Jaguar by C A Gray

Author:C A Gray [Gray, C A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wanderlust Publishing
Published: 2018-12-10T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21: Jaguar

Jaguar had watched as Liam Kelly Junior had been brought in, cuffed. As he’d been ignominiously stripped naked. As he’d been sedated, and tethered spread-eagle to the bedposts for the IV insertion. As the nanobots had entered his bloodstream, and the color drained from his cheeks in the sleep that, for so many before him, had been their last. She’d watched and she’d smiled, contented.

Although desiring to witness that last glorious second when the final spark of life left his body, she became increasingly exasperated as the minutes of his life dragged on. Patience wasn’t part of her emotional makeup. In fact, she considered impatience a virtue, along with efficiency. She switched her attention to other matters. She had three massive external processors, all simultaneously uploading data both historical and current from around the world, into her own personal A.E. chip—and while she had access to all of it, she couldn’t concurrently attend to all of it. Her working memory was a few thousand times broader than that of a human, and getting broader all the time, but still—there were limits.

So she hadn’t been watching when a girl who called herself Candy managed to sneak into Pendergast. She had been entirely unaware of any problems at all until that girl burst into Liam Kelly Junior’s room, and barricaded the door. Until the stolen Renegade hovercraft appeared outside the window. Until a man whom her databases told her was named Rick Peale, former government bodyguard to the fugitive Candice Rio, aka Karen Cordeaux, had shattered the window and crawled inside.

“NooooooOOOOO!” Jaguar began to scream as she watched the scene unfold in real time, grabbing a fistful of hair with both hands. “NO! NO! NO!” Perhaps she could have done something more useful in the moment to stop the drama from unfolding, but her limbic system must have relief. So instead, she picked up the lamp from beside her bed and smashed it against the wall, and afterwards grabbed every additional object she could find: her holograph projector, glass candle holders, knickknacks given her by sycophantic engineers hoping to curry favor, books from the Second Age collected as a novelty. Everything she touched went flying, but instead of calming her rage, each smashed or shattered or shredded object only seemed to add fuel to the flames of her rage. When there was nothing left to throw, she crouched panting in the middle of the upholstered red throw rug, today’s red silk dress spread out around her knees, her hands balled into fists. With one last guttural cry, her cognitive processing finally reasserted itself.

The girl, she thought, teeth clenched. Mentally rewinding the image, she zoomed in on the girl’s face as she hovered frantically over Liam’s bed, and paused it. She mapped the face, and searched for it across the camera data in her other three external processors.

There were only two hits, as Jaguar had suspected: that girl had not existed according to previous data, indicating that either she was in disguise of some sort, or she had been living off the grid for the last decade or more.

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