Shockwave Read Online Free Page B

“retrograde amnesia,” as if that explained everything. But they wouldn’t tell me anything else. Not even who put me there, or who was paying the bills.
    All I knew for sure was that English—American English—was my mother tongue. That was as close to “mother” as I was ever to get.
    No visitor ever came for me. I wasn’t envious—nobody in that antiseptically clean, soulless place ever got a visitor.
    I think I was somewhere around nine or ten years old when I escaped. It was so easy, as if moving in the dark had always been part of whoever I was.
    I got as far as the gutters of Paris. Always hungry, always afraid, always cold—until Luc took me home with him.
    When Luc neared his end, he knew. That’s when he pointed me toward that only door open to me: La Légion Étrangère. I never looked back—that last memory of the old man standing on his own feet, that was the picture I needed to keep in my heart forever. My last chance to show him my love and respect.
    For years, that memory was a pacemaker, the only thing keeping my heart alive. Before its batteries ran out, Patrice had come into my life, and they recharged. But my heart never grew powerful enough to pump on its own.
    That’s when fear left me forever, I thought. I hadn’t watched Luc go—the old man would never have wanted that. Years later, I’d carried the bullet-shredded body of Patrice all the way back to base. When I dropped him to the ground, the officers praised me for bringing him back.
    Our orders: we were never to abandon our dead, our wounded, or our weapons. But the officers were wise enough to understand that even the dullest of our despised band wouldnever actually obey any such order if it meant even the slightest reduction in their own chance to survive.
    I knew I still had a heart only because blood continued to pump through me. But after Luc, after Patrice, I didn’t have any other use for that heart.
    Not until Dolly.
    O nce Dolly accepted whatever was left of my heart, I was forever finished working at the only thing I knew.
    Cutting my ties to my past was easy—I didn’t have a past. Dolly never told me why she’d been no less willing to sever whatever ties she’d had, and I never asked.
    But just to stop working at my deadly trade wasn’t enough. Dolly told me I had to find a way to atone. This wasn’t any religious thing—nobody who’d seen what Dolly had seen could ever believe there was any “God.” Not on this planet, anyway.
    If there was a Hereafter, we’d find out together. Whoever went first would wait for the other. I prayed that would be me, because nothing in Heaven or Hell would stop me from staying wherever I landed, so Dolly could find me when she arrived.
    Regardless, Dolly said I had to atone for war because it was the only way I’d ever be at peace. I don’t know how she knew this, but I trusted anything she said. So when she told me there was no reason to search—the opportunity would come to me—I trusted that as well.
    D olly was right.
    A man who had access to the same network I once used reached out to offer me a job. The job—a job I would haverefused, as I’d refused so many in the past years—was to bring his daughter to him.
To
him, not
back
to him. He’d never been her father; she was just some carelessly spilled seed.
    Unwanted children are unprotected, and the unprotected are always the most clearly marked, the easiest of prey. So this man knew he was responsible for his daughter’s willingness to go with a flesh trader. I knew that was the truth—her “choice” was the same I’d once made.
    Finding the target was easy. There was nothing special about him—all I did was use the photos the father had supplied me with. Then follow the girl when oncoming morning drove all the night-birds “home.”
    He was a young prettyboy with nothing but some fraud-flash—zircons, fake fur, and a tired Cadillac. A galaxy’s distance from a place he could never reach. Just a nasty