Kathy looks at me in surprise, her light-blue eyes clear in the wrinkles around her eyes.
I had tried to keep the details as vague as possible when on the phone with her for safety reasons. The less she knew, the less she could give away at the border.
I nod while trying not to think of what they’re doing to Winn. They’ve had him for five hours now.
“Oh, honey,” Kathy weaves her way through the equipment over to me.
When she gets to me, she wraps me up in a hug. She’s shorter than I am, and her thin, warm body against mine feels almost like a child’s. But there’s a power in that hug that has nothing to do with her size.
She whispers in my ear, “Go get him. Men need us far more than they realize.” When we drop our hands to step back, she deftly slips an object into my hand that suspiciously feels like Winn’s caduceus-pendant digi-scrambler necklace.
How much did she guess when I called her?
I laugh through a sob that escapes at the same time, cupping the necklace away from Puo’s view.
“Man,” Puo says lightly. “You act like no one’s ever hugged you before.”
I flick him off behind Kathy’s back and tell him, “Go make sure you still have a read on Winn.”
I love Puo. But, sometimes, there are things only another woman can understand.
Kathy steps back from the hug, and I reluctantly let go. “So,” she asks, “what can I do to help?”
“You’ve already helped more than you can possibly know,” I say. “The best thing you can do is go home and be safe. I promise when all this is over I’ll stop by and explain more.”
“It’s a deal.” She steps back in and gives me another hug, squeezing me tight.
Her orange-blossom perfume is already becoming familiar. I squeeze back, and I’m left to wonder, is this what having a mother or grandmother is like?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IN THE YEARS after the mega-quake, as governments stabilized and people adapted to the new geography, a new movement emerged from the rubble: the re-creationist movement.
It was part architectural, part philosophical, part political. It was a bona fide movement all the way down to the grassroots level and heavily embraced by the youth of the day. The principle was simple: recreate what was lost, only better. It was captured in their motto: recreating the past in the future without the mistakes.
One result of this movement was a plethora of evergreen buildings that popped up in the Vancouver area, buildings where nature was heavily incorporated into the design. The goals were aesthetics and to have a minimal energy footprint.
This is relevant to our current situation because nature and manmade objects don’t always go together so harmoniously. Ask ship designers, or homeowners dealing with infestations or who have tree branches overhanging their roof. The evergreen buildings are beautiful and notoriously finicky. They lose power. A lot.
And for the last two hours, the evergreen building Winn’s being held in on the main island has been losing power on and off, while Puo’s been launching anonymous, increasingly sophisticated digital attacks against their network. Both of which, taken together, are hopefully infuriating its occupants and making them nervous.
It’s after ten in the evening, and now I’m driving alone in our borrowed hovercar, wearing the anti-gravity suit, the helmet on the seat next to me. I don’t normally drive these things. That’s what Puo’s for. It’s not that I can’t. I just don’t like to—more fun to have a driver and leave my brain unfettered.
Puo’s in the field, hidden in an all-night rooftop coffee shop near the evergreen building keeping an eye on things, both digitally and visually.
It is a mark of seriousness that Puo didn’t bitch incessantly about needing to leave the house. He hates fieldwork. He had a job go very wrong before he met me (almost twenty years ago now), and has been skittish ever since.
“There’s movement,” Puo whispers over his comm-link, monitoring Winn. The comm-link picks up the background sounds of the coffee shop, the espresso machine shooting out steam, the random din of conversation.
“Roger, that,” I say. “Standing by.” I merge the hovercar into the skylane that passes near the evergreen building.
We’re unsure if the building is the Cleaners’ Den or if it’s one of their safe houses. But from the point of view of extracting Winn, it doesn’t matter. We don’t have the time or resources to mount a frontal assault. And even if we did, that’d be a dumbass thing to do. The Cleaners have home field advantage, and there’d be about no way to do it without racking up a body count—which we’re categorically against.
No. The smart move is to force your opponent to make a move they think is organic, but which plays to your advantage. Like making them skittish enough to move a hostage because the power keeps cutting out and the digital attacks look like a precursor to a frontal assault.
Puo whispers, “Falcon’s definitely in a vehicle, moving too fast otherwise.”
“Eyes on target?” I ask.
“Negative,” Puo whispers. “Not yet.”
“Keep an eye on it.”
“Duh.”
Good to know there’s still some of the normal Puo in there.
I fidget with my helmet in the car seat next to me, mentally preparing for the extraction.
“I have a visual,” Puo says. “It’s the same as the pickup vehicle, the black-and-white SUV.”
“Roger, that,” I say. “Moving into position.”
“Roger, that,” Puo repeats back. “Breaking bivouac, and moving to make contact.”
“Understood,” I say. “Good luck, and going dark now.”
“I’d tell you good luck, but the crazier your crazy is, the more successful you seem to be. Going dark, aye.”
Heh. There is definitely some truth to that.
The background noise of the coffee shop clicks off. Now only the wind sliding over the borrowed hovercar fills the silence.
I spot the black-and-white SUV hovercar holding Winn merging from below up ahead of me. I increase my speed to pull up behind their hovercar.
Time to do some crazy.
* * *
I push the anti-gravity helmet on. It’s tight, squeezing my ears to my head and pulling my hair down (which is already carefully bobby-pinned and tucked into the back of the suit). Poof, most of my peripheral vision is gone, but as I click shut the latches that seal it to the rest of the suit, it powers on. Nightvision auto-balances what’s visually ahead of me, making it nearly clear as day (sans color). Heads-up displays spread out in front of me, showing a temperature of fifteen degrees Fahrenheit outside (sixty-eight degrees inside the car), an altitude of four thousand feet and ten-twenty-one at night.
I use the retina menus to place a digital tracker on the black-and-white SUV directly in front of me. Try getting away now, assholes.
There’s a lot more traffic this late in the evening than I’d like, for pulling something like this. But you work with what you’ve got. Some of these people are going to get quite a show.
I pass the SUV and pull in front of them and turn on the auto-drive.
Here we go.
I shift to squat on my seat. It’s all about speed. As soon as the goons in the hovercar realize something’s up, they’re going to break away as fast as they can. I grab the localized magnetic disrupter Kathy so helpfully brought, a conic handheld device that shoots a powerful, directional magnetic field out of the bottom—powerful enough to shut down a hovercar engine.
Cold wind gushes into the hovercar as I roll down the window, buffeting against me. The internal temperature in my anti-gravity suits starts auto-adjusting. I love internal heaters.
I initiate the jump routine through the retina menus and set the digital marker to land on the hood of the black-and-white SUV.
I take some deep breaths and halfway through an inhale I cup my free hand to the top edge of the window and push my upper body out of the hovercar.
The wind slams ag
ainst me, pours over me. My legs anchor me down in the cabin below.
I move my feet onto the ledge of the window and look back at the SUV. Hi, fuckers.
Yeah, they see me. There’s a lot of yelling and pointing at me in the SUV.
I leap, activating the jump routine, and use the leverage from the open window.
The suit reduces my gravity to arc me higher in the air than would be normally possible.
The driver’s mouth of the SUV goes slack.
The suit increases my gravity, and I slam down on to the hood of their hovercar without hurting myself, although it’s still a stiff landing.
I immediately drop to my knees, pound the magnetic disrupter on the hood, rip the safety cap off and press the button. I’m already pushing my body off the hood.
There’s no sound, no explosion from the disrupter firing. Only the sudden blip of silence from where an engine once hummed.
The SUV pitches downward out of traffic.
I’m free-falling over the altitude-challenged SUV. Objective one met. Objective two: time to get Winn.
I quickly use the retina menus to move the digital marker to the passenger side door, and angle my fall to meet the target.
We’re thirty-seven hundred feet up and falling fast. I streamline my form to catch up. I need to get Winn out before the crash-mitigation system activates.
The lights of the nighttime city are rushing up to meet us.
The SUV is nose down. I hit the back of it and use what surfaces and handholds I can to climb to the passenger door.
I try to rip the door open, but it’s difficult against the wind blowing past. I manage to get it open, using my legs to almost stand on it.
Inside the cabin is a jumbled mess. There’s at least two goons and Winn, none of whom were wearing seat belts.
One goon has the presence of mind to start to swing his gun toward me, but Winn uses his shoulder to knock it out of the way even though his hands are tied behind his back and his feet are bound.
His curly black hair is disheveled. There are bruises on his angular face and dried blood around his mouth and nose.
Winn uses what leverage he can to maneuver his way toward me. Winn always was quick on the uptake.
I grab him one-handed by the chest when he gets close enough and toss him out behind me into the open air.
Twenty-nine hundred feet.
I flick the two bastards off in the cabin and then leap up from the door.
I hear the door slam shut behind me. I shoot upward from the SUV and visually search for Winn.
Where the hell is he? Shit!
The early crash-mitigation system fires on the SUV, releasing a multitude of drogues to increase its drag and angle it away from buildings for more time to fall before launching the parachutes.
The sky is dark and overcast; only several lines of moving lights from the skylanes are overhead. I can’t see Winn against that backdrop.
The tops of buildings are becoming clearer, rushing upward. The lights of the city become brighter.
Ka-poof! The full crash-mitigation system of the SUV activates, launching independently-powered parachutes.
“Over here!” Winn screams to my lower right. He’s moved his bound hands in front of him.
How the hell did he get below me?
I pivot and zoom towards him. I don’t bother setting a marker.
I crash into him, and he scrambles to hang onto me as I scramble to hang onto him.
“Stop fighting me!” I yell. I don’t think he can hear me through the helmet, because he doesn’t stop the mad scrambling of a drowning person.
Twenty-one hundred feet. Those building tops are awfully close.
He works his bound hands over my neck so that he’s right in my face. We work my left arm up and through his bound hands so he’s holding on to me across the chest.
I wrap my arms and legs around him, which is way too familiar a position and makes my cheeks burn red. Really, Isa? You’re falling and about to die and this is embarrassing?
I shake it off and fly through the retina menus to tell the anti-gravity suit that I have an extra two hundred pounds for the landing.
I angle our fall to land as far away as we can get from the SUV.
Winn clings to me, burying the side of his head against my chest as we both watch the city rush up to greet us.
There’s a rooftop that looks dark, empty. I angle us there and tell the anti-gravity suit that’s where I’d like to land.
At a hundred feet to impact it starts to reduce my local gravity, compensating for Winn’s additional weight. We start to slow down.
At fifty feet we’re already at half speed.
At twenty feet, I start to exhale.
At ten feet, relief kicks in.
The small pebbles we land on are like a barefoot walk on a beach after a long time away: unbelievably welcome and satisfying.
I untangle Winn from around me and scoot backward, working the latches on my helmet.
Winn moans and rolls around on the pebbles; his white breath escapes into the air around him. He has no coat on.
I get the helmet off and take big gulps of the biting cold air, making me cough. The stone scent of pebbles hugs close to the roof.
“Winn,” I say. “Winn.” I scramble toward him. We need to get off the roof and get him somewhere warmer.
He looks at me, breathing heavily, a slight smile on his face, dried blood around his mouth, and says, “I knew you wouldn’t leave me behind.” There’s a twinkle in his clear blue eyes.
I frown at him. I’m relieved he’s alive. But now that we’re relatively safe, that smile is right back to irritating. He hasn’t earned the right to smile at me like that again.
“For the record,” I say, as I start undoing the tape binding his wrists and feet together, “you can thank, Puo. This was his idea. Personally, I’m going to start calling you McGuffin.”
“Where is Puo, so I can thank him?”
Running his own op. A spike of worry bolts through me. The comm-link is in my ear, but still silent. “Out,” I answer Winn. “Did you tell them anything?”
“No,” Winn says, sitting up, looking around the roof. “But they took my electronics.”
“We know,” I say. “Puo says they can’t trace us that way. He’s absolutely, one-hundred-percent sure he took care of that this time.”
Winn cocks a crusty eyebrow at me, and pulls his arms closer to himself to huddle around his body.
I spot the maintenance door near the edge of the building. “C’mon—” I stand up and offer my hand. “—We need to get off the roof.”
Winn takes it and pulls himself up.
I allow him to put his arm around me, and I lean in as I support him. Although I’m not convinced he needs the assistance.
“What’s the plan?” he asks.
“My least favorite kind,” I say. “We wait.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“YOU LET HIM do what?” Winn yells in surprise at me. We’re inside the maintenance stairwell of the building we landed on, waiting for Puo to come pick us up.
“What?” I ask. Fortunately the stairwell is warm, too warm actually. I’m sweating in the anti-gravity suit, with the helmet sitting next to me on the landing.
Winn is, too, sitting catty-corner to me, the beads of sweat streaking through blood and dirt on his face.
“He’s supposed to avoid stress,” Winn admonishes me. “You know how he hates being in the field.”
I shrug. It doesn’t matter at this point. It’s over. Puo successfully pretended to be from the power company and plugged into the evergreen building and riffed the Cleaners’ system with the copy of the Cleaners’ code we have.
Well, it was more like Puo wore a uniform from a power company which no one questioned, and he was able to plug in with no interference. “It went flawlessly,” I say. “No stress.”
Of course, if anyone cared to look closely, they would’ve noticed that the power compa
ny uniform was from Natural Seattle Power, and not a local Vancouver power company. But those are just tiny details. People see what they want to see; the power of suggestion is a beautiful thing.
“I doubt it,” Winn says.
“Why you bitchin’ at me?” I snap at Winn. “We saved your man-damsel McGuffin-ass, and hopefully have a lead on what the fuck is going on.” The Cleaners are definitely involved—they don’t take orders from Bosses. But how? Is this tied to Ham somehow? But we weren’t able to turn anything up from Ham’s cryptic warning when we were briefly back in the Seattle Isles.
Winn looks like he’s going to say something, but instead takes a deep breath. “You’re right. Sorry.”
I quirk my eyebrow at that, but don’t respond. Puo should be here soon.
Puo had to catch a taxi out to the transport hub to pick up another ride as our original borrowed hovercar is probably on every authorities list to track down, now that some beautiful, lithe, sexy, bad-ass maniac in a skin tight suit leapt out of it in front of witnesses onto another hovercar and caused it to crash, but not before heroically saving a man-damsel-in-distress out of the backseat as it plummeted to its certain death.
“I am not a man-damsel,” Winn says petulantly.
“You are totally a man-damsel,” I say, and fight the flirtatious smirk that wants to appear against my will. I hold up my hand and tick off the reasons. “You’re pretty. You can’t save yourself. And others use you to try and get to me. Ergo: man-damsel.”
“You think I’m pretty?”
“Oh, shut up,” I say. “You know you’re pretty the same way I know I can kick a man in the balls and totally get away with it.”
“Does this mean you’re ready to talk to me?”
“What the fuck do you think we’re doing?” I ask. Ugh. Where’s Puo?
“No, I mean really talk to me.”
Unwillingly, I flash on the caduceus-pendant necklace Kathy brought me that I ended up tucking into a dresser drawer back in the floating house. This only pisses me off more.
“What, like slow?” I switch to a cadence and volume of talking to a deaf old person. “What. Do. You. Want. To. Talk. About!”
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