Page 52 of I Dream of Danger
Damn! He was supposed to approach the whole subject gingerly. Lee knew only too well how crazy his plan sounded. He had complete faith in it, but to an outsider it would reek of insanity.
And here he’d blurted out the project bluntly to a man who had no imagination and no sense of grandeur. A man who dealt exclusively in dollars and cents, and believed only in what he could touch.
So he was very surprised when Flynn reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a platinum Bump card. He tapped on it. “Give me yours,” he wheezed.
Lee had to stand up, unbutton his lab coat to get at his wallet. His legs would barely hold him. He gave Flynn his own Bump card and tapped it against Flynn’s. When he looked at the card again, he could barely believe his eyes. Flynn had just transfer-bumped fifteen million dollars into his card.
Flynn looked up at him, heavy brows frowning. “Control them.”
Lee nodded.
“Then use them.”
Oh, yes.
Steadier now, Lee stood and looked at his specimens, now comatose on their beds, the only signs that something had happened the steel components of the crash cart scattered on the floor of the cell of number two, and the black scorch marks on the invisible wall of number three’s cell.
He’d hated his American childhood, ripped from what should have been his Chinese destiny. But he’d loved comic books as a kid.
Protocol One, the Warrior Project, would create super-soldiers. Forty million Chinese Captain Americas.
But Protocol Two, the Delphi Project, would go one step further.
It would create an elite force of X-men.
Hunkered down in the dark, Elle buried her face in her arms.
She was the very picture of helplessness and she hated that, hated it. But there was no choice. The escape from her apartment had eaten into her reserves so deeply she had none left.
There was possibly some kind of scientific ratio to be studied—the further she went in her projections, the greater the energy expended. It was an entirely new field of scientific research, one that she’d happily devote her life to, only it wasn’t going to happen.
What was going on at Corona Labs? Sophie’s panic call and the men in black… Elle wished she could call some of her other colleagues, to see if this was company-wide, but a cell was a huge arrow in the sky pointing down—here she is!
Sophie’d said to leave hers back in her apartment and she had. The latest generation of phones had an off button for localization, but she didn’t trust it. Not if people with guns were hunting her.
She shivered. Was it cold in the room? Her whole body was trembling and she felt ice cold. There was no way to tell if it was shock or the temperature in the room. Maybe shock. She understood perfectly the physiology of shock. She’d come out weakened from her dream state, had had to perform minor surgery on herself and then go on the run. All the peripheral blood had rushed to her core to maintain vital organs alive.
Everything in her was cold, even her brain. She was used to being able to think herself out of difficult situations, but it was as if someone had thrown a blanket over her brain and it moved sluggishly, as if stumbling in the dark.
Right now, she needed to analyze the situation carefully, start making plans. She’d disappeared before—surely she could do it again. But no thoughts appeared. No analysis, no strong sense of reasoning her way through as she’d always been able to do.
Instead, with her last reserves, her entire being had sent out what could only be a distress call. Just to show how crazy she was, she hadn’t even sent it out to any of her co-workers.
Nope, she’d sent it to Nick. Who could be anywhere in the world.
Nick, whom she hadn’t seen in ten years and would never see again.
Nick, who, wherever he was, wouldn’t care.
Insanity.
These past years of hard work, rewarding work, making new friends, entering the exciting world of scientific research—she’d tried very hard to forget all about Nick. Every girl got her heart broken by a handsome man, right? Nothing new about that. Happened to everyone. Whole days, then whole weeks would go by when she wouldn’t think of him and then wham! A smell, a taste, a sound…it was always something. It would remind her of the years they spent together, or worse, remind her of the night they spent together.
And it was enough to set her off.
Her heart would clench, a cascade of hormones, bad ones, the ones associated with fear and loss and pain, such as CRH or cortisol, would flood her system. Before she knew the words, she understood the mechanism.
And now that she knew the words, now that she’d made this her field of study, she thought she’d banished her ghosts. Her ghost. Nick.
