“Oh, it really could be,” the newsman/gossipmonger simpered. “I am not even kidding. You’re chin-droolingly hot. The dirty cowboy thing, right? Yee-fucking-haw.”
“Uh…”
“Fez,” Angela slid in smoothly, “would you like to guess my truths?”
“Happy to, Angel. Let me see. It’s true that you and Pretty-Boy Kellen were teenage sweethearts. Also true that Daniel is dead, and good riddance. True he survived October?”
Angela shook her head and held up one finger, like a little kid counting off maths.
“Ooch, strike one. Okay, the quads are fibs, which is such a pity. Multiple births are all the rage at the moment. Did you know the English princess-in-exile is enceinte? Very hush at the moment pending an auction for rights to live-vid the birth, but how tragic you’re lying about your condition. If it was true, the two of you would deliver at around the same time. Actually at the same time if you put a surgeon on retainer or banked the fetus. Are you sure you don’t want to run off and get yourself knocked up?”
This conversation was making Kellen uncomfortable. Also more than a tad wistful. If they’d stayed together, he and Angela could have a kid almost as old as wee money belt outside. What would that even be like, being somebody’s father? It didn’t take long for the possibility to settle itself over his life, in bright colors. Looked…well, not bad there.
“Three for four isn’t bad,” Angela said, ignoring the question. “In all seriousness, Fez, I’m going to need some amazing spin to pull this off.”
“What, bringing you back from the dead? Easy peasy lemon squeezie, Angel. Just you let Uncle Dead sort this one for you. Now, how would you like to debut your luscious new undead self?”
“That’s kind of a problem, too. I’m not sure yet.”
This was where listening without interrupting could get a body in trouble, but Kellen kept his cool. Even though inside, he was screaming. Whoa, now. You come back, publicly, you’ll go back to that life. Away from me. Ghost out. Fuck. How did I let you do this to me again?
“Okay, no rush,” Fez rolled on. “Can I at least know what you’ve been up to for the last eight weeks, ever since you floated that pink gown at La Mars Madrid’s gala? The print pattern for that dress is selling like penny chems at a dance party, by the way.”
“I’ve been grieving-not-grieving, but Kellen makes all the sads go away,” she said. “You could imply that he saved me from the ruin of the Hotel Riu. Very dramatic. He’s selfless and heroic like that. Rescues baby goats, for fuck’s sake.”
Fez rubbed his pudgy hands together. “I am so in love with this narrative! It’s going to play huge. Now, when last we spoke, you were talking up the evils of Texas, specifically that vomit bag Vallejo. Do we want to say he’s responsible for Daniel’s murder?”
The question hung on the air for a long moment. Too long. Yes. Tell him yes. Weren’t they on their way right at this minute to shovel some good old-fashioned justice onto Damon Vallejo’s head? Why deny it?
Was this another surprise she was waiting for the last second to spring on him?
Angela’s solemn face had gone one notch solemner. “Give me a week on that, okay? Just tease the resurrection for now. Atheist-girl-Jesus: kind of guaranteed to rile people.”
“You got it. Oh! And one thing: did you want me to set up a confessional with Rafa, or…?”
“Already on it.”
“Oh, magnificent girl.” Fez pressed two hands over the place most folks thought their hearts were located. “I have missed working with you. A paltry few people in this biz know how all the pieces fit together, you know? So despite the unfortunate thing you have done to your hair—though I still believe we can soar with this new look, maybe a mix of serious and valiant?—anyway, I just want to say I’m glad you’re back in the game.”
Something stark passed over her face. Real quick, too quick for Fez to have seen. But Kellen did. It mirrored a dark fury inside his own soul. He couldn’t address this bullshit with her right now, not with a professional gossip standing right there and gazing at her like she was made of dark chocolate and rubies.
Both their coms vibrated at the same time, and Fez was too savvy not to notice. He gave them the one-eyebrow well-what treatment, despite the fact that this shit was private.
Angela pushed back her sleeve to read the message, in text form, spooling along the smartskin patch on her forearm. Kellen followed her gaze to where their hands were still conjoined and read her message upside down.
It was short, from Garrett, of all people: Defenses here are holding. God save the queen. The data hole over Enchanted Rock moved. How d’you feel about the beach?
• • •
All the stress and the terror notwithstanding, this was Angela’s favorite part of any plan. Setting up the scenario, placing each block. Careful balance, steady. And then, when the precarious structure was perfect, she would storm in like a toddler with a constructo set and smash the shit out of her design.
Okay, so Fez was on board. One bullet point checked. Her personal design was coming together.
Fez was one of her favorite hooks into the social media universe. She’d met him early on in her marriage to Daniel. At the time, he’d been purely fan sites and celeb gossip, but he’d expanded his reach over the years, as had she. They’d sort of grown up together, professionally. She wasn’t about to trust anyone completely, not after the last several months, but she couldn’t remember being in close quarters with two people she sort of trusted as much as Kellen and Fez. For a bright moment there, she had felt…comfortable. Home.
Dangerous feeling, that. But also impossibly sweet.
After equipping for their journey into the vasty black of Texas, specifically now to the ocean edge of the state, she and Kellen climbed back into the dragon car, spun up the reactor, and laid rubber out of Las Cruces. The northern and eastern borders of the conflict zone were loosely secured, easily bribed through, but here in the west, this close to the capital, the UNAN security took shit seriously. Angela had thought ahead, though.
Her official identity as a continental senator was toast due to her recent tragic death, but what idiot only had one ID? Not this gal. That had been her second bullet point, even though technically, it overlapped with the first.
Just as senators and diplomatic envoys and superstar celebrities had an alternate gate for most sec checks, so did registered journalists. A group to which she now belonged, thanks to Fez. Her GNN credentials, and matching ones for Kellen, would show up on any data scan and would pass the sniff test if border agents checked in at the GNN databases. Best of all, because their car was a mobile news unit, they could broadcast the clearance and wouldn’t even be subjected to faceprint scanners.
Hugging Fez didn’t begin to repay what he’d just done for her.
She slid into the car with energy crackling just below the surface of her skin, about to explode with the need to share these supercool gizmo gadget details with Kellen. All those spy scenarios they used to concoct when they were kids had nothing on what she’d just pulled off or was about to pull off. She was the Jackal, 007, and Mata Hari all rolled into one. I am the fire. Fuck yeah.
What she didn’t expect was reality. Kellen in a sulk. Why was he in a sulk? Frustratingly in a sulk, and not anxious to talk about what specifically had ensulkened him.
They rode in silence for hours. Literally hours. Kellen alternately stared out the car windows or asked if she wanted water/jerky/a bio break. They passed the security checkpoint, rolling right through it and broadcasting her superspy GNN credentials, and got waved through. And she couldn’t even crow about how perfectly that shit went off.
Finally, unable to take it one second longer, she said, “You’re quiet.”
He flinched like he’d been sleeping. He hadn’t. “Sorry. You need…?”
“Not really anything. Not technica
lly. But seeing as we’re stuck in this car together for several hours yet, I thought we could, you know, interact.” She waited for the obvious flirty comeback, the absolute lowest-hanging fruit, but instead he stretched his long legs along the floorboard and scraped a big hand over his face.
“Sorry,” he said again. “Am being bad company.”
Yeah, you are. And you’re making me nervous/angry/sad. Was his problem meeting Fez, being reminded that Angela had a life outside of the little Pentarc-centric bubble she’d existed in these last few weeks? Could he not handle that? Daniel had opposed her strides toward independence, too. He had never wanted to share his toys. Specifically his main toy, her.
And oh shit, she did not just find a point of comparison between Daniel and Kellen. Yuck. She felt like she needed to bleach her brain for even thinking it.
“Was looking out at the land as we passed,” Kellen said in a low voice. “Thinkin’ how much has changed. This place used to be my home once. And now it’s not.”
The air whooshed out of Angela. Oh. Okay. Well, she could see why the landscape might affect him. She had seen it, the scarred leftovers of what had once been pretty, on hundreds of strategic sat feeds over the years. Orbital-bombardment craters, half-rubbled ghost towns, and intentional fire-break controlled scorches weren’t new to her, or shocking. Sometimes she forgot not everyone had seen the stuff she had. Not everyone had her emotional callouses. Fuck a muffin, she was being insensitive.
She thought about reaching out, touching him. Holding him. But connection was her core joy source, not his. He didn’t need to be constantly stroked, to be reassured that he wasn’t alone or incapable or insufficient. He was stronger than that. Stronger than her.
In the uncomfortable silence, Yoink slunk from her explorations in the back seat, climbed onto the center console, and licked her paw in a desultory fashion, peering side-eyed at her two humans, one and then the other. After a while she nosed Kellen’s hand until he moved it for her, and then shoved her needy head beneath it. When he cricked one finger against her chin, Angela could hear the purring from here. Traitor.
A traitor that Angela was suddenly super jealous of.
“I thought you were from East Texas,” Angela said after a long time. They were still pretty far west. No tall trees or green things yet.
“Yeah, Angelina County. Big pine trees, bigger cockroaches. Everything in Texas is big. You know it has—had—five distinct climatic regions? This here is a cold desert, but we should be heading into coastal lowland as we skirt south of San Antone.” He said it wrong on purpose, almost defiantly, owning the mispronunciation. People from this area said a lot of things wrong. Guadaloop instead of Guadalupe. Man-chack instead of Manchaca. Blaynco instead of Blanco. The speech pattern drew heckling from outsiders, and it had been a complete bitch during continental and language integration debates, but they kept on, almost like they were proud of their ignorance. Kind of like how Kellen had always held onto his twang.
“You sound like a tour guide.” She smiled when she said it but couldn’t help thinking that this wasn’t the conversation they needed to have. As freaked out as he might be about the damage his home state had sustained, it wasn’t like he’d never seen wrecked landscapes. Day in, day out, he rescued refugees on the cusp of annihilation. He knew how these things went down, what an area looked like as it approached the fail point.
“Just regurgitating facts,” he said. “Ain’t that what us supergeniuses do? When I was a kid, all’s I knew about Texas was that pecan trees are better than pines for climbing. Lower branches make getting a boost up easier. Over in Mustaqbal, though, I couldn’t read enough about where I come from. Geography, anthropology, bird-watching guides. You gotta know everything about a place if you’re gonna defend it.”
“We aren’t at war,” she reminded him gently. Ooooh, it felt dirty to say that. Had she not just spent a year and a half trying to draw the Texas rebels into a war? And for what? Her own career? Good God. Had that really been her?
“Everything is war, princess,” Kellen said in a fire-edged voice. “Just getting up in the morning sometimes works itself into a battle. Humans are by nature warriors, killers. Ain’t that what all the old texts tell us? We have dominion over the lesser critters, ownership over the land, all by virtue of how very good we are at killin’. But you figure it is ever possible to own something like this, something so vast?” He stretched an arm out, as if he could finger paint the landscape beyond the car windows. “We have failed as stewards, and in revenge, the land has kicked us out. Fucking look at it. We’re all at war, and we’re all refugees.”
“You’re getting scary low,” she told him. “And I need you to work through this funk before we arrive at the coast. We don’t know what we’re going to find there, and I can’t have you navel-gazing or waxing philosophical.” She didn’t mention how root-level terrifying it was to see Kellen—bright, optimistic, sunshine and roses Kellen, for fuck’s sake—go on about war and death and failure.
“I’ll have your back in Galveston,” he said, not looking at her. “You don’t need to worry about me being on point.”
Angela’s com buzzed, and she cringed instinctively. Alerts of more attacks? Another update from the Pentarc? Neither promised to be good news. She tapped, and the message crackled out.
“Lucky cat says sum of luck is proportional to number of belly rubs sustained,” Yoink communicated. Angela looked down and saw that the cat had stretched all the way across the console, her head and one paw on Kellen’s thigh, her fluffy butt pushed up against Angela. A little fur-covered kitty bridge. “More rubbing is urgently required.”
So hard not to laugh, so fuck it, Angela did laugh. For once, she didn’t resist the urge. She reached down and stroked Yoink’s soft belly. When Kellen rubbed between the cinnamon-striped ears and the purring rose to weaponized ultra-low-frequency levels, Angela couldn’t help feeling that this was right. This mission, this plan.
This…family?
Chapter 12
Night came early this time of year, and dark had settled in long before they got to the Highway 6 Bayou Vista exit, where the world ended. Kellen rolled the dragon close to the onset of the ocean but tucked it far enough back that the water wouldn’t be able to get at it.
Behind them lay war-scarred Texas, and ahead roiled a monster. The Gulf of Mexico wasn’t just a body of water anymore. It was a water beast that had consumed cities, had murdered millions. When Superstorm Agatha had roared up Galveston Bay, shoving mountains of its bloated, surge-driven self up the Houston ship channel, the beast had grown like one of those old Japanese anime horrors.
And Vallejo had intentionally moved his data-hole electronic-coverage bubble here. To the horror that he had created. What a ballsy, blight-upon-humanity little motherfucker he was.
Unless he hadn’t. Unless they’d guessed wrong about him being under that dark spot.
Was it sick as fuck Kellen kind of hoped he’d been wrong? If Vallejo wasn’t here after all, or somebody else had launched those drones, their quest could continue on. More days, more weeks. More time he could be near her, hold her, touch her, feel her voice on his skin and pretend all this would last. Sure, he wanted this mission to end the way it ought and the killing to stop.
He also, secretly, wanted it to never end.
“So do we check in with Garrett now or what?” Angela, bundled up in that ugly, borrowed peacoat, stood by the hood of the car, pecking into her com. Not that it would do her a lick of good.
“Data hole,” Kellen reminded her, coming around the scuffed bumper. “We’re on our own.”
Yoink hopped up onto the car and settled herself between her people. Close enough to touch, but not actually, you know, touching. Anybody wanting to pet her would have to come to her, on her terms. Saucy cat.
“What? So what are we supposed to do now?” Angela sounded frustrated. “We can’t
go any further with the car. I mean, I know the dragon is durable and smart and handles terrain like it’s on tracks, but I don’t think it’ll…”
She kept on talking. Kellen reached down and stroked Yoink between the ears. “All right, little general. Hook us up.”
The cat got still, channeling information through her amplified neural. Out here on the dark edge of nuthin’, Kellen might very well be cut off from the rest of the world and its cloud of information, but he had unique access to a totally different cloud. A moving, breathing one. He drew patterns on Yoink’s tiny head, and the metal horns by her ears extruded light in rivulets, forming patterns, drawing a picture. Well, a grid more than a picture. Along its light lines, a few dozen to a hundred blips came online, a pattern of color in the starless night.
“What is that?” Angela asked.
“Critters,” he answered. “All them critters under the ocean. Yoink just sent out a hello, and they’re answering.”
“They’re…altered? Like Yoink?”
He didn’t dare look at her when he said, “The early ones got microchips I put in by hand. But later on we switched to nanotrackers, and those things self-replicate, get passed on. So we got multiple generations now of tracked, augmented critters with artificial adaptations.”
“You did this?” She breathed the voice of judgment, and he wanted to crawl in a corner and pretend they saw this eye to eye. He knew her government’s policies on unsanctioned alteration. He knew he hadn’t been licensed for any bit of what he’d done. He knew if she was a good little law-abiding senator, she’d haul his ass to jail as soon as they got back to civilization.
But he couldn’t deny this work, his life’s passion, the thing he loved almost as much as he loved her. He just wished she could understand.
“World’s gone hostile to wildlife,” he said through tight lips, “so I make wildlife fit back into the world. Skin augmented with capillary action for more effective water collection and heat radiation in coyotes out west, Vectran-reinforced hide for prey animals like that vicuña you rode in with, to keep her and her someday-babies safe from poachers’ bullets. Yeah, that’s what I do.”
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