Those could have been Maya’s own eyes, during those first horrible days after she’d escaped the Hill and was still grieving Simon’s loss. They might have been her eyes again if Savitri hadn’t come to a warehouse in Southside and used her skill and talent to give Gray a second chance at life.
Maya had too many emotional bruises to take pleasure in poking someone else’s. “You don’t have to tell me,” she said gently. “Your secrets aren’t my business.”
“No, I deserved it.” Savitri’s mouth quirked in a sad little smile. “I’m not used to sparring with people on my level.”
“It’s a pretty impressive level,” Maya acknowledged. “Level One specialist at twenty-seven.”
“Youngest in company history.”
“And the Guardian Project?”
Savitri shifted her weight against the railing and stared past Maya. “Do you know what the Protectorate’s problem is?”
Maya couldn’t hold back a rude noise. “They only have one?”
“Depends on who you ask. But if you ask the people in charge, the main problem is that smart men are hard to control and the ones who aren’t smart aren’t very useful. Take your Captain Knox—undeniably one of the Protectorate’s most talented recruits. They worked hard to keep him in a patriotic bubble in an attempt to secure his loyalties. Breaking him would stunt the skills they found so useful, but he did have that terrible habit of thinking for himself, didn’t he?”
Confusion knotted Maya’s brow. “How do you know so much about Knox?”
“Because my job was to fix the problem he represented.” Savitri met Maya’s gaze squarely. “I was designing the next iteration of the Protectorate. Soldiers who wouldn’t suffer Knox’s fatal flaw.”
“Guardians,” Maya whispered. It was so like the TechCorps. A shiny name wrapped around a brutal lie. “But how would they…”
Savitri’s file flashed through her memory, the words dropping like stones in a pond.
Father, Dimitri Novak. L2 scientist, Bioengineering. Mother, Jaya Novak. L1 specialist, Neural Networks.
Her brain made one of its leaps. Endless rows of data, thousands of personnel files. All those TechCorps secrets that she could never escape. She knew almost every project undertaken involving neural networks. She knew most of the jobs that required a top-tier bioengineer.
She knew what sat at their intersection.
“You were making supersoldiers.” Maya could barely get the words out around her horror. “Ones who couldn’t disobey.”
“There’s no need to hide your disgust.” Savitri gripped the railing on either side of her body, the only indication she wasn’t as calm as her voice sounded. “Trust me. I’ve come to understand the full implications of what I was dabbling with.”
Maya doubted she could have hidden her disgust. Not from her face, or from her eyes, or from her voice. “Some sort of control implant.”
“Integrated Artificial Intelligence.” Savitri’s laugh held little mirth. “Of course, it wasn’t supposed to be AI the way most people think of it. After all, the last thing the TechCorps wanted to grapple with was true artificial sentience. But with sufficient behavior training, the theory was that we could create the perfect soldiers without all those pesky human flaws.”
They would have taken men like Gray. Like Knox and Rafe. Turned them into soldiers, only this time the TechCorps wouldn’t have needed the constant threat of a kill switch to keep them in line. Just some fancy little program hardwired into their brain that stripped them of the will to think, to want, to be.
It was worse than what they’d done to the Devils. Worse than what they’d done to Dani or Maya. Maybe even worse than what they’d done to Mace, because at least he could still fight.
This was worse than death. Worse than anything.
And Savitri had tried to make it a reality.
For one horrible moment, Maya wished the railing behind Savitri would crumble and send her on a thirty-foot tumble. In the next, she reminded herself of the truth—Savitri clearly hadn’t done it. And she was outside the TechCorps now, undermining them with gleeful regularity.
It still took effort to swallow down bile. “I don’t understand how Adam fits into it.”
“Most people don’t.” Savitri pushed off the railing and stared down at Maya. “Ryan took a bullet meant for me. They declared him brain-dead. But I know more about the human brain than anyone, so I decided to save him.”
Maya wet her lips. “I thought you said Ryan Lemieux died.”
“He did,” Savitri said just as softly. “But I’d trained my AI using his insights and personality. Ryan was my protector. The most brilliant, courageous, and compassionate warrior I had ever met. A true guardian.”
The impossibility of the implication was almost dizzying. Maya opened her mouth to ask the question, then closed it. Then opened it again. It was ridiculous. It was insane.
“Are you saying…” Maya hesitated. Tried again. “Is Adam…?”
“Adam is everything I made him to be.” Savitri smiled. “But more importantly, everything he chooses to be.”
Holy shit.
Savitri tugged her ponytail down and ran her fingers through her hair as she started for the walkway door. She paused with one hand on the handle, looking back at Maya. “Now we’re even. I’ll keep your secrets. You keep mine.”
Oh, sure. Maya was a runaway filing cabinet for corporate espionage, and Savitri had just admitted to creating life, but they were even. Totally even.
Except … that wasn’t all Maya was. She was the anchor of her community. An invaluable resource, not just because of what she knew but how she’d learned to use it. She made people’s lives better every day in big ways and small. She used the big, wild brain she’d been given to build a better world that undermined the dominance of the TechCorps at every turn.
And she was the heir to Birgitte’s revolution. The secrets in her head could bring down the TechCorps, applied properly. Savitri was looking at her like someone eager to apply a few of those secrets in places that would make the TechCorps hurt.
Maya wanted to make them hurt.
Plus, now if Maya got trapped in a room with any bad guys, she could just shoot out the lights and take them all out. Because she was a fucking superhero. She didn’t even need a renegade AI bodyguard.
But she’d have a protector. Her own guardian, who didn’t have to be coerced into battle. Gray would fight for her because it was what he wanted to do. To keep her safe. To help her achieve her dreams.
To love her.
Maya’s lips curled in a slow smile. “Yes. We’re even. Thank you, Savitri.”
“You’re welcome, Maya.”
Maya sat for a while after she was gone, watching the lights on the Hill as they flashed and sparkled and glowed in the night. She breathed in the scent of honeysuckle and kudzu, and it was peaceful and familiar, but it wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted soap and coffee and sweat and sawdust and the sound of Gray’s even breaths, each one a promise that there would be thousands more of them.
They would have time. Maya wasn’t going to waste a second of it. So she climbed to her feet and went downstairs to wait for her future to wake up.