breath seem like a magical gift from some benevolent god. And Nina had been somewhere in the middle, solidly caught between her brain and her heart, ruled by neither. Combining aspects of both while coming up decidedly short.
The Center had called them clones, designations A through C of HS-Gen16. But to Nina, Ava and Zoey had simply been her family.
And if she’d worked harder—trained more, been better—then they might still be alive.
Another thud dragged her out of the past, and she looked over as Maya rolled stubbornly to her feet, shaking off the takedown with a scowl of concentration.
“That’s enough.” Nina’s throat ached, and her voice nearly cracked. “For today, anyway. We have things to do. Maya?”
Maya backed away, grinning at Dani. Then she slumped to the mat and sprawled out on her back with her arms flung wide. “I did the books last night before we went out. It’s not looking great.”
Well, shit. “How not great?” Nina asked.
“The Carver job will help. We’re not gonna, like, run out of food or anything.” Maya tilted her head to meet Nina’s gaze. “But if you want to finish the basement and get heaters in there before it gets cold, we’re going to need to take more retrieval jobs.”
The back of her neck ached, and Nina rubbed at it. Insulating the basement and installing heat and beds before the weather turned cold had been her main goal for the year. Every winter, a lack of adequate heating and shelter killed at least a dozen people a week—and that was just in this neighborhood. They froze to death because they didn’t have anywhere to go. She had to get it done.
Then there was all the other stuff that kept getting shuffled aside—more shelving for the books they scavenged or traded for, another combination printer and binding machine, more activities for the community …
The list always seemed to grow instead of getting any shorter.
“Okay,” she said finally. “Okay, I’ll go out and make it happen. Maya, you handle the freeze dryers. Everything is prepped already, it just has to go in for the next cycle. Dani, you’re on food delivery. I’ll try to drum up some business.”
Dani pursed her lips and rocked back on her heels. “You know, I still have some active contacts. It wouldn’t be hard to land a couple quick jobs—”
“No. Jesus, Dani. You agreed—no more assassinations.”
“I’m willing to concede that killing people to earn money in order to save people may seem a little counterintuitive.” Dani shrugged. “But I only kill bad guys.”
“No.”
Maya rolled upright and started to stretch. “If we get that desperate, I can do another brain dump. People love TechCorps secrets.”
That was a terrible idea for entirely different reasons. If Maya let the wrong secret slip, it could clue the TechCorps in to the fact that she was not, in fact, as dead as their records seemed to indicate. “No way. Look, I’ll handle it. You just have to trust me.”
“I do,” Maya said immediately. “We both do. You know that. We just want to help.”
“You will—by delivering food and preserving more.” The rest was Nina’s responsibility.
* * *
Nina stayed out so long that it was full dark by the time she made her way back to the warehouse. Despite grabbing a quick lunch at the market earlier, she was starving—which made the sight of the pot of soup still warming on the stove particularly welcome.
She’d just filled a bowl when someone knocked on the front door. Dani and Maya were probably upstairs somewhere, or maybe not even home, so Nina abandoned her food with a sigh.
The first floor of the converted warehouse was mostly one big, open room, and Nina muttered a couple of blistering curses as she crossed it. She disengaged each of the bolts on the front door, including the biometric one near the top—
Then she opened it to a Greek god and forgot all about her rumbling stomach.
He had to be one of Dani’s hookups. He was vaguely her type, tall and broad, with the kind of exquisitely defined physique that came from conditioning, not just work. His clothes—jeans, boots, T-shirt—were casual and unremarkable except for the loving way they fit. He had blue eyes, brown hair that was a bit too long on the top, and a beard short enough for Nina to see the strong jaw beneath.
How odd. Though he wasn’t dressed like one, he carried himself like a soldier. And soldiers were not Dani’s style.