On that note, she ate some of the cheese. The taste was sharp, but not unpleasantly so, and with the bread? Well, it was pretty much the best thing she had ever put in her mouth—although that was more a commentary on that thing mothers always said rather than the food itself.
Hunger was the best spice. Or whatever the phrase was.
Getting up from the table, she took the makeshift sandwich with her, and the next thing she knew, she was systematically going through the quarters like it was a crime scene—
Well, because it was. Three men had died here, and one of them—the one who was mounted on that wall out there—had been the result of her own actions.
She inspected everything from the bathroom, the changing area, the gun rack—
Rio found the car keys hanging on a nail by the rifles.
Chrysler. A fob with a single black-headed key. Sneaking it into her other pocket, she turned to Luke. Lucan. Whatever his name was. He was breathing easier, now, although that was a relative thing. He still looked like he was in pain, his brows pulled in tight across the bridge of his nose.
Maybe he needed some of what they’d given Kane, even though he certainly wasn’t wounded as badly.
Back at the bedside, she lowered herself down onto her knees and looked at the back of his hand, the one that had been burned so badly. Then she frowned. The skin seemed . . . a lot less red and inflamed, as if it was progressing through the healing process, but at a much faster rate than made any sense.
She thought of what the burn had looked like when they’d been locked out in the back parking lot, next to the fire. Not that she had any medical training outside of rudimentary CPR and first aid, but the injury had looked like a third-degree one, what with the uneven blisters that had extended out of his sleeve at the wrist and down his fingers. Now? It was like a bad sunburn, nothing more.
Miraculous.
In the back of her mind, the warning bell that had saved her too many times to count started to ring properly. It had been on the verge of getting serious about its job ever since she and Apex had hurried down that corridor upstairs together—and he had crouched and had to fight through that nothing-wrong hallway like it was an obstacle course of radioactive chemicals.
Rio cursed softly and thought about the strange trance that guard had put her in in the workroom, how her hand with the gun in it had lowered of its own volition.
But surely that hadn’t happened, right?
After all, she’d had how many blows to the head over the last how many days? It was more likely that her mind was malfunctioning than there was some sort of mystical anything going on.
And yet she couldn’t shake the sense that nothing was as it seemed.
Rio stayed beside the bed on the floor for a little longer, and then she told herself she needed to use this time wisely. Going over to the table once again, she took a piece of paper and a pencil from out of the clutter—and sat down with her back to the door in case she had to cover up what she was doing.
Closing her eyes, she pictured the clinic area. The stairwell. The workroom with its tables and those two desks and the bin of kilos in the corner.
When she reopened her lids, she started to sketch out the plans of everything she could recall about the facility. The effort was not only intel she intended to give her superiors . . . it felt like a test of her cognitive abilities.
If she lost those in this situation?
She was a dead woman.
Amere thirty miles away from where Rio was playing amateur architect, V re-formed on a country road out in the middle of nowhere. As he waited for Rhage to hop-along his Cassidy, he took out a hand-rolled, lit up with his Bic—which he’d gotten from the Pit, thank you very much—and looked at the mountains in the distance. The valley between the two ranges was a straight shot of flat and narrow, and he imagined, if he were a nature-loving type, that he’d find a lot of peace and comfort in the landscape. As it was, he was a tetchy, techy sonofabitch with stunted emotional growth, a god complex, and questionable taste in cartoons.
Hey, he liked Tom & Jerry. Not that he brought that up around Lassiter.
So no, he wasn’t all that impressed by the Mother Earth stuff.
Rhage materialized beside him. “Okay, let’s go. And I’ll do the talking since you’ve pulled on your grumpy pants about all this.”
“Not my fault the bunch of you have your heads wedged.”
“Isn’t that your favorite thing?”
They started walking toward a farmhouse that was so picture-perfect, V choked on the quaint. From its porch to the obligatory tree in the side yard, its chimney and the happy-face arrangement of its windows, he would be afraid, if he lived in such a place, that he’d start crapping sunbeams and Care Bears.