Super Charged (The Gemini Conflict #10)

Chapter One

Gray

The Protogenus operative had been lying for three hours.

Gray Spark stood across the metal table from Larsen, watching the man's eyes dart toward the mirrored observation window for the hundredth time.

The interrogation room was standard issue: reinforced walls, dampening field generators humming in the corners, the kind of sterile institutional lighting that made everyone look like a corpse.

Larsen was sweating despite the cool air, his Protogenus coordinator uniform wrinkled from three weeks in a holding cell.

"I've already told you everything I know." Larsen spread his hands on the table, palms up, the picture of cooperation. "I was just logistics. Shipping manifests, supply chains. I didn't have access to the weapons programs."

Another lie. Gray's fingers twitched against his thigh, and he clamped down on the urge to let electricity arc between them.

Three weeks of dead ends. Three weeks since they'd raided the facility where Larsen had been captured, fleeing through a service tunnel with a hard drive full of encrypted files.

Three weeks since Keeley Arnold had torn through Protogenus's Bridgeport lab like a force of nature, and their leadership had scattered like roaches when the lights came on.

"The Dioscuri program," Gray said. "What's the current status?"

Larsen's eye twitched. "Discontinued."

"Lie."

"Relocated, then. I don't know where. Pierce moved everything after Bridgeport fell." He swallowed hard. "But I heard rumors. They weren't just trying to make new variants anymore. They were studying the bonded pairs. Your offspring."

That wasn’t new information, but it didn’t make him happy to have it confirmed that they were looking at children of the bonded pairs.

"The power-stripping weapons," Gray said, keeping his voice level. "Where are they being manufactured now?"

"I don't know anything about weapons. I handled supply logistics. Food, medical equipment, transportation. That's all."

"You were a coordinator. You had clearance."

"Compartmentalized clearance." Larsen's smile was thin, almost pitying.

"Protogenus learned from the Aethor Institute's mistakes.

Nobody knows more than they need to. I could tell you who ordered the toilet paper for the eastern seaboard facilities, but the weapons program? " He shrugged. "Above my pay grade."

The lights flickered. Gray realized his hands had started crackling, tiny forks of electricity dancing across his knuckles like living things. He shoved them into his pockets, but not before Larsen noticed.

"Having trouble with the equipment?" Larsen asked, all false innocence. "Or is that you?"

"Where did Dr. Pierce relocate after Bridgeport?"

"Don't know."

"What about the Dioscuri production facilities?"

"Never heard of them."

"You're lying."

Larsen leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms. "Prove it."

The rage came up from somewhere deep, a hot tide that crested behind Gray's eyes and sent static singing through his veins.

He'd been holding it back for weeks now, tamping it down with meditation techniques and endless paperwork and the crushing weight of responsibility.

But Larsen sat there with his smug expression and his rehearsed denials while somewhere out there, Protogenus was building weapons that could strip every variant on the planet of their powers.

While Tasha's daughter was growing up without a mother.

While Kumar's family was planning a funeral.

He kept a list in his head. Names of everyone they'd lost. Tasha. Kumar. The Arizona Eight—Jem clones who'd never even had real names, just numbers, who'd brought down an entire Protogenus facility with their combined power and their lives. He owed it to them to remember.

"You think you're better than us?" Larsen said, reading something in Gray's expression that made him bold.

"You're not. You're exactly like us. A monster playing dress-up, pretending to be civilized.

" He leaned forward, voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper.

"The Brewster clones understood what you really are.

They saw through the act. Deep down, you're just another Pollux animal waiting to get off the leash. "

Lightning erupted from Gray’s hands before he could stop it, a brilliant white arc that slammed into the metal table and sent voltage screaming through the bolted-down frame. Larsen convulsed as the current jumped to him through the chair, his body going rigid, a choked sound escaping his throat.

Gray watched it happen. Part of him, the part that had built the Gemini Initiative and preached cooperation and spent a decade proving that Pollux variants could be more than weapons, screamed at him to stop.

But another part, the part that had been growing stronger with every funeral and every failure, that part just watched Larsen's heart stutter and thought: good.

Three seconds. Maybe four.

The door burst open. Rick Charming crossed the room in three strides and physically hauled Gray backward, breaking his line of sight to Larsen.

Evie Danger was right behind him, dropping to her knees beside the operative's slumped form, her eyes going unfocused as she reached into his failing body with her mind.

"His heart stopped," she said, voice tight with concentration. "I'm restarting it."

Rick's grip on Gray's arm was iron. He didn't let go until they were in the hallway, the reinforced door sealing shut behind them, and even then he kept himself between Gray and any path back to the interrogation room.

"What the hell was that?"

Gray's hands were shaking. He stared at them, at the residual static still crackling between his fingers, and tried to remember how to breathe. "I lost control."

"No shit." Rick's face was unreadable, which was somehow worse than anger. "You almost killed him."

"Good." The word came out before Gray could stop it, raw and vicious. "He deserves it."

He heard the Pollux aggression in his own voice, the dark satisfaction that the Aethor Institute had engineered into his DNA, and it made his stomach turn.

Rick studied him for a long moment. "Evie will wipe his memory of the incident. We'll say the dampening field malfunctioned."

"Let’s continue this discussion in my office."

Gray's office occupied the top floor of the Gemini Initiative's headquarters, all glass and chrome and the kind of sweeping city views that were supposed to inspire confidence in the organization's leadership. Right now, the only thing it inspired was a keen awareness of how far he'd have to fall.

He stood at the window, watching the lights of New Athens City spread out below him like a circuit board, and tried to remember the last time he'd slept through the night.

Rick hadn't said a word during the elevator ride up. Now he leaned against Gray's desk, arms crossed, waiting.

"How long has this been going on?" Rick asked finally.

"I don't know what you mean."

"Bullshit." Rick's voice was flat, tired.

"I've known you for ten years, Gray. I watched you build this organization by being the 'good' Pollux, the one who proves we can be civilized, that we're more than the weapons Aethor tried to make us.

But you're not civilized right now. You're barely holding it together. "

Gray turned from the window, and the city lights caught on his face, throwing half of it into shadow.

"Since Tasha and Kumar. Maybe before." He sank into the chair behind his desk, suddenly exhausted, and stared at his hands.

They were steady now, but he could still see the afterimage of lightning dancing across his knuckles.

"Every loss makes it harder. I can feel it building.

The rage. The need to just unleash everything.

Burn it all down and let the ashes sort themselves out. "

"That's not a bug," Rick said. "That's a feature. You're a Pollux variant, Gray. We're built for war."

"I'm the head of the Gemini Initiative. I can't be a warmonger."

"You're the head of a military organization fighting a war.

" Rick pushed off the desk and began to pace, restless energy radiating from him.

"What did you think that meant? You've been suppressing your nature for years, playing diplomat, playing peacekeeper.

But we're past that now. Protogenus isn't going to negotiate.

They're building weapons to strip us of everything we are, and you're worried about being too aggressive? "

Gray didn't answer. Instead, he pulled up his holographic display, the blue light casting strange shadows across his features. The footage was from earlier that day, captured by someone's phone and uploaded to a dozen news sites within the hour.

Protesters crowded the sidewalk outside a suburban apartment building, their signs a familiar litany of hate: SUPES GET OUT.

SHE FOOLED US ALL. REGISTER THEM ALL. A woman pushed through the crowd toward a battered sedan, her midnight hair falling across her face as she ducked to avoid something thrown from the back of the mob.

Electricity crackled around her fingers, visible even in the shaky footage, but she didn't fight back.

She just kept moving, kept her head down, kept trying to reach her car.

Lightning snapped down Gray's spine the moment her face appeared on-screen, an instinct his body recognized before his mind allowed it. His mate

Hannah Charge.

Even in the grainy footage, she was striking.

Eyes like lightning, the files had said.

Gray remembered the moment he'd seen her in that Protogenus facility, strapped to their machines, electricity arcing from her body into massive conductors.

He'd taken one look at her and everything changed for him.

The recognition went deeper than conscious thought.

His DNA knew hers. His body had known before his mind caught up.

"You're watching her," Rick observed. It wasn't a question.