Chapter Three.

Leah wasn't sure what was worse, sitting alone in her cell and wondering what the army had planned for her, or knowing John was only a few feet away yet totally unavailable to her.

Either way, her depression and loneliness had her on the verge of tears. They were also making it impossible to sleep, despite the fact that someone had turned the lights off hours ago.

Of course, I slept half the day away, if not more than that, came the bitter thought, thanks to their drugging me.

Wait...

The drugs in the air had made her tired and sleepy, so sleepy she couldn't even muster the energy to use her Powers.

So why wasn't she sleepy now?

They've lowered the dose. The only question is, do they just do it at night, or did they decide they need me more awake?

The latter made more sense. If they wanted her to Cure something-or Kill something-she'd have to be alert. They already knew that if she was half-asleep she didn't pose a threat.

I still don't feel right, though. Her legs and arms seemed to weigh twice as much as they should. And while normally she'd have been full of pent-up energy and pacing her cell, the thought of making the effort to get off the cot seemed too much of a strain.

So they're still dosing me with something, just not as much. But my brain's working a thousand times better. That means my Powers should be too.

And that meant someone was in for a surprise tomorrow.

Captain Green showed up with coffee, donuts and a hard look behind his mask. The moment he entered the cell, he spoke to her in a loud voice.

And it turned out Leah was the one to get surprised.

"Ms. DeGarmo. Please don't try anything like you did yesterday. There are people watching us right now, and if you make any attempt to harm me, your friend John will suffer the consequences."

He stood by the door, waiting on her response.

As tempted as she was to still go into full Death mode, Leah knew she'd been outmaneuvered.

"I won't do anything."

It didn't help that the smell of the coffee and sight of the food had her stomach rumbling and her mouth salivating.

Food and love. That's all it takes to break someone, or at least me. Deprive them of food and love.

Feeling like a traitor to John and herself, she lowered herself into the same chair as the previous day and remained silent and motionless while Green approached her and set the tray down on the floor before taking the seat opposite her.

"Go ahead." He motioned at the food. "We've got a long day ahead of us, but if you cooperate, tonight you'll not only be eating dinner with your boyfriend, but sharing the same room."

Leah frowned but refrained from speaking any of the comments that came to mind. She was well aware he was testing her, prodding her with veiled insults and threats disguised as friendly advice. "If you cooperate" was another way of saying "do as you're told or else". And the offer to eat dinner and share a room with John was dangling bait, the same way a zookeeper would use a piece of meat to get an animal to follow instructions.

They consider me a guinea pig, a lab rat. They think they can tame me, train me to follow orders so I can get my reward at the end of the day. Well, I can play along for now. But sooner or later someone will slip up. And when they do, there will be h.e.l.l to pay.

Leah looked at Green and smiled as she took a bite of donut.

And that h.e.l.l will be me.

After she finished her coffee and donuts, Green called someone on his cell phone, and not two minutes later a woman in a white coat and a face mask like Green's had wheeled in a cart with two cages on it. One held a small mixed- breed with an unhealthy green glow surrounding it. Even without her Power, though, she'd have known it was sick. Its eyes were gla.s.sy, its tongue lolling and dry, and its fur l.u.s.terless. The other cage held a healthy, happy terrier pup.

"I think you know what to do," Green said, as the tech left the cell. He pointed at the sick dog. "It has late stage distemper."

"I won't kill an innocent animal." Leah crossed her arms and gave Green what she hoped was a defiant glare. Inside, she was worried. She'd promised to do what they asked in order to keep John safe, and now here she was refusing to cooperate before the first experiment even started.

But they wanted her to kill a puppy, and that went against everything she believed in.

"Ms. DeGarmo, you agreed-"

"I agreed to demonstrate what I can do, not kill healthy dogs for you. That's not how it works."

"Don't bulls.h.i.t me. I've read the reports. You take the sickness out of one animal and place it in another."

"Your report isn't complete, then. After I Cure something or someone, I pa.s.s it on to an animal that I can't Cure because too many people know it's dying. I'm a doctor. You think I go around making healthy animals sick?"

Green's eyes narrowed. "So what you're telling me is...?"

Leah let out a breath. "What I'm telling you is that both animals have to be sick. One of them should be old and about to die anyhow, the kind of animal that if it suddenly appeared to get well people would be very suspicious. Understand?"

Green stared at her and she had a heart-stopping moment where she thought maybe she'd gone too far, been too sarcastic. Then he spoke into his phone again and asked for another animal to be brought to them.

That reminded Leah of one other thing.

"Wait! We'll also need something to put the dog down. Sodium pentobarbital, preferably."

Green raised one eyebrow behind his mask.

"You want me to hand you a needle filled with poison?"

"You don't have to hand it to me. You can inject the dog yourself. But when I pa.s.s the disease to that other animal, it's going to feel a lot of pain, possibly for hours. I try to time it so that I pa.s.s it along right before the animal dies."

"Fine." He made another call and then hung up. "Anything else?"

"No," she said, ignoring his sarcasm.

During the five-minute wait, neither of them said anything.

The next animal to arrive was exactly what she'd asked for, and she remembered the old adage about being "careful what you wished for, you might just get it". Because it wasn't a dog.

The rhesus monkey was ancient, its gray fur balding in patches and its joints swollen to grotesque size by arthritis. Cataracts gave its eyes a bluish tint, reminding her uncomfortably of the way her own eyes looked when she transformed into her Death persona. It lay on its side, refusing to move even when she tapped on the cage door.

"Can we get on with it now?" Green asked, impatience giving his words an acid tone.

"Yes." In fact, Leah was more than ready to do what needed to be done. The poor monkey was in obvious pain and deserved to be released from it.

She opened the cage containing the dying mixed breed and carefully reached her hands toward it, wary of being bitten. As she touched it and felt the sudden, familiar shock that signaled the Cure, she realized how long it had been since she'd simply used her Power to help an animal. Since the day Tal Nova kidnapped her, she'd only Cured-and Killed-humans.

Healing the dog was like getting back to her roots, her true self, and she understood that she'd been missing it.

The dog gave a yelp and backed away from her, its eyes already alert and bright, its fur filled with color and life. The green glow was gone.

At the same time, a vague feeling of nausea settled in Leah's stomach. Nothing major, not yet; she knew from past experience she had an hour or more before her symptoms became life threatening. But unlike when she was at work, here there was no reason to wait and pretend nothing was wrong.

Speaking like a teacher demonstrating a procedure to a cla.s.s, she explained the next steps in the process to Green as she carried them out.

"The dog is Cured," she said. "Right now I'm carrying the disease inside me. If I were to wait too long, it would kill me the same as it would have killed the dog. Which is why I pa.s.s it on to another animal as soon as I can."

She motioned at the cage containing the monkey.

"You should inject him now and then step away. I wouldn't want you to be touching it at the same time I do."

The implication of her words caused Green's face to go a little pale. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead, although Leah wasn't sure if he was afraid of her or the monkey. As he reached between the bars, she wondered if he had any experience with injections. She'd never thought to ask. However, he expertly pinched a section of skin between his fingers and injected the contents of the syringe.

The rhesus, already on its deathbed, barely flinched.

"You've got about sixty seconds," Green said, backing up.

Leah didn't respond. She grasped the monkey's paw and felt the muted shock of transference. The monkey jerked once and then turned its rheumy gaze towards her, as if to ask why she was inflicting further torture on it.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, stroking its palm.

The monkey closed its eyes and let out a final breath.

Leah wiped tears from her eyes, wishing she didn't always cry when she had to sacrifice an animal. The soldiers watching her would no doubt take it as a sign of weakness, something to exploit. She walked away from the cart and sat down, pausing to rub the dog's ears as she went by.

"That's it?" Green asked from his position by the door.

"What did you expect?" Leah felt bitter inside and it flavored her words. "Lightning? Storm clouds? The trumpeting of angels? I thought you did your homework. That stuff only happens when I feel threatened, not when I'm Curing something."

Green wisely didn't answer. Instead, he made another call, requesting someone to take the two animals to the lab immediately.

Alarmed, Leah stood up. "You're not going to sacrifice that dog I Cured, are you? Because if you do, my cooperation is over."

"No, we're not." Something in Green's voice told her he was telling the truth, at least for now. "Blood tests, that's all."

A masked tech arrived and the door whooshed open, reminding Leah there must still be at least some soporific in the air.

Have I grown used to it? Am I tired and I don't even realize it?

Lost in her thoughts, she didn't notice Green exiting the cell with the technician until the door was almost closed.

"Wait!" She motioned with her hands. "When do I get to see John?"

Holding the door open with his foot, Green shrugged. "That depends on you. We have to run this same experiment again, except this time with some diagnostics hooked up to you. Can you, you know, do it again today or do we have to wait until tomorrow?"

Curing more than one animal in a day wasn't any hardship; she'd Cured as many as four in one day. But she wasn't about to let them know that.

"I can do one more," Leah told him, putting a note of exhaustion in her voice. "But that's all."

Green nodded.

"I'll see you in an hour."

Chapter Four.

That evening, after a quick cheeseburger and fries in the officers' mess, Green joined General Moore and the intelligence agent he mentally referred to as Spooky in the General's conference room. Moore and Spooky were already poring over the diagnostic reports from the two experiments.

"I thought the meeting started at six," Green said, opening his own file.

Moore glanced up at him, his expression hard.

"Gotta be ahead of the pack if you want to win the race, Captain."

"Have you reviewed the reports, Captain?" Spooky asked, never taking his eyes off the data tables he was reading.

"Yes, earlier. Nothing really exceptional, from what I could see. Blood pressure, pulse, oxygen levels, all almost identical before and after she cured the rabbit. Same with her blood panels and EEG."

"And you don't find that exceptional?" Spooky's dark eyes narrowed and he looked back and forth between Green and Moore. "The woman somehow transferred a carcinoma from the test animal into herself and then pa.s.sed it on to another animal, all without her brain waves, blood chemistry or even heart rate changing, and you don't consider that exceptional?"

"There is one change, right here." Green pointed to a blip on the EKG. "Right at the point where the cancer was in her. A slight increase in heart rate and blood pressure. But it goes back to normal before she pa.s.ses the cancer on."

Spooky nodded. "The time corresponds to when she told us she gets that nauseated feeling, after she's taken in the disease. Fluctuations that small could result from feeling ill, stress, worry, any sort of emotional change. Then her body adjusts. No different than if you or I stubbed a toe or got a piece of disturbing email. Statistically insignificant."

Moore frowned. "So on the one hand you say we should consider her results exceptional, but on the other you say the deviations are insignificant. You're not making any sense."

Spooky turned to Green, obviously ignoring Moore's comment.

"Captain Green. Your background includes several years in bioterrorism, does it not?"

Green said nothing. The question wasn't one that needed answering because Spooky had undoubtedly read his file, knew of his research experience with various biological and chemical agents of destruction. It was one of the reasons he'd been chosen as DeGarmo's prime handler.

"Tell me," Spooky continued, "in your professional opinion, what do these results mean?"

Green glanced down at the reports again, aware of the two men waiting for his answer. What had he missed that Spooky had obviously seen? He read through the data again. And again.