Freaks Under Fire
FREAKS UNDER FIRE
Book Three of the Freaks Series
By Maree Anderson
For a cyborg like Jay, life was never going to be simple.
Jay’s still reeling from her encounter with a rogue cyborg assassin when she discovers she has a twin—a severely damaged Beta unit. Jay is determined to find the Beta, and help her if she can. Now all she needs to do is convince her boyfriend Tyler that it’s best for him to stay behind. But Jay’s not the only one searching for her twin. With enemies who’ll stop at nothing, and Tyler and his family caught in the crossfire, Jay’s life is about to get a whole lot more complicated… and a whole lot more dangerous.
Reviews for the Freaks series
“Not the geeky, nerds unite book I was expecting. Instead the main character Jay was so great—a funny, smart, humble, super strong female cyborg. The relationship between Jay and Tyler was fabulous. I do hope there are more books in this series. What a great find!”
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“[…] a perfect blend of action and gut-wrenching humanity. I LOVED Freaks of Greenfield High. […] I cannot think of a more perfect book to appeal to guys and girls. Truly Amazing!”
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“This story grabbed me right away and I enjoyed Maree Anderson’s easy style and her spot on teen-speak. The characters were believable and I was impressed with Anderson’s ability to create such a loveable and meaningful character such as Jay, a cyborg on the run from a secret agency bent on capturing her and using her for their own means. Anderson gave this cyborg some interesting dilemmas and a kick butt approach that made her endearing and real. She also nailed the teen boy experience and voice, and I totally forgot I was reading something a woman wrote.”
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“You really find yourself falling in love with this cyborg who tried hard to run away and ended up discovering the greatest thing of all, raw human emotion. I just fell in love with Tyler and his sister who are the perfect brother sister example. They fight, argue, but at the end of the day, love each other unconditionally. As for the cyborg, Jay, she’s just awesome. Make sure to have some long sleeves because you’ll secretly be wiping tears during the last few chapters.”
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“I devoured this book in two nights. It totally played out like a movie in my head. Anderson’s descriptions of cyborg Jay were amazing. I especially loved that Jay was a girl, trying to learn how to cope with new situations while learning more about humanity. […] It was fast paced, riveting, real teen language that I loved and I didn’t want it to end.”
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“This book has one of the best heroines ever. Jay, the cyborg heroine, was so much fun, and the author wrote her really well. When I started the book, I was just going to read a little before going to bed. I ended up finally shutting off my Kindle at 2am. I finished the book the next night. A really enjoyable story. The teen hero had more growing up to do, which made him realistic. The YA language, doubts and attitudes were perfect, as were the cliques and the popular kids vs. the picked-on. It moved fast, and I think adults will like this as well as teens.”
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“My New Favorite Heroine. There are three things I’d like to see more of in fiction: ninja, bionics, and cyborgs. Maree Anderson has provided us with the latter, enclosing it in a YA tale of…well, coming to terms with feelings, but the author takes that sap and executes it superbly so it’s no way near as cheesy as it sounds. Needless to say, the cyborg is my favourite character.”
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“I loved these characters in the first book and they are just as good in the sequel. I don't want to give away the plot, but I guarantee you will enjoy it. Ms. Anderson excels at giving us fast paced action and emotional scenes that keep you turning the pages. I highly recommend this book.”
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“So great to catch up with Jay and Tyler again. Absolutely loved this book—a world that's written with typical skill by Maree Anderson and populated by characters you can really empathise with. Terrific, terrific story. Go buy it!”
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“I loved this series. I think Jay is sooo funny and bad ass. And the new cyborg guy. This is a great series and I can't wait for book 3!”
Table of Contents
Title Page
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Liminal Excerpt
Other Books by Maree Anderson
About the Author
Copyright
Prologue
The guard at the gate flashed a cursory glance at her ID badge before waving her through. She kept her expression pleasantly neutral while inwardly sneering at his incompetence. At the very least he should have phoned through to Reception to verify that she was expected. The “hiding in plain sight” tactic meant there were a number of storage units available to carefully vetted members of the public, and if one of those carefully vetted people discovered what was in Unit Twenty-Six there’d be hell and all its minions to pay.
Before she’d even released the handbrake the guard had resumed The Position—planting his substantial ass back in his chair and propping his boots on the desk, exactly as he’d been lounging when she approached the facility. Considering she’d had to blast the horn twice to get his attention, she suspected he’d been napping as well as lounging.
She drove off at a crawl, keeping her speed to a minimum until a glance in the rearview mirror confirmed the guard had remembered to lower the barrier arm. Hah. If Average-height Balding ’n Forgettable back there was an indicator of the caliber of the rest of the staff, just as well she’d been dispatched sooner rather than later. The whole place was a security leak waiting to happen.
Her stomach performed a lazy roll, acknowledging the true nature of the task she’d been dispatched to complete… and the toll it would take on what remained of her principles. She’d been required to do some distasteful things for Evan Caine—highly illegal things that would get her locked up for the term of her natural life if she were caught doing them. Some of those things bothered her in the dead of night when she drifted on the edge of sleep, but in the bright, uncompromising light of day, she found she could live with them. She could get out of bed each morning, and stare unflinching at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, because she’d not crossed a personal line she drawn in the metaphorical sand. The line that involved harming kids.
Until now.
She gave herself a mental smack upside the head, followed by a mini-lecture. Distance yourself from the task. Stop letting your emotions get in the way. Quit personalizing the target, and thinking of her as a kid.
The target wasn’t a child—wasn’t even human. “It” was a potentially dangerous machine that was incapable of empathy, didn’t have a conscience, and operated on severely flawed logic… if that recent display from Caine’s current pride and joy was any indication of typical core programming.
She stomped on the brake pedal, jerking the sedan to a halt alongside the main storage complex. Ingrained caution had prompted her to park where her vehicle couldn’t be seen from the reception area, and now she was thankful for the privacy the spot afforded while she took a moment to get her shit together. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel until her knuckles whitened. Bill had been a decent guy, one of the rare colleagues she’d wholeheartedly respected. In a rare moment, he’d confided to her that he was contemplating retiring because
he was “getting to old for this fucking crap”. And then, against the advice of his techs, Caine had unleashed his shiny new pride and joy upon Bill and his team, and in the space of seconds it’d been all over bar the agonized screams of dying men.
That unholy thing had ripped through six men—Caine’s most experienced security unit—like a knife through butter, leaving them broken and bleeding. Poor bastards. A shitty way to die—and for what? To prove a fucking point?
She quashed that thought before it took root, forcing herself to relax and focus. She had a job to do. But she would miss Bill’s gruff manner and monosyllabic responses. Not to mention their sparring sessions. None of the other men had the guts to go one-on-one with her a second time after she’d wiped the floor with them, but Bill hadn’t given a shit about being bested by a female. He’d never fully recovered his fitness after being injured in the field, but he’d still been able to teach her a thing or two.
Yep, she told herself, you’ll be doing the world a favor. This girl—it—is a ticking bomb, and it’s your job to defuse it before someone else gets killed.
Exiting the car, she grabbed her kitbag from the trunk and slammed it shut with unnecessary force.
She knew from security footage that the cyborg they called Beta was defective—incapable of moving, let alone defending itself. Beta could swallow food, but couldn’t feed itself. It responded to aural stimulation with a blink, but otherwise stared fixedly at nothing until one of its minders got around to closing its eyelids. It was the cyborg equivalent of a vegetable. And, according to Caine’s latest stable of techs, today’s task was simple: play the digital recording that Caine had entrusted to her, and get rid of the evidence.
She scowled, recalling how her boss hadn’t even bothered with a convincing lie. As he’d handed over the recording he’d looked her in the eye, curled his lip, and said, “I trust you implicitly.”
Yeah, right. They’d both known that was a crock of shit. The recording was of Caine’s voice speaking a command sequence to permanently shut the cyborg down. “Trust” had nothing remotely to do with anything, because it wasn’t like that recorded command could be scrambled to, say, recalibrate the cyborg’s programming so it would respond solely to someone else’s voice pattern.
Not that she would consider attempting such a double-cross—
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. If this cyborg had been functional, and she’d been handed the means to control it, she would have given serious thought to commanding it to locate Caine’s fully functioning killer cyborg and have at it. With any luck, both cyborgs would have destroyed each other beyond resurrection, and the world would be a much safer place….
Until Caine built another one of the godforsaken things.
Gravel crunched beneath her boots as she marched to the entrance. Putting on her “Don’t fuck with me” face, she shouldered through the doors into the small reception area.
No one was manning the desk. Voices drifted out from a room out back—the break room, at a guess. Huh. Why did it not surprise her that security was so lax? Not that it mattered. She had a duplicate key to the unit, so there was no need to hang around waiting for anyone to escort her.
Get in, do your job, get out—good advice for people of her ilk. It was better this way, without any witnesses to her dismantling a thing that looked like a helpless young human girl.
A helpfully marked “This Way to Storage Units” sign on a side door led her to a concrete path running alongside each row of units. She took a right at the third row and halted in front of Unit Twenty-Six. A decent-sized sturdy padlock secured its roller door. At least some effort at security had been made.
Her key stuck in the padlock, and she had to wrestle with it to get it to turn… and then fiddle with the lock mechanism to coax it open. Hmm. Anyone could be forgiven for believing this unit hadn’t been accessed in a while.
She pocketed the padlock. Only idiots left an opened lock hanging outside a storage unit—it was just asking for some asshole to lock you in. She heaved the roller door up and squinted, adjusting her eyesight to the interior gloom.
Strangely, the unit was bare save for a large canvas bag dumped in the corner by the right wall. And from what she could see, both security cams were down. Whoever had set up the feeds reckoned there was no further need to monitor this unit.
She snatched a scant moment to dampen growing unease before fishing a flashlight from a side pocket of her kitbag. And she was about to thumb the switch when some deep-seated instinct prompted her to pivot on her heel and close the roller door behind her, blanketing the interior of the unit in darkness again. She’d learned to trust her gut, and if her gut told her it was prudent not to advertise the fact she was here, then so be it.
Switching the flashlight to the lowest setting, she approached the bag, playing the beam over the stained canvas.
Not empty. Whatever had been stored inside was lumpy, and took up the whole interior of the bag. The fine hairs on the back of her neck rose. Damn, but she was getting a bad feeling about this.
She reached for the zipper and, in one swift, decisive movement, opened the bag.
Her torch beam limned chalk-white, almost skeletal features, haloed with a tangle of limp dark curls. It—the cyborg—lay on its side, stick-thin limbs curled tight against its torso.
She swallowed the bile that had surged up her throat and flicked the flashlight beam over that gaunt face again, both hoping for and dreading a response.
Nothing. Not even the merest twitch of an eyelid.
Her hand shook as she reached out to check for a pulse. And the instant she pressed the cyborg’s carotid artery, those paper-thin eyelids opened.
Whoa. She had never seen such incredibly blue eyes—eyes that sucked her in and ripped through her defenses.
Horror warred with a wave of hot fury that stained her vision a bloody red… and all possibility of professional detachment died. The hollow emptiness she’d endured for so long it was now a part of her filled with steely resolve, because she knew without a doubt that Beta wasn’t like Caine’s current pet. And there was no longer an “it” lying at her feet—some inhuman “thing” to be “dealt with”. There was only a defenseless, disabled child.
Sweet God Almighty. Beta was conscious and sentient and they’d zipped her into a bag, tossed her in a corner, and left her there to waste away, helpless, trapped in some nightmarish half-life. What they’d done to her…. It was unimaginably cruel. And Beta had suffered. Terribly.
Who were the inhuman monsters here?
Speaking the command that would shut this miraculous but flawed creation down, reducing this child to a lifeless machine, might be construed a mercy. But in this moment, right now, it smacked of murder….
And this time she didn’t have it in her to commit murder.
She stroked the cyborg’s hair. “Well, Beta, looks like it’s just you and me, and we’re up shit-creek without a paddle because that bastard Caine is gonna pin big-ass targets on both our backs.”
Her soft bark of derisive laughter bounced off the walls. And when the echoes of it had faded, she started making plans.
Chapter One
The cab driver performed an inept three-point turn and zoomed off with a wince-inducing screech of tires, leaving Sam Ross in Nowheresville. The jury of his peers was still out as to whether this was a good career move, but right now, as the sky blushed rosy pink with the birth of a new day, and some nearby feathered denizen warbled a cheery welcome, Sam told himself he didn’t give a crap what his colleagues thought of his decision. No one had said respite care was going to be easy and he’d gone into it with eyes wide open. But lately, the chinks in his armor had become gaping holes and he’d not been able to maintain the distance he felt he needed to perform his job. He was burned out.
Bottom line? When you glanced at yourself in the shaving mirror each morning and barely recognized the hollow-eyed stranger staring back at you, it was time for a change of pace.
&n
bsp; He hoisted his pack onto his shoulder, inhaling crisp country air deep into his lungs, holding it until tiny glowing sparks zinged through his headspace. And, as he exhaled, he cast off the last of his doubts. He’d been right to make this change—he felt it in his gut and his heart and his soul.
Coarse seal shifted beneath his feet as he approached the gate barring the cobbled entranceway. He pressed the buzzer on the speaker and leaned in to announce his arrival. “Samuel Ross.”
As he straightened, a flash caught his eye. A tiny security camera, barely noticeable amid the thick foliage poking through the gaps in the fence bordering the property. Which drew his attention to the fence itself, its sturdy metal palings colored a shade so close to the deep greens of the hedge plantings, he hadn’t even noticed a fence until now.
The gates shooshed smoothly, almost noiselessly, apart.
Disquiet feathered Sam’s spine but damned if he’d turn back now. He walked briskly through the gates… and fought the impulse to glance over his shoulder as they shut behind him. It was hardly unusual for an affluent property-owner living in relative isolation to install some stringent security measures, right?
Rolling the tension from his shoulders, he marched up the meandering pathway, determinedly admiring the freshly mown grass and bright, cheery flowerbeds with their neatly clipped borders. He passed two bent figures, diligently plying secateurs to a bed of standard rose bushes. Fulltime gardeners, perhaps? Not surprising given the extent of these grounds. Right now, he could be forgiven for imagining he was taking a stroll through carefully maintained public gardens. Fingers crossed the house wasn’t some drafty old mansion full of dusty antiques, with generations of stern ancestors glaring down their noses at him from the walls. Still, given the salary he’d been offered, he could put up with small inconveniences like OTT security measures, clanking plumbing and uninviting décor.
Besides, money hadn’t been his primary motive for accepting this position—though it’d certainly helped when he’d weighed the pros and cons. This placement was long-term. His patient was young and healthy—physically at least. And if her mental state left a lot to be desired, well, he could deal with that. So far as he’d been able to ascertain she wasn’t suffering. And for Sam, that was pretty much a win any way he looked at it.