Red Zone (Red Zone 1)

“Well, yeah,” Striker said.

When she took a deep breath, ready to shout some more, he held up a hand to stop her. “You can’t be trusted in the mist. Your mind wanders too much. You show me you can stop thinking, then you can walk through the mist.”

“That’s insane.”

“That’s the condition. You comply, or hello, Mr. Sandman.”

“What does that even mean?” She threw up her hands in frustration.

“That’s what I miss most,” Mace said around a mouthful of nutrition bar. “Nobody ever gets our cultural references. I feel like my sparkling wit is lost on the people of this new world.”

“You have wit?” She glared at him.

“Can we knock her out again?” Mace asked his team leader.

“Come.” Striker patted the boulder beside him. “Sit with me. We’ve still got a long ways to go.”

“I’m very annoyed with you.”

“I know.” His eye danced. “And if Mace wasn’t here, I’d make it up to you. But I know how much you hate an audience.”

She blinked at him for a minute. “Was that a sexual reference?”

His chuckle made her want to kick him, but the heat had gone out of her anger. Mainly, she just felt weary. With a humph of annoyance, she sat down beside Striker but resisted when he tried to hold her close—even though it felt like she was cutting her nose off in spite of her face.

“Whatever I want, whenever I want it,” he whispered against her ear, making her shiver. “And right now, I want to hold you, bébé.”

“Unbelievably irritating, arrogant man,” she grumbled as she moved closer to him, feeling his arm slide around her waist and liking it far too much. “I’m doing this under duress.”

He pressed a kiss to her temple.

“You know,” Mace said as he watched her, “the more I get to know you, the more I wonder why we’re bothering to rescue you. Do you even know how to study our genetics? I mean, how experienced in this field are you? What did you do at CommTECH, anyway?”

She narrowed her eyes at the man. He was really beginning to irritate her. “I was nothing more than a cog in the wheel. There are a million or more biotech engineers who can do what I do. There’s nothing special about me.”

“Then what makes you think you can study our DNA and come up with answers?”

Part of her wanted to rattle off her experience and study credentials, in some misguided show of ego in the face of his blatant disbelief in her skills. The rest of her wanted to tell him to go to hell and find another scientist. Striker saved her from making a choice.

“Friday here graduated top of her class in genetics. She won a year’s research scholarship to study with a Doctor Swanson in Germany, but she couldn’t afford the rest of the costs to take it up. She had to go work off her study debt at CommTECH, instead. If her field of study had interested them, they might have paid for her to go to Germany, but it didn’t. Tell him what your specialist area is, bébé.”

“How do you know that stuff?” She stared up at him and, as usual, felt the world fade away. Having Striker’s full attention made everything else feel as though it was a hologram and he was the reality.

“I had you researched. I read the report last night.” He brushed her hair off her forehead. “I had to know who I was dealing with.”

Of course he did. And it was stupid to be disappointed that he hadn’t wanted to know just because he was interested in her. Pressing her feelings down deep, where they usually lived, she turned her attention to the giant, annoying idiot.

“I studied genetic anomalies. The scholarship would have let me take part in Doctor Swanson’s study on how the slightest genetic manipulation could prolong the use of implants and make them less invasive for the host.” She glanced away before looking back at them, wondering if she should tell them the area she was most interested in. Wondering if they would think it was a setup, her approaching them. She took a deep breath and gave them honesty.

“What I most wanted to study was the genetic impact caused by the low levels of chemical seepage and radiation that are emitted by the implants and absorbed into the host’s system. In the implants I studied, especially the ones in the brain, I found significant genetic adaptation in relation to the host. Most of it was localized, but my hypothesis was that, given enough sustained exposure to the implant emissions, the overall genetic makeup of the host could, and would, change. I wanted to study these changes, to see what the implications were for the future. To, in essence, predict the genetic development of the human race in relation to the impact caused by the implants.”

It was the men’s turn to look stunned.

“In other words…” Mace recovered first. “Your field of expertise is genetic deformities caused by manmade chemicals.”

“Yes.” She whispered the word, and there was silence.

It was Mace who broke it, and his voice was ice cold. “That’s a helluva coincidence. The one scientist who falls into our laps happens to be the one who is a specialist in chemically-mutated DNA.” He glared at his team leader. “You still sure she isn’t a spy sent by the Territory governments?”