Elites of Eden (Children of Eden #2)(63)

“Southeast. I’m sure of it.” Fairly sure. “It’s off between three and four in the morning.”

He checks his watch and nods. “I guess this place has dealings with a few people on the wrong side of the law. Nice of them to give their friends a back door inside.” He leads me around the back of the building, and we count three chain-link superconductive panels from the left.

I lean close to try to listen for the telltale buzz of a charge, but the whole thing is humming and I can’t tell if this panel is deactivated. I look around for some debris to test it with. Maybe if we throw something at the fence we’d see a spark? I’m not really sure how this works.

“Can we . . . ?” I begin uncertainly, but in what I’m beginning to realize is a characteristically Lachlan approach he hurls himself at the fence . . . and doesn’t sizzle to death. He grins over his shoulder at me. “Coming?”

I can’t help laughing. And then . . . I can’t help racing him to the top. Despite his head start, my hand clasps the top before his. I feel strong, capable.

We drop down on the far side and make our way to the back door. As Mom told me, I knock twice up on the high corner of the door, pause for a breath, and knock three times near the bottom. There’s a long, tense wait, and finally we hear footsteps approaching from within.

I don’t know what I was expecting—a middle-aged scientist, a businesslike doctor in a white coat? We’re greeted by a young woman with red hair pulled severely back from her face, her eyes heavily lined in black, in an otherwise bone-pale face. Her paleness is further set off by her all-white clothes. She’s not wearing the traditional doctor’s coat I’m used to seeing my dad in, but rather an edgy ensemble of strange angles, accented with sleek steel fastenings. Against all that stark whiteness her slicked-back hair is like a lava flow, her eyes like burning coals.

She stares—no, glares—at me for a moment, then her eyes widen slightly. “Bikk! Where the hell have you been?” she hisses. “And who the hell are you?” She turns those smoldering eyes on Lachlan.

“I’m . . .” he begins, but she obviously has no patience for an answer. She grabs us each by an arm and jerks us inside.

“I don’t want to know who you are. And Rowan I know quite well. At least from your mother, and from physical schematics of you. I’m Flame.” The name suits her perfectly. “Why didn’t you show up yesterday?” she demands.

In as steady a voice as I can manage I tell her about the roadblock, Mom’s murder.

“She said someone was onto you,” the cybersurgeon muses. “Bikk!” she swears again, stalking away from us. We drift in her wake. “I should have destroyed the lenses the second there was even a hint of trouble.”

“You didn’t though, did you?” Lachlan asks, and Flame looks at him sharply.

“What does it matter to you? Never mind.” She turns to me. “Are you ready? The procedure will take about an hour, but we’ll have to monitor you for a while afterward. Then follow-up visits for twelve weeks. It will be six months at least before the lenses fully bond to your neurons, and you’ll need a final check after that. Until then if they’re removed or damaged you’ll have to start from scratch. After that, they’ll be a permanent part of your body. But don’t do anything to screw this up, because this is the only pair I’ve successfully made, and frankly after I implant them I’m out of this business. I don’t need the trouble. The money, yes, but not the risk of death.”

I try to get a word in edgewise through the whole monologue, but I don’t have a hope until she runs out of steam. Then I finally blurt out, “I’m not taking the lenses. I want Lach—my friend to have them.” I realized just in time that I probably shouldn’t give his name.

She doesn’t even stop walking. “Nope. Not gonna happen.”

I trot to catch up. “But I don’t want them. And he needs them.”

She dramatically pantomimes blocking her ears. “I don’t want to hear it. I got paid enough to move Serpentine three rings in, and that’s the only social issue that matters to me. You go fight the Center or turn yourself into a turtle or feed the hungry or uplift the poor—it’s all the same to me. Just don’t tell me.”

“You don’t need to know why,” I try again. “Just give them to him, not me.”

“Kid, don’t you understand? These are your lenses. Yours, no one else’s.”

“I know my mom paid, but . . .”

“This isn’t about money.” She gives a mirthless chuckle. “First and last time those words will ever pass my lips. Do you realize that no one outside the Center has even successfully made lenses that will bond to the individual? That will feed into the EcoPan like these do? This is my masterpiece! Me, with all my training and degrees, who spends her life implanting horns and scales onto Bestials, finally came up with something brilliant. These are not just any lenses. Your mom gave me scans of your eyes, your brain, a personality assessment, basal temperature readings, metabolic data . . . These are custom-made for you. They won’t work in anyone else.”

I’m stunned. I don’t know what to think. At one point I was desperate for a normal life, but when that became impossible I decided I absolutely didn’t want the lenses. I want to stay me. My eyes, my identity, even if I have to hide it all my life. Even if I have to die for it.