Replica

Nate’s eyes cracked open, then quickly closed again in response to the light. He wanted to go back to sleep, but the damn wasp was still buzzing around his head. He opened his eyes again, and realized there was no wasp. He blinked his crusty eyes a couple of times as one by one his brain cells woke up and dragged themselves out of his dream into reality. Reality that included his phone buzzing away on the nightstand.

The buzzing stopped briefly, and sleep tried to drag Nate back down into its clutches. He would have been happy to go, but the phone started up again. He considered grabbing it and throwing it across the room to shut it up so he could get back to sleep.

Cursing the damned piece of technology that was supposedly in “silent” mode, Nate pushed himself up to a sitting position and grabbed it. He pulled his hand back to throw it, but before he did, he noticed the flashing icon that told him he had more than a dozen missed calls. Groggy as he was, the realization still sent a burst of adrenaline through his system. According to the phone, it was just past eight in the morning, and a dozen missed calls at this hour was not a good sign.

Shaking his head in an attempt to clear the fog, Nate answered even though he didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello?” he croaked, using his free hand to rub the grit out of his eyes.

“Nate! Thank God I finally reached you.”

Nate shook his head again, having failed to clear the fog the first time. The voice was familiar, but whatever part of his brain matched voices to names was still asleep. “Who is this?”

“Dante.”

Dante? What the hell was Dante doing calling him? And how’d he even get Nate’s private number? Of course, he was a professional spy in training, so the latter probably wasn’t that much of a mystery.

“What’s going on?” Nate asked as more adrenaline worked its way into his system.

“Nadia’s been arrested.”

The trickle of adrenaline became a flood, and suddenly Nate was wide awake. “What?” He shoved the covers aside as he scrambled to his feet.

“She’s been arrested. It’s all over the news. They took her from her apartment this morning, about an hour ago.”

Nate was already rushing toward his closet, planning to throw on the first clothes he got his hands on. He had promised not to let Mosely hurt Nadia or her family, and he was going to keep that promise. Somehow.

“She’s supposedly been taken to Riker’s Island,” Dante continued. “That’s what the news says, at least. But that’s not where they took her.”

Nate pinched the phone between his face and his shoulder as he struggled his way into a pair of pants. The fingers of his right hand were stiff and swollen, and Nate fought to bend them enough to manage the button and zipper.

“Do you know where they have taken her?”

“Yeah. She’s at the Fortress somewhere.”

“Why?” The Fortress was not a place for prisoners. Its entire purpose was to guard the Replica technology. It was where you went to get your backup scans, if you were privileged enough to warrant them, and where Replicas, like Nate, were made. It hardly seemed like an appropriate place to be taking Nadia after her arrest.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you’re the spy. Find out!”

“I told you, I don’t have that kind of access. I’m still in spy training wheels.”

Nate would have torn into Dante for the flippant words if he didn’t hear the concern behind them. And if he didn’t recognize the same kind of inappropriate wisecrack he was well known for making himself.

“Then how do you know they’ve taken her to the Fortress?”

Dante hesitated a moment. “Because I put a tracker on her last night.”

Nate paused in the act of sticking his arms into a shirt. His swollen fingers curled into a painful fist, and he wished Dante were here in front of him so he could punch the asshole again. Never mind that it would hurt him way more than it would hurt Dante.

“You what?” he growled.

Dante cleared his throat, and sounded unsure of himself for the first time since Nate had met him. “Um, I put a tracker on her. We weren’t sure she wasn’t going to panic and tell Mosely everything. We thought if we could keep track of her movements, we’d, uh, have an early warning if she did something stupid. An insurance policy.”

If Dante was going to be a professional spy, then he needed to learn how to lie better than that. Nate gritted his teeth against the pain as he buttoned his shirt, realizing he should have gone with a pullover to spare himself the effort.

Why would Dante have put a tracker on Nadia? And why would he try to feed Nate this lame explanation? The answer to the latter was obvious: because he didn’t think Nate would like the real one.

Why put a tracker on Nadia? It was an insurance policy, all right. Only not in the sense Dante had suggested.

“You put a tracker on her so that your resistance buddies could find her and kill her if she was captured.”

Dante sighed. “We couldn’t let her talk. We have … people at Riker’s. People who could arrange for something to happen to her before she was questioned. Kurt and I figured if worse came to worst, we’d fess up to our mistakes and our superiors could … make the appropriate arrangements.”

“You set her up to die.” Nate wanted to kill Dante, wanted to pummel his face until it was nothing but a bloody pulp. And then he’d start in on Kurt, for agreeing to this plan.

“I’ve seen what Mosely does to people, Nate. Trust me, she’d be better off dead.”

“One: that wasn’t your call. And two: my name is Nathaniel. Only my friends call me Nate, and you’re not my friend.”

“Fine, Nathaniel. But we have a rather urgent problem right now. Mosely didn’t take Nadia to Riker’s Island, remember? The resistance might have been able to get to her there, but they can’t get to her in the Fortress. I don’t know why Mosely took her there, but it’s not for anything good. If she talks, I’m going to have to swallow this cyanide tablet I’m staring at, because I absolutely can’t allow them to question me. And you’re going to meet with some kind of unfortunate end yourself, because Mosely can’t afford to let you live with what you know.”

Nate shoved his feet into a pair of shoes, not bothering with socks. He knew Dante’s reasoning made a sick sort of sense, but that didn’t make it any more acceptable. Nate cursed himself for ever getting Nadia involved in any of this. Ever since the night of his murder, she’d been stuck between a rock and hard place, and he’d done nothing to make her situation any easier. Hell, he’d done plenty to make it worse.

“I’m going to the Fortress,” Nate announced. “I’m getting Nadia out of there.”

“Oh yeah? How are you going to manage that?”

Nate’s hand tightened on the phone as another surge of anger flowed through him. Dante was so lucky Nate couldn’t reach him right now. Of course, if Dante was telling the truth, he was contemplating suicide, so perhaps he wasn’t really that lucky after all.

“That’s why you called me, isn’t it?” Nate asked instead of answering. “You’re hoping I can get her out of there.”

“Hoping, yeah. But I don’t know what you can do. Mosely isn’t going to let her go just because you tell him to. And if he realizes you know about him, he won’t let you go, either.”

“Well, if everything is so hopeless, you go ahead and take your little pill, and I’ll see you in hell.”

Nate ended the call. He didn’t have time to hold Dante’s hand, nor did he have the inclination. He had to get to the Fortress and find Nadia. He had to save her. He’d promised to protect her.

CHAPTER TWENTY