I twisted my head hard to one side and the strap on my forehead slid off. I snapped my head forward, catching him on the bridge of the nose, shattering it. He fell back with a yell, pulled a gun and leveled it at me.
“Don’t you do it,” the nurse said. “We’ll both get eliminated if we lose her.”
The marine was breathing hard, blood flowing from his nose as I stared up at him. “I’ll kill you.”
What felt like days later, we stopped, and I was pulled out of the transport vehicle. The light was bright on my eyes and I blinked away tears as I looked up at the building we approached. Or rather I was pushed toward, still strapped down.
The sign on the front glass door had a different name then, one that they changed later.
Clearview Medical Institute for the Criminally Insane.
11
“Dios mio.” Anita was the first to speak after my voice faded. “So you had a daughter? She lived?”
“No.” I fought to keep my voice free of emotional inflections after speaking about what was no doubt the worst memory of my life, and that was saying something.
“We knew Killian had taken up with you,” Carlos said. “We did our best to keep tabs on the other important players. He does not seem like the man to turn away from his woman.”
“I would have said the same,” I said. “And maybe there was a Hider working their magic on me.” Something I hadn’t had a chance to mull over. I changed directions. “I tell you that because in the facility, they were keeping us quiet with a form of mind control. Not one abnormal, with the exception of the Magelore, retained any special abilities. Myself included. I’m blocked off from anything I could do before.” I mean, there was Cowboy, but he hadn’t been able to use his EMP pulse, so maybe he’d lost that too.
Their eyes widened.
“You mean . . .” Carlos shook his head, “they took away your powers?”
“I think they buried them deep under some sort of false memory. They gave us new names and told us that all we’d lived before was a lie, a memory of lives that didn’t exist. If you fought them, they hurt you. If you kept fighting them, they killed you.”
“How did you survive?” Anita asked. “If they were so inside your mind?”
There was fear in her voice and it was not unwarranted.
“I gave them exactly what they wanted. I gave them compliance and agreement. I never took a step out of line after they stuck me in the facility. But they were still watching me, as you can see. And I’m sure they kept sedatives in the food. Which I ate. Because I had to.”
“The last day?”
“I didn’t eat as much. I claimed I wasn’t feeling well.” I pushed my plate away from me, feeling that same nausea. “They made it addictive, I’m sure.”
“Oh,” Anita said, “you are looking rather green.”
I nodded and my stomach gurgled. I refused to throw up the first real meal I’d had in far too long. “I need to sleep.”
“He fled to Europe,” Carlos said as I stood. “With at least your son. There was no record of a girl.”
Hope, dangerous and so desperately needed, flared in my chest. “Did they make it?”
“He made it there, but the purge spread. What started here, most of the world adopted.” Carlos shook his head. “There is no safe place for us any longer.”
His words hit me harder than I would have thought possible—or maybe it was the withdrawal from the drugs in my system—and I stumbled after Anita. She led me away from the dining room, and my dog followed.
“What is her name?”
“Hasn’t got one yet,” I said.
Anita held open a bedroom door. “It is my daughter’s room, but she wouldn’t mind. There is a bathroom attached and you can use any of her clothes you find.”
She shut the door behind me, and I damn well knew she was trying to play on my sympathies. It wouldn’t work. I wasn’t looking for their daughter. I couldn’t. Not if I was going to find my boy.
I forced myself into the bathroom and ran a hot shower. The heat was a welcome distraction and I hissed as the water hit the sore points on my body where the tracers still resided. “Like I’ve been hit with buckshot,” I muttered, soaping up and scrubbing away the smell of the facility.
The dog gave a soft woof as I stepped out of the shower and toweled off. I ached all over, but the fatigue of a full belly, hot shower, freedom, and fear were crashing down on me and I fell onto the bed.
The dog jumped up and lay beside me and I slung an arm over her, an anchor in this storm I didn’t quite know how I was going to get through.
Sleep caught me quickly and I didn’t fight it, didn’t try to navigate my mind, or the things I needed to keep away from those who would read my thoughts.
The current that had been swirling through me, hidden away, swept over my dreams and I found myself wandering in the darkness as if I were meditating.
“Bear!” I called my son’s name, hoping but not expecting an answer.
“MOM!”
I spun to see him running toward me. His face was filthy as if he’d been rolling around in ashes, and his clothes were torn, but he was alive. I caught him in a hug, shocked at how much he’d grown. He was up to my shoulder now, too big to scoop up. Nearly twelve, he’d lived more than most people did in fifty years.
He clung to me, sobs ripping out of him. “I knew you weren’t dead. I knew you weren’t dead.”
The irony was not lost on me. This would not be the first time he’d been told I was dead only to find out that I wasn’t.
“Don’t tell me where
