Heron put a calming hand on her forearm.
“Relax, querida. It’s inert.”
Mari didn’t shoot, but she wasn’t comfortable skirting around that thing. She could fucking see its anesthetic-tipped mini-A10s bobbing like doc’s needles, ready to fang her as she walked by. Ready to hurt him. But they didn’t. The drone’s green light panel cycled, and its rotors hummed, but its metal hull didn’t budge.
She and Heron passed without so much as a whimper from the robot.
She joined her partner on the platform and worked on calming herself down. But was she really to blame for being just a mite freaked out? She had a wild urge to stick her tongue out at the drone as the platform started to move.
They descended so quickly that Mari’s ears popped. She swallowed. Seemed to her that maybe this elevator went a little slower when Heron wasn’t controlling things, and she recalled how much he liked fast. She wondered if that applied to all things, and for a full couple of moments there, her serious slipped. Hard.
She wanted to ask him what they could expect when they reached the arcade deck, but a sidelong glance at him kept her quiet. He was processing, running a zillion things in that wired-out head of his. She could tell by the set to his jaw, his game face.
His gloved hands flexed, opening and closing long fingers, drawing glyphs in the air. It looked half geek, half mystical, and so perfectly him. She wondered what he was signing to the ether.
She wondered a lot of things about him.
He’d implied that the feds were just after her, and that could very well be the case, but she wasn’t the one those assholes had taken apart upstairs. She wasn’t the one who’d been violated and invaded. She also wasn’t the one with clearly nonstandard, whoa-illegal tech in her body. It had never occurred to her before today, but he would be worth a lot on the black market. Tech vultures would pick him apart. And the mercs had said they were looking for the legal resident of that unit, hadn’t they? That would be Heron.
A mental image of that merc with his grubby hands inside of Heron’s head blasted into her thoughts.
A need for vengeance rose up black and horrible from Mari’s gut, and she wished she’d looted that hydrogen peroxide back at Mrs. Weathering’s. Nothing short of a brilliant explosion—or sheet-scorching sex—was likely to ease this fury.
“Easy.” Heron echoed her words from earlier. “I got this.”
And then the elevator stopped.
Mari looked around, getting her bearings. The arcade was lit, just as if this were a typical Saturday night. Signs had switched from daytime, kid-friendly fare to blinking and blurring come-here-and-get-chemmed lures. Mari stepped out first, placing her body between the creepily empty stretch and her partner.
The need to wreck something hadn’t left her, and her trigger finger was twitchier than she’d’ve liked. When she passed a boarded-up crèche with a holo of a crinolined schoolteacher out front, it was everything Mari could manage not to blow the light bank away.
One bullet. Make it count.
But there was nothing impeding their progress. They stepped onto the conveyor walk, and it surged forward. Typically, the outer rings of conveyors went slower, and if somebody was trying to get all the way to the far side of the Pentarc, they’d want to merge into the inner ring. But Heron, apparently, wasn’t into merging. The outer ring sped them so fast that Mari couldn’t even see the empty government storefront sector as they zipped by. She’d been thinking that the feds would be hanging out there, if they were capable of any blockade presence right now. But Mari’s best chance at getting to beat the shit out of somebody had just swept past.
It wasn’t that she was getting used to the feeling of being an actual killer. It was more that she had realized, right there against the door at Mrs. Weathering’s arco unit, that killing, even whole-organics, wasn’t such a bad thing. Heron was alive. She’d do a helluva lot more to keep him that way.
Murder, then, was a matter of priority. And the way Mari’s priorities were situated right at that minute, those feds had better get the hell out of her way.
The conveyor downshifted and paused finally on the far end of the arco’s version of a community college campus. The interior wall was glass, open to the funnel of sunlight that would be pouring in here during the day. At night, it just loomed. Mari didn’t want to think about all the mechanical eyes that could be looking at her through that ten-story, impact-glass plate.
She felt pretty calm now that she’d decided to shoot first and ask questions later.
“Immediately past the money transfer station is an access gate to the carpark. That’s where we’re headed,” Heron said. He touched her elbow just long enough to guide her.
Uni campuses the whole world over smelled like stale corn chips and burnt silicon, Mari thought as she passed through the abandoned miniature quad. Even the artificial on-sites like this one. Did they pipe the stench in or what? Regardless, that smell reminded her of some shit from her uni days, things that she’d thought tidily repressed.
And something else, an image, a memory…but it slid off her brain like a buttered noodle.
’Cause she had a lot more important stuff to pay attention to right now.
“Halt. Palms out. You are surrounded.”
Shit. Mari, for all her rage and determination, had been caught off guard. She extended one arm across Heron’s chest, raising her weapon with the other. Her shooter brain backtracked the voice and found the general direction of her threat, but she couldn’t confirm visual. If she’d had a whole magazine, she would have started shooting, hoping to hit something. If she’d had a mag of frangibles, she would have laid into the taco cart ahead and to the right, which she was willing to bet concealed a whole slew of feds.
But even as she paused infinitesimally to set up her sightlines, Heron just kept moving, his long strides eating up the rubber pavement. He didn’t pull her along this time, just went on right in front of her. Unarmed, unruffled. Serene. As if he were daring them to shoot.
“Keep up, querida.”
Mari opened her mouth, about to say something, but then she forgot what it was she was going to say and just left her mouth open. Because even as she watched, even as her feet hurried to obey him, Heron moved his hands away from both sides of his body, turning them palms up. He drew twin glyphs in the air, and Mari heard a sound like a flock of migrating birds, big suckers, descending in a whoosh.
She looked up in time to see a fleet of maybe two dozen drones, just like the one she’d passed by upstairs, moving in on either side of her and Heron, circling them.
But all their nasty needle guns were pointed away from Mari this time. Behind her, the glass wall glowed, chemlit to simulate day. It warmed, maybe too warm.
Over the Pentarc communication system came Heron’s voice. “Stand down, officers. Nobody needs to die today.”
“Nobody else,” Mari clarified subvocally.
“You need to be literal right at this minute?” he asked in his normal voice, and though he didn’t turn to her when he said it, Mari thought there might have been some smiling going on.
“You mean like I’m literally freaked out of my mind right now?” She did not verbalize her physical reaction to this flex of his technological muscles. If he dug deep enough into her psyche, he’d see how fucking hard she wanted him right now. Not even that deep, the want. Felt like it was burning all over her skin, in fact, like the chemlight in the glass wall, easy for anybody to see.
“Getting there myself,” she heard him in her mind, and she burned even hotter.
The drones moved in closer, forming an outward-facing circle with her and Heron at the center. He didn’t walk any faster than normal, but Mari hurried to keep up. She wasn’t really worried that those drones would sneak up on her from behind, but she inherently distrusted them. Even though Heron was controlling them.
; Machine controlling machine. How could she trust one so completely, but not the others, his minions?
He passed into the gate, and the vanguard of drones stopped there, waiting for her. His partner. His team. She followed him without looking back.
Chapter 6
Mari didn’t say much on the way down to the underground, and Heron counted that as a rarity and a blessing. His brain was still buzzing, a thousand inputs screaming through his data streams—organic and mech—but the main thing he wanted to know, needed to ascertain, was this: could he get her out? Could he keep her safe?
Once upon a time, his goals in life had been lofty. Once, he’d thought that he might change the world, create something that would fundamentally alter how human beings lived on this planet, and above it. Now, though, a good day meant everyone who depended on him was safe, his secrets were still secret, and he could reach through one of his mirrors, count Mari’s pulse, and know that wherever she was, she slept easy.
He no longer wondered how or when his universe had shrunk to this. All he knew was that as long as he could control the variables, he could affect outcomes. Could change the future and bury the past.
But he couldn’t sustain this balance indefinitely. Adele was right; the guilt was eating him up, and he needed to expunge it. Grow past it. He needed to tell Mari everything. That he’d been following her career for years, that he’d hired on as her partner to lead her away from Texas contracts, to keep her out of the state. To keep her safe.
And why.
Not the chest-pulling, desperate infatuation part. He didn’t need to tell her that. But he did need to explain the guilt, and soon. She might already have started remembering, and though that would be bad enough on its own, he didn’t want anyone else to tell her.
And he sure as hell didn’t want anyone dragging her back to Texas.
A monster of emotion lurked close beneath his surface where she was concerned, and leashing it usually wasn’t a problem. Until someone tried to harm her. It was a mercy those feds hadn’t started shooting up there in the miniquad. He would have had no compunction about shooting back, and with the whole Pentarc core at his disposal, the resultant mess would have been ugly. His surges of anger had spiraled to catastrophe before, and he was thankful that such hadn’t been the case today. Yet.
What would she do if she knew how little humanity was left in him? If she knew how easily he could set aside his conscience and focus on the task at hand, push the guilt and fury into a tidy aside to be dealt with later? Her thoughts from earlier echoed in his memory: murderer, monster.
If he told her the truth, she would run. And he couldn’t bear that.
He needed to get her to safety, tamp down these dark thoughts. Cool his systems, center himself. One heartbeat every 0.24 seconds. One breath every 2.2 seconds. One blink every 4 seconds. There. He could do this.
Pressure plates in the garage shifted, and Heron transmitted a command that would block any new vehicles from entering. He sent a query up eleven floors, adjusting the chems in Adele’s unit, so she’d wake up without a headache. In the same transmission, he downloaded location tags for his crew and the Chiba Space Station. Planning. Calm. In control.
He checked the evacuation protocol and was pleased that his instructions to the escape tunnels had finally gone through. He sent a signal to his car that would give them access to the exit. The Pentarc system didn’t show the tube as blocked, and if he could get out that way, he had just enough charge in the fuel cells to get her out to the desert. Flat would be good for what he had in mind.
But even as he planned their next dozen moves, he couldn’t tamp the fury entirely. What had happened this morning should not have happened. Mari’s contract had been to either retrieve or slag the Daniel Neko mech-clone. All systems had checked in, giving the green light. All of them.
Including Daniel Neko’s wife.
Now Heron was wondering if Angela Neko had been complicit in the deception. Had she meant to send her flesh-and-blood husband to his death? Did she have enemies in the UNAN government who’d called in the hit just to hurt her? Or had those fuckers from Texas played her, too?
Or was the TPA after something else entirely? Like him.
Heron shook his head, ignoring the flash of pain between his ears. Stop it. Think present, think future. Yesterday never happened. Later on, you can plan a suitable revenge for whoever is responsible for this morning.
“You okay?” Mari touched his arm, and he almost jumped out of his boots.
“Always.” He controlled the wince that his face wanted to make. His first priority, of course, was getting her to a haven, preferably one off-grid. Pentarc should have been that. How had those mercs gotten in here without him knowing?
The tube lift stopped. Curved doors opened. Heron knew that no one other than the two of them was on this level of the underground, but he scanned just the same. After all these years looking out for Mari, caution was a reflex.
The Pentarc processor core certainly sped things up, in addition to letting him peek in on her thoughts. That was a bonus he could get used to. Which, of course, meant he needed to disconnect soon. He had no desire to become dependent on the extended processing capacity. Too dangerous.
He reached behind his head, felt for the metal insert, and nudged it off of its connectors. So long, Pentarc.
The connection broke. He fell.
Hit.
Hard.
Whoa.
Retreating back into his own neural was the sudden stop at the end of freefall. It crushed his consciousness for a half second, cramming it into an itty-bitty space. And oh, he had enjoyed the stretch. He gritted his teeth against the squeeze, but fuck, it still hurt.
This fit was tighter than he expected. A lot tighter. He flailed, searching for threads of awareness, catching them and plugging them together, making connections. Ends still floated, frayed. He couldn’t see the tapestry whole, and those loose ends throbbed like exposed nerve endings.
The mercs had fucked him up worse than he thought.
Biting back bile, Heron concentrated on presenting a composed exterior for Mari’s benefit. People with regular organic brains did not implode when they disconnected. He couldn’t let her see how much this affected him.
He tucked the skin flap back over his ruined port, feeling the wet stickiness of blood still matting his hair despite Adele’s best efforts to clean him up. Lord, what must he look like to Mari? But he couldn’t just reach in and ask now.
A machine, his logical brain answered. A thing.
Probably a pretty fucking terrifying thing, after what he’d just pulled in the Pentarc, too. And he knew it could have been so much worse.
He growled in the back of his throat, and three shipping containers over, the car growled back. Good car. Now that was a thing, and if it could haul ass fast enough to get Mari beyond the reach of the feds and the TPA and whoever else wanted her to pay for someone else’s fuckup, Heron figured he could spare plenty of love for that thing.
He had his doubts about Mari’s ability to do the same for him.
• • •
When the V12 roared to life from three stalls over, Mari felt it in the soles of her feet.
She’s so hot. Well, that was the first thought that popped into her brain, and if Heron was still peeking in on her, he could just suck on that. She wasn’t going to self-censor for his benefit. If he hadn’t figured out by now that most of her thoughts had to do with the job, her family, and sex, he didn’t know her all that well.
Her fingertips stroked the curved hood on her way to the passenger side. She dipped her hand to where a handle ought to be and spent a couple seconds stroking nothing but fiberglass before she looked down. No handle. How had she never realized before? Even as she watched, though, the door hissed open on hydraulic hinges.
She climbed inside and dropped her
duffel by her feet.
“You might want to fasten your seat harness,” Heron suggested. Metal scraped metal, a sharp sound with a slip of something wet that might have been blood, and she knew he was plugging in. Once the human-vehicle connection had set, the car shifted into reverse, and they backed out of the shipping container.
“In a bit.” Mari leaned forward and unzipped the duffel, hunting down the various pieces of her weapon, and started fitting them together with sure fingers.
“And you don’t need your rifle.”
“Listen, I ain’t about to…”
“Here.”
And Mari did drop her rifle bits then, because Heron reached down, grabbed her hand, and settled it over something long and firm and so phallic, her mouth watered.
Gearshift. Oh, right.
“The switch at the base readies the weapon. Use the thumb button to shoot. Aim with your fist, and hold on tight. It’s a gun, not a launcher or a laser, and I haven’t upgraded yet, so no vents. The kick will sling us around some. We can put the top down if you need better visuals, but frankly, it might be better to keep the armor up and run for it. The cannon is really just for…fun.”
She gripped the stick. Hydraulics behind the firewall in front of her feet hummed and slipped. A seam down the center of the hood parted, and a heavy-weapon gyroscopic mount pushed through. He wasn’t kidding: sitting right there where most cars like this would have a trunk was a precious-huge snub-barrel cannon. She flashed Heron a glance. Looking to upgrade the guns on this car? Seriously? If he was making fun of her, she was going to…
But he wasn’t. He was looking right at her, and there wasn’t even a hint of smile on that mouth. It was everything she could do in that moment not to climb right over that gearshift and onto his lap, kiss his mouth to smiling, and pour a little bit of hells-yes right down his throat. She squeezed the gearshift, fighting the urges.
“Some fun.” Her voice huffed through a suddenly dry mouth.
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