The Takeover Read Free Page B

of feel like a sitting duck all alone out here in the van.”
    “Aren’t you masking it?” I asked. His ability of illusion was the reason we’d let him come with us at all. Because while Oliver was a genius, his arrogance made us all pretty much want to kill him.
    “Well, it was a fruit stand for a while, but people stopped and tried to buy some.” He groaned. “I had to make the fruit appear moldy to get them to leave.”
    I bit my lip “So put up a closed sign!”
    “Right.”
    Trust Oliver to take such pride in his illusions that his fake fruits looked and smelled great enough to make people stop to buy them even in this manufacturing area.
    I caught a glimpse of irritation on Ritter’s face before he said to Oliver, “We may need a distraction at the front of the building. Something with a lot of fireworks. Be prepared. And have Stella extend her satellite surveillance to a radius of three streets in case the Emporium decides to join our party. I want to know if there’s anything unusual.”
    “Will do,” Oliver said, sounding chastised. He didn’t have a lot of respect for the rest of us, but his admiration of Ritter was almost as irritating as his know-it-all attitude. “The satellite we tasked here did go down for a few minutes. Could have been someone hacking our feed, but it’s back up and running perfectly now, and we’ve detected no unusual activity so far.”
    “No other fruit stands?” Dimitri asked, a hint of a smile in his voice.
    Oliver took offense at his gentle jibe. “As a matter of fact, there is a defunct one. That’s what gave me the idea. There’s an orchard only two miles from here, so it’s completely logical for a fruit stand to be in this area.”
    “I was sure you had a reason, but that’s good to know.” Dimitri had more patience with Oliver than the rest of us. Probably because he considered himself the father of our cell.
    Biologically speaking, Dimitri was my father, but I’d only known him since my Change just over seven months ago. I’d come to terms with my uncertain beginning, and while I still considered the man who raised me to be my real father, Dimitri and I were closer in many ways.
    Shadrach shifted nervously, his eyes going to the door. “So what now?”
    Ritter’s eyes narrowed at the healer. “Now we try not to get killed.”

“DO YOU KNOW WHERE THE other men are located?” Ritter strode to the computer and brought up a map of the facility.
    “Yes.” Shadrach hurried over to Ritter, but his movements were regal, and I could easily imagine him in bright ceremonial robes, surrounded by women wearing burkas.
    Shadrach showed us all the rooms where the other prisoners should be located. Two were in this corridor, but the third was apparently kept near the common rooms where they ate meals and conversed until the guards forced them back to their solitary quarters. That is, if the doctors’ experiments permitted them to leave their rooms at all.
    “We haven’t seen one guy—Bedřich—for three days,” Shadrach said. “Usually, that’s as long as they keep us away.”
    Dimitri nodded. “Most casual regenerations can be completed in that time. Are they using a form of curequick?” That was our name for a mixture containing a heavy amount of sugar and proteins reduced to their most usable form. This mixture gave our bodies enough nutrition to speed up recovery by as much as five times. It was also addictive to us.
    “Oh, yeah. Someone spilled that little piece of information the first week in Morocco.” Shadrach made a face. “Can’t blame them, though. We thought we were helping ourselves recover. We had no idea the doctors there would use the information to increase the frequency of their experiments. The supervising doctor here is even worse.”
    Dimitri stared at the screen, the tightening of his lips the only sign of his disapproval at the treatment. “We could stall until dinner and they’re all in the common room.”
    “They have