Free Fade Away and Radiate by Michele Lang Page B

technology owned by FortuneCorp, the
soldiers serving their country. Sent by the US military to do what
regular soldiers didn't have the physical or mental stamina to
do.
    Roberto never spoke of what he’d done
as a soldier out in the Glass Desert. He wanted to leave the war
behind when he came home to her, and she didn't need to know the
details of what he’d had to do. She wanted to love those memories
away until he had to go back and make more of them.
    But the last time he’d come home, Anika
could tell something had changed. Roberto had changed. As if he
knew the next time he went back to the Glass Desert, he wasn’t
coming back.
    “ I didn’t come all this way
just to say hello.” Billy broke into her thoughts, his voice a
little too calm.
    A jolt of fear shot down the length of
Anika’s back. She didn’t want to hear any more, but she owed it to
Billy to hear him out. He had come to the edge of the known world
to find her.
    “ Do you know how Roberto
died?” Billy asked.
    Anika’s mouth was dry as sand. She
licked her lips and shrugged her shoulders. “It's war,” she managed
to say. “Soldiers die in war. You don’t need to tell me more than
that.”
    He squinted at her, as if he was trying
to figure out how much she already knew.
    “ But you need to know. If
you don't already.”
    Anika tried to relax but couldn’t.
Billy took a seat on Anika’s desk chair, set in front of an ancient
roll-top desk that looked ridiculously out of place on an
uninhabitable planet at the back end of nowhere.
    Billy’s hands rested on the arms of her
chair. She watched his strong fingers caressing the old-fashioned
realwood, and wondered where he hid his own weapons.
    She knew he was armed. She searched his
spare, hard body for the weapons – traveling from those strong,
knowing hands, up to his muscular arms encased in dark blue flight
silk, across the defined shoulders, the curve of his
neck…
    She realized, belatedly, that Billy had
stopped talking. Anika tore her gaze from Billy’s insanely
beautiful body and forced herself to stare right into his
eyes.
    Eyes the color of midnight, of
desolation. He seemed to pin her to the cot like a butterfly. Those
eyes spoke of suffering she would understand, like Roberto’s. And
yet his voice, vibrating inside her chest, remained gentle,
kind.
    “ Roberto didn't die in the
field, you know.”
    “ I know,” Anika whispered.
Miserable now, remembering. Billy was the one who had told her,
after the memorial, in a low, quick undertone, far away from
everybody else. The details were dangerous, she knew.
    “ Somebody got inside the
barracks, somebody who knew they wanted Roberto specifically. They
got past all of us – genmod soldiers – and killed him and escaped
before we could do anything. And, Annie. I didn’t tell you this
before. There was no investigation. Nothing. We were told to act
like it had never happened.”
    Annie swallowed hard. “I figured he
didn't die the official way, the way the government told
me.”
    “ What did you
think?”
    She shook her head as if she could
negate the truth away. “Both of us worked for FortuneCorp, not like
you soldiers. He never told you, did he?”
    “ Nope. As far as anybody on
the team knew, he was just another soldier.”
    “ Well, he wasn't. We worked
together on genetic research, human and ecological modifications.
He was a geneticist, I'm a biologist. Together we worked on
ecotransformative research. How to mutate human beings, and
climates.”
    Billy nodded, not looking too
surprised. “Roberto was way smarter than me,” he said. “A million
times smarter. But didn't have as much horse-sense. And you don’t
just need a killer instinct to survive the Glass Desert, Annie
girl. You need prey instinct, too. Roberto just wore his smarts out
in the open, and it cost him.”
    The lump in Anika's throat all but
choked her. She shrugged and tried to laugh. “I always warned him
to watch his back. Doing our kind of