Page 42 of Redstone
“… long?” Wyl managed to wheeze.
The doctor glared at him. “What did I just tell you?”
“How long … here?” Wyl persisted.
“Fifteen minutes. Your husband has been informed, but his duties prevent him from visiting you right now. I’m keeping you under observation until I can relinquish you into his custody.”
Oh shit, Robbie knew. Robbie knew that Wyl had basically had his fucking throat crushed. He was probably spitting iron.
“This unit brought you to me,” the doctor went on, turning his glare on ZeeBee, who stood calmly in one corner of the room. “It has since refused to leave. I informed the techs that it’s malfunctioning, but they say it’s a low priority, so you’re going to have to put up with its company for now.”
Wyl waved a hand to indicatefineand silently promised himself he’d modify ZeeBee’s code to hide his tampering better. The last thing he wanted was for the robot to be taken away and reprogrammed from scratch.
“Now I have another patient to see to. What a day,” the doctor muttered. “First a spouse, now a natural; I don’t even have a treatment plan for someone so primitive.”
A natural. Oh, shit, Tamara washerealready, and the doctor was going to see her now. The doctor turned and left, and as soon as he was gone, Wyl motioned for ZeeBee, well aware this was all being recorded. Fuck it, he’d deal with it somehow, and in the meantime, he’d make this as innocuous as possible.
He reached up to scratch his ear and came away with the chip in his hand. “ZeeBee,” he whispered, touching the robot on the arm and sticking the chip to it. He patted it once. “Go make Tamara your baby.” It was a fairly complicated command for his bot since it had never met Tamara before and could only work off of conjecture, but after a moment of perfect stillness, apart from its eyestrip pulsing, ZeeBee said, “Accepted,” and left the room.
Wyl sank back into the bed, conscious of the burn in his throat and his creeping fatigue. He’d done his best. It was up to ZeeBee and Tamara now.
Chapter twenty-one
Going now. Ten-fifteen minutes.
Tamara felt her breath catch in her throat but forced herself to reply.Understood. Good luck.
She closed her eyes and forced air through her lungs, pushing past the stuttering, adrenalized fear response that it had taken her what seemed like forever to break herself of. She wasnotgoing to break down right now, damn it. She was going to do her job, like the professional she was, and she was going to do it well. And someday, when she was old and looked more like her father’s peer instead of his daughter, she was going to tell him this story, about how she was an integral part of a daring escape, about how they had saved someone who was going to help save the Alliance as they knew it. And then he would see her for a real person, a person who could achieve things and live a full life even if it was a short one, and they would finally be equals.
But first she was going to dismantle her Morse device because if everything went to hell, it wasn’t going to help her tohave that lying around. Tamara disconnected the parts with brisk competence, reassembled the pieces into the innocuous communicator they’d once been, then stood up and went for her secret stash of perishable death: a very thoroughly wrapped package of snack crackers that had been imbued with peanut powder.
Peanuts. Tamara had an allergy topeanuts, of all things.So quaint, so much something that just didn’t happen to people anymore. A lot of modern doctors hadn’t even heard of allergies, as Regen usually inoculated people against local sources of irritation while they were still in their mother’s womb. For those who traveled to other planets, allergies occasionally popped up, but again, Regen worked wonders.
And then there were the naturals, for whom the most innocuous thing could become a fast-acting pestilence for one.
Tamara had first learned about her peanut allergy when she was three years old, visiting an aunt who owned a farm on Rhysis. Being a farmer was actually a quite elevated position on a lot of worlds, and her aunt had been very proud of her crop of peanuts. “One of the only naturally grown sources for them in the galaxy,” she’d said. And so, inevitably, Tamara had eaten one along with her cousins, and less than a minute later, her throat had closed up, and she’d stopped breathing.
It had been the first of many family outings she’d ruined. It helped, in a way, to know that her weakness was now going to be the very thing that made her infiltration possible. It wasn’t perfect, but it did take the sting out of what she was about to do. Not literally, though. Literally, it was going to sting like a son of a bitch.
Tamara tucked the package of crackers into her pocket, then headed out of her room. She needed to be in a public place for this. She checked her watch—five minutes had passed. Now was as good a time as any for her to get started. She walked into thecommon room, opened the package, and popped a cracker into her hand. It lay there, brown and crispy and smelling just like she remembered.Peanuts. Fuck. She’d better get a damn note in her file that said,willing to go above and beyond the call of duty, once this was over. She raised the cracker to her lips—
And a large, hard hand closed around her wrist before Tamara could actually eat the cracker. The hold startled her into dropping it, and she turned toward the source of her surprise angrily. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” Demarcos said, his body language relaxed but his voice intent. The casual layer of prison surveillance wouldn’t pick up anything amiss as long as theykeptlooking relaxed. “What happens in ten to fifteen minutes, Miss Carson?”
It felt like her blood stopped moving for a moment. “I beg your pardon?” she asked through numb lips.
“I believe I heard a message that mentioned that time frame. I just wanted to be sure I wasn’t going to miss anything.”
“How did you hear that?”
“Good ears,” he said flatly. “What’s going on? And don’t try to play me; I have had it up to here with being lied to. If this is some kind of plot against my client—”
“Do you really want to get into this here?” Tamara asked lowly. “Where anyone could walk in on us?” God, she was so stupid. She should have protected herself better. She should have been paying closer attention to her surroundings instead of letting herself get distracted with reminiscing. If she got locked up at the end of this, she would deserve it for being a fool.
“We could go to my rooms, and you could explain yourself there.”
“That—no.” Because damn it, she needed to be in a public place for this to work. “No, I can’t do that.”
