Read The Fall (Book 4): Genesis Game for Free Online

take him back to his room where he would be locked in. With someone inside the room to act as both helper and guard.
    All that time spent trying to find a place where he could finally settle in and work on the problem of developing a cure, but he hadn't considered the idea that his value in doing so would turn him into a commodity. Something of intrinsic value to be protected whether or not he wanted it.
    Even now he could feel the tense gaze of someone standing at the open window behind him, just waiting for Kell to clench his ass in just the wrong way so they could heroically leap out and save him from a stupid fall from the second story.
    Then a tiny voice piped up and the world got a few shades brighter.
    “What are you doing up here?” Michelle said as she glided across the roof and plopped down next to him. “You brooding?”
    Kell raised an eyebrow at her. “If I say you're too young to understand the concept behind that word, please do me a favor and punch me in my good arm.”
    Michelle smiled up at him, sunny as ever. “I wouldn't hit you. Mostly because you'll get better one day and then you'll get even. And I do too know what it means. Mom told me it's how you get when you think about all the sad stuff that happened to you.”
    It took an effort to hold back a smile. Michelle wasn't far off the mark, but the image her words conjured in his head were of him as Batman, being all broody on a rooftop. Jesus.
    “Your mom said that, huh?”
    Michelle nodded sagely. “She also told me if I saw you doing it, I should make you laugh even if I have to tickle you.” The last she said with a seriousness that would have been funny to anyone but Kell. He, however, had seen what happened when Michelle was tickled. Due to what was probably a crossing of developmental wires, Michelle did indeed laugh when tickled. But she also got intensely—almost impossibly—angry at the same time. The little girl turned into a mass of shrieking giggles and tearfully furious glares, and attacked the living shit out of the person tickling her.
    It should have been funny to think of the little pixie going bananas on someone trying to get a laugh out of her. It might have been if not for the aftermath, the obvious emotional toll the reaction took on her. The sobering fact was that Michelle was particular about how people interacted with her, and didn't like losing control. Being put in a situation that forced her to have an emotional reaction wasn't fun or funny. At best it bordered on assault.
    So Kell understood the serious concern Andrea, Michelle's mother, must have if she would suggest her daughter do something she herself hated so deeply.
    “I'm okay, kiddo,” Kell said. “I'm okay.”
    “You sure?” Michelle asked and the earnestness in her cherub face brought the long-buried fatherhood out in him. He pulled her into a one-armed hug and rained light kisses down on top of her head.
    “I'm sure.”
    And he was. Not only for the obvious reason, which was the fact that first and foremost Chimera had been designed to repair nerve damage. It was because even if his arm, whose fragile state precluded anything beyond basic sensation and motion testing, suddenly and permanently went dead, he would still get along fine. The value which turned him into a non-replaceable asset didn't require him to have use of both hands. Or any hands, if it came down to it. There was nothing he could do in the lab that John couldn't. Even a layman with a moderate amount of training could serve as his hands.
    Kell's value as a fighter wasn't trivial, but only handful of the people around him could be categorized as non-combatants. Even the little girl next to him could fight like seven kinds of hell. His skill set was useful in combat, but its loss wouldn't noticeably affect the ability of the group to defend itself.
    “I'm sure,” he said again.
     
     
     
    In times past, Kell would have been one of the central players determining what to do with the