The concrete subfloor on the transition from the skywalk to Northy got a little rough from time to time. Nobody had ever finished out this tower, and it was skeletal in most places, dusted with sand and weather-roughed. The view was downright gothic, approaching it like this in the middle of the air with nothing but twilit desert all around.
When Angela stubbed her slipper on a patch of uneven floor, Kellen caught her elbow without even thinking. “Watch your step here.”
She paused, looked up at him. An expression fluttered over her face, but he couldn’t lock it down. Fear? Exhaustion? “Where exactly are you taking me?”
“Right here. North Tower.” Actually not far at all. His furry little general liked this floor best, with its combination of not a lot of people and that permaglass skywalk. She was something of a sun worshipper.
Angela’s fine eyes narrowed. “For what purpose?”
“To show you where I get all my information and why the firewall doesn’t matter.”
She searched his face for a long time, then looked away and shook her head. “I’m sorry. It’s so hard to trust. I just saw all those empty rooms, most with no windows and long drop-offs into nothing…”
Oh. Well, that stung. She thought he was bringing her here, to an abandoned, witness-free area, to do her harm. Jesus. That was not him. Not even a little bit. How come she didn’t know him better than that?
His first reaction was anger, raising spikes, ready to tussle. Defensive reaction. Visceral. He took two deep breaths, forced himself to continue to the second reaction. Which was a deep soul-pulling wish she would trust him, completely and inherently, as maybe one time she had. Now she did not. That was the naked fact.
When his logic brain kicked in, he admitted anybody who survived an assassination attempt had better be cautious to the point of paranoia. What did she really know of him? That he associated with outlaws and murderers. That he still nursed a grudge.
And lord, what he was about to show her wasn’t going to make him look any better. If anything, it would bolster her image of him as a loose cannon, dangerous and walking the teetery edge of bioethics.
“Listen, princess,” he said, sliding his hand up from her elbow, along satin skin, “you don’t have any specific call to trust me. It’s been a long time since we…well, since you knew my mind. And lord knows we’ve both changed plenty. You probably look at me and don’t even know who I am, what I’ve become. I can’t ease your worry on that score, but I can promise you one thing: I will never hurt you. And if folk around me ever try, I will end them.”
Her mouth opened, but she didn’t speak.
He waited, still touching her arm, because he couldn’t stop.
Until, of course, she yelped like a pinched piglet and leapt sideways.
• • •
“Holyfuckingwhatwasthat?” All one word and bleating from her mouth before she even landed. She hadn’t considered the fact that she was perched on permaglass ten stories above the ground, nor that some of the sides at the North Tower end weren’t walled in properly. They’d be sheetrock thin, fragile if hit with enough force. So not a great place, in general, to freak out.
But something had touched her ankle. Something soft and sleek and please-don’t-be-a-rat. She hated rats. She’d been attached to an envoy in a backwater shithole once, and the rodentia there were…
And then the weirdest thing in the whole world happened. Her com warmed. Crackled. And purred.
What the…?
Before she could ask a more coherent question, Kellen dropped to one knee, his attention clearly snagged on something else.
Something small, furry, and definitely not a rat.
A cat.
His long fingers curled under a cinnamon-furred chin, and the tiny feline leaned happily into his stroke. “Little general, you shouldn’t have snuck up on her like that. You like to made her jump clean off this building.”
The cat growled in reply but didn’t stop purring. Talented kitty. Multitasker. She knew this cat.
“How?” Angela breathed, unable to move her gaze from the animal. “You found another one?” Memory pricked her eyes, and she blinked rapidly.
“Nah,” said Kellen, still looking down at the cat. Not meeting Angela’s eyes at all. “Not another one. Same one.”
“Yoink? How is this possible?” She was on her knees now too, her hands reaching out to the impossible softness. She could feel the vibration of the purring beneath her palms and also in her com. “She was an old girl already when we took her in. What did you estimate? Fifteen? Sixteen? And that was more than a decade ago.”
“I took care of her,” Kellen said. “Couldn’t let anything happen to our girl.”
Our girl. Oh, oh, Kellen.
Angela bit her bottom lip hard and stared at the cat, blinking fast till she thought she could live through that moment.
Something had happened to Yoink in the intervening years. The color and patterns were right, but other things were very, very wrong about this animal. For one thing, Yoink had horns.
Not horns like in old pics of longhorns or triceratops or anything. Little metal horns right in front of her ears. Humans used similar alterations for projecting user interface controls. But a cat couldn’t possibly connect to the cloud. And even if it had the capability, what would it do there? Order stupid-expensive flash-frozen tuna?
“I know you,” the com said, pushing a completely unfamiliar voice into Angela’s brain. A sandpapery voice with a digital edge. Clear green eyes stared up at her solemnly. “My human. I want you to pet me. I also want to bite you.”
A sob erupted before Angela could lock it down. It morphed into a semihysterical laugh on the end. “If she could have talked, that is exactly what she would have said.”
The cat beneath her hand stiffened and moved its head away from Kellen’s touch. Reluctantly, it seemed, and Angela couldn’t fault it for that.
“I did say,” the voice in Angela’s com rasped. “More petting. Right now.”
“I don’t remember her being so cherry-colored on the head,” said Angela. Yoink’s wee face looked different, less wizened. Kind of wall-eyed. “What did you do to her?”
Kellen’s hand retreated. He’d dipped his chin, and the brim of his hat concealed his face. “I should’ve said she’s mostly our Yoink. When I went back to Texas, the place was a wreck, people fleeing the southeast like bugs when a light comes on. The vet program at A&M had been forced to evacuate, and I helped them get to a triage on down the state highway. They kind of took me in. What I learned at MIST, it was pretty easy to slot my work into theirs.”
“You cloned her?”
“Yeah.”
“And it looks like you modified her somehow as well.”
“I did.”
Angela didn’t offer judgment. She just kept petting.
After a long while, Kellen went on. “I’ll tell you something about cats: they ain’t dumb. Structurally, their brains are a lot like human ones, gyrencephalic, lots of synapses, lots of electrical activity. They can be wired to function as a hub for strategic variables. Plus, they can listen and transmit like nobody’s business, and their agility gets them into places robots can’t go. The research was all there. I didn’t think up the concept of enhanced feline intelligence all on my own, you know.”
“You’re referring to DARPA’s spy kitty in the 1960s, which was a miserable failure by all accounts. But this is light-years ahead. We’re talking actual language. That’s not just a mini spy recorder attached to her tail. She’s talking to me. On the com.” Angela still wasn’t sure what she thought about that.
“It’s creeping you out, isn’t it?” Kellen asked. His smile was hesitant but brash, like he feared her response but mocked himself for entertaining that fear.
Yoink rolled over and presented her belly. Angela rubbed it obediently.
“Maybe,” she said. “And you’re right. It is also…kind of amazing. Not just the science and application potential but…this is my girl.”
Ours. Our Yoink.
Kellen had stumbled over her previous name—Ghufran—and after a while had taken to calling her Yoink. She’d been their responsibility. Their girl. The three of them, for that bright slice of time, had been a family. Angela’s very first.
“Yeah. She is,” he said.
His gaze was a weight on her skin, and Angela met his eyes. Something warm and dear washed through her, half convincing her he wasn’t talking about the cat at all.
But then he looked away and went on, “She’s also my general. You mentioned the DARPA spy cat, but truth is, I have tech-altered critters all over the world, all successfully reintegrated into their habitats, all transmitting data to Yoink here. Heron noticed a data hole over Guadalajara just before you left the area, so I dispatched some spies there to check things out. Got a data cache in just a few minutes ago.”
Her hand paused its petting. “What’s in the cache?”
“Mostly pics, some air quality assessment, possibly ambient bio markers. I haven’t had a lot of time to analyze it, but once it’s done decompressing and decoding, I can copy you on the whole batch. You can take a look, too.”
Angela drew her thumb over one of the tiny metal horns. Yoink pushed nose-first into her hand, directing the rub more to her liking. “Is it the kind of information that can tell me who bombed my hotel?”
“I sure as shit hope so.”
“Well, let’s decode this data cache,” she said.
“Can we wait till after supper? ’Cause Fan will have my ass if I’m late to one of her family sit-downs.”
Angela shot him a quizzical look. “Family? Did your mom…”
“Fan and Adele and Garrett and Heron and Chloe and even that scamp Mari…they’re my family now. Like I said: lots of things have changed. Not just for me, either. You changed, too.”
He held an expectant look on his face. Or maybe disappointed? Angry? Angela wished she could hook him up to a psych-emitter right now and sort out his feelings. He clearly wasn’t thrilled she was here, which made no sense.
And it hurt besides. Hurt a lot. She had missed him so damned much.
“I sacrificed a lot,” she said carefully.
He made a sound that was really close to a snort. “Yeah, you sure’ve been leading the life of sacrifice, international superstar, hitched to…” He batted air with the back of his hand and then pinched his nose at the bridge. Closed his eyes. Like he’d just confessed a dirty secret.
And he kind of had.
Had Kellen been jealous of Daniel all these years? That realization should feel so much worse than it did. Instead, a silly, self-satisfied grin tugged on her face, but she suppressed it, tucked the delight away so she could roll it around in her mind later.
“I told you my marriage wasn’t really a marriage. It was more of a business arrangement,” she said.
He opened his eyes and glared at her, but not with the understanding she sought. His gaze sparked with fury. “That makes it so much worse, princess.”
Deep inside her chest, she flinched, though probably no one would be able to tell. She was so very good at hiding visceral reactions, at smoothing over them and pretending a peace she’d never felt.
“What, it would be easier to believe I was madly in love with Daniel and living in perpetual bliss all those years? Come on.” She pushed a lighter note into her voice, trying to nudge the conversation away from dangerous territory.
Kellen’s forehead creased, and she couldn’t read the look in his eyes. It wasn’t light, though. Kind of the opposite. “To believe you were happy?” he said. “Yeah, that would make a lot of things worth it for me. Once upon a time, I put a lot of effort into seeing you happy. It’d be a damn shame if all that work went to shit the minute you sent me away.”
Not right then. Not that minute. Though maybe the one just after.
“Look,” he said, “do we really have to work through all this right now? We’ve grown into different people, and it’s going to take some time before you and I know each other again, if we even decide we want to.”
Not really as long as you think. He’d gone to extraordinary lengths to save Yoink, and he’d kept their cat, their family, right here at his side for all these years. So he was still the caretaker. Still her hero.
Still her Kellen, whether he ultimately decided he wanted to be or not.
She stood and clicked her tongue against the back of her teeth. Yoink perked her ears and shot Angela a feed-me-or-else glare. When Angela turned and followed Kellen back down the skywalk and into the finished-out south spire, Yoink padded along at her heels expectantly.
Good kitty. Best.
• • •
Angela enjoyed physical solitude. Life was best endured from the outside looking in, watching the patterns of states and individuals resolve, tweaking the flow of events but staying far, far away from the filth of human connection. Alone is safe had been her personal mantra for several years now, ever since she’d left her husband behind in LA. As it turned out, Kellen and his happy band of killers lived in the inverse of solitude, as un-alone as it was possible for a human to be. Which made what happened when she stepped off the elevator at the mezzanine level so…whoa.
Apparently Adele, the chain-smoking, muumuu-wearing wife of Fanaida, did not, as a matter of course, gallivant all over the globe with her partner. Instead she spent most of her time right here, organizing work parties on the hydroponics levels and dance parties after dark, watching way too many game shows, and cooking for small armies.
While Angela had been chatting Kellen up for information, the older woman had been down here at the food court, specifically in the shiny industrial kitchen of Charlie’s Fine Tortilla (still displaying a tarnished and perky “Coming soon!” sign), cooking and then serving vats and vats of amazing-smelling foodstuffs to the three-hundred-odd folks who called the Pentarc home.
Other meals, Kellen had told Angela on the ride down, were made of ration patties like the one she’d scarfed earlier, but for one sliver of each day, every human person in the structure was invited—requested? Instructed? How authoritarian did the authority get around here?—to come down to the food court and dine en famille.
Which meant a hot press of bodies gathered around plastic picnic-style tables, all bumping up against each other and air-horning a cacophony of languages. Dozens, maybe, with the sub-hum of com translators making conversation only minimally possible. All those people moved, smelled, radiated heat. Their organic odor mingled with roast corn, garlic, and way too much cumin.
Walking into such a stew held all the charm of wading through living, breathing Ebola. Angela halted two steps from the elevator, watching the writhing, laughing, chattering, slurping, burping mass of humanity. It was…terrifying.
“I thought you said this was a family dinner,” she whispered.
Kellen had come off the elevator at her side and stood close, almost protectively. It still took a minor miracle for him to hear her over the din. “It is. The fam’s back over near that old kebap storefront. See there? Sort of yellow-and-green sign?”
He pointed to a table off to the right. Angela recognized Heron and Mari talking to a third person, whose back was to Angela. She didn’t see mech-Daniel anywhere, but that wasn’t cause for alarm. He had a task and was almost certainly back in their unit diligently at work.
“Who are all the rest of these people?” Angela asked. If she looked at them, actually looked at the jumble of organisms again, she worried she might be sick. Or run away. So many. Too many. The table with places reserved for Kellen and her seemed acres away.
“Ain’t you an elected representative of the people? Behold”—Kellen swept one arm in an expansive, dramatic gesture—“the people
. Isn’t that what you politicos do for a living, press flesh and kiss babies?”
“God no.” She shuddered. “Bioagents and lone-wolf attacks have pretty much put an end to all that. We broadcast now and live past forty.” Okay, only three public figures had contracted fatal diseases during mass outbreaks of the past few decades, but still. Angela had always approved of the segregation of the ruling class. Alone is safe.
Instinct told her to run away, hide from the morass of organic material in this place. Rebuild her walls. But honestly, was that even possible? Those walls had come down, literally right on top of her at the Hotel Riu. She couldn’t return to her bubble of protection, her safe life of physical solitude.
No more hedging. No more hiding.
A slightly built old man, wearing a ratty printed robe with an electric cord for a belt, turned to peer at the new arrivals. He stopped talking midword, focusing all his attention on Angela. On second glance, he wasn’t a little old man at all. He was a kid, maybe fourteen, just skinny and with the posture of someone who’d been kicked. Slowly, the rest of his table fell silent and turned as well.
Their gazes pricked Angela, as if she’d been sitting too long and her whole body had gone numb and now was alight in agony as feeling swooshed back in.
The teenager hung back, but a whisper arced around their wide table. Another refugee rose. He was older, an adult or close to it, wearing a cheap robe printed from one of the patterns Angela recognized from the mostly failed Clothe the World campaign of a few years back. He approached the elevator.
Her body cringed away instinctively, but Angela had spent way too much time training for the psych-emitter to let something as mundane as instinct control her. She bloomed a soft smile over her face, a practiced smile and one that she knew also fired specific neurological activity that would be interpreted as acceptance and compassion. She didn’t see any receivers for her psych-emitter, but brain training for its use had taught her how to manipulate her own emotions, and she had gotten damned good at it. She calmed.
The young man wasn’t wearing a cuff com and certainly didn’t look like he had the technological means of translating. As it turned out, he didn’t need one.
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