A stab of hatred arrowed through her, so pure and strong that it almost felt good. Trust him, he’d said. He’d get her to safety, he’d said. Lies. She’d believed them, too, just before he betrayed her. She’d wanted to believe them. She’d looked for a reason to. And now she was strapped naked to a table in Council custody.
The voices ebbed in volume. She strained to hear them, to pick out intelligible words from the stream of low sound, but she failed. After a moment, a lock turned over behind her and to the right. Footsteps shuffled on the floor as several people entered the room. The door closed again.
Lena waited. She held her breath, paralyzed, only her hammering heart reminding her that she lived. For a moment no one moved. They stood outside her limited field of vision. One, then another, walked crisply across the floor. Blinded by the lights shining upon her face, she still couldn’t see them. Dark shadows examined her.
Slow steps came from her right. An arm reached across and snapped off each lamp in turn. She blinked in the sudden absence of light. By the time her eyes adjusted, Lucas had pushed each lamp back and up, away from her face, and then retreated to the side near her knees.
Another man joined him, moving in from the corner to flank her on the other side of the bed. He was older, his hair mostly grey except for an odd pocket of black along the hairline above his left eye, his face crisscrossed with seamed frown lines. He wore matching pants and shirt, an electric blue flecked with green, and both were prohibitively expensive silk relic-wear. He looked at her as if she were a specimen, a mixture of revulsion and dark fascination on his face. She recognized him.
“You’ve got your second chance, Agent Brayer, so then tell me,” the Councilor of Zone Three said, gesturing to indicate Lena, “how all of this works? You’re sure she’s incapacitated?” His voice had the resonating quality of someone who spoke and expected to be heard.
Agent Brayer? Second chance? Am I the second chance?
Lucas smiled and nodded, opening his mouth as if to answer, but another man stepped forward. He was middle-aged, older than Reyes and Lucas, but not as old as Councilor Three. Tall and broad, his bullish shoulders sloped into a thickly muscled neck. When he reached the end of the bed, he looked at the doorway. His gentle, soft voice surprised her. “Alex? If you’d care to leave the guards and join us?”
Five slow footsteps later, Reyes appeared at her shoulder. “Lena.” The greeting came low and even. His eyes were hooded, eyelids sheltering his expression from the men.
From her angle below him she could see directly into their dark depths to the emotion he seemed to struggle to bury. Disgust? Anger? Regret? Each time she tried to put a name to it, the word skittered away in her mind, driven out by the buzzing that filled her thoughts. She grunted her frustration, the sound barely registering as a huff of air. She swiveled her view from Reyes to focus on the ox at the foot of the bed, already talking.
“Councilor, if you’ll notice the electrode pads at temple, chest, pelvis, and ankles? We have a constant feed of electric current flowing into the subject—”
“Lena,” Reyes interjected. “Her name is Lena.”
The big man’s brows lifted. “Alex. I had no idea you were a sentimentalist.” The corners of his mouth twitched.
Reyes met his stare without flinching. “I’m not, Director Hernandez. But if I’m going to do something for the good of the people, then I will do it without shying away from full knowledge of exactly what it is I am doing and to whom. I take that burden because it is part of the job I believe in. I don’t look away. I don’t close my eyes. And I don’t try to make the weight of it less by dehumanizing the people who suffer for it.”
She glowered at him. Was that all it took for him to excuse his dishonesty?
The thought slid away from her.
What about trust? Broken trust?
“Alejandro.” The Councilor’s voice expressed his oily admiration, even if his words were a rebuke. “Please allow Director Hernandez to continue. I’d rather watch you gentlemen work tonight—” His speculative leer fell upon Lena.
She shivered and shrank back, aware enough to be afraid of the avarice in his gaze. He wanted to see her hurt.
“—but my presence is required elsewhere. This is all the demonstration I will get.”
Reyes extended his head in a nod. “My apologies, Councilor Three. Of course, you’re right.” He waited a beat before speaking again.
She tried to bring her focus back around to his words. But the static in her head crested. She lost his words in the wave of the damn buzzing. She widened her eyes, as if it would help her to understand if she could see them all better, and turned them to look from man to man.
The Councilor preened. The ox was amused. The rims of Lucas’s ears reddened, and his lips compressed into a white line. Reyes was neutral. Always neutral.