“When my training completes, then yes. I will become the same agent formerly known as Zenya.”
But disagreement passed across her face. A fight within herself, perhaps. The same look had crossed when she corrected him about her name.
Zenya, he understood from his conversations with the lady rogue, had been a killer, happier behind a fortress of piled bodies. If he met her face-to-face, an emotionless mask would be the last thing he ever saw.
But this Resa wore a mask to cover a writhing mass of emotion. Their conversation had already lasted longer than the lady rogue had suggested any conversation with Zenya Sen ever did.
And he had felt her petite body pressed up against the wall. She reacted like a woman. Curious, cautious, hungry. Her skin might repel glass, but it felt soft and supple beneath his hands. Crinkly black hair curled around her face. The memory of her body burned in his fingers like match-flares. He wanted to coat himself in oil and dive in.
Of course, that was insane, which was why he liked it.
“Decide,” she ordered. “The noxious oxide is almost to the arcade.”
“I need to make a statement to the family I’m still alive.” He took a step across the tilted floor and collapsed.
She simply looked down at him, splayed out like a smudge on the gritty debris-filled floor. “If you delay, you will be dead.”
“If I don’t make a statement, my cousin Darvin will challenge my authenticity, and I might as well be.”
She regarded him stoically.
He dared her with the last of his strength and only the start of his indomitable will. “Your interview test is to ensure I make a statement without collapsing from gas poisoning.”
Resa accepted the governor’s conditions spoken in a half whisper from ashen lips. Being surrounded by household debris, too, was uncomfortably familiar. Deeper than Zenya’s memories, it resonated with an image that was older, deeper, and somehow more true. Something that she almost remembered.…
No. She couldn’t remember. Resa shoved it aside just like she shoved aside the doubts her robot voiced. She didn’t dare.
“How do you make the statement?” she asked.
“A broadcast station,” came his faint reply. “With the highest security. And satellite.”
So, he needed to be filmed outdoors with the noxious oxide to prove that he hadn’t succumbed to it. Excellent.
She lifted Aris, trying to ignore the white smile he bestowed on her and the murmur of something that was bound to have been flirtatious, but which ended up swallowed by a pained gasp, and carried him to the hole. Grabbing the tether cable with her bare hands, she slid to the ground. Friction heated her palm to a molten shine. She turned off her receptors, dumped Aris in a groaning pile beneath a broken arcade column, and flexed her hand. The shiny skin swapped chemicals within so the skin returned to suppleness. She turned on her receptors again.
Step one: Contain the noxious oxide.
Resa unsealed her second weapon, a shatter pistol, from her thigh and aimed at the storage dome. A thousand closely-pulsed charges sheared off the side of the giant building, opening the dome. The metal-glass round slammed into the ground, crushed the buildings around it, and rolled into the noxious cloud. It fell open and gas pooled into it.
She shot the power transformer within the dome.
It exploded outward. The dome lifted off the arcade and wobbled in the air. A boom echoed through the ground.
Metal siding rattled and slid off ruined domes around the arcade overhead.
She sheltered Aris.
Several hundred pounds of debris boomed against them, snapping her rifle in half. The force reverberated through her marrow, crackling in her bones. Chips expelled at the force of a bullet. Several smacked her shatter pistol, weakening and cracking the plastic.
She followed the path of each fracture, moving faster than physics to protect Aris. One splinter unexpectedly sliced through her cheek. The metal siding came to a rest.
She shoved the metal siding off. It clanged and crushed the opposite building.
Two guns destroyed. She threw them aside. No matter. She disliked guns anyway.
You do not dislike guns, her robot said. You have no preference. Although losing both at once is strange.
But not impossible.
And… she did dislike guns. For some reason, they had failed her when she needed them. Sometime in the past… but the memories were out of reach.
Zenya loved guns.
Yes. Without poking the dark morass of her predecessor’s memories, she imagined that Zenya did.
Blood gaped from the exposed hole in her cheek, reacting to loss of pressure and chemical atmosphere to immediately bond into a seal. Magnetese in Resa’s blood contained it. She pressed the sides of her cheek together. Where the skin overlapped, it adhered like tape and reknit her injury. Her scar melded and disappeared.
Out in the center, the whole dome rolled over, crushing everything in its path, and landed on the lip of the hole. Noxious oxide poured out the hole like a poisoned faucet. In minutes, the area cleared. The air flowed clean.
Aris leaned against the column; his legs splayed and his head thrown like he’d been gut shot.
He licked his lips. “Anyone in those buildings you just destroyed?”
“No.”
“Did you bother to check?”
His judgment stuck her like needles.
“Yes,” she answered mechanically. “However, if I killed in error, I only accelerated the result of the gas.”
Emergency sirens filled the air as survivors crawled out of the wreckage.
He grunted. “Take me to the broadcast station.”
She dragged him past survivors, well-wishers, and emergency personnel over a mile to the nearest undamaged transmitter. It registered his ID chip and activated. He rolled up his sleeve, spoke, “Identity confirm,” and winced when the biologic needle stabbed into his bicep for a bloody DNA confirmation while the broadcaster confirmed voice print, hand prints, toe prints, eye scans, and earlobe depths.
“Identity confirmed,” the machine announced. “Voice transmissions out of order.”
He squinted at it, wiped blood across his forehead, and groaned. “Prop me up. Hit the video.”
She slid her arm under his, too aware of his heat against her torso. “What is your answer to my offer?”
“Sure.” He licked his chapped, split lips again and grinned for the video feed. “As everyone can see, we successfully survived a tragic accident. The victims will be compensated for their losses and resurrected according to their government contracts.”
She tilted her mouth away. “They can’t hear you.”
He nodded; lip reading would input the sound. His serious exhaustion gave way to lazy flirting.
Against her will, awareness of his sexy form pressed against hers and pulsed through her inhuman body.
It hitched a fraction with his next command.
“Now give me a kiss.”
Chapter Three
Heat and cold flushed through her. “What?”
“For the broadcast.” He positioned his lips against the corner of her mouth. “Act passionate.”
She froze in rigid confusion.
His firm mouth pressed against her soft cheek, missing her lips on purpose. His hot breath teased her skin, his large hands splayed across her waist, and his body pressed against hers. Crackling sensations broke through her circuits, and her whole brain seemed to hang. Her body pulsed from his electric contact. He felt hot in her arms, so deliciously hot. His forbidden pleasure teased her, tantalized her. She had always wanted to enchant a powerful man. All she had to do was just slightly turn her head, and then her lips would press on his, and she would experience all there was to this kiss.
Wait. She had always wanted to enchant a powerful man?
Since when?
In her memories, both the several-days-old ones that belonged only to her and the nightmares that belonged to Zenya, she
had never desired a man or his kiss.
Had she?
She lifted her hands to… what? Stroke his broad back? Shove him away? Mold herself to him? She left her hands in the air, a tangible question mark, a confusion of her body and her mind.
He ended the kiss, resting his forehead against hers and gasping. “That should confuse the bastards.”
Her voice sounded like it came from another person. “Why did you do that?”
“Proof.” He coughed and spat blood. “Only I would allow myself to be distracted by a beautiful woman while a city street fell in around me.”
Again, he caused a sizzling sensation deep in her body. Beautiful woman. He would say kind words to a career criminal, with as much apparent sincerity.
“I think,” his voice lightened as his grip on her faded, “it’s time for my new head of security to take me home.”
She battled the confusion pulsing through her hot body away, hefted his unconscious form, and carried him barefoot through the streets rapidly filling with emergency response drones and trauma sirens.
With all of these questions swirling in her head, caused by Aris, the last thing she needed was to join his house. But that was just where she was bound.
Because only he knew the location of the rogue. And as much as she disliked the idea of killing, she hated her predecessor Zenya more. The rogue was the key.
She had driven many robots insane with emotion.
Resa would not become one of them.
When the time came, she would dispatch Aris and the rogue without a single moment of doubt.
Aris lived in a cloud.
The floors, couches, and lower walls were all varying shades of white. Some laced with silver while others crackled with lines of gold; hard edges softened beneath pale peaches and grays. His carpeting caressed feet while seating areas invited sinking into and relaxing, and the domes overhead opened up to stars.
City residences floated below, and his governor’s mansion was one of three great domes that anchored their residences to the barren planet beneath and also soared up to the atmosphere shield above and interfaced with the stars. The other two great domes tinted their interfaces to pink mornings and cream afternoons. He left his as night. A land lit by sparkle after sparkle of pure white stars.
A hundred separate fountains tinkled around his residence, including fifteen waterfalls and seven hot springs, a project started by former governors and completed by him. That was how he always knew when he had returned home. On the airless planetoid, only the governor’s mansion afforded the constant serenity of burbling liquid.
The other way he knew that he was home was the mild scents infused into his thick, fluffy comforters and activated whenever his ID chip passed into the chambers. Coconut in his private rooms, sweet aprium in his kitchen, and sensual cinnamon throughout the public areas.
Scents that evoked comfort, richness, wealth.
And secrets.
Sometimes the price of secrets meant waking after too few rest hours and too many empty calories, his head pounding, his body throbbing, and his conscience ready to declare independence from one who clearly didn’t have a use for it.
That was how he felt right now. From the strength of the coconut scent and the pain digging into his backside, he guessed he hadn’t even made it to the bed; he must have collapsed on the floor.
Fuck.
He lifted his hand to his forehead. This form of espionage, he had intended cut back on, since his deal with the lady rogue made his life so precarious right now—
“I wouldn’t do that,” a woman’s voice said.
His hand arrested in midair. The whole mixed up day returned, starting with those damnable warning signs that his cousins were moving against him and ending with the death of his faithful security head, Joensen.
He opened his eyes.
The robot woman, Resa, sat across from him in the dark. Staring. With, he imagined, odd cat eyes and a frightening robotic grin.
Was this the kind of life he had to look forward to? Everyone he cared about cut down? His half sisters had certainly been dealing with fearful losses for decades, and only now did he have any appreciation for their suffering.
He groaned and actually opened his eyes. Resa stood across the room, and the area was dim, not dark. Her eyes certainly did not glow, and she wasn’t even looking at him. She was looking up, at the night sky, at the white spatter of stars.
“I assume I still have security,” he said dryly.
“I’ve eliminated the holes through which I snuck you in. Hundreds of alternates remain. Anyone could fire a single laser and wipe out half this city, and your residence with it.”
“That’s why the governor controls the satellites, and the solar system administrator controls the Hyeon fleet.”
“Unsecure,” she murmured.
He dropped his hand. It rested on the blood-smeared carpet; around it, lightening halos indicated where the residential nanobots lifted the stain, transforming his blood into pure moisture and a small amount of iron dust. It wasn’t the worst thing the nanobots had cleaned up.
“Why am I on the ground?” he asked.
“I thought that was your sleeping place,” she said. “I analyzed the body signatures of every inch of these quarters, and that particular section of carpeting held the most molecules.”
Great. Just great.
“More even than what appeared to be your bed,” she indicated the couch.
He groaned and pulled himself up to a sitting position.
Then he crawled over to the nearest chair and lifted his hand in the shape of a wine glass. His fingers interrupted the room’s particle waves, which triggered a signal to the nanobots. A glass goblet emerged as though by magic, excreted by the nanobot activities.
He dropped the glass to his throbbing knee, then lifted the rim to the edge of the particle beam, and said, “Pain level eight.”
A tranquilizer soporific began to multiply. A tiny droplet increased to a sloshing gobletful of liquid.
He dropped the glass below the beam and sipped the soothing medicine.
“You’re going to want more than a hangover cure,” Resa said, still from her position against the wall.
“It’s a start.” He rubbed his shoulders. It felt like his head had separated from his spine. “You could give me a healing massage.”
Silence graced his small joke. The female robot thing had no sense of humor.
“It’s not a very funny joke,” she replied, as though reading his thoughts aloud.
He glanced at her.
Standing silhouetted against the gentle cocoon of his private fountain, she seemed smaller and more delicate than ever before.
But it was simply his mistaken impression. Like imagining for one moment that she was a woman and not an undulating poisonous snake.
“Do you always trade insults with your targets before you kill them?” he asked.
She sucked in her lower lip.
A conscious gesture? An unconscious gesture? It abruptly made her more human, and more desirable.
“I did not mean to insult you,” she said.
“No offense taken,” he replied breezily. “You break into my house, leave me for dead on the floor, and then dismiss my real request for help as a bad joke. Why should I be offended?”
“I… am sorry.”
Fuck. The hesitant way she apologized, as though she weren’t used to it, as though only he evoked it in her, it did things for him. Things he shouldn’t be interested in. That must have been a hell of a knock to the head.
The recent trauma also explained the odd tightening in his cock, reacting to a woman who must have been formulaically constructed to tempt his interest. Her fragility, her fresh innocence, and her sweet caution were explosive ingredients in a cocktail that threatened to ignite all his desires. Especially since he’d just seen first-hand what she was capable of. His cock thought she was “fragile”? Even if she hadn’t orchestrated the death of his e
mployees or caused the pyroclastic cloud of noxious gas that had been visible through the hole in the unmoored residence, she could certainly rip off both his arms and use them to beat him to death.
He downed another glass of painkillers and asked for her help to his comfy couch-shaped bed. Which she gave, willingly. He leaned on her the way an old man leaned on an iron cane. She was probably less breakable. He collapsed on the private couch, injuries pinching everywhere. If she hadn’t saved him, he wouldn’t be feeling much of anything right now.
Of course, she had only saved him to end his life later.
“I organized medical supplies.” She set out a neat tray of creams and pills, ointments to deaden the shrieking nerves and speed the regrowth of torn skin. “You should apply it.”
He gave her his best lazy smile. “I’m so injured. Won’t you rub it into my skin?”
Her expression flattened.
Then, when he least expected her response, she lifted the tube of nerve silencing cream. “I’ll apply this numbing cream to your waist region first.”
He caught the tube. His fingers covered hers. Her breath stopped, but she didn’t pull away. “I didn’t realize robots had a sense of humor.”
“What makes you think I’m joking?”
In the gentle dimness, her eyes looked so completely normal. Black pupils surrounded by innocent brown irises, wide and liquid, and framed with a thick fringe of dark lashes. Although thin, her petite frame still held itself well. A demure black flight suit deflected notice like a shadow racing the wind. Even though he had looked for her for days, he hadn’t seen her until he was holding her in his arms on the inside of a destroyed building.
The body pressed against his, he barely remembered. Only its general shape, and that he’d clung to it so desperately, and the fact he wanted to cling to it again. In the daylight. Or even in the night, against soft glowing candles and cinnamon sheets, while slowly unmasking the new Hyeon flight suit to reveal the creamy skin beneath.
Not that there would necessarily be creamy skin. She was a robot.
And for some crazy reason, that just made him want to tease her more.
Liberation's Vow (Robotics Faction #3) Page 5
