The Reckoning (Unbounded Series #4) (5 page)

“What about the information?” Chris asked. “Is it what we thought?”

Though he’d been addressing me, it was Stella who answered, obviously having read the information as I transmitted it. “Yes, Desoto really is going to supply Iran with plutonium.”

Chris met her gaze, and without trying I could feel his attraction for her. I’d noticed it before, but with his wife dead less than four months and Stella’s husband gone just over five weeks, he hadn’t seemed inclined to act upon the feeling. Yet I knew he had been lonely since Lorrie’s murder and that Stella was great with his two kids, and I’d recently started worrying about him making a move. Stella had already lost one mortal husband, and I didn’t think it was an experience she’d ever want to repeat. I didn’t want to see Chris hurt.

“But they won’t use the plutonium, right?” Chris said. “It’s the threat of war the Emporium wants. That’ll make them billions through those defense contracts.”

Stella sank down into the seat next to me, placing her computer bag near her feet. “Unfortunately, their plans go much further than mere threats.”

EVERYONE WAS SUBDUED AS WE
left the San Diego airport and started toward the new headquarters that we had lovingly dubbed the Fortress. We’d made the flight from Austin in well under five hours, but because it was three in the morning, we didn’t head directly to the Fortress but to another building nearby.

This second building was just as old and almost as protected as the Fortress itself, but it was closer to more businesses, so our unusual comings and goings were less obvious. On the outside it was little more than an oversized garage—and the inside was no better. In fact, except for the hidden security alarms and the underground connection to the Fortress, the place was worthless. But it kept our neighbors near the Fortress from becoming suspicious. Well, as much as was possible seeing that it was one of the largest mansions left over from the founding days of San Diego. Our recent renovations had made it the place of security I had dreamed of for Chris’s kids ever since the Emporium had killed their mother.

Stella hit the garage code on her phone, and Ritter guided his Land Cruiser inside. His wound had long since stopped bleeding, but the dried blood was impressive. We grabbed our gear and headed for the wall where Stella placed her palm against the surface under what appeared to be a normal light switch. The wall panel clicked open like a door to reveal a staircase, which in turn led to a corridor deep in the ground that intersected with the sewers. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant-smelling jaunt, but it was worth any discomfort to have a back door in case the Fortress was ever breached.

We owed our good fortune to one of the early public works managers in San Diego whose business expertise was only equaled by his paranoia. When the city was still in its infancy, he’d built the tunnels below, reinforced them with concrete against high water levels, and connected them to both the sewers and his newly built mansion. Then he conveniently left the intersections out of the official plans. If anyone in the city’s employ had ever known about such a blatant use of city property, they were long dead now. The only copy of the real house plans, including its tunnels, had been given to Ava with the deed of the house more than a hundred years ago when she’d purchased it.

We passed several new steel doors with combination locks and a final one with another handprint reader. We weren’t taking chances this time. We entered into the lowest level of the house, a basement lined in more concrete. One section of this sublevel held our workout room, furnished with every weapon available. In another part we’d built a playroom for the children, with a climbing wall, jungle gym, a slide, and a connecting theater. We’d gone too far in making them comfortable, but the poor things deserved it after the horrors they’d endured.

We took the stairs instead of the elevator to the main floor where the hallway lights were on. Benito Hernández, our maintenance man, stood on a ladder in the hallway, a cordless drill in his hands. A painting he was apparently hanging leaned against the wall. He jumped down as we came from the stairwell.

“Shouldn’t you be in bed?” I asked. Benito was a hard worker, but I’d learned that he normally guarded his sleeping time as sacrosanct. He’d never once shown interest in joining us for the two-hour training sessions we held each morning at four in the workout room.

“Gotta hang the picture,” he said in a thick Mexican accent. “Besides, a bit hard to sleep with all the commotion going on.”

“Commotion?” At first I’d suspected he wanted a firsthand account of our doings this night, seeing as he was responsible for the intel we’d obtained from the Emporium thumb drive that had sent us to Austin in the first place, but the excitement radiating from him went beyond his usual gloating satisfaction.

“Yeah, that woman upstairs is waking up. Last night Dimitri said she was ready and he was going to let the sedatives wear off. Everyone’s watching her now. Well, not the kids. They’re the smart ones. Still sleepin’. Ava said to bring you guys up when you got here.”

“Thanks, Benito,” I said.

Ritter and Stella headed for the back staircase, and the soft suction I felt told me Mari had shifted away from us—presumably to the medical suite on the second floor. We were lucky that she’d stayed with us on the drive from the airport. She didn’t travel well, not since learning to control her ability. She would have tried to shift home all the way from Austin if our scientist Cort hadn’t advised her to hold off until we understood her limits better.

“I’m going to check on the kids first,” Chris told me, heading to the elevator.

“You okay?” Benito looked hard at me as we followed Ritter and Stella up the stairs. “You seem a little different.”

Ever since I’d helped get him off the streets, he looked for ways to make himself useful to me. In Mexico some five weeks back, he’d tried to save my life, almost costing his own. In the end, I’d saved him from being used to kill hundreds of innocent people, and he’d only become more dedicated. That kind of thing left a connection that wasn’t easily ignored or severed. I was as loyal to him as he was to me. “I’m fine. Thanks. But we’re not bringing back good news, unfortunately.”

He frowned. “Well, it’s better to know what you’re up against. It’s a good thing you do here. All of you.”

He’d come a long way from calling us vampires, which was a step in the right direction since it looked like he was here to stay. He’d never be a warrior, but he could fix just about anything in the Fortress and could even pitch in for the cook on her day off, so the arrangement worked well for everyone.

Benito turned back at the door to the medical suite, crossing himself and muttering under his breath. Okay, so maybe he hadn’t put the vampire idea to rest completely—the woman’s regeneration was something he still didn’t entirely comprehend—but I could live with that.

In a glass room in a corner of the medical wing, the woman lay in a raised stainless steel basin that resembled a large rectangular sink. Much better than the coffin I’d awakened in after my accident. She’d been naked during the first week, but Mari had covered her with a small blanket that was now coated in the curequick gel that filled the basin. The yellow gel rose almost to the top, with only the woman’s face sticking out. An IV of more curequick ran down from a pole and into her chest.

Ava and our healer, Dimitri Sidorov, who had over a thousand years of experience, were in the glass room with her. Two additional members of our Renegade family—Cort Bagley, the scientist who could see and understand patterns on the atomic level, and Jace Radkey, my younger brother, gifted in combat—stood near the glass on the outside next to Mari. Hardly everyone as Benito had indicated. Missing were Oliver, our illusionist, who was on loan to the New York group; Keene, Cort’s half brother, who had newly Changed; and Chris, who was still upstairs with his children. Our three mortal, former black op employees were also nowhere in sight. Probably on patrol or watching the security monitors.

Jace did a double take at Ritter as we walked into the room, his blue eyes narrowing. “Wait a minute. Is that dried blood on your head? I thought this was a snatch-and-grab, no-combat mission. If I’d known there was going to be action, I’d have come with you.” He made a face. “Man, I should have known. Erin always has all the luck.”

We ignored Jace. His enthusiasm had its uses, especially now that he was gaining a bit of experience to even him out, but indulging him only made it worse.

“So what’s up with Norma Jeane?” I asked.

Cort cleared his throat before responding. “She’s waking.” With his brown hair and lean body, he was the most average-looking of our group, an impression the scientist enhanced through his hairstyle and choice of clothing, but which was blatantly contradicted by striking blue eyes that saw everything. “Glad you made it back in time. We tried to wait because . . . well, we really don’t know what to expect.”

Meaning Norma Jeane wasn’t in our database of known Unbounded and we didn’t know where her loyalty lay. We also didn’t know what her ability was. Several odd things had happened during her recovery, the most unusual being that while we could detect the woman’s life force, neither Ava nor I had success delving into her unconscious memories. Instead of a warm lake and memory bubbles, the lake was frozen over and we couldn’t penetrate. It was strange.

I walked up to the glass, behind which the woman lay motionless in the basin except for the occasional slight movement of her head. She’d changed drastically from the smelly, gruesome mass we’d brought back with us from New York after rescuing her from an Emporium prison. A rotting mass, but one that still contained a connection between two of the three focus points—her reproductive system and her heart. Though her head had been missing and her outer flesh had dried to a leathery substance, her Unbounded body had protected the most important parts of herself, allowing for a complete regeneration once she was out of her sealed prison and could absorb.

After only three days of soaking in curequick, we’d had our first surprise when she regenerated enough for us to verify that she was female and not the male the Emporium had indicated before her rescue. The second surprise came four days later when we realized that during at least part of her life, she’d been a famous actress who was rumored to have had an affair with an American president. Kennedy had also been Unbounded, his assassination faked when it became impossible to continue hiding that he wasn’t aging. It made sense that they would have sought each other out, both being Unbounded, but their supposed tragic “deaths” only a year apart made me wonder at what lurked behind the public story. Did she know that he had since been really and truly killed in the battle with the Emporium?

Physically, Dimitri estimated the woman to be in her mid-thirties, and given that most Changes occur between the thirty-first and thirty-third birthdays and Unbounded age at two years for every hundred they live, she was probably over two hundred and fifty, give or take a couple decades. So perhaps Ritter’s contemporary. She had dark hair and a delicate face—beautiful by even Unbounded standards. No wonder mortals had been so taken with her during her short career.

Cort had a tablet in his hands and was making notes with an electronic pen. “We’ve activated the one-way glass, so she won’t be able to see us. Oh, there she goes.”

Her eyes opened. I knew they were blue because Dimitri had checked, though apparently in her professional life, she’d experimented with changing her eye color long before most people had ever heard of contacts. Her Unbounded connections, no doubt. It worried me that we could find no information on her. We’d contacted Kennedy’s Unbounded son in Europe where he worked with our Renegades, but he had no information for us. Though Junior had seen his father after his faked assassination and before his own pretend demise, they had never talked about the woman. He’d expressed doubt about her identity, and he might be right. After all, there were people all over the world who looked nearly identical.

She’d soon be able to answer our question herself.

Dimitri was talking to her softly, his voice coming to us through the speakers above our heads, telling her how we’d found her locked in a bomb shelter below an Emporium building used for imprisonment and experimentation. “You’ve been here two weeks,” he added. He’d shown the same kindness with me after my Change, and I still felt grateful for his quiet support that day.

To the woman’s credit, she didn’t start crying or asking question we didn’t have the answers to. She accepted Dimitri’s help to sit up, letting the curequick-soaked blanket slide down, showing indifference to her nudity as many Unbounded did, even the most conservative ones. I felt sympathy for her. Only a short time ago, I’d been the one waking up in curequick and being stared at by the people who would become my new family.

Her eyes went to Ava’s and back to Dimitri before she asked the year. At Dimitri’s response, she sucked in a quick breath. “Twenty years she had me there. Twenty years.” Anger tangled in each word.

“She?” Ava asked.