Wanted and Wired

by Vivien Jackson

  “The chatter on the cloud is that we just disappeared, and now the various departments are blaming each other. Plus, I have red herring drones up all over. Tracking those things should occupy the authorities until our backup extraction team arrives.”

  She should have known he’d have a contingency plan, even for a major fuckup like this. “How long have we got?”

  He made a sound that might have been a groan, only lots shorter and kind of strangled. “Two hours.”

  Two hours. In a tunnel. Mari slid a glance over to the driver’s seat. In the meager light of the phone, she could make out his profile. He wasn’t looking at her. Normally she’d be thinking ten thousand things she could do to him in two hours in the dark. And to be honest, even with death on her heels and panic in her gut, she could have gotten up for a few of those things.

  “So we just hunker down for a bit? I can do that.” But she couldn’t, and she knew it. Her pulse thudded like a lit grenade chain behind her ribs. She imagined sirens beneath the faint vibration of the electric engine. Her body hummed.

  And then Heron looked at her. She had no idea how he managed it, but despite the too-precise posture and carefully articulated movement, when that man turned the full force of his attention on her, the humming stopped. The guilt stopped. Time itself stopped. All that pause filled up with warmth.

  The blue light of the LED outlined the sharp angles of his face, severity easing to care as she watched. Because of her? Was he more human when he looked at her, or was she just seeing it more clearly?

  He pulled the phone from her nerveless hand. His gloves were butter soft and warm, cradling her cold knuckles.

  She bit the inside of her cheek, then let it slide out from between her teeth. “I should tell you some stuff about me,” she said. “I got this… I need to… Oh lord, this is hard to say. Look, it’s hard enough for me to come off a job in any case, but this job was such a fuckup, and it’s so much worse, and I might…”

  “Wig out?” He smiled.

  He looked different when he smiled, less intimidating, less machine. Of course, Mari, being the girl she was, only wanted to kiss that mouth more. She wondered if she ought to warn him what his smiling did to her.

  “Heh. Yeah. What I really need right now is sleep, to force myself to step down, y’know?” And also to keep my grabby hands off your bod when clearly you have no interest in hitting this. “You don’t happen to have an injector of happiness you’re willing to share?”

  He opened his mouth, and she waited for the reprimand, but he closed it again after a moment. “Not exactly, but I can help you rest. I just didn’t want to alter the air mix in here without your permission.”

  “Go right on ahead.” Now, how come she could trust him to put her down, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell him about that damned contract? Guilt was sure to kill her if the feds didn’t get her first.

  The heaters eased up, not so hot on her toes, but the source of warmth shifted, radiated through the seat instead. It infused her, comforted her. The sweetness in the air deepened, putting her in mind of hot chocolate. Winter cedar. Fires at her Aunt Boo’s hunting camp, back when she was a kid.

  Her hand dropped to the side of the seat in search of controls. She tipped back even before she pressed the button. A yawn clawed its way up from her throat, and she let it out.

  Her eyelids were way too heavy to prop open. All the panic and pressure of this day sloughed off, washed away by whatever he’d cooked up in the car’s environmental controls. All that bad stuff would come back painful, sure, but right now, she was content to let it slip away.

  “Rest, querida. I’ve got you,” he might have said. But Mari wouldn’t put hard money on that.

  • • •

  When the car stopped, she didn’t open her eyes right away. Metal scraped—Heron disconnecting from his rig console, switching to mobile. His gloved hand brushed her hair. Tentatively. She would’ve missed it if she hadn’t been waiting for that touch. She shifted, drawing his thumb to her ear. She’d purr like a kitten if it’d keep him petting her.

  “Hey? You awake? We’re, uh, home.” He moved, and she missed the weight of his hand even before she opened her eyes. He got out of the car on his side and then came around to hers.

  Mari shook the chemically induced sleep off. After the machine warmth inside, the dank chill of an underground parking garage slapped her awake in a hurry, and her calf muscles contracted against the cold. Her rain boots waited on the floorboard, but when she thought about shoving her feet in there, into the cool rubber and the scuff of blisters, she just couldn’t.

  Weird how she could endure discomfort for long stretches when she was working, but the moment the job was done, boom, she hauled in every shred of comfort she could get her hands on and hugged it close. Putting the galoshes on right now would be a step back, back into the shooter’s blind, back into the squeeze. Back into the darkthing spiral of guilt, horror, and oh-God-what-had-she-done.

  Screw that. The boots were staying. Snagging her duffel from the floorboard, she climbed out of the car barefoot.

  Wobbled. Heron set a hand beneath her elbow, and once she was steady, that hand slid down to her wrist. Mari looked up at him, blinking against the smoky, off-code halogens.

  Lace scraps of a dream caught on the edges of her brain, and she had an overpowering need to tell him…something. He needed to know it. Whatever it was. But it floated off, and realization moved in like a loud neighbor.

  She was awake and…where at, exactly? They hadn’t stopped in a generic parking garage as she’d first assumed. This underground was littered with bulk storage containers, arranged like a labyrinth, but she could make out a bright sign at the far end, self-illuminated deco-style letters spelling out the structure’s name: Pentarc Hyperstructure.

  If Heron was going for anonymity, he’d kind of failed bringing her here.

  Pentarc was the inverse of the sin tunnels: everybody knew about it. When somebody mentioned it, most folks shrugged their shoulders and had something pithy to say about megacorps and their big fat egos.

  About a decade ago, give or take, a handful of West Coast megacorp builders had gotten together and, with a whole bunch of public grant money, constructed this gigantic, looming monstrosity of an arcology, a high-density, self-sustaining mini city. It was supposed to be home, school, work, shopping, entertainment, the whole shebang for forty-thousand-plus souls, complete with the most advanced automation and haptic remote reality, so no one would ever have to leave. Advertisements promised it would rekindle a sense of community, relieve stresses on the coastal power grid, save millions in unnecessary transportation.

  But then Black November hit, and most average folks could barely afford to rent a sleeping bag in a FEMA tent. Leasing posh digs here had been unthinkable. And the massive almost-complete structure had been closed even before it opened.

  Mari had sort of assumed it was abandoned like most superstructures these days, a shell too expensive to light and heat and cool. But clearly, it wasn’t abandoned. The homey smells of axle grease and burnt tortilla indicated somebody at least lived here. Heron?

  He twined his gloved fingers with hers and squeezed, drawing her away from the side of the car so the wing-like door could whisper shut. He didn’t break the clasp of their hands, though, not even after locking the car. Not even when connection was completely unnecessary.

  She sucked in her bottom lip to keep from saying something boneheadedly obvious like, Hey, you’re holding my hand. Because then he’d stop, and she so didn’t want him to.

  Comfort, right? She was hoarding that stuff. And he was made of it.

  Still some distance away, he gestured with his free hand toward an unmarked metal door—service entrance? Inside, a heavy lock rolled over.

  He tugged, luring her toward the door. “This way.”

  Chapter 2

&n
bsp; He wished she hadn’t taken off her wellies. And he wished he didn’t care that her bare feet were quiet as kitten paws on the concrete—vulnerable, small enough to fit in his hands. Or that they peeked at him from under her skirt.

  Distracting.

  He was used to being distracted by his partner, though. He’d set up a whole partition in his neural just for watching her, thinking about her. Every time his thoughts got a little too graphic, he could tuck them all behind that partition, regulate the surface temperature of his skin, and slow his heart rate.

  Redirect blood flow from his groin.

  These simple processes were necessary when Mari was close. Holding his hand. Yawning and rubbing her eyes with the back of her wrist and flashing bare toes every time she took a step.

  He couldn’t take her up via the lifts in the center of the spire. Too many sense ports there would identify him, and probably her as well. If the authorities polled the Pentarc thereafter, they’d find Mari right away. He knew several other ways into the structure, of course, but any of those routes would reveal things to Mari. Things about him.

  He sucked in a breath. Well, he’d brought her here, hadn’t he? If he couldn’t handle a few questions, he should have gone elsewhere.

  The unmarked service entrance gave way to an HVAC control room. He led her over to a vertical vent and reached up inside it until he could feel the first of the welded-on ribs. A makeshift ladder.

  “Here.” He took her hand and placed it on the first rung. “Climb up.”

  She shot him a look as she wiggled past him, trailing hints of government-issue soap, petrichor, and WD-40. No doubt the sexiest combination of smells on the planet.

  He mounted the ladder behind her, not even bothering to pretend he wasn’t ogling her ass. She couldn’t see him anyway. He could indulge, this once.

  “You gonna tell me where we’re going, or is it a big secret?” Her voice echoed in the narrow space, curled around him.

  He blinked, realized that the disc of light from the HVAC room was getting smaller and smaller below them, and switched the tiny hornlike augments at either side of his forehead to extrude light rather than his usual holoprojected heads-up display. The implants themselves were too small to throw much light, and to make them useful at all as a torch lighting the way ahead, he would have to look past her gorgeous behind rather than directly at it. Oh well. The ogle had been good while it lasted. He let it go without too much fuss. This wasn’t the first time he’d deliberately tucked away his feelings for her. It wouldn’t be the last.

  “Not secret. Pentarc is a closed system, off the cloud. We should be safe here. I have a unit on eleven,” he said.

  “We’re climbing ladders for ten floors? Ugh.”

  “Something wrong with your stamina?”

  She paused, one foot on the bar above his face, the other already on the next step. He could see directly up her floofy pink skirt. He’d never at the same time cursed and blessed combat leggings so desperately.

  “Partner, I am very loose right now,” she flung down at him, “job-high and humming with whatever was in your car’s ventilation. You keep teasing like that, you just might have to fight me off.”

  Briefly, he entertained the idea of not. Not fighting her off. Letting her lay him on a bed somewhere and use him as her postjob catharsis. He knew she did that, typically, with men, though she never had with him. Again, both a curse and a blessing. Intimacy with Mari was only the most tantalizing and dangerous fantasy he could imagine. Dangerous because it would lay bare certain secrets he had no wish to share. And tantalizing because, well, yeah. Always that.

  “Point taken.” Deep breath. “But in answer to your question, the ladder’s only for one more floor. We have ramps and more graded steps after. Patience.”

  “You say that a lot,” she grumped.

  Even more frequently to himself.

  “You never answered my question before, you know,” she said.

  “What question do you mean?”

  Something like a tsk floated down, but her ascent remained steady. “You were going to tell me exactly how much I just fucked up.”

  “We, querida. We fucked up. We’re a team, remember?”

  “Duh. Now, how bad?”

  He swallowed, grasping the rungs maybe a bit too tightly. His hands felt humid inside the driving gloves. “You saw the law enforcement bulletins. Murder, whole-organic.”

  Her footing faltered. He caught a breath in echo, but she didn’t say anything.

  “But you also received some message from Texas, if I am correct,” he went on, “so at least you should have gotten the payout you were expecting.” He modulated his voice just so, excising the censure from it. Like he hadn’t accused her of betraying their partnership. Like he wasn’t on fire with a toxic mix of love and lust and anger. Like he had zero emotional investment in her reaction. Sometimes the extent of his physiomechanical control surprised even him.

  She stopped climbing. “Nope, not a whisper of that four point two…”

  Oh well. Said physiomechanical control was utter bullshit anyhow. “Stop it, Mari. We both know that’s not the price you negotiated.”

  She turned, looked down at him. In the brilliance of his light augments, her face shone like wet metal. Her eyes were huge. “You know?”

  “Yes.” No modulator on the planet could disguise his tone this time, and he wouldn’t have wanted it to. If she couldn’t hear the forgiveness there, the understanding and the fear, she didn’t know him at all. Which, after all their time together and all he’d done for her behind the scenes, would cut pretty deep. “What I don’t comprehend is why. Why would you risk dealing with Texas after what happened on your last job for them, in Corpus Christi?”

  He searched her face for clues.

  She’d taken the Corpus contract before they’d started working together, and she’d only mentioned it to him a couple of times and in a deliberately offhand manner. How much of that job did she remember? He had complete files, of course, but he didn’t want to tell her anything that would spark memories she’d rather not walk through. She couldn’t go forever without talking about it, though. Human psyches weren’t meant to suppress like that.

  Or maybe she just didn’t want to talk about it with him.

  He waited the space of two heartbeats, hoping.

  She didn’t say anything else. Her mouth formed an oval, and her brows ticked up in the center, and after a moment, she tucked her bottom lip between her teeth and turned, resuming the climb.

  He carefully removed the sharp emotional hook in his chest. Patience. She’ll get used to me. She’ll trust me, and then we’ll talk through all of it. Like friends. Just have to give her time.

  But how much time did they have, after what they’d just done? The worst-case scenario—which he always sketched out and planned for, even while he fought against it—saw them both captured and imprisoned without ever unraveling all the history and tension that had balled up in angry knots between them.

  He had to prevent that scenario, keep her physically safe. Focus on the goal. And after, well, if he did his job well, they’d have plenty of time to sort the rest of it.

  Two floors up from HVAC, he focused his light augments on the manual latch, and Mari popped a trapdoor open. He let her go through first. No dangers in here. Not of the physical kind, at any rate. But he still held his breath as he came into the room behind her.

  He replaced the trapdoor, then looked around. A couple of free-fae lights illuminated a far corner, but most of the room was lit just by him. He boosted power so Mari could see better, and then he stood stiffly and waited for her reaction.

  Crates were stacked floor to ceiling, some labeled and others open and emptied. Right next to her was a pallet of boxed heirloom seeds. A horticulturist had painstakingly drawn sketches of the mature plants onto the plastic bo
xes and noted the source county.

  She’d recognize some of those counties. He waited for it.

  But Mari didn’t say anything. She sniffed like she was about to sneeze, swiped the back of her hand against her nose, and then turned back to him. “Where to now?”

  “Mari?” he nudged.

  She blazed a look at him, fierce, intense. “Okay, yes, I negotiated for info on my dad. Of-fucking-course I did. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but you would have argued against taking the contract. You would have told me it was a trap.”

  “I did tell you it was a trap.”

  She huffed out a breath. “Well, duh. But the TPA has him, Heron. They have my dad.”

  She wasn’t telling him anything new. He waited some more.

  Her eyes glittered in the high-contrast light. “He’s an ass, I know. Everybody knows. And no, we don’t much like each other. He never made a secret of choosing his…his work over me, but damn it, he’s family. Mine. My own. What kind of daughter would I be if I didn’t try and save him?”

  He gazed into the face of pure loyalty, and something lurched inside him. Fierce Mari, courageous Mari, vulnerable Mari: these facets he knew. He hadn’t seen her loyalty on display like this before. Granted, she had precious few people in her life deserving of such care.

  All the gods knew he didn’t deserve it. But if she could forgive the father who’d scandalized the scientific community with his lack of concern for unintended consequences, who had abandoned Mari not once but often and cruelly, perhaps she could forgive Heron his sins. Maybe? He’d never let himself have that hope before. Not the least because he wasn’t anywhere close to forgiving himself.

  “You are a good daughter,” he allowed at last. “Too good.”

  But that didn’t dry the sheen from her eyes. “And a shitty partner,” she said in a small voice. “I should have told you.”

  His fingers flexed. He longed to touch her, but to reassure her…or himself?

  “Probably,” he forced past the constriction in his throat. “Now, if you’ve no other questions…”