play, was he?
I can use this. Maybe escape.
If he did, though, how would he break the Zed habit again?
He wasn’t sure he could. Once was enough for that particular hell, thank you very much.
The drug was meant to give you withdrawal so bad you’d do anything for another hit.
Without a full detox unit to help him through the worst of the physiological effects he might find himself in an even worse place than he already was now.
Strange as that sounded.
And if he escaped, where would he go? How the hell could he find the Society?
More importantly, would they trust him once he found them? Probably not.
He slid off the bed, his rig coming with him. He buckled it on, rolling shoulders to make sure it fit right. Slid the knife back into its sheath. Giving him a few weapons didn’t matter. One man, no matter how gifted or well-trained, couldn’t extricate himself from a full-size Sig installation.
It would be insanity even to try. “Well, we’d better go, right?”
“You think you can bring this girl in, Del?”
I’d rather firebomb this whole goddamn place and dance on your burning grave, you sadistic son of a bitch.
“If I trained her like you say, I should be able to.” But if I do find her, I’m going to help her get so far away you’ll never find her.
“You better be careful,” Andrews said. The bastard was smirking, blue eyes alive as if contemplating someone’s pain. Probably Del’s. “If she keeps this up the Colonel might decide she’s better dead, even if she is a golden girl. Jilssen has a hard time convincing him to bring her in alive anyway.”
Del shrugged. “If I cared, I wouldn’t be here.” I escaped you once before. But he was past lying to himself, and the thought was merely reflexive. Empty bravado wouldn’t help.
What would help him was finding the genius who could outthink Sigma, hold the shattered Society together, and direct an organization like this back from the brink of disaster. A genius like that might have an idea or two Del could use.
A genius like that might be able to help Del figure out what he’d done to his own head—and what he couldn’t remember.
Andrews laughed, sidling back out the door. “Yeah, sure you don’t care. Come on, Breaker. For this assignment, your ass is mine.”
“Color me excited,” Del mumbled, and followed him out the door into the blinding white-tiled corridor beyond.
Underground in the high security warrens, armed guards with personal dampers everywhere, and trackers in special cells on every level.
Someone down the hall screamed—probably undergoing their first reeducation session.
Zed and a beating, just the way to wake up in the morning.
Back home in the bad old cradle. They were going to send him out on assignment for the first time since recapture.
And any assignment, however well-planned, might offer Del a chance to do something other than keep being a Sigma lapdog.
Training clamped down on his hindbrain, regulating his pulse back to a steady, even thudding. Even a heartbeat could give him away.
Escape was just a vanishing possibility.
It was far more likely that Anton and Andrews were going to use Del like a ferret in a hole to smoke out any Society operatives possible.
They had all the weight of the government behind them, and had learned a few things since Del’s last escape.
Whoever this Price girl was, she was still playing in a rigged game.
Del’s unwilling acquiescence to Sigma might be the thing that tipped the balance against her. Whoever you are, Price, keep running. I hope I did train you, I really do.
‘Cause that’s the only thing that’s going to save you if they somehow make me hunt you down.