Predatory Game

She shrugged, but he noticed she twisted her fingers together and held them tightly against her middle as if her stomach was churning in protest. He wanted to put his arms around her and comfort her, but he stayed still, knowing she had to come to terms with the idea of using her talent on him by herself.

“Apparently it’s been known for some time that using electrical currents on wounds can regenerate lost limbs and even repair severed spinal cords in a variety of fish and mammals. Fish, Jesse. Mammals. Not humans. No one has tried what you’re suggesting.”

“Humans are mammals,” he pointed out.

“Don’t even try to be funny.” She jumped off the counter and began to pace with quick, restless steps. “This isn’t funny, Jesse. What you’re asking me to do…”

“I know it isn’t funny,” he replied. “But there has to be something to this.”

“Maybe.” She pushed at her hair, making it more tousled than ever. “Whitney concluded that the neural pathways need electrical stimulation for regeneration, and that without it, any attempt will eventually fail. There are drugs that stimulate growth, but he concludes that they will never push the neural pathways to form correctly. The downside appears to be that if you overstimulate, it can cause excessive cell growth and cause tumors. Cancer, Jesse. That’s what he’s talking about.”

“But without the electrical current, there’s really no hope.”

She whirled around to face him. “I knew you’d jump on that. I knew it. Whitney doesn’t know everything. He doesn’t, Jesse, and he’s capable of terrible things. I’ve seen it. I’ve been a part of his experiments and believe me, he doesn’t revere life. We’re inferior to him. He wants the perfect soldier, and we’re not quite up to his standards, so if he needs to find out how far electrical current can be used before it causes cells to become cancerous, he has no compunction about doing so.”

“I’m aware of that.” Jess kept his tone low, careful not to let the energy swirling in the room near her. He was worried enough without hearing what he already knew. “But you can manipulate the electrical current and read my rhythm at the same time, can’t you? Isn’t that what you do?”

“Nothing is that simple. I’ll admit that the report supports findings that bioelectricity plays an important role in cell regeneration and that electrical induction of tissue regeneration may have some application…”

“Not some application, Saber. Significant application.”

“Maybe. But you want neural pathways reestablished from your brain to your legs. The nerves are damaged. You have no feeling.”

“I have some feeling now. Since they operated and put in the bionics. You saw me walk. Something is happening to allow that. Before the operation, I couldn’t move my feet. Now I can. I have to concentrate, but I can do it.”

“There you go, then. Give yourself more time.”

“I would be walking by now if it was going to work.”

“You don’t know that, Jesse, and you’re risking cancer.” She knelt in front of him, looking up. “Please, for just a minute, put yourself in my place. How could I live with myself if I ever harmed you? How could I go on? Do you have any idea what you’re asking of me?”

He framed her face with both hands. “Yes. I know I’m going to do this. If you don’t help me, I’ll ask Lily and Eric, and neither of them can monitor me the way you can. I’m asking you to do this because I believe you’re my best chance.”

His thumbs brushed against her soft skin as he stared down into her eyes. It was difficult to ignore the fear he saw there, but he was going to try the experiment. He’d had too many operations and had worked too hard to give up.

“Do you have any idea what this will do to us?” she asked. “The changes it will bring?” She had to bring it up. He had to go into this with his eyes open.

“Having me on my feet can only make things better.”

“Is that what you really think, Jesse? Because I love you enough to try this madness with you, but you’ll go back to active duty. You will. It’s what you live for. You and your team will be all over the place and where will that leave me?”

He shook his head. “You’re part of us, Saber.”

“How? How am I part of your team? How could that ever be? I assassinate people and I do it alone.”

“You can heal people, Saber. You could be the ultimate safety net for all of us.”

She opened her mouth to retort, but closed it abruptly. Could that be true? Was it possible she could really use her talent for something other than death? She’d helped Patsy, but that had been a fluke. She ducked her head, not wanting him to see her expression, knowing that he’d stirred hope and it was there in her heart, in her mind. She’d always thought of herself as a kind of terrible plague people should avoid.

“Saber? Honey, look at me. You’re amazing. The things you can do are amazing. And if you can do this for me, imagine what you could do with someone wounded. I’ve thought a lot about this.”

“I could screw up big time, Jesse. My childhood was a training ground to kill, not save lives. I need to practice and I don’t want it to be on you.” She was listening to him, wanting it, wanting to be someone different, wanting the prize he was holding out to her, but there was a cost. She wasn’t willing to gain her new life at the expense of his.

“You can already read my biorhythm, right? You monitor my pulse, even my blood pressure. Start slow. See what you can do. We don’t have to do the regeneration all in one day, in one session. Neither of us knows how it will work.”

“It’s an experiment, Jesse, and a darned dangerous one. If Lily did this, she could have the equipment ready in case anything happened to you.”

“She could have equipment ready after the fact, but you can prevent disaster from happening in the first place. You’ll know if my heart starts to go crazy, or anything else goes wrong.”

“Maybe-but you’re betting your life on a very big maybe.”

“And the other thing, Lily has no way of monitoring the cells themselves. She would have no way of knowing the cells were becoming overstimulated, so she would be guessing at the electrical pulses used. You’ll be far more accurate.”

“Jesse,” Saber shook her head, holding her shaking hand out in front of her. “You don’t have a clue of the process any more than I would have for moving objects. You’re guessing because you want it to be true.”

“Am I?”

Saber closed her eyes and let her breath out. Eric and Lily couldn’t know the amount of electrical current to introduce. How could they? Their guesses would be less precise than hers.

“Okay. But you tell Lily.”

“She’ll want to be here, and I want to start now.”

“I don’t care. We can start, but you tell her what we’re doing. If she has advice or objections, I want to hear them.”

“I thought you didn’t trust her,” he grumbled, pushing his chair down the hall to his office, with Saber walking behind him.

“I’ve changed my mind.”

He unlocked the door and waved her inside. Saber took the most comfortable chair and waited until he brought Lily up on the monitor. As Jesse explained what he wanted to do, the dawning excitement on Lily Whitney’s face made Saber’s hands clench the armrests of her chair. “Jess! I should have thought of that. It was there in his file about cell regeneration, but I didn’t think about Saber. Can you really do that? Is it possible, Saber? Can you monitor him internally and know when to stop?”

Saber shook her head. “I have no idea.”

“I studied your file. You’re unique. I’ve never run across anyone else like you, with your talent, so this would be such a gift to the GhostWalkers if you could actually use electrical currents. There’s so much I could teach on manipulating cells for wounds. This could be historic…” She broke off. “I’m sorry. I get carried away sometimes. You must be really frightened thinking about trying it on Jess.”

“It terrifies me,” Saber admitted. She still found it hard to trust Lily-to trust anyone. “No one has any idea if it will work or even how to do it.”

The thought of Jess without his wheelchair was scary. She hadn’t realized how much she relied on that chair to