I’d rather firebomb this whole goddamn place and dance on your burning grave, you sadistic son of a bitch.
“If I trained her like you say, I should be able to.”But if I do find her, I’m going to help her get so far away you’ll never find her.
“You better be careful,” Andrews said.The bastard was smirking, blue eyes alive as if contemplating someone’s pain.Probably Del’s.“If she keeps this up the Colonel might decide she’s better dead, even if she is a golden girl.Jilssen has a hard time convincing him to bring her in alive anyway.”
Del shrugged.“If I cared, I wouldn’t be here.”I escaped you once before.But he was past lying to himself, and the thought was merely reflexive.Empty bravado wouldn’t help.
What would help him was finding the genius who could outthink Sigma, hold the shattered Society together, and direct an organization like this back from the brink of disaster.A genius like that might have an idea or two Del could use.
A genius like that might be able to help Del figure out what he’d done to his own head—and what he couldn’t remember.
Andrews laughed, sidling back out the door.“Yeah, sure you don’t care.Come on, Breaker.For this assignment, your ass is mine.”
“Color me excited,” Del mumbled, and followed him out the door into the blinding white-tiled corridor beyond.Underground in the high security warrens, armed guards with personal dampers everywhere, and trackers in special cells on every level.Someone down the hall screamed—probably undergoing their first reeducation session.Zed and a beating, just the way to wake up in the morning.
Back home in the bad old cradle.They were going to send him out on assignment for the first time since recapture.And any assignment, however well-planned, might offer Del a chance to do something other than keep being a Sigma lapdog.Training clamped down on his hindbrain, regulating his pulse back to a steady, even thudding.Even a heartbeat could give him away.
Escape was just a vanishing possibility.It was far more likely that Anton and Andrews were going to use Del like a ferret in a hole to smoke out any Society operatives possible.They had all the weight of the government behind them, and had learned a few things since Del’s last escape.Whoever this Price girl was, she was still playing in a rigged game.
Del’s unwilling acquiescence to Sigma might be the thing that tipped the balance against her.Whoever you are, Price, keep running.I hope I did train you, I really do.
‘Cause that’s the only thing that’s going to save you if they somehow make me hunt you down.
CHAPTER3
Rowan’s headbegan to throb as soon as they got within ten miles of the office building, navigating the van with no trouble through midmorning traffic.Skyscrapers rose, downtown beating around her like a heart.
She waited as Henderson drove, closing her eyes, reaching for that place of quiet calm that grew deeper each time she used it.It was the tranquility which allowed her to do some of her more showy tricks, like quick-healing a cut or a scrape.
Training by Miss Kate and Henderson—not to mention Justin—had triggered a deepening of her talents, and it was like a muscle.The more you used, the better you got and the bigger the talent got.She’d reach her limit soon, probably; there was a ceiling to every psion’s gifts.After that, you courted backlash, the body protesting once the mind was pushed past endurance.
Rowan hadn’t found hers yet.The massive effort during the attack on Headquarters—shunting aside the collective force of massed Sigma psions and also striking at the pilot of a helicopter firing at Henderson’s Brigade—seemed to have torn something inside.A thin protective barrier that had kept her from going all wacky with the woo-woo.
You could incite riots,Justin had told her.You could start revolutions.He’d been utterly serious.She didn’t think she was quitethatpowerful, but there were certain things she could do that seemed far above the norm.
Norm.As if that word applied to any of this.
Rowan had never been normal, really.Finding lost articles, hearing people’s most intimate thoughts shouted into her head, calming her ward of mental patients, sensing the moods of those around her—no, normal was not the word.
The massed attack, several Sig psions in a circle around a target site or funneling their talent through a single point, was an evolution in their tactics according to Henderson.Just like Rowan was an evolution in psionics, he averred.
And so, she had learned to trust her instincts.Especially when they were so painfully, exquisitely loud.
Is this just pre-job nerves, or is there a good reason for me being so edgy?
The deep calm returned an answer Rowan didn’t much like.
“Sigma’s already here,” she heard herself say in that queer, floaty voice.“I think they’re planning on getting him early.”
“Good,” Cath said from the back seat.“I want a little payback.”
“Bloodthirsty’s not the way to go.”Henderson, severely, as he said every time.
Boomer, sitting next to Cath, made a rude snorting noise.Yoshi laughed.Rowan felt their jagged nerves and reached to soothe, stroking away the rough edges of pre-operation jitters.
“Yeah, right.”Boomer’s sideburns would be wagging side-to-side in disbelief.“When was the last time you let a Sig get away alive?”
“Focus, people,” Rowan said softly, returning to herself.“We aren’tthem.”
