Mass Effect: The Complete Novels 4-Book Bundle (52 page)

“Just put the bags inside the front door,” Grayson instructed, eager to keep the batarians from traipsing through his home. “I’ll figure out someplace to hide them.”

“What’s the matter, human?” Sanak growled. “Don’t you trust us?”

Grayson didn’t bother to answer.

“Aria’s waiting for our report,” he said. “Why don’t you and your friends go fill her in.”

Liselle waited until the batarians were gone, then came over and draped her arms around his neck, pressing herself close against him. He could feel the heat emanating off her, and the faint perfume wafting up from her neck made his head spin.

“You’re not coming to the club?” she whispered in his ear, disappointed.

Grayson could imagine the sultry pout playing across her lips, and he felt a flush rising up his neck and into his cheeks. Liselle always made him feel like a cradle robber, despite the fact she was at least a full century older than him.

It’s different with asari
, the churlish part of his mind admonished.
They mature slowly. She’s still a babe in the woods, and you’re a weathered geezer pushing middle age. She’s probably got more in common with your daughter than with you
.

“I’ll be there,” Grayson promised, giving her a quick kiss even as he unraveled her arms from his neck and gently pushed her away. “I just have to take care of a few things first.”

She turned away from him, letting her fingers trail along the length of his arm as she did so.

“Don’t take too long,” she called out over her shoulder as she headed for the door. “You might find me dancing with a krogan if I get bored.”

When the door closed, he took a long, slow breath to clear his head. The lingering scent of perfume filled his nostrils, but without Liselle pressed up against him it didn’t have the same overpowering effect.

Back to business, lover-boy
.

He had to find somewhere to hide the red sand. It wasn’t likely anyone would break into his apartment, but there was no sense leaving it out in plain sight.

First, however, he had to make a call.

Kahlee Sanders knocked lightly at the door of Nick’s room.

“Come in,” he called from the other side, his adolescent voice cracking on the second word.

She passed her hand over the access panel and the door whooshed open to reveal Nick and Yando, one of the newest students at the Grissom Academy, sitting side by side at the desk in the corner of the room.

“It’s past curfew,” Kahlee said. “Yando should have been in his own room thirty minutes ago.”

“We’re studying,” Nick said, pointing at the haptic interface screens projecting up from the terminal on his desk.

Kahlee glanced at the assignment floating before her, then at the two boys. Nick stared back at her, his expression one of total innocence.

Nick had just turned fifteen. Always small for his age, he looked at least a year or two younger. His shoulder-length black hair and the wispy, curling bangs that fell down across his forehead did little to offset the impression of youth. But she knew he was mature beyond his years; if any of the students could
look her straight in the eye and lie to her without giving anything away, it was Nick.

Yando, however, was another story. Eleven years old, he had had his amplifiers surgically implanted only a few months ago. Everything here was still new to him, strange. The instructors of the Ascension Project still filled him with a sense of awe, towering figures of authority looming over this unfamiliar world. Kahlee wasn’t above using that to get to the truth.

“Yando,” she said, keeping her voice low but firm, “what were you really doing?”

The young boy looked from Kahlee to Nick and then back to Kahlee, his eyes wide and white against his dark face.

“We were playing Conquest,” Nick admitted with an exasperated sigh, letting his young companion off the hook. “But only for, like, ten minutes. Before that we studied for two hours at least!”

“You know the rules, Nick,” she replied. “No extranet after curfew.”

“It was just ten minutes!”

“I can check the logs,” she reminded him. “See if you’re telling the truth.”

“I am!” he snapped back defiantly, before adding in a lower voice, “Well, maybe more like twenty minutes.”

“Am I in trouble?” Yando asked, his lower lip trembling slightly.

Kahlee shook her head. “No. You’re not in trouble. But it’s time to get into bed, okay?”

The younger boy nodded, and she took him by the hand and led him to the door. Then she turned to Nick.

“We’ll talk about this when I come back to take your readings.”

“Yeah, right,” he said, his voice dripping with teenage sarcasm. “Hate to go one whole week without someone jabbing a needle in my neck.”

Kahlee led Yando to his room and tucked him in, but her mind was on Nick the entire time.

She wasn’t sure if she should punish him or not. In his first two years at the Grissom Academy, Nick had been a holy terror. Always ahead of most of his classmates in the biotic Ascension Project, he had been arrogant, selfish, and prone to bullying the other children. In the last year, however, something had changed. Nick had gone from a problem child to a model student, the perfect example of everything the Ascension Project was trying to achieve.

Among humans, biotics—the ability of some individuals to use their mind to affect the physical world through small bursts of dark energy—was a commonly known, but still misunderstood, phenomenon.

Many erroneously believed that biotics were mutants blessed with superhuman telekinetic powers. Urban legends told of out-of-control biotics upending vehicles with a mere thought, or using their abilities to cause earthquakes while unleashing rampages of destruction that decimated entire city blocks.

The truth was much less terrifying. For one thing, contrary to what popular action vids portrayed, generating biotic fields took time and focus; it wasn’t something that happened instantly. And without the surgically implanted amplifiers wired into their brains and nervous systems, most biotics could barely tip over a cup of coffee.

With the amplifiers and years of intense training, talented individuals could learn to generate dark energy fields strong enough to lift a full-grown man from the floor and toss him roughly against a nearby wall, but doing so required intense amounts of physical and mental energy. Two or three such displays were all that typical biotics could manage before total exhaustion would set in, leaving them as helpless and vulnerable as any other man or woman.

Making the general public aware of these limitations was one way the Ascension Project tried to bridge the gap between rumor and fact. The hope was that understanding would lead to acceptance, allowing biotics to integrate into normal human society without suffering the irrational mistrust and persecution they currently faced. Indeed, outside of the military, most human biotics preferred to keep their talents hidden whenever possible.

Kahlee didn’t want children like Nick to grow up ashamed of their gift. But there was always the fear the pendulum could shift too far the other way, leading to an arrogant sense of entitlement or superiority among biotics. They could come to look down on others as inferior, making it even more difficult for nonbiotics to welcome them into society.

When Nick first came to the program, Kahlee had feared this was the direction he was heading. But the Ascension Project focused on more than just maximizing biotic potential; the curriculum also concentrated on building moral character, and in Nick’s case it seemed to have made a difference.

As he’d matured, the bully had transformed into a
protector of the other students. He’d gone from sullen and selfish to helpful and cooperative. Now he regularly volunteered to tutor other students at the Grissom Academy—even the nonbiotics who weren’t part of the Ascension Program.

In light of all the progress he’d made, Kahlee decided she wasn’t going to come down too hard on him for his latest minor transgression.

When she got back to his room Nick was lying facedown on his bed, the nape of his neck exposed in preparation for the familiar procedure he was about to endure.

“I never meant for Yando to get in trouble,” he mumbled into his pillow as he heard Kahlee come in.

She sat down on the bed beside him, then reached over and carefully pinched the nape of his neck between her thumb and forefinger, wincing at the inevitable—but still slightly painful—static spark as she made contact with his skin. The Ascension Project had tried to find a way to regulate the excess electrical charge that built up naturally in a biotic’s body, but so far had experienced little success in coming up with a practical solution. For now, it was still a minor inconvenience the students and teachers simply learned to live with.

“Yando’s still recovering from his surgery,” Kahlee explained as she inserted a long, slim needle between the young man’s vertebrae and into the tiny subcutaneous transmitter. “He needs his sleep.”

The small ball on the top of the needle blinked green, indicating the data was successfully uploaded.

“He doesn’t like being alone in his room,” Nick
answered, muscles tense and teeth gritted against his discomfort. “I think he misses his mom.”

He let out a long sigh when Kahlee extracted the needle, and his body relaxed.

“I thought maybe if we played some Conquest he wouldn’t be so scared.”

Kahlee smiled to herself and gently rubbed Nick’s shoulder.

“You’re a good kid.”

Still facedown, he didn’t answer, but she could see his ears turning red with embarrassment. He shifted slightly, and she realized he was trying to get more comfortable while being careful not to roll over, desperate to hide his body’s involuntary reaction to her touch.

He’s not a little kid anymore
, she reminded herself, quickly pulling her hand away as what was happening to Nick dawned on her.
He’s a teenager practically drowning in hormones
.

Kahlee was aware enough to know that several of the older students had developed crushes on her. It was understandable: she offered them comfort and compassion, and though she dressed conservatively while at the Academy, with her shoulder-length blond hair and trim figure she was still an undeniably attractive woman.

“I better go,” she said, standing up quickly.

Uncontrollable erections were perfectly normal for someone Nick’s age, but the last thing she wanted to do was make an awkward situation worse by drawing attention to what was happening. Better to just make a quick exit.

“Yeah, okay,” Nick answered, his voice noticeably strained.

She flicked off the light and shut the door behind her, giving him some necessary privacy.

Once she got back to her own private quarters, she downloaded Nick’s data into her private terminal, where it would automatically be relayed to the central database inside the Ascension Project’s main laboratory.

The numbers were encouraging. Initial testing had indicated there was an upper limit to what each individual biotic could achieve. However, recent results from students like Nick seemed to imply that with hard work these so-called upper limits were hardly set in stone.

As she charted the latest results from her other students, she couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened with Gillian Grayson if she had stayed in the program.

Although she was autistic, Gillian’s potential had dwarfed the other children’s in the Ascension Project. Kahlee suspected her remarkable talent and her autism were somehow linked, though it was also possible her abilities were the result of the drugs her father and Cerberus had been secretly pumping into her system.

In the end, Grayson had chosen his daughter over his loyalty to Cerberus, and with his help Kahlee had managed to get Gillian onto the crew of a quarian deep-space exploration vessel … one of the few safe places in the galaxy beyond the Illusive Man’s reach.

Kahlee understood how hard it had been for Grayson to send his daughter away; it had been hard
for
her
to. But Gillian wasn’t alone: Hendel Mitra—the former security chief of the Grissom Academy—was with her, and he cared for her as much as her own father did.

Kahlee’s train of thought was derailed by the soft beeping of an incoming call over the extranet. The point of origin was blocked, but she had a pretty good idea of who was on the other end of the line.

She tapped the bottom right corner of the hovering interface screen to accept the call, activating the video feed on a separate screen. Staring back at her was Grayson himself, as if Kahlee’s thoughts about his daughter had somehow conjured him up.

“Kahlee,” he said, his face brightening as he spoke her name.

For the past three years, Grayson had called her every two or three weeks. Though he would never openly admit it, she knew he was checking up on her. She suspected that after Gillian was gone, he’d struck some kind of bargain with the Illusive Man to guarantee her safety … though what that bargain was, or what it had cost him, she’d never been able to find out.

From the image on her screen, it looked as if he was calling from a computer station set up inside a small bedroom. She couldn’t make out any other significant details, however; Grayson was always careful to give her no clue as to where he was calling from. So she studied his physical appearance instead.

He seemed to be wearing some type of body armor or combat suit, though it was hard to be sure with only his head and shoulders visible. She was relieved
to see that his pupils and teeth were white, with no trace of the rosy pink hue that would indicate he had started using red sand again. Yet his face looked lean and haggard, as if he was under a great deal of stress.

“You look good, Grayson,” she said, letting a smile slip across her lips to sell the white lie.

“I’m keeping busy,” he responded, as vague and evasive as ever. “How have you been? Everything going well on the Ascension Project? Nothing unusual?”

“Unusual? You mean other than teaching children how to move objects with their mind?”

Grayson forced a polite laugh. Kahlee could see he was on edge.