Free Runner: The Fringe, Book 3 by Anitra Lynn McLeod Page B

breakthrough.
    Looking up at Foster, she swallowed the despair in her heart. “I guess your new watchword is reputation.”

Chapter Eight
    Foster gave a slow nod as suspicion filled him. “Let me guess, you understand?” His voice, pitched to a mocking tone, grated against his own ears. He sounded like a smirking jerk as he mimicked her cultured IWOG tone, but he couldn’t stop himself from pushing her. “You understand and accept your fate because you understand and accept my reasons.”
    Jynx opened her mouth to respond, but he cut her off before she could.
    “No, wait.” He lifted his hand. “You not only understand, but you forgive me too, right?” He lowered his gaze so they came eye to eye with the bars between them.
    “I’m not a spiritualist.” She met his gaze with a ferocity that almost moved him back. “If you’re seeking absolution for your sins, you best look elsewhere.”
    Her pointed dismissal hurt more than he would ever admit, but he forced himself to smile. “And of course, you’re blameless.”
    “Of what?” She stepped closer to the bars, settling herself into readiness to meet his challenge.
    “You’ve never done anything you regret? You’ve never hurt anyone?” He knew he should leave the cell room now, but he couldn’t walk away until he’d resolved his confusion.
    “There are many things I regret. At the moment, I have more regrets about things I haven’t done rather than those I have. And I never said I’ve never hurt anyone. I said I never intentionally hurt anyone. Technically, people have died at my hands, but only because my hands weren’t skilled enough to save them.” Looking down at her tiny hands, she pressed her lips tightly together. “When I connected my mind to their body, I realized the futility of my hands. I couldn’t save them. No matter what I did.”
    He wanted to pull her into his arms and comfort her, but then he remembered all he’d seen on the media and resisted the urge.
    As if she’d read his mind, she said, “I’m well aware Roberts has put vid clips of me harvesting organs out of patients. I look like a woman possessed of a demon. Extracting still-living organs is not a pretty sight. What you don’t see, and what the media fails to mention, is that those patients are brain dead. Did you know, before this, those vids were used to train other doctors on how to transplant organs?”
    He didn’t know.
    “What you don’t see is the rest of the room, where up to ten people wait to receive one of those organs. You don’t see that part. Only the part where I look like a bloody monster, ripping apart a glistening and clearly alive human body.”
    He’d felt sickened by the gruesome clips, but now they made sense. He really had to stop believing everything Roberts put out there about Jynx. Time after time, the information turned out to be utterly bogus.
    Almost a hundred faces flashed in his mind, all those he had intentionally killed, by duty or self-preservation. Not for sport, like some Runners did. He didn’t enjoy killing and went out of his way to avoid it. But when he’d been young and just starting out, he’d had no choice but to kill or be killed. His survival instinct ran too deep.
    “Would you kill someone to save yourself?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
    “No,” she answered automatically.
    “No. Just like that? You don’t even have to think about it?” He found her quick answers unsettling.
    “No, I don’t. I know I wouldn’t, because if I did, I wouldn’t be me anymore.”
    “Hippocrates.”
    “Yes.”
    “Reputation.”
    Jynx nodded. “Yes.”
    “We seem to have something in common.”
    She flashed him an understanding nod filled with grim acknowledgment. “We are both slaves to our reputation. The difference is, at the moment, my reputation isn’t hurting me. It’s despicable and horrific, but it isn’t my fault. I’ve been true to myself, my inner reputation. I’ve hurt one man in my entire life