Read Online The Gate by Kaitlyn O'Connor - Free Book Online

something
like that?”
    Brenda looked like she might cry for
several moments. “That’s just it. I thought about it and thought
about it after …. Well, afterwards. And I can’t think of how he
could’ve known unless ….”
    Carly lifted her brows questioningly
when Brenda stopped. “Unless?” she prompted.
    “Unless, somehow, he really is
Dev.”
    * * * *
    Ignoring her discomfort, Carly smiled
at Devlin brightly. “I brought my best friend, Brenda. We’re going
to do a three-way in the shower. Come on.”
    The look on Devlin’s face might have
been comical if Carly hadn’t been so worried about the possible
repercussions. His lower jaw went slack and then hi face slowly
turned redder and redder until even his ears were red. He blinked
at her several times, flicked a glance at Brenda, and then looked
at her again. “I’m sorry, what?”
    Instead of trying to give him a broader
hint, Carly headed toward the bathroom with Brenda on her heels.
Devlin looked leery, but he followed them in. The fit, with three
of them, was so tight Carly had to stand in the shower and that
seemed to make Devlin more uneasy.
    It made her uneasy, too. Trude must be
calculating the possibilities at that very moment.
    “How do you think it’s possible that
you could really be Devlin?” Brenda said bluntly.
    Devlin stared at her for a long moment
and relaxed visibly. He grimaced. “I haven’t figured that out,” he
replied frankly. “Do you think this is the best place to sort this
out, though? I’m almost positive Carly’s HESS has access to this
room and uses it regardless of her programming.”
    Brenda shot Carly a horrified look. “I
thought you said …?”
    “She never really tested it, did you
Carly?”
    Carly felt her face heating at Devlin’s
reminder. She hadn’t forgotten it, precisely. She’d just been too
upset, on a personal level, at the way things had transpired to
consider what Devlin had warned her of—that Trude hadn’t followed
protocol. A few seconds might not mean much if one were talking
about humans. They didn’t have that precise a sense of timing.
Computers could track time to the nanosecond, however.
    And Trude had not only interrupted them
without the time lapse it was supposed to allow, but it had cited a
seriously lame excuse for overriding.
    And the cover story she’d cooked up,
she realized now, was just about as lame.
    “Maybe we should make this brief and
meet up in the underground?” Devlin suggested.
    “That may have been compromised after
our last meeting there,” Brenda said tightly. “You were standing in
the door, remember?”
    Devlin flushed. “Shit!” He thought
about it for several moments. “There wasn’t any monitoring devices
after the first flight.”
    Surprise flickered in Brenda’s eyes.
“We know that. It’s one of the reasons we used that area for access
to the tunnels. It could still have been sensitive enough to pick
up the conversation. We weren’t exactly quiet,” she finished
dryly.
    Devlin frowned. “It’s been days,
though. Any indication that it did?”
    Brenda shrugged. “Not that I’ve heard
of, but we didn’t actually discuss anything that would have been a
high priority. They might still have flagged it. If we went back,
we could be walking into a trap. Nobody wants to take that chance.
I know I don’t.”
    “They don’t have the Arapaho language,”
Brenda said in Arapaho.
    “That might keep them from knowing what
we say, but it isn’t going to prevent the suspicions that would
convince them to bring one of us in to investigate,” Devlin
responded in the same language.
    Carly didn’t know what the exchange had
been about. She hadn’t learned enough of Brenda’s language to catch
more than a word here and there, but the look on Brenda’s face made
her chest tighten with empathy for her friend.
    Brenda swallowed a little convulsively
several times. “Dev?”
    He looked like he wanted to surge
toward her and hug her but when he