couldn’t, because the medic had been like Conall—calibrated for genius. Always thinking just a little bit faster.
No wonder he’d declined so rapidly in that shithole prison cell.
“Conall.”
Conall dragged his ragged attention toward the sound of his name. Knox swam into focus, wearing the deep groove between his eyebrows that meant he was worried. For the first five years Conall had been a part of the Silver Devils, he’d seen that forehead crease half a dozen times. Every one had meant they were in shit so deep they’d be washing it out of their hair—if they survived.
Now it seemed like it was there all the damn time.
“Are you ready?” Knox asked, low and intense. “If you want to wait—”
“No.” Conall’s eyes unfocused. There was a cheap, crooked painting on the wall behind him. More geometric shapes. Rectangles inside rectangles. Thirty-seven of them. “No, this needs to happen.”
“Okay. Do it.” Knox’s voice drifted by, rough around the edges with emotion the captain pretended he couldn’t feel. Knox always worried too much about Conall. He’d wanted a tech for his squad, and the Protectorate had requisitioned him the best available man for the job. Conall hadn’t grown up training for combat like the rest of them, and Knox thought that made him vulnerable. The born-and-bred soldier boys never seemed to understand that brains would always outmaneuver brawn in the long game.
The short game? Well, that could get a little uncomfortable.
Vague pressure pinched his arm. The local anesthetic had numbed him from shoulder to elbow, but the alien tugging and the sound of the blade—whisper soft, sharp, wrong—dragged his meandering focus straight to what was happening to him.
Mistake. Mistake, mistake, oh fuck. Mistake.
Blood welled up on his skin. Out of his skin. The doctor—no, not a doctor, whatever else he was, he was definitely not a doctor—had the implant gripped in a pair of forceps and was—was—
Pain exploded through Conall. His brain scrambled to fill in the blanks the anesthetic had muffled, unhelpfully bypassing the numbness with vivid, agonizing detail. Conall sucked in a breath and jerked his attention back to the wall. Triangles. Triangles—fuck, who gave a shit about triangles when a madman was flaying open his flesh and he was just letting it happen?
“Conall.” Knox’s face appeared, blocking out the triangles. The groove between his eyes was so deep it looked painful. Every muscle in the man’s forehead had to be aching. What muscles did that, anyway? The corrugator supercilii? Occipitofrontalis? Mace would know.
Mace was dead.
Knox gripped the shoulder attached to the arm not currently being stabbed. “I thought you were going to numb that. He’s clearly in pain.”
“Not his fault,” Conall ground out. “Brain’s too smart to fall for stupid tricks. I know what it should feel like, so I feel it.”
“Almost done with placement,” the medic said. “All I have to do is wire it in.”
Conall started to look, but Knox grabbed his chin, his fingers damn near digging bruises into skin as he kept Conall’s head turned away. “Tell me what you’re going to buy once we’re free and clear. I know you have a list.”
Of course he had a list. When they’d bolted, they’d had to do it with the scant amount of tech Knox could requisition without arousing suspicion. There were a hundred things Conall had left behind. A permanent satellite dish. Tiny camera drones with a twenty-mile signal radius. His entire case of smart lenses—contacts that could record, analyze, and display results like they were floating in front of him.
Hell, he missed those the most. His brain hadn’t scrambled in so many restless directions with that constant low-level input.
“C’mon, Conall. Talk to me.”
He met his captain’s dark, worried eyes. Poor Knox. So bad at sucking it up and letting other people hurt. “Crab dinner,” he rasped. “When we’re really free, I want to go down to the Gulf and spend a year’s worth of wages stuffing myself on seafood.”
The words did what he intended. That groove between Knox’s brows almost vanished. His lips twitched up. Not quite a smile—the captain didn’t do a lot of smiling—but close. “All right, Con. It’s a deal. All the seafood you can eat. My treat.”
Knox would never have to pay. Conall wasn’t making it to the Gulf. He was pretty sure he wasn’t making it to the end of this mission.
That was the problem with being the smartest guy in the room. Sometimes, you were the only one who knew the odds were terrible and your time was nearly up.