It sounded like a warning. Caro nodded. “Go on.”
“Noah and Sisko and Luke had hacked into Obsidian’s computer system, and memorized all our geotagged implants. After we escaped, I jammed our internal frequencies until Noah could get bandages and disinfectant, and sterilize his pocket knife. Then he cut them out.” She shuddered. “There were a lot.”
“My God,” Caro whispered.
“Yeah. But Noah got it done, and he kept us all in one piece afterwards. I don’t know how. Figured out how to damp down our augmented sensory processing so that we wouldn’t go batshit. We survived, more or less sane. Most of us. We lost a few.” A shadow flitted across her face.
“Did you still have . . . any . . .” Caro’s voice trailed off. “Sorry. Shouldn’t ask.”
“Yeah. Some. There was nothing Noah could do about the implants inside my skull, but I could jam those myself at will, so they were no big deal. I had four implants on each shoulder, six on each of my upper arms, a few on my thighs. Nothing compared to the boys.”
Part of her didn’t want to ask more questions, but the rest of her won out. She sat down on the bed next to Hannah. “Tell me,” she said.
Hannah exhaled slowly, shaking her head. “They went absolutely nuts on the boys,” she said. “Plugged them full of anything and everything. No long-term strategy. We weren’t scientific experiments so much as toys that they didn’t care about breaking. Nobody was looking. The psychos did whatever they wanted.”
Caro could think of nothing to say that wasn’t hopelessly inadequate, but Hannah didn’t seem afraid of silence. In fact, she almost seemed to have forgotten that Caro was there. She was deep in the grip of some haunting memory.
Caro sat next to her and waited quietly.
After a few moments, Hannah shook herself out of her reverie. “Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t mean to stress you out with that old shit. I’ll go downstairs and see if the boys are on top of dinner prep. Come down when you’re ready.”
“OK.”
Caro sat for a while after the bedroom door shut, trying to make space in her mind for this new info. Noah had told her the story the night before, but she’d been too angry to let it in before. To feel any of it. Now she felt everything.
She got up, jittery and restless, and rummaged through the shopping bags, pulling out stuff at random. Underwear. Some jeans. Socks. A bra, just the right size. A warm sweater.
The clothes felt good when she pulled them on. Good fit, top quality. Hannah had even nailed her shoe size. She dabbed on some minimal makeup, brushed her hair, and looked into the mirror, trying to connect what she saw to how she felt. Her face was thinner, and she had assorted cuts and bruises, but she looked very like her old self.
But from the inside, she barely recognized herself. Everything was different. Everything she had been before was gone. She’d felt so empty.
But not now. After that intense encounter with Noah, she was feeling a sense of . . . well, she could almost call it hope for the future. If she dared to.
But she didn’t, really. That would be tempting the gods. She’d rather not be noticed by them right now. She was getting enough attention already.
She went down the stairs and headed toward the lights, smells and murmur of conversation coming out of the dining room. Noah, Hannah, Zade and Sisko were seated at a table covered with foil takeaway platters heaped with fragrant Mexican food.
It was always a fresh zing to her senses, seeing Noah after having looked away for any length of time, even a minute. Every sensual, starkly chiseled, larger-than-life detail of him. He seemed bigger, denser, brighter than everything around him.
He reached out and clasped her hand, tugging until she moved around the table to sit next to him.
“Thank God you’re here.” Zade said. “Noah wouldn’t let us start without you. We’ve been sitting here, snorting flavored steam.”
“Should have gone right ahead,” she said.
“She’s here, so stop whining,” Noah squeezed her hand under the table. His hand was so big and strong and warm. Her own tingled deliciously in it.
The food was very good, but she couldn’t eat very much of it, or follow the conversation. Considerable good-natured teasing was directed at Noah, but he ignored it, eating his tacos deftly with one hand while clasping her thigh under the table with the other. The contact made every luscious detail of their recent lovemaking run through her mind again, over and over, making her breathless and muddled.
Eventually, the conversation turned to her pepper spray, which sat displayed on the kitchen bar along with the other items that had been in her coat pockets. Plus her wig, her mouth thing, the tile from the Delaunay. Not her phone, though. That had been in the hidden pocket way down in the seam.
“Where’s my coat?” she asked.