The Operator
Page 24

Her urge to shove his foot off his knee shifted to breaking his nose. But then she’d draft to fix it. Maybe if she had let Bill pump that crap into her, she might have the pleasure of remembering it. “Excuse me,” she said tightly. “I need to give Silas a blood sample.”
“Peri . . .”
Back stiff, she walked away, shivering as she entered the lab and the cold Silas had it at. Allen wouldn’t follow her in here, where Silas was king, and her shoulders relaxed as she found him clustered before a wave screen with his technicians, looking over a hormone schematic.
“Hey, hi,” she called out, and he looked up, smiling. “I’m leaving at eight tomorrow night. If they shut you out, call me.” And then I’m gone.
“Peri.” Finger up to ask for a moment, he gave the technicians a last instruction before tugging his too-tight lab coat straight and heading her way. “I doubt they’re going to do that. They want to know how to make Bill’s wonder drugs as much as you do, and I had access to the old research. How was the, ah, meeting? Everything okay?”
She glanced out the big plate-glass window to where Allen dejectedly waited for her, slumped in the white cushions. “About what I expect. It’s a snag and drag. I’ve done worse than bring someone in who didn’t want to come.” Never another drafter, though.
“I meant are you okay working with Allen?”
Unable to meet his eyes, she shrugged. “As long as he doesn’t try to dress me in pastels again.” Depressed, she sat on a lab stool. “Allen is a such a dick.” Silas laughed, and she stared at him. “What’s so funny?”
“You are.” His smile was soft as he leaned against the counter. “Half our conversations used to start that way. You liked him best, attracted to his drive and goal-oriented personality.”
“Well, I don’t remember it,” she said sourly, thinking that didn’t jibe with what she’d been reading in her diary. But she’d gotten only a few weeks into it.
A technician nervously edged forward, and Silas casually took the ticker tape of data he handed him. “That was hard for me to deal with,” he admitted, voice distant as he unrolled his tablet from his pocket and pressed the bar code to the screen to upload the data. The entire tablet flashed blue to indicate a successful transfer, and he threw the tape away. “They can’t apprehend Michael without you. You know that.”
Nodding, she shifted the stool back and forth, thinking about her diary. Clearly something had shifted from what she’d read to the end, and a new desire filled her to find out when—and more important, how—his depression over Summer had shifted to jealousy, and then perhaps . . . a shared desire?
“Be careful,” Silas said, oblivious to her thoughts. “I mean it, Peri. Allen isn’t that good of a field anchor. Steiner thinks all anchors are alike, but if you draft, whatever you lose is gone.”
“I can deal with it,” she said distantly, then remembered why she was here. “Steiner wants a blood test to make sure I’m clean of the accelerator.”
“Huh.”
Silas was frowning at the new data on the screen. “What?” she asked flatly, and Silas straightened, his concern making her uneasy. “Is there a problem?”
“No. It’s the preliminary breakdown of the Evocane,” he said, brow furrowed. “Indications suggest the Evocane will have some nasty side effects. I mean, why is there a sodium uptake inhibitor in there?”
Her diary forgotten, she stilled her chair’s motion. “Side effects?”
Silas’s frown deepened. “I’m sure the chemical architects balanced everything out on paper,” he said, his casual voice confused as he studied the tablet. “But the human body isn’t a test tube. I know you want this to work, but this stuff is ugly. I can’t let—”
“It’s too soon to start talking about me taking it or not taking it,” she interrupted, her stomach clenching. “Maybe I should just run. I’m good at that.”
Silas exhaled heavily, his fingers slow as he closed down his tablet. “I don’t think you should. I think you need to do this. All the way to the end. One hundred percent.”
She sat where she was, stunned. “You want me to be the CIA’s new toy?” she said indignantly. “Risk WEFT pumping me full of this stuff instead of Bill? You know as soon as I get Michael, I’m in the cell next door.”
“Because they think you’re a weapon,” he said, his expression thick with concern. “This is your chance to prove them wrong.”
She laughed bitterly. “I am a weapon.”
“No, you’re skilled. There’s a difference.”
His eyes pleaded with her, their pinched heartache familiar. She wanted to believe it, but she knew better. “When you can be made to forget, used by the highest bidder or most favorable lie or blackmailed, you’re a weapon. Harmony is right,” she said. “I’m a risk.”
Silas touched her shoulder, and she stifled a surge of emotion. “You are a person. Convince the policy makers that you’re trustworthy.”
Her eyes fell from his. “Convincing Harmony of that isn’t going to happen.”
“She’s just jealous.” Silas gave her arm a quick squeeze before letting go.
“Of me? That’s a laugh.”
“Up until recently, Opti was hogging all the funds and resources,” he said as he shuffled through a drawer. “You got the good tasks, the new gadgets,” he added as he found a sterile finger lance and a blood-draw film. “And for what? Because you won the genetic lottery? Finding that out was hard. Harmony is good, from what I hear. And then you show up again, stealing her first chance to prove it.”
Grimacing, she held her hand out. “And this is my fault?”
He swiped through his tablet’s apps, shrugging as he pulled up the right one and set the blood-draw film on the softly glowing box. “Bringing Michael in will be the easy part. Convincing Steiner you did it regardless of the carrot he’s holding is harder. Okay. Little poke.”
She steeled herself for it, eyeing the crimson drop before pressing it to the blood-draw film, the tablet recording her fingerprint for identification at the same time the film accepted her sample. “This is a waste of time,” she muttered.