The lights flickered to life before Nina could reply, casting the oil-stained concrete floor and dirt-filled corners of the garage into unpleasantly stark relief.
And illuminating Knox as he materialized out of the darkness.
He was as rough around the edges as the gas station. Sweaty and dirt-smudged, with little chips of wood clinging to his tight jeans and ash from the fire darkening his fingers. One hand curled around the handle of the ax balanced recklessly on his bare shoulder, and that shoulder—
The light revealed scars that hadn’t been visible outside. Most were healed slashes, but there were a few bullet holes and even one small burn. He was a fighter. He wore the proof of that on his skin.
And there was so much skin.
Nina shivered, and immediately decided to blame it on the cooling effect of convection.
“Okay,” Maya murmured. “Maybe I’m upgrading him to Gothic villain.”
Smart move, kid. Nina tried to say it out loud, but her tongue felt like it was glued to the roof of her mouth. Knox was still standing there, exuding enough sex appeal to power all their equipment without the generator’s help.
He leaned the ax against a metal rack that had once held tires. Nina edged over to give him room in front of the fan, though she kept her gaze carefully averted as a last-ditch attempt to save her sanity from the vagaries of her libido. It didn’t work. She could feel his presence like a physical touch, as if every inch of empty space between them simply didn’t exist.
And her body reacted accordingly. Goose bumps rose on her arms, the back of her neck prickled, and her skin felt heavy and tight at the same time, like the tense milliseconds just before a full-body shudder.
A dozen conflicting urges tore through her, each one more primal than the last. She needed to start a fight. She needed to find someone to fuck. She needed to run.
She needed that cold shower more than ever.
* * *
CLASSIFIED BEHAVIOR EVALUATION
Franklin Center for Genetic Research
Subject HS-Gen16-A completed the advanced survival training test. There exists, however, some disagreement over whether she earned a passing grade. Her orders were to return to base camp within the allotted time, assuming acceptable losses. But rather than abandon an injured subordinate, she carried him over nineteen miles of mountain terrain, further damaging her own fractured ankle. When I questioned her, she said no loss was acceptable if she could prevent it while still satisfying her mission objective.
Her belligerence regarding her orders is unacceptable. She has therefore been remanded to solitary custody, to remain for a period no shorter than three weeks.
Dr. Baudin, December 2073
* * *
ELEVEN
Gray gripped the steering wheel and peered through the windshield at the motel’s pitted, dingy façade. “You sure about this?”
Knox didn’t have an answer. Not an honest one, anyway. He wasn’t sure about this. He’d weighed risk against danger for the last hour of the drive, periodically using the rearview mirror to assess the angry storm clouds roiling in the distance and the terrifying pallor of Conall’s face.
The storm had been moving slowly, but it was almost on them now. A mean storm, a treacherous one. It would split the sky and let loose a deluge, and the fact that it was slow moving only made it more perilous. Most of the shelters they’d stayed in recently would be hail-strewn and flooded by morning.
They needed real walls and a solid roof. And Conall needed a bed. Knox had always known that the techie’s biochemical modifications emphasized sharpening his mind and enhancing his ability to rapidly process information, but he hadn’t realized how that tiny difference would manifest once their implants started misfiring.
Conall was a heartbeat away from neural overload now, all the time. Even while he slept, his eyes shifted restlessly beneath his closed lids—though even that was rare. Without sedatives, Conall wasn’t sleeping much anymore.
There were no safe moves left. Just varying levels of risk.
Knox stared at the motel. It might have been nice before the Flares. Each room had a balcony with a few rusty chairs, and a pool containing six inches of sludge sat between the two wings of the building. Neglect had run it down, but lights shone through the curtains of most of the rooms, and plenty more spilled through the glass doors of the dirty little lobby.
It was a dump. It was full of people. And it was better than