Deviation (18 page)

"We'll think of something in the morning," Hedric said at last.

Myron breathed in relief and flashed him a smile. "For a second there I thought you'd gone off the edge, Cap'n." With a friendly slap on the arm his pilot laughed - a bit nervously - and climbed the loading dock into the ship.

Hedric watched him go, wordless, allowing the creak and brush of jungle sounds to overtake him.

"
The Community opens the A.R.C. Project - Advanced Reconnaissance Combatants. As the world closes down individual militaries, select soldiers have been transferred to the ARC unit with little to no explanations of what is in store for them
." A.P. July 12, 2264

Reesa had gotten some things wrong. Not much, but there were small details of the Balor that she had missed in her books. For example, while the grand ship moved with enough steady grace that things like plates and chairs could be detached rather than secured down, she discovered that everything was still magnetized. Her plate snapped against the table with a solid thump and she had to fight to get it up again.

"It's for when we travel by wormhole," Borden said with no small amount of amusement. "As the author of all I see, I'm surprised you didn't know that."

"It seems I missed a few things." Reesa shifted in her chair, self-consciously smoothing the velvety brown robe Matthew had procured for her.

"I'm curious, Miss Zimmerman," he paused as the wine glasses were filled.

Burgundy purled into her glass, absorbing the light around it and an ominous feeling knotted in her stomach. She was too comfortable with Borden. The servants - all of them male - avoided eye contact with her, kept from any vocal interactions and left her alone with Matt far too often. While she was happy to be out of the public eye - even with the new robes Matthew had supplied, she felt vulnerable and exposed - Reesa also knew the implications of what she was doing.

Such intimate encounters were reserved only for family members.

"Do you see me as the villain you painted in your books?" He asked when the servants had left again.

"I never defined you as a villain that often." She couldn't stop the smile. "Just the antagonist."

"Ah." He leaned back in his chair and sent her a nefarious wink. "So I am the driving force of the plot."

It was such an arrogant and purely Borden way to look at things that she smiled again. "Not entirely," she countered and took a sip of the wine. Reesa wasn't certain what vintage it was, but the grainy, sweet and almost thick flavor settled warm on her tongue for a moment. It was glorious enough that she paused to savor it. After a moment she spoke again, uncomfortably aware of his gaze on her. "Plot is not merely about two opposing forces crashing into each other. Good plot is rife with complication, with the very human manner in which each character reacts to it."

"So I am a complication."

"Yes."

"Very well, do you see me as the villainous complication that you painted in your books?"

She laughed. "Well, you're certainly as relentless as I pictured."

He flashed a boyish grin and the pit of her stomach locked up. Was this some sort of test of his? He couldn't possibly believe she was who she said she was. She certainly wouldn't believe it. In fact, she was having a hard time accepting things as it was, and she knew exactly where she had come from. She took another sip of her wine and looked down at her plate. Matthew looked so much like Jake that she wanted to scream.

The thought of Jake brought her mind back to Rebecca and the sound of the gunshot in Brady's Belfue Books, and she had to settle her suddenly queasy stomach. At the time, Reesa hadn't thought about the blood but for some reason it came into sharp focus now. Jake had been wearing a baby blue button down shirt, she remembered. She'd always liked that shirt. It did something nice to his chest and seemed to lighten the shade of his eyes.

When contacted with blood, however, the pretty blue turned the darkest color, nearly brown, soaking up the light almost like the wine in her glass. Reesa set the drink down. Her head was already a mess and she needed to concentrate on Borden. He was powerful and ruthless and the only man in the galaxy who could help her rescue Kate.

"Aside from being rather upset at his wife's death, why do you think Hedric brought you here?"

Reesa was so startled at the question that she actually jumped. She'd been so busy trying to escape or convince Kate of their reality that she'd never stopped to ask why this was happening.

Motivation.

The writer in her roused and began to review the events. Motivation was the key. While she had no doubts that Hedric Prosser was a driven, angry man, she could not envision him concocting a way to get to her. Her abduction had been a smidge botched, too, which was different for Hedric. He was methodical and clever, and had he been aware of everything he could have managed the kidnapping without encountering the police.

No, she thought and frowned. He was sent.

And with Rebecca's face clear in her memory; Reesa could even pinpoint who had sent him. Celeocia Prosser, High Priestess of the Novo Femina, she thought. It made perfect sense. Celeocia was Hedric's mother, and she was highly intelligent. However, Reesa didn't think the woman was a scientist, and given the restrictions placed on women she doubted that Celeocia had managed to employ one, either. Still, no matter how Celeocia had managed to figure out a way to travel through time, Reesa didn't doubt that the Priestess was to blame for her current predicament.

A chill crawled up the base of her neck as she recognized the motivation behind her abduction, too. After all, Rebecca had been adamant about finding Patient Zero. Undoubtedly, Celeocia was after the same thing; a name.

***

Matt watched her from across the table. He decided that Reesa was not a spy. Her face was too readable. He could see that she was calculating things, but she wasn't searching for a lie. Liars had certain tells that gave them away, but Reesa had none of them.

"It's not what he wants from me," she said at last. "It's what his mother wants from me."

"The Priestess?"

She nodded.

He didn't like where the conversation was leading so he activated the computer just to the left of the table. There was a basic rule in his business practice that he would not ever, under any circumstances, allow religious fanaticism to infiltrate the Borden Company. His father had kept that rule and taught Matthew to do the same. Personally, Matt didn't give a damn if there was an Almighty as long as the Company continued to flourish. But that didn't mean the men working for him weren't chest-deep in the faith.

The black surface of the table flicked to blue, commands at the ready, and he turned off all of the voice recorders and cameras in the room. He was a little annoyed to see that he had three messages from his brother and almost opened them but paused.

Reesa had been right about one thing. Everything he did was for his family or the company. He was at their beck and call, a glorified messenger boy.

He looked at her again.

She sat elegant and poised and unassuming all at once. She was impractical and probably insane and perfect.

And he wanted her.

Him, the man. Not Borden, but Matthew.

His mind flashed to Jake Knox's funeral, to that little boy and heartbroken wife, and he shut the computer down. David could wait.

"What would the Priestess want with you?" He asked.

"Patient Zero."

A chime at the door stole his attention again, which was a good thing since he didn't know which Patient Zero she was talking about. He knew the Novo Femina delved into the health sciences a bit, but for the most part they were restricted to the healing of current illnesses for charity work. He gave her an apologetic smile and stood to answer it. Internally he decided that if it was Charles Baine at the door, then the man was fired. Good help was hard to come by but it could be found again if necessary. Only it wasn't Charles, it was David, which annoyed him more.

"What have you been doing? I've been trying to contact you for hours." David scowled at him.

"What do you want, David?" The tone in his voice left no doubt that he was angry.

"Where'd you get this blood sample?" David lifted a small vial.

Matt glanced back at Reesa and stepped to block his brother's view. David seemed more annoyed than curious about the discreet movement and Matthew relaxed. He didn't want his brother to know about Reesa. Not yet. Not until he'd figured out how he was going to keep the single human female in existence away from prying eyes.

He remembered that she'd mentioned Hedric had her friend Kate, but his business mind had already checked the girl off as dead. Because when he destroyed the Lothogy she would be.

Undoubtedly Reesa would not thank him for that action. To his consternation Matthew realized that this bothered him more than it should. He preferred the cautious, tentative smiles and slow comfort she was growing into. The idea of Reesa's ire unsettled him in other ways too.

While he was fairly certain she was insane, the details she'd presented left a sliver of doubt. She might not be a novelist, but she might be something else.

"Matt." David's voice refocused him. "This blood sample has archaic vaccines in it. Preliminary reports alone show the enzymes are unaltered."

"And?"

David gazed at him with a new, excited gleam. "It tested positive for the Mavirus. I need more for tests."

Matthew's grip tightened on the door frame. David didn't notice the reaction, rambling on with mounting pleasure. "It's too soon to say for sure, but when I combined the MCV1 vaccine it actually seemed to work."

"Seemed to work?" Matt narrowed his eyes at his brother. "According to your reports you had three dozen women who seemed to accept the vaccine and they all died within seventy-two hours."

"I need more samples to test on." David waved a hand in dismissal, as though he could brush thirty-six helpless, tortured women out the air lock.

Matt grimaced. "No."

"What do you mean, no?" David snapped. "This is it, Matt. We're on the verge of the greatest discovery in human history. This blood is the key."

"What sort of vaccines did you find?" He asked, trying to divert his brother's attention. He realized then that Reesa was talking about "Patient Zero" for the Mavirus, the catalyst of everything. From the disfigured women, to his brothers obsessions and even, he thought with growing irritation, Mesa Prosser's death and his current predicament with the Lothogy.

David's eyes lit again. "The H1N1 vaccine. Can you believe it?" His brother explained after a moment. "The 2009 Swine Flu breakout."

The hair on his arms went rigid. That, he thought with grim certainty, was too bizarre to be coincidence. He fought the urge to glance over his shoulder at her. There was a very slim chance that someone had purposefully given her the vaccine to make her story appear valid, but to what end? She was too damn clumsy to be a spy, her face was too readable and the fact that she had no robotics made her stand out. And she believed every word of her story, he could sense that in her, which brought him back to the only two explanations available; either she was insane, or she was telling the truth.

Insane he could deal with. There were medications that could help her if she needed it. But, his mind stumbled over the implications, what if she was telling the truth? He was too prideful to think of himself as a work of fiction. If the Novo Femina knew, and they had to know something since they'd gone to so much trouble to acquire the woman, then what did they hope to gain from telling the galaxy that nothing was real?

For a long moment, as he stared at his brother, Matthew tried to put himself into the place of Celeocia Prosser. If the Priestess had stumbled onto an old bit of writing, if the Novo Femina had dug into history and found the novels Reesa claimed to have written, he could only imagine what they must think. They probably thought of her as a deity, or at the very least a prophet.

He wasn't quite ready to give up on everything as fiction, so if Reesa was telling the truth, the idea of prophet or deity was more appealing.

His mind zeroed in on the important factor of his present conversation.

Reesa was infected.

The general life span of an unaltered female infected with the Mavirus Carcinoma was twelve weeks. Three months. The idea of watching her die was so unappealing that he felt the pit of his stomach drop. A primal sort of protectiveness resounded in him. With grudging acknowledgment, he realized that David was his only hope to keep her alive.

"Fine," he said. "I'll get you another sample."

David flashed a smile. "Excellent."

Matthew watched his brother walk away with a mix of disgust and hope. "You'd better be as brilliant as you think you are," he muttered and closed the door.

When he turned back to Reesa, she was frowning at the table top with severe concentration. She didn't look insane. And the swine flu vaccine did seem to validate her claims. He had a sudden and nearly uncontrollable urge to stride up to her and put his hands on her, but managed to keep himself in place.

He'd visited brothels before, every man had. All the prettier women from the correctional facilities were sent there. Generally speaking, brothel girls were treated a good deal better than some wives. That didn't seem right somehow, but he'd never much cared before. This moment was different in any case. The feelings stirring in him were possessive, powerful, and incessant like the push and pull of waves on his beach.

She looked up and blushed, turning a pretty pink that nearly took his control. With calm, predator-like clarity Matthew planned out his seduction. The attraction was there, thrumming through the air between them as he returned to his seat.

"You were saying?"

He leaned back as she picked up the threads of their conversation. He absorbed every word that she said about patient zero and the Novo Femina struggle to regain feminine rights. The details she gave him about the Novo Femina were rather creepy, now that his mind had settled on the idea that she wasn't insane. All the women wanted was liberation, a chance to learn and grow and be respected for who they were.