Nina stared back at him, unblinking. “Is that really what you want to say to me?”
“I don’t know what to say to you.” It was true. The words wedged themselves in his chest until he wanted to rub at it to soothe the ache, but he didn’t know how to start. If he should start.
No, there was one thing he could say. “I’m sorry.”
“You told me that already.”
He had. The ache expanded into a sharp pain. “Then … thank you. For helping us, even though we didn’t earn and don’t deserve it.”
She kept staring at him, her eyes wide, her expression inscrutable. Finally, she opened her mouth, but the intermittent beep signaling a truck backing into the docking bay cut her off.
She took a step back instead. “Better gather the troops, Captain. It’s time to fake some deaths.”
* * *
Knox’s first problem was keeping Rafe from killing Ava.
Or more realistically, given the fact that Ava was Nina without Nina’s capacity for affection and morality, keeping Rafe from getting murdered while trying to kill Ava.
The group spread out around the warehouse, perched on crates, straddling chairs, and leaning against walls, as temperament dictated. Rafe was seated at the table, pointedly sharpening his meanest knife and casting menacing glares at an unconcerned Ava. Conall and Maya had claimed cross-legged positions on the table, tablets spread out around them.
“So tell me how this is going to work,” Conall said, looking back and forth from Maya to Nina. “Because I’ve never heard of anyone pulling off something like this.”
“I’m not sure anyone has,” Nina allowed. “You nervous?”
“Conall,” Knox chided. “Nina, can you break down the basics for me?”
“The basics are easy—we replicate your bodies so the Protectorate will have something to find in the wreckage after they use drones to drop bombs on this place.”
“It’s the details that are going to be rough.” Dani hopped off her crate. “They won’t just trust finding four crispy corpses. They’ll want positive ID. So when Nina says replicate—”
“I mean replicate.” Nina nodded, and Maya activated one of the tablets. “First, we’ll do full-body scans of you so we can start 3-D-printing skeletons.”
Gray shook his head. “And the minute they take a tissue sample, the whole thing falls apart.”
Nina tilted her head. “This isn’t amateur hour, Gray. The skeletons won’t just look real, they will be real. Printed with a matrix of osseous cells.”
Knox glanced at Maya. “Is that how she faked your death?”
Maya wrinkled her nose at Conall. “Really? You found my file?”
“Hey, in my defense, for all I knew, you were a psycho.”
“Still, it’s rude.”
“Faking Maya’s death was easy compared to this,” Nina explained. “In her case, I figured they’d follow protocol for finding skeletal remains in the field—a quick dental scan and a bone marrow sample—and move along. I printed Maya’s skeleton out of the same stuff they use to make surgical replacements, then filled the long bones with replicated marrow.”
Yep, Knox had been right that first day on the road. Her casual description of efficiently faking a death and fooling the most powerful corporation on the Eastern Seaboard was unbearably attractive.
“Of course, with Maya, I only had to fool a squad CO.” She looked around. “Your bodies? They’ll drag them to a lab, no doubt. Subject them to numerous tests to make absolutely certain the Silver Devils are dead.”
“And that will be their mistake.” Ava slid a tablet across the table toward Conall, who caught it and studied it with a frown that vanished as his mouth fell open.
“No fucking way,” he breathed. “Is this…?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And you just encode it…”
“Right into the DNA.”
“And it works?”
“It did the last time.”
Genuine awe filled Conall’s eyes. “You are basically an evil fucking genius.”
Ava’s chilly, vicious smile sent a shiver of atavistic fear through Knox. He rubbed at the goose bumps on his arms and pinned Conall with an expectant stare. “Care to share with the rest of us, Con?”
“Oh, you know. Nothing big.” Conall waved the tablet. “Just a sexy bit of malware that will give us a back door into the TechCorps. She encoded it in the DNA, so when they haul everything back to the lab to lovingly scan it, they’ll be handing me access to … Hell, almost everything.”
“Security? Protectorate orders?”
“We’ll know what they’re doing almost before they do.”
So Nina wasn’t just faking their deaths. She was giving them the tools to stay one step ahead of the TechCorps. To