“Heron?” Kellen said, far too softly and in a voice that sounded like dust.
Angela dragged him the last few feet to the truck. She scrambled up over the tailgate, pulling him along, which must have looked nuts to bystanders and the viewing public, she being small and him so big. But she wasn’t going to let him have this conversation with his best friend from ten feet away, with all those people listening. It was a closer moment than that, and there was too much to say.
But first, this bit first. She crouched down in front of the machine, cupped the bloody mess of Dan-Dan’s jaw in her hands.
“Thank you,” she said. “And if there’s even a bit of Dan-Dan in there, thank you, too. You are good.”
The mech-clone lifted his arms wide, and Angela and Kellen both moved into an embrace. With the thing. Group hug, but without all the silly, fluffy connotations that phrase would bring if spoken aloud. Network hug, rather. Family hug. Home.
“He’s still here,” Heron said through Dan-Dan’s mouth, the quality crispy and metallic through the half-ruined voice apparatus. “His kernel is intact, archived as you instructed him to do. But I have, as Kellen guessed, appropriated this body to dig its way out of the tunnel. It was not an easy process, nor quick. I had lots of time to think of what you all must be imagining for our fates. I’m so sorry for that, for the scare. Now, is there a nodal relay anywhere nearby where I can plug this body in? I’d like to get some heavy equipment where we are, to dig us out. There are some among us who cannot climb.”
“The plane’s parked right over there,” said Garrett as he approached the truck bed.
He’d found them. Angela could have thwapped herself for not messaging him first, but somehow he’d known anyway. He hopped over the side of the pickup bed, almost like gravity didn’t apply to him. Angela peered at him wonderingly. Hadn’t Garrett been working alongside Kellen at the pile all day? Hadn’t he busted his knuckles earlier? She was sure she’d seen him with bloody, wrapped hands. Those hands now were smooth, though, long-fingered. Dainty even.
So there was more to Garrett than appeared on the surface. But that was kind of the story with all humans, wasn’t it?
“Excellent,” Heron said. “You may fill me in on the rest of it as we drive to the plane, then. I assume you three have been busy.”
Angela met Kellen’s eyes and smiled slightly. “Oh, we have a few balls in the air. Did you know Chloe could rig a whole army, or am I just the last to know all these fun things?”
• • •
Rescue and recovery went lightning fast once they got that heavy construction equipment in place. Limitless resources will do that for you. The volunteer camp in the desert stayed together for a little while after, though. Apparently there were rumors of treasure to be found in the pile, and Kellen refused to speak to that. If somebody ventured down there and happened to find a pink-diamond tiara or a priceless Russian egg, well, good on them. He was done with digging.
The reunions played awful sweet. The mamas hugged and hugged him, and Fan went on so fast rat-a-tat-tat that even Kellen couldn’t keep up, and his Spanish was pretty good. She said something to the effect of, “All our baby animals are safe, and my preciouses also, and all our enemies must die a giant flaming death, and can you make that happen right this minute?”
He could be off by a word or two.
Adele, nearing eighty if she was a day, didn’t run as fast as some others during the evacuation, and she’d had a tunnel collapse on her. She’d regained consciousness while Heron was out running that mech’s body eastward. Her head, she said, was still giving her gyp, which Fan said was a leftover Britishism and he wouldn’t understand, but basically, although Mama Adele felt like hammered shit, she was on the mend.
The attacks had stopped, but nobody knew if this pause would stick.
The dual houses of Congress had called an emergency session, but plans were still on to re-up Medina as president tomorrow at the Colina Capitolina. Shithead had hired a live band and everything for the party after.
There was some concern for the Chiba Station, which had left its geosynch sometime during the attack on the Pentarc and now could not be located, not on coms and not in the sky. Nobody quite knew where it went, and that worried Kellen a lot. The mech-clone queen of that station wouldn’t have left Heron if he was in danger, not if she’d had even a spark of choice in the matter. She was loyal. But there was no wreckage either, and she had a lot of power reserves in the station. Possibly she’d gotten bumped off course or something. He hoped the cause of her disappearance was that innocent. He hoped there weren’t orbit-to-orbit weapons in play.
Chloe, that little superstar, had drawn herself back together and was hanging out in Mama Adele’s recovery room, determined to keep her whole crew within grabbing distance, even though, without a solid body, she wouldn’t be doing any actual grabbing. She’d counted the refugees a dozen times and still seemed unconvinced they were all safe.
Garrett sat right there with her. Of course he did.
She could disperse instantly, whenever they needed it, she said. She knew the pattern for fitting herself back together after such a wide spread. She’d put all her borrowed bits back into the free-fae lights all over the country, but if the need arose, she’d round them all back up. Kellen didn’t think anybody would call that stealing.
There was a rough spell among those bright reunions when Mari realized her asshole father had come along. Vallejo had been out there digging in the pile with everybody else, and he looked a lot worse for wear after. His bouffant hairdo was sideways, and tears had left deep tracks in the dust on his face. Knowing Mari, Kellen had thought she might just shoot first and ask questions later. But you know what? That girl had a soul deep as a cenote and a capacity for forgiveness deeper still. She also wasn’t scared to admit when she was wrong. And she had been wrong about Vallejo. He didn’t have shit to do with her auntie’s situation.
She towered over her daddy, but she leaned, put her forehead to his, and said some stuff in a low voice that Kellen couldn’t hear. Didn’t want to. And that old coot had cried and cried.
Things were afoot. Rebellion glimmered like a too-hot summer on the surface of everything.
And when Angela set up her command center about one hour’s flight time outside of Denver, in a little town called Crested Butte, Kellen went with her. Pretty town in the summer, used to be crammed to the gills in winter, back when winter snowfall was predictable and ski trips were a thing. They found a unit low on the mountain and a wide strip of place to park the plane. Then they started hauling shit in. Cameras and support staff. Communications arrays and performance tech. Angela spent a whole day recording speeches in all sorts of languages for all kinds of eventualities.
Including one where she didn’t survive tomorrow’s inaugural ball.
Kellen didn’t think he was supposed to see that one. He probably shouldn’t have watched. But damn it, he’d been so sure so recently that folk he loved were gone, he couldn’t even wrap his mind around a world without her in it. So seeing that speech was a lot like watching a vid, a made-up what-if, a thing he knew could never happen. Would never happen.
A thing he personally would not allow to happen.
He aimed to be there, to protect her, no matter what. She wasn’t getting him into another psych helm. She wasn’t running off on him again.
’Course, when he mentioned that, there at the end of the day with hours left before dawn and her team wrapping up and moving out for the night, she just slung him a vixen grin. “Not happening. You can put that thought to bed.” She paused. “Now, may I? Put you to bed, I mean?”
“Didju just sling a flirt at me?” He wasn’t gonna tell her she sucked at innuendo. If he hadn’t been so clued in to her tone and movement, he might have missed her invitation completely.
In reply, she dropped her voice to velvet and rubbed it all ove
r him. “I tried to. Did it hit anything like a sensitive spot?”
Only every single one. “I don’t know if you realized when you hired this place, but there is, right above where we’re standing, a loft sort of doohicky. And in that loft, there is a giant bed.”
Her dark eyes narrowed. “You need to go upstairs. Right now.”
“Yes’m. Lead on.”
She did, working a wiggle into her stair-climbing that made the going way too slow. Not that he didn’t enjoy every single sashay.
She’d crawled into some kind of slinky dress for her latest speech recording, but it didn’t take much to get that thing off. Wore her brand-new printed cowboy boots underneath, where the cameras wouldn’t be peeking and that he found mighty adorable. There was some discussion of cowgirls and haylofts and shit like that. Private discussion.
He kissed her mouth, and then all the rest of her.
They had to move the cat—who complained, jumped back up, and had to be removed a second time, and then flicked her tail and sulked over to a dresser, where she had a better view—but that bed was all he’d imagined it would be. Space enough to spread Angela’s body beneath his attention, to lavish and worship and take time over a thing. It was a coming-home kind of bed, a thank-you-kindly one as well. A please-stay-here-with-me-forever, though in fact those words scared him shitless, and he couldn’t force them out. He didn’t know, even after all they’d been through, what she’d say to that kind of declaration.
His love was a wild thing, a powerful thing, angelic and immortal and fully beyond his ken. But he didn’t want to waste the time tonight trying to figure her all out.
Tonight was about licking their wounds clean, about healing.
There was a time, back in the before, when they’d memorized each others’ bodies, every curve and valley, mountain and river. Tonight, they fitted the pieces of their map together till no spaces remained between parts. Fusion and perfect, a laser-cut puzzle put right.
It was okay that the big bed squeaked. It was okay that the cat watched creepily from her perch on the dresser. It was okay that winter roared just outside, and nothing tomorrow was promised.
They held.
Each other, the future, the past, all their hopes and dreams and words.
They held.
And then, long after and with their naked, sated limbs still tangled in sheets, she broke first.
Chapter 18
“My love, I need to tell you a thing,” Angela said. “And after, if you need to leave and never look back, that’s going to be okay. Just in case things don’t work out so well tomorrow, I want you to know the truth. Keeping this secret has been so very hard.”
She almost said so fucking hard, but the tone wasn’t right. It might have led to more frolicking, and she needed to get this truth out in the open. It was time.
“Aw, love,” Kellen said, pressing a kiss against her hair. “I ain’t leaving you. I aim to stick on you like glue all the rest of our lives.”
Did he realize he echoed his own words from long ago? From their last day together at Mustaqbal? Knowing him, yeah, he probably did. Boys with eidetic memories were such a pain in her ass.
“I thought I had a problem with that,” she confessed. “With forever. I thought, back on the submarine and lots of times before, that loving you was a weakness, my Achilles’ heel. I worried that if somebody wanted to get to me, to hurt me, they’d just hurt you instead, knowing that it would kill me.”
“That’s a hard word, kill.” He stroked her back, inscribing it with fire.
“But it’s the right word,” she said. She desperately wanted to leave it at that. To let him keep on stroking her skin, and then she’d pull him into her arms and they’d make love for a full day straight, like goddamn rattlesnakes. But that plan was like all her other plans, a goal to aim for, not reality to live. And all based on lies.
“Nah, you’re stronger than you know, princess,” he said.
“Maybe. At least, I think you might be right.” Unable to stop herself, she wrapped her arms around his body, fit her palms against the ripple of muscles on his back, and drew in a deep breath. He smelled like fresh-showered man, no cologne or clinging scents. Just him. For half a moment, she held him completely in her embrace, and she actually did feel strong. Strong enough to tell him the truth. “At the pile in the desert, when we didn’t know yet who’d survived, when we thought the worst, you were still going. Hell, I was still going. We were still living, functioning, even if the worst had happened. Somehow the world itself didn’t end.”
He didn’t say anything to that, but she knew she was right.
“The tragic thing, and the secret thing,” she went on, “is I didn’t always know that. I didn’t always know that losing the thing most precious to me would not, in fact, end me.” She paused, gathering up courage as if it were armor. And it was, sort of, but cold. “Kellen, what did Vallejo tell you that made you so sad in the submarine?”
He loosed a long breath that eddied in her hair. “He said the consortium wanted you to get yourself hitched to Daniel because they had run your genomes and thought you two would produce some kind of superkid. It struck me that was just the sort of thing an evil person might hold over your head, to keep you down and to make you miserable for a long, long time. Got to say, it pissed me off some.”
Close. Real close, Vallejo. Maybe you really are a supergenius madman. Observant at the least.
She thanked the old man silently for not saying the rest. For letting her do it herself. “Except it wasn’t Daniel’s genome I hitched mine to.”
His hand on her back went still. His breath stopped.
“You were…” His voice like dust.
“Um, yes,” she said. “I knew before you left Mustaqbal, but I didn’t know how to tell you. I mean, we weren’t safe. You said it yourself, there’s no cure for nineteen. At least technology was on our side, sort of. Zeke said I could bank the fetus until I, quote, got my shit together, unquote.” She had been such a mess, and so alone. For a long time after Kellen had left, she just hadn’t been able to function. But he didn’t need to know that. Not now.
“That snotfucker,” Kellen murmured.
“Agreed, knowing what I know now. At the time, he had all the answers, though. Of course, he never intended for me to come back and retrieve the fetus. What he intended was exactly the thing I did. I married Daniel. I promised to put my super girl genome to work, and we tried. A lot. For a long time. But we never got along on, you know, a personal level—in private, he was the asshole no one ever realized, and cruel besides. I offered to get it over with, in a lab, like civilized people. He, ah, didn’t like that idea. Despite his threats, I left him two years ago.”
“Right about the time you got the mech?”
“Do you remember every single thing that has ever come out of my mouth?”
“Purt’ near.”
The accent was really horrible. He hadn’t done anything to fix it in all these years. She kind of loved it. Okay, real hard loved it.
“So anyhow,” she went on, “Zeke bought mech-Daniel to keep my defection from getting back to the consortium. He swore he was trying to protect me from them, said they would be really angry if they found out I ditched Daniel and put a snag in their horrible Bene Gesserit–type breeding program.”
He took his time digesting her confessions, and Angela’s body tightened, coiled. Damn. She put her brain training on it, worked the tension out, soothed herself, slowed her breath, thought about where she was and who she was with and what they’d just done together. This was why she’d chosen now, when they were both sunk in such deep postcoital bliss they’d be too lethargic to move. When he would be too sated to grab his pants and run the fuck away, as fast as humanly possible.
She knew Kellen. After all these years, she knew him. He tended his people, his critters, and he would ne
ver forgive her for, even temporarily, giving up their child. He wouldn’t accept as atonement all the messages she’d sent him over the years, unanswered, all the times she’d tried to get in touch. Her own sense of justice was honed to a fine point, but his was at least as sharp.
She lay there, naked, holding on tight, waiting for the cut.
After the longest time, he said, “So where’s she now, our girl?”
A shiver skidded down her spine, but he petted it away. “How did you know it was a girl?”
“Science,” he said. “Statistically, when folks fuck as much as we did, they more often conceive female offspring.”
“That’s…” Well, it was intensely sexy that he knew the factoid, and it almost distracted her from the guilt soup she was stirring, from finishing out her confession.
Because this would be a great time to stop. She could leave it right there. He didn’t seem to hate her yet. Not irrevocably. But if he knew the rest of it, he would. He was good, at the core. How could he not loathe what she was?
Buck the fuck up. You did it. You did all of it. Can’t just skid to the edge of a confession and then wimp out at the last minute. All the way in, right now.
“Okay, that was distracting,” she told him. “And you are distracting, in the most amazing way, but I need to tell you one more thing.”
“You really don’t.”
“I do. Please listen.”
He went silent. His hand stopped stroking.
She continued. “Two years ago, when I left Daniel…”
“Yes.”
“I left him because I went to Tamil Nadu, after the flood water receded. I hadn’t been there in a long time, but that’s where my father was from, and it’s where I went, back when I was nineteen and stupid and things got bleak. Anyhow, because I was there after the flood and it was a place I thought about a lot, I went to the cryobank where…where I left it. Her. The place was gone.”
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