Brute Force
Page 35
“What? No, why?”
Curious, she activated her scans again and flipped frequencies until she could see Santino’s face. He was older than she remembered, with crow’s feet beginning to crack around his eyes. “Figured Wyatt was the last straw,” she replied. “I pushed you hard last year—this was worse.”
“No!” He laughed, and the crow’s feet crinkled. “No, it’s got nothing to do with you.”
“Then why?” she asked, before she could swallow her words and keep herself from sounding like the world’s biggest self-pitying teenager.
“I really liked living with you,” he said. “Big yard, finally got the garden the way I wanted…”
“Shut up,” she said, smiling, and picked up the begonia. “Is this what I think it is?”
He nodded. “Yeah. It’s not rooted yet, so be gentle. But you used it to fight off a trained killer, so it’s yours by right of conquest.”
Rachel stroked the plant’s soft leaves. A single flower remained; a bud had survived the beating and had coaxed itself open despite the stress. “Thanks,” she said.
“I want to tell you something,” he said in a rush. “But you’ve got to keep it a secret for another few weeks.”
“What—” she began, and then whipped her scans around to find his girlfriend in the crowd. She flipped the emotional spectrum back on, and honed in on Zia’s violet core.
Zia was carrying blue around in that core—a babysoft blue, with the seafoam greens of dreamless sleep.
“You son of a bitch,” Rachel said to her partner.
“Most people lead with ‘congratulations’.”
“You could have told me!”
“I am telling you!” He rose up on his knees and hugged her in blues, purples, reds, and the most joyous yellows she had ever seen, colors brighter than the sun, or maybe the bottom of the ocean. A whole future cascaded around them in rainbows. “We wanted to wait until we were safe in the second trimester,” he said. “But you’d know, so we’re asking you to keep it quiet.
“Oh, that reminds me,” he added. “Want to be my best woman at the ceremony?”
“You are such an asshole,” she said.
Acknowledgements
There’ve been a lot of jokes about how 2016 was an especially wild year. All I know is that I had a decent chunk of Brute Force written before Ammon Bundy and his militia took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. When that happened—January 2, 2016—my draft of a handful of madmen with a vendetta against OACET became too tame for a work of fiction. I spent the next nine months expanding the plot to keep ahead of current events, and sent the final draft out to my copyeditor during the first week of November.
…yeah…
A wild year, indeed.
Sovereign citizens shouldn’t be overgeneralized: I hope I haven’t done that here. They are a highly diverse group with no central governing structure, and are only loosely united by a broad view of government corruption. Some of their members are, however, a serious threat to law enforcement. The FBI has identified “sovereign-citizen extremists as comprising a domestic terrorist movement,” especially during confrontations with law enforcement. If pushed, sovereign citizens will push back.
Three works of poetry appeared in this novel. These were, in order, Carl Sandberg’s “Prayers of Steel,” “Amaze” by Adelaide Crapsey, and “Dreamers” by Siegfried Sassoon. Rachel never got to recite the second part of Sassoon’s poem:
I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.
It’s a shame she didn’t have the chance to introduce the other Agents to these lines, as I feel they would have embraced Sassoon’s tribute to mundane normalcy.
As always, this book wouldn’t be possible without the goodwill and support of my husband, Brown. As always, this book would have been finished much, much more quickly if it weren’t for my dogs. Thank you for purchasing a copy: you’ve helped offset the cost of their numerous vet bills and the cost of the three windows they’ve broken.
Thanks goes to my beta readers, Fuzz, Gary, Kevin, Tiff, Joris, and Cora, for their critical and necessary feedback. To Danny and Jes, thank you for the copy edits. And to Rose Loughran of Red Moon Rising for the fantastic cover art.
Finally, Brute Force is set in a larger fictional universe. Patrick Mulcahy’s story is free to all readers, and is in graphic novel form at agirlandherfed.com. The novels in the Rachel Peng series, fill in the five-year gap between when Mulcahy discovered the purpose of their implants and when he was finally able to establish OACET as an independent federal organization. Please excuse the talking koala; he has a good heart.
You can find updates on current projects and novels at kbspangler.com and agirlandherfed.com. Thanks for reading!
Rachel and Santino will be back!