Theyshouldn’t be there—either one of them!
The recall was for the COs—soldiers—that had malfunctioned on the battlefield.
Not the pleasure droid series.
Or the home security series.
But then again,noneof them were supposed to be down here in cages awaiting destruction!
She’d been told the recall was to install a programming patch to correct the issue.
This holding area was for disposing of defective product ….
Andshewasn’t supposed to be where she was.
How could Raathe be here? He should’ve been at her father’s estate.
And Caleb?DearCaleb!
The release button for the cages, she saw, was just behind the manager’s left shoulder—a palm sized, backlit red knob of a button that was flashing at her and yelling to her psyche ‘push me! Push me!’
Her father had always warned her that snooping was going to get her in deep one day.
Fortunately, her obsessive-compulsive father had ordered her to take self-defense lessons!
It had been a few years ….
But she was running on instinct and thought almost instantly transformed into action.
Tabitha executed aperfectflying kick! The top of her foot connected with the man’s jaw and swung his face sideways. His body followed. And then he simply tumbled onto the floor, following the high heel shoe she’d slung off in the process.
It felt as if the blow had broken every tiny bone in her foot.
Pain went off inside her like an exploding bomb. The concussion enveloped her so fast, she was blinded by it, could barely make out her goal—the button—through a blur of agony.
The spike heel on the shoe she was standing on broke abruptly. She staggered, corrected her balance.
She had to get to that button before the guy got up!
She hobbled over to the wall and slammed her hand down on it, setting off a screaming alarm and wild, churning lights.
“Run!” she bellowed at the top of her lungs. “Run for your lives!”
Something grabbed her ankle and Tabitha looked down in pure horror to discover the guy had climbed up and was trying to scale her leg. She stared at him blankly for a moment and then began beating him on the head with her purse.
He snatched that out of her hands and threw it so she used the pad she’d been carrying when she’d been posing as a government rep who’d been sent to inspect and account for the recalls.
That drove him off for a handful of seconds and Tabitha spared a glance to check the progress of the cyborgs’ escape, wondering how much longer she needed to hold the bastard off.
Some had filed out of the cages, but she couldn’t tell if all of them had and it didn’t seem to her as if enough time had passed that they could have emptied the cells.
She didn’t see Raathe or Caleb, but she didn’t know if that was a good thing—meaning they’d taken off—or bad—meaning they were still trapped inside.
The man took advantage of her inattention. He got to his feet and punched her shoulder hard enough to send her sprawling. She got up on her hands and knees and launched herself at him, ramming her head into his crotch and forcing him back several steps so that he wasn’t able to punch the button to close the cells.
He planted his hands on her shoulders and shoved her back, breaking her hold, and then lunged for the button. She managed to grab his ankle, slowing him, but she didn’t have the weight to stop him. He simply dragged her with his next step.
He tired of that very quickly, though. He was just about to kick her in the face when he abruptly flew upward.
