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

an excessively formal position, her eyes staring dead ahead. ‘Explain,’ he added softly, almost resigned to what was about to follow.

‘No excuse, sir,’ Ingram replied instantly, as if she were still going through her basic training during the Freedom Wars.

Gonzalez’s hand twitched. He wanted to hit her. He wanted to hit her again and again until she broke enough to talk to him. But he would never do it; it wasn’t his style. He pulled his hand back, but not before she saw it.

She wished he had struck her, but knew he never would. She deserved it. She deserved so much more. Sometimes, she wished Gonzalez was more like her training officers back in the early days. She almost missed getting her ass kicked; it was easier to deal with failures that way.

I lose my cool too damn easy. Lingering drugtox is no excuse. I should know better.

‘Explain,’ he ordered more forcefully. Personally, he had been willing to let bygones be bygones and not pry too much into what had happened in the Underground City, but it was no longer an option. It was clear that neither Eloise nor Ingram would be able to go forward as if nothing had happened. Because a lot had happened.

It was his responsibility to determine the appropriate course of action. The Medibot had told him what had happened in general terms, but that was a poor substitute for understanding the how. And he needed to know the how.

He needed both women capable of not only doing their job but of doing it together. He had to think about Eloise, and there was no way of predicting what the Elite woman was going to do next. Without understanding the situation, he couldn’t even begin to predict how she might feel, or which way her mental health might spiral. He was less worried about Ingram, knowing what her past experiences were, but even there, he longed to give his friend the time she needed to recover. The time neither of them had.

‘No excuse, sir,’ Ingram repeated. And in her eyes, there truly was none. It was her duty to bring Eloise Moretti back to safety. It was her duty to protect her, not beat her up. It was her duty to be understanding and help her.

‘Did you nano-drug her?’ he asked, switching gear to more direct questions.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘How?’

‘First with her own patch—she had it on when she came to the 4th. I stripped it.’ Such a nifty little term to describe the illegal nano-patch manipulation she had performed. ‘When that ran out, I used some Braindaze I managed to get my hands on.’

Gonzalez flinched. Braindaze was nasty stuff. He knew from the Medibot that there were trace amounts of it in Eloise’s blood, but somehow it had never occurred to him that Ingram might have injected it voluntarily.

Leeches had limited access to nano-meds, so they improvised. They grew herbs that could be used to dilute and stretch the supplies of nano-drugs they did possess. Though trial and error, and possibly quite by accident, they created Braindaze.

The original intentions were pure. Through the disconnection of conscious thought and awareness, it acted as a heavy analgesic, which was pure gold when Leeches needed to perform crude surgeries, clean wounds and deal with the plethora of physical traumas their rough lives led to. The Braindaze provided the patient with an easy escape into a world of oblivion without suppressing the breathing instinct or requiring nanobots to provide oxygen. It didn’t create the painless state the Elite drugs could provide, but it was the most effective thing the Leeches could produce themselves.

Of course, it quickly became abused for less noble purposes.

By Elite standards it was strictly illegal—even the lab-produced, non-contaminated variety. Their doctors had access to more sophisticated drugs and something so primitive wasn’t required. Whatever little of the law existed in the slums tried to control the drug, but for different reasons.

The Syndicate, of course, had two sets of laws, one for themselves and one for everyone else.

Ingram had had no trouble getting her hands on a couple of shots of Braindaze. There had been no way to check how pure the sample had been. That could have led to some serious side effects, increasing the risk of developing nano-drug sensitivity and all sorts of imbalances in the body’s biochemistry, but it had kept Eloise in a suitably vegetative, non-disruptive state. It had been a choice Ingram had to make. And thanks to the Medibot, Eloise was going to be just fine.

‘Did you beat her up?’

‘Yes, sir.’ It was like pulling teeth out.

‘Was it strictly necessary?’

That question surprised Ingram, and she barely suppressed a twitch to look at Gonzalez.

‘Yes and no, sir. I had to knock her out. She was freaking out and I was out of Braindaze at that point. The punch that broke her cheekbone was necessary, although I didn’t strictly need to hit so hard. The knee into the guts was not necessary,’ she reported with brutal honesty. She repressed a sigh; she had kneed the Elite woman because she had allowed her anger to take over. She had been tired, hungry and desperate, and she hadn’t even considered a different solution.

Gonzalez turned around and walked across the room to look at a map of the East Side of Lyon, stalling for time to collect his thoughts. He had spent long hours staring at the map when Ingram and Ms Moretti had been missing, hoping for some inspiration. It felt like he could plan a route through the area from memory, but of course, he still lacked the understanding of what the slums really were. He never would truly understand what the life of a Leech was like.

Next to the map of East Lyon was a map of the Afro-European Alliance, consisting of Europe and Africa, as the name suggested, but also of most of the old Middle East. The eastern border ran from the Kanin Peninsula south to the Volga River, and right down to