The headset wrapped itself around his skull, its cold spike seeking I/O connectors. It wouldn’t find any on him, of course.
Holo projector horns extruded from the helm’s sides, and they vibrated a split second before the image shimmered in front of him. Kellen caught a breath in his mouth and held it.
For a long moment, she was just a shape, a wire frame filling with gray. Then the textures started arriving: crisp couture blue skirt, slim and tight over her legs, not a crinoline but somehow managing to look fashionable rather than a decade out of date. Severely tailored coat, scraped-back hair in a tight knot, cameo at the throat, and sleek red boots, buckled up the front. Her hands rested easy at her sides, encased in bio-deterrent gloves.
Her face resolved last, or maybe his eyes just took their time to get there. For a half second, he could convince himself he was just looking at a campaign promo spot.
Then she tilted her head fractionally and frowned. “Oh, goddamn fucking hell no.”
Her words were so at odds with her slick put-together image that whatever he’d been about to say shriveled up and died behind his teeth. He released the breath.
“Look, Dr. Farad,” she lasered at him, “I have no idea what game you’re playing, but if you know that face, that…person, clearly you’ve been hunting through my personal history, and I can tell you categorically that you have fucked yourself over in the worst way. Putting Kellen Hockley’s pretty face on your screw-up isn’t going to move me to mercy. It’s more likely to make me hunt you down in whatever shitty hovel you call home and scoop your goddamn machine eyes out with a pair of tweezers.”
Now see, she probably intended that minispeech to reduce him to a wibbly pile of yes-ma’am. Probably would’ve worked, too, if he couldn’t see right through her. But Kellen knew her, remembered her, every crevice and curve on her body, every quick fang in her mental arsenal. So instead of being cowed by her ferocity, he wanted to stand up and holler victory.
Because she wasn’t some plastic pretty thing that made speeches and played the newsvids. She was still Angela, through and through. And before he could self-censor, the thought seeped up: my Angela.
In spite of everything, he grinned wide. “Pretty? Woman, you ain’t never called me pretty.”
Her mouth had been open, ready to launch some more verbal shrapnel, but when Kellen spoke her lips froze that way, part open. She closed them, but it looked like the movement cost her. The wobble in her composure was fleeting, but he caught it.
“But anyhow, you’re partly right,” he went on. “Heron Farad sometimes speaks for our crew, and I know he sent you that message, but our family is bigger than one man, as you no doubt figured. I been working with him, oh, ’bout eight years now.” The bulk of the time since he’d last seen Angela Neko, in fact. Since he’d touched her. The pads of his fingers remembered. They tingled.
Wherever she was, likely on the other side of the country from where this station was tethered, she had been standing. She sat down now. Her face still looked calm, in control, but her nostrils flared. Breathing fast? Her gloved hands found each other in her lap and clasped. Too hard.
“I’m sorry about what happened to your…to Daniel,” he said. It was only half a lie. He didn’t know Daniel Neko from Adam, but what he knew of the dude indicated the world was a better place without him. And that wasn’t even jealousy speaking. Kellen was sincerely sorry if her husband’s death had caused her pain.
Except she didn’t look particularly pained. Mostly she looked pissed. “Farad messaged me on the darknet, told me he had information on Daniel’s shooter, things I needed to know,” she said, “and then he sends you instead, to…what? Plead for mercy? And I get nothing. No answers. Any way you look at this, it is supremely shitty.” She could have been talking about a lot of things, not just her husband’s murder or Heron’s message or the circumstances placing Angela and Kellen on opposite sides of a conflict swiftly shaping itself into a war.
“I ain’t gonna beg you for anything, princess.”
Her mouth tightened, an obvious crack in her equanimity. “Don’t call me that.”
He half shrugged but didn’t apologize. “What I will do is cut a deal for Mari. She didn’t know that was flesh-and-blood Daniel. She bought a capture-or-kill contract for your mech-clone, that swanky robot you tote around.”
“Don’t paint her, or yourself, as an innocent. Even if mech-Daniel had been the one out in California, even if he’d taken that bullet, your team would still be responsible for felony property destruction—he is stupid expensive—which… Wait. Her name is Mari?”
Was it his imagination or had Angela suddenly gotten really still? Even for a holoprojection still. He shouldn’t be saying this, confirming his shooter’s name for the authorities, but something in her face, in her confusion, drew the words out like leeched poison. “Yeah. Mari Vallejo.”
Silence stretched for a long time. So long he imagined he could feel the movement of this station through space.
Angela stared down at her gloved hands. Finally she spoke, but in a totally different voice. Small. Cold as the vacuum outside. “I am told Damon Vallejo’s only child was named Marisa. You are moving in dangerous circles.”
Dangerous for whom? For him? Like she’d give two shits. He shrugged again. “Don’t matter who her daddy is. She still doesn’t deserve to be hunted by federales. They’ll put her down bloody without a trial just to make the shocker vid channels, and you know it.”
“What are you offering in exchange for her safety?”
“Was kind of hoping you’d suggest something.”
She pulled in a visible breath. “I will see what I can do for her, and in exchange”—she raised her head and pinned him with dark eyes—“you can owe me.”
That had been too easy. Way too easy. What game was she playing at? For the first time, Kellen wished he hadn’t been so damn self-sacrificial. Heron ought to be here, with all his cloud resources whirring, sussing out her real motivations, looking for chinks in her armor and designs in her words. Scaring the bejeezus out of her with that post-human glare.
A politico in her position had deals within deals going on, and if she was caving to Kellen’s demands at this point in the negotiation, that meant she already had what she wanted.
So what had he given her? He mentally replayed their conversation so far but came up with nothing. Could she have misinterpreted something he said?
He pushed, just a little, to see how she’d react. “What does that look like, to owe the war minister of this hemisphere’s biggest empire?”
“Confederation, not empire,” she snapped. “And I’m not the war minister.”
“Yet.” He shoved her ambitions into the space between them. Right where they’d always been. “I’m just trying to get an idea of what you’ll want from me.”
One gloved hand pinched a fingertip in the other glove and rolled it. Nervous tic? She didn’t used to have any.
“What have I ever wanted from you?”
What had she…well, shit. Granted, he hadn’t been grown yet last time they’d met, but back then mostly what she wanted, or what she said she wanted, was somebody to study with and somebody to fuck. He’d provided both services.
“Well now, this telepresence tech is pretty good, but far as I know, it don’t support full-contact naked across time zones,” he drawled.
“That’s not fair.”
“Quoth the fairest of them all.” A line from a tale of fairies, an illuminated relic they’d pored over during late afternoons at the paper vault, the place they’d called a library, back when. Sun had slatted in through the desert dust, making it seem like heaven stroked the pages. That memory glowed golden still, and bringing it up right now, in such a context, felt like desecration. But if it spurred her into revealing what she was really after, he’d count the pain worth it.
Her gaz
e remained fixed on her hands. She twisted one finger of her glove.
“See, I know what you do, how you spin truths until they’re twisted and dizzy and wrong,” he told her softly. “Same’s what all your kind does. Only you’re the best at it, aren’t you? Now, this time, I know what really happened. And I’m curious what you’ll call it, how you’ll play it. And then how you’ll use that favor, the one I gave up so easy, to hurt people I love.”
Her mouth moved, but no sound came out, and her gaze skidded to the side. Odd. Something was very off about her posture, her movement. For a minute he thought he might have cracked her defenses and she was going to tell him exactly what was going on.
He wasn’t sure how he felt about bringing her so low. Part of him just wanted to wrap his arms around her and hold her. Hell, all of him did, even knowing how little she’d appreciate such a gesture.
Even knowing she’d tell him to go away. Leave me alone, then. I lived this long on my own. I’m good at alone.
“I’m really not like that now.” She raised her face and met his gaze directly. “You don’t know how the last ten years have been for me, Kellen. I have seen things I now can see no more.”
Something clicked in the back of his brain, a cog of memory sliding into place. Gold-dust sunlight and books spread wide over their knees. Her forest-fae eyes alight in mischief, reading bad poetry out loud till they both convulsed in laughter. Damn. He hadn’t expected the memories to hit this hard, but that one was a sucker punch.
He took a steadying breath and followed her down the path. “Been a rough day for you, I reckon.”
“Yes.” The telepresence setup they were using didn’t allow folks to transmit emotions, but she didn’t need one of those fancy rigs. He could see all of it on her face: the weariness, the loneliness. “Tell your shooter to lay low for a few days. I will be in contact with my demands.”
She raised a hand, an easy gesture, as if she were waving goodbye. Her fingers cricked, and he deliberately did not focus on her hand. He met her gesture with its mirror.
The headset vibrated, indicating the termination of their link. The tether on the helm pulled, like it would retract up into the ceiling, but Kellen paused it with a command word. He rewound the conversation. Played it back. There. Right there. Well, I’ll be damned.
She’d raised her hand, slim in its bio-deterrent glove. Its smartfabric bio-deterrent glove.
She’d scratched letters onto the palm, or she’d planted them there on purpose, a stain that would erase itself in moments but for right now shone stark against the black fabric. A secret message just for him.
He knew exactly what it meant. Emotion clogged his throat, but he swallowed past it. Looked again at her hand, her fathomless eyes, the soft set of her mouth as she waved goodbye.
He thought of her other goodbyes, and the last one.
After a long while standing there in the silent sphere, he erased the session, trapping it and her message in his memory:
worthdarkwords13
Chapter 2
Angela was not okay after that meeting. She was as un-okay as she had been in…well, a long time. Late that night, on the edge between wakefulness and rest, when her body was already paralyzed but her brain was on fire, thoughts slammed her like a hurricane. Even an injector push of sleeping chems, delivered without judgment by mech-Daniel, didn’t settle her.
Fuck it. She gave in and sloshed to the hotel galley kitchenette. Over a cup of something vaguely coffee-like, she scanned her message feed. The whole world mourned along with her, proclaimed Ursula Dioda, the show of sympathy underscored by a beehive-coiffed chatbot reaching out its arms in the universal gesture for “virtual hug.”
But the gossip wasn’t even close to done. In the next breath, right after noting how dignified Angela had been in her interview with Rafa, Ursula splashed a picture of Angela across the display and oozed, “Look at that face. So bleak! And just take a pull on her emo feed. Oh my, I’ve got goose bumps. See? That’s leadership, people. You’re looking at the future of our great confederation.”
Angela might need to have a chat with Ursula in the near future.
So far, no one had come right out and said “Angela Neko for president,” but the implication was clear. The voting public fed on emotional sincerity, or the perception thereof, and for whatever reason, they believed she had it. They’d petition for recall of the president and an emergency vote on a new leader if she wasn’t careful.
Flattering as such a groundswell might be, Angela wasn’t ready to oust her mentor. Zeke had always helped her, looked after her. Hopscotching over him would stink of betrayal.
She tapped the smartsurface by the coffee station, brought up a message app, and requested a follow-up interview with Rafa. The chances of him refusing to have her on his channel twice in one week were nil. She would be booked by morning.
And she knew exactly what she would tell him. She caught her reflection in the stainless-steel cabinetry and practiced her earnest face. “Daniel? Dead? Who would make up such a horrible lie?”
He’d buy it. They would all buy it. Because she told them to. And Mari Vallejo, that demon spawn freak of science, would go free.
Just as Angela had promised Kellen.
Which was the other reason she couldn’t sleep.
The holo hadn’t been full-sensory, and that was a mercy. She could not have endured being physically in the same room as him, not without ripping his clothes off. Over the years she’d half convinced herself that all the power she’d ascribed to him back when they were teens was just half-remembered hormones. He had never answered any of her messages in the darknet, not one. He’d cut her loose so easily back then, she must have imagined what they had was more than the reality. But seeing him tonight…if anything, her memory had underserved him.
He was still too good to be true.
Except not. Not good anymore. Somehow, gentle, pacifistic Kellen was hooked in to a group of freelance thieves and murderers. Plus, he’d developed a vicious streak of his own, implying that she was nothing more than a professional liar. Implying their relationship had been mostly physical. That was not the Kellen she remembered. What had those dungnuts done to him down in Texas? She should have never…
No, no, no, she couldn’t go down that rabbit hole. Not right now. Back up, girl. Reset. You were thinking about the game, the pieces. The whole world, and you are in control. Focus.
She sucked in a breath and chased it with coffee so hot it singed her esophagus.
There. Better.
Angela had been startled to learn that Damon Vallejo’s daughter had pulled the trigger on Daniel, but now she took the time to process that nibblet of info. Had somebody specifically turned Mari on to that contract? All the pieces just fit up against each other too seamlessly, which, in her experience, meant somebody had meddled.
Had Vallejo himself gotten involved? What message was using that particular killer meant to send? And had that message been meant for her or somebody else in Daniel’s sphere?
Precious few people knew of her link to Vallejo, that he had built the mech-clone imposter she used in place of Daniel. Zeke knew. Vallejo knew. Daniel had known.
Two years ago, at a particularly low point in her marriage, she had left Daniel. Her political career had been in a tricky spot barely a month from election day, and instead of creating a wobble in her senatorial campaign, a scandal, Zeke had acquired the mech-clone from Vallejo and had given it to her as a gift. A priceless one, as it turned out.
Meaning Angela owed people. Owed them too much. Debt, like guilt, threatened to squash her pretty much every second of her life, so she tried not to think about it. Except when something popped up like this: Daniel murdered by Vallejo’s professional-assassin progeny.
Yeah, that didn’t stink of too much coincidence.
She half expected Vallejo to message her
with some blackmail or at least some snide comment about how Daniel’s rotting human corpse was a down payment, but so far, she’d gotten only silence from Texas. Even the drone raids along the Red River had ceased in the last few days.
If this was a game—and Angela had no illusions it wasn’t—was the next move hers? Would denying Daniel’s death be enough of a play? If he wasn’t in league with Mari, did Vallejo have some other way of knowing that the mech-clone survived and the man had died instead?
She’d need more than a single interview with Rafa to drive the message home. She needed a multipronged media spike. She tapped the counter again and roused her team.
A person didn’t rise to her position without help, and her inner circle was slick as black ice. Half a dozen close confidantes insulated her from unnecessary human contact. They spoke for her, made arrangements for her, greased her passage through the halls of power. About the only thing they didn’t do was wipe her ass when she shat, but that was a logistical impossibility since they all lived in different time zones and logged their advisories in remotely.
The day immediately following Daniel’s death, she deployed that inner circle to confiscate records, plant alternative timelines, edit images. Basically, to systematically dismantle reality and rebuild it as she so chose. Managing this sort of project was what she was trained to do, and it came as naturally and inevitably as mud to white shoes.
Angela told herself she didn’t have time for navel-gazing or self-indulgence. Certainly didn’t have time to recall every syllable drawled in Kellen’s velvet Texas twang.
She had shit to do, and promises to keep.
• • •
Two days after Daniel’s murder, one of those promises was to attend, in person, the Global Change Initiative Awards Gala. Most events like this were attended virtually by remote telepresence because of safety, but hostess Ofelia Ortega y Mars de la Madrid was old and one of the seven global trillionaires. She had habits and the resources to turn them into demands. She had proclaimed this gala a meat-meet, end of story.
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