“Stop him,” a stranger’s voice shouted. “Ambulance. We need an ambulance.” A hand on his head. A strange, soft caress. “It’s going to be okay. I won’t let him hit you again.”
“He’s the devil,” his grandfather screamed. “A monster.”
“Monster,” Mace whispered as his mind shut down. “Can’t remember the number.”
“Where’s that ambulance?” the woman shouted. “We need it now.”
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Mace blinked several times, and his reflection came back into focus. He’d been unconscious when they took him from his grandfather. He never saw him again, and he never found out who’d saved him. His life in the months after that beating had been a blur of hospitals, courts, offices, and then finally foster care.
At nine years old, he’d been placed in his first foster home, and he hadn’t been surprised when his new parents turned out to be monsters, too. He’d known for years that the world was filled with them.
He was living proof. His father and grandfather’s genes lived on in him.
“Hey.” Keiko’s voice snapped him back to the present. “Stop admiring your pretty face and come with me. I found something.”
She was staring at him as though she was worried for his sanity. He almost laughed. That boat had sailed a long time ago.
“Interesting new look,” he said as he pushed away from the washbasin.
She’d found a pair of cream pants that were far too big for her and cut off the legs to make shorts. They were fastened at the waist by a belt that almost wrapped around her twice. Her dress hadn’t been spared her scissors, either. She’d cut off the bottom section to turn it into a top.
As though she’d already forgotten what she was wearing, she glanced down at her clothes. “Can’t kick or run in that dress. This will have to do until we get out of here. I couldn’t find shoes that fit, though.”
The look of disgust on her face made Mace laugh. “That’s because you have tiny, baby-sized feet.”
“My feet are perfectly in proportion to the rest of my body.” She waved a hand at him. “And you can hardly talk. You’re not exactly average sized. Your feet are huge.”
“You know what they say, the bigger the feet, the bigger the…”
Other women might have been embarrassed. Not Keiko. She laughed at him. “I have experience with your perfectly proportioned body. As far as I can see, the only part of you that doesn’t measure up is your brain.”
“Now that’s just plain mean.”
“You’ll cope. Now come and see what I’ve found.”
Clasping his hand in hers, she dragged him from the room. He couldn’t help but thread his fingers through hers and go where she led. It was a compulsion, the need to feel closer to her. The smile of mischief and approval that she shot him over her shoulder made his stomach fill with butterflies.
It was official. He’d turned into a fourteen-year-old girl.
She led him down the corridor decorated with black-and-white photos of abandoned buildings. Some of them Mace recognized from his childhood. One had been an insane asylum, famous for illegal lobotomies. Another was a high-security prison that specialized in death-row inmates.
“Miriam sure does love her cheery art,” he muttered.
On the far side of the living room, Keiko let go of his hand to open a door. She waved him inside. “Voilà. The office. And it’s connected to the security hub. Maybe you can check the building cameras from here instead of going down there.”
“Hot damn.” He rubbed his hands together as he headed straight for the control panel. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
Her bare feet were silent on the carpet as she came to stand beside him. It took all of his self-control to stop from pulling her close to him. Instead, he stabbed at the screen. And nothing happened.
“It won’t let me access it,” he said with frustration. “It’s probably a security thing. You’d need the right code to remotely connect with it.”
“I can’t remote access anything because of the signal jamming, but I might be able to tap into the panel and get the cameras up for us.” She waved her fingernails at him.
Mace scanned the room. “I don’t see a keyboard around here.”
“Keyboard? The only keyboard I’ve seen in years was the one your tech guy was using. No, I mean my nails are hardware. There are chips embedded in them. Watch.”