but I won’t tell— it’ll be our little secret. You’ve always believed yourself a cut above the rest. If anyone could challenge the inscrutable Dr. Loy, it would be you. But maybe I’m wrong and you’re just another grub crawling in the dirt.”
Clever. She was baiting him into aiding her. An odd choice of tactics but it was working. He couldn’t back down now. She clearly understood how much Lydia galled him. What else could she tell about him?
Joe stuck on a smile. “You had me going.” She smiled smugly. She’d won a round but he wasn’t backing down. He took up his smile again, one he knew women found irresistible. “I’ll do everything in my power to convince Lydia to allow you to be together.”
She approached him. Uncertain of her intention, he stood his ground but a telltale sweat broke out on his upper lip.
“I’m not going to hurt you Doc. Scout’s honor,” she whispered, reaching up to brush his face, her fingertip touching the drop of moisture forming against his will above his mouth. “Just trying to illustrate a point.”
Her surprising touch filled him with awe. He could barely verbalize his amazement, “You’re warm!”
Her hand didn’t leave his cheek. “I’m not dead, or undead as I believe the term is.” She carried his hand to her own face. “I’m as alive as you are but I’m fully realized, while you’re a mere embryo.” Her eyes widened, reflecting his image in the dark pupils.
He backed away from her. “No…”
“Convince me otherwise.” She laughed low in her throat. “I’ve embraced the inhumanity of man intimately— takes one to know one.”
“You can’t judge me by your standard.”
She shrugged and picked up the hand mirror on the table, admiring her reflection. “I’m paying you a high compliment. You have courage and superior ability.” She flipped her hair, setting the mirror down. “Get me what I want and I’ll cooperate with you.”
“You must understand the fear.”
“I understand Doctor Loy’s fear. Tell her I understand completely. But Kurt and I bunk together or there’s no project.” She crossed her arms, business-like. “I personally bear you no malice, Doctor. You’re merely the go-between. You don’t trust me and frankly I don’t trust you. You have no real desire to befriend me. You’re an opportunist but from one avowed taker to another, I respect that. I don’t want to hurt you or any of your little mortal friends but tell your boss that if anything happens to Kurt, I’ll dispatch her and every other soul in this facility to hell. Capiche?” She paced away from him. “I won’t put up with being manhandled by those baboons and I won’t be restrained. And for crissakes fix the air-conditioning, it drips constantly. Tell all that to your Doctor Loy.”
“Of course, I’ll make it very clear.”
“We need some things. As you know we brought very little with us.”
“Make a list. I’ll come by tomorrow to get it.”
As he turned to place his fingerprint in the reader, she touched his shoulder. He started, not hearing her creep up on him, heart pounding.
“You have a name? What should I call you?”
He turned to face her. “Joe, you can call me Joe.”
“Simple and to the point, I like that.”
“What should I call you?”
“Anything, but late for dinner. You can laugh.”
“I didn’t find it amusing.”
“Lighten up, it’s a fucking depressing world if you can’t laugh, take it from me. I’m Mia.” She smiled, for the first time revealing her incisors. “Don’t disappoint me, Joe.”
Bile splashed up into his esophagus. He backed to the exit reader, watching her for any sudden move, but she just stared back, shaking her head.
TWO
* * * *
The elfin woman in the chair opposite Joe tried to remain cool, black eyes glaring over the tops of her glasses. Joe rather enjoyed it. “Who told you to remove the restraints?” Her black-bobbed head shook, making her appear a tiny petulant child behind the mound of expense reports and requisitions for equipment he had dumped on her desk. “She’s just looking for an opportunity to escape!”
“Escape implies they’re imprisoned. They volunteered.”
Lydia’s voice calmed, as her small, triangular face smoothed out. “She attacked one of my staff. We had no choice but to restrain her. You’ve read the notebooks?”
Joe couldn’t wait to drop this one on her. “I gave them back to her.”
“You gave back a critical tool to understanding them.”
“Shouldn’t it be her decision? It’s a personal journal.”