Raven Strike Read Online Free PDF Page B

before. Everyone, Zen included, had given him up for dead.
    A recent Whiplash mission had discovered him still alive, though so physically and mentally altered, he was barely recognizable. Zen had helped rescue him. Now he felt obligated to help him back to health.
    Mental health. Physically, he’d never be what he was. He’d always be much, much better.
    Rescued from a helicopter crash by a scientist working with Olympic athletes, Stoner had been the recipient of numerous biomechanical improvements and a host of steroidlike drugs that had turned him into something approaching a Superman. While he had been weaned from most of the drugs the scientists had put him on, he still retained much of his strength.
    A single nurse was on duty in the basement ward. Two guards with loaded shotguns stood behind her.
    “Good morning, Senator.”
    “Katherine.”
    “Dr. Esrang is with him.”
    “OK.”
    Zen wheeled himself next to a chair, then waited as one of the guards ran a wand around him and looked over his wheelchair to make sure there were no weapons or other contraband. Cleared, he got back on and wheeled himself to the steel door. A loud buzzer sounded; the door slid to the side. Zen entered a narrow corridor and began wheeling toward a second steel door. The doors acted like an airlock; only one could be opened at a time, even in an emergency.
    Two more guards waited on the other side of the door. Zen was searched once more. If anything, the second search was more thorough. Cleared, Zen went down the hallway to a set of iron bars. The burly man on the other side, dressed in riot gear but without a weapon, eyed him, then turned and nodded. The bars went up; Zen wheeled through. He said hello, not expecting an answer. He had never gotten one in the weeks since he’d been coming to visit Stoner, and he didn’t get one now.
    Past the last set of iron bars, the place looked pretty much like a normal hospital suite again. It was only when one looked very closely at things, like the double locks on the cabinet drawers and the ubiquitous video monitors, that one might realize this was an ultra-high-security facility.
    The hall turned to the right, opening into a large, glass-enclosed area. The glass looked into four different rooms. Zen pivoted to his left, facing a large physical therapy space on the other side of the glass. Stoner, dressed in sweats, was lying on a bench doing flying presses with a set of dumbbells. If the numbers on the sides of the plates were to be believed, he was swinging two hundred pounds overhead with each arm as easily as Zen might have lifted fifty.
    Zen caught a reflection in the glass. Dr. Esrang was leaning, arms folded, against the glass almost directly behind him.
    “You’re trusting him with free weights,” said Zen.
    “He’s making good progress,” said Esrang, coming over. “He’s earning our trust.”
    “Are the new drugs working?”
    “Hard to say, as usual. We look at brain waves, we look at scans. We are only guessing.”
    Zen nodded. They’d had variations of this conversation several times.
    “You may go in if you wish,” said the doctor.
    Zen watched his old friend awhile longer. Stoner’s face was expressionless. He might be concentrating entirely on his body’s movements, feeling every strain and pull of his muscles. Or he might be a million miles away.
    Zen wheeled over to the far side of the space. There was a bar on the frame. He slid it up, then pushed the door-sized pane of glass next to it open. He made sure to close the door behind him, then wheeled around to the room where Stoner was working out.
    Stoner said nothing when he entered. Zen wheeled about halfway into the room, waiting until his friend finished a set. Stoner, six feet tall and broad-shouldered, weighed about 240 pounds, nearly all of it muscle.
    “Working with the dumbbells today?” said Zen.
    Stoner got up from the bench and went to a weight rack on the far side of the room. He took out another