So he’d heard some strange things over the years, but he’d never heard of any military genetics projects that utilized siblings. Strong bonds of loyalty like that were inconvenient and dangerous, especially in soldiers who didn’t come with off switches.
Or maybe her sisters were the off switches. Built-in hostages.
Brutal.
“There were three of us.” Nina’s voice sounded vaguely detached. A little distant. “There were always three in every cluster. That’s how the Franklin Center operated.”
The Franklin Center. The words tugged at a vague memory, but he couldn’t follow the path. It didn’t sound military, though. “That’s where you’re from?”
“The Franklin Center for Genetic Research.” She leaned against the wall, as if she needed it to hold her up. “Trios of genetically engineered clones as far as the eye could see. That’s where I grew up.”
Clones.
He shifted uneasily. The TechCorps’ public stance on cloning was that it was an ethics quagmire, and of course they’d never do such a thing. Their public stances often differed greatly from their private ones, but Knox was pretty sure they wouldn’t have created Nina. He had no doubt they’d violate their ethics mandates in a heartbeat if the money was good enough, but someone like Nina—someone with power built into her and nothing to check her reckless, unrelenting decency—
They’d never take that risk.
But someone had created her. Someone who’d left her with shaky knees and that vague detachment. A sick weight settled in his stomach. “What was it like there? Was it … bad?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “It’s all I ever knew. We worked hard, trained hard. But they didn’t keep us isolated from each other, and I don’t remember being sad.”
He needed to know why she’d left. What had happened to her sisters, who might be chasing her, how dangerous they were. What they’d do to get her back. A dozen questions piled up in his throat, each fighting to get free.
It was the lost look in her eyes that stopped him. The fact that she didn’t know how to answer a question as basic as what was it like? That the best she had to offer was the lack of sorrow.
He rose silently, crossed the space between them, and held out the bottle.
She stared up at him, unmoving. “You feel sorry for me.”
“A little,” he admitted. “Maybe not too much. I know a lot of people who can definitely remember being sad.”
“No.” She finally reached for the tequila. “That came later.”
He waited until she’d taken a generous sip of the liquor. “What happened?”
Her cheeks were wet. It might have just been the rain, but Knox couldn’t be sure. She moved slowly, as if she had been the one to take a beating in the cage. One more drink, and she set the bottle on the battered dresser.
He’d laid out his clothes for tomorrow. Nina picked up the worn white T-shirt he’d left folded on top of the stack and hauled it over her head. He waited until she’d crawled back onto the bed and curled up, then moved slowly, like she was a wild animal he might startle.
The bedsprings squeaked as he slid onto the mattress. He settled next to her—close, but not touching—and asked the question again. “What happened, Nina?”
She took a deep, shaky breath. “We each had different skills. Ava was the brains. Zoey was the heart.”
He could guess what she must have been, but something told him she needed to say it. “And you?”
Her fingers slid over his, tracing the rough bumps of his knuckles. “I was the fists. Combat, soldier, brute force—whatever you want to call it.”
“You were their leader.”
“I was the muscle,” she corrected. “Anyway, when we finished our training, we were going to change the world. Save it. It didn’t exactly turn out that way.”
She fell silent, and he waited. After a few moments, she shifted on the bed, moving closer, and continued. “Our first mission was a simple rescue. A pharmaceutical company had kidnapped one of the Center’s neurogeneticists. You know how it goes—they tried to woo him with money, then blackmail. They’d moved on to torture by the time we got the assignment.”
“Torture?” Knox had brought in his share of “recruited” scientists over the years, but the TechCorps typically employed more subtle methods of persuasion—for very practical reasons. “What kind of work could they possibly be getting out of him like that?”
“I don’t know. And I couldn’t ask him.” She swallowed hard. “We infiltrated the building easily enough. We had a clean window of operations.