Not good.
It was just a matter of time before the UNAN offered a bounty, and then a whole horde of vigilante, anti-Texas continentalists would also be aiming for her. Mari. His partner. His responsibility. His…damn it. Heron’s hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly, it cracked.
For a second, all he could do was look at the break. Technically, he didn’t need the steering wheel, not in this car. Steering and gear progression went through his neural, but he liked the connection, having his hands on the car, driving it. At the moment, though, fracturing the steering wheel hurt. A physical pang, like a broken tooth.
He blinked again, logged off the mirror, and scrubbed the connection, then smoothed his fingers over the leather wrap, testing the fissure beneath. It throbbed.
He needed to order his thoughts. He needed to plan. He needed control.
The autobus in front of him whirred atonally, shredding his calm. All-electrics were required by city ordinance to emit sounds to alert pedestrians and other vehicles of their approach. But nothing in the law said they had to sound like intoxicated crickets. Heron extended his wireless bubble outward from the car, touching it to the back of the bus. He caught the synthetic audio wave on wireless, deconstructed it to its base musical components. Gave it melody. Overlaid it with some John Williams. Bounced it back through the bus’s onboard speakers. Now that ugly behemoth farted something approximating “The Imperial March.” Ahhh, control. He was back in charge of this extraction, a realization that soothed him almost as much as speeding.
But not nearly as much as catching sight of her at the bus stop, exactly where he’d told her to wait. Mari. Safe. Looking like springtime in a pink sweater and holding that pretty really-her-converted-rifle-barrel parasol against one shoulder. She’d taken off the sense gloves she used for shooting—he could feel them wadded up in her duffel, still transmitting—so he scanned her com instead, counting her pulse, measuring her pupil dilation and blood chemical levels. Not an adrenaline spike in her whole body.
She popped her bubble gum and leaned against a Plexiglas route map. Cool as a daiquiri was Mari.
He waited for the bus to pull away from the stop and then rolled his car to the curb, about a meter from her mud-caked wellies. Green ones, with tiny sunflowers on the pull loops. He moved one hand off the steering wheel, signed a command, and her door shished open.
She leaned in, twirling the parasol, flinging errant raindrops all over his contrast-piped leather interior. Cool sprinkles, like cupcake dusting. A dimple tucked itself next to her flirty smile. “Hey, stranger. Goin’ my way?”
Heron pressed his lips into a line. “No funning, please. Get in. Quickly.”
“No kiddin’ no fun,” she muttered under her breath, probably forgetting that her com was subvocal. Although she was sharp as a shiv when her hands were on a gun, she could forget crucial things on planning and extraction. Or she deliberately relied on him to keep all that sorted.
Either way, Heron didn’t mind. He reached through the wireless and shut down her com.
She furled the umbrella, tossed it to the floorboard, and folded herself into the passenger seat. Heron had the door down as soon as her skirt was clear of the seals.
He’d examined this sector extensively in planning and had every escape route timed down to the second. He hadn’t counted on the law enforcement response being so fast, though, almost instantaneous. Road blocks and drones were popping up like dandelions every time he polled the mirror, and he had no defenses set up to counter them.
He knew precisely the speed at which information flowed, and there was no way within normal parameters the authorities could know her identity and location this quickly. Clearly, Mari had been set up. He even had a good idea who’d done it. The cloud, with its delicious glut of information, hovered just beyond his vision, tempting. He could see her doom erupting, 33.3 milliseconds behind real time, and he couldn’t do a damn thing to stop it.
No, that wasn’t true. He had a range of options, but the only one he allowed himself, the only one that made sense, was to get her away from here. Get her somewhere safe. Hide her.
Traffic became a torment, not just because his escape was slowed or capture crept closer with each passing second, but also because…she was here. Close. Too close. Within touching distance close. He could practically feel her vibrating with postjob adrenaline. Just eight blocks to the expressway entrance ramp. He endured them. Every bloody inch. Every stroke of her naked hands on the cushion. Every drip of skin-warmed rainwater from her ponytail, teasing its way down between her shoulder blades and along the seatback. Every push of her breath against damp synthetic cashmere. Every distant siren, every rolling update from his mirror… Interpol had her bios now, but he suspected the UNAN agents would find her first.
No. Over his goddamned corpse they would.
He hit the entrance ramp at 120 and blew into the cruise lane. The wireless exchange with the bus earlier had reminded him of another closed system, off-cloud. A bigger one. Private. Safe.
“Thought our exit vector was south. Cabana down in Cabo San Lucas and an endless tab of mojitos? This ringing a bell, partner?” Mari craned to see a road sign too blurry to read with naked eyes.
Heron cataloged the sign, crossed three lanes, and slung the car onto a flyover, taking them decidedly not south.
“I told you our plans had changed. No cabana this time, but don’t worry. I’m taking you someplace safe.”
“What place? Your place?” She waggled her eyebrows.
He inhaled deliberately. She doesn’t mean it the way it sounds. It is not an invitation. You know how she is. Bald come-hithers and poor timing were typical of her postjob process. Everybody had a different way of ramping up and down for jobs like this, and hers was invariable. A peek at her biometrics showed elevated hormone levels in her blood. Flight or fight or fuck, and Mari had an unnatural ability to suppress the first.
Any other job, he’d have her on a plane by now and off to the hired harem of cabana boys she needed to seduce to prove she was still alive. But this wasn’t any other job. This was a botch. On a contract held by Texas. She was in danger, and he didn’t have time to wrestle with her attempts to make him into another of her temporary playthings.
Temporary, because the only time she’d be able to stomach fucking a post-human would be right after a job. And then she’d hate herself after. He knew what she thought about people with implanted tech. Cyborgs. No better than machines.
And he sported a metric shitload of implanted tech.
So he’d kept their relationship purely professional, and there had never been a reason to alter that structure. Until today. Now, to keep her safe, he was willing to suffer a lot more than her derision. He was willing to lay bare his most deeply held secrets and hope she didn’t heckle. Or worse, send him away.
He accelerated through fourth gear, and the car lowered, uncomplaining, hugging the asphalt.
Fuck it all—he was taking her home.
• • •
Mari hadn’t completely come off the postjob high, but even in her present jitterbug state, she could tell something was wrong. Like, flat-out, fucked-up wrong. And dollars to doughnuts it had something to do with that bloody mess on the sidewalk downtown.
She’d brought down mech-clones before. A whole shipping container full of them once. Man, that thing had burned. But every time she slagged one of those fuckers, they fought it, gears whirring, electrics sparking, machines till the end. They didn’t bleed like her target had today. They didn’t just fall down, give up.
She swallowed, but her throat was dust-dry, and it hurt.
But more painful was the stark truth: she’d just offed a whole-organic. She closed her eyes tight and swallowed past the burn.
Some of her work was illegal, stuff governments and corporations needed done but didn’t want on their transparency-touti
ng newsfeeds. Convenient, inexpensive plausible deniability with a gun: that was Mari. But she was fairly low on the food chain of freelance chaos wreakers, and the jobs she ran, while legally iffy and dangerous, generally didn’t draw law enforcement notice. Who cared about a missing vat of nanos or a stolen pallet of vanadium batteries or a slagged mech-clone? Even a pricey limited-run mech like that one today was likely to go down without too much trouble. The authorities had bigger fish to fry.
Murder of a whole-organic, though…that was a whole different thing. High stakes. Felony. Thirty to life.
Murder hadn’t been part of this contract. And even besides the legal shitstorm it brought down on her head, having done something that wrong…hurt. Hollowed her out, filled the new empty space with guilt and dark and yuck.
And memories. Wispy scraps of memory, sneaking up on her like flies when she had lived the last eight years perfectly happy without them. They were looking to swarm her. Soon. She could already feel them pressing around her, cutting off her air.
She squashed them mercilessly. Couldn’t wig out now. Not in front of him. Keep it together, girl. Just a little longer.
She pinched the com unit at her throat and pulled, disconnecting the embeds.
“You okay?” Heron didn’t look at her when he spoke, just stared straight ahead at the highway, unreadable but using that voice. The velvet, wubby, hot-toddy delicious one.
She snuck a glance at him, wondering if he got an alert or something when she removed the com. A muscle might have flexed just below his jaw. Or it might not’ve.
Mari’s control over her aim was laser precise, perfect, but Heron exerted that kind of control over everything. His job, his environment, his drones. His body. Every movement was deliberate, every scowl of his narrow mouth, every crick of those long fingers. When ink-dark hair fell over his eyebrows—and it did that a lot—he never brushed it aside. He acted like he wanted it there, untidy. His odd mix of self-possession and mystery was a cocktail Mari had a damn hard time resisting.
A year ago, when they’d first met, she wouldn’t have given a second thought to somebody so obviously post-human. Folk with that much metal in them weren’t really people—or so she’d been raised to believe. But since they’d partnered up, she’d come to rely on his immutable self-control. And his care. Yeah, that too.
“No worries. I’m just cold,” she said. “From the rain.”
He didn’t move, but the vent in the dash angled and breathed heat over her knees. Sweet-smelling heat: almond, neroli, leather. Mari rolled up her skirt a few inches and let the air lick her leggings, warming the mud. Humidity built up in the galoshes, and she kicked them off, stretching her toes under the machine heaters. Ahhhhh.
She dropped her head against the seatback and settled into the leather, but relaxation wouldn’t come. Instead, a claw of panic scratched the inside of her skull. She shoved it down. Hard. Later, darkthing. Lemme keep it together just a little bit longer, at least while he’s here. I’ll let you wreck me as much as you want when it’s just me and you. Deal?
She sucked in a breath, concentrated on how baby-butt-soft that leather was. Concentrated on Heron’s classic aquiline profile, his steady hands on the steering wheel, the sweet heat enveloping her body.
“So, partner, when are you planning on telling me how badly I just fucked up?”
Definitely a muscle twitch that time. She caught it.
“When we’re clear,” he said. “Patience.”
He dipped the car into a trash alley between two multistories. About forty feet this side of the corner, a ramp led to a parking garage, and Heron turned down it without decelerating.
Mari grabbed the oh-shit handle above her door and dug her bare toes into the plush carpet. She had to remind herself that he wasn’t depending on vision like she was. He had eye implants; he could drive blind. Theoretically.
Two levels down, he angled the car past a rusted-out delivery truck with naked wheels. Behind it yawned a hole in the wall, about eight feet square and beetle black.
The tension roiling off him eased down here, now they were hidden a bit, and she let some of that calm rub off on her. She recognized where they were headed but was kind of surprised. Originally built by the drug-smuggling cartels back when borders other than Texas existed on the continent, sin tunnels didn’t show up on maps, not even the anomalous-gravity spreads, which made them perfect transit lanes for criminals and other off-grid folk. Going deep into one made total sense now.
She just hadn’t expected a guy like Heron to know about the sin tunnels, much less ferret out the entrance to one. She’d never pegged him as hard-core into illegal shit, despite the contracts they’d worked together. Far as she knew, she was his only team for shady jobs. He seemed more like a byte jockey who’d gotten mixed up with the wrong crowd.
Mari being the wrongest possible crowd, of course. But maybe he hadn’t needed her to connect him with illegality after all. If he knew about tunnels, what other seedy underground stuff was he involved in? Suddenly, his trademark reticence and calm weren’t prissy at all. Suddenly, they were mysterious, maybe even…wicked. Bad. And Mari was just girl enough to breathe a little harder at that.
Clearly unaware of the salacious turn her thoughts had taken, Heron shoved the car into the space with centimeters to spare, and it was like going down a drain. Everything went black. Silence roared in. The car’s engine cut off, too, though they still hurtled forward.
“I can’t run a combustion engine without good ventilation, so we’re switching to the electric,” he explained. “And we’re safe, relatively speaking. So here.”
Something landed in her lap. Plastic, cool, rounded edges. Mari stuck a ragged fingernail in the seam, unfolded the vintage phone, and thumb-navved to the messages. Most folks had gone over to implanted coms, but Mari was determined to sidestep the biohacking fad for as long as possible. She was proud of her all-human self, most times, despite her flaws. Besides, she liked the heft of an old-time phone in her hand. Felt a teensy bit like a grenade.
“Well? Did they pay what we asked?” He could have peeked, but he didn’t. He just sat there not looking at her, not looking at the phone in her hand. Waiting.
She hunted for the funds transfer message…and maybe something else.
Come on.
“Nothing about our money, but…” She swiped through a stream of law enforcement bulletins featuring crackly overhead vids of her handiwork today and…shit. Now, that pic wasn’t from today.
Darkthing panic squeezed the base of her throat. “How’d they…?”
“The police knew it was you right away. I have no idea how they found out, but one must assume somebody set you up.”
Mari opened her mouth, closed it, swallowed…or tried to. “Texas?”
Their contract had been through the Texas Provisional Authority, the pseudogovernment that had been set up after secession, or at least the faction that seemed to be in charge at the moment. And “in charge” basically meant the group with the best plan for getting the nascent government’s economy out of the shitter.
These particular dudes were technocrats, folks who thought that the smartest people ought to be the ones in charge. According to Mari’s Aunt Boo, who still lived in Lampasas, the technocrats were about as useless as the last faction that had assumed control, but at least she’d had electricity to run her air-conditioning last summer, which was something of an improvement.
Plus, the TPA had won some goodwill recently by capturing a UNAN detention facility and releasing political prisoners, folks who had been rounded up as Texas sympathizers during the Austin riots and the crazy months that followed. Mari had watched vid of the prisoners coming out of their cages, haggard and squinting against the sunlight. People detained against their will held a soft spot in her chest to begin with, and she couldn’t help scanning those vids for something else besides. One face.
She didn’t find it.
When her contact had messaged her details on a job sponsored by this new technocrat-run TPA, a job that seemed right up her alley and paid well besides, she hadn’t been thinking with her cautious brain. She’d been thinking with her heart. Dad.
They’d told her they had her father, that the TPA had taken him after the Austin riots and was keeping him safe. They’d promised to tell her where he was, or at least let her speak to him.
She hadn’t been able to say no to that. No matter what they’d asked, she would have done it.
To give him his due, Heron had warned her taking this contract wasn’t a good idea. He’d said something seemed off about their initial info packet. And she’d still jumped in with both feet, dragging him along with her.
She stared hard at the pic. It was about six years old, taken back when she’d been in the habit of coloring her hair about as often as she changed her mind. She no longer worried so much about her looks. The price of fixing them was too high, both in aggravation and in money.
She couldn’t recall having this photo taken, but that wasn’t anything new. Her memories could get slinky, especially the bits from before the south Texas prison, before Nathan and the deep hole she’d had to claw out of afterward. In the image, she was smirking at the photographer.
In Austin. She could see the lake in the distance and the Pennybacker Bridge. The bridge no longer existed. Sometimes, she felt like the girl didn’t either.
She swiped a thumb over the pic, leaving a smear of damp on the screen, and navved back to the list of messages.
“Look, I’m monitoring law enforcement,” Heron told her. “It might seem bad now, but, Mari, it’s going to be all right. You will be safe.”
As if his just saying it rendered it so. Still, his voice was as dark and cozy as the tunnel blurring past the window, and Mari longed to pull it all around her like a blanket and snuggle deep. So deep she didn’t have to think.
Wanted and Wired Page 2
