Read Helix: Plague of Ghouls for Free Online Page B

unfocussed. Mottled brown skin was regaining its even complexion. Her burns were healing at a superhuman rate.
    Helen had been given the same faulty vaccine as Dep and Digger.
    Holly slid her hand across his back, making him jump. She tossed wet hair over her shoulder and regarded him with a gentle but worried expression. “What did Gil say?”
    “He said I’m fine,” he said. “It’s all in my head.”
    She rubbed his fingernails, turning his hands over to feel the ligaments and bones in the palm. She looked alarmed. “Ishmael, are you running a fever?”
    “I’ll be fine,” he insisted, pulling away. She pouted. “I run hot when I’m pissed off and anxious. It’s been too long since I’ve heard from the Council. They were supposed to hand down a decision two weeks ago, and they still haven’t made up their minds what to do with me. What to do with us . And now Burley says she’s got a job for me.”
    Holly stared out a window, mouth slightly open, as if listening to birds no one else could hear.
    “Gil needs help, and he thinks Foster’s gone. He wants Shuffle. He wants Dr. Grey.”
    Holly didn’t answer for a long while. “I’ll go as far as the Hollow,” she said. She looked confused, angry, as if wrestling with herself. Not far from the truth, I’ll bet . When she slept, she talked to herself—or rather, to Eva Foster. Ishmael would sit on the edge of the bed, watching over her, listening to the one-sided shouting match. Some mornings, she’d wake up with her arms and hands full of bedclothes, growling and swearing as if she were trying to strangle a ghost in the sheets. But, morning after morning, it was Holly who gained supremacy and emerged, though she’d have to endure thirty minutes of disorientation, distrust, and despair before she began to remember who and where she was. He’d begun to understand why Eva and Holly had slept so little in quarantine; the nightmares were there waiting for them when they fell asleep, and then again when they woke up.
    And since Ishmael had been getting sicker, Foster was waking more often, and shouting more loudly inside Holly’s head. Sometimes, Holly would stumble with her fingers pressed to one side of her head, as if Foster had stabbed her there. When the pain passed, Holly always had a question to ask, yet it usually sounded as if she was translating it from a language she barely knew. “If you’d been masticated in your gluteal, why don’t you fibrous your collagen . . . ? In your arm?” or something equally convoluted. He’d give her some kind of answer, but by the time he’d said it, Holly was blinking like someone coming out of a mescaline trance, and she’d forget both his answer and the question she’d asked.
    He didn’t want to leave her alone with her demons. Holly needed someone to hang onto. She needed someone to watch her back, if she slipped and Eva broke through.
    Ishmael opened the bottom desk drawer. Inside was a clean USB memory stick on a lanyard. He’d snuck the original USB out of quarantine, but it didn’t have a case to keep dirt out of the connector, so, to protect its data, Ishmael had copied everything onto a standard, unmarked USB key indefinitely borrowed from the Wyrd stock room. Foster’s research had already been pirated once by persons unknown, but Ishmael felt safer knowing that he’d secretly cloned and destroyed the original, and kept the copy away from anyone else at Wyrd.
    “How are they doing?” Ishmael asked, meaning the Tiger Dogs.
    Holly didn’t answer. Like someone distracted by distant music, she dumped the towel on the dining room floor and walked over it. She didn’t bother closing the bedroom door. She dressed unselfconsciously. Like Ishmael, she’d been eating a lot of healthy food and had completely recovered from six years of famine; and like Ishmael, it was all muscle that she’d added. She moved like a circus acrobat, lean but hard, and full of powerful curves without busting seams.