“God-blessed idiot,” he muttered, pushing the sleeve of the slick-suit up his arm to find the tiny puncture wound where they’d darted him—darted him like an animal and dragged him back into something he’d worked hard to leave behind. He’d been in his car the last he remembered, on the way to the restoration site. He rolled the sleeve back down, struggling because it was a size too small.
“I’m not doing this,” he said, directing the statement at the watching eyes. “You hear me?” he said louder. “I’m done, Fran. Done!”
He frowned as the chime rang out, hating that they knew his pulse had quickened. God-blessed slick-suit. God-blessed idiot for helping them design it.
“Good morning, Dr. Denier,” a woman said pleasantly over the unseen intercom. “I’d say I’m sorry, but you and I both know you wouldn’t have come if I’d just asked.”
Silas sat back from the table, thick arms across his chest, making the slick-suit run with stress lines. “I fulfilled my contract. Open the door.”
“Open it yourself,” Fran said, her confident smugness irritating.
Silas’s face twisted in frustration. He was not an agent. He was a designer, a tinkerer, an innovator whose playground was where the surety of electronics met the vagaries of the human mind. And they wanted him to run a maze like one of his rats? “You can’t make me do this.”
“Yes we can.”
A wave of sensation rippled over him, cramping his muscles and making him grunt in surprise. It was the slick-suit. Silas reached for the sensitive brain of it, then choked as someone tightened the wavelengths. Gagging, he fell prostrate, shaking with convulsions.
They stopped as quickly as they had begun, and he lay on the asbestos tile floor, his anger turning cold. Son of a bitch …
“Begin,” Fran said, and then the chime.
It rankled him no end that he’d chosen the sound himself.
Seething, Silas pulled himself up. Grasping the back of the chair, he flung it at the door lock, shattering the chair and damaging the panel. With a primal shout of anger, he punched it, satisfied when the light went out and a wisp of smoke trailed to the floor.
“Don’t be stupid, Denier,” Fran said, and Silas sucked on his bleeding knuckles. “You want to talk to me? Tell me how wrong I am? Get out of the room.”
“I’m no one’s lab rat,” he muttered. Levering himself up onto the table, he stood and hammered his way into the ceiling. The audio link was still open, and he couldn’t help his satisfaction at the sudden uproar.
Years of bench-pressing paid off, and he pulled himself up into the low crawl space above the training floor. It was cooler up here, and the outlines of the various rooms were easy to see. Besides, they hadn’t changed them. Keeping atop the sturdier walls, he walked to the hallway in a low hunch, clear of the training room’s potential immobilizing field.
“Silas, get back on the training floor!” Fran demanded, faint through the ceiling.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have forgotten that I designed it,” he grumbled, gauging that he’d cleared the active areas, and jumped clear through a ceiling panel and down into the outer hallway.
He’d landed badly, his ankle twinging as his arms pinwheeled to keep him from falling outright. Dust and ceiling rained down, and he slowly rose through it, grimacing at the five men in combat gear pointing close-range weapons at him. He felt vulnerable in that outrageous slick-suit, clinging like a second, uncomfortable skin.
Her heels clicking, an older woman with short, dyed blond hair styled back off her face pushed through to confront him, an aide tight behind. “You designed it. Isn’t that the point, Denier? You owe us.”
“I don’t owe you anything. I quit Opti. And I quit you.”
“If you’re not Opti, you’re alliance. And you are alliance,” she said, and he held his breath against the sneeze her perfume tickled forth. Most women would have looked odd in a flamboyant red business suit with an orchid-and-silk corsage, surrounded by squat men in bulky combat gear, but not Fran. Her sure confidence made it all work.
But she had a right to be confident. The alliance was made up of renegade Opti personnel who believed the government shouldn’t control the ability to manipulate time. They’d make their fight public except that their ranks consisted of anchors and drafters themselves, and if word got out, the populace would panic and kill them all. So they worked in the shadows funded by benefactors, benefactors like Fran. It was exchanging one power-hungry boss for another as far as Silas was concerned.
His file was in her hand, the photo of him with his close-cropped hair and lab coat three years out of date but still accurate. He’d put on some muscle since then, but his frame had always been bulky, earning him the nickname Hulk from those who didn’t like him, and that had been more than a few.
Fran ran her attention up and down his body, smiling in appreciation. Weight shifting, he clasped his hands into a fig leaf, trying not to look obvious about it. “I was done three years ago. Nothing has changed. You going to shoot me?”