Chapter 25
Darkness. Burn of a needle in her arm.
“It’s not Zed,” the voice said. Male, slightly whistling, familiar. “Calm down. It’s just a little cocktail to keep you reasonable while we discuss things.”
Rowan’s eyelids fluttered. Light slowly, slowly flooded in. The drugs took effect quickly, wrapping her in a warm blanket. She could not move, but was upright somehow.
Where’s Justin?
Her eyelids were heavy, so heavy, and she was strapped against something hard. Her head lolled. “Whaaaa…” A long, slurred word. Her mouth simply wouldn’t obey.
“Just be calm,” the familiar voice crooned, and uttered a high whistling giggle. “Nice and calm. I’ve waited a very long time for this. Shame we couldn’t have done it earlier, before the other testing was complete.”
I know that voice. Where am I?
But she knew that, too. Sigma had her.
With that revelation came a flood of memory and the strength to lift her head, even through the blurring disorientation of the drugs.
What greeted her was obviously a lab—bare gleaming counters, weird apparatuses set at intervals, and two monitors at the far end blinking with data.
She was strapped to a chair, leather restraints at wrists and ankles, as well as her knees, elbows, torso, and throat.
The effect was almost total immobility, though she could wriggle a bit, shifting drunkenly.
Wires dropped from her forehead, probably attached to electrodes.
She could see an IV pole, some kind of drip.
Sedation? Okay.
The lighting was clear and low, obviously turned down, and she blinked as a familiar face swam into view.
Moist, dark eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, thin cheeks and sawlike cheekbones, liver-spotted hands trembling as he raised one finger to shove the glasses higher on his nose.
He wore a rumpled white lab coat, too; recognition slammed into her.
“Jilssen,” she breathed. The traitor who had shut down the security grids and let Sigma into the old Headquarters was standing right in front of her. Justin had mentioned seeing him again, confirmed he was responsible for the carnage.
It was small consolation that Rowan’s instincts had been right all along. If only she’d known what her instinctive response to him had meant, she might have been able to avert the massacre. But even Justin hadn’t been able to find anything at the old Headquarters.
Jilssen had covered his tracks too well.
“Hello, Rowan!” He beamed, proud of a prized specimen. His strong, crooked teeth almost glowed. “It’s so good to see you again, without any interference.”
“Traitor.” Her mouth wouldn’t work quite right, and her head far too heavy to hold upright. She sagged against the restraints. “Traitor.”
He shook his head, the smile dimming. “You’ll soon see things in a different light, my dear. There’s work for you to do. You’ll be serving your country, and that’s very important. You should feel proud.”
She could see racks of test tubes, plus wires leading off to something. Smelled like chemicals and burned insulation; there was another faint pervasive stench of human pain and desperation.
Wherever this place was, several people had suffered here. Suffered terribly. “What are you…”
“When the Colonel arrives, we’ll begin. You see, Rowan, Sigma is just the first step.
We’ve been trying to create something very important, a physical bulwark, as it were.
Several years ago…” He muttered something, scooped up a clipboard and checked a flutter of paper. “Dammit, it’s not like him to be late.”
The Colonel. Adrenaline flooded her, fighting the sedation. A little easier to think, now. Anton? Maybe. Where have they taken me? How long have I been out?
The dream of revenge faded, replaced by a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Stupid, stupid, stupid! The blind man had buried something in her head, deep and foul, pushing her through the maze until Sigma could scoop her up.
He’d distracted both Justin and her with pain and slipped the fishhook in, neat as you please.
Rowan hadn’t recognized or felt the intruder because she’d been too busy worrying.
Useless, frantic worry. She should have listened to Justin. She should have—
Well, too late for that now. Her head was clearing rapidly. Her freakish talents did that, burned up pain medication and tranquilizers much faster than normal. She tested the straps, taking care not to make any sudden moves.
Now was a fine time to wish she was telekinetic like Cath.
Come on, Ro, keep him talking. She let her head drop to the side, as if still drugged. “Whaaat?” she moaned, deliberately making her voice loud and drunk.
Jilssen’s watery gaze moved over her, a touch almost filthy as the maggot-squirming blind man’s.
“You see,” he said pedantically, “all along, we’ve been trying to create.
We need reliable means of reproduction. There’s only so much a coerced psion will or can do—Agent Breaker proves that, at least. We can’t offer some benefits the private sector can, and we lost a great deal of talent there before we started pursuing our policy of necessary persuasion. ”
I wish he’d stop pontificating and use a noun, give me something to work with. She took a deep breath, sought stillness, calm. If this Anton was due along any minute, she might not have much time to figure a way out of the restraints.
The idea arrived as a gift, a haphazard plan depending on instinct, as usual. Oh.
Risky. She didn’t know what the drug he’d injected her with would do to her ability to concentrate, but it was worth a shot.
It took more effort than she liked, to reach for that space of quiet calm where most of her Talent lived. She listened to Jilssen’s babble with half an ear a she let her breathing lengthen. Her pupils dilated; she found the space of alpha waves and pressed, sliding home.
Immediately the room seemed a little brighter, the situation a tad more hopeful.
“That’s why we try to get them young, raise them right. Unfortunately, there’s something amiss. They are always highly resistant.”
Of course they are. You’re a bunch of fascists. The thought braced her. It sounded steady and amused with an edge of ironic anger, just like Hilary.
She reached delicately, searching for the fringes of his mind through the drug-blur.
Hard, slippery, exhausting work. Sweat trickled down the channel of her spine; she smelled the chemical reek of exhaustion and her body metabolizing the drug, pushing it out through her skin.
Jilssen leaned against the counter, watching a separate monitor.
“Heart rate steady, respiration normal,” he murmured.
“EEG normal. Very good. Very good. You like the alpha waves, don’t you, Miss Price?
Empaths always do. Anyway, we discovered we had to create.
It was a farfetched scheme, though one I always felt was viable.
But of course, it was shelved until we came across the perfect psion, one who can alter cell metabolism and body functions almost at will.
Capable of producing the focused bioenergetic fields necessary to alter genetic material and… ” Jilssen paused, shaking his head.
Rowan breathed deeply, firmed her concentration, and tried again. The borders of his mind were so slippery, and the touch filled her with disgust she had to push aside to make this work.
He continued, evidently loving the sound of his own voice.
“There’s a time factor, of course. Your body isn’t capable of producing more than one at a time unless we use fertility enhancers.
But once we have three or four good stock to breed from, we can begin to approach the problem of stem cells.
There’s been some promising advancement—”
Contact.
The sewer of a normal mind flooded her. Jilssen didn’t have any psionic talent, which made his ability to hide intentions from the Society all the more remarkable.
No, that wasn’t quite right. There was the shadow of another mind behind his, a psion whose mental footprint filled Rowan with frantic loathing, made her wonder if she’d ever feel clean again.
Ah. So that’s why he was so nervous when some of the kids in Kate’s class practiced their talents on him.
The mental walls holding his secrets were strong and thick, oozing slime. She didn’t even try to breach; she didn’t want any of Jilssen’s indiscretions.
She would settle for escaping his filthy, murderous reach.
Rowan pushed again, delicately. Jilssen, still babbling, moved toward her, liver-spotted hands trembling. His fingers met the restraint on her left wrist and began to unbuckle it, slowly, unaware of what his hands were doing under her mental grip.
“—and of course, we have to pick that stock very carefully. We have samples to be cross-checked, and you can be artificially inseminated. I=I wonder if the gestation period will be shortened because of your accelerated healing factor? It’s a question I’ve often posed; Anton thinks you’ll gestate normally. We have a rather large wager.”
Another psion built defenses for him, defenses so good we couldn’t tell what he was planning. Who?
Fresh loathing bloomed as her attention drifted across Jilssen’s words.
They wanted to breed her. Like a cow, or a pedigreed dog.
He unbuckled the restraint at her left elbow, then moved to her right wrist. Rowan’s head pounded with the effort of keeping him under control, pushing ever so gently, so carefully. A soft beeping—a red light flashing down at the end of the lab.
He didn’t notice. She strengthened her hold carefully, one fine thread at a time, every lesson from Henderson and Miss Kate standing her in good stead.
The old Rowan would have never been able to shut out the waves of disgust and terror. She trembled with both effort and repressed anger, her will turned to steel. The push tipped delicately, subtle mental control so insidious she was almost horrified at herself.
It was, at bottom, no different than what Sigma did to other psions. Controlling, using.