Page 74 of Neon Flux

I shook my head. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll zap you?”

“Afraid of what? That you’ll hit me with all the power of a nine-volt battery? You’ve got precision, doll, I’ll give you that.” He tapped the side of his Vysor for emphasis. “But you can’t hurt me. That takes an anger you just don’t have. Otherwise, you would’ve killed me when you had the chance.”

“You don’t fucking know me. Not all of us lash out at the smallest thing like some doped-up psycho. Some of us have to be careful, want to be careful. I don’t want to kill anyone—but you have no idea how angry I am.”

“Oh, I don’t know you?” He scoffed. “I know that you’re smart as fuck, studying things at Elysium most people can’t even begin to imagine. I know you can read people, show them exactly what they want so that they give you exactly what you need.” His grin grew, nearly splitting his face open as it turned manic and predatory. He grabbed my face, his fingers digging into my cheeks. “Best of all, I know how ridiculously good that pussy of yours tastes when you come. I don’t think there are many who have that honor.”

“Let go of me!” I struggled, and to my surprise, he did—but he whipped his wrist, and my neck snapped to the side. As pain flared in my vertebra, I clenched my eyes shut, not looking at him.

“I know you’re angry, but you’re way too chickenshit to do anything about it. Even now, you won’t hurt me, you can’t—”

I screamed and sent a bolt of lightning at him so strong it shocked even me. The fiber of his jacket singed, and the air filled with the smell of burnt tetracarbon. He winced, taking one step back, and an ugly feeling of triumph rose in my chest. But I saw him shake it off, and his clenched jaw was replaced by that wicked smirk.

“You call that angry? I’ll show you angry.”

The hair on my neck rose as his power surged. I knew the blast was coming moments before it happened, an unavoidable premonition. The lightning hit my chest and branched out over my skin, my whole body seizing.

“Stop! It’s too much!”

His other hand gripped my chin again, forcing me to meet his gaze, his irises swirling with his power. “You are so fucking beautiful when you lie. You can take it.”

I felt myself light up from the inside out, as his Flux consumed me. It was just like the data center, but this time it was just me and him.

My head locked back as my spine arched violently, and there was pain—so much pain—but I didn’t fight it. Instead, I reveled in it, aligning my power to his, my frequencies matching instead of clashing. My power and his rose together, intertwining as it danced over my skin, its sharp caress laced with ecstasy.

“That’s it. You’re doing so good for me. No, don’t fight it. Eyes on me, doll.” With nearly herculean effort, I raised my head back up so I could see him. Electricity snaked around his dark irises as his gaze bore into me, hungry. The tattoo that ran underhis eye and over his cheekbone was glowing white-hot from the power.

I’d had my suspicions, but now I had to know. I stopped resisting completely and let the current flow through me—raw power now unrestricted. His pupils went wide, but he didn’t stop, almost like he couldn’t. I rode the flow, through my body and back into his, and what I saw there was horrific.

He didn’t have a Flux chip, but instead his power coalesced in huge, chrome implants that had been grafted to his skeleton, his circulatory system forced to filter through them. Even in just the flow of his power, I could feel the pain—the eternal ache that permeated from them. It all concentrated in his right shoulder, where something was wrong. The flow was erratic, his Flux glitching with every small movement.

His hand snapped away from my chin, and the flow stopped. “Not bad.” We were both panting, and something in my chest ached—but it had nothing to do with his Flux.

I’d never seen first-gen Flux control implants before. Implants that literally filtered the blood of the affected, reducing hormone load to safe levels. Tech scrapped together from what was rumored to have been top-secret military hardware for soldiers. It was massive and painful and only minorly effective. The failure rate was still over sixty percent. Luckily, it hadn’t lasted long. A few years later, the Flux chip became the standard.

Every single one of his “tattoos” was actually an implant, glowing and controlling his Flux underneath his muscles and skin. Cy was my age. The chip had been standard practice when he went through puberty. Why did he have these?

I shook my head. It didn’t fucking matter. He deserved the pain he was in. He deserved much worse.

His hand was still sparking, and he shook it absentmindedly. Then he ran those gloved fingers through his wild blue hair, pushing it back from his forehead. His chest rose with a deepbreath, and I heard him mutter, “Fucking off track.” He turned back to me.

“What was the goal of the attack?”

I sighed. Did he think this little display had bonded us in some way? Did he think the feeling of our powers flowing together so naturally, with so much force, had affected me?

It hadn’t.

It hadn’t.

“We’re back to that? Look, I really don’t know. You know I wasn’t lying when I said my only involvement was distracting you and Maddox. Why would they tell me more?”

“You were there at HQ. Why’d they have a genius like you whoring instead of doing the heavy lifting.”

“Just doing what I’m best at.”

“I thought we said no lies.”

I didn’t respond to that.