Marcus 582: Book Three of Cyborgs: Mankind Redefined (2 page)

From the stories she heard working for Dr. Winters, cyborg reintegration into society was going like that for most of the soldiers being restored. In their minds, they were just back from the war, but their families had all moved on in the decade that had passed without them.

“Hey—listen to you. You’re finally talking,” Marcus declared, forcing enthusiasm into his voice. It was hard to hide how displeased he was about Rachel sounding so much like the antiquated AI bot downstairs.

Rachel snorted at Marcus’s comment, easily reading his appalled expression. “I know…I sound like the…announcing bot…at the air transport…station.”

Her reward for her admission was an honest grin. It wasn’t much, but she’d take it as positive proof his humor was going to save her from a cross-examination. When his expression of delight changed to one of genuine concern, she fought back a sigh of having lost. Marcus shouldn’t be worried about her. He had enough problems of his own to deal with.

“You didn’t have to hide it from me. Now I know why you’ve been wearing all those neck scarves. Does it hurt to talk?” he asked.

Rachel ignored him for a minute to finish pulling on her solar protection jacket. His soft-spoken question was thoughtful, just like so many others Marcus had asked her from time to time.

“Only hurts…when I laugh,” she finally answered. At his continued hard stare, she reluctantly gave up trying to be light-hearted about it. Marcus could tell when she was trying to bullshit anyway, and he always called her on it.

“Vibrations…make my…throat sore…but this beats…typing…every word…on a com. Need to…be more…succinct.” She smiled when Marcus released a heavy sigh. “Good thing…I was…never a…chatter…box.”

She finally got a grin as she looped her Norton Industries sanctioned backpack over her shoulders. Though Marcus wasn’t officially assigned to monitor her activities any longer, he still showed up to walk her to work every morning and back home every evening. He did so even though Norton was only two buildings away from where she now lived.

No matter what she communicated to him with her typing or her body language, she hadn’t been able to dissuade him from being her personal escort. Now at least she could verbally argue about it. She opened her mouth, thinking carefully about how to express it in as few words as possible.

“Don’t make your throat sore arguing, Rachel. It would just be a waste of your energy. Protecting you is my only job right now. I intend to keep doing it.”

Closing her mouth in surprise at his firmly spoken statement, Rachel instantly fell back to expressing herself in body language. She sighed loudly, nodded, and then shrugged.

She had no choice but to let him trail behind her as she opened the door and stepped out into the hall. Or did she? Maybe she just wasn’t being assertive enough with the persistent man.

Deciding she had caved too fast, Rachel turned back to make another attempt. Marcus was busy securing the door behind them. It was something he insisted on doing for her and another she’d learned to let him do.

Not a sound emerged when she caught Marcus checking out her bare legs under the short, full-skirted dress she’d worn. Her heartbeat picked up—which surprised her. She couldn’t decide whether it was concern about his masculine interest or excitement to feel like a normal female again.

Needing some time to think about her reaction, she decided it best to pretend she hadn’t noticed. Instead, she ducked her chin and headed for the airlift, her booted feet eating up the short distance quickly. Of course, Marcus’ long legs brought him almost immediately to her side.

The confined space of the lift shrunk with her new awareness of him as a potentially interested male. She wanted badly to turn and meet Marcus’s gaze—maybe see what lurked in the depths of his blue-gray eyes—but why did she suddenly care about his thoughts? Until a couple months ago, Marcus had been her jailor. His daily presence still made her feel punished for ending up some crazy cyber scientist’s victim. Resentment over his hovering lingered with her like an irritating splinter stuck under a fingernail.

And why should she care about the thoughts of someone who was a prime example of all she feared becoming at the hands of someone like Bradley Smith? She still didn’t completely trust Dr. Winters, even though she had worked for the woman for months. How could she ever find her ease? The woman made cyborgs for a living. Goddess only knew what Kyra Winters could do to her—probably way worse things than Evil Brad had contemplated.

She grew uncomfortable when she felt Marcus sneaking looks at her face. She covered up her nervousness with the first inane thought that crossed her scrambled brain.

“Wasted…too much…time this…morning. I hate…being…late,” she said aloud.

Though she had just been trying to fill the silence, Marcus interpreted her comment as being a problem. She should have known better.

“Relax, Rachel. You’re not going to be late. It only takes us four point seven minutes to walk to the building. Scanner clearance takes an average of one minute and twelve seconds. You will arrive in Dr. Winter’s lab ten minutes and thirty-five seconds before you are due to be there. You will not be late.”

Rachel rolled her eyes at the outpouring of so much precise data. The next guy in her life was
definitely
not going to be a cyborg, not even one of the nicer restored ones. If—no
—when
she started dating again, the man she chose was going to be a normal human male whose brain did not function like a com station. She would date no more cyber scientists. No more avid gamers. Definitely no good-looking geeks with hidden evil agendas. And no former Cyber Soldiers.
No…simply no.
Her libido was going to have to accept it no matter how attractive guys like Marcus were to her.

She glanced at his backside as she followed him out of the airlift. His walk was confident, sure, and it was more than just the fact he was a man and not a boy. But his ass—even in the horrendous jeans he typically wore—was the kind sex dreams were made of, as she had come to know.

There were good reasons she had chosen to study arts and humanities in college…a decision made long before she had been abducted. With her singing voice gone now, and probably forever, she was going to have to choose another career. She had already been an older student at twenty-six. Now she’d be in her mid-thirties before her education was completed.

Too bad she hadn’t gone into some sort of medical field. That career path was ripe with opportunities these days. But every time she went into Norton, all she could think was how it was nothing more than a giant building full of sad situations.

While she was busy processing her rapidly occurring epiphanies, she and Marcus walked to Norton in silence as they always did. She couldn’t stop thinking about Marcus looking at her legs and what it might mean. She also couldn’t push away the realization that this was just one more typical, boring morning in a monotonous life, one she didn’t want. She needed a change—and she was going to have one. Like every other person on the planet, her life had problems and challenges, but only she could really do anything about them.

“Good morning, Rachel Logan. Please place your ID hand on the scanner.”

Rachel smiled automatically in reply to the polite request, pretending as she always did, that the guard was human. The AI bot that asked was a self-aware version who, unlike the bot in her apartment building,
always
recognized her visually.

He also called her by her real name, at least until she passed through the scanner. When the embedded ID chip turned the scanner archway green, she exited rapidly so she could avoid the guard repeating the UCN mandated clearance statement. If she was fast enough, he’d skip it, and just wish her a blessed day. Today, she could really use a blessing.

Her anxiety over Marcus irritated her. She didn’t like his hovering. He wouldn’t listen to her complaints. Why did she care about his feelings?

Her self-preservation urges had always been strong which was how she’d survived being used as a sex slave, housekeeper, and general science lab lackey for two months. This morning she couldn’t fight the urge to be outright disobedient, especially if it meant the chance to have a life where she finally got to be in control.

Stopping in the middle of the scanner, she turned back to Marcus and calmly lied, using her new tinny mechanized voice to deliver it.

“Do not…come to…walk me home.” She paused to take in a nervous breath. “I have…a date…with an…old…college…friend. He will…see me…home.”

She turned away quickly to finish being scanned, but was not quick enough to miss the flash of disappointment in Marcus’ eyes. Refusing to believe she had crushed some struggling human part of him with her news, Rachel stared defiantly at the AI bot who seemed more taken aback by her unusual actions than the cyborg with his mouth still open in shock over her words.

“You are cleared to enter the building Rachel 235. Please proceed through the scanner.”

Hearing herself being addressed by the hated cyborg moniker, she lifted her chin and strode forward without glancing back. The scanning system could identify her however the hell it wanted, but she was never going to think of herself as a cyborg.

***

“
I have
a date.
”

Marcus repeated Rachel’s statement aloud to see if the words sounded any more believable when he said them. All the woman did was go to work at Norton and return home. How did she make a date without him knowing about it? Rachel had less of a no more social life than he did—unless it was someone at Norton hitting on her.

Back when he was officially monitoring her for Dr. Winters, he’d had Eric set up some discreet surveillance on her living quarters. When the situation changed, he’d left the monitoring equipment in place. He’d done so for complicated and illogical reasons admittedly based on an inappropriate interest that kept getting harder and harder to fight. His reasoning—though it remained vague in his mind—was now causing a sinking sensation in his gut.

At the time he made the decision to keep monitoring Rachel, he’d had enough problems to deal with in his life. He had been working then, and was still working, to get his children not to be afraid of him. Thankfully their stepfather was a decent man who helped ease his way back into their life.

It had also taken him more time than he’d expected to completely accept he’d lost his wife. She hadn’t wanted him to have the Cyber Soldier enhancements done in the first place. They had fought often and bitterly about his decision long before his actual conversion, but he’d been unwilling to send his military unit off without him. In the end, he’d proceeded without her agreement.

Accepting the loss of his one real marital relationship had hurt badly and turned into a pain that had brought tears to the surface during many sleepless nights. The loss had revealed in a harsh way how much illusion had been behind what had kept him sane during the war.

In the last seven months, he’d had to shed many more ideas. The life he’d had before the enhancements was nothing like the life he had now. The war had ripped his real marriage apart with no chance of him fixing it after being put in the Cyber Husband program. Infidelity was infidelity to the mother of his children, whether consensual on his part or not. She had filed all the paperwork to divorce him and married someone else shortly after the war ended. It might have even happened before he’d been assigned to his first contract wife. He’d avoided looking at the dates.

Logically, he couldn’t blame his ex for moving on, but the reality of never again being with his family had still been surprisingly hard to accept. Unlike the memories of the four women who’d bought him—memories he had willfully relegated to data storage—the many wonderful years of his marriage before the war were permanently stored in his human recall.

Today it seemed like he was going to lose another woman. Rachel’s announcement about having a date meant he’d taken too long to make up his mind about acting on his growing attraction to her. Referencing his lingering shock as the most convincing evidence he had about having heard her words correctly, he conceded all incoming data pointed to only one conclusion. He had stayed longer in Rachel Logan’s life than he should have and now he was going to suffer as he watched her move on to other men. He rationalized his inaction as waiting for a sign she was healing from Brad’s abuse.

Eric had been on his ass about making a move, but he’d never figured how to approach Rachel about the possibility of the two of them dating. She was a lot younger than him and a lot less jaded. Plus, she hated him being a cyborg worse than his wife had. Hell, he was nearly a hundred percent sure Rachel still hadn’t accepted the fact that she was a cyborg. Maybe her processor lacked that level of logic circuitry. He had no clue what went on in her human mind or her cybernetic components. No one around her would ever suspect what Brad had done to her anyway. All they would ever see was a short skirt and long legs and…hell. He needed to stop dwelling on the image of having those legs wrapped around him. He didn’t need that kind of torture.

Having regained her capacity for speech, Rachel certainly hadn’t lost any time telling him to get lost. But her announcement about dating still irked him. When had she made the necessary social contact with other men that would have led to a date? It was totally illogical to obsess over her having done so, but it was going to nag at him until he discovered how it had happened.