Wanted and Wired

by Vivien Jackson

  “So since when’d you join the dark side?” Nathan asked, jolting Mari. It wasn’t that she’d forgotten he was here. She’d just been wishing too hard that somebody else was.

  She replied with a look. What the heck was he even talking about?

  He gestured with his chin toward her forearm, where the countdown cuff had shifted, exposing her implant scar. “The girl I knew was fervent against alteration.” Damn if his voice didn’t sound a whole lotta wistful.

  She shrugged and resisted the urge to shove her arms into the jacket sleeves.

  “Pheromone pump. Brand new. Why? You feeling unexpectedly frisky?”

  Nathan made a sound in his throat that Mari interpreted as disbelief. True, when they’d been together, she’d been a little wild. Okay, a lot wild. Opinionated, cocksure, with a chip on her shoulder the size of Alaska. It had all been in an effort to keep the self-loathing at bay, of course, but Nathan hadn’t known that. And she’d never told him. She wondered if he’d hated her as much as he professed to love her, but she didn’t dare ask.

  He was bathing her with one of those looks. A dimple-ended smile hovered on the edge of his mouth, and Mari’s skin crawled with questions. He was sizing her up, that much was plain, and once upon a time, she might have worried that he found her lacking. Right now, she didn’t give two shits if he did.

  “Always frisky, ma’am.” He leaned toward her and leered. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Now, see, she’d gotten all nostalgic and sappy when Kellen had called her ma’am back on Chiba. When Nathan did it, she just wanted to smack him upside the head.

  Chapter 13

  Nathan wasn’t originally from Texas, but he sure had adopted the yeehaw. A scrawny, strung-out valet in jeans brought his truck around, and looking at it, Mari thought it could tow at least a big-haul gooseneck. Which was ludicrous: the Nathan she knew wouldn’t know what to do with a cow. Given one, he’d probably name it Frisky and feed it guacamole.

  He didn’t hold the door for her, and Mari didn’t expect him to. She grabbed the leather seat harness and hauled herself up into the monster truck. The door shushed closed behind her. Standard, self-driving cab, just a single bench seat on the floor and control deck in the dash, no steering wheel or gearshift. This truck ran itself. Which meant Nathan wouldn’t have to divide his attention between her and the road.

  That should not have made her nervous, but it kind of did.

  She watched him climb in the other door, tint the windows, and set their trip parameters on the control deck.

  She studied the console, but she couldn’t make sense of the longitude and latitude he put in as their destination. Again, Heron usually handled the nav.

  It’d been a while since Mari’d ridden in an autocontrol rig that wasn’t public transportation. It felt weird, like the cab imprisoned her. She was perfectly used to a machine driving her around, granted, but her machine.

  When the windows went dark, leaving her alone with Nathan Grace, she was suddenly twenty-one again and reckless. Only she wasn’t. She wasn’t that girl anymore.

  “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” Nathan said. As an opener, it wasn’t far off his usual.

  Mari grimaced. “What the hell are you even talking about?”

  “Your tech, babe.”

  Oh.

  “The implant is just the pheromone pump. You already saw it. My com’s external.” She felt like folding her arms, tucking them behind her back, doing whatever it took to keep Nathan from checking out Kellen’s careful work. It wasn’t like he’d be able to tell who her carver was just by looking at her tech, but it still felt too personal. Which was just stupid. Mari’d been ass-naked under this man’s gaze countless times, but here she was, cringing away from showing him her damned forearm?

  “Show me the com.” He paused and then added, “I’m not asking.”

  Mari froze. Nathan was still smiling, still leaning easily against the bench squab, half turned toward her. But there was something hard in his face this time. No matter what he looked like or how he made her feel, he wasn’t the same person he’d been before Corpus Christi. She needed to keep that in mind.

  She could take him out right now, of course. No matter how much he’d changed, he didn’t have any obvious alterations, not like that Viking giant who’d been stalking her in the bar. Not like the mercs she’d put down in the Pentarc. Even without a gun, she could end Nathan. He ought to know that.

  But if she rolled Nathan and slipped out into the dark Dallas night right now, she’d never get that transmission shut down. And Heron would…no. She’d get it done.

  She tilted her head to the side and shished back her hair, exposing the earpiece and the cameo.

  “Just a dock-mounted piece,” Nathan murmured. “Temporary?”

  “You can take it out if you need to.” She held her breath, waiting for the pinch. It didn’t hurt when she removed the earpiece, not at all, but she still tensed when Nathan slipped it out. He did it as a caress, gentle, pushing up into her hair. That was new. Nothing about Nathan and touch had ever been gentle, back when. He’d liked it rough, on the giving and the getting. Often, their sex had bordered on violent, and some particularly excruciating memories were burned into Mari’s brain, unavoidable even in nightmare.

  His thumb dipped beneath her jaw, stroked the rim of her cameo. She closed her eyes and waited for the metal catch, the hiss of release, and the dull pinch as the com came free.

  She thought of how keyed into that com Heron was usually, how he’d even been able to read her mind with it in, for a couple of hours at least. Losing it was almost like losing her connection with him. It hurt.

  “There,” Nathan said, palming the now-inert bit of metal. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  Yeah, it was. Mari opened her eyes slowly, wet her lips, and leveled him with a stare she’d spent a lifetime practicing. “Now show me yours.”

  Nathan turned the com over and over in one hand, but he didn’t move other than that. His smile had grown enigmatic, and the cab of the truck felt closer. Warmer. He didn’t have control over the air mix like Heron did, but Mari’s breath still shallowed. Her nerves went live, on fire.

  A flash of certainty whacked her in the head. This was where he’d betray her. This was where he’d hurt her. He had her at his mercy, or thought he did, and Nathan had never been big on mercy.

  What if he wasn’t planning to turn her over to the authorities? What if he’d acted solo in fabricating those nano transmitters after all? What if he had a more personal vengeance planned, and all he’d wanted to do all along was pay her back for Corpus?

  Because that had surely been a shitstorm worth avenging.

  They had been a team, more peers than chaos-and-remote like her and Heron. Nathan had been tracking the movements of a security detail while Mari snuck in and filched shit. Small shit. Shit nobody would miss till she and her partner were long gone and had banked that job.

  Mari didn’t even know what was in the shipping containers, just that she was supposed to load them onto a hovercart and get them onto the dock. A retrieval craft would take it from there. Simple job, in and out, minimal risk.

  Com tech hadn’t been good back then. They didn’t risk walkie-talkies or other radio-wave communication. Nathan had tracked the security for days, got their schedule down, walked her through the whole thing. Promised he’d be her eyes and ears. Swore he had her six. Fucked her until neither of them could walk just right. They’d blissed out on chems and sex and the prospect of a shitload of cloudcoin, untraceable, once this was done.

  And then he’d sent her out on the job. He’d scanned and laser-painted the first container, and she’d loaded it for transport. Had paused for the guards’ shift change. He painted the second target. And then Nathan…

  She’d set some charges remotely, just in case. Nobody knew better
than Mari the value of a good diversion. And lord, she always had loved causing mayhem. When the federales showed up, she ducked inside one of the shipping containers. She expected Nathan to drop the tag so it wouldn’t mark her position. They could go dark, wait out the law. No need for anything hasty. They were professionals.

  But then, the raid wasn’t on Nathan’s dug-in blind; it was right there on the dock. And her hiding spot was for shit. They found her easily. Claimed she was trespassing, claimed she was murdering, claimed she was engaged in high treason. Yanked her up. Cuffed her. Stripped her. Searched her.

  Yeah, that was what they’d called it.

  Nathan was armed. He could have picked those federales off. Only four of them, and he had a steady aim. She always did regret, after that, not being the one behind the barrel. So much would have gone different.

  She was ten thousand questions into an interrogation when the charges blew.

  Orange had burned her retinas. She couldn’t hear. She’d screamed for Nathan, but the federales were closer. Pulled her to the ground. Heat and pain and bright white silence, and she had no idea how long she was like that.

  She spent seven weeks in a South Texas prison. Cement building said UNAN on the front gate, but laws and regulations on the treatment of prisoners had been wild-wild-west at that point. Maybe they still were, Texas being the chaos pit that it was. And besides, she wasn’t being held on suspicion of crossing against a traffic sign, as her captors frequently reminded her. She was suspected of high treason. Assassination. A lot of other words she only partly understood.

  They asked her things like where she got the C-4. Like what she was planning to do with plutonium and nanorods. Like what she knew about mech-clone fabrication processes and who she worked for. Like what some string of numbers meant.

  She thought back, but now, a thousand years and a lifetime later, she couldn’t remember the specifics clearly. Just the sensory details. Smells. The slow creep of her hearing coming back. The pain of burns, and worse. It all healed so slow.

  Nathan hadn’t been in that prison, and she hadn’t seen him since. She’d never gotten his story, had been forced to assume and invent.

  She remembered sirens, the blue smoke that smelled like burnt cotton candy. She remembered being cuffed in a ceramic med closet and swept for tech.

  She remembered the miasma of cheap tequila and musty sea air and sweat, and the organic manacles of guards holding her down. She remembered how they’d cheered each other on, lilting into a squirm of languages that eluded her. Shamed her. Broke her. The first guard, the one with blue eyes so like Nathan’s, had sported a beard, and all this time and space later, sitting safe in Nathan’s big-ass automated truck, Mari raised a hand to her throat, feeling the whisker burn.

  Shit, shit, shit. She didn’t want to remember this. Any of it. She didn’t want to see these things. She didn’t want to be the person who’d lived them.

  “Mari,” Nathan said, “you still with me?”

  Not really. “Haven’t been for a long time.”

  Nathan let out a long breath. “No, I guess you haven’t. We aren’t strangers, though. You’re thinking something hard. I know that look.”

  She wanted to ask him, and she didn’t even know why the words stuck in her throat. She had to swallow past them. “Nathan, what’s the last thing you remember from that job in Corpus?”

  He took so long in answering that Mari thought he hadn’t heard her. Memories moved in, monsters and shadows from all sides.

  “Your face in my scope,” he said at last.

  Mari blinked, took a breath, blinked again, but it didn’t help. Her vision wasn’t resolving. She stared hard at the green display on the control deck. It didn’t even look like numbers anymore, just a blur of light. Not fae, though. Plain, flat light.

  Her fingertips prickled, and her skin felt hot, like she was sweating. She tried to move one hand to the back of her neck, to lift her hair away, but the weirdest thing: her hand wouldn’t move. With great deliberation, she shifted her gaze to the leather seat and stared hard at her hand, sent it commands, and watched it ignore them completely.

  “Lie back and rest.”

  She obeyed. The hell! She’d never obeyed Nathan, never in all their time together. Not even when her rebellion made him furious. But now, she could feel her spine curl in on itself, could feel her hips sliding down, her knees flexing and falling to the side, her head lolling against the seatback. She felt Nathan unzip her plastene jacket and spread the lapels. The metal zipper burned cold on her feverish skin.

  “What are you doing?” she tried to ask, but the words sounded slurry.

  “Making sure you aren’t armed, babe. But you don’t have to be awake for this. Just relax.”

  All the parts of her vision that had blurred, the fuzzy edges and giant dark splotches, filled with memories. Bad ones.

  Tequila, teeth, raw throat, blood and bile, thrust and burn. Pain. So much.

  Nathan’s hands—no longer gentle, more like she remembered—unbuckled the slim leather sheath on her thigh. He drew out the blade, six inches of pretty and sharp as a razor.

  “Fuck, Mari.”

  “Wouldn’t if I were you.” She had to dig hard for each word and to keep her vision squared, but it was so worth it to watch his face when she murmured, “Got one of them dentata implants. Knock yourself out, perv. ’Cause it’s gonna bite like hell on the way out.”

  And then chemically induced sleep enveloped her.

  • • •

  Reset. Checksum discrepancy, input input. Retry? No. Streaming I/O: Connected. Search parameter = Mari + location + biostatus. Return: 1. N: 30° 29′ 45.45′ W: 98° 49′ 11.53″. 2. Paused. Retry?

  His primary systems were offline, and Heron couldn’t feel…anything. Where was he?

  He searched for input points but could access none of his senses. No eyes, no hands, no ears, no mouth.

  He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t scream.

  Panic clawed for him, but he thought through the problem, forced himself to sort the data he could access. Slowly, over the space of milliseconds, his memories trickled in, fitting themselves together. He was in the Chiba Station computer. He’d plugged himself in and transferred a small part of his consciousness, just a control routine really, to the larger computer. The plan was to reboot remotely and scrub his own neural net.

  He remembered doing all these things and making all these plans, but the memories smelled like spray paint.

  No. Memories didn’t smell. That was absurd.

  Lacking any of his usual senses, he searched for other sources of data. He located the power transfer conduits in the station and followed two to cameras in this med bay. One was connected to a nanite-sized machine meant for surgical applications.

  The other was a security camera, hidden in the molded wall. Jackpot. He accessed its feed and saw the med bay, more or less as he had left it. Kellen slumped at a desk, his arms crossed and his face tucked into the impromptu nest between his elbows. The queen stood still and tense beside a gurney.

  That was new. When he’d left, the queen hadn’t been here. Mari had.

  Mari.

  Her name lit up in all his pathways, throbbing like a fresh wound. Where was she? She had promised to be here, to hold on to him. But his first thought on waking had been of her. And she had not been here.

  Search parameter = Mari + location + biostatus.

  She had moved since his last check. She was heading south-southwest at 137 kilometers per hour.

  In Texas.

  What was Mari doing in Texas?

  That was the last place she ought to be. Alarm threatened to overtake his logic unit, but he held it off. In a body, he would be taking deep breaths.

  Wait. Back up. Body. Gurney. He panned the camera, and sure enough, there was his body, reclining on a gurney. Away, apar
t from him. Watching it through the camera was surreal. For a moment, disorientation swamped him, and he bobbed in the data stream. He struggled to steady himself, to keep fitting the data input and the memories together.

  He was on Chiba. Mari was in Texas. The station was in a low geosynchronous orbit. The space elevator was still connected to a depot on the surface. His spaceplane was no longer docked on the tether.

  He arranged all of these facts until they formed a picture of reality, but what stood out with perfect clarity was this: Mari’s com had just alerted him from nine hundred miles away, disconnected by fingers that weren’t hers.

  Her com signal was welded to Heron’s consciousness, served as an integral part of who he was. When it left her, he knew. It didn’t matter that his entire neural, his entire self, was running off a copy in the space station’s central computer. He knew.

  And he was pissed.

  She was in danger. Captured? Arrested? Betrayed? Regardless, she needed him. For once, she needed him. And here he was, fucked up, stuck to a gurney. Impotent.

  He worked his way through the maze of data paths and found the monitor above Kellen’s desk and an input device connected to it. Bringing up a text window, he painstakingly wrote out words. “Hey. You still here, buddy?”

  Kellen wasn’t really asleep, or maybe he sensed that he was being watched, or maybe he checked the monitor at regular intervals. Whatever the reason, he looked up less than a second after Heron quit typing.

  “Heron?” Kellen blinked and knuckled sleep from his eyes. His face was pale beneath his tan, and his hair stuck out from his head at strange angles. The clock showed not quite midnight. He had probably been asleep. “Is that you or am I dreaming crazy shit up now?”

  “Why is Mari in Texas?” Heron typed. The words formed, dark against the white monitor.

  Kellen raked a hand through his spiky hair and muttered something too low for the speakers to pick it up. Probably curses. Then he raised his voice and aimed it toward the monitor. “She’s following up on a lead, tryin’ to figure out who messed you up. One of her contacts holds the patent on those nanites, and she thinks she can get him to shut the buggers down, cut the transmission. Don’t worry about her, though. You got other stuff you need to see to. Also, I checked in with her just a couple hours ago, and she was finer’n frog hair.”