by Jody Wallace
“You’re in the same cracked dome,” she reminded him, thumping to the mattress beside Pumpkin. She wanted to pet the cat, but she was mad at the cat. It wasn’t Wil who’d created this fiasco, though he had agreed to the scam when the cat suggested it. “You’ve got no funds for a Q-ship. You’re stuck.”
He simply watched her. “There are worse places.”
“Casada knows you’re on Trash Planet. He won’t stop looking as long as you’re alive.” Whether she hid them, relocated them, or paid for them to fly to another part of the Rim, Casada would still come for her as Wil’s last known contact. How would she handle it?
“That is a problem. I certainly don’t want to be dead.” Wil rubbed his hands over his face and through his shiny, short hair. “A push from Pumpkin won’t do it. Pushes are temporary.”
“Good to know.” She eyed Pumpkin, whose lack of concern at the danger they were in annoyed her enough that she reached over and poked his soft, fat side. “What are you going to do about it?”
He startled as if he’d been napping and glared at her. “Rude.”
“There is no way you fell asleep in the twenty seconds we’ve been arguing.”
Cats did not have eyebrows, but the expression on Pumpkin’s face was the epitome of a single arched eyebrow. “It’s called a cat nap?”
“We need a plan to get Casada to quit chasing you and Wil once and for all,” she said. “You’re in constant danger. Do you want to live like that?” And bring danger to her doorstep to boot?
“He’d stop if Pumpkin and I were gone,” Wil said.
“Or if he was dead,” Pumpkin added.
That would work, except for one thing. “Depends on how many of his underlings he’s told about you and how ambitious they are,” she mused.
Wil swiveled the chair to face her. “You can’t seriously be contemplating murder. Again.”
She lifted her hands. It was the most obvious way to solve the issue besides selling Pumpkin to the highest bidder. Because that would be so terribly simple. “I like permanent solutions. We don’t do things half ass on Trash Planet.”
“Come on. This isn’t Kolliyar,” he said. “You’re not a bunch of lowlifes and criminals.”
He barely knew them. Then again, in the short time he had, she’d saved his life and risked just about everything to protect him. She hadn’t been this much of a sucker since…ever. “We’re not exactly noble.”
“Neither is the nobility.” Wil rolled the chair close enough that their knees bumped. “You’re one of the most honorable people I’ve ever met.”
Honorable. Just how she wanted him to regard her.
“If you won’t let me kill him, I guess you and Pumpkin need to disappear.” Trash Planet hosted its share of humans wanting to lay low. The caveat was that the person in hiding had to prove worthy. If you came looking for someone on Trash Planet, union loyalty generally meant you weren’t going to find them.
As much as Su hated to admit it, she would have trusted Hazer Union and her corner cutting, platitude uttering, fancy footworking, mutated uncle not to point Casada in her direction. Uncle Hoff would have cut off his third arm before he’d betray his family—if she still counted as family after their mutual disowning of each other. And she’d trust a lot of the pickers in the Bristler Union to abide by their contract and misdirect anyone looking for Su to the Alfreiti System and back.
But not Garza.
What in the hells was she going to do, and why were Wil and Pumpkin already so important to her?
“What was your escape plan when you started this mess?” Su asked. Sometimes you had to begin at the beginning instead of jump ahead to the dark moment. “You couldn’t have imagined you’d get away with it forever.”
“I figured I’d stop gambling once Pumpkin said we could and go back to normal.” Wil looked at the cat, who had closed his eyes again. “Gamblers come and go. It’s not illegal for a dance teacher to gamble. I didn’t think anyone could prove I was cheating.”
“If you cheat, there’s always a way to prove it,” Su scolded. How could he have been so naïve? Had his life as a dancer been sheltered? He didn’t seem unwise to the ways of humanity. “Then again, the cheating isn’t the issue. It’s the cat Casada wants, and that would be the case whether you’d cheated or not. Pumpkin, what was your plan?”
The cat opened one orange eye a half-slit. “I can disappear as needed. I didn’t require a plan.”
Su exchanged a glance with Wil, who didn’t seem surprised. When the cat had such a callous attitude, how had Wil survived a whole year? “You’d let us take the fall and suffer so you can get your money?”
“Obviously not,” Pumpkin said with a sniff. “Here we are, suffering together.”
“Yeah, here you are on the verge of destroying a factory full of humans. You’re a disaster,” she told the cat. “How are you going to pay me?”
Pumpkin yawned as if bored by her rant. “We’ll get more money. Easy come, easy go.”
“How? You can’t gamble. You’re marked now. And Wil can’t dance. Can’t earn a living the way he was trained to do. He’ll have to stay in hiding. Change identities. Casada knows who he is, and that sumbitch is going to hold a grudge forever.”
“Until Casada dies,” Pumpkin reminded her. “Which could be sooner rather than later.”
“There is no way he hasn’t told people about you.” Su shot up and paced to the door as if the answers lay outside this room. Her brain whirred. “You can’t trick casino bosses. You just can’t.”
“Hmm. Except we did,” Wil said.
“A few times, but not for a year. This plan of yours was stupid the day the cat made it and stupid the day you agreed to go along with it. And I was stupid for sacrificing my crew’s safety to help you.” Rage at the situation, and the lack of solutions, burned inside her like a chem fire. Something about the cat’s arrogance in the face of her sacrifice slid under her skin like a scalpel. “It’s because I was pushed.”
Pumpkin rolled onto his side and studied her. “You would be hurting my feelings if you were of consequence to me.”
“Oh, you have got to be shitting me.” Su grabbed the cat, who squawked with indignation, and wrenched open her door.
“Su, stop!” Wil said, catching her shoulder. “He didn’t mean it.”
“Yes, he did.” She tossed the cat to the floor. “Go sleep with Tama.”
She and Pumpkin glared at each other. His tail lashed. “You will regret that.”
“Are you going to piss on my boxes?” If she stopped to deconstruct why she was so determined to help the obnoxious cat—and Wil—she’d learn more than she wanted. “You need us. Behave yourself and the adults will try to figure out a way for you to survive this.”
“I saved your life,” the cat said.
“I was only in danger because of you, and now I’m in debt because of you.” Su wouldn’t deny she had a temper, and she could feel a rash decision bubbling up inside her like the day she’d split from her bio family and started her own factory. “I saved Wil. I was glad to do it, but we’re equals here, cat. If we aren’t of consequence to each other, then we aren’t a team and you don’t get my help. But then again, you don’t need it, do you? You can disappear anytime you want. Please. Demonstrate.”
“I don’t appreciate this type of treatment,” he huffed. His tail fuzzed out to twice its size and he raced straight toward her.
“What the—”
Pumpkin swiped at her leg. Since she wasn’t in coveralls, his claws tore through her soft pants and raked her calf. Then he scampered down the hallway in a flash of orange.
“You deserved that,” Wil told her as she cursed and stormed into the room, slamming the door. “You’re much bigger than him and bullying is beneath you.”
“I didn’t deserve any of this,” she hissed. “And you know what else? Your damn cat made me promise not to keep you. Keep you! Like I had nefarious plans to press you into service. Perhaps you’d like to
learn to rewire hazmat containers.”
Wil studied her as obliquely as the cat had. If he told her she wasn’t of consequence to him, either, she was tossing both of them into the bristler den. “That’s not what he meant.”
“Yeah, I know, but let me rage a bit.” Her room was too small for pacing, but she paced and stomped anyway, letting the smack of her shoes against the floor distract her from the raw sting of the cat scratch on her leg.
“Is that a benefit you hoped to receive for helping us?” Wil asked, arms crossed. “You did ask if I was a prostitute. I’ve met elites who expected that and more.”
She whirled on him. She wasn’t thrilled with the way she’d lost her temper, but did Wil really think that of her? “No. Come on, man. No.”
He approached her with a dangerous gleam in his eyes. “You seem very upset about the lack of payment. Upset enough to bully a small cat. What else would you have me do?”
Her back hit the doors of a storage cabinet before she realized she was dodging him. “I will have my best cybbie tracer look into your accounts. I’ll get paid the traditional way.” Not that Amatist could for sure hack a Gizem-based bank that a casino boss had frozen, but Su would put her to work on it first thing. Picking the wasteland could wait.
“I don’t want charity,” he said more seriously. “But without immediate funds, I have limited things I can offer. I would prefer be of service to you—somehow.”
Why had she ever thought this man helpless? Even in cryo lag, sound asleep, he’d affected her, rearranging her priorities. “Well, I’m not in the mood for that kind of down payment.”
He reached for her face, his eyelids heavy, and ran his fingertips up her jaw and into her hairline. His thumb rested just under her bottom lip. “What if I am?”
“You’re in the mood after what I did to your cat and money and how angry I am?” With one touch, he’d flustered her so much that she was barely making sense.
His gaze dropped to her scar. Her lips. Not many men on Trash Planet worried about scars on their dates, but he was used to elites. “You went too far with Pumpkin, but it’s not easy to stand up to him. It’s not easy to be the kind of person you are.”
“What kind of person am I?” She could sweep his legs out from under him in a flash. His training couldn’t outpace her mechanical limb. That was the kind of person she was.
Wil leaned forward until she could smell her own soap on him and lightly touched his lips to hers. His nearness was as much of a caress as the kiss. Every part of her body tingled, and her breath hitched in her throat.
He drew back far too soon. “Someone who’s too good for me. Someone who’s right—she doesn’t deserve this mess.”
He started to move away from her and she grabbed his hand. “Wait. I mean. You don’t deserve it, either.”
He looked down at her fingers—calloused, scraped, her scant few nanobots not encoded for minor injuries anymore. “I could have said no. I could have moderated him. I got lazy.”
“He pushed you.”
“He can’t really do that to me anymore.”
It didn’t matter. Not his bad decisions, not the danger he’d dragged into her life. She wanted him to kiss her again. She wanted exactly what Pumpkin had told her she wanted—to keep Wil for herself, at least for tonight. “I shouldn’t have grabbed him. Dang it. Why does he need all that money?”
Greed was a sore spot with her, forever and always. Especially when it hurt other people. Or worse. And it looked like Pumpkin had a touch of that trait.
“He’s a sentient, talking cat who can transport himself through space, and for all we know, through time.” Wil shook his head and laced his fingers through hers with a careful intimacy that sank its claws into her a lot more deeply than the cat had. “I wish I knew.”
“If we knew the truth, it might open up better solutions.”
He grinned. “If we knew the truth, we might not be willing to help him anymore.”
“That does seem more likely.” She stared up at Wil, and he stared back. At her age, there was no reason for her to be nervous around a man just because she was attracted to him and he was holding her hand. He was grateful because she’d rescued him, and she would be worse than a scab if she took advantage of that. “I would still want to help you, Wil.”
Wil drew in a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. “I’m going to my room now. If I don’t, if I keep looking at you, I’m going to kiss you again, and I’m not going to stop.”
Worse than a scab. She lifted her chin. “What makes you think that would be unwelcome?”
“Did your mood change?” he asked, eyebrow arched.
She shrugged. Her stomach fluttered. “I got less mad.”
“Pumpkin did tell me you had…an attraction to me.” She’d suspected as much, and it was hardly worth denying, so she waited for him to finish. “I’m not going to use that to maintain your cooperation.”
“I helped you before I…” She stopped, not sure how to phrase it, and then remembered how this had started. “Wait a minute. You offered to pay me with sex. Now you’re saying that seducing me is manipulative so sex is off the table?”
Wil lifted their hands, still clasped, and brushed a kiss over her fingers. “I’m not as young as I used to be. I prefer a bed to a table.” Then he returned her hand and backed off. “There is probably something here, between us. You’re like a dance I’ve never seen before, and my need to learn your rhythm is intense. But the timing is awful, so we should…not.”
He thought she was like a dance. The best compliment she’d ever gotten from a lover was that she was a helluva woman. Accurate, but it wasn’t a dance. “The cat’s right. You’re right. It’s too complicated. Everything is too complicated.”
“I can appreciate complicated.” His gaze was an industrial magnet pulling at her very core. “I appreciate you.”
“Pumpkin doesn’t.” She could resist. His body, his fingers, his lips, his wit—not for her. Not for a Trash Planet picker. Women probably did want to keep him, all across the Salty Way. She was the last woman who could or should keep him, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t help him. “I’ll apologize to the cat as soon as I see him again. If he’s not already listening. Pumpkin?”
The cat didn’t magically appear.
Wil didn’t magically change his mind about the complications between them, and he bid her good night shortly thereafter.
She didn’t see either of the new men in her life again until the alert klaxon shocked her out of bed in the wee hours of the morning.
Chapter 10
The shriek of a loud buzzer ruptured Wil’s dream and tore it into half-remembered threads. He was on his feet before he was awake, out in the hallway before he was dressed.
Lights flashed. Su ran toward him, her hair in a loose, fuzzy braid, and skidded to a halt. Her eyebrows arched. “Go put on some clothes. If we have to run, let’s not do it with you naked again, yeah?”
“Right.” Wil had on scivs and nothing else. The siren clicked off as suddenly as it had started. A man carrying an EE-rifle jogged past them without stopping to chat. “Was that a false alarm?”
She tapped the chrono on her wrist. “Oh, it’s real, but I’ve got to go find out why it was set off. I doubt it’s just a hailer. Meet me in the common room. Wear boots and bring that gun I gave you.”
Wil dressed faster than between sets in a one-act play. Thinking hard about what might be going wrong, he tugged on the maintenance worker jumpsuit over the soft grey casuals he’d been given after his shower. He stashed the small gun in a pocket but had no other possessions to collect. “Pumpkin? You around?”
No sign of the cat. Could be good—nothing to see here—but could be awful. The last time there was a full-on fubar and Pumpkin disappeared, Wil had ended up in a hazmat container in temp cryo.
The barracks, where apparently all of the employees lived, were laid out in a simple grid pattern, and he found his way to the common room with a minimum of fu
ss. The number of people mingling there surprised him, as he’d assumed most factories were automated. There were even children, sleepy-eyed and fussy, on the outskirts of the group.
At the center were Su, Scrapper, and a man who looked somewhat familiar. Wil was better with dances than faces. It took a minute to place him.
“You gotta get these kids outta here. I had to steal a company roundabout and I barely beat him,” said the tall man in the blue uniform of Pish Incorporated. He was the same fellow who had attempted to convince Su to hire his brother yesterday. Was that yesterday? No, two days ago. “Those Tomens are fast, and when I left he was talking heavy cruiser with some bearded man.”
Wil edged through the crowd until he could hear and see better. The tension was evident in the narrowed gazes, alert stances, and fingers lingering over sidearms.
“Almost all the men on Trash Planet have beards, and half the women,” Su said. “Can you be more specific?” She checked her chrono again and frowned. The people on Trash Planet didn’t have as many tabs and computers as wealthier citizens, but their antique comms did a lot more than place calls, and even their wrist chronos seemed to be souped up. “One of my employees heard that the off-worlder was seen with Garza.”
“Coulda been the name I heard,” the Pish employee agreed. “That’s your president, right? I think I’ve seen him in first round picks before. It tracks.”
Su turned to a wiry man not much taller than she was. “Nico, you did the right thing waking everyone the minute Bart showed up. Any word from the perimeter?”
Nico tapped the modern style comm in his ear. “Something’s coming, and it ain’t a herd of bristlers. We’ve sent out the union SOS and warned the other factories.”
“Militia didn’t help us in the mountain,” Su growled, “but now they’re threatening a whole factory. A profitable factory, at that. Garza better make good on my union contract and send the militia, or I’ll depose him with my foot up his ass.”
It seemed Casada had discovered who Su was—and, worse, where she was. And he was coming. Because of Wil and Pumpkin, all the people here were in danger.