“The man I lived with wasn’t the one people met in his vids. He was really good at acting.” She leaned over him.
Opening his eyes was a reflex. He couldn’t help seeing the pain writ large on her lovely face.
“I want you to know that I have suffered for my bad decisions,” she said.
“You don’t need to—”
“Daniel was not kind to me, and every moment I lived with him was fucking horrible. Not adorable torment, like when I’m naked and you’re a half centimeter away and refuse to touch me. Different torment. The bad kind.”
He nudged the pad of his thumb against her mouth, tracing her lip. “If you need to say it, I will listen, but don’t feel you have to.”
A couple of messy tears splashed against his neck. She sniffed, to spare him a worse drenching, but more tears followed. He didn’t move to wipe anything away.
“Thank you for that. Someday I will tell you, and I hope you won’t hate me for it.”
Good lord, what had they done to his gal? He wanted to put his hands around Daniel’s neck and squeeze. Nasty little shit ought to be thankful he was already dead.
She sank against his body, fitting herself to the shape of him, atop him but not able to get still. He put his arms around her and asked the car to turn up the heaters. It obeyed, fanning warmth up her legs, beneath her skirt, where he still held her close.
She had more bad memories, he was sure of it, and he reckoned she’d release them in good time. She’d popped the cork on them, though, and this froth was just the beginning of a long pour. He swore, silently, to hold her tight through the whole thing. Let her decant at her own speed.
He stroked her back, the dip there above her perfect ass, and drew a line up her spine, testing the tension between her shoulder blades. She sighed like a kitten purrs.
“I don’t hold with revenge, generally,” he told her. “Those consortium assholes avenge themselves all over the place till they’re sticky with it, and I refused to be a part of them. But if he was living right now, I expect I could make an exception for Daniel Neko.”
“Wait.” She popped back up onto her elbow and frowned down at him, like lightning had just struck her. “You know about the consortium?”
He had wondered when she’d connect the two. Her handlers, his wannabe handlers. End-of-the-world-blabbering conspiracy crackpots, all of them. Better world, after the end of this one. A world entirely populated with elite humans and the technology that bolstered their luxurious existences. Them same asshats who offered him a place among them. “I told you about the deal they offered, and where I told ’em to poke it. Suspect they’re also the planners stuck you and Daniel Ashe together in unholy matrimony. Manipulative sonsabitches sure do like their deal makin’, don’t they?”
“Maybe,” she said, steel in her voice, “but I’m not taking any more of their deals.”
• • •
Reluctant as he was to do so, they had to untangle themselves from each other a few times for bio breaks along the way. Turned out there were lots of ways to get comfortable in a car, ways that had nothing to do with rest. This was about the damndest road trip he’d ever been on, yet every second of it was sweeter than stolen honey.
They took the long way around both Phoenix and Tucson, pussyfooting past what was clearly still a country hunkered down and scared. No public transit in sight, no planes in the air. Whole swathes of burbs turned to ghost towns, emptied by fear or worse. It was unnerving to see ruins this close to the capital.
Two alerts came in: more attacks out west, one of which was thwarted by some force that clearly flummoxed the newsvids and the government press reps alike. Apparently, a whole slew of unidentified intercepts came from space, from the sky. A couple of cults had already formed and were praying real hard. Garrett included a short note claiming it was aliens all the way, but he ended it with a smiley. He was likely getting a kick out of all the misreporting, because of course, he knew who was responsible for those intercepts.
Kellen had a good idea who’d helped out, too. He sent along a message of thanks to the queen of the Chiba Space Station. If she was watching over the Pentarc and all the space nearby, he felt a lot better about being eastbound and out of pocket.
As if all that man-made chaos weren’t enough, Mother Nature offered her own little fuck-you in the form of an eruption of the Volcán de Colima, right there on the border of Jalisco and Colima. Kellen’s butterflies were still hanging on, but widespread evacuations had inflated populations in Guadalajara and, to a lesser extent, Morelia. Infrastructure there wouldn’t hold long, especially with these other hot spots taking up a lot of the emergency response resources.
He sent a message to Heron asking when they could get their plane in the air, maybe do a drop or a fetch down there in old Mexico. If the Chiba was shielding them, they probably didn’t need Chloe dispersed anymore. Just a half second after he hit send, he remembered the data hole over Guadalajara. That would make getting a mission into the area a lot harder, if it was possible at all. Dangit, logistics.
“Seem to you like the whole world’s going to shit?” he asked out loud as the feeds continued to roll in. He only half expected an answer.
“That’s the pattern.” Angela was chewing on a nutro-crunch, eyes closed, her bare feet, still pink in places from her run through the Pentarc spires in wintered grass, propped on the dash. Yoink had draped herself over the upper part of Angela’s chest—that spot she called her boob shelf—like a slightly tubby old-Hollywood fur stole. That growled when he tried to move it.
“Shit has a pattern?”
Angela flexed her eyebrows but remained focused on whatever evil she was reading on the backs of her eyelids. “Yeah. The bad shit pattern. Goes like this: bad shit happens, there’s an evacuation, and waves of refugees wash up against the nearest metropolis. Femacities are born. Then, just when the NGOs get set up and people start to settle in as best they may, boom, subgroup infighting or another disaster or a crazy person with a bomb decimates that population. Move, settle, repeat. People don’t get a chance to grow deep roots or communities. Sometimes they are sent all the way across the world in these massive refugee-relocation initiatives. Sort of like your Pentarc refugees.”
“Now hold your horses,” Kellen said. Midmorning sun stung his eyes, and he’d slipped a hat on, low over his face. “We’re building a home at the Pentarc, a community.”
She opened her eyes. “Do you ever ask them if they want to stay? Or do you just assume that Pentarc living has to be better than wherever they came from?”
“In a lot of cases, it ain’t assumption. There is literally nothing left. Like that island that went under the ocean. But if they truly want to go home, yeah, we’ll help them get there. Ain’t our intention to hold hostages.”
“I’m not actually talking intentions or ethics here,” Angela said mildly. “Just demographics.”
Yoink yawned, opened one eye, then the other. She stared at Kellen reproachfully. In moments like these, the cat didn’t even need to use her interpreter net. He could see clearly what she needed. She was an unusually expressive critter.
He pushed his hat back and checked the dash nav. “Looks like we’re coming up on Las Cruces. Want to get out and walk around some? Rustle up some food other than compressed kibble for our half-starved feline overlord here? Maybe get you a new skirt ain’t ripped all up one side.”
“Says the mad ripper himself. You could use a new shirt as well, or at least new buttons.” Her dark eyes swept him from hair to boots, and her eyelids narrowed assessingly. “On second thought, why don’t you just take it off? I could stand the view, pretty boy.”
“We have discussed the inappropriateness of the term,” he grumped, but his body was in full howdy in response to her sloe-eyed stare. Damn, woman didn’t even have to touch him.
“Right. We agreed on fuckable, if I am n
ot mistaken.”
He grunted. “In any case, it’s colder’n a cast-iron commode out there. I am not going to gallivant around shirtless on the short-hair side of winter.”
“That is a goddamn shame. Can we go gallivanting again later on, say in summer, then? Or, you know, any time when you wouldn’t have an objection. I haven’t seen you bare in years and consider myself deprived.”
He held that sentence close for a minute, drawing the warmth of it all around himself. Had she just made plans for summertime, plans that included him? Or was that offhand banter? He didn’t want to commit to hope at this point, but she painted their relationship in such bright colors.
A part of him wasn’t convinced. He wanted to ask for promises, but even if she offered that boon, how could he possibly believe her?
If it is just for today, tonight, tomorrow, I’d best make these hours count.
The car slowed and exited the highway.
“Did the dragon just go sentient, or do you know where we’re headed?” he asked.
“Yeah, I adjusted the itinerary some kilometers back. Flea market downtown with a stand of refrescandos attached. We can tidy up, make sure we have everything we need for the next few days. Stores will be hard to come by once we cross the border.” She looked pointedly at his jacket, wadded in a pile in the back seat. “We might need more ammo.”
He had no plans to use that gun Mari’d given him. Only reason he hadn’t left it back at the Pentarc was the kindness of her gesture, and he didn’t want to offend. But if things went sideways with Vallejo, they were both going to need a lot more than one dinky pistol and a few boxes of ammo.
Things went sideways with Vallejo, they were more likely to require a goddamn army.
Though come to think on it, he might know some folks could muster up a fighting force. Might even be core-deep in love with one of those folks right now.
Chapter 11
The flea market was called Big Daddy’s, and it was smack in the middle of town. They shouldn’t have been able to park so close. When horrible things happened, though, most folk holed up in their homes and plugged into the news feeds, ingesting disaster porn like it was corn chips. Who could blame them? Kellen had been like that once, for a long time in fact, hoping that just sitting still and not fussing would make the angel of death pass by faster.
They got out of the car and safety-set it so that it cycled air for Yoink but wouldn’t respond to a thief trying to boost it. Taking kitty along would be a bad bet in a place like this. Too many ways for that gal to get into trouble, and, being her, she would find every last one.
Angela pointed past the open-air stalls and toward an ugly metal building that promised air-conditioning, full-service cloud ports, and bargains-bargains-bargains. A gaggle of mamas swamped with young’uns watched them walk by but didn’t say anything. They were the only people Kellen could see, at least on the outside.
There was something creepy about a sparsely attended flea market, and this one sure wasn’t helped by the giant armless statue out front, presumably of Big Daddy himself. The pallid-flesh attempt at paint was peeling, but the color had been tending toward zombie even in its prime.
Inside, a few more shoppers milled aimlessly, but most of the people were vendors who, having arranged their wares on booth shelves and folding tables, now lounged in picnic chairs, gazes glued to whatever was being fed into their wearable coms. News, maybe. More likely porn.
Kellen wandered near a booth hawking preserved meat and injectable magnetic tattoos, but Angela grabbed his hand, and he decided to keep on holding rather than wander. If she’d had some kind of mental block against touching others before, she appeared to have blown through that sucker. She was downright grabby lately. Kellen had no problem with that.
He followed her to a booth in the back corner, poorly lit and offering woo-woo on the cheap: oils, crystals, a vaguely Tesla-looking device that promised to enable cross-dimensional communication with loved ones who had passed on. The thick smell of chem-laced patchouli near knocked him out.
A kid with an electronic money belt watched him, suspicious. Couldn’t have been more than ten and had an unsettling way of not blinking. “Red stamps are ten percent off today only.”
“What if I want to barter?” Angela said.
“I ain’t authorized. You’ll need to talk to Dead Fester.”
Angela rolled her sleeve back and showed the kid something on her com. Kid blinked rapidly then pushed back her picnic chair and scrambled behind a grungy purple-brown curtain Kellen hadn’t even noticed before. It resembled one of those changing-area privacy screens, only this booth didn’t sell clothes. After a few seconds, the kid returned.
“Dead said come on back.”
Angela still had his hand clamped in hers, so Kellen didn’t have a choice but to follow.
The tiny office/changing room had a lot in common with nighttime in the desert. That is to say, it was dark. Also lots more cramped and, um, smellier. Back here, the patchouli stench deferred to what Kellen would swear was Somah solution and ammonia. He did a quick scan for organics transport containers or portable surgical rigs. Didn’t see either. Which proved exactly nothing. Unlicensed carvers could still do backroom bioalteration without a proper surgery-in-a-box. He himself had improvised more than a few times.
But the lone occupant of the tiny room didn’t seem ready to come at them with scalpels, at least not right away. He was a portly gent wearing overalls and sitting on a giant balloon, his close-shorn pate hooked into at least three wire bunches, all connected to what resembled a noodle strainer. He did not disconnect when his guests entered.
“Thanks for agreeing to a meat-meet,” Angela said. “I know it was short notice.”
“No worries, Angel. Messaging from your car in the middle of the desert and sounding all breathless and urgent—how could I possibly ignore all the story potential there?” He finally looked up. He had this amazing expression, kinda disapproving and awed at the same time. “Now that’s a new look for you.” He motioned toward the dark scruff that just barely covered Angela’s implanted psych-emitter rig.
She hadn’t bothered to hook her wig back on, and Kellen hadn’t encouraged it. He would always prefer her hair long and strokable, but this style suited her. Mature. Serious. Fierce.
The dude in the overalls slid a pair of sunglasses down his beaky nose and gave Kellen a narrow-eyed stare worthy of the most disapproving librarian. “Who’s this?”
Lots of ways Angela could answer that question, but her choice came as something of a surprise. “My partner,” she said, squeezing his hand beneath her overlong sleeve. “My lover.”
“Yer so-posh husband know about him?”
“Daniel’s dead,” Angela said, her voice exactly that: dead, flat, no-nonsense. “He survived the attempt on his life in October, but his faculties were severely impaired, and he had to be supplemented increasingly with chems and devices. A second attempt, by way of one of these recent smartbomb attacks, finished the job. He died the day before yesterday.”
“So you hired pretty boy here to dance on his grave or what? Not that I’m judging, but some people will want the sordids.”
“I’ve been having an affair with this man since I was fifteen,” she said. It was even true, sort of. Not counting that long dry spell in the middle. “I tried to get him out of my mind, even confessed tearfully to Daniel, but you know how it is with true love. We’ve been sneaking, this man and I, like Romeo and fucking Juliet. Also, I’m probably pregnant, but he doesn’t know yet, and I won’t know for another six weeks that it’s actually twins. Follow-up potential there, if the interest level is high enough.”
The dealer stared hard at her for a few more seconds, then said sternly, “Make it quadruplets and we might have a runnable rag piece with options for pickups on major channels, since you are—or were—a big-time senator and all.”
“Deal.” Angela smiled, that practiced, perfect smile he’d seen so often over the years.
The dude threw his wire-studded head back and hee-hawed. Then he rolled his balloon-chair back, stood up, and opened his arms wide. After the slightest of pauses, Angela let loose of Kellen’s hand and hugged the man whose name apparently really was Dead Fester.
When she extricated herself from the big man’s embrace, she was half laughing, half crying. She held out a hand, and Kellen approached warily.
What she’d said had had the taint of lies on it, but just enough had been true that he had to wonder. Was she pregnant? She’d only been widowed what, seven, eight weeks? It wouldn’t be obvious yet. Granted, her husband had been a hot-buttered asshole, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t been intimate. She’d had a tough note in her voice when she’d spoken of Daniel. A victim’s limp fury. Had he been at her unrelenting till the end? Every caretaking cell in Kellen’s body—and lord knew he had more than his fair share of those suckers—woke up worried.
He took her outstretched hand, moved to stand beside her, and nodded to Dead. Truthfully, he had no idea what to think, but in such situations, he’d learned it was best to stay quiet and soak up all information as it came at him.
“Kellen, meet Dead Fester, better known as SwankVid, Ursula Dioda, the GNN, and…did I forget one, Fez?”
GNN. Global News Network. Only the news reporting source of record for three multinations, plus the ZaneCorp. And come to find out the whole thing was run by…one dude in the back room of a flea market? This dude, moreover? Fucking hell. Pretty much everything Kellen knew about the way media worked just got stood on its head.
“Well, FanSource as well, but that one is a labor of love and is, I’m afraid, somewhat small.” He looked proud as a new mama. “You can call me Fez.”
Kellen shook his hand. “Is a pleasure,” he mumbled.
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