Breaking Danger Read Online Free

Breaking Danger
Book: Breaking Danger Read Online Free
Author: Lisa Marie Rice
Pages:
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keeping up but shows signs of cardiopathy. His breathing is irregular, coloring ruddy. He has stopped and is looking around bewildered, holding a hand to his chest.” Sophie watched as the man fell to one knee, still looking bewildered but not afraid, then pitched forward onto his face. No one in the pack stopped or even looked around. Eventually, his chest stopped moving. “Subject died at 5:37 P.M. , presumably of a heart attack.”
    No one will do an autopsy, she thought. There wouldn’t be a functioning morgue anywhere in the city. And what was one heart attack in the midst of so much death?
    Sick at heart, Sophie turned away from the window. No more of this right now. She needed a short break. Watching the world go mad outside her window all day was breaking her heart, her spirit.
    There was another factor. She was a healer. Had been, all her life.
    This was well beyond anything she could fix.
    One of her first memories was of holding a bird that had fallen to the ground. She remembered how it lay listlessly in her hands as she cried. Her mother had started gently curling her fingers away from the small body when suddenly there was a flutter in her hands and the bird flew away.
    Then Nana Henderson had come for a stay when Sophie was seven years old. Nana suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and had walked with two canes, her face often disfigured by pain. Sophie sat on her Nana’s lap for a while every afternoon, and when Nana left, she was walking normally.
    Sophie had missed a lot of school that semester because she’d always been sick.
    Pain, disease, afflictions. As she grew older, Sophie had felt these things in her fingertips when she touched someone. She could feel her hands grow warmer, could feel muscles bunched against the pain relax in the other person. Could feel sickness departing the body.
    And entering hers.
    With hindsight, she realized her parents had worried about her.
    A healer. If word got out, every sick person in the world would show up on the doorstep, begging for help. And it would kill her. Because the other side of the coin was that she had to rest for several days after touching someone who was sick. She was weak, feverish. Depleted.
    Both her parents were scientists and they threw her into an accelerated program, a scientific fast track, where she found herself studying biology, then virology, because both were so fascinating. Her parents had wanted her to go into computer science, engineering, or pure math. Something as far from medicine as possible. But Sophie was fascinated by viruses, those minute segments of protein that seemed to hold such immense power over human beings. Such terrible diseases. Rabies, Ebola virus, hantavirus, the 2021 bird flu that killed two million people. Certain cancers were caused by viruses.
    She wanted to make that better. She wanted to fix that. She couldn’t cure the world herself, but she could have a hand in finding out how to help the world heal itself. Virology proved to be a natural fit for her and she was recruited to Arka Pharmaceuticals directly from the Stanford PhD program.
    Stanford was where she met her best friend, Elle Connolly. They were young and bright and were making names for themselves. They had something else in common too. Something deeper, something darker than shared courses and an inability to find decent dates.
    Powers. Gifts. Curses. Whatever you wanted to call them.
    Arka was funding a major study on psychic phenomena and by some principle of the drift factor, they’d both ended up in it. Elle as both a subject and researcher, which was a big no-no. There were a lot of no-nos in the program, it turned out, including human sacrifice. Research subjects were disappearing; and it just so happened that the ones who were disappearing were the most gifted with extrasensory powers. Those were the ones who ended up in an enormous black hole, nowhere to be found.
    She was piecing together what was happening when
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