“Senator Neko,” he said in perfect English with a sweet rub of Southern on it. “I saw you on vid. It sure is a comfort, you coming by. They told us when they brought us here that we were being rescued, right before that last cluster of storms blew into Mobile. I didn’t think the government was doing the rescuing, though. You gotta forgive me for thinking y’all were just ignoring us.”
This Atlantic hurricane season had been typically brutal. Angela vaguely recalled a closed-door congressional committee discussion regarding mandatory evacuations in early June. If she remembered correctly, the interior minister had swept in and nixed the idea out of hand, before anybody could vote on it. Preemptive evacuation was ludicrous, he’d said. It would break the economy. In retrospect, however, the idea had been a good one. More than ten thousand people had perished on the Gulf Coast this summer. Hundreds of thousands remained displaced, swelling the temporary-housing cities that had sprung up all over the country. All over the world.
“It is a pleasure to meet you,” Angela said. She put her hand out and suffocated the urge to recoil when the young man took it and shook it excitedly. She could almost feel the biocontaminants attaching themselves to her skin. Burrowing. She breathed. “Are you getting enough food, settling in?”
“Oh yeah, they’re treating us like kings, but you know how it is. We all just wanna go home.”
“Surely you have seen the vids,” she said before she could catch herself. Mobile Bay wasn’t going to be a safe place for humans to live near for a long, long time. For this man and his family, there would be no going home.
One side of his mouth pinched up, and he shrugged. “Can’t hide out here forever, I guess, but we do appreciate the help in the short term.”
Angela wasn’t sure what to say. He was deliberately ignoring reality, pretending that his story was going to have a happy ending, home and the picket fence and everything back the way it was. But life didn’t work that way. The world didn’t work that way. She couldn’t speak that truth, though. She couldn’t tarnish that halo of trust he seemed to be living under. Instead she smiled, asked his name, met his family, let them touch her.
They all knew Kellen, of course, and he was so easy in their company. As she made her way through the room, heading in a general path toward the buffet line and then her table, she met lots more refugees, learning all their names and stories. Suraya, Benito, Cass, Isit, Yanaghando, a giant named Viktor, an infant whose mother insisted would choose his own name someday. They approached her haltingly, weighted down by manners and gratitude and awe. Some assumed that she was a guest. All assumed that she was here on a mission of benevolence or at least a photo op.
Angela could have told them the truth, that she hadn’t come here at the behest of her government. That in fact, as far as she knew, her government had no idea these people had survived the disasters they’d fled. But she sensed that truth would be crueler than the lie at this point.
So she met them. Touched them. Endured them. By the time she got to her table—her plate piled with beans, tortillas, and sliced tomatoes—and sank to the plastic bench, she could no longer smell the body odor. Or if she could, it was just part of the place now, part of the moment.
It wasn’t even a terrible moment. And it felt like…fucking hell yeah, she’d just done that. Skinny-dipped in acid and stayed unburnt.
She waited for Kellen to point out how well she’d done, to say how proud he was of her. But he didn’t, and she thought herself foolish for expecting a pat on the back every time she accomplished something. God. Her handlers had trained her well, hadn’t they?
“Bean tacos, best stuff ever,” Kellen said, sliding into the seat beside her. Real beans and tortillas, no matter how much spice Adele had poured on them, were a veritable feast for anyone not of the elite class. “How you taking to all this, Miss Mari?”
Across the table, Mari Vallejo wiped some red juice from the side of her mouth and shrugged. “You mean the food, the place, or the comp’ny?”
Goodness. Her accent was almost as horrible as Kellen’s.
“All the above, and the rest of it. You been through something of a wringer lately. You doin’ okay?”
He’d always been like this, concerned and caring and saying just the right thing. However, right now the look he directed across the table at the other woman stabbed Angela with a tiny, bright-green sword. Jealousy? It wasn’t a worthy reaction or one Angela was anywhere near confessing. But it lay there, sharp-edged and pokey, definitely not dulled by the fact that Mari Vallejo was tall and pretty and apparently had won the grand prize of boobdom, which her shred of a blouse did little to hide.
Angela focused on her taco. Once she got into it, it tasted kind of heavenly. All fresh ingredients, no protein flakes or fillers. Fine food, shabby setting.
Mari answered Kellen’s query with a minxy grin that dug trench-deep dimples in her cheeks. “Heron’s okay. I’m okay. Got no complaints. I’m even getting sciency these last couple days. We’ve been testing my theory that this clone-brain-slice technological zombification that folk did to my body has now made me essentially unbreakable. It’s been…intense.”
“Now, you know I can’t approve of experiments that put you in danger,” Kellen admonished.
Mari laughed, loud and clangy and infectious. “If you have to worry over somebody, it should probably be Heron. Pretty much all our experiments so far have involved the two of us and nekkid.”
Heron didn’t even twitch. He raised one imperious eyebrow, swallowed a forkful of beans, and said, “A rigorous research environment suits her.”
“I tell you what would suit me more, though,” Mari said. “And that’s getting a stab at one of these rescue missions you folks go on. Garrett here”—she indicated the quiet young man who had been facing away from the elevators when Angela arrived and who seemed overly focused on his dinner—“has been telling me all about ’em, and they totally sound like my kind of crazy. I know my way around a fight, might be of some use. Plus, it sure would be nice to wreak my special brand of havoc for the good guys’ side for once.” She flicked a glance at Angela when she said this, but her gaze shifted away and down too fast for Angela to respond.
Was she still feeling guilty about killing Daniel? How strange that his murderer would mourn the man more than his wife did. Not that Angela wanted to explain.
“Listen to Garrett’s tales all you want, querida,” Heron said, “but we are grounded for a while until I can figure out what is going on with those data holes.”
“You found more?” Kellen asked, totally serious.
Heron nodded.
“The data hole like you mentioned over Guadalajara?” Angela asked.
“Yep,” said Kellen. “Big, black-ICE blobs of nuthin’.”
“On satellites?”
“On everything. All data feeds,” Mari said. “Can’t even get voice-com transmissions in or out. Heron can break through the ICE, because he’s a god like that, but he’s got to find it first. Might also help to know who keeps making the damn things, how they’re doing it, and why.”
“Texas is the obvious culprit,” Heron said. “That’s where we found the first anomaly.”
“Vallejo, that asshole,” Kellen agreed. “No offense, Miss Mari.”
“None taken. My daddy’s crooked as a dog’s hind leg, and he must indeed have been somewhere under that ICE, seeing’s he hijacked poor Nathan’s brain up there on Enchanted Rock. Y’all did say signals can’t get in or out of those blocks. Stands to reason he was right there, inside the bubble, being his usual dastardly self.”
Angela quietly rolled some more beans into a tortilla and nibbled on the end. There was something in what Mari just said, something that clanged her clue bell. But she couldn’t figure out exactly what.
The quiet guy, Garrett, looked up from his plate. Angela did a double take. He was startlingly good-looking
. Beautiful, even. Fine-planed face, inky, unkempt hair, unsettlingly intense amber-colored eyes. She could imagine him slinking down a runway in Grigori Hahn couture. If, you know, he could manage to wash some of those grease stains off his hands.
“It could be the Black Knight,” he said.
“The what-what?” asked Mari.
Heron and Kellen both groaned.
“Whatever is causing these data holes, it almost certainly is not an ancient alien satellite,” said Heron dryly.
“’Specially not one more likely to be a blanket that fell off the old International Space Station,” added Kellen.
Garrett’s dark eyebrows swooped down like a predator bird’s wings. “Blanket. Exactly. A satellite, especially one launched with malicious intent, could seed dampers in the upper atmosphere, basically erecting a gigantic data blanket. Boom, there’s your data hole.”
Heron smiled, but this particular smile was neither sarcastic nor scary as hell. It was almost, well, warm. Warm looked wrong on him. “You have a point, G. I could certainly create a damper field such as you describe with foglets. Maybe we should have the queen sweep one of these data holes for the presence of atmospheric nanites. Not a bad theory.”
“Thanks.” Under such praise, Garrett warmed to the topic. “And as to who and why, I know you don’t want to hear that the Green aliens are setting up massive planetary weapons to deter the imminent approach of Nibiru and the Grays—”
More groaning, but softer this time, and with some chuckles salted in.
“—so I’ll just skip that theory and go right to the why. Anybody, not just aliens, wanting to move large-scale machinery or matériel into a certain location wouldn’t want hobbyist satellite hounds documenting their every move.”
“True that.” Mari seemed completely on board.
A lot of the concepts were flying straight over Angela’s head, but the enthusiasm of these people was contagious. She’d found herself nodding more than once during Garrett’s half-breathless spiel, but that clangy something was vibrating the back of her brain. A few seconds later it bloomed into a full-on eureka.
“Wait a minute,” she broke in. “You said there was a data hole over Guadalajara when I was there, right? And that no data could get in or out? Well, I was able to get a voice-com transmission out.”
“Before the attack or after?”
“After.” Cement dust, bomb breath. Just thinking of her experience made her shoulder ache and terror claw her throat. She swallowed. “Mech-Daniel contacted the government to let them know I was still alive. He used a backdoor relay I almost certainly should not be mentioning to people without the appropriate security clearance.”
“Whoa, then, best quiet fast, ’cause we sure don’t have—” Mari started.
But Kellen interrupted. “I think that’s her point.” He met Angela’s gaze, and something deep and raw inside her body hummed to life. “You’re taking a big risk, laying out that info to folk like us, gal.”
“You all took the risk first, when you invited me here, and then another when you told me about Chloe.” She held his gaze. “I trust you.”
You know me. Let me in. Please.
The smile he reflected—secret, intimate, as if they were the only two people in this room full of hundreds—warmed her like dawn after midwinter. “You about done eatin’?”
She nodded.
Without breaking their locked gazes, Kellen addressed the rest of the people at the table: “I will wish you fine folks a good night. Now you’ll have to excuse us. I’m gonna take this woman up to her bedroom.”
• • •
He didn’t mean it the way it’d sounded. Or not much. Aw, fuck it. Yeah, he would dearly love to take Angela up to a bedroom, lock the door, and spend the next forever or so showing her how much he wanted her. He could admit to himself, in private, that he was just so barbarian at the core.
But reality necessitated a different course of action. Reality needed him to be civilized.
He’d just gotten a vibration on his wrist cuff: the blip board was all decoded and decompressed and ready for viewing. He was itching to get eyes on that data, figure out what his critter spies had been able to document.
Somebody had tried to kill Angela, and he could barely contain a powerful need for payback.
Also, to be fair, he wouldn’t mind getting some more private time with her. Safe place, cozy place. Maybe they could continue to talk out some of the issues that squirmed between them, catch up on all those years they’d lost.
He and Angela passed the kitchen, and Yoink—by her cloying aroma, no doubt coming off a sweet-pickle binge courtesy of Adele, the old softy—fell into step with them.
And then so did Angela’s mech-clone husband. It had been waiting for her just outside the food court.
Well, this wasn’t the sort of evening Kellen had in mind. Dangit. But he was a big boy, right? He could handle it. They could still inspect the data, just without cuddles and soft talk. And with all their clothes on. Might be better that way anyhow. Safer. For him.
He calmly led their way-too-populated party to the glass-walled elevator and then up to her floor, pointing out random shit as they passed it. Pentarc had a lot to see, though most of it didn’t work and never had. He had a need of the distraction, and playing tour guide in a sense relieved some of his tension.
Yoink, apparently sensing something on the air, sat herself in the middle of the elevator carriage and proceeded to lick her own ass, just to taunt him. Sweet evil, that cat.
At floor seven, the doors dinged and glided open. The feline and the mech preceded them into the corridor. Kellen was just about to follow when a bare hand snaked out and pressed the button for eight. The doors closed before he could so much as twitch.
Angela pressed the emergency stop, and their carriage paused. It was glass on the rear, but this far up, there wasn’t anything to see other than a painted elevator shaft. They were alone.
And she stood right in front of him, burning a look upward. Holy fuck, that look.
“What you—”
She put two hands on his chest and pushed him against the elevator wall. Faster than a duck on a june bug, one of those hands was up, past his collar, behind his head, pulling him down. Her mouth found his, hot and needy and not asking.
He was stunned for the first half second, surprised enough that she got the jump on him, but he couldn’t let her win. Not without giving a little of his own back.
She was a little thing—he had forgotten how slight—and when his arms went around her and he cradled her ass, it was the easiest thing to lift her. Her legs came up, wrapping around his waist. Something in her tidy wool skirt tore, and she oomphed a breath against his teeth when he turned their bodies, still locked together, and pushed her back up against the elevator wall.
Better. The angle. She slotted snug against him, mouth to mouth, heartbeat to wild heartbeat. Her hands clamped the back of his head, crushing him into her kiss. Oh yeah, this was the Angela he knew, the girl only he knew. And he had missed this—had missed her—so fucking much.
Her teeth skidded against his, sharp and bright. He nibbled, drawing salt from her lip, and she groaned into his mouth. That count for consent? He thought it might, or maybe the fact that she’d all but attacked him in an elevator. Still, the gentleman in him needed to be sure.
“We gonna do this right here, then?” he rasped.
“At least once,” she breathed against his jaw. “Please tell me those jeans aren’t held together with a goddamn button fly.”
“Press seam,” he said.
“Thank all the made-up gods.” Her magic fingers found the seam and undid it, but the movement stole some of her concentration. Angela, the great multitasker, apparently couldn’t undress a man and pour kisses down his throat at the same time. Kellen reared his head back and watched her.
Wild thing, his gal. He remembered so many times they’d been at this business, and always, always, it had been the death of him. A thousand deaths, a million surrenders. He’d never minded. He’d have given her anything, willingly, as often as she wanted.
But the man she was taking down that road right now wasn’t her nineteen-year-old plaything. And he didn’t have a hankering to play the role for her again. He’d fought to become his own person.
“Think we might pause here for a second, princess?”
She’d made quick work of his pants, and she had him out, clasped in her hot little fist. He couldn’t even process what that felt like. Heaven was too small a word.
“Angela.” Didn’t sound like his own voice, but he had things that needed saying.
She looked up, neither moving nor removing her hand. His arms were holding her up against the wall, and he couldn’t very well shift weight without dropping her unceremoniously on the floor. There was no way to make space between them, not at this point. Heat roiled in the interstice between their bodies. She never had liked the feel of knickers on her nethers.
“What?” Confusion broke through the naked desire on her face.
“That emergency call button only pauses us for three minutes,” he said, trying so hard to be gentle about this.
Her grin got sly instead. “You clearly have no idea how ready I am.” She squeezed, and his throat compressed in synch. “Why are we wasting all this time chitchatting?”
“Maybe what we need, actually, is a bit more chitchat. And a bit less fucking.” He shifted his weight, lowering her slightly, like he was about to disconnect them. She flicked the pad of her thumb over the head of his cock, and he damn near came on her hand. Shitfuckgoddamn. But he inhaled, slammed his eyes shut, and worked the hell through it. Took a few seconds, but he got steady.
Disbelief froze her mouth into an O, then she snapped, “Impossible to do less of a thing you aren’t doing. Or not yet doing. Who are you, and what have you done with my Kellen?”
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