Page 38 of Seductive Architect
I had asked a question, but I wasn’t prepared for the answer.
Help.
12
“Clones?”I asked.
“I tested him. He remembers Mom grounding him for the vodka I hid in his backpack.”
“Aliens?”
“Don’t the Venusians have the ability to shapeshift?”
“Yeah, but you’d be able to smell them.”
I leaned over the balcony, watching the employees below. Janet claimed Tia at Synergy had been acting weird. They had a rivalry bordering on epic. I heard how she hadn’t made a snide comment or threatened to impale our beloved administrative assistant. I believed her. Drew and Arthur continued going through the motions, but it was almost as if their emotions had been dialed down.
“Could it be an empath?”
“Maybe. Usually, they don’t affect people this long. We’d be affected.”
“Not me,” she said. Janet tapped her temple, her tiara hardly moving. “Nobody is messing with this brain. It’s a fortress.”
I didn’t argue with her. It seemed to rule out empaths, telepaths, and all the other paths. “Could it be the drinking water? It wouldn’t be the first time using the drinking supply?—”
“Ahem.” She glanced at the cup in my hand.
All day I had been chugging coffee. “I guess we’ll know in a few hours if that’s the cause.”
“What about Wyatt? Don’t aliens have some sort of immunity to these things? He’s been acting normal so far today.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “It’s hard to tell?—”
“What’s normal?” she finished. “I can try stealing some chocolate from him later and see how he reacts. If he doesn’t cry, we’ll know they got to him.”
“The question is, who are ‘they’ and why these people?”
Janet peered over the railing at the people below. She thrust an elbow into my ribcage. I tried to snatch the paper cup, but I watched in slow motion as the contents flew everywhere. When it splashed along the lobby floor, I spotted the familiar red lipstick.
“See,” Janet said.
Tia waved, and not with her middle finger in the air. “I think I liked her better when she wanted you dead.”
“Me too. Now, who am I going to terrorize?”
Of all the people I could have had this conversation with, I’d never have picked Janet. Her brand of chaos made my head hurt. With Connie scouring all the security cameras in Vanguard for the last forty-eight hours, I needed to chat with somebody. I prepared for it to bite me in the ass.
“Hudson is a robot.”
“In bed? Does he come with a turbo button?”
Yup, already regretted it. “He’s a machine. I can hear him just as clearly as the toaster. Except?—”
“Wait, a second here.” Her eyes darted back and forth as she processed the info. It went from confusion to looking as if she smelled something foul. “This explains why he didn’t hit on me.”
I ignored her. “I recognize the code from Synergy. But I can’t understand it. It’s too sophisticated to be created by one of their programmers.” I hid my face in my palms. “I can’t believe I’m dating a machine.”
Even now, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. About that grin. About the way he made me feel like a person. The irony wasn’t lost on me. It required a machine for me to connect with my humanity. That terrified me. Because if he wasn't real, what did that say about me?
