by Susan Grant
His stomach rumbled again. He peered around the dark, hollow building. His retina implant detected a small animal darting across the floor. He lifted his pistol and downed it with a single pulse of energy.
His weapon dangled from his hand as he walked over to the kill. Data scrolled behind his eyes—Earth species identification: Rat. Weight: 6 oz. Nutritional Feasibility: Edible.
He picked it up with his gloved hand and dropped it on the cold storage compartment of his suit. If he needed one, he’d have a meal. It was important that he keep up his strength. Tracking a target manually, as he would be doing now, took energy. But for now, as hungry as he was, he’d hold out for tastier sustenance. The human part of him enjoyed the nuances of well-prepared food.
The tinkling of glass echoed from the back of the building. He saw the heat signatures of two humans sneaking around outside. Humanoid, male. Quantity: 2. Weight: 177, 223.
Reef dropped into a crouch to stalk them for no other reason than he was cold and they wore warm clothing. According to his enhanced vision, they wore thick upper-body garments with hoods and denim jeans, as they were called here. Reef didn’t care for the showy jewelry, but he’d take it and wear it. Any clothes that would serve to camouflage him as a local were valuable, serving in much the same way invisibility did in keeping him out of sight from his target. Especially now that he was operating without the high tech of his armor.
Reef slipped out the back door and stepped in front of the two males. “Give me your clothes.”
They stared at him for a moment and broke into laughter. The taller of the two drew a small knife. “How about you give me yours, fucker? Your stash, too.”
Reef kicked the pitiful weapon out of the male’s hand so fast that it had skittered across the alleyway before the first hint of surprise reached his face.
“Fuck.” The shorter male thrust a hand into his coat. Reef’s enhanced vision displayed the male’s hand closing around a weapon—a gunpowder pistol. Reef fired first.
A plasma burst tore through the man’s pocket. A startled yowl interrupted the quiet of the alley. The sizzling pistol dropped to the ground. Before any rounds could explode, Reef blasted it again and melted the pistol.
“My hand, my hand,” the male moaned, gripping his wrist above the blistered hand.
Reef aimed. “Give me your clothes.”
The other man’s breaths exited in rapid puffs of steam. “What are you, that Terminator dude or something?”
Reef accessed his Earth cultural data files. Terminator: Year created: 1984. Rating: R. Classification: action/sci-fi/thriller. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a human-looking, unstoppable cyborg that feels no pity, no pain, and no fear sent back in time to assassinate the mother of a future revolutionary leader.
In seconds, Reef had downloaded and viewed the entire movie. “Worse,” he replied.
The men snickered nervously.
“Take off your clothes,” Reef said in a precise imitation of the movie’s villain.
“Shit. He sounds just like him. That robot.”
“At least he’s not naked.”
“Yeah, but check out what he’s wearing. Where did you ever see shit like that?”
“PlayStation, man.”
“No, man, the Terminator. I tell you. Look at him.”
The humanoids were too talkative. Reef drew out his spare plasma rifle, spinning both weapons before he aimed them. “Strip. Now.”
The two men frantically threw off their clothes.
AFTERWARD, REEF CARRIED the garments back to the warehouse, where he changed and settled in for the night. The clothing was warm. His human body appreciated it. He was cold and his head ached. It wasn’t right, feeling so low, physically, mentally. He sensed changes within him, but an in-depth scan showed no neural damage. Perhaps the damage he’d suffered in the crash was worse than he thought.
Rest and stay warm, and he’d heal. Before Reef gave in to sleep, he replayed the day’s events in his head. If only he’d been able to ascertain the identity of the female in Far Star’s company. But Reef didn’t let that small defeat frustrate him. It wouldn’t be hard to learn her identity. And if he hadn’t yet killed his target, he’d use the female to bring him to his prey. And then it would be: Hasta la vista, baby. Reef balanced an arm across his bent knee, leaned his head back against the brick wall and closed his eyes. The robotic assassins from the series of Earth movies had been comically inept, but they did have some good lines.
Chapter Seven
IT WAS JUST AFTER DAWN when Jana tiptoed down the stairs, dressed in sweats she’d borrowed from Evie’s closet. Even a shower hadn’t lifted the fuzz left in her brain from getting only two and a half hours of sleep, although it had done wonders for her sore feet. Her hair was soaking wet. She’d style it at the apartment as well as change.
In the kitchen, she scrawled out a note to Cavin then tiptoed toward the door to the garage. Before her hand could touch the door handle, she heard, “Good morning, Jana.”
She stopped. Swore. The soiled clothes in her arms stank of old bananas. The sweats were the oldest she could find, and she’d hijacked a pair of her sister’s powder-blue Ugg boots to cover up her bare feet. Her wet hair left drips on the lenses of the reading glasses she’d donned to skim through incoming text messages on her cell phone. She looked hideous, she knew, but she hadn’t planned on running into anyone, least of all Cavin.
She pasted a bright smile on her face and turned around. “Good morning.”
Dressed in black and nearly invisible in the shadows, he leaned against the wall adjacent to the family room. Sadie sat at his feet, casting an equally accusing look at Jana.
“Going somewhere?” he asked.
“My apartment. To change clothes. I have an early coffee meeting with my staff, followed by a breakfast reception, meetings, lunch, hearings and more meetings.” I’m going to dive back into my workaholic life and practice what is known in pop psychology circles as massive denial. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Jana pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “And don’t sneak up on me like that. You startled me. This assassin business has made me a little jumpy.”
“You think I am sneaking?” Cavin’s smile was deadly. Arms folded, he pushed away from the wall. “I was in the midst of inspecting the security of this dwelling with my assistant, Sadie, when I heard you awaken. Then I see you attempting to exit this dwelling without telling me. Since my unique expertise was what kept you from incarceration last night, I thought I deserved a ‘hello’ or at minimum, a ‘goodbye.’ Sadie thinks so. Don’t you, little creature?”
Ears perked, Sadie tipped her head to the side. Her luminous brown eyes gleamed with adoration as she awaited his command.
“Look at that, one night with you and she’s yours.”
“You had the opportunity, but—” he made a spreading motion with his fingers “—you let it slip away.”
“Sadie doesn’t have to work today. I do. And why aren’t you still asleep? I thought you would be. And you should be. You’re injured.”
“I’ll sleep later.”
“You didn’t sleep at all?” She was beginning to see a man who was as driven as she was. When something fired his passion, he didn’t give up until he’d achieved his goal. Just like her.
“There wasn’t enough time to make sleep worth the effort, so I set up a security array.”
Her eyes went from his holstered space-gun to the marble-size balls lined up along the threshold of the garage entrance. He carried a few more little balls in his big palm, tossing them like a gangster playing with a handful of coins. “What are those?”
“They’re used to form the array. If anyone tries to penetrate the secure area, these will emit a harmless pulse of energy to deter the intruder. Nothing the REEF or anyone else looking for me could detect. Now, back to you,” he said and sauntered closer. “And your sneaking. It reminds me of the morning after a romantic tryst, only I was always the one stealing a
way.”
“This has nothing to do with a morning-after. There can’t be an after because there wasn’t a before. Besides, I left you a note,” she pointed out guiltily. “I told you where the food is, what to do with the pets, and not to answer the door or the phone. And I wrote down my cell number so you can reach me.”
“I don’t read your language. Or any Earth language.”
“But I thought…”
“The implant is an aural translator only. I’m functionally illiterate.”
He reached for her glasses and slipped them off. Her physical reaction to his closeness was immediate. She picked up his scent, warm and male. It was intoxicating, and she felt the echo of the primitive drumbeat of their kisses. Overcome it. Prove you are a higher life form than the sturgeon.
With obvious and touching curiosity, he held her glasses up to the light to study them. As tired as she was, and without the glasses to help her see, the details of his face were a little out of focus. The effect softened his features, took away the creases he had from squinting in the sun, smoothed the shadow above his upper lip where he shaved, and erased the tiny scar on his chin. “Primitive eyewear,” he commented.
“We do the best we can here on quaint ol’ Earth.”
He ignored her sarcasm. “Do you use them for magnification?”
“Yes, I’m a little farsighted. I need them for reading. When I’m tired, I depend on them.” She opened her hands. “Like now. Give.”
“I like how you look in these,” he said, studying the glasses.
“So, you’re attracted to nerds.”
“I’m attracted to you,” he said and slipped her glasses back on.
Her skin warmed and her pulse kicked up another few notches, pounding boom, boom, boom in a thrumming urgency that begged her to throw off her glasses, shake out her hair and tear off Evie’s sweatshirt with seam-popping abandon.
Jana jumped backward and grabbed hold of the garage door handle, clinging to it as if it were the only anchor to the real world outside, where normalcy reigned. Or at least where it had reigned before yesterday. “I’ll be late unless I leave now.” Like really late, hours-of-mind-blowing-hot-sex-later late.
He held open the door for her as if he were coming along, too. “No, Cavin. You have to stay here. I have to keep you safe.”
He reared back in surprise. “To keep me safe?”
“From us Earthlings. You make it sound so simple—‘Take me to your leader, Jana’—but I was thinking about it in the shower this morning. It’s more complicated than you think. You want to get to Area 51 and hack into a spaceship the government denies is there. You want to use said spaceship to transmit false signals to an invading alien fleet that the government also knows nothing about.” She pressed two fingers to her temple and prayed her headache didn’t turn into a migraine. She’d never had a migraine, but if she were to start, now would be the time.
“We can’t be rash and act before we’ve analyzed all the angles. See, it’s never been proven there’s life anywhere else but here. Some people think there is, but many more don’t. The nonbelievers will probably laugh at you, and the believers will probably want to kill you because they think extraterrestrials are coming to take over, which is exactly what you plan to tell them.”
“I’ll talk to them. Allay their fears about me.”
Her protective instincts flared. He was her Peter, her magical boy. She wouldn’t let anyone hurt him. “There’s more. You’ll be seen as something valuable for your secrets, for the implants you carry in your body. The technology. Whatever country gets you would have a huge strategic advantage over everyone else. Make the wrong people nervous or whet their appetite for knowledge or power, and you could disappear, for good, all for the sake of science and world supremacy.”
He looked grim. “Permanent disappearance. This seems to be the theme of my life lately.”
“I’ve been through that once already, losing you, and I didn’t like it. I won’t let you disappear.” Big words, but in reality, could she make that promise? “Let me think of the safest way to do this.”
She came up on her toes and pressed a goodbye kiss to his cheek. “Don’t talk to the neighbors. Don’t answer the door. Pick up the phone only if it’s me.”
“You worry needlessly. I’m well trained in my conduct with alien species.”
“You might be trained, but Evie’s neighbors aren’t. That’s the problem. Stay in, stay low, don’t go anywhere.”
She cracked open the door. Cold damp air flowed in from the dark garage. Keys jingling, she walked to her car. Had he any idea how hard it was to leave him?
Cavin followed. “Who will watch over you today?”
“Me.”
His chin went down so he could look in her eyes. “You.”
“Yes. The capitol building is very secure. So is my apartment building. It’s brand-new, state of the art. There’s a doorman, awesome security, and I live in the thirty-second floor—that’s pretty high in Earthling terms. Astronomical, in Sacramento terms. And I was doing just fine until you showed up. I wasn’t stealing cars, getting pulled over for speeding, or getting shot at. Of course, I wasn’t getting kissed into oblivion, either.”
Something fleeting and wonderful flashed in his eyes. Then he frowned. “Don’t try to distract me. Rewind, please, to the getting-shot part.”
“The REEF.”
“He’s still out there. REEF assassins never give up. Battlefield legend claims that not even death ends a REEF’s desire to kill. Once, as the story goes, there was a REEF whose bloodied and broken human body continued to slither after its target after death, its inner components still whirring as they dragged the mutilated body toward the intended kill.”
“Ugh! Gross.” Jana wrinkled her nose. “No more war stories, please, or I’ll throw up. I get it, okay? This thing, this robot guy, he’s persistent. It’s the invincibility that I question. He’s screwed up too many times for one with a supposedly perfect record.”
“He may have suffered a malfunction, perhaps in the crash, but we can’t be sure. But unlike me, he can use his nanotech to heal himself and fix his weapons, and it is likely what he’s doing now.”
She opened the door to the Jeep. Cavin pushed it closed before she could climb in. “Do you want to be around when he breaks his losing streak?” he demanded.
“Chances are if he does find out I’m connected to you, he’ll go to my apartment to find me, not here. Evie’s divorced, but she kept her married name. How is REEF going to figure that out? I think we’re both safer here.”
He thought about that. “Perhaps.”
“We’ll stay another night. Maybe a couple of nights. I’ll tell Evie. She won’t mind.”
Jana opened the car door. Cavin took her arm before she could climb in. “I’ll be careful, I promise,” she said gently.
The pained look in his face brought her back to the night he had to leave, all those years ago. The air felt just as charged. Then he made a sound in his throat and dropped his hand. “Will every separation we have be this wrenching?”
That’s what it was, she thought with a jolt. They couldn’t stand being apart.
She fell into his arms. His hug was crushing, broadcasting their reluctance to part. “I never wanted to leave you, not even then,” he said. “I wanted to take you away with me and my father as a sample from Earth.”
Jana smiled against his chest. “You wanted to abduct me? Now it comes out. Why didn’t you? I could have been in the Enquirer—on the front page, too.”
“I thought it through. I wanted you with me only if I could make you as happy as you made me, not because I forced you. This is no different. Go.” He let go and stepped away, placing a palm on his gun. “But come back.”
Two decades of life had infused his face with character, but his eyes were still Peter’s eyes. “I will,” she said. “I’ll come back.” She pressed a too-quick kiss on his lips and hopped in the Jeep. She wasted no time starting it up a
nd backing out of the garage.
Gritting her teeth, she shoved the Jeep into first gear, catching a glimpse of Cavin in her rearview mirror as she sped away. An achy, full feeling swelled inside her chest, and it wasn’t because of the stress. It was because of Cavin. Seeing him conjured the same feeling she’d experienced when she saw Evie holding her first baby, or the times she’d find Grandpa gently tending to his vegetables when he didn’t know she was watching, or when Mom would purposely say something to fluster Dad, and he’d push his glasses up his nose and give her that goofy, lovesick smile. Being with Cavin was how it felt when she was around her family, only sharpened with a desperate physical attraction.
“You won’t feel this way once you fall in love for real,” Evie had insisted that night Peter had left and Jana had confessed her wish to marry him.
Jana pondered that as she shifted into Third. She hadn’t argued with Evie at the time because her gift was so new, the gift of gab. All she’d ever wanted was to be normal, to be like everyone else. That night gave her the chance, and she’d been determined not to blow it. Boys had been the last thing on her mind, even one as special as Peter. It wasn’t until much later that she realized how much his departure had affected her. How much she missed him.
And it wasn’t until now that she knew Evie was wrong.
“You won’t feel this way once you fall in love for real, Jana.” She’d been in love. Three times. Not once had it come close to what it was like with Cavin.
Cavin…
Peter.
Everything you are today was because of him. Everything you’ll become will also be because of him. How could any one person have so much influence over her life?
But she’d had just as much influence on his. Now they were finally back together, but for a purpose: uniting to save the world.
Headline! Fairy-tale Romance Has Cosmic Consequences.
