RedeemingZorus Read Online Free PDF Page A

is enhanced.” He sounded pissed. “I heard you.”
    “How is your night vision?” She lifted her hand and flipped
her middle finger up at him, over her shoulder. “Move it, Mr. Valuable Cyborg.”
    He growled behind her. She itched to get her hands on his
access panel and remove that little annoying quirk from his programming. The
building door remained unlocked, the way she’d left it, to allow them to enter
the stairwell. She begun praying they didn’t run into anyone. People didn’t
really use stairs anymore but they remained intact inside older buildings.
Unless the power failed or a fire broke out to force other people into the
stairwell, she estimated they’d make it to the basement undetected.
    His heavy tread remained behind her so she knew he followed.
At the basement level she faced him. “Wait here.”
    “You’re not leaving me behind.”
    “I’m making sure no one is within sight when you step out. I
have a hovercraft parked two stalls over. We’re going to drive out of here but
I can’t risk anyone seeing you. There aren’t cameras inside this building. It’s
why I picked it.”
    He nodded curtly. She paused. “What’s your name?”
    He hesitated. “I am Zorus.”
    “What kind of name is that?”
    “It’s a masculine name intended to be used for a male. We
have that in common.”
    Her eyebrows arched. “Zing on the insult I haven’t heard a
thousand times before. I meant what culture did it come from? I’ve never heard
it before.”
    He hesitated again. It was obvious that he didn’t want to
answer. “It’s one I gave myself. It has meaning to me.”
    Her curiosity was pricked. “What’s the meaning?”
    He said nothing.
    “You want out of here?” She decided to be a bitch. He
totally deserved it. “It’s the least you could tell me since I’ve risked my
life saving you.”
    Irritation showed clearly on his handsome features. “It
stands for zestful of rights undermining supremacy.”
    Charlie gaped at him. “Uh-huh. Okay.”
    “You were never deemed subhuman and under the total control
of others. I was young and newly freed when I came up with the words that
formed the acronym of my name. Eorus sounded wrong to me. The E would have
stood for enthusiastic.” He gave her a cold look that would freeze water. “What
is the meaning of zing?”
    “Forget it. It’s slang, which I suppose you weren’t
programmed to speak.”
    “Why do you have a male’s name?” His dark gaze lowered down
her body slowly. “Are you really just a small male with a female voice?”
    “You know,” she warned softly, “if I didn’t need to deliver
you completely undamaged to get paid enough money to escape Earth Government, I
just might turn you into a toaster or something.” Anger burned inside her at
his calculated insult. She knew she wasn’t gorgeous but nobody had ever implied
she might not really be a woman. “My parents had me during the years of the
black flu.”
    “I’m familiar with that bit of your history. We occasionally
monitor what happens on Earth to assess their danger level. The black flu
struck mostly human females with a death rate of the infected estimated at
seventy percent. Earth Government implemented a quarantine until the epidemic
could be contained. The affected sections were deemed irrelevant. Why would
that have any relevance on your given name?”
    The urge to deck the big bastard had her fighting hard to
keep a lid on her temper. “I was one of those irrelevant people who lived in
one of the poor sections nobody gave a shit about. I lost an older sister, my
grandmother, and two aunts when it spread through the neighborhood. They were
all denied medical attention. The only intervention the government decided to
give was to snatch healthy, newborn baby girls to be given away to some
high-ranking officials who wanted to adopt them. Or they donated us to be
medical experiments. My parents gave me a boy’s name and a sympathetic doctor
put ‘male’ on my