The Operator Read online

  “I noticed.” She ducked, shying sideways as a chunk of tile fell. Fear was a thin line icing her motion. She was going to forget. In about thirty seconds, she was going to forget everything past her last contact with Harmony. Bill was an anchor. If he was close enough to her when she snapped out of it, she might forget even more. “We have to get out of here.”

  “Reed?” Michael called, his long face hard with anticipation as he stormed into the lunchroom, two men behind him with unslung rifles. His Glock was in his hand, and he clearly wanted to use it. “Ah. There you are.” A smile split his face as he took aim.

  Beside her, Allen’s weapon fired, numbing her ears and sending the men with Michael to cover. The recoil of her weapon thumped into her hand as she fired as well, but there were more men coming in, screaming at them to put their weapons up even as they ran for cover.

  Face ugly, Michael hesitated, then, with a cry of outrage, pulled his aim from her.

  Bill, she thought as she saw him come into the lunchroom, his brow furrowed at the haze and sudden silence. He knew they were in a rewrite—and he wouldn’t forget. Halting, the heavy man smiled when he met Peri’s eyes. “Get Michael out of here,” he said softly, and Michael fell under an avalanche of men. “Sorry, kiddo,” he said as he lifted his dart rifle.

  “Move!” Allen shouted, shoving her, and she ducked, willing the draft to end. But she couldn’t make time move faster, and with a puff of compressed air, a dart arrowed to her, the red fletch alive and boiling like lava. It hit her perfectly, thumping into her bicep with the sudden wedging pain of a monstrous bee. Breath held, she yanked it out, furious. He’d timed it perfectly, getting it into her in a draft where she couldn’t rewrite the mistake out.

  And then the world flashed red with the energy of twin timelines meshing.

  “Peri! Get down!”

  She gasped as Allen yanked her into cover. A red-fletched arrow was in her tight grip, and she stared at it, feeling a hard ache in her shoulder where it had hit, but not remembering it. Her head came up, and vertigo rose as she saw the dead men ringing them. More were shouting from cover, and one man screamed, his voice high in pain as Michael broke the man’s wrist to gain his freedom. There was a ragged hole in the ceiling, and the Glock in her hand was warm.

  I drafted, she thought, enormously relieved that Allen was with her, his skinned shoulder bleeding slowly as he peeked over the oven and dropped back down.

  “Someone shot us and you drafted,” Allen whispered harshly. “Short version is Harmony can’t help us. We have to get out on our own. Bill is here. He—”

  “Set a trap for me. Yeah, I got that part,” she finished, dart in her hand. It must have hit her as the draft was ending. It was in the last timeline, not the one she’d rubbed out. It was real and immutable. She couldn’t jump with whatever antidrafting drug he’d hit her with.

  “Time to move.” Allen angled his weapon around the edge of the oven and fired off a few blind shots as more men spilled into the lunchroom. “We’ve used up our wishes and have to get out on bullets now.”

  Peri looked up at the ragged hole in the ceiling, then threw the dart away. “You first.”

  “Nah-uh.” Allen dropped back down from looking over the edge of the counters, dust from the ceiling making his hair gray. “You’re the lightest.”

  “Peri?” Jack shouted from the far end of the kitchen. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”

  “Shit,” Allen swore, and Peri eased forward, eyes narrowed as she shot at a shadow. It stumbled back, Jack’s voice rising as he fell into a rack of pans. Satisfaction filled her. Not the illusion-Jack, then.

  “Pull back. Give her some space,” Bill said, but she didn’t trust the implied cease-fire, and she looked behind her for the men Bill had probably sent to circle them.

  Allen squinted at the ceiling. “This is bad,” he said, checking his ammo.

  “It’s over, Peri,” Bill called authoritatively, and she sank deeper into the scant cover. “Weapons on the floor. Now! And that knife of yours, too.”

  As if.

  “You go first,” Allen said, looking at the ceiling.

  Peri’s gaze shifted from Allen’s bullet graze to the hole above them. “I can’t pull you up with a bum arm. I’m the better shot, anyway. I’ll cover you.”

  “Fine,” he muttered, gathering himself. “You got a new magazine in there?”

  “Go!” She stood, firing at anything that moved. Men scattered, and her lips pulled back in an angry grimace when Bill dove for cover. If I get shot again, Harmony will laugh her ass off for me not taking a vest.

  Allen fired six shots even as he levered himself up onto the counter. Grunting, he pulled himself into the ceiling. His legs dangled, jerking when a dart lodged, and then he was gone.

  Anger pushed out why she was here. It didn’t matter. There was only firing as many times as she could before someone got a good shot in.

  “Hand!” Allen shouted, and she stood, continuing to shoot even as her palm smacked into Allen’s and he lifted. She swung wildly, her bullets hitting nothing but keeping their heads down. Heart pounding, she felt the dusty, cold darkness take her.

  “Damn, that hurts,” Allen groaned, and she got a knee on the ceiling support and levered herself up and in. “I can see why you bitch about them.”

  “Can you move?” she asked, dragging him across the ceiling until they were over the walk-in fridge. As promised, it was one dark, open space. Bill would force the battle up here soon enough. “Allen! Can you move!” They wouldn’t have hit him with an antidrafting drug, but Bill liked his sedation darts.

  “Go ahead. I’ll catch up.”

  Peri grimaced. He was slurring, but he had enough fortitude to slap her hand when she tried to see whether his eyes were dilated, impossible in the dark. Frustrated, she fired a few shots at the growing sound of men at the hole in the ceiling. “Can you move?”

  His shadowed, pained eyes met hers. “Not fast enough.”

  Damn it! Peri’s brow furrowed, and she wiped the cooling sweat from her forehead, chilled from the sudden cold in the ceiling. Adrenaline made her legs shake. It was her job to keep her anchor alive, and they were out of options. Grim, she reached to help him rise. “You’d better start moving because I’m not leaving you here.”

  Allen took her hand off his arm, eyes pained, but from below came Bill’s harsh demand, “Get up there before she’s gone!”

  Heart pounding, Peri gripped the Glock tighter, focus narrowed on the small patch of light from the kitchen, but not a single head showed. Apparently no one wanted to be first, and Peri’s breath slipped out as the call for a high-Q drone rose. She scanned the dusky open area as her eyes adjusted. If they were calling for an eye in the sky, she had a precious few moments.

  “Sedation darts only. You hear me?” Bill demanded. “I want her down, not dead or drafting. The accelerator has to be given intravenously within twenty-four hours, or this entire exercise means nothing!”

  “Go,” Allen slurred, head hanging. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  Bullshit. Tucking the Glock away, Peri grabbed his arm. “Get up.” But something Bill had said niggled at her. Why was he talking about accelerator? He knew she didn’t have any Evocane in her system to buffer her sanity. Twenty-four hours?

  She felt her expresson go slack as she remembered the discarded dart. That hadn’t been a sedation dart, and it was looking less likely that it had been Amneoset, either. It had been Evocane.

  Shit. Peri jerked at the hum of a drone, dropping Allen’s arm in order to take a bead on it. She fired a single shot, and the drone fell back through the hole amid cries. “Well, at least we know one of them is still up there,” Bill said sourly. “Peri?”

  Wire-tight, she backed away from the hole in the ceiling as the calls to position the ladder filtered in. Bill had always had more than one option to get his way. He’d gotten her hooked, and Silas had only a week’s supply. Less, maybe, because of what he’d bee
n using to reconstruct it.

  “Peri, you’re fine!” Allen said, his complexion sallow as he swung his head up. Clearly the dosage had been set for her. He wasn’t going down, but he couldn’t move.

  “Bill darted me, didn’t he.” She couldn’t get enough air, and her finger shook as she pointed down. “Didn’t he!”

  “You’re okay,” he said breathily. “You can still . . . draft safely. Nothing’s changed.”

  She jumped at the metallic clunks of a ladder being set up. Nothing changed? Bill said it was addictive!

  “Go,” he said, pushing weakly at her. “Get to Silas. Stay on the Evocane. He’ll make more.”

  “I can’t leave you.” It wasn’t just that he was her anchor, her partner, her friend. It was that leaving him behind went against everything she believed.

  Allen’s hand slipped from her cheek, his fingers fumbling to take his watch off and press it into her hand. “I thought you’d say that. Don’t trust Bill. Silas will figure it out in time.”

  “Allen, what— No!” she exclaimed as he rolled across the ceiling and down the same hole he’d pulled her into. “Allen!” She jerked back as men called out and the ladder fell. “Allen, you crazy bastard! What are you doing?”

  “Go!” he shouted from below, and then he cried out when someone dragged him clear.

  “This is unnecessary, Peri, even for you,” Bill said, and then, louder, “Get up there.”

  Eyes wide, Peri grabbed the handgun and watch Allen had left behind, backing up until she found the oven’s vent. Breath held, she checked her hoppers, then pointed. She’d take whomever she could for as long as she could.

  “Reed!” came behind her, and she spun, almost shooting Harmony. She was dirty and disheveled, hunched from pain or the cold—hardly recognizable in the dark. “Let’s go!”

  “They have Allen,” she blurted, her adrenaline burning. “If we drop down together—”

  “Then we die together. Let’s go. I called in air support but it won’t wait.”

  Peri jerked her attention from the ragged circle of light and the masculine shouts filtering up. “Not without Allen.”

  Harmony crab-walked back. “You’re the only one left, Reed. You were right. It was a trap. Michael is a sadist. We leave now, or I’ll shoot you on sight next time I see you as one of Bill’s brainwashed dolls.”

  “But . . .”

  “Now!” The whites of Harmony’s eyes were vivid, her determined anger held just in check. “We’ll come back for Allen.”

  “Peri?” came Bill’s oily voice in the sudden silence below them. “I’ve got Allen. If you want him dead, you just go ahead and shoot who I send up there for you. You want him alive, you drop your weapons down through the hole. I’m not mad at you, but it’s time to come home. I won’t let you need. I promise.”

  For three seconds she stared at Harmony. With a groan, Peri turned away, hunched as she darted around supports and sudden vents. Harmony was a dark shadow beside her, moving remarkably fast. Suddenly Peri realized there was blood splattered on her. I don’t even know whose it is. “Are you okay?”

  “I doubt it.” Harmony halted at the shifted ceiling tile she’d probably gained access at. Behind them, the light was eclipsed as men cautiously poked their heads up through the ceiling. “It’s a back office. Out the window. It’s too hot for the airlift. We have to get at least three buildings over. You can run?”

  Peri nodded. Her chest hurt. If she hadn’t left, they would’ve killed him. They might kill him anyway, but there was the chance they’d keep him alive. Most drafters were sentimental about their anchors, and therefore they made good leverage. I am a fool.

  “You first,” Harmony said, looking at Allen’s watch between Peri’s palm and the butt of his weapon. There were men up here now. A dark shadow shifted where the light from the kitchen stabbed upward, and it jerked when Peri took a shot at it.

  “Don’t piss me off, Bill!” Peri shouted, and Harmony smacked her shoulder to be quiet and get through the opening. “If you hurt Allen, I’ll kill you myself!” she added.

  “Out. Go!” Harmony said, and Peri dropped through the ceiling and into the shadowed office below. Harmony was right behind her. Blinds fluttered before a broken window like a bird’s shattered wing, and Harmony levered herself through it, not waiting for Peri as she ran across the icy lot and through the solar array to the adjacent building. Grim, Peri followed, not knowing how she could still move.

  She’d lost Allen, but more than anger gnawed at her. She had wanted what Bill offered, wanted the power that remembering her drafts would give her. She wanted it even as Silas’s warning that it was a poison echoed in her thoughts. But not like this, beholden to whoever held the keys to the lab.

  As soon as WEFT knew she was hooked on it, they’d all start making their demands.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  The ceiling of the off-site airport warehouse was lost in shadow, and the air was still and stale as Bill made his way past the organized shipments to the janitor room he had appropriated as a temporary holding cell. Michael was beside him, his steps meeting Bill’s strike for strike despite the hint of a limp from where Peri had stabbed his knee. But Bill felt anything but unity with the tall, swarthy man still in his combat gear, the stink of his excitement at killing an entire team lifting off him like bad cologne.

  Bill had taken the hour of downtime while everyone had pulled out to shower and change into a suit. That Michael hadn’t—wanting to prolong the memory by continuing to wallow in another man’s blood—seemed to Bill to be the capstone in what made Michael so unsuitable.

  “I got what you wanted,” Michael said, breaking the long silence, and Bill glanced sidelong at him as they wove past a cling-wrapped pallet of water purifiers.

  “I told you to stay in the room.”

  “You said stay until I got the data. I got the data,” Michael insisted, his calm, precise tone grating on Bill.

  “And you still managed to make a travesty of it.” Bill gave up trying to keep his polished veneer in place around Michael. “If I can’t fix this, I’m going to have two major corporations thinking I’m playing them off on each other when what I’m trying to do is salvage something from your clusterfuck.”

  Michael frowned as they approached the man standing guard at a locked door, running his middle finger under the cut Peri had given him. “They were in my way.”

  Bill stopped, not wanting the guard waiting at the door to hear their argument. “I don’t give a fly’s dick about the CIA agents. I said no live ammunition, and you leave holes, casings, and brain tissue in the carpet.”

  “As I recall, it was your soldier girl who opened fire in the lunchroom,” Michael said.

  Bill leaned in, not liking that Michael was taller than him in his combat boots. “Everblue is going to know someone stole their information. They’d be fools not to go into production immediately. It’s going to hit the market three years ahead of schedule. Their CEO will be Time’s Man of the Year. You pissed my new building and support staff away, Michael, and for what? Tormenting a woman for information she wasn’t going to give? Information we were going to acquire anyway?”

  “You wanted to know just as much as I did,” Michael said, picking the blood out from under his nails. “This is not my problem, it’s yours. Reed is still at large.”

  “She’ll come in. She’s halfway here already.” There was blood on his ring, and Bill polished it off as he paced forward, eager for the endgame. Meeting the guard’s eyes, he gestured for him to open the door.

  Shoulders hunched in anger, Michael followed him into the barren room lit by a bare bulb in a protective cage. The janitorial cart, buckets, mops, and racks of cleaning supplies and poisons had been pushed into the shadows to leave a good-size ten-by-ten space. Bill’s lip curled as he saw Jack hunched over Allen in the middle of it. The beaten and bloodied anchor was restrained in a folding chair, but both men looked as if they’d seen better days. A
s Michael and Bill stared at him in question, Jack slowly stood upright, his mood unclear.

  The door shut behind them with a heavy click. Away from the guard’s eyes, Bill turned, shoving Michael into a rack, pinning the lanky, taller man with his anger.

  “I told you to stay in that office because I knew you’d try to kill her,” Bill said, voice low and inches from his face. “Don’t think I don’t know your every thought. Leave her alone. She will slit your throat and walk away before you hit the ground if she decides you’re a danger to those she cares about.” And a little threat to the ego never hurt.

  Michael’s clenched fists slowly opened as Bill gave him a disparaging up-and-down look before returning to Allen and Jack. “She’s not going to kill me,” Michael promised in a dangerously soft voice.

  Not as long as I can keep you away from her, anyway. “Jack,” Bill said, his voice mockingly light. “How’s our girl?”

  A flicker of fear crossed Jack’s face. “He said the dart was true. She’s on the Evocane.”

  The rush of satisfaction was like white light through Bill. “Are you sure?” he said, unable to read the truth of it in Allen’s hanging head.

  Jack nodded, and Bill clapped Jack companionably across the shoulder and drew him from Allen. “Then we did well,” he said. “Soon as she runs out, she’ll come back.” He looked at Michael. “And we have our final test subject,” he added, knowing the man didn’t believe it.

  “She won’t,” Allen croaked, peering at them through a swollen, misshapen eye. “She won’t.” He almost breathed the words. “Denier will reverse-engineer it. She’ll be gone in less than a week, and neither of you bloodsuckers will be using her again.”

  Expression ugly, Michael stepped forward, his arm raised to smack him. Tired of his ham-handed methods, Bill jerked him to an unexpected halt. Michael needed to feel in control, but with too much freedom, he’d remember he could kill Bill, too. It was a balancing act, but Bill had a net and Michael didn’t.