by Madi Le
"I mean they're invulnerable."
"I've got addresses," Grant said, flicking through the list again. "Nobody's invulnerable."
"You're talking about something you can do to one or two. Maybe half. These guys are smart, okay? And the ones who can hurt you, they're not the ones getting their address leaked, no matter how you're going about getting the list. So whatever you think you've got, it's nothing."
"You sure do have high opinions of these guys," Grant said.
The kid's lips pressed together. "Not really, I don't. But they're fine, you know? Whatever. No, you're not going to hurt them. But you know what you might be able to do?"
"Why do I suspect you're going to tell me?"
The kid took a deep breath, touched his nose again. He didn't wince too hard. Grant wondered if he'd been losing a step, but tried not to think about it.
"You get these guys pissed off at the right target, and you point them in the right direction and let them go. If you say that the Feds are using us against you, then let us work for you. Against them. They're not going to like being anyone's personal army."
Grant looked at him flatly. "And you're sure this will work?"
Fingers through his hair again, pushing it out of his eyes. "Positive."
Eighteen ♥
*
Misty let out a breath, pulled the car off to the side of the road, and leaned back.
"You know a good way to contact these friends of yours, kid?"
The young man had been finding his spine for the better part of the last ten minutes, and apparently that was the last straw. Misty tried not to take it too personally.
"My name's not 'kid.' You want me to help you, at least stop calling me that."
"What is it, then? Zero Cool? Or, wait. Crash Override, wasn't it?" Grant looked very pleased with himself over the joke. Misty assumed it was a reference to something.
The kid's jaw cocked off to the side. "Was that supposed to be a joke?"
"What, you kids don't use hacker names anymore?"
He pressed his lips together. "Ian. Call me Ian."
"Okay, Ian," Misty cut in. "Do you have some way to contact your friends?"
"I mean no better than anyone else."
"Okay, then. Get a chat together. I want to talk to them."
"You want me to get them to deliver a pizza, too?"
Grant's eyebrow raised. "That's an option?"
Ian looked at him, trying to decide how much of the question was intended as a joke, and how much of it was at least a little bit serious. Whatever he decided, he shrugged. "It's hard to say. Sometimes."
"We just ate," Misty cut in again, not looking to let the two of them get into another pissing contest. "I just want to get a talk going. Tell them you've got insider information."
"They're not going to believe me."
"Isn't that why they say 'pics or it didn't happen?' Take a selfie, what are you, forty years old?" Misty frowned. "You're not using your head, Ian."
There it was again, the annoyed expression. But she was right, and what's more, everyone present knew it. So Ian pulled out his phone, took a picture of the three of them, and then started tapping away.
"Don't try to pull anything," Grant threatened. He patted his hip. But he didn't need to. Misty watched over Ian's shoulder, and if he'd tried something particularly questionable then she'd have made quick work of preventing him without too much trouble.
Lucky for Ian, he just posted simply and directly. "Here with the Sheriff. Says he was framed. AMA."
The responses didn't come in immediately. The first one to come in was almost predictable, though. 'Ask him who the girl is,' it said. Misty had guessed. She should have stayed out of the photo. Then again, there was at least one video out there, and the news was reporting that they were together.
But posting a picture of a women around these places tended to focus all eyes on her, around chest-high. "Nobody," Misty said.
Ian typed an answer. Misty read it, leaning on his shoulder. He didn't pull away. Misty enjoyed the expression on Grant's face as she did it. Like he was going to start mauling Ian like a bear.
"You getting anything?"
Ian cut in before Misty could answer, his voice thin and far-away, like he was thinking about something else. "Not yet."
Grant frowned. Misty tried to explain. "It's not like it's immediate. People have to see it, and then the right people have to see it, and everyone has to respond. It's going to take a little while. The sort of people who respond this quickly are… Not necessarily the kind of people you're looking for."
"Well, hurry it up as much as you can," Grant said, suggesting that he didn't particularly understand anything that they'd just said.
"Will do, boss."
But after a few minutes, the answers did start to come a little more quickly, and a little bit more usefully.
"Hey, why did they frame you," Ian asked suddenly.
"Why? I don't know," Grant answered. It wasn't the whole truth. He knew it had something to do with her, but it was another distraction, as far as he was concerned. Misty thought for a moment about telling what parts of the story she could. But she wasn't about to burn the only thing that she still had to hold on to, for better or worse.
"Anything to add, lady?"
"They're trying to cover up some people who were using government assets to deal with personal vendettas," she said. It fit into the narrative that the hackers seemed to have constructed for themselves, and the fact that it was basically true didn't hurt.
"Can you give me any more details?"
"I'm not at liberty to discuss them right now."
"I'll see what response it gets but I think they're going to tell me that you're full of shit."
"Well, I'm not. I don't want the same thing to happen to you."
"But your friend was willing to shoot me."
"Yeah, he was," Misty said. "And I was fine with that."
"But–"
"And yet, I don't want to bring down the hell on you that this sort of scrutiny would bring. What does that tell you about the guys were running from?"
Ian looked at her, his eyes searching for some sign of a joke. Misty didn't show one. It wasn't a joke. It wasn't even hyperbole. "Right, okay," was all he said.
They waited a little longer. Most of the questions were meaningless, and the answers were more meaningless, a mixture of half-truths and lies, truth when it didn't matter either way.
And then came the thing that Misty had been worried about. The possibility that they weren't going to be able to talk these guys into anything at all.
Someone posted their location. And they hadn't even managed to convince anyone to help.
Misty tapped the brake pedal just hard enough to slip the car out of park. Ian got left behind. His phone didn't. When the cops got there, they could give him a ride home. And the cops would show up, sooner than later, and they would want to talk to Ian. He didn't know anything that the Feds didn't know already.
They were on the coast. They were on the run. Grant had left the army. Things like that didn't account for a whole lot. The only thing that he had on them, solid, was the hacking charges, and that would be difficult to prove without some kind of evidence–evidence that they wouldn't get from him. Maybe they could get it from the computer shop, but not Ian.
Grant sat beside her, making no effort to hide his irritation. "I knew this was a bad idea," he said, sourly.
"We have proof that they've got someone looking for us. Things were going well until that guy showed up."
"Okay, then. What are we supposed to do about it?"
"We keep things up. We've got Ian's phone, it won't be hard to keep the conversation going as if we were him."
"And when his face shows up on the news?"
"It won't," Misty said, more confident than she felt. Maybe it would. Maybe her understanding of what qualified was worse than his. She certainly had less experience with it. This wasn't the time for doubts,
though, and she had a ton of experience being more certain than she really was.
"Okay, then. What now?"
"Now we lie low," she said. Misty pulled the car into an alley, around a corner. It dead-ended into a parking bay, one that didn't seem to have been used in a long time. She shut off the lights of the car. "When are you going to call your friend?"
Grant laid his head back and knitted his fingers together. "It just eats at me," he said cryptically.
"What does?"
"These assholes come along, uproot my whole life, and for what?"
For an instant Misty wanted to talk about what it was that she had done for them. How things had gone, in specific. Why she had run. He already knew half of it, and she was sure that he'd guessed the other half. But he deserved to know, not guess, and she was the only one who could tell him without a single shadow of doubt what had put her into that situation. It was the only way to tell him in a way that he would really understand.
She stopped herself, and the urge passed. She couldn't afford to tell anyone any of it; Grant already knew too much.
"I'm sorry this happened," is what she said instead.
"I'm not asking for you to be sorry," Grant said, lowering his head. He let out another breath. "I wish I had a smoke."
"It's a nasty habit," Misty said, automatically.
"You used to say that," Grant said. "And I never let it stop me before."
"Something change?"
Grant looked at her, weighing his answer. Then he shrugged. "Sure."
"You going to tell me what?"
"Not really."
"Good talk."
"I'm gonna go for a walk," he said softly. "To cool my head a little."
He stepped out of the car. Misty watched him walk down to the parking bay. He walked back, in the darkness. Misty opened the car door, and the dome light came on, illuminating the alley. She closed it again, and the dome light went off.
Halfway between a stolen car and an abandoned warehouse, Misty pressed her lips against Grant's. She had to strain to get her mouth up high enough, but she did it.
He looked down at her, and then he kissed her back. "This isn't a good place to do this," Grant said.
"I don't care," Misty told him. It was the truth. She was past the point where she was going to worry about a little grime on her dress. She had stopped feeling disgusting months ago; all told, she'd been in a hotel twenty hours ago, and was as clean as she'd been in a long time.
He pushed her up against the wall, his kiss moving lower. She threaded her fingers through his hair, pulled him tight against her. His teeth bit down. She gasped aloud.
"Keep going."
He did. His hands pulled her hips against his. She could feel his hardness there, pressing against her. She could feel his arousal. She could feel her own, building inside her. She wanted him. She wanted the safe feeling he brought her.
He obliged.
Nineteen ♥
*
Grant couldn't see the sunrise. It was something he had enjoyed seeing his entire life, and most days, he could make it happen. Here, though, in this alley, his first signs of morning didn't come until the black of the sky turned to a light-enough colored navy that he could tell the sky was lightening.
A thick knot in his shoulders made it painful when he tried to move his arms. He opened the car door, the dome light turned on. He slipped out and walked down the alley. In the cold, clear light of early morning, after what could charitably be called 'sleep', he could smell the acrid smell of days-old human waste. He pointed himself in the right direction and took care of the full feeling in his bladder.
He made it back to the car. The kid, Ian, had a text. It was from a contact, but from the name–mechanical bullfrog–he guessed that it wasn't someone that he knew well. The message all but confirmed it.
'You really with them?'
Grant picked the phone up. It was near-dead, but he typed in anyways. 'This is the Sheriff.'
The first message had come in five hours ago, sitting there, ignored. To Grant's surprise, the reply came only a few minutes later.
'What's this conspiracy thing?'
Grant tried to decide how seriously he should take the conversation.
'Weren't you in the thread last night? We talked about it.'
'I was there. I want details.'
'I don't have much. We've got a few names. A few C.I.A. guys. An F.B.I. guy. Joe Greene. Peter Cross. They're trying to swallow the girl up. At this point we're both dead.'
'I can look into it for you, if you want.'
Grant looked at the message. Doubt didn't need to form; he was swimming in it. But he wasn't about to look a gift-horse in the mouth. He looked over at Misty. She was asleep, still, or faking it well enough. She stirred, halfway turned. The slight bucket to the seat moved her back to a position nearly approximating the one she'd been in before.
'I'd love that,' Grant typed. Send.
The phone died in his hands, before he could get a response. Grant reached past Misty, pulled the glove box handle. No charger. He let out a breath and got out to stretch his legs again.
Something, whether it was the shuffling around, or the dome light, or the sound of the door shutting, woke Misty. She joined him a minute later, silently.
"Morning," she said.
"Yeah," Grant agreed, as if it were a question. As if there was anything that either of them could do except deal with whatever came to them, at that point.
He put an arm around Misty's shoulder. She leaned her head against his chest. "We should go," she said softly.
"Yeah," he agreed. He decided not to tell her about the text. It was easier not to. It didn't change anything. They still had no way to get out of their problems. They still had to leave, and Grant still had a short list of favors he could still afford to call in. Short, but long enough. Nothing had changed, so there was nothing to tell. "Do we have a phone with battery?"
"Why?"
"To call my friend. We're getting out of here."
Misty didn't lift her head off Grant's chest for a long time. It took him longer than he'd like to admit before he noticed her breathing had become ragged.
"Are you okay?"
"Is it going to work?"
Grant ran his fingers through her hair, brushed it out of her face. He didn't look at her. Something about the moment felt like it would be easier for her if she didn't have to let him see her crying, and he wasn't about to force the issue.
"It'll work," he said. He sounded like he was convinced. It was better than he thought he could do, because the only thing he felt right now was a long way from convinced of anything. He would make it work because he had to. How that was going to happen, well… it was in the future. He could try to figure it out.
"Yeah," she said finally. "I left the phone I took turned off. Should be mostly full."
"Then let's get going."
Grant leaned back, took a half-step. Misty kept a grip on his jacket.
"Just a minute," she said softly. "I'm scared."
Grant put his arm around her again. He squeezed.
"You? Scared? Jeez, what am I supposed to say to that?" He tried to use his tone to let her know that it was a joke. "You're the tough one in this relationship. I thought you were just keeping me around for my looks."
She laughed. The laugh broke into a sob, showed it for the lie it was. "You shouldn't talk like that."
"Once we're gone," Grant said. "Then you can be as scared as you want. But I just need you to be strong for me a little while longer, okay? Just a little while. When we're out of the country, and we've got a plan for what we're doing next… then you can worry. But I don't think you're going to have to."
Grant held his breath. If he could have, he'd have stopped his heart from beating, for those long seconds. It was hot and stuffy and far, far too crowded, pressed into the tiny box with Misty. But there wasn't much other choice. The voices on the other side were friendly. From here, Liam's voice sou
nded almost totally different. The only thing that made it identifiable was the things that he seemed to say, and the fact that it was fully an octave higher than the booming voice of the harbormaster.
"Yeah, you're fine," he said finally. The car started to sputter, and Grant felt their momentum shift in the darkness. His head bumped the back of the seat in front of them, but if the harbormaster was there to hear it, he made no indication. They kept moving until they didn't any more.
A minute later a knock came on the trunk. Then it opened, and the light immediately forced Grant's eyes shut.
They moved quickly. It was the only way that it could be done. The good news, at least, was that they made it inside. Grant let out a breath. Now they just had to get caught. It was the stroke of genius of the plan. Someone had to see them. They just had to avoid seeing Liam with them, and maybe at that point things would work themselves out.
Grant stretched out his muscles. The hardest part of the plan was the time in the trunk, and that had come to an end. He spread his back and hugged himself. His spine made an unpleasantly loud popping noise. He turned, and it made another long series, like a zipper going from his hips to his neck.
"Remind me never to do that again."
Grant looked over at Misty. She seemed no worse for wear. Whether that was because he had a good ten inches on her, or because she had been worn down so far that nothing they did to her could be considered bad at that point, he didn't know. They had bigger things to worry about before he could ask himself how she was doing.
She laid a hand on his shoulder. He'd never seen the ocean before. It seemed strange to think; he'd flown over it a handful of times, but military flights aren't exactly comfortable experiences, and he wasn't in much position to gawk out the windows. If he had, it would have been at such an altitude that it would have been more clouds than ocean anyways.
"I was listening," he lied.
"I asked if you were ready."
"As ready as I'll ever be." He touched her cheek. "I just want this whole thing to be over with. When it's over. That's when I'll be okay."
She leaned in and kissed him. Grant's eyes drifted shut and for a moment he felt whole. "It's going to be fine."
