Chloe cocked her head to the side, eerily like Heron did sometimes when he was getting a lot of input. After a heartbeat, Chloe’s eyes focused again. She leaned over Mari. “I don’t know. I had him back before we got to you on the plane, but I can’t find him now. Must have lost him for a sec. Be still, Mari. This will pinch.”
Must have lost him. No, no. Her head roiled. She was gonna horf.
“What do you mean, can’t find him? Where the fuck is he? And what do you mean pinch? What’s gonna pinch?”
But Chloe dispersed, right there as Mari watched. Her nanobits spread out into a mist, blanketing the surface of Mari’s body. Cool, soft. A dust of rain just beneath her clothes. Settling against her skin. Pushing soft as kisses. And then…merging through it.
Hot, that merge.
Mari screamed.
Live fire stabbed through every pore. She’d had a bikini wax once, and she could safely say that this was full body and a thousand times worse. Maybe a million. Felt like her skin had been flayed off, rubbed with a wire brush, and slapped back on raw, all in the space of a heartbeat.
But afterward, when the next heartbeat thundered in, all that pain receded. Instantly. Just like that. Was the darndest thing.
“Okeydokey. I’ve just implanted myself subdermally,” Chloe told her, only now, Mari didn’t just hear that voice in her ear—she felt it all over, even though she couldn’t see a physical manifestation. “I’m in the process of repairing the tissue in your leg and those scratches on your back. Try not to move too much, ’k?”
The pain in Mari’s leg had gone away. The other owie had been so vicious that she hadn’t noticed the missing leg twinge right off. But Chloe was right. Mari didn’t feel any pain at all. Instead, she had this too-sweet sensation on the outside of her thigh, exactly the way her gums had felt when she was seven and ate a whole bag of stale Peeps in one sitting. “This is so freaky. But I need you to tell me about Heron, Chloe. What do you mean you lost him? You mean you lost him?”
“Lost does not mean dead, silly. I just can’t find him in the cloud. I mean, he’s there, but sort of, um, all over the place. Now hold still. You wiggle.”
Mari took a couple of deep breaths, but they didn’t do any good. The whole world still felt wonky, and she was falling off.
Viktor moved in closer. He grabbed her left hand and held it between his giant meaty paws. Mari was conscious enough to be grateful for the gesture, even though what she really wanted was to crawl inside herself, or better yet, inside Heron’s embrace, and sit tight until the crazy stopped.
But she couldn’t. Because he was “all over the place.” Immaterial. Dispersed. Lost. That had been his fear about logging in. That he would be lost in the cloud. What did it even mean? And how could she get him back?
“Look, Chloe, this medical stuff is not your programming, and it feels really complicated. Why don’t you just stabilize things and get me to Heron?”
“No, waiting is definitely not in my programming. According to my emergency medical program, I need to get you fixed now, or it won’t be worth doing. And also, this is probably a very bad time to say so, but I am feeling your skin right now, and it’s just brilliant. I—mmmm—want to rub you all over with something semiviscid, maybe buttercream frosting.”
Well, that had come out of nowhere. However, it didn’t strike Mari as wholly strange. Truth be told, she was used to thinking dirty thoughts at the absolute wrong moment, usually when she was thick in the middle of a gunfight or some other tense situation.
Back in the Pentarc, for instance, she’d been plenty worried about Heron and the feds and her own unexpected capacity for murder, and the first thing she’d thought of was how intensely she wanted to fuck him in the vestibule of Mrs. Weathering’s living unit. As if all those other bad things would just wait till she got that sizzle between her legs sorted out.
Was that ability to disconnect, to channel sex right on the end of impending death, another indication that Mari was not human? After all, Chloe seemed to have a similar context problem, and she was pretty much the definition of nonhuman.
Mari shook her head, trying to dislodge the wild supposings. She didn’t want to follow the logic. She didn’t want it to be true.
But would it really be so bad to be a machine? She was already in love with one, after all.
“Wiggling again.”
Mari realized that she could feel her face again. She opened her eyes and wet her lips. She couldn’t move much, else Chloe was like to crack the whip on her again, but she glanced down without shifting her head.
Her skin burbled. For a second there, she had one of those alien-birth moments: the surface of her thigh shifted, bulged, and the wound gaped open. The bullet oozed out.
Weird-looking thing, that bullet. Mari’d fired acres of the little suckers, crafted still others on hired lathes, but she’d never yet yanked one out of a body after it’d done its work. Looked smashed, sideways, ruined, and when it rolled down the side of her leg, it left a squiggle of blood, just like a snail on Aunt Boo’s porch. Only uglier. It wet-plinked on the deck.
Mari swallowed a couple of times, just to make sure nothing came out her throat. Took her a good minute before she was able to get her thoughts together.
“All righty. Good news. I think I have you stabilized now, and I’m on my way out. I don’t think it will pinch as much as embed, but you might want to brace yourself. Garrett just spun up the engines over on our plane, so we can probably leave as soon as we’re all on board. Hang on.” Chloe’s voice moved along the inside of her skull—weird, but not altogether uncomfortable. It also echoed in her throat and, oddly, in her chest.
Just like a built-in com.
Lightbulbs went off all over Mari’s head. “Hey, Chloe, wait a sec.”
“For what?”
“Make you a deal,” Mari said to absolutely no one, because, well, Chloe was embedded in her skin, which kind of precluded a face-to-face. “You verify that transmission is dead, and let me do one little thing while you’re here in my body, and I’ll give you a full buffet of tactile sensation after.”
“Bathe in pudding?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Sure thing, I can verify. Transmission is cut. Fini, kaput. Heron nixed it right away, as soon as he plugged into the cloud. So I kind of just tricked you. But it’s all to a good end, right? We’re still on for the pudding?”
Heron ended it. Despite her plan for saving the day, for saving him, she had ended up accomplishing a big old wad of nothing. She didn’t even know who Dad was working for, and he was still out there, somewhere, up to no good.
Only, the crazy part of that realization was…she was glad. Not thrilled that Dad was the same old asshole he’d always been, but even if he hadn’t changed, he was Dad. Hers. And now she knew he was alive and in reasonably good shape. She could let it go, her quest. She could stop worrying about him so much.
She was free.
“Yeah, we’re still on for pudding. So far. Now the other thing.” Poor Viktor probably thought she was delusional, talking out loud to nobody, but Mari didn’t care.
She thought of the com rig in Nathan’s glove compartment, and the newer one under her skin, sliding up against Chloe. What were those com rigs anyhow, other than interpreters of the movement of her voice box and muscles? She wondered how big a boost she could get from Chloe.
“Chloe, I need you to access maker design on com extenders.”
“But why…?”
“Please.”
A hesitation, and then, “All riiiiight. Done.”
“Overlay that on your own communications programming.” She waited for confirmation. Nonverbal this time, just an urge to nod her head. “Now, transmit to the cloud exactly what I say.”
“Uh…this really isn’t my programming.”
“I know. You’re doing fine.”
Mari closed her eyes, made her thoughts crystal clear, just like she had in the Pentarc. Pushed them out into the air. Into the cloud. Hey, partner. Can you hear me?
Nothing.
She recited the only line she could remember from that Mexican poem.
Again, nothing.
Moisture beaded on her skin, chilled there. She was beginning to get desperate.
She didn’t know her way around the cloud, didn’t know tech stuff for shit, but she steadily constructed an image of it in her mind—fractal and hexagonal and shredded and siphoned and gray and scary and shatter—she thought real hard about wearing a bikini in Miami, about the cool rubber deck planking under her feet on Heron’s plane, about the mosquitoes biting on Mount Bonnell, and the slide of warm skin on its like, raw and unsteady and needing and connected.
Connected.
Hear me, Heron. I know you’re out there. I know you’re everywhere. But I need you here. With me.
Stretching into this weird construct of the cloud in her mind, she imagined old vids of that children’s game, tetherball. Ship anchors. Rainbow bungees. Those harnesses nannies put on toddlers when they took them out in crowds. Reins on horses, strings on kites, cords on vintage vibrators.
I know there’s a lot out there to see, but please find me.
Her head hurt, her pulse throbbed in every muscle of her body, a tick-tock of unbearable pain. Except, not unbearable. She’d bear it, goddammit. She’d bear anything if it’d get him back, hold him here.
But…what if he was hearing her, and he just didn’t want to come back?
What if what he really wanted was the coed in the red dress, the whole-organic girl he’d met at that faculty party?
What if he had heard all that on Enchanted Rock, and now he knew what she really was?
She slumped against the deck metal. Good God, who was she kidding? All the power in the universe, and he’d back out of that for her? For a cheap jobber off-label rebuild? One who couldn’t even drive a car no less fly a plane or resolve algorithms for fucking climate change. Just plain ol’ Mari.
A sob wormed its way up her throat. Sounded like Chloe, but it was her. Just her. Hot tears pushed against her eyeballs, leaked out the sides.
She needed touch, desperately enough that she realized she was clasping her own hands over her belly. Hard. Was digging her fingernails into them.
Knuckles in a figure eight.
Infinite.
“Fuck it. You stay there if you want, but I ain’t leaving you. Not ever,” she said out loud, a last swagger.
Please.
And then, from very far away, “Care to put that in a contract, querida?”
Heron.
And there he was, attaching himself to her—she could feel it, like a hook in her chest. Hurt like the dickens, but it also made her feel mighty. Steady. Brave. Complete.
Connected.
“Jesus, that hurts,” Chloe observed.
“Mari? It hurts? What hurts?” Heron, here, in her head, in her body, in her thoughts. Right where he belonged.
She soaked up his concern like socks on a wet floor. “Oh, never mind. That’s Chloe. She’s inside my body right now, talking to me while I’m talking to you. Which has got to be freaky looking to Viktor and technically might be some sort of kinky ménage thing, but you’re okay, Heron? Now that the transmission is kaput, you’re okay?”
“I am here. Waiting on you. As usual.”
Mari stifled her laughter. Wouldn’t want Chloe to worry about the wiggles now. “Oh, that’s good. You just stay with me.”
“For as long as you want, querida.”
And wasn’t that just fine.
• • •
She drowsed in the belly of that chopper for a long spell while Chloe mended her up good and told her all that had happened. Heron had been wild when he’d gotten his brain back in his body and woken up, apparently, mad as a wet hen at the fact that she’d run off down to Texas, and even more when he figured out she’d been shot. He’d sent in every rescue team he could think of, including Viktor, the giant Viking-looking dude with the enviable arsenal.
“Chloe’s telling me that you came to save my ass,” Mari said to him now. “Thanks.”
Viktor nodded. “You are welcome. Guarding you is easier than most jobs. You take care of yourself, mostly. I am sorry for the rock shrapnel. None of my bullets hit you, but I cannot say the same for the rock.”
“What about Da…Nathan?”
“Sorry for him, too.”
Mari almost let herself feel a twinge of grief, but then she caught sight of Viktor’s face. He was grinning. He looked so much more human when he smiled, so much less like a brute. Appearances, deceiving and all.
“He’s okay, then?”
“Sedated, but otherwise unharmed. I am guessing Dr. Farad will have something to say to him.”
“We have a detention at the Pentarc,” Heron said into her head. “I plan to try it out on your cowboy.”
“Don’t go too hard on him,” she said. “He was being marionetted at the time. Oh, hey, did I tell you I found my dad? I mean, he was hacked into Nathan’s brain, so I didn’t actually see him, but I’m pretty sure it was good ol’ sack-of-crazy Dad.”
“You do realize you’re implying that Damon Vallejo was also the marionette at the Pentarc, the one who had those mercs implant a nanovirus in my head.” Even in her head, Heron’s voice had the stink of revenge being planned on it.
Mari needed to settle that right quick. “Yep. But he and I had a long chitchat. I think we’re okay now.” She wished she could ask this next question in private, without Heron hearing, but he was probably all up in her thoughts anyhow, reading her mind. She tried to keep it all frothy in there. Or at least not vengeancy. “Hey, Viktor, before you sedated him, could you get a handle on whether Nathan thought he was Nathan again?”
The giant bodyguard frowned like it hurt to think, or at least to remember. “He gave instructions for retrieving his truck and asked for his gun back also. I did not give it.”
He gestured to the big-ass pistol, now safely peeking out of one of his many holsters.
“Oh yeah, that’s Nathan being Nathan,” said Mari. It was good to hear that Dad was out of his brain, that he was back to being his pretty, smarmy self. True, he’d kidnapped and drugged her, but there had been times during the night when he’d seemed weirdly sincere.
Maybe he hadn’t known exactly what Dad was up to. Maybe he was being played just as hard as she was. What was that bulbing down at the base of her throat, a soft spot for Nathan, a desire to forgive? Typical. She had a bad habit of letting the worst sins slide.
She still loved Dad, despite it all. Still loved Heron. Well, of course, that. Maybe that’s what made all the other forgiveness possible.
She swallowed around the bulb.
It made her feel odd to think that all these people—Chloe, Viktor, Heron, and probably Kellen and Garrett, too—had come after her, to save her ass. Heron must have suspected she’d hie off on some damn fool crusade the moment his back was turned, else he wouldn’t have built in all these contingencies.
It did occur to Mari, on the flight westward to where Heron was waiting, that she could just ask Chloe for a rundown of her innards. Chloe had been inside her, after all, and must have gotten a good peek at what was there, at least enough to determine which bits were girl and which were machine. Mari could suss out the truth from the convenient lie that her dad had laid on her.
But she had bigger fish to fry. In any other circumstance, she’d be stressing over her father’s revelation—was she, wasn’t she, and what did any of that change?
Because the fact was, it didn’t change anything. So what if she had some post-human parts in her? She’d had a freakin’ free-fae collective inside her body, and the world wasn’t ending. No snow in hell, far
as she could see.
And every once in a while on that trip back, she touched her chest, wiggled the invisible hook there. And always, always, he smiled back. She couldn’t see him do it, couldn’t hear him either, but damn if she wasn’t one hundred percent certain he did.
Chapter 17
In the lobby-level conference room of the Pentarc, Heron experimented with his new normal. Sort of trying digital godhood on for size.
Just as he’d worried would happen, when he logged on to the cloud, his consciousness had expanded to fit the space. In fact, it was still expanding, even while he sat here, palms flat on a smartsurface granite-skinned table. He was back in his body now, or at least completely in control of his body. However, the exact location of his consciousness, his thinking self, was less certain. The technical term, often used to describe nanoconstructs spread out to cover wide areas, was dispersed. Heron’s mind was dispersed, permanently. There would be no shoving it all back into his organic head.
And that was okay.
He had been scared of existing like this for so long, but now he wished he hadn’t spent so much time in fear. It wasn’t bad, just different. He could still breathe, could still connect to all his physical senses. Hell, he could still connect to all his mechanical sensors and control rigs, too. At the same time. Right now, for instance, he was flying the spaceplane that zoomed Mari forty thousand feet above Flagstaff. And he could feel every wiggle of her ass in the copilot’s chair.
Which she almost certainly realized. Minx.
And at the same time, he could sift data from all over the world, in real time. The amount of information he could access was amazing. Part of him wanted to sit down in the Pentarc basement vault with a data cable plugged into his skull port and just ride waves and waves of information for the sheer joy of soaking up all that knowledge. Guess he was still a bow tie–wearing academic at heart.
Every few minutes, though, he’d get a flash of wrongness, almost vertigo. Maybe it was a human person’s inherent objection to infinity. Early astronauts had written about similar spasms of horror when looking out into the blackness of space. But whenever he felt like he needed to hold on to something, he reflexively sought Mari’s data stream in the cloud, the bright thread in all that static. Steady. His tether.
Wanted and Wired Page 27
