Perfect Gravity

by Vivien Jackson

  Her gaze flew to his, crashing energy in the stuffy air of a small room. What if, what if, what if. He could almost hear her voice forming the words, even though her mouth was closed.

  Medina still had ahold of her by the left arm, but she reached the right one out. To Kellen.

  He moved to her side, clasping her hand. Yoink darkened her blip board, hopped down from the table, and settled her furry self at their feet.

  A trio. A team. A family. Enough.

  “Shut up, Zeke,” Angela said.

  “You can’t mean to let—”

  “Shut up,” she repeated, her voice growing louder, more commanding with every syllable. “I’m done playing your game, being your pawn. It’s a shit game, and you’ve taken it too far. Only this time, you lose. I have all the pieces now, and I am the fucking queen.”

  Which was the absolute hell-yeah-est moment of Kellen’s life and also right about the time four hijacked N-series mech-clones burst through the doorway. They disarmed Medina, recited his rights, and wrenched his arms back so tight, his shoulder sockets slipped. Medical knowledge does not necessarily mean an innate sense of gentleness or compassion.

  “I thought you were gone,” Angela said in a low voice as the mech-clones cleaned up and hauled Zeke off. “Not many people, especially good people, could endure me, knowing what I’ve done. And I could have distracted Zeke long enough for the mech-clones to arrive. All by myself I could have. I’m kind of a big deal when it comes to giving speeches.”

  “I know,” Kellen said.

  She looked up at him, her eyes wide and dark and terrifying. “But I’m so fucking glad you came back.”

  He couldn’t think of a damn thing to say to that. Not poetry or teases or even promises. So instead he leaned down and kissed the hell out of her.

  • • •

  There were a lot of legal and administrative noodles to untangle after taking over a government, after ripping the hat off a conspiracy. It was a long night. Word came in some of those protests had turned ugly. Not all security officers had moved aside like the ones in the Capitolina had, and some had fired on the protesters before they got the stand-down. This coup had not been bloodless.

  They went together with the whole family to take Mama Adele home. She was originally from up near Leeds, in England, but her own parents were from Motherwell, in Scotland. A bagpiper played when they put her in the ground.

  Mari never got confirmation of her aunt Boo’s death, but the land where she’d been staying was wiped clean, as if no building had ever existed in that place. The family went with Mari to Lampasas, smack into a war zone, to gather up her family’s treasures, what was left of Boo’s home site. But it wasn’t really closure. Not like Mari must surely need.

  Kellen accompanied Angela to all the other services, too. Six hundred twenty-four souls died to make their voices heard, to make their government stop. There were memorials for a solid month after, and Angela remote-attended every single one. Even if she only stayed a moment, to sign the condolence register, she was there. Only good thing to say about any of that was sometimes the services clustered, like the forty-one who went down together in Atlanta.

  And all the while he was there, feeling her feels. The way his brain worked, those folks weren’t an aggregate. They were names, individual ones, with faces and lives and families and snuffed potentialities attached. And he would know them all, clear as church bells, until the day he died. Sometimes it hurt to have a perfect memory and internal record of the wrong.

  Angela made speeches till her voice went, and then she had an amplifier stuck in her throat, and she went on speaking.

  When exhaustion snuck up, the two of them tumbled to rest wherever they found themselves, sometimes with clothes on, sometimes not. They didn’t talk much, but that was okay. They were soldered together now, didn’t hardly leave each other’s sight. Hell, they even bathed together—which, he had to admit, was something of a bright spot in the midst of the rest.

  The special session indicted Medina on all counts and promptly chose the education minister, some dude by the name of Wendell Week, to be the next interim president and fill out the term just started. Congress declined to create a war ministry. Actually, they didn’t even address the status of arms, not officially. Angela, reinstated as the elected senator from California, still possessed the command codes, and both Heron and Chloe sure had a will to rig them suckers. Kellen guessed if the new President Week wanted to blow something up, and it wasn’t a terribly mean thing to do, he could always ask nice.

  Kellen wasn’t sure whatever happened with the mech-clones once his people were done with them. They reverted to the control of their owners, most likely. And that bothered him some, how easy it had been to take them over and then give them back. Like the mech-clones themselves had no say in the matter at all. And legally they didn’t, so nobody pushed. Nobody said anything, publicly, about the mech-clone hijacking the night of the inauguration. Narrative spun it that evidence against Medina had convinced his closest advisors he was a warmongering psychopath, so they took him into custody. As good citizens do. Narrative, as always, was about ten percent true, but nobody fought the lie this time. They just wanted it to be over.

  Three days after the government changed, Week signed a policy directive countermanding all wildlife and weather adjustment initiatives until studies could be made of unforeseen consequences. The order provided full funding for reclamation and rescue as needed, both people and critters.

  The official doc didn’t say critters. It said animals.

  Kellen celebrated Christmas on a hired plane over Florida. Private jet, slower than Heron’s spaceplane, but with way better bunks. Bed even, and long enough for Kellen to stretch out on. Not quite wide enough for two people and a cat to fit comfortably, but he wasn’t complaining. Sleep while traveling: that luxury made the day begin to feel festive. Like after the longest night, they really were coming out of the dark.

  He gave Yoink a pouch of special-order high-priced tuna, and she reacted with typical Yoinkness. First, she ignored him for an hour. Then, she sniffed the pouch, devoured half, sat on his head purring, and went back to the corridor to polish off the rest of the food, nasty smelling but happy. Any cat—hell, any man—should be so lucky.

  Kellen rolled over on that comfy bed, tapped a control on the wall, and shut Yoink and her fabulous stink treasure out in the corridor.

  Angela did not by habit celebrate religious holidays, which he remembered from before, so he didn’t push. He didn’t consider himself evangelical about, really, anything. Live and let live and let some more life happen.

  Which made her gift to him that night even sweeter.

  Air circulators worked at getting the tuna smell out of the cabin, and the plane roared through the night like Santa Claus’s sleigh. She came out of the closet lavatory in a nightshirt with some futbol team’s logo splashed across the front. Her hair’d grown some, though it still wasn’t long. It framed her face like a halo in black. She climbed onto the end of the bed, perched herself beside his feet, and stared down. He’d seen a very similar look on a deer’s face once.

  It worried him. That deer had jumped off wounded and never come back. Surely he and Angela were beyond such things now. They had better than love. They had trust. Also, they were on a plane. She wouldn’t get far.

  “I spoke to Fez today,” she said. “My numbers are still polling really high. We’re talking ionospheric, so that’s scary and awesome. Also, Wendy sent me a summons to Denver. It’s possible he means to offer me a ministry post. Education is empty at the moment. What would you think of that, former classmate of mine?”

  “I think someday it might be nice you weren’t on pet-name basis with the continental president,” he replied. “But in the meantime, minister of education is perfectly you.”

  “I also got a message from Mari, from the island. They’r
e settling in.” She shrugged. “She said I could visit, and Azul misses you.”

  “They need to let that gal back out where she belongs. The vicuña, not Mari. She wasn’t meant to be trammeled in some little island home. I only kept her temporary. Wild things like her were born for bigger lives.” He met her eyes when he said it, and she knew what he was talking about.

  If he had a home on this world, it was probably there with his people and critters. Home was the living creatures that surrounded a soul, not a place or a building. Which made it all so much worse when it existed in more than one piece. One beloved in one place, and another days away and longing.

  Angela broke her gaze to the side. She picked at an edge of printed linen sheet and fiddled with it, like she could unwind all those tight wefts if she just kept at it. “Limontour ‘reached out’ to me. That’s how he talks—such a dick. My skin crawls when I think about replying. You know he’ll just take it all back to them, to the consortium. But you know, he’s teaching at the Mustaqbal now, at least part time. If I take this post that Wendy will in all probability offer, I’ll have to interact with him. Meat-meets. Maybe with other consortium members. I don’t know. I’m not sure I can handle it.”

  He didn’t move, and neither did she, but she was drifting. Like that deer, sinking back into the treeline, back to where she belonged. He pulled her hand off the sheet, and she followed him down into the bed. He could roll her beneath his body and kiss her till she stopped talking. He’d resorted to that before and wasn’t too proud. But it was Christmas, and she had things needed saying. Turned out he did, too.

  “Well, it sounds like folks got a lot of plates spinning on your behalf,” he said slowly. Instead of warming herself along the side of him, she moved over top, straddling his pajama’d hips, hands over his ribs. She had a seat any equestrienne would covet. “What if you just told all them to fuck themselves?”

  “What if.” But it wasn’t a question. She looked down at him, and he had no idea what was on her face. She could be thinking anything. “Would you play a game with me instead? I want to guess your truths.”

  • • •

  For a man as smart as he was, it certainly took him time to figure things out. Specifically, things about himself. She’d been keeping a mental log of his reactions each time the former-Pentarc denizens contacted them. He was dying of wistfulness. Worse, he didn’t think she noticed.

  Had her gaze really ever been so wide that she couldn’t see what was happening right in front of her? Well, if it had, it wasn’t anymore. She didn’t want to see the mechanical intricacies of the entire world. She just wanted to solve for one variable. This man. Hers.

  He raised eyebrows and engaged dimple action, but not with his usual grin in accompaniment. More a one-sided, noncommittal grimace. Still distractingly gorgeous, but she could keep her focus despite it. Practice made perfect.

  “Am I going to like this game?” he asked.

  Great. He wasn’t going to make this easy. “I think yes.”

  “Does it end with you naked?”

  “High probability.”

  “All right. Bring it.”

  Precisely what she wanted to hear. “Okay, let me see. Hmm. It is true that you are wearing only these pajamas because the organics-removal unit is broken and we haven’t used a laundry in a week, and therefore it is also true that there is exactly one layer of synthsilk between my body and heaven at this moment.”

  He pushed his head back into the pillow and shut his eyes. Other parts of him responded appropriately as well. She contained an urge to whimper.

  “Full points. Go on.”

  “Also true that you would love to go to Isla Luz for the new year and haven’t figured out how to tell me.”

  His eyes flashed open. “Now hold on—”

  “Shhh. Don’t interrupt,” she scolded, shifting her seat just to let him know what happened when he tried to distract her. “Or was that a denial? Did I get that one wrong? You don’t want to go?”

  He worked the half grimace again. “No, I don’t. Not unless you come, too.”

  Oh. She stopped wiggling. Because this was important. “Kellen, those people are your family. Wherever they are is your home. These things are important to you, and I don’t want to pull you away from them. It was wrong, what our parents did to us, letting us go out there to the MIST and follow other people’s visions for our lives. I’m not going to do that to you. I’m not going to drag you around the world forever and cut you off from everything you love.”

  “I hate to say it, but you suck at this game,” he said. “Everything I love is right here. You’re getting it all wrong.”

  She dropped one hand to the elastic waistband of his pajama bottoms and eyed him solemnly. “Okay, what about this? It is true that you’ll be proud of me still if I resign my office, refuse the ministry appointment, ask you to marry me, and tell you the only place I want to go is exactly where you are so I can hold you any goddamn time I want and make a bunch of babies with you for the whole rest of my life.”

  In her entire political career, that was, hands down, the scariest speech she’d ever made. She held the floor, waiting for the blowback. Would he laugh it off? Would he reply with a different speech, telling her she needed to think about…fuck if she knew. Her career, her life, her government, her world? Her role in the future disintegration of the consortium and all their as-yet-unknown evil plans for humanity?

  Which part of her guess would he find most objectionable?

  He covered her hand with his, low over that ligament she’d ogled on a cold November night. She could feel the push of his blood below his skin, the breath in his body.

  And a rumble of…oh yes, laughter. What the actual fuck?

  “That ain’t a game, princess. That’s a candy counter, and I want all of it.” He wrapped her hand in his, dragging it from the warm spot below the elastic. “But I’m a selfish shit at heart, and I got to have more than that. I got to have all of you, and you’re so damn much, honey. So you go ahead and grab all that, and also the rest. Come with me to Isla Luz for a little while and help me walk them out of the dark. And if you want to take that post and go toe-to-toe with the consortium, I’ll be right there, too, backing you up. It’s all open from here, all those possibilities. Just let me live them with you. Don’t make me go away.”

  She leaned down, walking her hands up his body, till she crushed him. Just crushed. She hovered her mouth above his. “So that is a yes?”

  “What are you asking in specific?”

  “Marry me. Stay with me. Have children with me.”

  “And help you take over the world?”

  “Well, that’s a given.”

  He raised his head off the pillow and kissed her, hot and hard, and she could not breathe, and that was absolutely fine.

  “Yes, little queen,” he said before the next kiss incoming. “Fuckin’ hell yes. Now, if we’re gonna mess up all the clean laundry in private, we’d best be quick before that cat unlocks the door.”

  She can do that? Angela thought, but only for a second. Because words stopped being as important as touches, and it all sort of went downhill from there. Because love. Because kisses. Because joy and faith and connection and hope and life and infinite possibility. She owned all these parts of herself now, and they were all fucking awesome.

  Which was exactly how the game was played.

  Acknowledgments

  I have the best crew in the ’verse. Many thanks to my superstar subject-matter experts, critique partners, and beta readers: Claudia Renard, Amy Kalinchuk, Tracy Talbot, Jen DeLuca, Sloane Calder, Paula d’Etcheverry, Christa Paige, and Allen Jackson.

  And the muse feeders: my Digital Darlings, Faeries, South Austin ARWA Critique, Thursday Night Starbucks Critique, and SFR Brigade. We rise together.

  And finally, thank you to the people who championed a
nd built this book: agent Holly Root and the awesome folks at Sourcebooks, especially Cat Clyne, Emily Chiarelli, Hilary Doda, Rachel Gilmer, Sabrina Baskey, Dawn Adams, and Stephany Daniel.

  All those people I just called out? Rock so hard. The Tether series could not exist without them.

  About the Author

  Vivien Jackson writes fantastical, futuristic, down-home salacious kissery. After being told at the age of seven she could not marry Han Solo because he wasn’t a real person, she devoted her life to creating worlds where, goldarnit, she could marry anybody she wanted. And she could wield a blaster doing it. A devoted Whovian Browncoat Sindarin gamer, she has a degree in English, which means she’s read gobs of stuff in that language and is always up for a casual lit-crit of the Fallout universe. She has been known to write limericks about old Gondor. With her similarly geeky partner, children, and hairy little pets, she lives in Austin, Texas. She’d love to hear from you: vivienjackson.com.

  BREATH OF FIRE

  The stunning sequel to A Promise of Fire from USA Today bestselling author Amanda Bouchet

  I am Catalia Fisa, and I do not break. Deep breath in. Long breath out. The Gods are telling me I’m some sort of new Origin, which apparently means it’s my job to give Thalyria a fresh start. Griffin crowned me with the symbols of the three realms.

  If I’m supposed to be not just a queen but the Queen, I’d better start acting like it.

  “A heart-pounding and joyous romantic adventure.”

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  For more Amanda Bouchet, visit:

  sourcebooks.com

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