Cold Sweat

"Before Kaiba Corp was a leisure and gaming company, it manufactured weaponry. You wanted to change that, Kaiba; you wanted to erase Gozaburo's legacy but…"

A squeak came from the next room. "Rats?" he remarked, raising his eyebrows.

"I'll explain." Ms. Waltz leaned into a computer screen. The pixels blurred like water; then she vanished through. Kaiba followed confidently.

They were in a little room full of complicated equipment that beeped, chirped, and whirred. Spotlights, scanners, wire sensors, and googly lenses all peered at a subject strapped to the operating table in the center. A man crouched beside the table. He was crying into his hands.

"Mr. Sloan," said Ms. Waltz, more for Kaiba's benefit than anyone else's. The patient was a little girl who thrashed and snarled like a wild thing, while staring with the glazed eyes of a rabid dog. "And this was his daughter, Soraya."

Kaiba knew Ms. Lucia Waltz well; Kenji Yatisimo owned YTech Inc., the third largest technology supplier in the world, and she was his right hand man, figuratively speaking. Five years his senior, and all the wiser for it, he knew to watch her carefully, like a mouse should watch a snake. He noticed the tricky curl to her lips and interrupted smoothly: "So you're kidnapping children these days?"

"Only for you, Kaiba," she replied sweetly. "This girl, what do you think is wrong with her?"

"Neurotoxin. Possibly strychnine."

Ms. Waltz laughed. The tinkling sound clashed discordantly with the man's crying. "You're so silly, it's cute," she said. "This girl has been infected with an electronic supervirus. Her sensory nerves especially are covered with them. I have reason to believe that she no longer sees, feels, nor hears what we see, hear, or feel. She is no longer human. Judging from a…nasty incident getting her in here, I can also tell you that she is ten times as strong as you are, and three times as fast—with all due respect, of course, Seto."

"With all due respect, of course, Lucia, that's absurd."

She steepled her fingers and nodded politely.

"An 'electronic supervirus' is too advanced to exist. The only company that's anywhere developed enough to produce this is…"

"Yours, Mr. Kaiba." The heart rate monitor beeped into the sudden silence. "Now, whatever happened to the Duel Nano?"

"It wasn't meant to work this way."

"But someone saw that it had the potential. You should have seen that it had the—"

She had that look in her eye now; the "Take Him Down" look. Mr. Sloan wiped away his tears and began to frown and clench his fists.

"This is not my fault," said Kaiba. "There's no reason why I should care about this. I'm going back to my company." He expected her to say, "Your company is doing this." He waited for her to say, "You're too clever to not have known the risks." "Profit, profit, that's all you care about," she would cry, and then Mr. Sloan would rise up like a Frankenstein monster and try to bash him over the head with an X-Ray machine.

Well, he wasn't going to let that happen. He wanted to go home. His ribs ached and he couldn't breathe and he wanted to fly to his private doctor in Milan; he wanted to get his hands on a computer and freeze the thugs who had the audacity to take his life, his love.

He did not expect her to say, "I've been tracking the hijackers who have taken your company. The leader is a man named Jaime. He's been monitoring all the people infected, like that girl over there. Remember the dots, Mr. Kaiba? Soraya is a dot. Maybe your neighbor is a dot. Maybe Mokuba is a dot… Maybe Tea is a dot."

His heart stopped. Mr. Sloan reached out to turn on a TV.


Author's Note:

wow! i almost never get to write these things! :D just wanted to say: please review! i wish i could add more fluff. i will stuff fluff in somewhere. hm...