She attracted lightning. It came to her. The lead stroke always found her. She couldn’t send it somewhere else. She didn’t work that way. She was the magnet on the ground. It didn’t matter how high a target was, how tempting. The lead from the cloud would seek her out wherever she was. She couldn’t make it go somewhere else.
Jonquille didn’t realize there were tears in her eyes until her vision blurred. She looked away from Rubin, blinking rapidly, slamming the door closed on those memories. She wouldn’t look back. There was no sense in it. She wasn’t going back there. No matter how many teams of soldiers Whitney sent after her, she wouldn’t go back. Very few could match her skills in the woods. She didn’t need accuracy with her lightning strikes. She was a skilled soldier. She was a marksman. A sniper. Every bit as good with a knife. She could live off the land if need be.
“There’s no need to tell us,” Rubin said. “I’ve heard many stories about Whitney and his insane experiments. Several of my fellow teammates are married to women who escaped from one of his laboratories. They didn’t believe they had choices either, Jonquille. That’s why I asked you. I wasn’t trying to be sarcastic or make you relive a painful past.”
She managed to get herself under control, pulling in enough air to recover quickly. Growing up in Whitney’s compound, one learned fast not to show weakness.
“One of my teammates is married to a woman who has the venom of a blue-ringed octopus in her. If she calls up that venom when she feels threatened or excited, she can kill. Another has three little girls who all have venom sacs and when they bite, they can kill. They’re babies, and all babies cut teeth. Another GhostWalker—not one of my teammates, but on another team—is married to a woman who has difficulties with the buildup of fire. These are problems, but they aren’t insurmountable.”
Dahlia. He had to be talking about Dahlia. She had grown up with a girl who couldn’t control fire. Jonquille pressed her lips together. She wouldn’t ask. She wouldn’t show interest. If he was fishing, and a part of her was certain he was, she wasn’t going to take the bait.
“I took a risk going to the conferences because I knew the more information I had, the more likely I was to discover a way to help myself,” Jonquille declared, determined to get back on track. “I’d attended several over the last couple of years. You were the only one who made any sense at all. Your ideas were more advanced, and you actually sounded as if you believed you could direct and manipulate lightning. Perhaps use it for your purposes. If you could do that, I thought it was possible you might have ideas on how to undo what Whitney did to me.”
Rubin looked at her for a long time. “Whitney has a lot to answer for, doesn’t he? He took advantage of infant girls. Of soldiers. Of the government who believed in him. Of those who still do. He’s a brilliant man, and he surrounds himself with other brilliant and unscrupulous scientists. He can’t do these experiments alone. He has other like-minded men and women eager to carry out his ideas. It isn’t just that he has money—and he has billions—he also has others covering for him. People very high up. For all we know, the president is sanctioning what he does.”
Her stomach twisted into hard knots. She didn’t want to hear what he was saying, but she couldn’t help it. She’d thought along the same lines. There was no hope. He was telling her no matter what, Whitney was a force that couldn’t be stopped. What he’d done was so far advanced …
Rubin kept going. “Not one soldier thought when we volunteered for psychic enhancement that he would also mess with our DNA. Who knew he would arbitrarily decide to give us the sight of an eagle or the setae of a lizard? Any of the thousands of enhancements he decided his soldiers might need to make us better in water or in sand or in the mountains, as long as we were hunting the enemy? When he did those physical enhancements, he made us more aggressive. I’m sure you saw those results in his private army.”
Jonquille nodded. She had. She didn’t know what his newer soldiers were like, but the first versions, the ones with the rejected psych evaluations, had proven they’d been rejected for a reason.
“Every single one of us across the board wanted Whitney to reverse his DNA experiments. We had asked for the psychic enhancements, so we couldn’t very well bellyache about what we got, even though those weren’t what we expected either. But the DNA enhancements have been difficult to live with. I imagine it isn’t any different with you?”
She knew he was fishing again. Asking if Whitney had experimented on her as well, enhancing her DNA. She figured it didn’t matter if he knew. He was fourth generation. By now, those soldiers had to know what Whitney had been up to with the orphans he’d experimented on. The longer he’d had the girls in his possession, the more he’d done to them. She could admit it to Rubin and his brother, but they wouldn’t know how she was enhanced—what exactly Whitney had done to her.
Jonquille nodded. “Yes. In order to make his perfect soldiers, he had to do his experiments over and over to make certain nothing went wrong when he tried them on all of you.” She kept the bitterness from her voice with effort.
Whitney did love his soldiers. It mattered little if the women were imperfect and his supersoldiers were imperfect. He ran tests on soldiers in the military to see if they could join the elite Ghost-Walker program, but they had to score very high in so many areas and most flunked out in the psychological division.
Whitney offered those failures another program—his. They could “die.” Receive full military honors and their families, their benefits. He would then pay them ridiculous amounts of money to work for him. He would enhance them and they would be every bit as good as the elite GhostWalkers they had applied for. What he didn’t tell them was they would burn out very fast. He would send them to be tested against the female soldiers he’d created, with their venomous bites or other deadly enhancements, promising the soldiers they could then be paired in his breeding program with the woman of their choice. He often sent them against the Ghost-Walker teams to be tested as well. They lived very short lives.
“Whitney does have a flawed way of thinking,” Rubin conceded without rancor. “He has his breeding program now, forcing the women he still holds captive into it, expecting them to give him babies, yet having no respect for what they can provide. That doesn’t even make sense.”
Jonquille was very glad she had escaped before Whitney could pair her with someone in the program.
“You’re saying the things he does can’t be reversed.” She just put it out there, watching his face.
She studied Rubin. He didn’t give much away on his very handsome face. He looked a little sad. A little regretful. Those dark eyes of his didn’t blink, reminding her even more of a predator and less of a man. She was susceptible to him in many ways. His voice. His looks. His brain. She had to be careful not to let her guard down. He wasn’t the gentle man he appeared to be. It was important to always remember that. He’d all but warned her.
The bottom line was, he wasn’t going to help her. She heard it in his voice. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe there was no way to help her. She’d run out of options. All that work tracking him down for nothing. She’d known. That really wasn’t why she was here, but when she saw him, she’d suddenly had hope. She wasn’t going to cry. She’d given too many tears to Whitney’s messed-up experiments already. She didn’t have any left to give.