There was silence on the other end for a long time, and then, “Oh, honey. I hear it all in your voice, you know that?” Never could lie to Aunt Boo. “Listen to me. I don’t care what you done or even that you keep getting yourself into scrapes. I just need you to take care of my girl, y’hear?”
Mari sniffed back a sob. “Be safe. Have a great vacation. Indulge yourself some.”
“You too, Princess Butterfly. Keep off the newsvids now.”
Mari usually responded with a wry rejoinder, but she couldn’t force that level of bullshit to her tongue. Not today. She nodded, knowing that without the video app on, Aunt Boo couldn’t even see.
A digital chime signaled the end of her conversation, and she muttered a payment code, one that wasn’t linked to any accounts in her name. Even so, she suspected that Aunt Boo’s garden in Lampasas would be raided before sunset. Didn’t matter which side got there first: secessionist ops team or UNAN antiterrorist forces. Either one would stomp all over Aunt Boo’s winter squash seedlings and never think about the harm they caused. She hoped they didn’t do anything cruel with the shirtless young hottie.
She also hoped Auntie had told the truth and was on the other side of the planet by now.
The ride to Ardmore, Oklahoma, would take a little more than two hours, and Mari blessed the maglev technology the whole way. She also put the time to good use, researching Nathan as much as she could.
She got her job contracts through the darknet, but she didn’t need to access the secret network to get plenty of info on her ex. He lived right out in the open. He’d even purchased property in Dallas a few years back. She put a pin into that spot on her mental map. She’d start looking for him there.
After an hour of reading on a tiny projected screen, her eyes got tired, though, and Mari closed the phone and slipped it into the cloth pocket by the window. She leaned her head against the squabs while the maglev vibrated beneath her skull, hurtling south. Taking her home.
At Ardmore, she left the high-speed lines and hitched a ride on a humanitarian-aid truck headed south. The driver swapped her a Texas rations bracelet for the balance on her cloudcoin account.
The bracelet identified her as Heidi Cisneros, who, according to the liquor allotment remaining, was something of a teetotaler. Thank God. Mari suspected she was going to need those booze rations. She didn’t ask what’d happened to Heidi or whether the identity was completely made up. Wasn’t her business.
She made it to Dallas by late afternoon, after three security and validation stops and some slips past the more invasive checkpoints. Her faceprint spoofer and fake identity held, but it wasn’t a good idea to let her guard down. Not here, not ever.
The first thing she did was rent a room near the old West End. The place she found hadn’t had a bug treatment in a decade at least but didn’t ask for identification scans and was happy to take her tradables instead of money. She’d handed over a sack of late-season California grapes, just a little bruised. In Texas, grapes were more valuable than UNAN-secured credit accounts or even cloudcoin.
She spent a good hour hunting down and squashing cockroaches under her boot heels. Killin’ them things always did calm her.
She took a long shower—lukewarm and sparse because of energy rationing now that Texas was limited to its own grid—and changed into the togs she’d bought up in Laramie: off-the-rack printed crinoline, a black, long-line corset, and a translucent flak-style bomber jacket over top. If folks were looking hard enough at the cleavage, maybe they’d miss some of the other things Kellen had helped her get ahold of before she’d left Chiba. Plus, the rigid boning in the bra would give her an excuse for setting off metal detectors on every other street corner. She wished she’d had access to her own clothes, especially her vectran-armored bits, but, well, wishes weren’t horses.
And then she hit the street, hunting down Nathan.
Dallas sure had changed plenty in the last decade, and none of it for the better. Mari used to think of Dallas as the bigger-haired, louder-mouthed stepcousin of the other Texas metropolitans. The one that she endured but never really liked. War had shaved that head of big hair down to scruff, though. Wasn’t a single thing glamorous about this place now. It looked haunted and hungry, decked out in more barricades than neon lights.
Texas rebels had dug in deep here in the densest population center they controlled outright, and suspicion crackled on the air like live wires. Mari could see it in the face of the motel clerk who’d taken her grapes.
She checked through three validation points just getting to a taqueria. Granted, she might have been stopped more frequently than the average citizen. Her clothes pegged her as an outsider, so she attracted more than her share of attention.
After using her rations bracelet to buy a couple of fuego rolls—and deliberately not asking what the mustached taqueria vendor had stuffed inside; tasted like raw, off-code habanero and protein flakes, maybe mixed with oatmeal—she took that attention-grabbing show to the bar scene in the West End.
Her first stop was Boudreaux’s, which used to serve Cajun and vino. Now, Mari was happy that her beer didn’t have proteins floating in it, even if it was a home-brewed monster of a drink that nearly knocked her off her stool on the first swig. She stayed at the bar for a little over an hour, danced tit-to-tit with a pretty young thing too sweet to know anything about jobs or clouds or the secession, and all the while, felt the prickly-hair certainty that somebody was watching her.
Well, that was quick. Good.
On the walk to the next dive, Mari pressed the fresh scar tissue in her arm and opened up a com to Kellen. “How is he?”
“He still doesn’t have admin access. Queen’s running the scan, but it’s taking for-fuckin’-ever. We got…thirteen hours yet till the space elevator comes up. We have time. He could still pull this off. And you could still get back here before he knows you’re missing.”
“Been over this, Kellen. It ain’t like we have a whole helluva lot of other options. I can’t sit up there and do nothing.”
“Might be best for my health if you did,” he said. “I been imagining what he’s gonna do when he wakes up and finds out I let you go.”
If he wakes up. Big if. Too big.
“It isn’t a matter of letting me,” she reminded him. “And don’t worry. I’ll tell him that myself. I’m a big girl. He wakes up, you ping me right away.”
“Surely will, gal.”
“But?”
“No buts. You be safe.”
“Rest of the crew okay?”
“I s’pose so. Garrett and Chloe went off on some mission or something before you even left, but she had a message for you. Glad you asked, ’cause I had plain forgotten. Chloe wanted me to ask how the dress did. You got any idea what she means?”
Mari grinned, a burst of warm in the cool Dallas night. “When you see her again, tell her it was all magic and whispers.”
And she cut the signal.
• • •
Heaven’s Gate, three blocks south of the ruins of Southern Methodist University, used to be chic but now skirted the line between loyalist and seedy. A girl could toast a war hero, inhale a chemical cocktail, and pay for a clit-licker in the same bar. They even had curtained alcoves, because Texans were notoriously prim about public fuckery.
It was also about a mile away from some property Nathan used to own, before the TPA expropriated all private land holdings. He wasn’t the kind of man who’d give up his stuff willingly: if he’d once owned something, he’d still be squatting nearby and grumping about his rights. And if he was still alive, still in Texas, and still Nathan, he’d eventually find his way to a bar like this one.
It was Mari’s third stop of the night. Her feet hurt, her patience was thin, and she’d ingested way too much homemade hooch. Still, she had a good feeling about this place. With seven hours to go before the queen nee
ded to disconnect the space elevator and no word yet from Heron, she needed more than a good feeling. She needed to be successful.
One thing made her think she was on the right trail, though. At bar number two, she’d noted a giant blond dude lurking in a corner booth and downing so much cheap vodka that he never could have processed it without internal scrubbers. Post-human, then. Dangerous.
She spotted him again at Heaven’s Gate, looking somewhat more discreet but still out of place. Overbearing. Ginormous. Grumpy. She picked out a few obvious signs of alteration: that slip-sprint movement she’d seen in the mercenaries back at the Pentarc, a tilt to the head and a hand over the mouth, clear tips he was talking on a com. There was a trick to not letting folks know what you were up to when you ran silent, but this guy hadn’t perfected any such tricks. He looked like the type who typically walked into a brawl, spread his arms, and said something along the lines of, “Do your worst.”
She also noted the bulges in his clothes where he probably had weapons at the ready. They were the same places, more or less, where she would have strapped her own goodies, if she’d been carrying. Clearly, he had some experience in her world.
Mari slid a glance along the bar, getting an eyeful of him, and she wondered why he hadn’t approached her. Could be he was part of a smash team, and the heavy guns were waiting to ambush her once she was away from this semicrowded establishment. If he was an agent for UNAN, she could imagine them being that careful. Texans, probably not. They tended to shoot first and ask questions later, lord love ’em.
She glanced down at her chest, fully expecting to see laser paint. But all she saw was the black bra and a bead of sweat nuzzling the centerline.
She tipped her head back and drained the beer, froth included. The brew seared her esophagus, and she licked the foam from her upper lip.
“Show me the work of that tongue one more time, beautiful, and I’ll have to haul you off to that there curtained alcove, and not a body here’d blame me.”
Mari’s insides clenched. Lord, she knew that voice, but she didn’t turn toward it. Was a time when it would have set up a corresponding gush in her nethers. Not tonight, though. Not anymore. Hearing it did bring on some memories. Not all of them good, not all of them bad.
He slunk into the stool beside her, blurring into her periphery. Smelled like booze and cologne. His jeans were starched till the crease stood out white. Boy still dressed up fine when he was on the pull. Some things never changed.
“Nathan.” She set her dirty glass on the bar but didn’t move her elbow.
“How about that? Sweet Mari Vallejo, right here and warming a barstool in my neighborhood.”
“Came looking for you.”
“Consider me flattered.”
“Not for a fuck, mind.”
“Mind fuck, then?”
“Nathan…”
He held up a hand, palm out, and chuckled. It was a silky, sexy thing on the ears, that chuckle. He had never worked too hard to get a girl out of her panties. Seduction just came naturally to him. Like digging to a gopher.
“Well, you found me, sweetness. Now, what do you plan to do with me?”
Here, Mari did look at him. One eyebrow raised, she turned. She was prepared for what met her gaze, granted, but it still took a minute to ingest it all. Time had been kind to Nathan. He was one of those just-gets-better-with-age sorts of men, with bronzed hair and laser-blue eyes and cenote-deep dimples. Bastard knew exactly how pretty he was.
“Might ask you the same,” she said. “Pulled some of your nanites from my partner’s head. Marionetting, really? That shit’s pretty low, even for you.” It never, ever hurt to cut right to the chase with a guy like Nathan.
His charming grin wavered. “Marionetting? I don’t know what you…”
“Killed your hired muscle boys, too. What? You’d forgotten that I do that sort of thing, like, for a living? Gettin’ stupider by the day, Grace.”
That grin faded altogether, and the sight of it sliding off his smug, gorgeous face made Mari feel a little better. Okay, a lot.
“You killed them?”
Murderer. But she didn’t feel so bad about it now. Not about the mercs, though she did still regret poor Daniel Neko and reckoned she always would. Strange thing, guilt. Or just a strange thing, her guilt? “You know it.”
Nathan tested his lips with his tongue, signaled the bartender, and ordered something that might imitate whiskey. He shifted his weight on the barstool, but he didn’t look straight at her.
A slinky ballad came on the neurospeakers. Mari cut it off using her new implanted com but made a show of pressing the inert piece of tech over her ear at the same time. She’d worn the cameo throat piece, too. And, of course, her cuff with the countdown on it. Nothing wrong with letting Nathan know she was hooked in to the outside world, but she didn’t want him to guess her newest alterations.
“The puppeteer who fucked over my partner said something about bringing me in,” she said. “That’s why I came. Figured you could pass along the message: I’m willing to go, any old time, and I won’t even shoot you for your troubles. I hear the bounty on me is huge. Just need you to deactivate some of your nanocritters first.”
“That won’t be a problem. You turned into kind of a cheap date, Mar. Which nanos?”
She gave him the patent numbers from the nanites Kellen had pulled. Nathan fed them into an implant on his forearm. “Those things are ancient. Didn’t realize they were still part of a fabrication. No skin off my nose if they dark and go back to a vat.”
Which was how most folks thought about nanos. But Mari couldn’t think of them that way now. The idea of Chloe in a vat made her sick to her stomach. Instead of horfing, though, she steadied herself.
He looked up. “Done. That all you wanted me for?”
Mari swallowed her whew.
Transmission was cut. Kaput. Success. Relief. Now she just needed to make her grand exit. Or run the hell away, which seemed kind of the better option. Honestly, she hadn’t planned much beyond getting the transmission sliced. She hadn’t counted on it being so easy.
Which meant it probably wasn’t. Which meant Nathan was either playing her or getting played. Which meant she needed to poke this situation a bit harder.
She peered into her drink, letting her hair fall forward and shield her face for a moment, long enough to mouth subvocally, “Kellen, you there? Did it work? Have the transmissions stopped?”
He replied almost instantly, like he’d been waiting for her to call. “Shit. No. What are you up to? Did you find Grace? Are you okay?”
Well, fuck.
Mari shook her hair back over her shoulder and raised the glass, meeting Nathan’s gaze over the rim. She swallowed, smiled. “What exactly are you offering?”
If it was close to midnight, as she guessed, she still had almost seven hours till the queen had to stop her scans and move her station. Till Heron would be on his own up there, trapped outside his body and freaking the hell out.
That wasn’t long, but she could still make this work. She could chat up Nathan, find out who had sent those mercs. Maybe take a knife to that son of a bitch, whoever it was. Nathan fabricated tech just fine, but he wasn’t a big thinker. Unless he’d grown up a lot in the last few years, he didn’t have the balls to set her up so elaborately, and he sure as shit didn’t have any connection to better-than-human-looking mech-clones like the Daniel Neko that was currently canoodling an UNAN senator.
“So who you taking me to? Who’s holding your leash? By personal history, I’ll assume it’s a woman, likely one in leather.”
Nathan’s grin slunk back, edging his glass as he took a sip. “You know me too well.” He swallowed another but still waited in profile, not looking right at her. “Actually, my boss on this one is somebody you know. Been working for the biomech division in the TPA. Technocrats.”<
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Not surprising. What Mari did count as surprising was the fact that Nathan was being so up-front about it all.
“So what’s the next step? You cuff me, haul me to a slap-and-tickle debrief, after which these TPA assholes do some sort of prisoner swap with the UNAN?” Not likely, considering her get-the-hell-out skills, but Nathan wouldn’t know that. His last memory had her getting caught in the worst way, and he likely thought she was still that noob. Guys like Nathan never did reckon a person could change or learn.
“Nothing so dire, babe. You just take a ride with me. Little road trip, for old times’ sake.”
Maglevs didn’t run in Texas anymore, not with the UNAN electrical grids cutting off at the borders, so Nathan meant to take her someplace in a private vehicle. On a road. Totally bare to any satellite’s eyes. When Heron woke up, he’d be able to track her easily through the satnavs. If she was all out in the open like that, maybe he wouldn’t worry. Or get mad at Kellen.
Yeah, not likely. She needed to work quickly, before that countdown ran to zero.
Mari stuck her forearm out and waited for the bartender to scan her rations bracelet. Nathan just nodded, and Mari didn’t see a band on his wrist. She wondered if he kept an open tab at this establishment. In Mari’s experience, that was on the high end of trust, more than just good custom.
If Heron were here, he would be feeding her particulars on the bar: who the operators were, what licenses they held, how fast she could get to the nearest exit. She’d know not only whether Nathan had an account here but also what his balance and last payment figures were. She’d know whether he had an equity interest and whether TPA had given him any special perks because he’d done work for them. Might be able to track him back to the technocrat faction, might be able to find out more about who’d set her up to kill the real Daniel Neko instead of the mech-clone.
In that moment, Mari missed her partner keenly. And not just because her nipples squeezed up tight every time she so much as pictured him. He was part of her process now, and interfacing with the world when he wasn’t beside her just…sucked.
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