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  I was weak when it came to him. And weakness always came back to bite me.

  Julius watched me, indecision crossed his face. He looked at me as though he wanted to tell me something, but there was a drop in his gaze, and thankfully, the connection was broken. I didn’t want to know any more. Knowing would increase our connection. Make me weaker.

  I reached for the LearnX control, played with it in my fingers, wishing like hell it wasn’t this way, but knowing there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. “I need to study more.” I didn’t look at him when I spoke.

  “You should rest. You’ve worked your brain hard. It would be better to see how you go before you assimilate more information,” Julius said quietly.

  But not putting it on meant I’d have to keep talking to him, and I didn’t—didn’t—want to do that. “I’m not waiting. I’m starting with Sleep Therapy.”

  “If you’re so determined, then I have something in my personal papers that may benefit you. Genome Technology. You’ll need to know ...”

  The P.A. silently hovered up to the ceiling behind his shoulder. It studied me, its black eye never straying away. A shudder worked up my spine, Anyone could be watching through that thing, and I wondered what was stopping anyone from doing just that? Those machines seemed too insidious to be as harmless as Julius told me they were. Maybe that was just me and my twisted view of the world. Maybe I just naturally expected the worst, but I’d learned from Father Dear and my gut told me not to trust them. If it wasn’t Julius’s, I’d send it hurtling to the floor as I’d done the others. Julius followed my line of sight, spotted the P.A. and looked back at me. A shadow passed in the depths of his eyes. I’d forgotten about the damn thing. I hadn’t seen it over the past few days, but now I was up, it was always there, silently watching me.

  Again, I had the strange feeling he wanted to tell me something important, but instead held it back. All he said was, “Maybe you can find something interesting there.”

  I wiped the feeling aside. I had no time to waste analyzing my gut. I punched the start image and settled back, eager to receive the information I needed for a new life. A life that would not, on any level, no matter how hollow I felt about it, include Julius any longer than it absolutely needed to.

  Chapter Nine

  Julius had obviously spent a lot of time in his research of Genome Technology, if the length and depth of his articles were anything to go by. He’d written detailed papers, especially on cell regeneration when undergoing treatment while in an induced coma. The papers, although filled with information about how to reach the mind and build conscious brain activity in coma victims, didn’t seem to have much to do with my predicament, and I wondered why he’d sent me in this direction.

  I sighed as I finished with the last installment and took the LearnX off my temples. I looked out of the window. Subtle pinks pushed the dark blue from the sky, and I realized with a start that I’d been at this thing all night.

  I rubbed the grains from my eyes, feeling the heaviness in my eyelids. My body craved the sleep I’d not given it. It didn’t matter. I’d been in this situation before. Hell, my father had starved me of sleep for a week, and I hadn’t broken. It had made me stronger. A night of study, resting on a comfortable, warm couch with a full stomach was more than I could ever have asked for.

  I realized I still hadn’t the faintest idea where or how I’d been found. Although Julius had told me, I wanted to know the details. I had the distinct feeling he’d skipped a lot of those in order to somehow protect me from the worst of it. I slipped the band on my head and searched the recent news, finding an article quickly. I ran through articles describing how the worker-robots found me. There were photos of the empty capsule after they’d pulled me out.

  “There’s not a lot of time. Get her in there. Quick!” Two scientists scuttled over to a silver-bullet type cylinder that was large enough to fit a body. My body. The top opened, and the shining silver sent reflected light sparkling about the room. My space-age coffin awaited.

  The guards gripped my biceps so tight the bones felt bruised as they pushed me toward the coffin. My legs locked, heels scraping over the floor, as they tugged me closer. “No! No!” I hated the way my voice sounded so breathless, so full of fear, hated that they knew how scared I really was. Hated that I struggled against them.

  I wanted to die in that firestorm. Had looked forward to it. But before death came, the guards had appeared through the smoke like apparitions and brought me here. A building I had no idea even existed. But I was here, facing something much, much worse than death.

  “Get over here and help me. We have to get her in there, otherwise we’ll never get out ourselves.” The guard to my right grunted to someone behind me. My feet were swept from beneath me. They held me over the coffin. That’s when I started to scream. I heard myself, but I couldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop the noise that came from within me. Didn’t know I could even make sounds like that.

  My wrists, arms, waist, knees, and ankles were locked against the gleaming silver sides, then they inserted stints into veins in my arms, legs, and lastly into the carotid in my neck. They closed the lid and my screams ricocheted against the cold metal. Gas filled my lungs. Fire entered my blood. Then I found the death I’d been seeking. Or so I thought.

  But why did Victor put me there? Why go to the trouble? Why not simply kill me there and then and stop the fires?

  There’d be a reason. It was only logical. Victor wasn’t going to sacrifice himself or lose what he’d spent so much time and effort molding. I was the pinnacle of his work. If there was one thing I knew about my father, he didn’t do something unless there was a reason for it.

  My head throbbed from a building headache. I leaned my head back onto the pillows trying like mad to make sense of everything.

  I smelled the coffee before I opened my eyes. I lifted my head and blinked open sawdust eyes. I must have fallen asleep. Julius walked through the doorway carrying a tray of food and a large cup of coffee. That’s what had woken me.

  “Good morning,” Julius held a cup of black coffee to me, and I concentrated on that. I took it gratefully and watched the steam float from the top of the dark liquid. I couldn’t remember being woken so nicely in my life.

  “What’s the time?” I asked, my voice sounding like I’d dragged myself through gravel.

  “About 7 a.m.” Couch cushions dipped as Julius sat next to me. He looked young this morning. Refreshed. Clean-shaven. Hair brushed. Lean. Broad-shouldered and sexy-as-hell. My mouth turned dry as I realized how I was seeing him. Not as a doctor. Not as a being I was using. But a man. A man who had the power to take my mind away from the abomination I was and level me to just a woman who wanted to be cared for. To be loved. To feel that indefinable way that could only be found with that one special person. To even begin to wonder if I could have that with him. That I could even be attracted to him.

  That he was one man I would deny myself.

  I forced my attention away from him and to the innocuous top of the coffee table, emotions raging a storm inside of me, working hard to pretend I didn’t feel a thing.

  “I left you at around two in the morning. I didn’t want to disturb you. You were engrossed in the middle of a lecture,” he said. That was why I’d been undisturbed. “How do you feel?”

  “A little tired, but that’s okay.” I worked to concentrate on his words, not on his body, or the care I recognized in the way he watched me. I made myself speak to the coffee table. “I’m making up for lost time.”

  “Did you get through my notes?” he asked.

  They were much more than just notes. Good, that was something I could think about. They were full studies of which contained hours and hours of experiments and study. I nodded. “All of them.” I wasn’t sure why he’d been so determined to have me read them, but the pleased look on his face made me feel ridiculously happy. “You’ve done so much research about cells. Rejuvenation. How did you even think about cel
ls needing permission to regrow? And how do you even give them permission?” He was intelligent. A genius really, and I had to wonder why he was just a medical doctor in a hospital when he could clearly do so much more.

  His mouth twisted, “Sometimes ... inspiration ... strikes in the darkest of times. And sometimes, we don’t have a choice but to see things.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “It means that I found out by pure chance, as most advances often go. When circumstances called for it. But just for now, they are only notes. My research. They haven’t made it into any journal, and all advances in medicine need to be read by the intellects and the powers that be to be funded. As of yet, they are my mere ... thoughts. Conjecture.”

  I hated to think he’d gone to so much time and effort to think his research was just supposition. “They’re good, Julius.”

  “But do they make any sense?”

  I shrugged, “They do. I understood, if that makes any difference?”

  “Then that makes me happy. I’m glad you read them, and I’m glad you understood them. That’s a start. Now, if I can just get them into medical journals, I might be onto something.”

  “Well, how do you do that?”

  “Make an impact. A big impact somehow. But for now, the word of a doctor is hard to get heard.”

  “Your mind has an unusual capacity,” he said quietly, as if he mused a point to himself.

  “It’s a pity I’m not just a normal person.”

  “You are special, Katia.”

  His voice was no more than a whisper, but it was loud and clear enough to touch my soul. A tingle scattered inside of me. I shook my head, not quite believing anyone could say something about me like that and actually sound as though they meant it. “No.”

  A small smile tugged at his mouth, and for a moment, he looked inexplicably sad. “I wonder why you don’t believe that. And yes. You are special. More than you could ever know.” He paused, reaching for my hand, hesitated, and withdrew. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed. A quiet seriousness settled on his features, “Katia, I want you to know I’ll do anything to try to help you. You’re a very—important—woman, and whatever happens, I will do whatever is in my power to keep you safe. Promise me you’ll remember that.”

  I didn’t doubt what he said, but it had come out of nowhere, almost as though he expected the worse. I didn’t know what to say, how to answer such an odd declaration. The heaviness of unease settled in my gut. I rose from the couch, walking across to the windows, battling against it. I concentered on the rows of traffic below to try to clear my head.

  The sky was a cloudless blue. Cars flowed in a continuous straight line in the distance, looking like a string of blowflies. “The M1. I remember the information on the road laws of 2060. All flying vehicles must fly in the designated route as installed into the internal GPS system of every car powered by magnetic-gravity. Fifty years ago, people were having all sorts of accidents brought about by the increase in flying vehicles going wherever they wanted. When people adopted this method of transport, no one had thought about roads in midair apart from the flight paths of planes.” I rolled out the information to keep my mind off him and on something other than how he made me feel.

  There were various lanes, some straight, like midair highways; others flowed around the sides of buildings. Lanes were stacked one on top of the other. All were busy. What I didn’t see was the ground. “How high are we?”

  “Two hundred and twenty six floors up,” Julius said.

  Vertigo pulled me into its vortex. I didn’t like heights. It was my greatest fear. I couldn’t stop that bizarre feeling that took control of my mind and body when I was even a few meters in the air. “I can’t see the ground.”

  “I used to feel the same way, but you get used to it. I concentrate on the sunsets now. They are breathtaking from this height.” Julius placed both hands on my shoulders and urged me backward. “Move away from the window. The feeling will pass.”

  I closed my eyes and concentrated on keeping my coffee in its cup. The heat from his hands slid like silk through me. He took the cup from my nearly numb fingers, placed it on the coffee table, and grasped my hands with his. “Focus on your breathing. In through your nose and out through your mouth.” I was grateful he still thought I suffered from vertigo.

  I concentrated on his face, but maybe that was the wrong thing to do. My heart rocketed, jumping on adrenaline. It occurred to me how full his mouth looked. It was a masculine mouth, firm, wide, compassionate. Noticing these things about him was a danger. I was taking too much comfort from him. Making the time when I knew I would have to leave him all the more hard.

  Heather had suffered because she was my friend. Needlessly suffered. After they had severed the fingers off her right hand, they’d taken her away unconscious. I didn’t see her for days after that, not knowing if she was alive or dead. They mind-fucked me, the most insidious type of torture. I didn’t eat, sleep, talk. They left me alone in that solitary cell afterward. Time was upside down. I felt like I was turned inside out. When they brought her back to me, they had nursed her back to health. Ready for try number two.

  “I’m fine,” I drew a sharp breath and slipped my hands from his. “Tell me. Which city is this?”

  “It’s Melbourne,” Julius said, facing out of the window with me.

  I looked without seeing. It was the same city I’d known, but looking at it now, it was totally different. Now it was a meandering metropolis, made of massive skyscrapers and a cityscape that disappeared beyond the horizon.

  This city was where I was born and raised, but there was nothing about the buildings now that was familiar to me. It was buzzing, filled to the brim with people and unfamiliar technology. It would never be the same as I had once known.

  I looked out of the window and took comfort in the clear blue sky. This I knew. Some summer days with the sky this blue, I would let myself lie in the warm, glossy grass in the middle of a park and fool myself that I was normal, that I had a home, a family, someone who cared about me.

  “Has anything stayed the same?”

  “I’m sure you’d recognize some things from the right angle.” Julius studied me for a moment. “Feel like getting out of here for a while?” He must have been reading me because he sent me an easy smile. “You’ll be safe. I’ll be with you. I won’t leave you. Promise.”

  He left the room and came back a minute later with some shoes. We headed out of his apartment into a corridor. It was a familiar layout with other apartments on either side of the hallway. Julius directed me down a little way to an elevator. A female voice asked us to state our destination. “Sky-garden,” Julius replied.

  The lift dropped, and moments later, the doors opened. We stepped into an open area directly from the elevator. The P.A. drifted out with us, but I soon forgot it as I looked about. A few people milled in groups and sat on benches, and none looked our way. Their own P.A. s hovered silently behind them. The P.A. behind us was just one in many. As were we. I felt brilliantly inconspicuous. The atmosphere was peaceful. No one looked my way. He squeezed my shoulder. “They’re just regular people. Relax.”

  A woman jogged past us, her P.A. keeping pace behind her shoulder. She was dressed in a figure-hugging bodysuit that had trails of light tracking up her legs and arms. They met at a small square where a number flashed, and I realized as she passed, it was her heart rate.

  A garden filled with shrubs and trees of different hues of greens had been planted with perfect symmetry. A gravel path wound through flower beds and below the canopy of tall trees. A slight breeze made leaves rustle. Julius pointed out various plants, telling me a little story about their variety or species of flower and why they’d been chosen for this garden. I recognized most of the names and even the species of flowers, but there were varieties of plants there, grafts between roses and tiger lilies, lilacs and wattle, each wondrous and beautiful in its own right. I bent to inhale their perfume,
delighting in the new fragrances I’d never even dreamed could be possible. As we wandered along the path, we came to a grassy section where there were chairs, tables, and benches. A couple sat next to a particularly laden flower bush and had set breakfast on their little table. The woman reached to touch a flower. The man said something to her, and they both laughed.

  “People come here for breakfast?”

  He nodded. “And exercise. All of the parks and gardens have now been designed within the buildings, especially apartments. That was one the rules for buildings that were slated to be built over park lands.”

  I guessed space was at a premium, but at least they had created new gardens and not just built over them leaving nothing but dust and concrete. “It’s beautiful.”

  I walked down the gravel path, listening to the sound of the small stones crunch beneath my feet. The garden was quite large, and soon, we’d left other people behind walls of shrubs. I walked to a balustrade, scanning to horizon and what lay spread before me. “I can see half of Melbourne! The Melbourne I recognize!” I turned to him to find he watched me. “Is that why you brought me here?”

  Julius leaned his arms on the balustrade, looking out over the view. “I thought I could point out some features you’d identify.”

  “The Yarra!”

  The Yarra River swirled like a giant brown snake through towering buildings on either side. It was full of life. I saw a variety of boats and even rowers. My heart beat a little faster as I recognized signs of life that stood the test of time. Technology might have changed, but maybe people hadn’t that much.

  I saw a large building with a spotted crown blinking somewhere above the building. A car drove right through the hologram. “Crown Casino! Don’t tell me that’s still going.” I looked beyond. The Exhibition Building had been greatly extended, but I knew what it was. When food events were on, I used to hide in the loading bays and steal whatever I could find.