“No questions,” she reminded him swiftly.
“Right.” He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a small bottle that contained contact lenses. In a few practiced moves, he’d applied them. He shrugged on a coat, slid his dark glasses into the pocket, and picked up her duffel bag. “Shall we?”
Sure enough, the luminous gold glints of his eyes were gone, transformed into inky darkness. She shook herself out of her fascinated trance. “One moment, please.”
She twisted up her loosened hair and tugged her wig on over it. Jammed the wide-brimmed hat over the top. Then the jaw-changing thing for her mouth. Pop, suck, and it was in. Then the glasses. Done.
They were both wearing their respective armor now.
He scrutinized her. “Are you trying to beat facial recog bots?” he asked. “I could give you pointers on how to do it better.”
“Don’t get tricky with me,” she warned. “The rules are the rules.”
“I’ll be good,” he said easily.
“You saw through my outfit this afternoon,” she said. “How did you do that?”
“Any kind of disguise jumps out at me. You know those online ads with GIFs that jiggle? Disguises look like that to me. But your camouflauge is pretty effective, all in all. Inappropriate for this context, but good in theory.”
Great. She’d managed to get herself seduced by the guy with X-ray eyes.
They walked through the deserted offices, and waited for the elevator. She kept her gaze down, partly because of the security cameras, but mostly out of embarrassment.
The silent walk out to the parking garage felt so purposeful, so deliberate. Never in her life had she gone after sex so shamelessly. Just met a guy, and decided to do the deed. That had always happened in the context of a relationship. One that she could fool herself into thinking had a chance to go somewhere.
They never did, of course. Sooner or later, she managed to scare any would-be boyfriend away. She eventually got blindsided by a stress-induced vision, and could never hide her reaction fast enough. It freaked them out. Invariably.
She hoped she could manage not to scare this guy away, at least not tonight. Not until she had gotten herself a nice stiff dose of his sexy magic. Something suggested to her that he was way different from any of the other guys she’d been with.
It was ironic, that this relationship had no place to go at all.
She’d blocked all the exits herself.
*
Mark stared down at the GodsEye safe that Lydia had failed to open for him. It was squat and ugly. He’d even say it looked smug, sitting on the floor. Taunting him.
He mentally reviewed every word of the conversation he’d had with. Masks, the general said. Caroline invited him to an art show that featured masks. It made sense. She was a rabbit, a coward. She needed a mask to cringe behind.
Masks. To find something hidden, all one needed was the right filter.
Mark adjusted the light on his monitor. It would look like a dead screen to an unmod, but anything brighter than near black and his AVP would zap him into a fugue state.
He’d woken to some gory messes after fugue freak-outs, but he’d gotten expert at cleaning up after himself. Mayhem drained excess toxic energy. It allowed him to masquerade as a normal member of society. When he bothered to.
He took off his glasses and peeled off his shirt, to mitigate the AVP temperature spike. He popped out his shield lenses. Naked eyes were better for digital info dumps. Worth the nervous jitters that followed. It wasn’t as if he slept, anyway.
He logged into Caroline’s Facebook page, though there wasn’t much point in it. She hadn’t posted since she disappeared eight months ago, but he still periodically prowled her feeds. Mostly posts from her nothing friends’ pathetic lives.
Checking her page was a ritual. Mark liked rituals. They soothed the screaming inside his brain.
Noah had lectured them ad nauseam about stress flashback management. Know-it-all prick. He’d busted them out of that place, so he thought he owned their asses.
Yessir nossir anything you say sir Captain Gallagher, hup hup! Be good soldiers, now, and never use your powers against the unmods because of ethics and morals and blah blah blah di-fucking-blah! Right.
Noah’s AVP management techniques had never worked for Mark. He couldn’t stand being motionless, concentrating on the inside of his own head. Slow death by boredom. He’d been tortured enough already, at Midlands. Fuck that shit.
Rebellion day had taught him all he needed to know about AVP management. That day had been a mind-opening crash course. Killing those researchers had helped him like nothing else possibly could. Struggle. Blood. Death. Yes.