Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(103)

But he had aged at least ten years. What the hell? Had she slipped into one of her visions while she slept?

Seeing the shock in her expression, Mark straightened, the age lines melting from his face as he did, leaving the boy that she knew.

“Sorry I startled you. Just wanted to try out my new look.”

Heather opened her car door and stepped out into the brisk morning air. “What just happened?”

Mark shrugged. “I had been driving all night, just thinking about things as the car rolled along, stopping for gas here and there while you slept. I got to wondering how we would get by without being discovered. I mean two kids our age. We’d stick out like a sore thumb. Then, just about an hour ago, it hit me. Our age.”

“Our age? What do you mean?”

“Think about it. What does it mean to look older? Mostly it has to do with the age lines in people’s faces.”

Something clicked in Heather’s head. Of course.

Mark nodded. “So I stopped the car and started working on it in the mirror. If you scrunch your face, you get a ton of wrinkles. Then I just started relaxing a single muscle here and there, changing the look gradually until it matched a picture of some thirty-something people in the magazines. Once I had a look I liked, I memorized its feel. With our kind of neuromuscular control, we just have to recall the feeling to get that look back.”

“Show me.”

Mark’s face moved, the slight age lines in his forehead and at the corners of his eyes and mouth producing a remarkable transformation. It was like looking at a different person.

“Wow!”

Heather’s heart hammered in her chest. Moving to the car mirror, she tilted it outward. Then repeating the technique Mark had described, she scrunched her cheeks and forehead, feeling all the muscles tense, forming lines across her face. Then, one by one, she let them relax, retightening some as she worked the age look to match the facial lines on a woman she had seen in People Magazine.

Although it probably took her a bit longer than it had taken Mark, within thirty minutes Heather had mastered the lines of that look. She was sure she could pass for a woman in her early thirties.

As she demonstrated the finished product for Mark, he clapped his hands. “Hello, Mrs. Robinson. I don’t know if a young man like me should be seen with you. People will talk.”

“You know what this means?” Heather asked.

“What?”

“We’re going to need new fake IDs.”

Mark slid back into the driver’s seat, reaching across to open the door for Heather. “Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”

Starting the car, Mark took the access road toward the freeway onramp. On the radio, Rod Stewart began crooning “Maggie Mae.” When he reached the verse about the morning sun really showing her age, Heather glanced at Mark and, together, they began to laugh. As the sun peeked over the distant mountains, they kept laughing, while the tears rolled down their cheeks.





106


It was late and Raul was tired, something that he hadn’t experienced for a long, long time. The harder he worked, the more the Rho Ship responded to his efforts. Even Stephenson seemed impressed. Not that he gave a shit what Stephenson liked. Raul found himself thinking of Heather again. In the end all his work to repair the ship centered on the same thing. He was lost without her, constantly trying to picture her face in his mind, to recall the sound of her voice.

Every new power cell he brought online brought him closer to his dream, closer to the reunion that was destined to be. And just as he was becoming a god, she would become his goddess.

Raul glanced down at his legless body. As much as he loved the look of Heather’s long legs, as much as he loved to picture them wrapped around him, they would have to be removed. It was only right that the two of them should float here in this room, legless, but with a power that would shake this world. Once he had cut her lovely legs from her body, there would be no running away from him, ever. Not that she’d want to. How could she?

The latest of the subspace probes worried him. The Enemy was still out there, and somehow they had found his ship. At first, Raul had thought that the subspace probe must have come from the dead ship in the Bandelier cave, but a scan of all Rho Project data on that ship indicated that it showed no signs of activity, no energy fields whatsoever. Dr. Stephenson checked on it periodically but showed no active interest in the ship or its technology. As much as Raul hated the man, he had to admit that the deputy director was a brilliant scientist. If there was anything that warranted concern, Stephenson would be all over it.

But tonight was not about Stephenson, or the probe, or even the ship. Tonight was the first night in a long time that he would indulge his fondest desires. It had been so long since he had taken any time for self-pleasure that he could barely contain his excitement. And that excitement swept away the fatigue his round-the-clock work had inflicted upon him.

Pooling the ship’s new power, Raul felt himself floating upward in the stasis field until he stilled at the exact center of the chamber, drawing upon the nexus that would form the strongest and most stable worm fiber he had yet constructed, one that would let him follow Heather through the hours of the evening, from undressing in her bedroom to her bath and back again. Perhaps he might even be able to pass a breath through the fiber to ripple the fabric of her nightgown, a soft lover’s touch that would tickle her with excitement.