Rising Tomorrow (Roc de Chere Book 1) by Mariana Morgan (essential reading txt) 📕

‘Tilly… is gone,’ Tilly’s voice answered. ‘Dead.’

‘What?’ someone shouted, but Eloise didn’t hear it. There was only one explanation, and she felt all her energy drain away. Someone caught her before she hit the ground, but it didn’t matter. Her home. Her sanctuary. Tilly. Gone. Dead. Lost.

Something was still shrieking, almost piercing through the pain and devastation. She needed it to stop. She couldn’t…

Everyone else in the room winced as the noise intensified, hands shooting to their ears as Tilly expressed her anguish. The scream mutated into crackling, whistling and buzzing, merging into one overwhelming racket as the state-of-the-art system seemed to get stuck in a hopeless loop.

Gonzalez shot out of his chair, ignoring the eardrum-shattering noise, and knelt in front of Eloise, grabbing the woman’s face and forcing her to look at him. He too understood what was going on.

‘Switch the AI off. Shut her down!’ he shouted. He had spent enough time working with Tilly over the last couple of days to realise she was no ordinary computer system. Somehow the personality subroutines had grown, turning her into the closest thing a machine could ever be to a human being. There may not have been a body to go with that artificial intelligence, but Tilly could feel, and what was ultimately a loss of her parent, or her alter ego, was now driving her crazy. She had felt the destruction of the Chandler N-Suit Research Base and the original Tilly, her own template, in a way their human brains couldn’t truly comprehend. But she wasn’t the original Tilly, with all the subroutines that could help her deal with the loss. She was raw and incomplete because of the limited storage space at Roc de Chere. There was no telling what damage might be done to her system if she was allowed to suffer for much longer.

‘Tilly is frying her subroutines—switch off her ability to think. Now!’ he shouted again, shaking Eloise, hoping the woman could snap out of her own agony long enough to understand him.

At first nothing happened. The Elite only stared at him, eyes vacant and lost, but then her lips mumbled the instruction and the personality subroutines switched off one after another. The noise ended as abruptly as it had started. The basic computer system was still there, but the part that could anticipate, feel and fear, and be confused by all of that, was offline.

‘Good,’ Gonzalez muttered, patting Eloise’s shoulder. ‘Good.’

‘Asshole!’ Eloise shouted, lashing out without warning, hitting and punching. Or she would have been hitting and punching if Rivas, who had caught her before she hit the ground, hadn’t been there to hold her down.

‘No, Eloise!’ he said, trapping her arms behind her back.

‘Let me go!’ The woman writhed. Her feet lashed out but found nothing but empty space. She tried twisting out of the ironclad grip, throwing herself with all the force she could muster, but there was no escape. In a last-ditch attempt, she dug her heels into the ground and straightened her legs.

Rivas felt his back slam into a table leg as her body pushed into him, and he coughed as the air left his lungs. But then he twisted before Eloise could wriggle free, throwing his arms further around hers, squeezing them behind her back as his legs pinned her body.

Her legs, the only part of her she could still move freely, continued to lash out, trying to strike at anyone nearby but hitting only tables and chairs. Stunned for a moment by her crazed outburst, no one moved to help Rivas.

‘You’re hurting me!’ Eloise wailed. Her shoulder might have been fixed, but the twisting motion had taxed the freshly reassembled flesh. ‘You’re hurting me,’ she repeated more plaintively when the pressure eased off and her panting body collapsed to the floor. Tentatively she moved her arm; it was sore, but seemed undamaged.

‘I’m sorry.’ Rivas pulled her towards him for a hug. ‘I’m so sorry.’ He too understood what Tilly meant. Eloise’s home had just blown up when the self-destruct program kicked in. Wagner’s people must have finally breached the residence. Everything she had ever owned, everything she thought defined her, was gone.

‘Clear the room,’ Gonzalez ordered, signalling to Ingram to wait. Even with most of his focus on Eloise, he couldn’t possibly miss the scowl Palmeiro directed at Ingram when he realised she was allowed to stay.

‘How can we help?’ Gonzalez knelt in front of Eloise again, but maintained a safer distance this time.

‘I think you have done enough.’ Her voice was quiet but the venom in it was spectacular.

‘Actually, I think he has,’ Ingram said evenly. ‘If it wasn’t for the self-destruct, Wagner would now be roaming through your home. Your bedroom, your labs. Your privacy and your sanctuary gone forever.’

Eloise looked at her. She really wanted to object, deny the truth and blame them for all her suffering, but she couldn’t.

Dammit, they’re right, a small voice in the back of her head said.

‘I want to be alone,’ she whispered, tightly gripping Rivas’ arms around her, redefining the word alone.

CHAPTER 40

Roc de Chere

Lac d’Annecy

Afro-European Alliance

Tuesday 28 April 2725

DAY 9

Outside, Gonzalez paused, lost in thought, watching Ingram walk away.

‘Aisha, wait!’ he called, and nudged his head towards the unoccupied medical room.

‘Sir?’ The innocent face didn’t fool Gonzalez; the woman knew what he was after.

‘What’s going on with Captain Palmeiro?’ Gonzalez asked the moment doors had closed behind them.

‘Nothing,’ she replied, just a tad too quickly to sound believable, and then sighed, admitting defeat. ‘Federico is a good operative, always has been. He’ll get his shit together and won’t disappoint you, sir. Neither will I,’ she reassured him.

The list of suitable MIS operatives that Ingram and Rivas had compiled had been short, and given the time constraints Gonzalez had gravitated heavily towards the people he had worked well with before. Personal knowledge was always handy when it came to relying on other people in the heat of the