The Bionics (The Bionics Series Part 1) (5 page)

His eyes harden and his jaw clenches, his knuckles going white around his spoon. “D.C.”

My jaw drops. Only the richest and those in the upper echelon of society inhabit the nation’s capital.
Just as I suspected,
Gage come
s
from a very rich and influential family. My windpipe is suddenly gripped in an iron grasp and I feel like I’m going to be sick.
If Gage is from Washington D.C., then everything that
Dax
suspects could very well be true. It’s just too much of a coincidence, the fact that he’s so strong and good looking and just happens to be from the city where the Military Police train and the most militant of those against us are located.
But then I look at him and the protective way he’s watching the girl and I can’t help but chastise myself for jumping to conclusions. If I suspect him without cause, I am no better than the people who would judge me because of my titanium parts.

Gage must suspect the train of my thoughts because a grimace crosses his face before he says, “It’s not what you think. I really do want to help. I think it’s wrong what the
President
is trying to do.
I’m happy to have helped
Agata
, but I want to do more. I want to make a difference.
”

“Is that so?”

I make a mental note to rip
Dax
a new one later as he lowers himself onto the bench beside me, dropping his tray on to the table with a loud ‘clang’. His dark eyes are hard and shining like onyx, every muscle in his neck and shoulders coiled with tension. Gage isn’t impressed or intimidated
, and
I admire him for meeting
Dax’s
anger head on.

“Yes,” he answers, his biceps flexing in answer to
Dax’s
clenched fists.

“And just who the hell do you think you are, marching in here like some kind of goddamn savior to the poor, deformed outcasts?”

Gage’s meaty hands grip the edge of the table as he stands, all six foot, five inches of him solid muscle.
Dax
is of equal size and just as frightening as he rises as well.

“Better than being some bitter, meat-headed jackass,” Gage hiss
es.

“That’s enough!” Olivia interrupts as she joins us at the table. For once I am happy to see her and her obnoxiously large breasts and perky smile. “
Dax
, the guy just got here, lay off him.”

Dax’s
nostrils flair and I can tell he wants to leap over the table and treat Gage to a roundhouse kick in the chest with one of his prosthetics, but decides against it. The guys sit back down and Olivia joins Gage on his side of the bench. I try to ignore the annoyance I feel at watching Olivia turn that wide smile on Gage.

“I’m Olivia,” she says. “
I thought it was real nice what you did for that little girl.”

“It was nothing,” Gage answers, turning his attention back to his soup.

“Damn right, it wasn’t,”
Dax
grumbles. Gage tenses but doesn’t respond.

“Is this seat taken?”

“No!” I answer quickly to the girl with Kevlar for skin. Her name is
Yasmin
e
, I remember, as she sits down on my opposite side. “Please, join us.”

The more the merrier at this point. I have a feeling if
Dax
and Gage ever
get a chance to really go at
it
,
it’s going to take several of us to stop them despite the fact that Gage doesn’t have any robotic advantages.

“You’re Blythe, right?” she asks, ignoring her plate and turning those wide, brown eyes of hers directly on me.

I nod.

“They say you’re the one to talk to if I want to meet the
Professor
.”

Gage perks up at this. “I want to meet him to
o
.”

I’m not surprised they want to meet him. Even before his retreat to the underground and forming of the Resistance, he became something of a celebrity for heading up the Science and Technology department after the nuclear blasts to create the bionic technology that saved many of our lives. Everyone knows him as the leader of the Resistance, even the President. They’d like nothing more than to get their hands on the Professor, who is pretty much public
enemy number one. This is why we are so protective of him. Ve
ry few of us have access to him
and to get to him
,
you have to go through us.

“Whoa, you guys,”
Dax
says. “The
Professor
is a busy man. He doesn’t have time to entertain.”

“I want to join your team,”
Yasmine
answers, irritation edging her voice. I love the way she’s eyeballing
Dax
like she doesn’t give a damn. I like this girl already.
“I overheard some of the others saying that you go on missions to save others like us from the M.P.s and I want in.”

“What can you do?”
Dax
challenges.

Without taking her eyes off of
Dax
,
Yasmine
reaches
for the knife on her tray. She brings it down, full-force, on her arm. The blade bends in half on contact, repelled by
Yasmine’s
diamond-hard skin. She arches one dark eyebrow at
Dax
.

“I can also walk through fire without getting burned and withstand temperatures cold enough to turn you into an icicle,” she says. I can hear pride in her voice and I kno
w that she will be a lot like
Je
nica
, who is proud of her bionic additions.
Dax
nods approvingly, his eyebrows raised.

“What about you?” she asks
Dax
, arms folded over her chest. “So far as I can tell, you’re just a big lummox with car parts for legs.”

Dax
laughs and I’m glad to hear the sound. Things have been way too tense since we left the hovercraft this afternoon. He stands and grins at
Yasmine
.

“Punch me,” he says, pointing to his torso.
“Right here.”

Yasmine
stands as if eager to take on the challenge and cocks her fist back. When it connects, the sound of bone connecting with metal reverberates through the dining hall, drawing all eyes to our table.
Dax
doesn’t even flinch.
“Okay, not bad,” she acquiesces.

“And you can take that ‘car parts’ joke up with the
Professor
,”
Dax
says as he slides back into his place at the bench. “He’s the one that made my legs.”

“What happened to you?”
Yasmine
asked,
her voice suddenly soft and childlike. I know that she is thinking of the day that changed all of our lives.

“I was living in Manhattan when the bombs were dropped,”
Dax
answers, his eyes lowered to his tray. “I wasn’t close enough for burns, but the blast took out my entire neighborhood. I got trapped under a semi from the chest down. My entire body south of my ribs has been reconstructed with titanium. My legs are enhanced with the Restoration Project’s machinery, giving them extra speed, endurance, and flexibility.
I’m metal inside and out. My bones from pelvis down are titanium, but I’m skin and flesh over that down to my knees. Calves and feet are all machine.
”

A few minutes of silence passes before
Yasmine
looks to Oliv
i
a. The petite blonde shrugs and flips her hair over her shoulder like she’s talking about a trip to the mall.

“Radiation poisoning,” she said as if it were no big deal. “My body was wracked with tumors for years, the worst of which were on my internal organs. By the time I finished cancer treatments, my adrenal glands were gone. I got new ones.
Oh and I lost my hand in a totally unrelated incident. Call my new one a bonus.
”

Gage frowns. “What reason would the
President
have to be afraid of a girl with enhanced adrenal glands? Look at
you,
you’re hardly more than a hundred and twenty pounds. You’re just a girl!”

My bionic eye catches the sneer that crosses Olivia’s lips just before she disappears in a blur of blonde hair and black suede. Two seconds later, she’s back at our table, holding a chicken leg. Across the room, one of the little ones at the kid’s table is bawling his eyes out over his missing dinner. Olivia takes a huge bite out of the chicken and grins as she chews.

“Don’t underestimate me, Gage,” she says in that throaty voice of hers that always sounds like a cat’s purr. “I’m more than just a little girl.”

Gage’s eyebrows are nearly touching his hairline, he’s so impressed with what he’s just seen.
“My apologies,” he says with a laugh.

After awhile he realizes that everyone is watching him. He glances over at the kid’s table and the smiling, laughing
Agata
. He sighs and plunges ahead.

“
Agata
sustained
head and spinal cord in
juries
in the blast th
at
hit Stafford, Virginia. She was p
aralyzed from the waist down,
lost most of her speech ability and suffered memory loss. We were afraid she’d have to live out her days in an institution, a vegetable. The bionic left-brain and modifications to her spinal cord gave her a second chance. It’s good to see her walking and running again.”

My jaw is nearly on the table and Olivia is brushing a tear from her cheek. Even
Dax
has softened a little bit after hearing that. The emotion in his voice is thick and we can all tell that he truly cares about
Agata
. Gage shrugs off our stares and admiration and takes a sip of water.

Then he swivels that blue gaze to me. “What about you?”

My mouth tightens involuntarily and my bionic eye fills my vision with readings of my heart rate
spikin
g
and my
core temperature rising as bile clogs my airway.
Dax’s
hand is on my shoulder, but his hard eyes ar
e fixed on Gage in a narrowed gl
are. Just before I turn and leave the table I hear my best friend growl, “She doesn’t like to talk about it, man.”

Four

Blythe So
l,
Dax
Janner
,
Yasmine
Zambrano
, and
Gage Bronson

Restoration Resistance Headquarters, the office of
Professor
Neville Hinckley

August 15, 4010

9:00 p.m.

Entering
the
familiar office of the
Professor
calms me immediately
which
is
good because
,
for a moment there I was totally freaking out.  No one around here asks me about my past, because they know I don’t like to talk about it. I don’t talk about the injuries that caused me to enroll myself into the Restoration Project’s ‘Healing Hands’
campaign,
and I don’t talk about my life before joining the Resistance. Of course
,
Gage, being new to the group, didn’t know that and I can’t
really blame him for asking. N
ow I feel like an idiot for running out on them.

Fortunately, no one has called me out for acting weird. By the time the rest of the group caught up with me on the steps of the dining hall, I had gotten myself together. Gage was silent and so was
Dax
once he’d asked me if I was okay. Olivia had said something about a date and bounced off in the direction of the park we had erected a few years ago.

“I’ll take you two to see the
Professor
now,” I said to
Yasmine
and Gag
e, ignoring
Dax’s
annoyed glare
.
I know he doesn’t
want Gage anywhere near our team, but I had a feeling he would be perfect. Despite my doubts about him being from D.C., I have to say that Gage’s passion and dedication to helping our kind has me squarely in his corner.
Dax
can kiss my ass.

As we set off across our small citadel toward the Science and Technology center
,
the guys fall in behind me silently and
Yasmine
walks at my side. After a few seconds, she looks at me with t
hose soulful, dark eyes of hers and I see my pain mirrored there. She has been through what I have been through.