It was though, because she’d just hit the ground after the long fall. She was pretty sure he’d sliced her right down to the quick the day he’d pulverized the men trying to rape her and told her he’d come to rescue her from that nightmarish place. She was hurting already and she hadn’t had to say goodbye yet.
* * * *
Surprise flickered through Nigel when he looked up and saw Dax striding toward him. Knowing the vids were on both of them, though, he tamped the sensation of finding himself off kilter and merely jerked his head in invitation as if he’d been waiting for him.
“How’ve you been?” Dax said, smiling in a friendly way and extending his hand.
Again a flicker of something not quite right went through Nigel. He returned the smile and the handshake mechanically, deciding finally that Dax was putting on an act for the vids. “I didn’t expect you. How’s Lena?”
Something flickered in Dax’s eyes. He hadn’t expected the question, Nigel realized, and for a moment he thought he’d really screwed up. He was not good at this cloak and dagger shit! “Never mind. Tell me later.”
Dax shrugged when he’d settled in the chair across the table from Nigel. “She’s taken care of.”
Nigel frowned into his coffee mug as the server bot rolled over. By the time Dax had ordered a full breakfast and the bot had left again, Nigel had himself well under control. “I guess it’ll be me and you, then?”
“Yeah.”
Nigel chewed his lower lip, glancing around at the other patrons at the sidewalk café. Finally, he picked his cup up, drained the last of the coffee, and stood up. “Seven, at the rear service door.”
“We need to meet at the base.”
Nigel looked at Dax in surprise. After a moment, his expression cleared. “Afterwards, you mean? I thought that was the plan?”
Dax nodded. “That’s what I meant.”
A cold sweat had begun to form on Nigel’s brow before he reached the entrance to Quasar Corp. The meeting he’d just had wasn’t just unexpected. It had been downright strange. His instincts were screaming at him to turn around and head in the other direction as fast as he could go without drawing attention to himself, but like a bot, he kept moving, going through the motions of his daily startup. He relaxed fractionally when he made it through the security check without incident.
Maybe he was just imagining things?
It was halfway through the morning when everything that had been tumbling around in Nigel’s mind since the morning meeting abruptly clicked together into a solid picture.
The man in the café hadn’t been Dax.
They were on to them. Cold fear washed through him again, tying his guts in knots. It took all he could do to focus on the procedure he was trying to perform, but it helped that he had been on the job so long that most of what he did was more by rote than thought. When his heart settled into a more normal rhythm and the panic receded, he began trying to think exactly what his situation was and what would be the safest move to make.
That part wasn’t any easier than gaining control of his initial fear.
Dax had been cloned.
Cloned and replaced? Before or after he’d gotten Lena, Nigel wondered?
Was she safe? Was she dead?
He focused on those questions for a while, trying to decide what meeting up with Dax’s clone must mean besides the fact that he was fucked.
They had to think there was no chance that anyone could meet up with Dax and his clone, so Dax was either out of the picture all together, or they knew, or thought they knew, that he was a long way from the city.
Or this whole business was making them sloppy?
When the time for his lunch break rolled around Nigel still had no idea of what do to, so he did what he usually did. He left his lab and headed down to the company lunch room, expecting any moment to be confronted by security and escorted out of sight so that they could make him disappear permanently.
Instead, he arrived without incident. He was feeling vaguely ill with nerves, though, and it took a concentrated effort to behave as if nothing was any different from any other day. He decided after lunch, when he was on the way back to his lab, that he must have carried it off. He couldn’t remember anybody looking at him strangely, or commenting that his behavior seemed off.
His case of acute paranoia didn’t wane though.
He rarely took his afternoon break. Today, he deviated from the norm, because it had finally dawned on him that it wasn’t just paranoia. He really was in deep shit, and he had to let the people at base camp know it.
He couldn’t send the signal from inside Quasar Corp.
