Abigail tried to grab her sister, but Naomi was glowing more brightly and Abigail pulled her hand back with a gasp. “Sis . . .”
“Go,” Naomi said. She sounded funny, not unclear or slurred, but like she was buzzing, almost as if she was overcharged with electricity. “I can control it. And it’ll wear off. It did with Christopher, it will with me. In time.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “It’s so good to feel . . . everything again.”
Adriana dragged Abigail away. “We’ll be more help to her if we’re out and safe,” she said as she followed Amy, who wasn’t moving all that fast toward the exit.
Claudia, Lorraine, and Serene didn’t look eager to leave, either. I was sure that all of them wanted to help Naomi in some way. Based on Abigail being unable to touch her, though, I was also sure that Naomi was able to not get helped unless she wanted to be. And her expression said she didn’t want to be.
There was only one good option. “Malcolm, get everyone out of here.”
“Not leaving you, Missus Chief.”
I turned to him. “You have to. You’re the only one who can actually get the right people on this and I can’t do what I have to with all the other girls here.” I put my hand on his arm. “I know you want to stay to protect me, I know that’s your entire job. And you’re damned good at that job. But you’re also supposed to protect Jamie and right now, she and the other kids are in danger. No one’s expecting this. More computer hacking, more attacks, maybe, but not this.”
Buchanan looked at Naomi and back to me. “You’re in as much danger of being killed as you are being saved.”
“I know. But I have to try to help her, and get us both out of here alive, or I’ll never be able to look Chuckie in the face ever again. You know the Teenagers From Hell have called for backup by now. The girls can’t get out of here without your help—you know it, I know it, and they know it.”
“You’re full of it, Missus Chief.” He looked like he was going to continue to argue, but instead he jerked a little and nodded his head. “Fine. You be careful.” He took my hand, gave it a squeeze, then turned and headed off. “All of you, with me, now.”
The girls went after him. I looked back at Naomi. She closed her eyes. I counted in my head. In fifteen seconds she spoke. “They’re back in the Embassy.”
That timed out right for them to have made it back to the bathroom with the power cube in it if they were going at hyperspeed and not stopping to search for things or beat people up along the way. I wasn’t leading them, so it was a safe bet they hadn’t gotten lost or turned around.
“You can see them there?” She nodded. “Did you make Malcolm go, or just tell him to go in his mind?”
“The latter. I’m not the bad guy, Kitty.”
“No, you’re just really scary right now, Mimi. Honestly. You need to come with me. We have to get some adrenaline into you, pronto.”
“No. I’m ending this. Now.”
As she said this, the door was unlocked and flung open, and Reid and LaRue came out, toting some impressively big guns. “Seriously? You two aren’t as smart as you like to think you are.”
Naomi laughed and the guns exploded, but the kids weren’t hurt. Hoped this was because Naomi knew we needed more information from them. “You want to threaten my family and friends? See how you like it.”
Reid and LaRue were lifted into the air, by nothing as far as I could see, though they were now glowing a bit, too. “Put us down, you bitch!” LaRue shouted.
“It’s really stupid to call the incredibly powerful woman holding you a good ways up in the air a bitch, kids. Just saying.”
Reid didn’t look frightened. “You know, Father said this might happen. That she’d OD. I wish he was here to see it.”
Holy crap, the Mastermind had foreseen this? What else was he prepped for? And who the hell was he? We needed him neutralized as if the safety of the world depended upon it, because it did.
“I’m not going to overdose you horrible little creep,” Naomi said.
I wasn’t so sure of that, but kept it to myself.
Both teenagers started to gasp and their eyes bugged out a bit. Figured Naomi was squeezing them in some way. Whatever way it was, it looked painful. Perhaps she hadn’t let the guns kill them not to keep them around for questioning but so she could kill them more slowly later. Like now later.
“Mimi, they have answers we need. We can’t kill them.”
She turned to me and her eyes were terrifying—open so wide I could see the whites all around her irises, and glowing, just like the rest of her. “I knew you’d say that. ‘Don’t kill them.’ My brother and aunt are dead. Who said ‘don’t kill them’?”
“Um, all of us.”
“I mean on their side!”
“Those kinds of things separate us from them, Mimi. It’s part of how you know you’re a good guy—when you only kill someone because you have to, not because you want to.”
She looked back at LaRue and Reid and released the hold on them so they could breathe. Maybe if they’d begged for their lives, or lied and said they were sorry, or just shut the hell up and gasped for air, things would have gone differently.
But they didn’t do any of those things.
LaRue smirked. “You know your husband loves her more than he loves you, don’t you?”
“And you know he’s in on all of this, right?” Reid said quickly. “And always has been.”
“He doesn’t, he’s not, and he never was,” I said. “Mimi, they’re baiting you because Father really hates Chuckie for some reason. They want you to give in.”
“You were his second choice,” LaRue taunted. “We all know it.”
“How would they know anything about this?” I asked her. “This is just part of their indoctrination.”
“Someone knows,” Reid said. “Or we wouldn’t.”
“Second choice, second choice,” LaRue said in a singsong voice.
“You won’t know anything any more,” Naomi snarled.
“Mimi, they know you can read them. They’re trying to distract you, to play you, so you don’t find out the truth about who Father is, what else they have going on, and all that. We need to question them, and you need to not listen to their lies.”
She turned on me. “And you need to stop telling me what to do!”
“They must be programmed or indoctrinated or whatever to self-destruct, like the androids. At least in extreme cases.” Naomi certainly looked like an Extreme Case. She was glowing more brightly and was now floating above the floor.
“Why would we do that?” Reid asked. “We don’t want to die. We’re just telling her the truth.”
“You’d do it because you’re confident you’ll be brought right back, good as new, with all the old memories and all of the new ones intact.” They’d been inside their living quarters longer than just grabbing guns would have indicated. The chances that they’d taken pictures of themselves for download or upload or whatever they called it in their cloning process were high.
“I can’t wait to watch her kill you,” LaRue said. “When she sees that her husband still loves you more.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. He does not, you little twerps.”
And, maybe if the next few things hadn’t happened, things would also have been different.
But happen they did.
CHAPTER 88
BUCHANAN RETURNED, with Jeff and Chuckie in tow. Adriana returned, with White and Gower in tow. And the reinforcements the Crazy Super Twins had called arrived, with lots and lots of firepower in tow.