Rising Tomorrow (Roc de Chere Book 1), Mariana Morgan [epub e ink reader .TXT] 📗

was no guessing whether she would go berserk, for example, blinded by panic and sheer terror. Or whether a more visceral response would deprive her body of vital fluids as she puked her guts out.

No, Ingram couldn’t just pull the patches away.

‘Think!’ she admonished herself in a harsh whisper. ‘You’ve done it before. Whatever the personalised modification, the core chemicals and structure have to be the same.’ They’d better fucking be or I’ll end up killing her by accident.

She knelt in front of Eloise, saying a quick thank you to her rough field experience and the muscle memory that now guided her. She grabbed a pin from her hair and laboured a moment sharpening the damn thing against the least crumbled concrete surface she could find. With the improvised point, she carefully deactivated two patches and disabled the safety settings on the other one. Then came the tricky part.

It was illegal as hell, but just about anyone who survived the Freedom Wars had either done it or seen it done. And those Leeches who survived the military training during the Wars would probably never forget what it felt like…

The patches were supposed to be used as a whole. Simply unwrap the packaging, apply it to your skin and the patch would do the rest. They were designed to monitor the function of a person’s body in real time and release chemicals to return the body in question to a pre-programmed balanced, healthy state. They were really no different than a miniaturised analyser with its own cabinet of nano-meds to be dispensed as needed. Depending on the condition being treated, the medicine cabinet had different meds available.

When the miniaturised analyser, known as the monitoring subunit, failed, the patches were useless. This hardly ever happened. The monitoring subunit had back-up nano-circuits, and those back-ups had their own back-ups. The system was shielded from all known forms of radiation, electro-magnetic interference, you name it. Of course, physical trauma could still damage it irreparably. Take an old-fashioned hammer and a patch would be squashed into uselessness. Or someone could use a sharp pin to rip parts of it out.

Ingram’s fingers worked on autopilot from muscle memory. She couldn’t see where the brain of the patch was, yet she stabbed a spot that looked no different than the rest of it and made a confident scooping motion. A thin strip of jelly-like substance tore off, the monitoring subunit within it. Another two similar motions ripped off another two strips, removing some of the chemicals the patch had originally contained. The rest, on manual control, had… an interesting effect on the human body.

Within a few seconds Eloise’s body was in a strange form of half-sleep-like coma. Her brain had mellowed, making her not only extremely suggestible to instructions but actually unable to resist. At least for as long as the chemicals lasted.

It was no wonder that the unauthorised modification of patches was highly illegal. Yet Ingram often wondered if they had purposefully been designed to be modifiable in such a straightforward way. The process was so simple once you knew what you were doing that it took no specialised knowledge. All that was needed to make the wearer utterly helpless were fingers steady enough to arm a meds dispenser.

The same effect could be achieved with a cocktail of meds in the form of injections or pills, but that required greater expertise. The patches were ready mixed, came with long expiry dates and were heat-resistant, which made them extremely useful during the Freedom Wars. They were also more effective than pills, lasted longer than other forms of nano-meds, due to the slow-release chemicals, and their use was virtually painless. A perfect, lush solution for the perfectly spoilt Elite.

Ingram brought her attention back to the present and placed the comatose Eloise on the floor, covering her with abandoned junk and rags.

The pain in her ribs intensified the more she moved, but she didn’t dare to slow down.

Clothes. We need clothes to blend in. Weapons. Water. And anything of value I can find.

Her own pockets were empty. She had set off to take Eloise Moretti home with nothing but her uniform. She had her wrist-comp: a useless piece of technology in the current circumstances, since she couldn’t use it without being traced. She couldn’t trade it, because it was of absolutely no value to the average Leech. Her BCC could give her access to her account, which still contained the majority of her salary, but that would get her traced just as fast. Not to mention no one in the slums would accept digital creds. No, they would want the old Novo coins, which the Elite no longer used and Ingram had none of.

Luckily the slums had very few BCC readers that still functioned and it would be fairly easy to avoid them, keeping her undercover persona a secret. There was nothing good awaiting her in the Underground City if the Syndicate discovered that she was a gendarme. And just thinking of someone casually scanning Ms Moretti’s BCC made Ingram shiver.

‘Right, spoilt princess, you stay exactly where I left you. Be back in a few minutes.’

She rose and crept slowly towards the door of the closest housing unit, shrugging her uniform tunic off as she went. Another piece of her soul died at the thought of what she was about to do, but she didn’t have the luxury of time to hesitate. She hoped that inside would be a typical, small, run-down but habitable unit with makeshift, basic facilities. If it was anything bigger than that, she was probably in deep trouble.

She kicked the door open, the old, strained lock giving in easily with surprisingly little noise. Within a second, she was on top of the person nearest to the door, and a few seconds later both the men and the woman inside were unconscious on the floor, before they had managed to react in the slightest.

‘Thank fuck there were no kids in here,’ she gasped, her left arm