Total pages in book: 149
Estimated words: 138217 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138217 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Your big brother,
Déwei
Chapter 33
Subject V-1 is showing significant neural “burns.” We need to stop the alternating drug regimen before the subject begins to lose cognitive function.
—Message from Dr. Upashna Leslie to Councilor Marshall Hyde (5 May 2069)
AS HE AND Theo continued to search the facility, Yakov’s bear nudged at him to move closer to her, dazzle her with his prowess. The human part of him told the bear to rein it in. Theo might’ve allowed him to cuddle her in bed and petted him with wild pleasure, but she wasn’t yet ready to be dazzled as the bear wanted her dazzled.
Naked. The bear wanted naked. Lots of naked.
After all, it had spent years waiting for her to turn up. It figured now that Yakov knew Theo could be trusted, the courtship was done. Time to get naked. Naked skin privileges would also make her feel better, the bear argued. She was so sad and angry inside and what better cure for that than hard-core cuddling?
We have to be subtle, he reminded the bear. Valya had won Silver by being subtle, hadn’t he? Psy like subtle.
Valya climbed up Silver’s building and appeared outside her door, his bear pointed out helpfully.
Shaking his head to stop the argument going on inside his head, he lifted up the bed he’d already searched and stood it against the wall. And yes, he flexed a few muscles in the hope that Theo would notice, but he was subtle about it.
No ripping his clothes off, then strutting over to her and putting his hands on his hips to best display his assets as his bear suggested.
He didn’t glance over to see if she had in fact noticed, which was as well, because his eye caught on something. One of the legs of the bed didn’t look right. All the other beds he’d examined so far had featured a single continuous metal frame, but this one appeared to have legs that could be screwed on or off.
“Means a cavity inside,” he said to himself, thinking aloud. “Question is whether it’s deep enough to be a useful space, or just enough for the leg to be screwed in.”
Unscrewing it was child’s play—it hadn’t been built to withstand bear strength. He pulled and it was off.
A cascade of color bouncing off the polished but dusty floor.
“What’s that sound?” Theo ran over, her scent a welcome caress over his senses. “It sounded like pebbles.” That was when her eyes fell on the colorful array at his feet.
They crouched down in concert, each picking up a different pill. Hers was long and red, a capsule in which tiny particles tumbled when she turned the capsule this way and that. His was a small and hard tablet, half green and half pink.
“A patient hoarding or avoiding medication,” he murmured, picking up another jewel-like pill; this one was hexagonal in shape but a bland beige in color. “For a long time, too.”
Theo stared at the array of color. “No,” she said. “Look at the different varieties. If we say that the patient was given one of each every day, there are still only enough pills for four or five days. Ten days if we split the pills into alternate days.”
Yakov realized he’d made a critical mistake; he’d assumed that no one would give a patient so many pills in a single day. “You were more on the tech side of nursing, right? Developing medical items?”
“I was a drone,” she muttered. “I chose the nursing degree, thought I could use it to get out. But my grandfather punished me for rebelling against him by sticking me in a dead-end position that I couldn’t leave without abandoning Pax—because if I left, I knew I’d have to go under, beyond deep.
“Otherwise my grandfather would’ve hunted me down out of spite; and by then, he’d learned how much pain he could inflict on me without my subconscious reaching out to Pax. He would’ve taken great pleasure in keeping me as his whipping girl after I conveniently made myself disappear.”
Yakov went motionless, the bear’s playfulness replaced by predatory rage. “He physically abused you.”
A shrug. “I never cried.” Fierce pride. “And I was bored out of my skull in my job, so I made it my business to learn as much as I could about what it was my grandfather manufactured in that particular facility. Including all of these pills.”
It took teeth-gritted concentration for Yakov to focus on her words and not on the information she’d so casually shared.
“I’d built up quite the chemical arsenal simply by picking up detritus from the factory floor,” she told him, a gleam in her eye. “I was planning to poison Grandfather at our next meeting, but an assassin blew him up before I could. It was the one murder I would’ve never regretted.”
Yakov’s bear rumbled in his chest, proud of her ferociousness even as he wanted to go out there and bring Marshall Hyde back to life so he could rip him to shreds with his claws. The bear’s rumble yet in his tone, he said, “Any therapeutic reason a person would be given this many pills?”