Wanted and Wired

by Vivien Jackson

  “Tell me about it.”

  And that, she thought later, was the moment she fell in love.

  • • •

  Nothing shot at them right away when they broke the surface and roared away from the Pentarc. Night had fallen on the desert, and the clear watchfulness of it bothered Mari more than she wanted to admit. She kept her hand fisted on the gearshift and couldn’t calm down, but she was no longer certain whether she was worked up because the feds were after her, because she’d done some seriously guilt-making things this day, or because her libido was firing like all get out.

  “Really, you can sit down and buckle up. We’re safe.”

  “Uh-huh.” She stroked the gearshift with the side of her thumb, and he…tensed? In response? Nah. She was imagining things. He had a lot more on his mind than watching her hands right now.

  “Quarter panels, hood, and the soft top are reinforced with 60-carbon fullerene,” he said. “We’re as safe as we’re likely to get from bullets, shrapnel, lasers, EMP attacks, fire—you name it. About the only thing that can damage this car is the hand of God. Now, Mari, relax.”

  The heater was going again: negative ionization and serotonin-exciting aerosol, soothing the burn of body and mind.

  Mari’s grip eased, but she didn’t sit down. She glanced at him in her periphery. “I know what you were trying to do.”

  Heron didn’t reply. His gloved hands tightened on the steering wheel.

  Mari went on, “Back at Mrs. Weathering’s, when you kissed me, you were trying to distract me, focus me, keep me from freaking out. I needed that. Thank you.”

  Heron still didn’t say anything, and Mari swallowed a lump of regret. If he’d meant it, if he burned for her anything like she burned for him, she’d left the door wide open for him to say so.

  The car shifted to fifth, soft in transition like a lover nuzzling in sleep.

  “It seemed like you needed the distraction. You aren’t a murderer,” Heron said at last. “Never think of yourself that way. You defended yourself…”

  “Yeah, but at what cost? I mean…”

  “…when I could not.”

  Mari opened her mouth to say something, but she caught a glance at the dash. The lipstick-red speedometer needle hugged the right end of the arc. It didn’t even quiver back down to the max speed, 220. They were flying over the desert.

  Her gaze drifted up to his face, illuminated only by the dash lights. He looked perfectly at ease, focused on the road and unreadable, but Mari saw the little tells: minute furrow between his eyebrows, lips pressed together a smidge tighter than usual.

  This was more than just him worried for her safety. Something else was freaking him out.

  “Don’t think I’m stewing now, partner. I’m glad I killed those guys.” She watched the muscle near the hinge of his jaw. “If it’d kept their filthy fingers outta your head, I would’ve slagged the whole fed ops corps, and their pet kittens, too.”

  He cracked the faintest grin, more a hint of one really, and the needle still pegged 220, but it was enough. “No, you would not have. Broad-scale devastation isn’t your game.”

  It isn’t yours either. She watched, but he didn’t so much as twitch. Apparently, without the Pentarc amping his neural, he couldn’t read her thoughts. She kind of missed that intimate connection, even if it had been frustratingly one-sided.

  After a while, Mari shrugged and settled down into the leather seat, facing forward. “Well, I’ll work on the bloodthirsty, but it’d be a damn shame if I reformed completely, ’specially before I get to test out your cannon here.” She nodded to the gearshift, still unwilling to let it go.

  Out the wing-shaped windows, the desert stretched endless and black with no feds in sight, but she knew they were out there, looking for her. Hunting her. Being prey didn’t feel so stark as long as she had a weapon in her hands.

  Especially this weapon. She cricked her index finger, and the emplacement shifted, responding perfectly to her touch. The barrel was way too short for a conventional load at this caliber. Might be electromagnetic. Whatever its inner workings, she was pretty sure it was fully integrated with the car.

  And so, she suspected, was Heron.

  Mari firmed her fist on the gearshift, slipping her palm down to the base. A corresponding twitch fluttered over his jaw.

  Holy crapfire. He felt it.

  Felt her grip on the stick, felt her shifting the cannon. Felt her palm tracing in metal the shapes she would like to be making over his body. The certainty bloomed simultaneously in her mind and between her legs.

  “You’ll have your chance in about seven minutes.” His voice was tight, clipped.

  No way could they be thinking about the same thing. She bit her lip to keep from smiling. “Eh?”

  “We don’t have any live targets right now, but we will shortly. My inputs are showing a roadblock up ahead. Their lasers are hot, but our shielding will hold. We will be in range within six minutes.”

  She panned her gaze across the desert. She couldn’t see anything yet, which wasn’t surprising considering how fast they were going. But she did discern a shift in the pattern of the black sand horizon, a shudder of shapes. She leaned forward until her forehead mashed against the windshield and turned her head to look up.

  She had to let loose of the gearshift when she moved, and she thought she heard Heron sigh. Regret or relief?

  But she didn’t have much time to ponder, because right up there, smack-dab in front of them but up in the air, the sky looked a whole lot darker than it had any right to be. No stars, just black, a giant black, and headed right for them.

  “Um, Heron? Remember when you said that we were safe from everything but the hand of God?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t look up.”

  “Excellent advice. Five minutes now, querida. Be ready in case we can’t get out of their range before they have targeting locks.”

  “Ready for what? To shoot our way through? Tell me you aren’t fixing to ram this pretty car into a roadblock. And what is that thing in the sky?”

  “Ready to hold on. Of course not. And that’s our extraction team.”

  Four minutes and closing. Mari heard the countdown in her com, ticking backward. She tried to establish a visual along the road in front of them, but darkened headlights and a new moon sure weren’t helping. And neither was the thing—extraction team—swooping in on the horizon.

  “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. I can’t get our exit vector lined up before we’re in range of those federal guns. We need to make them think twice about firing. You’re going to get a go on that cannon, Mari, but probably just one shot. You don’t even need to hit them necessarily. Just make them duck. But you’ll want to hang on tight with the other hand, okay? Tight as you can.”

  Mari thought of a few things she could say, but she settled for a quick squeeze on the gearshift instead.

  Heron shifted in his seat. Huh. Had she gotten to him at last? Even with all this tension, with feds ahead and allies above and speed making her soles vibrate, Mari could still spare plenty of brain space for innuendo. She only wondered if she’d stoked Heron to that point as well. He’d said some things back in the arco that had made her think he wouldn’t mind fucking her blind, but then he’d also sidestepped her conversation thread about the kissing. Why the hell couldn’t he just play nice and tell her what he wanted?

  She checked the rear, shifted the barrel on her cannon slightly, but when she turned back, she saw the first of the flashing lights from the roadblock up ahead. Even as she zoned in on them, the dash display lit up with a ticker message, first in English, then in Spanish and French: This is UNAN regional police. Power down and exit the vehicle. Repeat: Power down and exit the vehicle.

  If their communications system was in range, chances were their guns would be shortly. Mari
armed the cannon with the switch on the base, and then, keeping her eyes on target and her whole body aware of Heron beside her, she slid the pad of her thumb over the brushed chrome button on top.

  He jumped like he’d been pinched. His hands gripped the steering wheel, so hard he nearly wrenched the whole thing off. Mari contained a grin. No, he wasn’t immune to her.

  And yes, he was getting direct sensory input through the car. Hot damn.

  “Fucking hell, Mari.”

  “What?” she said in her most I-have-no-idea-what-you-mean tone. Oh, this was fun.

  “Never mind. Remember: hold on.”

  No, she hadn’t forgotten. She peered hard out the front windshield, found the flashing lights in the distance, and lined the roadblock up with the digital sights that blipped along the top edge of the safety glass.

  She remembered the way he’d projected light back in the arco and later how he’d navigated them through the dark. That boy almost certainly had a heads-up wired in, either holographic or tatted on the backs of his eyelids. The dash sights were unnecessary. Which meant he’d put them there for somebody else. Her? But no. She wasn’t even close to letting herself believe he thought about her that much when they were off a job.

  That would mean he liked her.

  I take care of precious things, he’d said.

  She eased her thumb down, bracing for the kick, but nothing happened right away. A keen from deep inside the emplacement made the small hairs on her forearms stand up, and then the cannon rumbled. She saw a flash in the distance full seconds before the recoil slammed into the car.

  Collision, full impact and hard. Her back wrenched, and she wished for a half second that she’d put on the harness like Heron had told her. She tightened all her muscles, concentrated on her core, and gripped the harness strap with one hand and the gearshift with the other.

  The stability control thunked, tires screeched against the blacktop, and then the car was spinning. Spinning like a teacup in a carnival ride. The holler those tires put up as they fought for purchase nearly popped her ear drums.

  Mari heard the impact of her one shot at the same time that the car straightened out. She opened her eyes, stared straight ahead, but she could no longer see the flash of lights in the distance.

  Had she hit them?

  The engine revved, and then they were moving again. Twelve cylinders roared, and the car shot forward like it’d been launched. Mari’s breath tore from her lips. She tried to sight in for another shot, but all her vectors were off. She didn’t even know which direction she was facing, though it sure as shit didn’t seem to be the same one she’d started out in.

  And then their headlights came on, splashing the desert ahead with white, and Mari flinched back against her seat, instinctively covering her head.

  That something, that thing that she’d seen as a giant black blot above them, their hand of God extraction team, was now directly in front of the car. Shit. They were going to ram right into…whatever it was. Plane or airship of some sort, obviously, but flying impossibly low, matching its speed to theirs. Low enough to…

  It dipped, or at least part of it did. A cargo ramp extruded out the butt end of that plane. Heron gunned the engine.

  Gravity gave for one hot second, and then the tires clutched the cargo ramp. He downshifted so fast the gears screamed. He slammed the brakes, and Mari heard the screech of tires on metal, felt a whump against her door, something padded but still too hard, grasping and lifting the car.

  And then everything went quiet. All Mari could hear was the frenetic drum of her heart.

  “Wha…?” She didn’t have brain space for a whole word.

  “We’ve docked. The plane is climbing. We probably ought to stay put for a few minutes, until we hit altitude. Then the cargo vent should pressurize, and believe me, this plane has weapons that roadblock wouldn’t dare go against. They’re prepared for asymmetrical threats, and we just evened the playing field. Breathe, Mari. You did well.” Heron calmly unhasped his own harness and tilted his head, popping the kinks out of his neck. He laced his fingers, bent the bridge back, and cracked the tension from his knuckles, too. Exhaled deliberately.

  “So we’re not dead?”

  He grinned, quick and wolfish. “Not even close. I am sorry about the wild ride back there, though.”

  Wild ride. Mari turned those words over and over in her mind, blurring her most recent memories with the fantasies of rides she’d like to take with him. Or on him. The postjob high coalesced around all that tension, all that adrenaline, and she smashed her eyelids closed.

  Settle, girl. Today’s been a doozy, but it ain’t over. Not by a long shot. And she didn’t need to be molesting her partner while her self-control was down either.

  “Querida? Mari? You okay? I didn’t mean…” He’d turned in his seat and leaned toward her, his gloved hands clasping her wrists and sliding upward. Likely to check her bios again or to make sure she wasn’t sobbing like a wee baby after the day she’d just endured, but it didn’t matter, the whys and wherefores. All she could process right then was that he was touching her, and she had never in her whole life wanted something as much as she wanted to touch him back.

  Touch him? Hell. She wanted to put her mouth all over him and swallow him whole.

  She lurched toward him, burying her face against his neck and wrapping her arms around his body. The gearshift poked hard against her thigh, but she was too far gone to care if the cannon was armed.

  His arms came around her like it was their cosmic purpose to hold her. She couldn’t stop her lips from pressing hot against his collar, his throat, the divot beneath his ear, behind his jaw.

  His mouth.

  God, it wasn’t even a kiss, not a real one, a brush of tongue against his closed lips, but her whole body hummed at the connection. Female to male, direct current, a closed circuit.

  Electricity surged.

  He tasted like mint and metal, a certain reminder of what he was, not that Mari gave two shits about his alterations anymore. No unaltered whole-organic man could have rigged that dock, could have matched speeds on two vehicles that perfectly, especially not coming out of a 360-degree skid and a cannon shot to boot. No man could have taken over the security bots for the Pentarc just to get her out safely or plotted a capture-or-kill job down to the second.

  Nope, Heron wasn’t a man. But he wasn’t a machine either. No machine could make her insides roil like this, could make her writhe in frustrated lust equal to her terror and exhaustion.

  Slowly, patiently—frustratingly—he splayed one gloved hand between her shoulder blades, holding her steady, and the other slid up, fighting with the ponytail elastic. The band snapped before he could unwind it, and Mari groaned when he skidded his fingertips along her scalp, spreading them through the mess of hair. The waft of expensive shampoo settled around her, knocking that ball of tension around her insides, setting off klaxons of awareness.

  He hadn’t returned her kisses, but he didn’t push her away either. Instead, he just sat there and took it, endured her desperation, and gave back…what? Comfort. Kindness. All the stuff there was no way he could have known she craved. No way. He stroked her hair and murmured, “That’s it, querida. You just let it all out. I’ve got you.”

  She rested her forehead against his jaw and closed her eyes. The kicker of it all was that yes, she wanted him so hard, her teeth hurt, but she also didn’t want this moment to end. The pause, the sweet of it. It had been a long time since Mari had felt this safe, this treasured. She was used to running, to fighting and slipping out of danger by the skin of her teeth. That kind of tension wasn’t anything new. But what she wasn’t used to was having somebody offer her comfort on the pause. These sorts of moments usually felt so goddamn bleak and lonely. Not here, though. Not now. Not with him.

  She sniffed, fighting back the bulb of emotion in her th
roat.

  And smelled blood.

  His blood.

  All he’d been through this day, and he had her? Um, no. Partnerships didn’t work that way, not in Mari’s world. She pressed one more kiss against his jaw and then drew back, moving her hands between them and smoothing his rumpled shirt.

  “Nah. We’re good, partner.” She could control herself, could fight off the darkthing and lust combined. She could. She met his dark-eyed gaze and didn’t look away.

  “Mari, we should probably talk about…”

  “Yeah, I know. You’re not a natural at killin’ folks or being chased, but you’ve clearly been in this kind of pinch before. It shows. The experience. Color me impressed.”

  One brow kicked up.

  She barreled on. “Also, even though you didn’t say as much, I ’spect I’ve just been taken home to meet the parents. Mrs. Weathering? I like her, your mom. She’s pretty badass, despite that weird game show addiction. Well then. That about cover it?” She thought about the gearshift. “Oh, wait, one more: I know you’re hiding other things from me. Technological things.” Tension corded his arms, and oh man, she wanted to get his shirt off and inspect those tense areas up close, but she had a few more things to cover first. “I deserve it, though, since I kept secrets back, too, and anyhow, I can’t worry about it too much, ’cause I got a bigger problem right now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “My partner has a hole in his head and probably needs a shitload of rewrap and rebuild, and I don’t know anything about fixing mech. What can I do to help you?”

  A corner of his mouth quirked, and he settled one hand at her nape. His thumb teased the fine hairs behind her ear, a thing that made it real hard for her to keep her shit together. She sucked in a breath, held it, and sterned her features. Best get a hold on them sexy thoughts. This isn’t about me. It’s about him. Heron. Taking good care of him.

  It felt weird to care about somebody else’s comfort this much, after so long living only for herself. She hadn’t even visited Auntie Boo in years, just kept up via com. All those weekend flings with postjob hookups merged into a faceless blur of memory. Those folks didn’t need her, she didn’t need them, and it stunned her to think that, once upon a time, she had considered such relationships liberating. Once upon a time wasn’t even so long ago.