Madman's Dance (Time Rovers #3)(43)

jacynda very ill need help

Nothing happened.

Cyn?

Alastair remembered the strange key and pressed it.

Who are you?

montrose

A long pause. As each second ticked off, Alastair’s panic rose tenfold.

“Come on, talk to me!” he pleaded.

Dr. Montrose?

yes. “This is good. They remember me.”

Jacynda leaned against him, staring at the words in the air.

“Pretty,” she said, waving her hand through the letters.

“They’ll help you,” he offered, trying to sound reassuring.

She gave a firm nod that bolstered his spirits.

Send her here.

It was what he’d feared from the moment he’d seen the strange mark.

promise to treat her, he typed.

You have our word.

They’d given their word before, and it had been like gold. He had little choice but to comply.

He did as the typed instructions required, closing the connection, securing the watch to her wrist and then placing it in her hand. She looked at him inquisitively. The trust in her eyes was like a bayonet to his heart. What if he were sending her into the arms of her enemies?

There was no other option. “You’re going home,” he informed her solemnly.

“Home?” she repeated, looking puzzled.

“Your friends will help make you better.”

He threw her possessions into the Gladstone at a furious pace, snapped it shut and set it on her lap. Right before he closed the watch cover to trigger the transfer, he brushed her cheek with a kiss. Her innocent smile made tears bloom in his eyes.



“Even if…” he nearly choked on the words, “even if you never remember me, I will always care for you.” He snapped the watch cover closed and staggered away a few paces, fists knotted.

She studied him with a sober expression, as if she knew how much this hurt.

The halo effect was brilliant, nearly blinding him. He saw her mouth open in astonishment, and then she was gone. He knelt, touching the floor where she’d been. Nothing of her remained.

Yet Keats thinks this is just nonsense.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the stuffed ferret. It had fallen on its side, misplaced in the rush. He scooped it up, tucking it under his chin and letting his tears fall with abandon.





Chapter 14




2057 A.D.

TEM Enterprises

Cynda landed hard, the wind knocked out of her. Her chin was resting on a chilly surface. It wasn’t wood like the floor in the nice man’s house. She inched a hand out. Flat…bump…flat…bump. Like mountains and valleys made out of solid metal. She kept moving her fingers farther away, touching the elevations and the depressions, trying to make sense of them. Then she encountered an obstruction. White, something hard. She tapped the end of it.

“Cyn?” a voice called.

The sound rattled around inside her head. She kept tapping the tip of the…shoe. A hand appeared and touched hers. She yanked hers back.

“Miss Lassiter?” another voice sounded, this one filled with authority.

She raised her chin to find two men staring at her. One had a long, gray-streaked ponytail that draped across a shoulder. His round glasses reflected the bright lights in the strangely shaped room. The other was dressed in black, with a dash of silver at his temples.

She focused on the one with the white shoes. He looked familiar. A name came to her tongue, but then it darted away.

“Is this a crazy place?” she asked through cracked lips.

“What?”

The other man cut in. “This is TEM Enterprises, Miss Lassiter. We were told you were ill. What is wrong with you?”

She shook her head, which made things worse. Shapes floated in front of her eyes like half-formed ghosts. Maybe they were ghosts. Where was the man who’d taken care of her in the old place? He would help her.

“Not right,” she said, trying to rise to her knees. Hands caught her a moment before she sank into the welcoming oblivion.



~??~??~??~



Senior Agent Klein didn’t fit the surroundings, but then few people did. Theo Morrisey’s private solarium was a reflection of its owner: unique. Stocked with rare tropical plants and butterflies, skittering geckos and a small colony of hummingbirds, it was not the ideal place for a senior Government spook to interrogate someone.

Which is exactly why Harter Defoe had chosen it.

“Talk to me,” Klein ordered, unconsciously tracking a hummer as it zipped mere microns over his head. “Tell me what’s going on so I don’t feel tempted to throw your ass in jail.”

Defoe carefully spread his hands, mindful of his healing chest wound. “On what charges?”

“Removing your ESR Chip, for one. That’s a Class 3 Felony. Traveling with a cloaked interface, a Level…hell, you know the regs better than I. You created them.”

“Some of them,” Defoe corrected. Time Rover One, as they called him, had not been responsible for the Essential Subject Record Chip rules. He detested the notion that someone knew where he was at any given moment because of a piece of hardware imbedded under his skin. “So what do you want to know?”

“Let’s start with your chest wound. Who gave it to you?”