Heading for the tube again, she climbed down the ladder to the lowest level. It was dark, for there were only a few dim lights along the narrow corridor that ran between the clutter of equipment and machinery on that level, but she could see an area that was more brightly lit at the opposite end.
There was only one guard on duty. When he saw her approaching him along the corridor, he virtually leapt from the chair he’d been sitting in. “This area is off limits, ma’am.”
Lena stared at him in dismay. “But … I’m supposed to be here. The captain said I was to be put in the brig after Mel took care of my injuries,” Lena said, feeling stupid for demanding to be locked up, and fearful at the same time that he would refuse now that she’d convinced herself she would be safe, that no one would feel threatened enough to feel like she had to be terminated, even if they still thought she was a clone, as long as she was locked away.
He gaped at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Nobody told me,” he responded suspiciously. “And why would you be downhere without an escort?”
“Just put me in a cell, and then you can call and ask the captain about it.”
“They’re full, ma’am,” he said with the same mixture of indignation and surprise as a desk clerk would of someone demanding a room when there weren’t any available.
She hadn’t thought of that. “Well, can’t you put some of them together?”
Again she received the, ‘this woman’s crazy’ look. “I’m the only one on duty right now. We don’t move prisoners unless there are three men down here.”
“ButI need to be here!” she exclaimed in distress, feeling all of the fear she’d managed to fight down crowding back into her like water over a burst dam.
* * * *
“You think it’ll work?”
Dax sent the security chief, who was hovering over his shoulder, a narrow eyed glare.
The man stepped back uncomfortably.
Returning his attention to the quad-screen, he saw that Mel had just looked up at the vid. Mouthing the word ‘asshole,’ she turned away.
Dax’s lips thinned, but he ignored her insubordination, switching from vid to vid, tracking Lena as she raced from the med lab. His frown drew his brows tightly together over the bridge of his nose when she stopped at the gym and went in. Taken totally by surprise, he watched in confusion as she scurried into a dim corner and crouched into a tight ball, covering her ears with her hands.
For many moments, he simply stared at her, too stunned to figure out what she was doing. Abruptly, an errant memory surfaced. It might not have if she hadn’t mentioned the incident to him earlier, but in any case, he did remember even though it was the only time he’d been around her when she was little, the only time he’d tried to go home after he’d left.
He and his father had gotten into an argument about the waifs his father had brought into his home. It hadn’t taken much for the argument to escalate into bellowed accusations and recriminations about his mother, because he’d always blamed his father for his mother’s death and, to him, it had only seemed to add insult to injury that his father had pretty much ignored his own family and then taken in someone else’s.
When they’d finally exhausted every curse they could fling at each other, his father had looked around, discovered Lena and Nigel had vanished, and promptly gone into a panic. They’d found Nigel quickly enough, hiding under his bed, but they’d turned the apartment upside down twice before he’d finally discovered Lena in the back of a closet behind a stack of boxes in a space so small he wouldn’t have thought she could squeeze into it. She’d been curled into a tight little ball, her tiny hands over her ears to shut out the angry bellows of him and his father and he’d felt so shamed by his behavior and the things he’d said, it was that that had kept him away more than anything his father had said.
“What’s she doing?”
“Hiding,” Dax said grimly, just like she had when she was a baby--like Lena had. No clone would have ‘remembered’ the things she did, the things that had driven Lena to try to protect herself in the only way she knew how whenever she felt threatened.
“Not very well,” the security chief said, chuckling.
He took a step back at the look of rage in Dax’s eyes when he surged to his feet.
“Is there something about terrorizing people that you find amusing, soldier?” he growled. “No sir.”
“Good, because I don’t keep sick fucks around me. We do what we have to do. Nobody enjoys it.”
“What’s eating him?” the man muttered when Dax had disappeared through the access tube.
“You’re lucky he didn’t stomp the shit out of you and throw your broken, bleeding carcass in the brig,” Rodriguez retorted when the man turned to look at him.
“What did I say?”
Rodriguez shook his head at the man. “You are stupid, man. Either he’s right and you are a sick fuck or you just haven’t had the pleasure of watching somebody you care about replaced by a stinking clone.”
* * * *
She’d vanished by the time Dax reached the gym. After glaring at the empty room for several moments, Dax moved to the com. “Cline, where is she?”
