Page 6 of The Edge of Dawn

She’d have to look at other options. Underground surgery was a possibility. Get them to change her face, her eyes, her voice, her gait, her fingerprints… until the AI no longer recognized her.

She would have to get a new name, too. A new bio-sig. A whole new identity.

She would have to find the right people: biohackers and tech people who did this sort of thing. She’d have to go to Darkside.

All of that would be terribly expensive.

She had no funds to speak of. She was cut off from her family and from her husband of two years.

Bloody Cameron. He was the one who’d pushed for her to undergo the neurotransmitter and receptor modification procedure, otherwise known as NERM.

They all thought she was in the grip of psychosis.

According to everyone else, the voices were just hallucinations. She couldn’t possibly be hearing real voices.

But then… to the surprise of her treating team, the meds didn’t work, and the NERM didn’t work, and the voices kept flooding in, and they were even louder than before, and once, when she’d tried to talk to them, they’d talked back.

That had freaked her out more than a little.

Treatment-Resistant Psychosis, Not Otherwise Specified, they called it. That was her official diagnosis, anyway.

Translation: they had no idea what was going on. Apparently, her brain activity scans were highly unusual.

But out here, in the middle of the desert, she didn’t have to worry about the voices because there was almost nobody around.

When she moved away from populated areas, the voices went away.

Funny, that.

At least here, she didn’t have to worry about her husband—well, ex-husband apart from on paper—who’d been trying to get her committed to the Wellmind Institute for the past six months.

Wellmind was a last resort. Only the most difficult cases were admitted there.

Cameron had already frozen her accounts, but unless she was officially declared mentally incapacitated by the MWA, he couldn’t access her credits.

She’d escaped before they could legally determine that she was incapacitated. Besides, she wasn’t. Cognitively, she was intact. She could research, strategize, and execute a plan. She knew exactly what was going on around her.

With nothing but a few unmarked credit chips and a backpack full of clothes and a hat and a mask and sunnies to conceal her face, she’d fled Sydney by airborne taxi, getting off in Canberra, then taking the most circuitous overland route to this underground bolt-hole.

She’d gone on foot. Then by electric scooter and hover-bike, staying at a pod-motel, using her credit chips to buy meals and drinks from retail-bots and vending-drones along the way.

She’d hitched rides on produce transports and mining rigs. The bloke who’d dropped her off in Coober Pedy had been in a rush to get to Teluria. Something about delivering his cargo, then getting back home—which had an underground bunker, from the sounds of it—before everything went to shit.

It wasn’t unusual to hear people talking like that these days.

She’d been catching snippets of doomsday panic from people ever since the dark ships first appeared in Earth’s atmosphere.

The rumor going around was that the Kordolians were finally going to take over Earth. To “officially” invade.

“About bloody time,” Jade muttered wryly, rolling off the bed in frustration. There was no way she could sleep now. She’d just take a dissolvable neuranol and try to calm the fuck down.

In her silent underground home, which had been passed down through her family for generations, she felt restless…

And desperately lonely.

There was nobody she could reach out to. Any contact with family or friends would risk her location being pinpointed by the Federation.

All she could do was keep going down into the mines, searching for the rich veins of opal that might lead to the motherlode. Thankfully, the mining robot was still here. It had helped her a lot.

---