“And how is it,” Reyes’s voice grated from the corner, “that you know so much about this, Junior Agent Brayer?”
A gloating smile ghosted across the younger agent’s face. “Because there’s a lot you don’t know, Reyes. Now you’re the junior, and I’m the master. You see that much, right?” Lucas said. He walked toward her head, searching her face as she gasped in recovery. “She adapted, just like I said. But there’s pain. And then there’s pain. It’s time to do things the Brayer way.” He grinned suddenly, the tight skin of his face pulling down with his leer. He purred the next words like a promise. “Because there are some things for which there’s no immunity.”
Chapter 8
What was Lucas waiting for?
He perched next to Lena on the bed, one leg dangling, in obscene parody of a concerned friend visiting a patient. He didn’t ask her any questions. He didn’t speak at all. He waited.
Hernandez leaned against the wall to her left, hands clasped across his broad front. She assumed Reyes still stood in the corner.
She tried to figure out what Lucas had meant with his pain comment and who he’d called in as back-up. Someone better at causing her pain? What kind of pain? Her current-addled brain couldn’t hold onto the start of a circular thought long enough for her to come back around and begin to analyze it. She had to let it go.
Pain is pain is pain, and I have the advantage. She had managed to regain even more control over her own Dust, both that which lived inside of her and that living on her skin. Lucas could do little to hurt her now. She only wished she could hurt him.
She couldn’t send commands out beyond her body. She’d tried. Oh, how she’d tried, staring at Lucas sitting smugly beside her, to force her thoughts and will to pulse out at him in the gaps of focus between waves of static. It simply hadn’t been enough. It hadn’t been enough to work on the generator or Hernandez the Ox’s charge-producing machine, either.
If she could gather enough Dust both above and beneath her skin at each electrode point and ask the Dust to send out a quick pulse of energy at each point, she might be able to short them out. The trick would be to do it not once, but eight times. Once she’d done that and regained the ability to focus….
She turned her eyes to look at Lucas. He stared at the wall behind her, face relaxed, hands loose in his lap as he meditated. Focused on how best to hurt her? Why?
She pursed her lips to ask him. The static made her lips buzz, and the word came out heavy with a buzzing wwhhhh that overpowered the long “I” sound of the end.
Nonetheless, Lucas’s gaze moved from the wall to focus down on her face. A restless shuffling from the corner of the room was the only sound in the long pause as he examined her.
“Why?” Lucas repeated her question in a voice so soft she had to strain to hear.
It would be impossible for the others to hear his soft words.
He made a small sound of amusement, but his lips were twisted. “Good question. I’ve asked it myself. Every time I ground, I ask why. Every time I think about how I am the only one in my family to be cursed with the Spark, I ask why. Every time I think about being less human than my brothers, I ask why. I grew up asking why—why did I have to be the spawn of the men who caused our destruction, a living reminder of those who ruined us all?”
The first Sparks? The soldiers? She blinked, trying to find her way through the static. The people had been dying. The Sparks brought them out of the dark. Hadn’t they? She tried to follow through, but could only remember that Lucas blamed Sparks. But he was an agent?
Lena swallowed. A feral light bloomed across his face. No, more than feral. Rabid. She tried again to make sense of his words, but her mind turned and fuzzed out. It made no sense. If Lucas hated being a Spark, why become an agent?
Lucas pitched his voice for her ears only. “I learned long ago that asking why is pointless. We must follow where the Council leads and do what the Council compels without question and without complaint. That’s how we earn the right to l—” He stopped to swallow spasmodically. He looked at her, expression icy. “We earn the right to live and contribute as citizens.” His lip curled in disgust. “Even you. I begged him to let me kill the aberrations. The world would be a safer place with none of you bitches in it. It would be cleaner. Would you like to know what he told me?”
She stared back at him, silent, stunned as much by the rictus of hatred that contorted his face as the electricity that buzzed through her. He? He, who?