and get your winnings.”
She had one chance here, one safe card to play. “Keep them. It wasn’t a properly placed bet, anyway.”
His bloodshot eyes narrowed. “What are you playing at?”
“I don’t want anything from you,” she assured him. “Nothing you haven’t already promised, anyway.”
“Nobody wants nothing. That’s not how the world works.”
“It’s how I work.” She took a step closer so she could lower her voice. “Knox held up his end of the bargain, and now it’s your turn. Help Conall, and then leave us all the hell alone.”
“Fuck.” Boyd spat on the floor—and on Nina’s boots. “You’re just like that motherfucker. You righteous assholes deserve each other.”
He stomped away, and Dani snorted. “He seems nice.”
“I’m still open to murder and mayhem,” Rafe said, holding a cold beer bottle to his eye. “The captain’s probably hoping for a lower profile, though.”
Low profile was out of the question for Knox. People swarmed him as he exited the cage—brand-new fans, dazzled women and men looking for a hookup, even the other fighters. They didn’t know him, but they wanted to.
Nina understood the feeling.
CONALL
There were seventeen water stains on their motel room’s ceiling. The peeling wallpaper was printed with a subtle geometric triangle pattern. Triangles were harder to count, because if you stacked a few of them together, they made more triangles. There was a trick to it that Conall could never remember—something about the base number of triangles?
It didn’t matter. No one would be coming behind him to check his work. He wasn’t racing the clock and his fellow recruits, tense with the knowledge that whoever solved the problem too slowly might not be there tomorrow.
Of course, disappearing didn’t mean they were dead. The aptitude it took to be drafted into the TechCorps’ elite computer division made a kid too valuable for disposal. But their teachers also made it clear that washing out into a lesser program would result in the revocation of the privileges and perks that came with being the best.
The techs who lived chained to their little desks, crunching numbers for the scientists and sleeping in assigned bunks, weren’t exactly indentured, but there was no way to repay your education on a tech’s salary. You’d be eighty by the time you had a hope in hell of breaking free of your debt. The only way to breathe free air again was to push your brain to its limits, to go faster and harder than all the brilliant kids around you.
To be the best.
No, to be second best. Second best would have been smarter. If he’d stopped before hitting the peak of his world, Conall would probably be in a high-rise somewhere, doing home security for TechCorps board members and taking baths in champagne flecked with gold dust. But he couldn’t resist clawing his way to number one.
And the TechCorps couldn’t resist seeing how much higher he could go if they hacked his brain.
Conall couldn’t remember the trick to counting triangles, but he didn’t need it. His brain never stopped working. There were eight thousand, six hundred, and forty-seven triangles on the wall in front of him. Once upon a time, knowing that would have given him a soothing rush of satisfaction. A blissful chance to catch his breath.
Now, he couldn’t remember bliss. He needed something new to count.
The man in the clean—well, mostly clean—white coat beside the chair rubbed something cold on the inside of Conall’s forearm. “Normally, I’d use a general sedative for this,” he said flatly, “but your condition won’t allow it.” He paused. “I’d advise you not to watch.”
Not very encouraging. Conall’s wired brain skittered in sixteen different directions, instantly compiling an anxiety-driven list of everything that could go wrong if he let some backwoods butcher cut him open and hop him up on unregulated drugs.
He could go into neural overload. He could die. He could wish he’d died when the high hit him wrong and amped up the world to a brilliant Technicolor so out of control that his sanity cracked under the pressure. He could crash. He could burn out half his brain cells and never be the best at anything ever again.
That last one scared him the most.
Mace would have handled this better. Mace would have sat down with Conall and laid out the possible side effects. He would have given Conall a sense of control over what was about to happen, even if that control was a mere illusion.
“Conall?”
Mace would have understood what was happening to Conall in a way the others