“That’s my wife,” I explain. “It’s a rather long and complicated story.”
“Not really,” Doc says. “Garrett was probably cleaning you up and using the girl to do it. If what you say is true and you’re not Company.”
“Yeah.” Sasha sighs. “That’s probably right.”
“So you’re the man everyone around here is counting on to bring our boy out of this terrible situation he finds himself in?”
“Our boy?” I make a face. “He’s not my boy. I’m here as a favor to her.” I nod at Sasha. “She said Donovan is worth saving, so.” I shrug. “Whatever.”
Doc turns to look at Donovan. He’s pale right now but you can just tell that’s not his normal pallor. His hair is dark, almost black. And he’s built different than, say… well, every other Company man I’ve ever met. Including Garrett. They are all chiseled and muscular. Fair, and blond, and light-eyed. With the exception of Nick, of course. His brown eyes have always been out of place in that way.
But Donovan here looks lean. Not skinny. Lean. Like his body was bred for something other than killing people. He’s built like a guy who might win a gold medal in swimming or run the Boston Marathon just for fun. Or… a model, maybe. He reminds me of Ronin. Except Ronin has those brilliant blue eyes and according to Donovan’s chart, his are hazel.
I walk over to Donovan wanting to see those hazel eyes for some reason. Sydney is dark like this too. Her eyes are brown, though. Like Nick’s. Her father was a Wyoming senator for decades but my wife was not well-bred the way these girls in this house are. She was some kind of mistake, I think. I never ask her about the past. It’s better left dead. And I doubt she even knows many of the details, anyway. She was given to Garrett as a girl. Assigned to him, is maybe the better way to put it.
Sydney was a throwaway.
The girls in this house—including Sasha—are all keepers.
Donovan’s eyes are closed, of course. So there’s no way to even get a look at his peepers unless I invade his space and open his eyelids myself. And maybe I’m not the most cultured man on this earth, but understand limits.
“I like Donovan,” Doc says. He walks up to me and we stand shoulder to shoulder. “I very much want to save him if it’s possible.” He pauses. I look over at him because it feels like he’s waiting for me to do this. “Is it possible, Mr. Case?”
“It’s just Merc. And I don’t know yet. We’re gonna have to bring him out of it so I can do an evaluation using my own cocktail of drugs.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem. He’s not under very deep. Just enough to keep him from waking.”
“Good,” I mutter under my breath. “Hopefully we can do that tomorrow. Well, today, I guess. It’s almost morning now.”
“I should warn you that his second is… disconcerting.”
“I can imagine.”
“No. I don’t think you can, Mr. Case. Donovan was always a very special boy. A child genius. Went to medical school as a teenager. Had a private practice specializing in plastic surgery in LA by the time he was in his early twenties. But that’s not what’s special about him. They did this on purpose.”
“They split him, you mean?” Sasha asks. She’s on the other side of me now.
“Exactly.”
“How do ya know that?” I ask.
“I did some digging. I have access to the Company medical vault so I got his file.”
“Vault? What vault?” Sasha sounds a little confused. “I was under the impression that everything was destroyed?”
“It was. This is a back-up vault that I put in place myself decades ago. When things went digital in the late nineties I was still in charge of certain things. So I had the coders program in redundancy so all records were duplicated. One set to the main vault, one set to my vault.”
“Sounds sneaky,” I say.
Doc smiles, but only to himself. Like he’s remembering the good ol’ days when he really was a sneaky little Company fucker like all the rest of them.
“Do you still have it?” Sasha asks. “Or access to it?”
“Yeah,” Doc says. “It’s all where it’s supposed to be. But of course, that system aged out, and it was all done again. This time I wasn’t in charge. So I lost track of Donovan.” He pauses to look at me. “But none of that is what matters. It’s the stuff they did to him when he was very small.”
“On the island,” Sasha says.
Doc nods, then looks at her. “Were you ever on that island?”
Sasha shakes her head no, but this is the second time she’s done that. Like she’s holding something back. “But I know about it. My father was a Company arms dealer before they killed him. They ran hunts all over Wyoming where we were from. Practice hunts, maybe?”