Emotion: Forced Pair: Fifth And Dent, #1

By C Ryan Bymaster

Marion Dent is a high-functioning sociopath, unafflicted by emotions, trained from a young age to become the perfect soldier to combat illegal emotional-tampering technology known as eTech. Relieved of his military duty, he has become a contractor for the highest bidder—his mental handicap making him the perfect weapon in a world where illegally controlling emotions means controlling economic power. Dent's skills are put to the test when he's contracted to steal a package—a young girl dubbed Fifth, who has a very unique talent which has the potential to render current eTech obsolete and usher in a new form of undetectable emotion-tampering.

Seemingly betrayed by the person who hired him, Dent flees with Fifth, where they find themselves in a tentative partnership, struggling not only to survive hitmen and assassins but also to understand each other. Dent races to figure out why he was betrayed as he comes to suspect the people behind Fifth's secretive past may have ties to his own. For the first time in his life, Dent's actions are clouded by emotions, and if he can figure out how and why Fifth makes him act irrationally, he may have a chance to save her from the same fate he suffered at a young age—being studied and manipulated into becoming an unwitting pawn as countries and corporations fight for economic dominion, with no remorse for those they harm or kill in order to obtain power.

A sociopath may just be the only hope for ensuring the emotional freedom of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: C Ryan Bymaster
• Release date: Jun 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386021087

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Kasumi startled awake, hands clenching her bedsheets. She stared up into the near pitch black, not willing to look to the side. Something ...

Something was happening, something that had to do with her. It was one of those gut feelings. She was thirteen now, old enough to understand these intuitions. These woman’s intuitions, she thought with a quick, proud smile.

Her smile gave her just enough courage to tilt her head and look up at the little purple light in the corner of her bedroom. Relief battled with confusion when she saw it wasn’t flashing, just giving off that same solid purple glow. Weird. If something was wrong she knew it would be activated. Maybe her gut had been wrong. After all, she was only thirteen.

Now that her heart slowed down, no longer trying to jump out of her chest, she gave herself a ten-second count. Breathing in check, she sat up in her bed and pulled down the dark satin sheets. She yawned, widely, and fumbled in the purple-tinged darkness until she found her EB and checked the screen.

10:17 PM.

She rubbed her face, not too vigorously, but just enough to wipe the remnants of sleep away. Apparently, she didn’t rub hard enough as another yawn worked its way up and out. This time she caught a whiff of her breath. Whoa! Good thing she wouldn’t be having any visitors this late at night — all the doctors were home by now, their stupid tests on her finished with for this day.

She untangled her legs from the cover and sheets and slid them over the side, where she wiggled them back and forth to get the blood flowing. When she stood on the thick carpet she gave her body a huge stretch, thinking herself a two-legged cat as she did, then padded her way to her small living room and kitchen, flipping on the lights as she went. Not many girls her age had their own living quarters, but then again, most girls her age were still free to leave their quarters.

She tossed her EB to the couch, maybe with a little too much anger, where it landed next to her phone. She bit her lower lip at the sight of the phone. She’d been allowed to use it less and less lately. Some of her friends still texted — every message received and sent relayed by one of her mother’s techs — but actually talking with them ... She missed that. And she missed hearing her name. Everyone here at this new facility called her Fifth. It was a nickname from when she was younger, and it followed her like a flea-ridden stray dog. She couldn’t even remember who had given it to her, but it had stuck with all her mother’s coworkers. Especially those people here at this new facility, who looked at Kasumi like she was a walking Nikoli puzzle.

Tomorrow she’d ask her mother if she could call at least a few of her old friends. How else would she find out if Mei had finally decided to ask Teddy out? Unless it got posted online, she’d never know.

Kasumi wanted to growl. She hated being forced to stay in these rooms, wanted nothing more than to go back to living a normal life. But she knew that would never be. Not now, not after what she had done last year. Her mother would never allow it. Her mother’s company would never allow it.

That thought made her actually growl. Then she giggled as she thought of herself as a cat again. Except, cats purred, and Kasumi wasn’t in a purring mood. So, maybe more like a tiger, then. A caged tiger. A hungry tiger.

She rummaged through her fridge, looking for anything to munch on. She shoved her face inside, the pangs in her stomach subsiding briefly to the sensation of frosty air in her face. Finding nothing enticing and sighing in defeat, she closed the door then brought her hand up and tapped her lips, thinking.

Ha!

She pirouetted, twice, and perfectly — thank you very much — stopped before a cupboard. With a flourish, she opened the small door, dipped her hand inside, and magically produced a bag of microwavable popcorn.

Butter flavor.

She beeped in two and a half minutes and pushed start. The motor whirred into action and so did her mind. Butter flavor. What, exactly, is butter flavor? Why not just use butter? Why flavor something with butter when the real thing actually existed?

Health issues, she guessed.

She stopped her philosophical monologue and checked the amount of time she had left before she was in butter-flavored heaven. Time enough to be proactive, she decided, and rushed to her room to pull out what she was going to wear tomorrow. It didn’t take long as she was a girl who knew what she wanted.

Over her chair she’d thrown a pair of dark jeans that weren’t too tight and faded just right, a pastel pink top with short sleeves, and a powder-blue jacket with cute stitching done in white along the hem and around the pockets. And, because she could, she tossed one bright pink sock and one electric green sock atop it all. Completing the look would be her black leather low-tops with the wraparound shoestrings.

She fought back the growing sense of hopelessness that no one but the doctors and techs would see how cute she would be and was relieved when the microwave called out to her.

Popcorn, salt, two Cokes, and heels up next to her bedazzled purse on her coffee table — oh man, forgot the napkins ... oh well — she scrolled through her EB searching for a movie to throw onto her TV. She almost put on Lady and the Tramp — one of her top five — but then thought better of it. She was thirteen. And now that she had her own TV, maybe something more age appropriate. She thumbed through her secret media folder, dismissing each title without much thought. But then, oh! She loved Jean Reno films. This particular one would have plenty of action and would be in French and English, two of the four languages she knew, English coming in a close second to her native Japanese.

She wore a devious grin as she sent the movie from her EB to the big screen and leaned back. Her toes were in the way and she wiggled them back and forth, too lazy and way too comfortable to move them. Tossing her EB to the side, Kasumi settled in, one hand in the popcorn, one around a finger-numbingly cold Coke.

It was just when the movie started to pick up when she shot up. Yellow butter-flavored puffs fell into and around her lap, but she was beyond caring. Something ...

She turned her head slowly to the right, almost wishing her body would ignore her brain even as she told it to do so, and locked her eyes onto the pretty purple light in the corner of the room.

Except, it was no longer pretty and purple. Oh, it was still purple, but when it flashed like it was flashing now, it was anything but pretty. Her gut feeling, her woman’s intuition, flared again.

No, no, no, no!

A series of noises, somewhere inside the building she was housed in, crept closer to her quarters. Loud, muffled sounds echoed down the sterile corridors outside her rooms and through the concrete walls. She tried telling herself that they were nothing more than some of the equipment blowing their fuses, or, maybe even fireworks. She tried convincing herself that she was safe. She stood up, Coke and popcorn ruining the carpet as one bled and soaked into the others.

Grabbing her purse and throwing her phone in it, Kasumi ran to her bedroom, fighting to control herself, to keep her mind focused. If there was one thing her mother had taught her it was that if she didn’t control her emotions, bad things would happen.

Again.

And if there was one thing Jean Reno movies had taught her, it was that gunfire had a very peculiar, very particular sound, and when you heard it, you needed to be ready. She tied up her shoes then slipped on her jacket, all the while that ugly purple light kept flashing.

I

Marion Dent was clinically diagnosed as a sociopath at the age of twelve. It wasn’t that he was a cold-blooded killer — no, that would come years later along with an eight-digit bank account courtesy of the government. It was that his brain was wired differently, chemically incapable of producing more than a vestige of basic emotions. The perfect man to combat a society where emotion could be forced into one’s mind, the perfect man to contract out for jobs others would hesitate.

He had been picked up by the U.S. government in his late teens. He’d first been poked and prodded, tested and studied. Scientists and psychoanalysts could not reproduce the effects that his brain produced, or could not produce, naturally. Not long after that he became a prime candidate for the newly created Department of Unfair and Unwilling Practices. He was sent into suspected eTech facilities to eliminate emotion peddlers and manipulators. These high-tech facilities employed their illegal technology to keep outsiders away, in methods that proved far more effective than razor-wire. Unless one knew the frequency with which these companies used to forcibly pair their false emotions, one was defenseless.

Unless one was incapable of being rendered incapacitated by emotions.

Stretching his neck, Dent looked over at the young Japanese girl sitting directly to his left on the plane. She was still fast asleep.

He’d completed the terms on his latest contract and was currently heading back to the U.S. to drop off the package. He was being paid handsomely, but no longer by the government. He’d burned that bridge years ago. The first and last time he would let emotions get in the way of a mission.

His current employer, a stock mogul who’d made more in a day than an average family made in a year, had been accused of fraud, insider trading, price manipulation, and production of illegal emotional software commonly referred to as eTech, to say the least. That all meant nothing to Dent. He didn’t scrutinize his employers. He’d been hired for a job, contracted out, given a reason to do what he did so well. And he was doing it. This was Dent’s lot in life.

The package stirred, her head rolling on her thin shoulders to fall against his arm. He shrugged it off without a second glance. The cocktail he’d given her was a mix of strong sedatives provided by his employer. Dent didn’t ask, but his employer claimed the cocktail wouldn’t harm the package. As long as it made the delivery that much easier, Dent didn’t care. Besides, the hard part was over, all that was left was to make the drop and receive his payment.

He flexed his right shoulder, rolled his arm slightly in the socket, and winced as the torn skin stretched. The new scar would be yet one more souvenir to add to the rest, a reminder of what he was and what he’d done.

II

Dent felt the pain before he’d heard the retort of the shot, felt the bullet rip through his milk-silk protective under-armor. The hybrid material dissipated much of the impetus of the bullet, but the hot metal still sizzled and gouged a bloody-line across his right deltoid.

The almost immediate retort meant the shooter had been close to his position. Dent hadn’t been warned, and so hadn’t expected, that they would have armed men this far out along the perimeter