“Yes, Dad.”
“Cason.”
“Reese.”
We stare at each other for several seconds, both of us too stubborn to back down. Then I step forward, closing the distance between us, and grab his shirt, yanking him down into a kiss before he can try to argue even more. It’s quick, just enough to distract him so I can turn us around. As soon as I let him go, I open the driver door.
Before I can get inside, Reese grabs hold of the door and locks his gaze with mine. “I want you back here tonight.” His tone leaves no room for argument. “Bring the damn cat if you have to.”
“Aw, do you want to raise a cat with me?”
His eyes roam my face for a few seconds before he says, “I want everything with you.”
My heart does a flip in my chest, and if I didn’t already know what it felt like for it to stop, I’d swear it just did it again.
“Me too,” I whisper.
Then I give him one last swift kiss before climbing into my car because if I don’t go now, I’m not going to want to at all. He shuts the door for me and steps back, and I can see how much it pains him to let me go.
But I’ll be back.
And as long as we survive this, we’ll have everything together.
Felix ispissed.
That’s the first thing I learn when I step into my apartment. The second is that I own a tiny, furry missile of judgment. Before I barely get the door shut, he comes bolting out from the bedroom, launches himself onto the couch and meows loudly like he’s filing a formal complaint with management.
“Missed you too, you dramatic little gremlin,” I mutter as I move into the kitchen.
He leaps down and follows after me. I fill up his food and water dishes quickly so I can head to my desk. My fingers barely touch the keyboard before the connection snaps into place. Data pours out of me, clean and organized, slotting into folders and files, so that it’ll be easy to go through it all.
It takes me less than two minutes to dump everything out of my head and into the hard drive. Which is a sentence I really wish didn’t make sense.
By the time I’m finished, my screen is a mess of categorized directories, flagged documents, and encrypted files I alreadyknow how to open without even trying.
Felix hops up onto the desk and sits directly in front of the screen.
“Bold of you to assume you can interfere with what is essentially my brain now.”
He can’t. I don’t even need to be touching the computer, so I get up because I can’t sit any longer. Instead, I pace, back and forth across the living room, shoes kicked off and the floor cool against my bare feet as I flip through files by nothing but brain and radio waves. There’sa lot, but it’s definitely less overwhelming than if I had tried to do this in my head alone.
The screen flickers behind me. Documents open and close and rearrange. Data scrolls faster than any human should be able to process. But I’m not processing it like a human. I’mabsorbingit. 1s and 0s fly around the apartment, code only I can see as I continue pacing.
Felix watches me like he’s deciding if it’s finally time to look for a new owner.
Part of what I discover is what we already knew. The Institute has been tracking flatlines, flagging survivors, predicting Ascension probability. Reese does a version of the same thing, just…less corporate evil.
But then there’s something else. Something worse.
Files shift in my vision, layering over each other until a pattern starts to form. Protocols, medical logs, internal memos. Terminology that makes my stomach turn.
“P0E iteration cycles,” I read aloud because, somehow, that makes it less fucking terrifying. “I guess ‘die, revive, repeat’ didn’t test well with focus groups.”
Serial death. Repeated murder.
Or, in other words, torture.
We knew Malcolm had purposefully killed at least one person to manufacture an Ascended soldier, but…fuck. This is…
