Heart of Steel Read Free Page B

generally came with staying in a hotel—this wasn’t even her hotel room in Hawaii. There was a slightly metallic smell to the air, and an oppressive, mechanical thrum filled the lower registers of her hearing. The bed appeared to be a twin, and the only one in the room. She tried to move, but then her entire body complained painfully, in a way that reminded her of the attack again. The pain was especially bad in her left knee, though she could wiggle her toes okay.
    Moving brought her attention to the fact that she was naked. She never slept naked. Granted, she was snug-gled between clean linen sheets, but still . Somebody had undressed her and put her in this bed for some reason.
    The idea made her skin crawl.
    She sat up slowly, her head gently spinning with a wave of vertigo, and swung her legs over the edge of her bed. She glanced around, looking for Jim—who would almost certainly be close by if she’d been injured and was in a hospital—but he was nowhere to be seen. The air was cool against her skin, and she shivered and broke out into goose bumps. She glanced down at her legs and found, to her surprise, that they were both still there. She had a flash of memory about a shark monster yanking on her leg, and felt certain that she should be missing at least some soft tissue.
    There was something odd about her left leg, though. She looked closer and saw a line of stitches around her leg just below the knee, and a distinct change in complexion below this border. The line was clean enough that the use of surgical adhesive was also likely.
    What the hell.
    Her blood ran cold, and she looked herself over for any other oddities. She found precise, rectangular patches of similar, lighter-colored skin across the right side of her ribs and on her right shoulder, likewise held in place with tidy, small sutures. When she poked at the one on her shoulder she felt the touch, but it seemed a bit distant. She reached down towards the pale lower leg…
    A crackle of static near the ceiling made her yelp in fright and instinctively wrap her hands protectively
    across her bare breasts. Her head whipped in that dir-
    ection and she saw a speaker mounted on the wall, accented by a tiny red LED.
    “I do apologize,” said an unfamiliar male voice in a cultured baritone, “I know you must be feeling very disoriented and afraid right now, but I assure you that I mean you no harm.”
    “Who are you?” she demanded, lowering her hands in the apparent absence of a security camera.
    “My name is Doctor Alistair Mechanus, and this is my island. You and your… companion are currently my guests here.”
    “Is… is Jim okay? Can I see him?” If Jim was okay, she thought, then maybe everything else would work out fine as well. He had a way of getting out of sticky situations—it was that sort of luck that made him a daredevil. It also made him accustomed to getting what he wanted.
    “He’s, uh, here with me,” Dr. Mechanus told her, and then paused for an interval that seemed—somehow—to sound guilty, “In a manner of speaking, anyway. My people are very good at what they do.” He paused. “As for seeing him, why don’t you get dressed first—you will find a bundle of clean clothing on top of the dresser near you. Call me old-fashioned, but I feel odd talking to a nude woman.”
    Julia’s hands leapt up to shield her breasts again, her face flushing red. Of course there would be a camera in here. She’d seen enough James Bond movies to know that the sort of person who owned an island in the middle of the South Pacific was also the sort of person who had no sense of privacy. After all, who would complain about the surveillance? His neighbors? He probably didn’t have any. They were almost literally in the middle of nowhere, on an island
    that the natives all said was haunted and probably wouldn’t land on if you put a gun to their heads, in the clutches of someone who probably wasn’t all that happy by their