Trance. Part 22

"I'm not?"

"You're injured, Gage, and you should be taking it easy."

His indecipherable expression s.h.i.+fted squarely into anger. "I don't see you taking it easy."

"I didn't get knocked unconscious by a chunk of ice."

"Teresa-"

"No, Gage, you are not working out with us."

And there it was-the shuttered, cut-off Gage I was so good at producing. He squared his shoulders, pivoted neatly on one foot, and marched out of the gym.

I watched the door swing shut and heard the bang. I didn't chase him, though I wanted to. I wanted to grab him and apologize for doing that in front of the others. I'd just embarra.s.sed the h.e.l.l out of him, and I wasn't even sure why. h.e.l.lo, overreaction.

Renee and William quickly returned to their work on the free weights. Marco shuffled his feet and fixed his attention on the floor. I ignored them all, flabbergasted and furious. Flabbergasted at his walking out on me, and furious for thinking a few hours of s.e.x could bridge the emotional wall he'd kept carefully between us since we met. Even more furious for not trusting Gage to know his own limits when it came to injury and personal training. For letting my worry and my feelings for him affect my judgment so badly.

Dr. Seward was right.

s.h.i.+t.

If Gage were ever under Specter's influence, I couldn't deliver the killing shot. I knew I couldn't when Seward asked me, and I knew it again in the gymnasium. I would rather let Gage/Specter kill me than watch him, or my other friends, die at my hands. It created a liability on the team: me. A bad position for a leader to be in.

"Teresa?" Marco had wandered away from the wall, concern furrowing his brow.

"I'm fine," I said, shrugging it off and hoping I managed a nonchalant smile. "I'm going to get out of here. You guys enjoy your workout."

I scooted before they had a chance to argue. I needed s.p.a.ce.

Hoping a shower would clear my head, I returned to the Housing Unit. It felt odd being in the bathrooms alone and able to see. The memories of my shower with Gage were still so fresh, I thought I could feel him standing behind me. Watching me intently, memorizing my curves and flaws.

No. I refocused my attention on Specter. He could attack at any moment, through anyone in the complex whose mind was weak enough to exploit. His victims so far, from the greasy blonde to a near-comatose Janel, had been compromised, whether from drugs and liquor or from injury. We were vulnerable to him, and I hated it. I also didn't know what the h.e.l.l to do about it.

I turned and let the water cascade through my hair.

The door squeaked. Gage appeared in the shower archway moments later, a towel cinched around his waist. The bruise on his chest still stood out like a splash of blue and black paint; it didn't seen to bother him. Those haunted shadows were back beneath his eyes.

"Hey," he said, surprised.

"Hey." I wiped water from my eyes. "By the way you ran out of the gym, I thought you'd be halfway to Long Beach by now."

"I'm sorry I acted like that."

I blinked. I was the one who was supposed to be doing the apologizing. "I had no right, Gage."

"You were just doing your job."

I planted both hands on my hips, almost wis.h.i.+ng he was angry with me. It would be easier if he was angry. Angry Gage was less likely to shut down than Quiet Contemplative Gage. "You drive me bats.h.i.+t, you do realize this."

He smiled. "My sinister plan is working, then."

"That wasn't a compliment." His smile stayed, though its intensity faded. I continued, falling headfirst into my frustration. "You get angry with me for good reason, then apologize for it. You seem to want to be with me, but you won't talk to me. You're standing there in a towel, and all I want to do is rip it off and rerun last night with my eyes wide open, but what happens after? We go back to being Cipher and Trance and forget the rest?"

Utter bewilderment telegraphed across his face. My words stayed in the air, an invisible barrier between us. Many long seconds pa.s.sed, marked by the constant spray of water against my back. Bewilderment slowly faded to resignation. He padded toward me.

No. Past me. c.r.a.p.

One of the scars on his abdomen stood out, contrasting sharply with the bruised skin. It definitely wasn't an appendix scar. He'd never mentioned how he got them; I never thought he'd tell me if I asked, and now I wanted to know more than almost anything. I was desperate to know him. To prove that last night hadn't been a huge mistake.

"Tell me something truthful, Gage."

He stopped in front of my stall. "Like what?"

"I don't care. Something I don't know about you, as long as it's honest."

"You don't think I've been honest with you?"

"I think you tell me only as much as makes you comfortable, and you know what? Relations.h.i.+ps are uncomfortable. They're hard, and they only work when two people are open with each other. And given what we're up against right now and the sheer odds against us winning ..."

"What, Teresa? Say it."

"I can't invest in a casual relations.h.i.+p with you when I know it's going to affect my judgment. It will, because it has already, and it should stop right here where it began."

He narrowed his eyes. "This started before last night. For me it started the moment I saw you in Bakersfield."

I s.h.i.+vered under the powerful emotion in his voice. He continued to stand in front of my stall. Indecision played across his face, until something finally won. "I didn't move to Portland to help a friend. I moved there to try and save my brother."

His ... brother? "Jasper died in the War."

"My foster brother, Nathan. He was two years younger than me, already with the family I was first fostered with." A sad smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. "Nate was a good guy who made a lot of bad choices over the years. He got mixed up with the wrong people in Portland. Disappeared. I went to look for him. He turned up in a Dumpster two months later." Anger and grief flashed briefly across his face-a look with which I was all too familiar. "I was too late to save him."

Gage stepped into the next stall and turned on the faucet. He adjusted the temperature of the spray, testing it with his fingers. I watched his slow, deliberate movements. I wanted to go to him, hold him, console him. I didn't. If he'd wanted that, he wouldn't have put a six-inch-thick, four-foot-tall tile barrier between us.

"But you stayed anyway," I said, hoping to keep the conversation going, break a few bricks out of his wall now that it was showing some cracks.

"St. Louis was never my home, so I had no reason to go back," he said to the water. "I met a guy who lived across the hall from the apartment I was renting. He ran a teen work release facility, and he got me in touch with some people." He flexed his shoulders, as though buying time before saying the rest. "I joined a corrections officer training program."

I stared, not sure I'd heard him right over the roar of the showerheads. Corrections officer. That explained some things.

"It fit," he said. "I never would have thought of it on my own, and yet being a CO worked. It was d.a.m.ned hard, don't get me wrong, even working with juveniles. But if one kid got out and stayed out, we considered it worthwhile."

The irony that he'd been a corrections officer was not lost on me. Nor was the weight of his story-the familiar search for a job that meant something, and finding one that gave him a sense of purpose. He'd found something in corrections I'd never managed to find as a waitress.

My gaze dropped to the pale lines cutting across his back and abdomen. "Is that how you got those scars?"

Gage closed his eyes and put his face directly under the spray. He stayed there for almost a full minute, until I decided he wasn't going to answer. Then he pulled back, blinked water from his eyes, and turned to face me.

"A couple of years ago, some kids on my block thought I ratted them out to another CO. After they got out of solitary, they cornered me in the gym. I was always a good fighter, but it was four to one." Even though he recounted the event without details or emotion, I saw it clearly in my mind. Felt the accompanying fear and rage, and wanted to smash those four teenage offenders into pulp for hurting Gage.

He continued: "I spent a week in the hospital and was back to work a month later. I kept my guard up for a long, long time. I didn't want to be distracted ever again, to be cornered like that because I wasn't paying attention to my job." He paused. "It's one reason I've held back from you. The way you spin me around scares me."

I was struck dumb by the confession, and since all I could do was stare at him, he returned to his shower. I watched him soap up a washcloth and get to work, while his words tumbled around in my head. "One reason?"

He quirked an eyebrow. "What?"

"I was a distraction, one reason you held back. What was the other?"

"Doesn't matter now."

"No?"

"No, because you're not a distraction, Teresa. None of that old s.h.i.+t should matter anymore."

He was right. Our personal neuroses would never be far from reach-they were too much a part of ourselves. We didn't have to let them control us, though. We could be more than the sum of our parts, by accepting what we were and how we felt, instead of denying it. Use it to our advantage.

"What are you thinking so hard about?" he asked.

"Our next move."

"Which is?"

"Specter, as always." I reached for my own washcloth. "I keep trying to puzzle out ways to capture him or locate his physical body, and I always come back to Ethan's suggestion."

"Using bait?"

"Yes. Not Ethan, though, he's too weak. I doubt Specter would go for him even if Ethan let his guard down long enough. That isn't even the big problem."

"What is the big problem?"

"Holding onto Specter's mind once we've got it." I squeezed the washcloth, watching suds form. I liked this-talking out the problem with Gage and getting his input. "Even if I could make a force field to hold his consciousness, I couldn't keep it up long enough to make a difference. We need a more permanent solution, some way to get both Specter and his host into stasis or something."

"Stasis?"

"Or something. We just need to keep him in one place, away from his physical body while we search for it."

Gage rinsed soap off his face. "What if we're preempting ourselves here? We've had Specter's description out to every law enforcement agency for the last four days. He can't look that different after fifteen years. Someone matching the few early photos we have is bound to turn up."

"Maybe," I said, unconvinced. "But Specter doesn't stay anonymous for thirty years just to get picked up on a speeding ticket and booked into the system. My gut tells me the cops won't find him before we do."

"So even if we figure out a way to bait him, we still need a trap to spring."

"Precisely."

And how do you keep a mind separated from its body? Especially a mind as strong as Specter's?

I hung the hair dryer on its hook and shook out my hair. The purple smudges on my hairline and throat were now as natural to my eyes as plain pink skin had been two weeks ago. I adjusted the short jacket of my uniform, pleased with the fit. Someone had picked it out for me and left it in my room. Renee ranked at the top of my suspects list. I wasn't a fas.h.i.+on plate and didn't care what I wore, as long as it was both comfortable and functional.

The ensemble consisted of a tank top the same silver as a pair of knee boots with wedge heels, a gunmetal-gray three-quarters jacket, and matching low-slung pants. The effect was professional enough for a television interview, with a dash of my own personality to give it some sparkle. I checked my appearance once more before leaving my room.

Gage's door opened just as I closed mine. He stepped out, dolled up in a body-hugging uniform: black slacks tucked into a pair of cobalt-blue boots, topped with a blue-and-black patterned s.h.i.+rt. The colors didn't swirl, exactly, just coexisted in the material so it looked blue from some angles and black from others.

He wasn't paying attention and nearly slammed into me.

"What's your hurry?" I asked. "We're not late."

His eyes blazed. "The trap."

"What trap?"

"Specter's trap. If we can lure him, I know how to trap him."

Speechless, I let him grab my hand and pull me toward the elevator, listening as he rattled off his idea.

Marco and Agent McNally were easy to find. We had to rustle Renee and William out of bed in order to get their feedback. William took the time to throw on his uniform; Renee trudged into the conference room in rumpled pajamas. She yawned as she sat, extending her jaw to comical proportions.

"Please don't tell me, T," she said, "that you dragged us down here to tell you how stunning you look for your television debut."

"You can go back to bed in ten minutes," I said. "Gage has an idea."

Renee held up her hand and made a spinning motion with one finger. I rolled my eyes.

"I still don't have anything in the way of bait," Gage said, when attention turned to him. "But I know how to trap him away from his physical body long enough to find it."

McNally straightened up in her chair, as fresh and awake as I'd ever seen her during the day. "What do you have in mind, Cipher?" she asked.

"Psystorm."

"Si-what?" Renee asked.

"Psystorm. He's a Bane, one of those imprisoned right now on Manhattan Island. I remember him because my mentor Delphi fought him a few times. She also mentioned one day having to train Trance to fight him, because they had similar powers. Back then, anyway."

"The name is familiar," Marco said. "What is his power?"

"With line-of-sight contact, he can seize control of your conscious mind. He can affect your thoughts and the signals your brain sends to the rest of your body. Freeze you up. It'd be a risk to the host, but Psystorm could keep Specter inside one of us."

Renee smacked her hand palm-down on the tabletop. "Wait a second, you just said Psystorm is a Bane. Why the h.e.l.l would he help us capture one of his own kind?"

Gage leaned forward. "Specter avoided prison all these years and never made an attempt to free the people he led during the War. Sounds like a reasonable excuse for some payback."

"What would he have to lose?" I asked. "We were raised to believe all Banes were bad, but maybe they aren't. We should study Psystorm's background file and figure out a way to make a deal. Not for free, obviously, but we don't know his price until we ask."

"And what about after?" Renee asked. "What the h.e.l.l's to stop Psystorm from turning on us when it's all over?"

"Nothing, but I think it's a chance worth taking. The alternative is sitting here twiddling our thumbs and hoping for the best next time Specter decides to take potshots at us."

Marco flinched, but I got my point across. I wanted their support-no, needed it-for this decision. If I didn't get it I would d.a.m.ned well do it without them. Psystorm was a Bane, but I had to believe he could change and be someone other than who he'd been fifteen years ago.

"I think it's a good idea, Trance," McNally said. "I'll have my office send over the file on Psystorm, so we can work on your approach. We can't offer him the world, but I'm sure there's something he wants."