Free TimeBomb: The TimeBomb Trilogy: Book 1 by Scott K. Andrews Page A

death. She’d been feeling it ever since she had been rudely awoken in her cell and, after a moment of disorientation, remembered that her ENL chip had been removed. That chip was her ticket to immortality, the safety net that made her invulnerable. It was because of the chip that she had been so devil-may-care throughout her short life, so reckless that only the craziest of her classmates had anything to do with her. Jana, they all knew, was willing to push it one degree more – swim that bit further from the shore, take a corner a few mph faster than the car was designed to handle.
    It made her fun to be around. And dangerous.
    More than once a classmate or friend had been injured trying to emulate or impress her. The pattern was always the same – they’d try to push things as far as Jana but, at the last minute, realising how much of a risk they were taking, they would lose their nerve and try to pull out of whatever mad death-spiral they had committed themselves to. There was a look they got in their eyes as they recalculated the odds, Jana had seen it many times, a mixture of fear and surprise. She wondered if that was what she looked like now, as she stood trapped by an army of faceless kidnappers in a building farther from home than she had ever thought it possible to be.
    The secret, she had learned, was to follow through, to never back out once you’d committed to a course of action, no matter how risky. Whatever danger you were in, it was always more dangerous to second-guess yourself at the last instant.
    Gripping the gun tight in her right hand, she forced herself to wait. Normally she would have taken charge, but not today. Instead she looked to the man called Steve and said, ‘What do we do now?’
    Steve paid her little attention. He was assessing the forces arrayed ahead and behind them. The guards stood there, unmoving, implacable, penning them in but in no hurry to disarm or capture them. Their immobile calm was terrifying.
    ‘Come on, what are you waiting for?’ yelled Kaz.
    The guards did not respond in any way to his taunt.
    ‘They’re waiting for Sweetclover,’ said Steve, almost absent-mindedly, his gaze now fixed firmly on the lab doors at the end of the corridor before them. ‘He wants to be in at the kill.’
    ‘You said we could leave right now if we wanted,’ said Jana, alarmed at the tremble in her voice.
    Steve nodded. ‘But I may have a better idea.’ He glanced down at his watch, then turned to face Jana and Kaz. ‘When the bomb goes off, stay focused on me,’ he said. ‘We need to hold hands to form a circle and you must, absolutely must, empty your minds of all thought.’
    Jana didn’t even know how to begin to respond to such a bizarre order, so she decided to go with it.
    ‘OK,’ she said.
    ‘What bomb?’ asked Kaz.
    ‘Not a place, not a time in your life, not a person. Nothing, understand?’ Steve continued. ‘Think of the colour white. Empty, blank, void. Can you do that?’
    Jana nodded. Kaz just looked confused. ‘Um, I’ll try,’ he muttered.
    ‘Hello there.’ It was Sweetclover. He had stepped out into the corridor ahead of them, about halfway to the lab door, flanked by guards. He was waving and smiling. ‘I must say, you are the most handsome terrorist I’ve ever met. Dashing, too. When this is over we really must share grooming tips.’
    Steve did not smile as his doppelgänger made jokes.
    ‘You can drop the disguise now,’ Sweetclover continued, his fake smile fading away. ‘It’s not fooling anybody any more and I would so like to look you in the eye.’
    Jana slowly slipped her gun into her pocket so that her hands were free. She caught Kaz’s eye and, with a glance, indicated that he should do the same. He gave an almost imperceptible nod and did so. He reached for her hand but a single red spark arced between their outstretched fingers and he whipped his hand away again. If Sweetclover noticed this, he gave no sign of it. His attention