The Recoil Trilogy 3 Book Boxed Set: Including Recoil, Refuse and Rebel

by Joanne Macgregor

A fiery-orange oak leaf twirls down from the branches above us. Quinn plucks it from the air and hands it to me with a little bow, as if presenting me with a bouquet of flowers.

  “It’s beautiful.” I trace the sharply scalloped edges and dark veins with a fingertip, wondering how one leaf can change so dramatically, can hold so many colors — red and green and gold and brown — and still know what it is.

  “You’re beautiful, mo chuisle.”

  “Is that Irish? What does it mean?”

  “My beloved. Literally, pulse of my heart.”

  “I prefer that to ‘wench’. Tell me some more,” I say as we walk around to the wide platform built onto the far side of the oak’s trunk.

  “I don’t know many — you’re my chéadsearc, my first love.”

  “That’s a nice one, too.” It shouldn’t matter, but it pleases me mightily that he’s never loved another girl.

  We lie down, side-by-side on the rough planks, holding hands.

  “More!” I demand.

  “Is tusa mo spéirbhean, mo stóirín.”

  “Your spear van? Your storeen?” I struggle to get my clumsy tongue around the lilting music of his words.

  “You are my sky woman — a beauty to match the sky. And my little treasure.”

  Sky woman. I like that one a lot. I love being Quinn’s treasure and his heartbeat. I wish I had beautiful endearments for him, but I’m a sharpshooter, not a poet.

  “You are my love,” I say simply.

  “That’ll do,” he says, and I can hear the smile in his voice.

  We lie quietly for long minutes, staring up at the leaves quivering in the soft breeze, listening to the sound of the geese honking and the goats bleating below us.

  “I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with an E,” I say.

  “An eyrie?”

  “What’s an eyrie?”

  “Kind of like what we’re in now,” he says.

  “No, not an eyrie.”

  “An ear?”

  “No. Give up?”

  “An egg? An eagle? An elm?”

  “No, no, and still wrong. Give up?”

  “Sure. You win.”

  “An elephant.”

  “You’re seeing elephants now? Faith, maybe I should get Doc Beth to take a look at you, too.”

  “Over there.” I point at a large white cloud, high up in the patch of blue sky visible between the treetops. “See, there’s its trunk and ears, and its legs and tail. Do you see it?”

  “I do indeed. Right, my turn. I spy with my eye, something beginning with a C.”

  “A cloud?” I guess.

  He gives me the look that deserves.

  “A cabbage?” I wave at the small round cloud beyond the elephant. “Or one of those crabbeeny things you made me eat at —” I cut myself off. I don’t want to think about ASTA. But what comes out of my mouth next is even worse. “A Connor?”

  “No, Jinxy,” Quinn says, capturing my hand and bringing it down to hold against his chest. “I am not lying here beside my love on a fine, sunny day, imagining I see my brother’s face in the clouds.”

  But he must be missing Connor, and his mother and father and little Kerry. Got to be. I’m missing my mother.

  “Have you heard anything from him?” I ask.

  “Not a peep. I think he’s excommunicated me from the O’Riley church.”

  “Nah, I reckon he’d take you back in a heartbeat.”

  Just so long as Quinn ditched me, the girl who got him detained, the girl who came between the brothers and broke up the family. I should get myself a T-shirt made: Here comes trouble.

  He traces a finger over the henna yin-yang tattoo on the back of my right hand. It’s faded a little now.

  “Are you worried about your mom?” he asks.

  Using one of Neil’s burner phones, we got a message to her that Robin and I are okay, but we haven’t dared more contact.

  “Yeah, I am. After my father died, she got real depressed. Now, without Robin or me to keep an eye on her and take care of her, I worry that she’ll sink under again.”

  I’m getting uncomfortable lying on my back on the hard wooden surface. The Ruger 9mm tucked into my waistband is digging into the small of my back. I keep it with me all the time now. I know there’s a real risk we’ll be tracked and found, plus there have got to be mutant rats out in these woods. Just because the government’s out to get us, doesn’t mean the rats aren’t too.

  I roll onto my side and feast my eyes on Quinn — his dark golden skin, the slight cleft in his chin, the stubble that darkens his jaw. When I run a hand through his thick hair, his eyes open, and I see they’re a deep slate-gray today — the color they are when he’s relaxed and happy.

  “It’s getting long,” I say, giving his locks a tug.

  “And your roots are starting to show.” Now he is the one playing with my hair. “Are you going to go back to blond?”

  “Would you prefer that? They say gentlemen do,” I tease.

  “Ah, now, my father advised me never to make the mistake of telling a lass you prefer her this way to that. ‘You canna win by answering those sorts of questions, lad. Just tell her she looks beautiful every which way,’” he says, in a broad Irish accent. “He’s a wise man, me father. Also, me mother is a fierce woman!”

  We spend a few delicious moments kissing in the golden light under the shifting, sighing leaves. Reality intrudes in the form of a sharp rapping nearby. The woodpecker is back.

  “Perhaps I should go redhead, like that character,” I muse. “Or I could go black and white, like a skunk. I could back-shave it, and maybe just leave a horizontal ring, like a monk. Though, easiest of all, I guess, would be to shave the lot off.”

  I sneak a sidelong look, expecting him to fall into the trap of protesting against me going bald — I know he loves my hair — but instead he takes a deep breath and holds up a silencing finger for a minute. He is clearly thinking hard. Then he clears his throat and begins.

  “That Jinxy James, that Jinxy James, I sure do love that Jinxy James. I would like her as a skunk, I would like her as a monk. I would like her bald as coot, ‘cos she is sexy and she’s cute!”

  “Green Eggs and Ham, O’Riley — really?”

  “It’s love poetry,” he says, all mock-offended.

  “So would you like her here or there?” I ask him, playing along. “Would you still like her with no hair?”

  “I would like her here and there. Faith, I would take her anywhere,” he replies, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively.

  “Would you like her in a box?”

  “Sure I’d like her in a box … um …” He pauses, searching for a rhyme, then grins and says, “Have you seen her? Girl’s a fox!”

  I laugh. And it feels good. It’s been a while.

  “Would you like her in a house?” I challenge.

  “I would love her in a house, if she’d take off her stupid blouse.” At this point, he pulls off my long-sleeved T-shirt in one swift movement, leaving me gasping. Before I can protest, he continues, “’Cos mostly I would love her bare, so I could touch her here” — he cups one lace-covered breast — “and there” — and then the other.

  His touch ignites a fuse in my core.

  “I could love her everywhere.” His hand moves lower. His eyes are heavy-lidded.

  I want to see more of him, too. Feel more. I grab the bottom edge of his T-shirt, slowly roll it up and pull it off, murmuring, “Would you? Could you? In a car?”

  I trail my hands along his shoulders, down over the planes of his chest and the muscles of his flat abdomen. When I lightly trace the line of dark hair that leads down, he sucks in a breath. He leans forward, and along the curve of one breast, he kisses a soft line and whispers, “Girl, I will love you near and far. All of you. Always. Everywhere.”

  “That doesn’t rhyme,” I say, breathless with my own pulsing need.

  Quinn doesn’t reply. His mouth has other things to do than form words.


  Chapter 13

  Smuggled out

  When we all file through the open archway into Robin’s room, my eyes go immediately to his right arm. The shoulder and wrist are bandaged, and the whole arm is immobilized in a complicated-looking sling. I examine his face. It’s pale, with dark shadows below his eyes, but he looks … cheerful.

  “Quinn said you had news for us?” I ask him.

  “Take a seat, y’all, it’s a good story.”

  I sit on the bed by his feet, since Sofia already has the chair beside him, and Quinn stands behind me, his hands resting on my shoulders. Evyan slouches in one corner, while Bruce and Cameron sit up against a wall, and Neil perches cross-legged on one of the low adobe partitions. Everyone looks expectantly at Robin.

  “So, you know I hacked into ASTA’s database and then into The Game?” Robin says.

  “I told you to stop doing that,” I say, irked.

  “I was very careful. But what I was seeing in there was just too interesting to stop.”

  “What did you see?” asks Neil.

  “Some really weird stuff. Like double-layer coding, stacked architectures — the thing is structured like the double helix of a DNA molecule.”

  “What do you think it is?” Quinn looks intrigued.

  They seem set to sidetrack this into a technical discussion, but I want to know what happened when Robin was captured.

  “How did they catch you?” I ask.

  “I think I triggered an alert when I went into the bottom layer of that code. I wasn’t sure they’d detected my intrusion, but when I got your message I decided to destroy the evidence, just in case they came knocking. Good thing I did.”

  “I thought experts could still recover stuff from computers even when you’ve deleted and wiped them clean,” Evyan says, sniffing. She caught a cold after our adventures in the rain and has been in a foul mood ever since.

  “They can,” Neil confirms. “Did they take your PC when they detained you?”

  “Yup,” says Robin, looking pleased with himself. “But all they’ll find on that is my schoolwork, gaming history, my movie collection, and non-incriminating emails.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say.

  “Because I wasn’t using my laptop for the hacking.”

  “Good!” I say. That was clever of him. Then a thought hits me. “Wait — do you mean you were using mine?”

  He grins guiltily.

  “What the hell, Robin!”

  “You weren’t using it, and it was more powerful than mine.”

  “No, it isn’t. Mom bought us identical models for our sixteenth birthday.”

  “Yeah, well, I pimped your drive.” At my look of incomprehension, he explains, “I added some upgrades. It was a thing of beauty.”

  Another thought intrudes. “Why are you talking about my laptop in the past tense?”

  “When I got your warning, I grabbed it and ran to the basement, and … well, I chucked it in the biohazard incinerator.”

  “Grand techno meltdown. Linux to lava. Very cool!” Bruce nods approvingly at the thought of the carnage.

  “You destroyed my laptop?” I ask, equal parts outraged and relieved.

  “Yeah, sorry about that, Jinxy,” Robin says, looking anything but. “Anyway, I was back on my machine, playing games when the goons arrived.”

  “Mom?” I say, even though I’m scared to ask.

  “You won’t believe it, but she was great, like fierce — yelling at them to leave me be, demanding to see warrants for the search and my arrest —”

  “They had warrants?” Quinn asks.

  “Nope. They said under Emergency Regulation number whatever they didn’t need them. They asked her a few questions and confiscated her PC along with mine, but she very obviously knew nothing about anything.”

  “Do you think she’ll be okay?”

  Robin knows what I’m asking. He nods. “Last I saw her, she was threatening to sue them for false arrest and to complain to her senator. And declaring she was going to lay a charge of theft with the police for the PCs. She didn’t look like she was set to go curl up in a corner and cry.”

  I guess if there’s anything that would make Mom come out fighting, it would be a threat to her kids.

  “And when they got you to PlayState and questioned you?” Quinn asks.

  “They were fishing in the dark. Without that laptop, they knew next to nothing,” Sofia says.

  She tells us how when Roth wanted an intel representative in on the questioning, she volunteered so she could feed information on where Robin was being held to Quinn.

  “Of course, they still knew I’d hacked their systems,” Robin says. “They must have traced the IP address somehow, even though I’d used a subnet mask and proxies.”

  Yeah, or maybe they just knew because Zonia left a tip on the SEE-SAY line, as she threatened she would if I refused to assassinate President Hawke.

  “But without your machine, Jinxy, they didn’t know exactly what I’d done, where I’d penetrated, what I’d seen. They didn’t know, for example, that I’d installed a back door to access The Game programs in the future.”

  Neil gives a whistle of appreciation, and behind me, Quinn murmurs a soft, “Huh,” sounding seriously impressed.

  “And while they were questioning me at ASTA, no one asked about that, so I’m pretty sure they haven’t found out.”

  “They would have, once they got you to the interrogation center,” I say.

  “And they didn’t know that I downloaded huge chunks of code and APIs, protocols, mods, libraries and specs onto a microchip that I smuggled out of home and … that I still have with me!” he declares, sounding mighty proud of himself.

  Neil and Quinn look amazed. Sofia is frowning, the filigree pattern of the tattoo surrounding her eyes crinkling in concerned lines. But Evyan, who appears to have no more trust or liking for my twin than she does for me, is visibly skeptical.

  “No way. They would have searched you,” she says in a pissy tone.

  “They did search me. Very thoroughly. But” — Robin’s grin is maximally mischievous — “only on the outside.”

  “Eww!” I exclaim. “You don’t mean that you hid it up your —”

  “No! A.) No. B.) Do you think I’ve gone five days without … going? And C.) Just no! Gross,” he says, looking offended. “We’re going to need the doctor to extract it though.”

  “I’ll get her,” Sofia volunteers, and Robin calls after her, “Tell her to bring a light and tweezers.”

  “Dude, you didn’t stick it in your flesh-flute?” Bruce says, wincing. “That’s gotta be some kind of uncomfortable.”

  Robin rolls his eyes to the heavens. “Get your minds out of the gutter, people.”

  When Beth comes in, he tilts his head to one side and taps his ear.

  “Your ear?” I demand. “You hid a microchip in your ear?”

  The doc tuts with disapproval as she shines a light into Robin’s ear. “You could have done some serious damage. And didn’t it irritate you?”

  “It only made a noise when I moved my head quickly.”

  “I see it.” Beth inserts the ends of a set of tweezers and extracts something which she drops into the palm of Robin’s waiting hand. “Here you go.”

  We all crowd close to see the tiny chip, even Evyan. It’s miniscule — less than half the size of a cell phone sim card.

  “Careful!” Neil says when Evyan sneezes. “That’s a fifth-generation nanochip. It can hold terabytes of info.” He sounds awed and looks eager to begin exploring the contents immediately. “May I?”

  “As long as I can play, too.” Robin moves as if to get up.

  “You’re on bed rest, you’re not going anywhere,” Beth says firmly.

  “If Mohammed won’t go to the mountain … I’ll bring everything we need up here,” Neil says as he scurries out of the door.

  “And I’ll be your right hand, if you like,” Sofia says, directing a shy look a
t Robin from her liquid brown eyes.

  “I do like,” Robin replies, and Sofia blushes.

  Ah, so that’s how it is. Things have clearly been developing between the patient and his pretty nurse while I’ve been hiding out up in the trees.

  “So that’s my story,” Robin says. “That’s all, folks.”

  Sofia, Neil and Quinn are clearly excited to analyze the information on the chip. The more action-oriented members of our group look less impressed by Robin’s story.

  “I’d like to terabyte your bits,” Bruce says to Evyan as they make to leave the room.

  “Roses are red, violets are blue. I’ve got five fingers, the third one’s for you,” she replies, suiting the action to the word.

  “Guys, can I have a few minutes alone with my brother?” I ask Sofia and Quinn.

  But when we’re alone, I struggle to find the words to say what I need to say.

  “Thanks for the blood, by the way,” Robin says. “Beth told me I’ve got of pint of you sloshing around inside of me.”

  “It was the least I could do after I let you get shot,” I mutter. “Look, Robin, I’ve got two things to tell you.”

  “I’ve also got something to tell you.”

  “Me first.” I want to get this over with. “First, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” I lightly brush his arm.

  “Jinxy, you didn’t do this to me. It’s not your fault.”

  “It is. I screwed up. I should have checked Sarge, I should’ve been the one to guard him. You could have lost your arm. You could have died!”

  He waves away my words with the hand on his uninjured arm and says, “And the second thing?”

  I look down. There’s a loose thread in the quilted patchwork bedspread. I tug at it, unraveling a few stitches.

  “Jinxy?”

  “Did Sofia tell you what we found out, about the sniper unit?”

  He shakes his head, frowning in puzzlement.

  I tell him about the poison-filled ammunition, the killing.

  “Oh, Jinxy.” He pulls me into a careful, one-armed hug. “That’s why you ran away?”

  “Yeah.” I gulp, swallowing tears.

  “We’ll figure this all out. We’ll find out what they’re up to and tell the world,” he promises.

  “That’s the plan. So” — I sit back, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand — “what did you want to tell me?”