by daisy harris
Kuri lifted her eyebrows. “Oh really? You’re out now.” She pinched his chin. Her fingers were cool and soft. “And you left your man-cave to find me last night.”
“Yeah, but that was… I was only trying to keep you safe.”
Kuri rolled her eyes. “My ass says differently.” She surveyed Frank’s appearance—from the dress shirt he’d never taken out of his closet to the loafers that pinched his feet, and finally to his face, smooth but ripped from the razor. Kuri arched her eyebrows, her expression thoughtful, but not unkind. “It seems I’m not the only one who’s been making a few changes.”
* * * * *
True to his word, Frank didn’t so much as let her change her clothes. So as they coasted down the hill and through downtown, Kuri hand-combed her hair and wove it into a makeshift braid. The long strands kept catching in her glasses and falling in her eyes. “You should have at least let my do my hair.”
It wasn’t a big deal—there were showers at the office under Pike Place Market, towels and toiletries of all kinds. Kuri even kept a few changes of clothes in her cube normally. Of course, they were packed in the moving boxes. “Do you have any mousse I could borrow?”
Frank’s lip curled up in a smile. “How do you think I stay looking so suave?” He looked different than she’d ever seen him before. Cocky, maybe? Or perhaps a little arrogant.
Her body tightened, like it knew something she didn’t. It was as if her thighs and belly had some kind of sense-memory, and being close to Frank with his rough voice and rugged smell set her nerves on alert. Kuri could only assume that whatever happened the previous night, her body had enjoyed it. “I’m not going to ask, you know,” she said.
“About the mousse?” Frank steered around a curve under a building. He gently patted the steering wheel as if he were humming a nameless tune in his head.
“No. About the sex.”
Frank didn’t react, but she could tell he wanted to. His big hands held the steering wheel a fraction tighter, so the muscles of his forearms bunched where he’d rolled up his cuffs. “What about it?”
Kuri sighed. She’d brought it up only to say that she wasn’t going to bring it up, and now she was screwed. “I’m not going to ask how it was.”
He glanced at her just long enough to cock an eyebrow. Kuri had never seen him do that before and she wondered if he’d tinkered with his programming to enable that tiny muscle twitch. The guy was such a freak.
“Do you want to know how it was?” he asked softly. His voice was gentle, as if maybe he understood.
Kuri couldn’t remember a single time she’d had sex, though she’d never told that to Frank. She may as well still have been a virgin. “No thanks.” She laced the words with as much disdain as she could. “It’s probably best I don’t know.”
“Whatever you say.” Frank patted her leg, but pulled away right when she might have complained. He let the issue drop, keeping a tantalizing thread of curiosity suspended in the air between them.
“So, not much left to do at the office?” Kuri leaned back and crossed her legs, letting their connection snap. She set her mind working on checklists of tasks. Moving was a big chore, and if she focused on her role in the company, maybe she could stop her imagination from wandering back to Frank’s mouth, and his hands. Her center pulsed, and Kuri shook her head in frustration. She felt sore, worked. It vexed her to no end not to know why.
“I sent Bane to pick up the moving truck this morning. We’ve got most of the team on hand to load it up.”
“Why not Shani?” Kuri wasn’t ready to let their argument from the previous day drop. Fighting with Frank, she felt on solid ground. Plus, it was true that Frank favored Kuri and Bane for jobs that required interaction with humans. With Barbie and Q-ter, Kuri understood why—Barbie was just too spacey. It wasn’t that she couldn’t pass as human. But the girl couldn’t accomplish the types of tasks Kuri and Bane could manage. Barbie worked best at the coffee shop where she pulled espresso.
“Would you want to wake up Shani for a job at six a.m.?” Frank pulled into the parking lot and set the car to idle. In the early morning, the waterfront was cold and damp. Light shone across the lake—the only glimpse of clear sky Seattle would get before the sun disappeared into the ever-present blanket of cloud cover.
Kuri shrugged. “Okay, maybe not for an early-morning job, but you should give her more work around people. She’s a lot less combative since she hooked up with Royce.” Kuri climbed out of the car and then shivered at the early-morning chill. On the other end of the lot, an eighteen-foot moving truck curved onto the asphalt and eased up next to the loading dock.
Frank waved to the driver, Bane. “I’ll think about it. But we need her for stein recovery. If I was going to train someone for public relations, I’d be more likely to choose Royce.”
She grabbed his shirt when Frank would have walked away. “What about me? I’ve been wanting to work on recovery and extractions for years.” Kuri bit her lip. Sure, she’d mentioned it, but never so directly.
“Are you kidding?” Frank snorted a laugh through his nose. “You black out on a regular basis. I can’t send you into the field with a gun.” He turned away as if the whole topic of conversation was ridiculous.
Kuri wanted to smack him. “What if I stopped blacking out? If I wasn’t glitching anymore, could I do ops?” She didn’t know where this new determination came from. Before, Kuri had dreamed about running her own extractions, saving steins who were being abused, setting steins free. For some reason, today she imagined she might be able to do it someday.
“We’ll see.” Frank looked at her as if she’d gone insane. Maybe she had. “If you wanted it that bad, I could have done a system reset and…”
“No.” Kuri marched past him, to where Bane stood, hovering near the truck. The blond former-military stein pretended to fiddle with his phone, though Kuri was pretty certain he knew Frank and she were fighting.
“If you get to make deals today, then so do I.” She walked past him, in Bane’s direction.
He huffed behind her.
Kuri ignored him. “If I can stop altogether, I want to learn to fight.”
Frank chuckled. “You don’t even argue when someone makes incorrect change,” Frank called from behind her. “And you want to learn to fight?”
She could tell he was nervous, that the ground was shifting beneath him. “Doesn’t matter, Frank. Those are my terms. If you’re right—and your super-love stops my glitching, then I want my own gun.”
* * * * *
Frank wiped the sweat off his forehead and bent to lift another box. His lower back ached, but after ten hours of hauling, most of the office had successfully been transferred into the truck.
“You should have gotten more of the girls to help.” Bane stepped up to take the box from Frank’s arms. The military-grade stein shifted the box higher to get his weight under it. “Where are Kuri and Barb?”
“Well, Kuri’s in my office working on some time tables.” Frank had given her busy work, turning her down when she offered to help with the lifting. Kuri didn’t weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet and Frank wasn’t about to let her hurt herself hauling heavy things all day.
“And that couldn’t wait ’til tomorrow?” Bane grumbled as he shifted the box to a more comfortable position, higher against his chest. “We coulda done this in half the time with a few more hands. Plus, Shani’s ready to strangle someone. Why isn’t Royce here? He shoulda been here all day.”
Arriving next to the open truck, Frank set down his box and flexed his fingers to regain circulation. “Royce needs to stay hidden still. Synadate issued a fresh warrant for him the other day.” He arched his back, listening to a loud series of cracks. “Hell, his makers are determined. Back in my day, you snatched a stein and never heard about it again.”
Q-ter stood next to the truck with a clipboard. He checked the label on the boxes and then pointed to the back left corner of the truck. Frank lifted with exhaust
ed arms, and waddled into the truck. “No company would admit to a stein being stolen. Or that the steins were illegal in the first place, like the girls.”
When Bane and he had maneuvered their armfuls to the perfect cubbies set aside by Q-ter, Frank plucked off his packing gloves. Then he rubbed his mismatched hands. “Sure, the military kept looking for you, but only on the down-low. Synadate’s got a real hard-on for Royce.”
Bane snorted out a laugh. Considering Royce had been built as a sex slave, the hard-on analogy was all too appropriate. “You considered plastic surgery?” Bane leaned on the concrete wall, pulling a water bottle from his cargo pocket. He drank a long swig. “Royce doesn’t have to look so pretty now that he’s out of the business.”
Frank shook his head. This was exactly why everyone at the ZU needed him. Bane was a smart guy, but didn’t understand shit about other people. “Are you nuts?” He didn’t want to spell out for Bane that Royce was way too vain to ever volunteer to have his face rearranged. “He’s not like you.”
Bane shoved the bottle back into his pocket. Blond-haired and blue-eyed, Bane Connor was almost as good-looking as Royce. But unlike Royce, Bane saw his looks as an impediment more than a tool. “Maybe, maybe not. But you could ask him. Have you even considered asking him what he wants?”
“I know he doesn’t want to—”
“Really, how?” Bane crossed his arms. “How do you know?”
Shaking his head, Frank reached into the cooler and plucked out a water bottle for himself. “I just do.” He unscrewed the cap, not meeting Bane’s eyes.
“Bullshit.” Bane pushed off the wall, hauled open the fire door and headed back into the building.
Frank gulped down half the bottle in long draws. He could feel Q-ter’s eyes on him, and knew from experience that the kid would back up Connor. Ever since Q came to the ZU, he and Bane had formed an axis of resistance against Frank’s authority.
“Don’t you start with me.” Frank stepped past Q and tossed the bottle back into the cooler.
Q-ter only shrugged. “I didn’t say anything.”
Frank didn’t have time to get into it. “Whatever. Is Shani back yet?”
“Nope.” Q checked his watch. “She said an hour. Traffic between here and the east side sucks this time of day.”
Frank pressed his thumb and forefinger into his eyes. He’d wanted to be spending time with Kuri by now. Instead he was waiting for Shani to pick up two more ZU members, Ben and Kee, from their apartment on the other side of Lake Washington. “I never should have let them live so far away.”
Q-ter’s dark eyebrows drew together behind his giant glasses. “Let them? Who says you let them do anything? Ben works out there. Makes sense they’d want to live close to his job.”
Great. Now Q-ter was siding with Ben and Kee too—and Ben wasn’t even a stein. He was a human who’d gotten involved with a stein. “Fine. Just tell me when they get here.” Frank dragged open the door and stalked through the hallways.
A figure holding a box marched toward him. Thin legs in sweatpants trembled under the weight.
“Kuri.” Frank rushed toward her, snatching the box from her hands. “I told you. Me and Bane got it.”
She pressed a hand on her hip and marched around to the front of him, barring Frank’s way. “Oh please, Bane told me to get my behind out of your office and help. He’s calling Josie too.” She pried the box out of his hands with an exasperated huff. “Why you thought you boys could do this on your own…” Kuri stepped around Frank and started down the passage. She smelled like a bouquet of orchids and lemongrass.
“You’re going to hurt yourself,” he called after her.
“Yeah, yeah.” She turned around to back out a door.
He followed behind. “So, what’s it like?” Frank spent so little time around Kuri lately it occurred to him he hadn’t asked her about her glitch. Sure, he’d done an intake years and years ago. But since then, he’d only paid attention to whether she was malfunctioning, not to the details of her experience.
“What’s what like?” Her steps got a little stiffer. Kuri’s shift to nervousness made it clear she knew what he was talking about. She put down her box.
“When you, y’know, lose it? Is there an aura? Like with a migraine? Any consistent triggers?” Frank knew he’d slipped back into clinician mode, but he didn’t know how else to ask what he wanted to know. He tried again, speaking more softly. “What’s it feel like?”
Kuri stopped, just inside the final door that led outside. It was dark and quiet in the little hallway. Perfect for telling secrets. “I can feel when it’s going to happen.”
Frank wanted to ask more—whether she could head it off, a thousand questions. But he held his breath.
“First I see blips of code. They pop into my head—not like when I’m searching for it.”
He nodded. Every stein could call up their code at will. But only those being controlled remotely had data stream into their brains. “So it happens even when you’re alone?”
Kuri raised a shoulder in half-agreement. “Yeah. Weird, right? I get blips all the time, though more when I’m tired.” She sighed. “Or upset.”
Frank felt like an ass. He wondered how many times one of their fights had worn Kuri down enough to set off her malfunction. “So, after the aura, what happens?”
She rolled her eyes. “You know.” An outside door opened and voices carried down the hall. It sounded like a football team storming into the tunnel.
Shani was shouting as she talked to Ben and Kee. “And then the asshole asks me, ‘Did anyone stand on it?’ and I’m all, ‘of course someone stood on it. It’s a damn ottoman.’ But the effin’ store wouldn’t refund me my money.”
Frank smiled at the sound of Shani’s voice. He tried to catch Kuri’s eye, but she picked up her box and lifted—blocking her eyes from his sight.
Chapter Five
Kuri stared out the window as Frank drove the moving van over the bridge and along the wide, industrial streets toward the warehouse. Squat craftsman houses dotted the edges of the landscape. Lights from their porches battled the darkness. They crossed into the Scandinavian neighborhood of Ballard and Kuri peered down from the highway to the rusty fishing boats and docked trawlers.
“You still with me?” Frank touched her hand. He’d inquired about her mental status every fifteen minutes all day, but since evening fell Frank had upped his rate of questioning to once every ninety seconds.
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, Frank. I told you I’d let you know when it hit again.” Kuri shifted in her seat so she could look him square in the eye—or square on the side of the head, since he was driving. “I do get some warning, usually.”
He darted a glance her direction. His expression looked momentarily angry, but then he gripped the wheel harder and his face relaxed. It was as if he’d diverted his frustration from his head to his hands. “When you feel it coming on, could you go somewhere? Lock yourself in a room or something?”
Kuri didn’t miss the edge of disbelief to his voice, and she answered by snapping, “Duh, I never thought of that. You’re a genius. Now you’ve solved all my problems. What’s next, Dr. King? Curing cancer?”
Frank scowled at her, but the edge of his lip lifted as if he were trying not to laugh. “I was only trying to help.”
She scooted back in the seat, crossing her legs underneath her. “I tried it. Of course I did. But if I can manage to lock a door while aware, I can just as well unlock it while glitching.” Kuri bit her lip to stop herself from elaborating. She hated that her alter ego was so smart. It was like being at war with an equally matched opponent.
“You like seafood, right?”
Kuri blinked at Frank’s sudden change of topic. They drove along Salmon Bay, where docks and marinas alternated with waterfront restaurants. Steins needed the high mineral content in organ meats to run their internal batteries, so mostly they ate brains and offal. However, with the heavy metal load in the ocean, s
teins could get quite a few of their required nutrients from fish. She smiled at the idea of seeing Frank in his dress shirt and pants again, ordering off the menu like a real date. “Okay.”
Frank’s lip curled up into something like a smile, but he turned his face away so fast Kuri couldn’t be sure it happened.
“We need to change first.” Kuri furtively sniffed at her armpit. Her cotton sweatshirt smelled like sweat and dust. Frank had changed into a t-shirt and loose hemp drawstring pants for hauling boxes. His clothes were smeared with dirt and oil from when he’d taken apart some of the desks.
“Sure thing. I brought some clothes.” Frank patted a duffel bag set on the floor of the front seat’s divider.
“Let me guess, you brought some for me too?” Kuri sneered at the bag on the floor. It was so typical of Frank to do something like that—demand she leave her house in clothes she’d practically slept in and then take it upon himself to get her toothbrush, pajamas and stuff from Shani or Barb later in the day. Kuri ran her hands through her hair, tugging to dull the frustration. Frank was such a control freak he might have gone out to buy her new clothes while she was distracted. Some girls might have found his actions sweet, but Kuri found them suffocating.
“Well, yeah. I figured you wouldn’t mind.” Frank pulled past a chain link fence and into a lot down the street from the warehouse. Empty boat trailers and older-model vans filled the gravel pad. A dim light shone from inside a rusted truck with a cab trailer.
Kuri wondered whether the occupant was a squatter or someone in charge of managing the adjacent hangars. “Are you sure we can leave the truck here tonight?” She waited until Frank had opened his door and descended the truck to follow.
The chain-link gate whirred closed. Frank stepped around to Kuri’s side. “Yeah. Q-ter paid off the attendant.” Frank bent to open his duffel bag and dug out a sweatshirt. He pulled it on and lifted the hood over his head.
“Okay.” Kuri accepted the hand he offered and let him lead her across the weed-strewn gravel. When they passed the lit cab-over-trailer, the curtain rustled and a male face peeked out from within. Kuri shivered. It was dark and she had been glitching like crazy lately. But Frank squeezed her hands, warm and comforting.