Girl From Above #3: Trapped Read Online Free PDF Page A

moved but for his jittery knee.
    I’d gathered enough data to know the basics about the events that had transpired during the past few hours, but I needed to hear his recall to complete the picture. Much about his data didn’t align. I’d spent enough time around the captain to know that if I were a person, my instincts would be telling me that something was off with Caleb Shepperd’s behavior. “What happened?”
    “Jesse …” His voice caught. “She turned up at my hotel room. Probably sent by Bruno to keep an eye on me.” He struggled to get the words out, guarding them behind walls and only letting a few through. He still didn’t look at me. “She’s … she was working for him. Again.” His vitals skipped and jumped. “We er …”
    There was that hitch again.
    “Caleb.”
    He darted his gaze to me like I’d slapped him. He didn’t like hearing his name from my lips, but it worked to focus him.
    “Are we in any immediate danger?” I asked.
    “Fuck yeah. The cops don’t believe me, even though they saw him. They think we were working together, that a threesome got out of hand. They charged me with her fucking murder.” He laughed—an ugly, broken sound. “I didn’t kill her, synth.”
    The truth in his words shone like a beacon of confidence through the storm of mixed messages his body was broadcasting. “What man?”
    His gaze locked on mine, half-accusatory. The rest of the accusation arrived in his voice. “One of your kind.”
    My kind?
    “A synthetic killed her?” If I’d had a heart, it would have been hammering hard. As it were, countless processes and scenarios spilled into my thoughts. “That’s not possible.”
    “Fuck you, synth. That’s what the cops keep telling me. Of course it’s fucking possible. Fucking protocols and bullshit failsafes. They’re all killers, every last one thousand and one of them. Even you. Especially you.”
    His words struck at a part of me that didn’t exist in programming, that intangible part where emotions were born, and it hurt. The pain was different this time but as worthy of study as empathy. I swallowed and closed my eyes, regaining control inside of a second. “Did he have a number or call himself by a name?”
    “We didn’t have time for proper introductions while he was beating the shit out of me.” Hatred burned through the anger in his eyes. Hatred for me? I tilted my head. No, hatred for my kind, for the others who looked exactly like me, and for what I represented.
    “We should return to Starscream, ” I said, careful to keep my voice leveled and controlled. He couldn’t know how his words hurt, not yet. None of them could know until I’d studied the data and concluded what it meant to be … me.
    “No.”
    “No?”
    He rubbed a hand down his face. “I just … I need to get my shit together. I can’t go back there and face my brother’s questions. I need time—just some time, synth.” He bowed forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and threaded his fingers into his hair. “ Starscream will never get clearance codes for departure, not with me on bail. The docking umbilical won’t release without those codes. She’s as grounded as I am until I can deal with this.”
    “Brendan is worried.”
    Caleb bowed his head once more and mumbled, “He should be.”
    I had more questions. I wanted to know everything about the synthetic who’d attacked Jesse—what he’d said and what he wanted—but Shepperd was in no condition to withstand a barrage of questions.
    We rode in silence. Outside the pod, Lyra’s permanent darkness lightened and the lights faded away as we approached the rim of the entertainment domes. We eventually alighted the pod in a rundown strip where the residential blocks were in the process of being torn down and others rebuilt. Empty high-rises stood like tombstones, reaching toward the concave domes high above. Black windows watched me like a thousand eyes. The unease I’d experienced in the