Fury: Book One of the Cure (Omnibus Edition) (13 page)

I can’t help it—I duck my face to kiss along the line of her rib. There’s something impossible about how she tastes, about having her salt skin against my tongue.

A sense assails me suddenly—like a slap—of this moment being too perfect, like a bubble that must pop, a stone thrown that must fall back down again. It fills me with a strange melancholy, and the love inside me grows weary of constantly being tempered, contained. It wants out, wants free. It wants no caveat, no conditions; only truth.

“You’ve ruined me for every other person on this planet,” I tell her softly, unable to articulate better the tragedy of what we have done and will do to each other.

“There
are
no other people on this planet,” she replies.

I smile, and in this moment the truth of that envelops me and becomes everything. A perfect, lonely world, shared by two who make each other not, in fact, lonely at all.

I thought it when I first saw her, and I think it again now.

Here she is.

“You know what’s weird?” I ask suddenly.

Luke looks up from the images we’ve been studying. We’re sitting in bed, projecting our timeline of crime scenes onto the opposite wall and undertaking our usual session of ‘stare at a picture that has no meaning for hours while your mind daydreams about other things and pretend you’re making progress’. Only this time I think I actually have thought of something.

“Why hasn’t anyone noticed these deaths? Or at least the disappearances?” I knead the tight muscles in my hand while I mull it over. “I mean, if you got murdered, I’d report you missing, right?”

“I wouldn’t want you to put yourself out, darling.”

He is cutting a mango into slices on a board, and I consider warning him that juice is running onto the bed before realizing I don’t care and turning back to my epiphany.

“So we need to prove that all of these victims are real people with names and families. How do we do that?”

He smiles like he’s been waiting for me to reach this point. There is mango caught in his teeth, and it makes me grin. “We have to steal the missing persons reports from the police.”

“Excuse me?” Like that, my grin’s gone.

*

We’re standing two blocks away from the biggest police station in the city. I’m freaking out; Luke is calm. What a surprise. These are our perpetual states of being. Maybe we balance each other out.

“Wait!” I hiss. “Can we go over our cover story one more time?”

His eyebrows arch in disbelief. “We’re brother and sister. Our mother has gone missing. That’s it. It’s not particularly complex, baby.”

“Should we have back stories?” I ask, wringing my hands worriedly. “What’s my motivation?”

He seems amused by this. “Your motivation is that you want to find your mother.”

“Right. Yeah, okay. That seems plausible. What else? Do I have any personality quirks? What’s my job? What’s our family like? What—”

“No, nothing else, Josi,” he interrupts. “Just keep it simple. In fact you don’t have to talk at all. Just look sad.” Then he adds, “Won’t be too difficult for you, Sad Eyes.”

“I don’t have sad eyes!”

“Trust me, you do. Let’s go.” Luke leads the way into the station and I focus on getting into character. I’m sad. My darling mother is gone. I’m not remotely attracted to my brother.

Inside the station it’s a rather chaotic mess. Every wall is a screen full of constantly changing information. Officers are everywhere, chatting and calling out to each other, or ordering other people to get a move on. There’s a row of criminals sitting handcuffed to their chairs, which seems really weird to me—shouldn’t they be kept out of the way of the innocent public? I give a choked, somewhat hysterical laugh—I just considered myself an innocent. Luke shoots me a warning glare over his shoulder and I swallow.

He walks straight up to a desk in the middle of the room. The woman sitting behind it looks up and actually does a double take when she sees Luke. I roll my eyes.

“Hello, gorgeous,” he says smoothly. “You brighten a rough day with those peepers.”

Jesus, what a sleaze! I go ahead and assume that treating a woman like a disrespected 1950s housewife isn’t the best way to go, but it seems to work on the girl, so what do I know. She smiles and blushes.

“Where can my sister and I go to file a missing person’s report?”

“Oh, that’s at the front desk there …”

“Thank you,” he says, letting his voice drop off a bit as though he’s struggling to contain his grief. “It’s just … Could we maybe speak to the officer who’ll be handling the case? I’d really like to convey the details myself.”

“Once twenty-four hours have passed a detective will find you and question you—”

“It’s my mother,” Luke whispers. “She’s not well. If she’s left the house, then I fear the worst. I can’t bear it, knowing she’s out there on her own, scared and cold. Night’s coming on. And she was making threats.”

He’s certainly laying it on thick. The young female officer gives a quick nod. “Of course. Follow me—I’ll take you to Detective Webb who handles the missing persons.”

“Thank you so much,” Luke sighs, flashing her a smile that’s so delicious I’m surprised the girl doesn’t melt straight into the damn floor.

Quite frankly, I’m amazed and a little bit disgusted. It’s disconcerting how good an actor Luke is. We follow the young woman to the back of the station and into a quieter area. She pauses at the door and speaks through an intercom. After a terse response from within, she places her thumbprint on the scanner and admits us.

Luke and I enter a large office with a window that looks out onto a parking lot. There’s a huge screen on the back wall, and a professionally dressed woman is standing in front of it, moving pieces here and there, tapping images and muttering to herself under her breath. As soon as she hears us enter she claps her hands and the whole screen turns into an image of a tropical fish tank. It’s unnervingly real, even though the fish are too big to be comforting or cute. They kind of look like massive sharks gliding around the room. Not exactly the most relaxing environment in which to work.

The woman’s eyes travel over our faces. She reads Luke first, eyes softening appreciatively, but when her gaze finds me her eyes narrow uncertainly. I grow uncomfortable, horrified that she could somehow guess the truth—she seems to be searching me with a hawk’s keen eyes, aware that I’m unusual.

“Sergeant Landers brought you to see me,” she states briskly. “Why?”

“Forgive the interruption,” Luke says, taking a few steps forward so that Webb is forced to look at him instead of me. “We have a crime to confess.”

Detective Webb motions for us to sit in front of the desk. She remains standing behind the chair, clearly to intimidate us. “And what crime would that be?”

“We’re responsible for an old woman’s disappearance.”

Webb’s expression doesn’t change. “You’d better explain.”

“Laurel—our mother—needs constant care. Lately, she’s been talking about wanting to get revenge for what ‘they’ did to us, but I have no idea who ‘they’ are. In any case, she got out of the house yesterday. She’d been ranting on and on about some man named Ben Collingsworth and then she smashed the window to go after whoever that is. Josephine and I waited the twenty-four hours, but now we need help. She might try to hurt someone, or herself.”

“Ben Collingsworth,” Webb repeats. Her eyes are shrewd, calculating. She’s watching Luke closely, but his mask and story are flawless. If I didn’t know better I’d believe every word out of his mouth. “Do you know who Ben Collingsworth is, Mr …?”

“Bates.”

“Mr Bates.”

“No, ma’am, I don’t believe I do. But it hardly matters anyway, right? Whoever he is, or whatever Ma is trying to do, we need to find her and get her back on her medication.”

Doctor Ben Collingsworth is none other than the scientist who first developed the cure and successfully introduced it into the world. I really wish Luke had warned me that he was going to go into this much detail. I have no idea what he’s doing here, dropping a name like that and tying it to our fictional mother.

His plan becomes clear very quickly.

Detective Webb walks for the door. “Stay here. We have protocols for a threat like this.”

“Threat?” Luke asks in alarm. “There’s no threat—she’s just an old woman—”

Webb closes the door behind her and we both hear the locks deploy, sealing us inside. Luke immediately grins and launches himself over to the screen.

“We’re trapped in here!” I hiss.

Luke raises a hand sharply. I go still in fear. He points one of his fingers to his ear and then to his lips, and I realize he’s warning me that someone is listening to us. He starts pressing the screen, his fingers moving with startling speed. Colors, pictures and files appear, moving around the screen at Luke’s bidding. I can’t follow what he’s doing—it’s too quick for me to make out any of the words. I do see a flashing red icon popping up in the middle a few times, but after only a moment it turns green and Luke smiles once more.

“Okay, you can rant at me all you want now—I’ve disabled all the bugs.”

“She locked the door!”

“All part of the plan,” he says mildly.

“What the hell is going on? Why did you say that stuff about Collingsworth?”

“There are certain alarm words that police use to identify levels of threat. It’s a whole business around terror. Collingsworth’s name is one of those. Some years ago he was the most hunted man alive—the protesters and rebels had a movement against him, and there were countless attempts on his life.”

“In ’55 he was put in hospital with stab wounds,” I agree faintly, remembering the pictures I saw plastered all over the city. For months—years, actually—every surface of every building was covered in moving media centered on the Collingsworth riots. Pictures of him in hospital were even splashed across buses. For a while there, everywhere you looked was the man who started all of this mess, alongside slogans like “
Even our savior isn’t safe from the infection”
.

“Right. So lovely officer Webb has gone to inform the necessary channels that they have a threat that could turn into a new terrorist movement.”

“It’s an elderly woman!”

“Doesn’t matter—they have to treat every person on the planet as a potential threat.”

“There have been terrorist movements?” I ask, amazed.

“Sure have. Never got very far, but they tried—gotta give them that.”

“Do you think they’re still out there?”

“I don’t know, babe.”

“But, wait—why would we want her to alert the channels that there’s a threat?”

“So she leaves us alone in this room.” He focuses more closely on what he’s doing and starts typing in a whole lot of coding script that I don’t have a hope of understanding.

“And how are we supposed to get out?”

“I have it covered.”

“Right.” I swallow a wave of irritation. If he’s being intentionally mysterious in order to show off I’m going to be pissed. “What are you doing now?” I inquire.

“I’m pulling up the locked records and sending them to our computer at home. Then I’ll have to break their firewalls and ensure I can’t be traced.”

“How the hell do you know how to do that?”

“Did I not mention?” he grins. “I’m rather good with computers.”

Holy shit. My boyfriend is some sort of hacker. “What about when they ask for your prints and stuff?”

He shrugs. “There are ways around that.”

Not in this world. There was a technology created ten years ago called PRD that is famous for being completely and utterly unbreakable—it’s used on all the locks on every door, in every piece of security in the world, and it can’t be faked, either. It stands for prints, retina scans and DNA samples, and to everyone’s knowledge it has never been tricked or overridden. And Luke is standing there calmly finding ‘ways around it’.

“Who
are
you?” I ask incredulously.

He doesn’t reply. After a few minutes he punches his fist in the air. “Done! Let’s get the hell out of here.” Luke jogs to the door, grabbing my hand and pulling me with him.

“How will we get out?”

“Quickly,” he winks. I’d really rather he didn’t have such a condescending streak to his personality. He is busy doing something with the security system so he doesn’t see my look. I prepare myself for the alarm that is undoubtedly about to go off, but miraculously the door clicks green and then opens!

We are halfway through the huge front room when Webb’s cold voice rings out over the chaos. “
Stop those two
!”

Luke’s face falls—I guess he expected to reach the door before Webb cottoned on to anything. He doesn’t let go of my hand, pulling me forward into a headlong sprint for the front doors. There are about a thousand cops in this place, but it takes them all a few moments to figure out who the detective is talking about. Pretty soon they’re diving at us from every angle.

We’re definitely going to jail. Worse: I’m going to wind up cured.

Except that somehow, even though I’m his biggest fan, I still keep underestimating Luke Townsend. He dives beneath cops and jumps over flying chairs, and he drags me along with him, never letting go of my hand even though I’m slowing him way down.

He palms off a policeman with a casual jab of his left hand that breaks the man’s nose. He does this a few more times until someone finally manages to sever the hold Luke has on me. An officer dives into me, flinging me to the floor. I skid across the carpet and it burns the skin on my thighs. As I try to free myself from the hands that have grabbed me by the shoulder and neck, Luke launches himself back toward me. He has to jump over a large wooden desk to reach me, and as I watch, feeling a bit like this whole thing is happening in slow motion, a huge, burly cop flies toward him and connects with Luke midair. The two of them crash like a ton of bricks onto the table, which buckles and splinters impressively.

A scream erupts from amid the wreckage and my stomach twists before I realize gratefully that it was the policeman who made the awful sound. He has a piece of wood through his calf and he’s whimpering in pain. Luke is already up, armed with one of the desk legs. He holds it in one relaxed hand, and his eyes flash dangerously, taking in every person in the room. He gets this same look when he’s solving a problem.

Everyone is watching him warily now that he has a weapon of sorts. Most policemen are approaching slowly; a few are shouting at him to drop the wood, their own guns raised. Jesus, I’m surprised he hasn’t been shot down already.

Luke turns back for me, but a policewoman’s strong hands are around my wrists, holding them tightly behind my back so I can’t get free.

“Go,” I tell Luke.

He rolls his eyes. And here’s me thinking it was a heroic declaration of love and selflessness. The stupid idiot doesn’t even appreciate it.

Luke launches himself over the broken table and wounded cop, moving too fast for anyone to stop him. He lands behind my captor, and even though I can’t see him anymore, I can hear the swish of the table leg and I feel the impact it has on the woman’s body as she gasps and slumps on top of me. Jesus Christ. I’m instantly queasy, but the adrenalin’s still pumping through my body, making it possible for me to function. Luke grabs my arm and hauls me to my feet. We almost make it to the door before we’re stopped—properly this time.