Lust Read Free

and ready, and not before.”
    Gaia clamped her mouth tightly closed, tucking her lips inside it for extra emphasis, and refused to look at Jake. He was so close to her, she could feel the heat from his body making the left side of her face flush. Without her permission, her eyes flicked toward him, then away again. The expression in his eyes—he seemed to know her in a way she wasn’t sure was either good or bad. He was teasing her, daring herto feel something for him. It was maddening, frustrating.
    The doors finally opened. “Jake!” Mrs. Montone called out, her arms extended as if she were about to reach in and yank him out. “Why you sneak off like that? Come here.”
    Jake shot Gaia one last look and joined his father and grandmother, who draped a coat carefully over his shoulders.
    â€œGaia, can you get home all right?” Mr. Montone asked. “Should we drop you somewhere? We’ve got a car service waiting.”
    â€œOh, no, it’s all right,” Gaia promised. “I can take the subway.”
    â€œAre you sure? It’s no trouble.”
    Gaia was touched. If Mr. Montone knew what she’d been through in her life, the guy wouldn’t have been concerned about her being inconvenienced by the midday subway.
    â€œI promise. It was nice to see you again. And nice to meet you, Mrs. Montone.”
    â€œYeah, I see you again,” she said, nodding cheerfully.
    â€œSo I’ll see you tomorrow after school?” Jake asked. “You’ll show me that stuff we were talking about?”
    Gaia felt herself nod. Maddening, yes. Frustrating, yes. But whether it was out of guilt or some kind of unexpected fascination, she’d have to see Jake again.
    Internal Hard Drive
    OLIVER SEARCHED THROUGH THE databases he had found stored on his computer—the ones that hadn’t self-destructed when he’d gotten his login wrong the first time. It had taken him half a day just to get access to his own information. This was like trying to put together one of those all-black jigsaw puzzles. In the dark. During a windstorm. If something looked familiar, he had to then ask himself why, and what it might connect to, and how he should approach it. He felt like a blind man in a maelstrom.
    Finding this information required the highest level of mental functioning. For someone so recently out of a coma, it was exhausting. And there was something else that was required: To access some of the memories he needed—passwords, log-in names, locations of files, meanings of notes—he had to force some of Loki’s memories to the surface. And Oliver was not a computer; he couldn’t just pull up one file out of a folder and leave the rest safely closed. If he exposed one memory to the light, others would try to bubble to the surface as well. And he could not afford to have that happen.
    He was dancing a dangerous tango with his evil former self.
    Oliver took a long drink of water and turned his eyes to the screen again. He had to secure transportation for them. Airline tickets. How did this work again? He had to get the passports in another name, the visas to match, enough tickets for everyone. . . . The screen began to swim in front of him. It seemed to morph into a television screen. On it he saw a man—a man dressed as a doctor—in an antiseptic room, a white room, but not a hospital. A loft of some kind . . . A young woman was there, a girl, a friend of Gaia’s; something in him told him that. The scene was new but dripping with familiarity, like in dreams where some subconscious voice acts as a narrator for unfamiliar terrain.
    The girl bent over and the doctor injected her with something. Oliver squinted to see more clearly. Then the screen split; on one side, he saw the beautiful young woman struck blind as a result of the injection. On the other side he saw the doctor raise his face. With horror, Oliver recognized his own eyes