After the Dark Read Online Free PDF

freaks, and a large segment of the city still wouldn't let them forget that. After Colonel Donald Lydecker, the surrogate “father” of Manticore, had left, Renfro assumed command. She'd been in charge when Max was captured.
    Before Max's escape, Renfro and her team of conscienceless scientists—the Nazis might have relished having these “mad doctors” on staff—had injected Max with the virus, which was harmful to only one person on earth: Logan Cale. If Max and Logan touched in any way, he would get the virus . . . or rather, the virus would get him: Logan would die within twenty-four hours.
    For this reason, the two were careful not to touch, and both constantly wore gloves, and long pants in the warmest of weather . . . and even in intimate situations like this one, as they sat in the restaurant in a booth, the couple kept a respectful distance, like a middle-school boy and girl on a first date.
    Earlier this year they got a firsthand look at what the virus could do if it went unchecked. During Max's capture of Kelpy—the chameleon-boy-turned-serial-killer—he had somehow caught the bug. Due to Kelpy's fixation on Max, his ultimate target had been Logan, his prime goal to “become” Logan and thereby win Max's affections. When Kelpy started his chameleonlike morphing, turning him into a pseudo-Logan, Max had touched the changeling transgenic, and somehow that had been enough for the virus to be passed on—that is, to be unleashed on Kelpy.
    Max and her friends—Logan, best buddy Original Cindy, Alec, Joshua, and several others—had witnessed young Kelpy's meltdown and horrifying death. Since then, Max had worked even harder to make sure that she and the man she loved never touched. Anything—the brush of a kiss, the holding of bare hands, even the most perfunctory of hugs—would be the touch of death to him.
    Gem brought his coffee, placed the steaming cup in front of him and offered a warm smile, which Logan returned.
    “How's Eve?” he asked the waitress.
    The night after the Jam Pony hostage crisis, Gem decided that since her baby was the first transgenic to be born in freedom, the child should be named after the first woman in the world . . . hence, Eve.
    “She's already standing and she wants to walk,” the slim, attractive waitress said, “though she's not quite ready yet. She's gonna be a handful.”
    “Standing already?” Logan asked, astounded. “At six months?”
    Max just smiled. “Good genes—that is, really,
really
good genes. All of us X5s did that.”
    Logan shook his head in wonder, then sipped his coffee as Gem returned behind the counter. Max ran a hand over her face and let out a long sigh.
    “You look beat,” he said. “Too bad you weren't genetically enhanced to be a mayor, not a killer.”
    She gave him a weak grin. “That's how tired I am—even a weak-ass crack like that made me smile.”
    He snorted. “Weak-ass, maybe. But you did smile.”
    “I did smile,” Max admitted.
    “And we do have much to be thankful for.”
    “Yes, we do. Do I sound ungrateful . . . ?”
    “Oh yeah.”
    Max just shook her head. “Sorry . . . I wasn't wired up to be a leader . . . I'm a loner. A commando.”
    After taking another pull from his coffee, Logan said, “Well, loner or not, there's a whole lotta people up on the roof, asking for ya.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Joshua, Alec, Original Cindy, Mole. I think Dix and Luke are up there. Sketchy, too . . . case you wanna toss his ass off the building.”
    “Now you are tempting me . . . But it's cold up there.”
    For most of the last two weeks, the weather had been miserable, even by Seattle's standards. The temperature had hung near the freezing mark, and the wind howling at thirty to forty miles per hour, with gusts as high as fifty.
    Logan gave her a look. “I don't see you wearing a coat . . . Anyway, aren't you the one told me 'bout holding your breath for five minutes? In a pond under a sheet of ice? Back when you escaped from