Ghostwalker 06 - Predatory Game

feeling.”
    “I have some feeling now. Since they operated and put in the bionics. You saw me walk. Something is happening to allow that. Before the operation, I couldn’t move my feet. Now I can. I have to concentrate, but I can do it.”
    “There you go, then.Give yourself more time.”
    “I would be walking by now if it was going to work.”
    “You don’t know that, Jesse, and you’re risking cancer.” She knelt in front of him, looking up. “Please, for just a minute, put yourself in my place. How could I live with myself if I ever harmed you? How could I go on? Do you have any idea what you’re asking of me?”
    He framed her face with both hands. “Yes. I know I’m going to do this. If you don’t help me, I’ll ask Lily and Eric, and neither of them can monitor me the way you can. I’m asking you to do this because I believe you’re my best chance.”
    His thumbs brushed against her soft skin as he stared down into her eyes. It was difficult to ignore the fear he saw there, but he was going to try the experiment. He’d had too many operations and had worked too hard to give up.
    “Do you have any idea what this will do to us?” she asked. “The changes it will bring?” She had to bring it up. He had to go into this with his eyes open.
    “Having me on my feet can only make things better.”
    “Is that what you really think, Jesse? Because I love you enough to try this madness with you, but you’ll go back to active duty. You will. It’s what you live for. You and your team will be all over the place and where will that leave me?”
    He shook his head. “You’re part of us, Saber.”
    “How? How am I part of your team? How could that ever be? I assassinate people and I do it alone.”

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    “You can heal people, Saber. You could be the ultimate safety net for all of us.”
    She opened her mouth to retort, but closed it abruptly. Could that be true? Was it possible she could really use her talent for something other than death? She’d helped Patsy, but that had been a fluke. She ducked her head, not wanting him to see her expression, knowing that he’d stirred hope and it was there in her heart, in her mind. She’d always thought of herself as a kind of terrible plague people should avoid.
    “Saber? Honey, look at me. You’re amazing. The things you can do are amazing. And if you can do this for me, imagine what you could do with someone wounded. I’ve thought a lot about this.”
    “I could screw up big time, Jesse. My childhood was a training ground to kill, not save lives. I need to practice and I don’t want it to be on you.” She was listening to him, wanting it, wanting to be someone different, wanting the prize he was holding out to her, but there was a cost. She wasn’t willing to gain her new life at the expense of his.
    “You can already read my biorhythm, right? You monitor my pulse, even my blood pressure. Start slow.
    See what you can do. We don’t have to do the regeneration all in one day, in one session. Neither of us knows how it will work.”
    “It’s an experiment, Jesse, and a darned dangerous one. If Lily did this, she could have the equipment ready in case anything happened to you.”
    “She could have equipment ready after the fact, but you can prevent disaster from happening in the first place. You’ll know if my heart starts to go crazy, or anything else goes wrong.”
    “Maybe—but you’re betting your life on a very big maybe.”
    “And the other thing, Lily has no way of monitoring the cells themselves. She would have no way of knowing the cells were becoming overstimulated, so she would be guessing at the electrical pulses used.
    You’ll be far more accurate.”
    “Jesse,” Saber shook her head, holding her shaking hand out in front of her. “You don’t have a clue of the process any more than I would have for moving objects.You’re guessing because you want it to be true.”
    “Am I?”
    Saber closed her eyes and let her breath out. Eric and Lily couldn’t know the amount of electrical current to introduce. How could they? Their guesses would be less precise than hers.
    “Okay. But you tell Lily.”
    “She’ll want to be here, and I want to start now.”
    “I don’t care. We can start, but you tell her what we’re doing. If she has advice or objections, I want to hear them.”
    “I thought you didn’t trust her,” he grumbled, pushing his chair