by Kit Rocha
Christ, that was hot. "So when Noelle said the two of you were close, she was talking biblically?"
"She gets a little adventurous now and then. I'm happy to oblige."
Noah fell silent, lost for a moment in that visual. Maybe that was the method to Dallas O'Kane's madness, the only way to reconcile his mercenary reputation with the contented loyalty of his people--even the women.
No, especially the women, because that was what was different here. Emma could be anything she wanted, do anything--or anyone--she wanted, and her happiness was part of the puzzle. The women here were woven in with the men, stronger and better for it.
Mac Fleming had a wife and a string of mistresses. Dallas O'Kane had a partner.
"Did you do them, too?"
Noah blinked and glanced at Emma. "What?"
"The drugs. It's my next question." She pressed her lips together as she dipped her needle into the ink again. "Were you into the same shit my brother was all fucked up on?"
A swift kick in the balls couldn't have brought him down faster. "No. I did some--the nonaddictive stuff that keeps you alert and focused. But I never got into the recreational drugs, and I wouldn't have gone near the shit Fleming cooks up to hook people. I didn't know Cib had, not until it was too damn late."
"Okay."
Her face was an impassive mask, and the persistent prick of the needles felt like a punishment now, a well-earned one. "I should have kept a closer eye on him. For all I know, it was my fault."
The corner of her mouth curved up in a mirthless smile as she shook her head. "Is that what you tell yourself? That you could have stopped him?"
"Wouldn't you?"
"You're assuming I didn't try," she answered flatly. "That I didn't beg him to give it up before it all went too far."
Belatedly, Noah realized what he'd said and gripped the chair to keep from jerking upright. "I didn't mean-- Fuck, Emma. You were barely more than a kid. And I'm the reason he got into that world to begin with. It was my fault."
"Cut it out." Her tone was still flat, but firm this time. Steely. "I'm not into the blame shit. It's past, it's over. Cib made his choices. It's just..." She shrugged. "I guess by the time he regretted them, he couldn't find his way back."
"Blame Fleming," Noah told her roughly. "Nothing he sells has to be addictive. He made that choice, and that's why I want to bring him down."
"Works for me." She shut off the machine and started unscrewing the metal tip that held the needle. "You need to take a break before I start in again?"
He'd barely felt the pain. Even now it was more sore than anything else, like gently abraded skin. He'd gotten far worse scraping his arm on concrete. "Nah, it's fine."
"No more questions," she offered. "You're paid up."
It had been too easy, and nothing about life in the sectors was ever easy. Emma focused on her work, handling the machine and its complicated parts with long familiarity, leaving Noah crawling back over the answers he'd given her.
No, the words he'd given her. He knew better than most that words were merely the outer layer, the most basic syntax of communication. Only Emma knew what truths she'd read into what he said and how he said it, and he supposed that whatever she'd gotten had satisfied her.
Whether that was good or bad... Fuck, he was already a mile past knowing, because he'd had a darker reason for cutting out without a warning, a reason so selfish and self-absorbed he could barely admit it to himself. The answer to a question he had no right to even ask.
Now he knew Emma could forgive him.
Chapter Five
Dallas's girlfriend made Noah nervous.
Alexa Parrino--Lex, to the people in Sector Four--might not appreciate being referred to as someone's girlfriend, but Noah didn't think she'd begrudge him the nerves. A woman with her training could put a man at ease if she wanted to.
And Lex clearly didn't want to.
She stared at him from across the desk, tapping her pen on its smooth surface. "Did you have a nice trip home, Lennox?"
"I got in and out in one piece."
"So I see." She gave him an appraising look, then shrugged. "You're not a prisoner here. You can do whatever you want. But we can't guarantee your safety off this compound, and especially not outside this sector."
Noah raised an eyebrow. "I figured you'd be more concerned with the danger that might follow me back."
"See, and I figured you'd be smart enough to handle all the worrying on that count. For Emma's sake, if nothing else."
He'd walked right into that trap, and judging by the knowing glint in Lex's gaze, his nervousness had been justified. The words hadn't even been a question--she'd stated the truth like she knew it.
She probably did. "Trix talked to you."
"I talked to Trix," she corrected. "There's a difference."
"Is there?"
"Yeah, because I asked. She didn't volunteer. Though I guess that only matters if you care who's keeping your secrets." Lex braced her elbows on the desk. "But then, you seem like a man who prizes his secrets."
His heart slammed against his rib cage, a painful jolt that had him gripping the arms of the chair. "I don't know what she told you, but some truths--" He forced himself to take a slow, calming breath. "Emma has a dead brother who loved her. I'm not taking that away."
Lex shot across the desk and wound her hand in the front of Noah's shirt. "Now, you listen to me. If you tell her the truth, I will kick your ass so hard you won't have to walk back to Three. You'll land there."
Disengaging himself from her grip would involve touching her, and Noah wasn't sure Dallas O'Kane would let him keep his hands if he tried. Besides, he was too busy choking on relief--intense, dizzy gratitude. "Do I look like I want to tell her?"
"Guilt does funny things to a man. Starts eating you from the inside out, and one night you get a little drunk and figure unburdening your soul's the way to go." She released him and straightened, glaring down at him with fire in her eyes. "Emma's a nice girl. She deserves the truth, but it's got to happen the right way. If you hurt her trying to make yourself feel better, you'll regret it."
"I will," Noah agreed, quiet and easy. "If I hurt her for any reason, I'll regret it, which is why staying here is dangerous. Secrets have a way of coming out when too many people know them--and a lot of people in Five know this one."
Some of Lex's anger melted, and she sighed roughly as she stepped back. "Do you want to stay?"
Before yesterday, no would have come easily and honestly. "That's irrelevant."
"Why?"
"Because other priorities take precedence. Emma takes precedence."
Was that a flash of sympathy in her eyes? "She's not your responsibility anymore."
Because she was an O'Kane now. Because this woman owned her people as surely as any queen, and would guard the duty of protecting them as closely as she did their loyalty. It was a different kind of relief, having that confirmed. Bittersweet, because he'd had the opportunity to be the one who kept Emma safe, and he'd screwed it up.
But he couldn't let go. "I'll always be responsible for her. I may just have to reconsider the best way of keeping her safe."
"She's as safe as she can get." Lex pulled a cigarette out of a silver case and lit it. "If you're going to go, it needs to be soon. You know that, right?"
"I know." Noah leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees, and reminded himself that this was for Emma. "The stronger you are, the more secure she is. So tell me why O'Kane's so hot to recruit me, and I'll make it happen before I leave."
"You're supposed to be a genius, Lennox. You know why." For the first time, Lex smiled down at him. "Information and services. Information, you can give us from anywhere. But Dallas has something he'd like for you to work on here, too. A program."
Since he'd yet to see a scrap of tech more advanced than Emma's tattoo machine, he raised an eyebrow. "A program, huh?"
"Yeah." She pulled a key out of a drawer and slid it across the desk
to fall into his hand. "Time to see if you're half as good as your reputation, hacker."
Watching Noah work was an old habit Emma could definitely fall back into.
"This is unreal." He crouched in front of one of the shelves and tugged out a box labeled in Noelle's meticulous cursive as Miscellaneous: Surveillance Related. "You could build any goddamn thing out of the parts he's got here."
"Dallas never throws anything away." She knelt beside him and peered into the box. "That's the stuff Rachel pulled off a downed Eden drone last year."
"Might be able to put a functional one back together with it, too." He pushed the box back into place and looked in the next one. "Lots of memory chips, that's good. Those are hard to get these days."
The tone of his voice--distracted but still intense--brought back a rush of memories, and she bit her lip against a smile. "Noelle put something together for you."
He rose and followed her to the table, where a workstation had been constructed with a slim keyboard resting in front of one of the biggest tablet screens they had--the kind Nessa and Noelle liked to play movies on.
Noah spun the chair around and straddled it before swiping his fingers across the screen. It sparked to life, bathing his face in harsh white light as he narrowed his eyes.
His gaze flicked back and forth for a quiet minute, and he frowned. "Huh. Edwin Cunningham's daughter did this?"
Emma punched him on the arm. "She's smart. And she says she doesn't know much, but you're the only other person I've ever met who could handle this kind of tech."
"Hey, no arguments here." He nudged her in the side with his elbow. "But there's no fucking way someone in Eden taught a councilman's daughter how to code like this. She must be like you. Naturally gifted."
Emma's cheeks heated. The praise wasn't new, but there was something different about hearing it now that their circumstances had changed so much. "Thanks."
"It's the truth." He swiped his fingers across the screen, rearranging windows full of code with half his attention. "My father had me learning how to do this before I was five years old. And I'm good, but it was never like you are with the art. You just do it."
"Uh-huh." She leaned over him. This close, she could smell soap, leather, and a hint of mint, of all things. "Did Lex tell you anything about Noelle's program?"
"Nope. I think she's testing me." A furrow formed between his brows. "But from what it looks like... Oh, shit."
When he started laughing, Emma knew he'd figured it out. "Uh-huh. It's like that."
"Naughty girl, spying on Eden," Noah said, still grinning. "And tricky, but I can see where she's gotten tripped up. She's dumping all the data from the access points broadcasting past Eden's walls, but I bet she didn't realize just how far out some of the signals go. No one does."
A system monitoring all the data traffic in and out of Eden was one thing, but what he was talking about was something entirely different. "How far do they go?"
"Farther than even Eden knows." A swipe of his hand cleared the tablet, and he pulled up a program he'd showed her before, a digital art application where you drew directly on the screen. She'd never liked it--how could you feel your art when you couldn't feel it?--but she watched silently as he used it for a more practical purpose.
"This is the city," he said, drawing a circle with his finger. He drew the four spokes coming out of it in the cardinal directions next, and then the diagonals, dividing the outside into eight sections. "And the sectors. In the original designs, there was supposed to be a secondary wall." He drew a larger circle to encompass all of it. "That wasn't finished before the solar flares, but they'd already laid the groundwork. The tunnels, wires for power and networking. Everything but the wall itself, basically."
Emma stared at the screen. "So Eden isn't self-contained at all. The sectors are wired for access to their systems."
"Yup. The only way for Eden to be truly off-the-grid was to make sure all the support structures were connected. This was all in the original plans, but..." He trailed off and slanted a look at her. "How much do you know about what happened when the grid went down?"
Only the secondhand stories she'd heard curled up at her grandmother's knee--the darkness of the big blackout, followed by the almost magical appearance of the aurora borealis, all shades of green and blue and red, extending much farther to the south than it should have. "I know a solar storm knocked out the power grid. Destroyed it. The Flare."
Noah snorted. "They should have called it the Surge, because that's where things really went wrong. There was a technical failure in the systems that were supposed to prevent a power surge from wiping data, and it cascaded. Every device connected to the network fried, and it was anarchy."
"And the lights went out." It should have been more horrifying, to think of an innocent, comfortable world, gone in an instant. But Emma felt simple wonder that there ever could have been a society that knew only light and ease.
"Except in Eden, because it wasn't online yet. Nothing to fry." Noah circled his finger around the wall again, drawing in a second, overlapping line. "My grandfather was one of the founders, you know. It was supposed to be some big dream, the first high-tech green city. Totally self-contained, totally sustainable. They were going to prove it was possible."
Instead, it had become a prison, a place where citizens' thoughts and feelings were policed as much as their actions. "What happened?"
"Good people had something valuable, so bad people took it from them."
"Men with smaller ideas--and bigger guns?"
"Smart girl." Noah swiped his hand across the screen, banishing the drawing. "They killed my grandfather."
His hands were busy, so she squeezed his arm. "I'm sorry."
He shrugged. "He died five years before I was born. All I ever knew about him were the stories, and my father... Well, you know how my father was."
Emma remembered the man's eyes--red-rimmed and bloodshot, a dull version of Noah's bright blue. "He was pretty fried by the time I met him." It was hard to imagine he'd once been one of the best hackers in the sectors.
"I guess he was." He rearranged the windows on the screen again before pulling the keyboard closer. "The drugs made him dumb, but they didn't make him mean. He was that way from the start, bitter and angry. That's why he hacked Eden's files while everything was still in chaos. There's no record now of the outer access points and control rooms having ever existed."
"So they're there, but Eden doesn't know about them?"
"Emmy..." His fingers hovered over the keyboard, and he glanced at her. "What I've already told you is dangerous. You get that, right? I'm not even talking about Fleming now. You could disappear into a holding cell in Eden and never come out."
Her heart pounded against her breastbone. Her entire life had been about the immediate evils, the dangers that had surrounded her. But always, hovering beyond that, was the threat of Eden, the invincible city with endless resources, endless power.
Not so endless, maybe.
"Hey." Noah rose and spun the chair to face her before catching her hands in his. "By the time I'm done helping Dallas, no one will be able to touch you. Not while you're wearing his ink."
"What? No, that's not what I was thinking." Her gaze locked with his. "They're not infallible, and that means no one is. Especially not Fleming."
His fingers tightened. "That's what I'm counting on."
"Then why can't you see?" she asked desperately. "You don't need to go after Fleming, guns blazing. You can hurt him worse on your terms, doing what you do. Thinking."
Noah's jaw clenched. "It's not that simple. I can't just live out in the open like a normal person. Fleming won't let me. My only chance at anything close to a life is taking him out."
"Is it? Or do you want to kill him so badly you can't see anything else?"
Noah hauled her closer, until she was straddling his thighs, practically in his lap. "I'll think about it, all right? For you, I'll think about it."
His
proximity made her head spin, but she held her ground. "No, for yourself."
He stroked up her arms and slid his hands into the loose strands of her hair. "It's the same thing. Until you get that, you won't get me."
Emma shivered. "Everything in your life can't be about me."
Tugging gently, he tilted her head back and pressed a kiss to the underside of her chin. "Why not?"
"Because..." There were a hundred damn good reasons--a thousand, even--but with his mouth on her skin, all that mattered was one. "Because you haven't said you'll stay."
"And that would make it okay?" His fingers tangled in her hair, pulling until her scalp tingled.
"It would make sense." Why deny that sort of all-encompassing emotion?
"That's not what I asked." He licked her pulse. Grazed her skin with his teeth. "It's obsessive. Possessive. Dangerous. Is that what you want?"
As if there was any other way to love in Sector Four. "O'Kanes don't do anything halfway, Noah. Especially not this."
Groaning, he forced her to meet his gaze. "Do you have any goddamn idea what you're saying? What you're offering?"
More than her body. Her heart, her soul, everything. But words would never convince him. "Give me one night to prove it to you. You get this thing done for Dallas, and I'll show you what it all means to me."
"One night?"
"Not some tits-and-ass setup so Dallas can show you how very luscious things are around here," she clarified. "The real shit. Fight night."
"Okay." His hands slipped from her hair, and she immediately missed the gentle pressure. "As long as you realize that if I show my face, I'll probably end up fighting. Too many people from Three want to take a swing at me."
He didn't exactly seem displeased by the prospect, so Emma smiled slowly and rubbed her thumb over his lower lip. "So climb in the cage and take a swing back."
His eyebrows lifted, and he smiled under her touch. "My turn to put on a show?"
"A little. But maybe also to see how O'Kanes celebrate victory."