She tipped her chin back and flashed a grin. The strip of nascent dawn haloed her head. “Babe, you don’t need forgiveness. Not mister awesome-in-every-way you. Haven for Chloe, hope for Kellen and his critters, beloved of that chain-smoker Adele who patches up your booboos and smells like turpentine. And, don’t forget, partner to me, best I’ve ever had. Best person I know. Nope, you don’t need forgiveness, not mine or anybody’s.”
“I’ve done things that are unforgivable.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What things?”
He’d had nightmares about saying these things aloud, and saying them now to her, the person he most admired and respected, was going to kill him. But he said them anyway. They tasted like penance. “Your father blamed the UNAN confederation for Superstorm Agatha, but he was wrong. The cloud-seeding work was mine. I thought it up, designed the foglets, programmed them. Agatha was my fault. What happened to Houston was my fault.”
She didn’t look away. Bless her, she could still look into the face of a monster. “Did you do it yourself? Release the nanos, make the storm, blame UNAN, start a war?”
“Doesn’t matter. The research was mine. I thought I was saving the world, repairing climate change. Instead, I caused unthinkable damage and…death. Murder, Mari. On a scale like nothing you have known.”
She shrugged and leaned against the clear impact glass. Mari, casual, with all of the black universe behind her. “All murder is off the scale, ’cause there isn’t a scale. It’s binary. You either did it or you didn’t. Black, white. On, off. So did you? Did you put the barrel to somebody’s head and pull the trigger?”
Breath shuddered into his lungs. It pushed against his ribs. Mari reached down and grabbed his hand. Her absolution poured through him.
“Tell me, or I’ll ask Chloe,” she said. “She was there. She said she was your original vat.”
Let go of that guilt, Adele had said. Forgive. Live.
“Heron, did you seed the clouds?”
In a whisper, he replied, “In simulation. In a mirror. And it worked. It worked. I wrote up the findings for publication but couldn’t help bragging first. To my rival.”
“You told my father?” Hissed like a hex. Spat like poison.
Yes, he’d been that stupid. He’d been so elated at the simulation results that he’d run to Dr. Vallejo’s office even before he’d submitted his paper to the cloud archive.
Damon hadn’t been thrilled. Oh, he’d offered congratulations, but Heron should have known. Should have realized that Damon Vallejo was an emperor in his little world. He couldn’t have a snot-nosed young’un wheel in and show him up. He’d never had his top billing challenged. His campus, his lab, his vid channel, his grant money.
Damon had struck back, burying the results, shutting down the vat.
Unleashing Agatha. Blaming UNAN. Starting a war.
“Unforgivable.”
“No,” she murmured. “No, it ain’t. It was a gullible, stupid, kid thing to do, but not unforgivable.”
“I don’t think anybody’s ever called me stupid before.” He laughed, but it broke.
“Aw shit, I didn’t mean…”
“But it was, querida. Telling Dr. Vallejo about my simulation was the single stupidest thing I’ve ever done. And I’ll be regretting it for the rest of my life.”
“So let me get this straight: you can forgive me for murder, but you can’t forgive yourself for some infantile hotdogging?”
“Forgiving you is easy,” he said.
She snaked her arms through his, wrapped them around him, turned her body completely away from the window. “I was about to say that same thing.”
Heron rested his cheek atop her hair.
They stood there unspeaking, only the whir of the air-reclamation system intruding. And then she trembled. God, was she crying? Heron drew back and looked down.
Fucking hell. Mari wasn’t crying. She was laughing.
“Querida?”
“It just occurred to me: my dad ruined your research, kept you from publishing, so you stole his gal. You snatched the queen right out of Austin.” She cackled like a hyena.
“I so did.” He hadn’t simplified his actions down to those words before, but in essence, she was right.
She laughed louder, harder, so hard at one point, she snorted. “Too fucking awesome, babe. Man, I love…” Her voice blew out like a candle, that fast to silence, then, “It. I love it.”
She looked up in his arms when she said that last word, and every gear in Heron stopped. Just creaked to a halt, waiting. Wishing. He wanted to be her it.
But she didn’t clarify, and Heron breathed deliberately. He dropped a kiss atop her hair, avoiding the heat of her skin.
Avoiding a lot of things. He knew he couldn’t keep changing the subject forever. He needed to let her know all his secrets. Even that one. But not tonight. Tomorrow was a different beast, but tonight, he wanted, needed to comfort her. To make her feel safe.
“Come on, querida. There’s something on the station I really want you to see.”
• • •
On the queen’s level, the chambers formed a circle, so she and Heron had to duck back into that freaky harness control room and then on through a hatch on the far side. The queen was so deep into whatever it was she was doing that she didn’t notice them. Or maybe she did, but she didn’t say anything. They slunk through, waggling eyebrows and being stealthy as a pair of grade-schoolers trying to skive off class.
But in the far room, a full corridor beyond the queen’s control room, they encountered a curtain barrier, and quiet smothered them. Solemnity. Heron removed his shoes and nodded for Mari to go ahead of him. She toed off her boots and ducked past the curtain into the chamber.
What a chamber. Made of pure dreams.
As with much of the station except for the queen’s control capsule, the walls here were covered with free-fae designs. These, however, weren’t the typical blue. They were autumn brown, mimosa orange, a collage of leaves and sunlight, shifting only as the breeze rustled them.
Yes, a breeze. On a space station. How’d that even happen?
Late evening’s breath eddied through the soup of humidity, mixing up smells: damp leaves, summer rain, wet critter fur. Mossy red brick stairs led upward, and Mari mounted them without even having to think about it. Her mind had no memory of this place, but apparently, her instincts, her muscles did. Weird.
She was supposed to climb.
She knew this vista but vaguely, like she’d seen it on a postcard. But with each step, more bits of information downloaded and revealed the scene. She could lay films of sensation over the picture: the smell and the shape of the leaves and the pattern of sunlight peeking through and minting her skin like fresh coin. Cicadas clicked, and birds squawked their ownership of the trees.
She blinked through the first glitter of fireflies hovering on the edges of her steps.
Mount Bonnell. Austin. The words materialized in her mind like subtitles on a vid.
Home.
There were no handrails here, no help in climbing, but the steps were broad and sloped in, so that a body felt it was making progress, never slipping back or likely to fall. One hundred two steps, safe and always heading upward.
She counted them, knocking each footfall against the door of memory, but nobody answered. All her sensory inputs were coming from outside, from the hologram, not from her memories. Which was just wrong. She ought to know this place better. She’d spent a lot of time here in college, damn it. So weird that her postcard memories didn’t smell like this, though, like Carolina jasmine and honeysuckle. They smelled like gunpowder.
But wait. That was another memory, a whoa-different one. Still Austin, but…it fell open like an old book. She breathed the dust from its pages.
Dad had come to her dorm in the middle of the nig
ht, told her that Austin was burning and she needed to get away. Not to Aunt Boo’s. He gave her money and black-Sharpie’d a Dallas address on her forearm. She recalled these things like lines from a nursery song: tinny and distant and so, so blurry. Had she gone to that address? Had she washed the permanent ink off her skin, or had it just faded over time?
So hard to remember. So hard. But one thing stayed clear: Dad had bothered to warn her. He must have loved her. Right?
She struggled to reconcile that blurry-edged memory, her last one of him, with all the other stuff she knew about him now. With what he’d done to Heron, to Houston.
Which version of Dad was the true one?
She didn’t want to answer that question.
By the time she reached the top of the brick stairs, her vision swam. She stared out over the precipice at the top, shielded from sunset by the wood-slatted limestone shelter.
Heron came up the stairs but didn’t join her on the edge. He hesitated.
He didn’t need to. Mari blinked the wetness from her eyes.
She reached a hand back and sighed when at last he took it, came up to stand behind her, resting their tangled hands on her shoulder. Something young and sad detached from her chest and lit out over the cliff’s edge. She watched it go.
A sting on her wrist mimicked late-summer mosquitoes. Perfectionist nanos, getting their hologram right, not idealizing. They must not realize how painful truth could be.
“Did you do this, or did she?” She the queen. Of course. You are made of bad memories.
“I built it, at her request. She remembers Austin fondly, despite what had to have been a difficult life there. This setting is just a program, a simulation. She hires free-fae projectionists to run it from time to time, but…you know it doesn’t look like this anymore, right?”
No, it wouldn’t. Austin was a big scar on the landscape now, after the orbital bombardment. You could even see the bleak smudge of it from space. Nothing from Mari’s childhood had survived intact. Not even her memories.
“This is what you’re talking about when you say you mirror stuff for our jobs? Impressive hobby. I mean, when you’re not smuggling shit or hiding fae or watching my ass make trouble.”
“I’m always watching your ass.”
Mari bit the grin off her bottom lip. “Stalker.”
“Tease.” He nuzzled his chin against her hair. Dang, he was tall. His arms came around her, but hesitantly, like he wasn’t sure they’d be welcome. “I thought Mount Bonnell might make you feel safe, feel home. Thought you might need that after the day you’ve had. But it isn’t real, querida. It’s all fae. Nanos. Tech.” He didn’t say it, but he might as well have: tech like him.
He didn’t move away, didn’t stop holding her, but his posture stayed stiff. Was it shame that made him keep his distance? Mari turned in his arms, away from the precipice and the sunset-bathed lake below. She reached up, between them, folding her hands over his chest.
“No, it is real. And you are. You’re the realest thing in my whole world. And the best.”
A breeze off the lake picked up strands of her hair and painted Heron’s chest with them. He moved one hand to smooth her hair back, and she caught that hand, pressed a hot kiss into his scarred palm. His mouth moved, but no words came out. Didn’t mean Mari couldn’t hear. “Likewise.”
He leaned down and laid his mouth to hers, and the sweetness of that kiss near melted her. She’d have thought, after all her deliciously pornographic fantasies starring him and all that verbal tango earlier, that this, their chance at last to drink their fill of each other, would be torrid.
Instead, yeah, heat simmered to lust and begged for the next step, but that urgency was overlaid with something far richer. Made her want to cry. Made her want to shout and dance, to hold on to him as tight as she could and leap off that cliff. Made her want to pet him to sleep and sing him lullabies. Made her want to dig her fingers in deep and never let go.
He moved his mouth, pressed a hot, sad kiss to her forehead.
Then he took a step away from her.
Wait. He what?
• • •
This night wasn’t going according to plan. It was going according to fantasy. Sordid, delicious fantasy. And Heron was very, very tempted to let it keep on in that direction. What if, just once, he did what he wanted instead of what he ought? Do it, do eeeet, his brain insisted. Let her.
But it wouldn’t be just once, would it? He’d let his id control him before. After Austin, after he’d lost his career and dreams and most of his humanity, he’d ditched his lizard brain and went straight neo cortex, said fuck it to conscience or consequences. Results had not been catastrophic, not like Superstorm Agatha, but they hadn’t been pretty. While his wrecked body had been rebuilding itself, his mind had spent all day every day in the cloud, fucking with things he had no business even knowing about. He’d created online identities, altered financial forecasts, fixed lotteries, rerouted airliners. For two years, he existed on the edge of disaster, like a serial killer who wants to get caught just to make the crazy stop. And then out of the blue one day, the queen called him with a set of location coordinates and a grainy pic of Mari in a South Texas prison. No explanation.
He hadn’t needed one. From that day, Mari had become his purpose and salvation. He wasn’t going back to throwing himself at fences and hoping one would break. Controlling his baser urges had worked out well for both of them for how many years now? Six? And even tonight, with all his command systems on the fritz and this damned transmission spawning every few seconds, he could keep his shit together.
For her. Because God, yes, he wanted her, but she deserved the best of him, or better than him. She was a precious thing. He would care for her as if she were the last bottle of single-malt Yamazaki. He would.
“So.” Heron cleared his throat and blinked, resetting switches. “I’ve ordered in food. Star rise is in about half an hour, and right there behind the lake is a window. We can watch it and, um, talk.”
Those words sounded silly, even to his own ears. After a lead-up like this, with the simulated sunset, the deliberate breeze, and the banter and the touches he hadn’t been able to resist, she would be expecting romance and heartfelt protestations. Or, at the very least, torrid sex.
Which was inadvisable.
Whatever those mercenaries had implanted in his skull was too much for his system to handle. Transmissions were rolling out one on the heels of the last with no pause between, requisitioning all of his resources. He could barely string sentences together, for fuck’s sake. He wasn’t in a position to take things slow, to make this right.
And at the same blisteringly frustrating time, he couldn’t keep his hands off her either. He looked down at those hands, looked at them hard. The damned things stayed locked with hers. Touching. Promising.
He’d kept his infatuation with Mari secret for years, had locked it down tight these last few months of working side-by-side. But right now, there was no way he could control…anything, really. Pulse, breath control, triage of all the input that came through any of his various machine-heightened senses—all of that was slag at this point. And if he gave in, if he let this scene play out the way his imagination insisted it must, he’d come across as an ingénue, a grade-schooler receiving his first playground kiss.
He’d be at her mercy.
Mari hadn’t let go of his hands. She grinned up at him, roiling her flirt through the air between them. “Relax? On these nerves? Partner, I got seven thousand things I’m wantin’ to do with you tonight, and not one involves relaxing.”
He wasn’t proof against this woman. So far from it. And with his systems going dark one after another, with most of his attention focused on basic compensating, just trying to stay alive and coherent, he couldn’t do much more than look at her, a kid enthralled by a Christmas catalog. He let out a short breath. “
I…can’t.”
Run. She ought to be running now. Or laughing. Sighing? About the last thing he expected was for her to keep gazing straight at him, flaying him layer by layer with hot-whiskey eyes. She stroked a finger over his bare knuckles. “Well, we already talked about the guilt, got that sorted. So I’m guessing something else is going on. Ain’t it always? Tell me.”
Her voice was made of temptation.
Heron pressed his lips flatter before he spoke, out loud and in his most uptight, professory tone. “Well, for one thing, physically, I’m hampered by this transmission, this virus. I appropriated voluntary control of most of my autonomic systems some time ago, but…”
“The big words do turn me on, but I flunked out sophomore year. You want me to follow this, it’s gotta be in English. Or Spanish, if you’d rather. Just not Genius.”
He rubbed his thumb over her hand and clenched his teeth against the surge of input. Fuck, he’d forgotten about the sense-tips. They sucked in more than data. His nerves lit with awareness of her. “You would have gone back and finished your degrees if your world hadn’t exploded. Don’t sell yourself short.”
She shot him that pinched-lips-drawn-to-the-side sarcastic look. “Start over. I’ll try to follow.”
He knew from experience that she’d keep at this nut, thumping it, gnawing it until it cracked. He’d rather give a little than crack completely. “Okay. You know how most people don’t have to think in order to breathe? They just do it? Well, for me, those things require deliberate will.”
A hitch on just one side of her mouth warned him that she was thinking something salacious. “So you were deliberately hard for me in the car?”
But didn’t warn him quite enough. Her voice quicksilvered through his body, tripping switches. He swallowed. “No.”
“No? You didn’t really want—”
Oh, holy goat fuck. Heron’s vision pixilated on the edges, and before he could stop himself, he leaned down and shut her up.
With a kiss.
Wanted and Wired Page 16
