Total pages in book: 36
Estimated words: 33658 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 168(@200wpm)___ 135(@250wpm)___ 112(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 33658 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 168(@200wpm)___ 135(@250wpm)___ 112(@300wpm)
“I don’t have fourteen years of patience, which is how long it’s been since we last saw each other. Is there someplace we can sit down and talk?”
“I met you in a library forever ago. There’s no logic to how you can be standing in my house. What is this about?”
“Science. And I’m just as surprised as you to be here and to have seen your name on the list of people who might be able to help me.” I hold up my hands. “I promise you. This is a business visit.” I lower my hands, my voice softening. “The way we parted ways has always been a nagging regret I’ve never fully understood. We were kids who barely knew each other. It’s really good to see you.”
She studies me several beats, her intelligent gaze sizing me up, before she motions down the hall. “This is still weird, but okay. This way.”
I hang back a bit, flip the locks into place, and follow her into a shiny, all-white, rectangular-shaped kitchen that sparkles with the kind of perfection you expected of a soldier’s home. But then, she’d grown up a soldier’s daughter.
She brushes the windblown brown silk of her hair from her face and motions toward the table, offering me a seat, but without any indication that she plans to sit down herself. I arch a brow. “You’re not going to join me?”
“Not until I know how and why you’re here,” she says, leaning against a counter. “And frankly, I’d rather you sit while I stand. It makes me feel like I have a running chance if this reunion turns bad.”
I chuckle and grab a wooden chair from the table, whipping it around and straddling it to rest my arms on the back. “Happy now?”
“No. No, I am not happy. I feel like I am in the Twilight Zone. And I can’t think of one reason why the boy who stood me up for a date fourteen years ago would show up on my doorstep out of the blue like this. How did you even know where to find me?”
Damn, there it is. The reason I deserved to be slapped. “That night—”
She holds up a hand. “I don’t need to know.”
“I want—”
“Please don’t,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s awkward. It’s over. And actually, just thinking about how I sat in that library for hours waiting for you is making me ridiculously and irrationally mad. Maybe you should just tell me why you’re here.”
As much as I want to push, want to explain the past, that prickly instinct I felt outside is ever present and warning me that trouble is nearby, and I need to get to the point. “We need your help, Layla.”
“We—being who?”
“We—being my special operations unit.”
“You joined the Army?”
“Fourteen years ago.”
She blinks and seems to process the timeline to our missed date, but she doesn’t comment on that point. “Why in the world would a special operations unit need my help?”
“There’s a highly addictive street drug being circulated around the general population. And when I say addictive, I mean, once you use this drug, you can’t stop without dying. If we don’t come up with a method to safely wean people off the drug, we’re looking at mass casualties. We’re hoping you can help us make that happen.”
She pales. “Oh, God. I haven’t heard about this at all.”
“We’ve kept it as on the down-low as possible, but that won’t be the case for long.”
“I want to help. I do. I will, but I’m an astrobiologist, Jensen. I don’t know the slightest thing about street drugs.”
“This isn’t a typical street drug. The drug is created from military technology, and by that, I mean of an otherworldly nature.”
The look of utter horror on her face defies my suspicions that she had knowledge of ICE before this and that she might have been in Germany helping Julian. She sits down next to me, the space barrier between us forgotten. “Please tell me I’m misunderstanding, and you don’t mean an alien organism, because an alien organism in our environment could have devastating, unpredictable results. Maybe not immediately, but over time. It’s what we fear at NASA, what we work sunup to sundown to prevent.”
“I don’t know if you would call this an organism. Then again, maybe you would. We don’t know at this point exactly what we’re dealing with. The lab reports have identified an unknown component. What we do know is that almost three years ago, the Army created a serum made from a DNA sample obtained in a…shall we say, unique aircraft, back in the 1950s. They proceeded to tell a group of two hundred soldiers they were being immunized against a chemical agent the enemy had obtained. Those men became what we now know as GTECH Super Soldiers. Not long after the injections were completed, the DNA that created the serum was destroyed, and with it, the ability to replicate it. Our scientists believe this street drug is a synthetic recreation of the serum.”