Perfect Gravity

by Vivien Jackson

  “That’s kind of what I’ve been telling you, sweetheart. I ain’t that guy.” You sent him away, or did you forget? He’d been disposable. Fuck-boy. Convenient. Nothing more than a rung for her pretty foot on her epic climb to the top. It did occur to him that he was being cruel, but goddamn it, so had she been. “You want my dick in your drawers and my mouth on your sweet spot, princess, I will require some wooing.”

  “I distinctly heard you tell all those people at the table—the people you call family—that you were taking me to bed.” She stroked. Jesus. “I believe this is what you would call lying like a rug.”

  “I said I was takin’ you to your bedroom.” Temptation shaved pieces off his will.

  “That’s exactly what you said, and your intentions could not have been clearer,” Angela argued, getting her debate on.

  “Well, but after that, Yoink and your husband decided to come along to watch. Gotta say that damped my want-to some.”

  She huffed a breath against his throat. “Look. I kicked them into the corridor. Pressed the emergency stop. Problem solved.”

  “It ain’t that easy.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I ain’t that easy.”

  She tested her tongue against her upper lip then drew it back inside. “Are you saying you don’t want me?”

  No, you insufferable woman. I will want you as long as there’s breath in this body, blood in these veins. And then I will love you longer still. “I’m saying we need to slow this down. Let me get to know you again. You said you wanted time. Well, let’s take some.”

  “I could slide down your body right now, lick you into my mouth, and make you come.”

  And every cell in his body knew what that would be like. “Could you? Could you really do that to me, sweetheart?”

  She went downright pale. He’d hit a raw nerve, apparently. Not the possibility that she wasn’t alluring enough but the threat that if she kept on, she’d hurt him, maybe break him. She hadn’t worried about such nuances, back when. The Angela in his arms right now was different, older. Kinder.

  Shit, he might have just fallen more in love with her. Not a good thing.

  Her ankles unhooked themselves, and her legs slid down the outsides of his thighs. She tucked him back into his jeans, resealed the seam. He eased her down the wall until her feet touched the floor. When he stepped back, still breathing too hard, still aching until he wanted to howl, he watched her smooth her skirt, check her cuffs. She pressed a palm to one cheek. Testing for blushes?

  What had he just done? What had she? His mind was spinning too fast, out of control, knocking against the edges of his heart, and every collision hurt like hell.

  This. This was why he hadn’t wanted her to come here. Not because of a grudge or bad memories. Not because he didn’t want her safe. Sure as hell not because he didn’t want her.

  But rather because he so very much…did.

  Chapter 8

  That was the last time she was going to let herself be alone with him. Swears. She had some discipline, damn it. She could control herself. Most of all, she could control how others saw her. She was a master of that bullshittery. In the days that followed the incident in the elevator, she polished her persona till it fucking shone.

  Data from Kellen’s biomechanical critter spies—most of which, she was disgusted to learn, were in fact rats—showed a singular lack of anything interesting. The air quality in the ruined Riu was pretty good. No radiation or odd chemical profiles. Somebody vaguely government-like was attempting to clean up the mess of the building site, but in a haphazard and desultory sort of way. At first she was pissed about that—shouldn’t they be trying to get in there and look for survivors?

  But then mech-Daniel got firewall clearance for her gossip feeds—finally—and she understood why. Nobody had survived. That was the official word, parroted by news services and professional gossips alike. Comprehensive destruction, including the unconfirmed but almost certain death of Continental Senator Angela Neko and her husband, Daniel Neko, the classic film and emote-vid star.

  On the steps of the Colina Capitolina, the new unified-state house in Denver, somebody had set up a shrine of ratty machine-printed teddy bears and plastic roses. Disaster-porn channels flooded with gruesome retrieval of body parts, some of which, presumably, were meant to be hers.

  For the first couple of days, she expected Zeke to issue a statement denying the rumors. But he didn’t. She also sort of expected him to respond to her own communiqués. Again, silence. True, he was at the ass end of a very contentious election, but it wasn’t like he couldn’t spare five fucking seconds to message her. If he was spinning her fake death story to score votes, she was all right with that. She was even willing to help plan the postparty, when, after the victory speeches, a rescue was staged to miraculously “find” her, maybe trapped in the hotel garbage chute and surviving on leftover sugar skulls from Dia de los Muertos.

  Okay, making up the stories was a lot of fun, but it didn’t resolve the fact that she was completely cut off now from everything familiar. On first blush, that meant nobody was calling her for a statement, nobody was trying to get her to agree to meat-meets or other inconvenient bullshittery. But also, it meant she couldn’t access about 80 percent of her life.

  Deceased senators had no clearance. She tried to log on to her remote-vote service, but her account no longer existed. The Vatican nuncio she was supposed to have met with this week instead mass-messaged a public prayer for her immortal soul. It was viral-mapped seventy-three thousand times on three separate social media platforms.

  She no longer existed.

  She had to break it to herself—Zeke had cut her loose. She didn’t know why he’d done it, and it annoyed the ever-living fuck out of her, but strangely, it didn’t hurt. Not on a gut-emotion level. It just seemed like what people did in her life: they came in, told her what to do, and then left. Sometimes the telling hurt like hell, but the leaving rarely did.

  Except when Kellen did it. She wondered if he realized he was the only person on the planet currently capable of hurting her. She wondered if he’d think that was an honor or a burden.

  He hadn’t been alone in a room with her since that elevator thing, so she couldn’t ask, play the getting-to-know-you game he seemed to want.

  He met with her at least once a day, always in the presence of others, when his reports for all his freaky bio-noodled animals came in. Sometimes they plugged the vid bits into a VR rig, so she could get her own eyes on the ruin. She’d run through the bombed-out hotel in rat POV so many times, she almost—almost—didn’t shudder every time she saw that room, that doorway, the fallen ceiling.

  He’d located bits of the smushed bomb. They didn’t look like bomb parts to Angela. They looked more like twisty metal toothpicks, but if he said they were weaponized toothpicks, she figured she might as well believe him. He knew more about this killing business anyhow.

  Mari came in a few times and laid some of her explosives expertise over the evidence. She thought it was a GBU-12, whatever the hell that was, but honestly, one mangled bit of wreckage looked like any other mangled bit of wreckage to Angela. Bombs typically didn’t have trite from-sender messages scrawled on them. She was pretty sure none of these spy-data caches were going to supply the breakthrough she coveted.

  Maybe she just didn’t want it enough. Maybe she wanted to keep not knowing, to keep fearing. So she could stay. So she didn’t have to try again—or fail again—to take control of anything.

  But she couldn’t tell Kellen that. It was manipulative and me-thinking and just generally shitty. He, as an opposite, was so solemn, so careful to lay out all these facts for her, like prizes. Or offerings. He kept his distance, no touching, and refrained from mentioning anything remotely related to either elevators or penises. He didn’t meet her eyes, he didn’t smile, and he didn’t attend Adele’s family d
inners, and her heart broke into a zillion guilty pieces every time she did catch a glimpse of him. She imagined scooping up those component bits, gluing them back together with apologies, and offering the resultant ugly craft project as proof that she wasn’t a monster.

  Instead she stayed across the room from him, watching and waiting and regretting.

  Zeke won reelection. He cried affectingly during his victory speech, dabbing with a hanky like a posh Victorian duke, live-emoting the whole thing, and lying like a lying thing that lies. Days then weeks passed, and he still didn’t message her, despite the fact that she’d left signposts out there in the cloud, “I’m still here; message me” notices. Well, fuck him.

  But even that bravado felt hollow, wasted on her lack of audience.

  Her plan had been to gather evidence. Well, she’d gathered, but instead of an enemy and a clear target going forward, she had…nothing. In terms of power, she was naked. She had no idea what her next step should be, and that terrified the shit out of her.

  The only dollop of peace in this whole situation tangle was Yoink. True, gears clicked somewhere in her hairy little body when she stretched, and having her rub those metal horns under an armpit at three in the morning could be startling, but there was also something marvelously peaceful about feline companionship. Angela had forgotten. She had forgotten how easy it was to get lost just watching her girl sleep or lick a paw and then rub that same paw behind her ear, cleaning herself in the daintiest way. She’d forgotten how comforting it was to know that when she woke up, somebody was there waiting for her to open her eyes. Even if it was just so Yoink could have her breakfast (right the hell now), she had a thing, a reason to hoist herself out of bed.

  Such reasons, for her, were kind of in short supply.

  Angela followed Yoink across the skywalk almost every day into Northy. Sometimes the two of them would go exploring, skipping gaps in wounded staircases or prodding unfinished walls until they revealed their unintentional secret passages. It reminded her of the years she’d spent exploring Mustaqbal.

  With Kellen.

  Damn it, everything did always circle back to him.

  Sometimes they’d sit and do nothing at all, Angela and the cat. Except for her, doing nothing took an absurd amount of effort. Thinking hurt. See, the thing that the experts never say about abnormally smart kids, those with eidetic memories and other unique methods of cross-hemisphere neural activity, is that the ability to remember every page of every book ever read, every photo of every campaign donor, every cruel word delivered like a knife in anger, was more torture than talent. What she experienced could never be annulled. Angela couldn’t claim ignorance. She knew what she’d done.

  But she also had a cheat when it came to Kellen, because he remembered all those things, too. So as the weather turned cool and late autumn blew in over the mountains and the two of them maintained their let’s-play-chicken staring contest from different ends of any given room, Angela started work on a project. It didn’t take much begging to get what she needed. She had no doubt Kellen would understand the meaning when she was done. She would make him understand, damn it. She only hoped he’d see it as an apology as well. Because that’s what it was.

  • • •

  “Oh, hey. I am flattered to be found more important than a whiny camelid,” Heron said when Kellen ducked into the Vault, the Pentarc’s subterranean control room. His voice was dryer than a popcorn fart, and it chafed. “But it is strange to see you someplace other than the barn.”

  “And a good fucking morning to you, too,” Kellen said. True, he’d spent the better part of the last several weeks tending his critters. He’d installed trackers and heavy-duty immunizations in Azul. He’d…been busy. Too busy to spend alone-time with Angela.

  Who was, at this moment in Northy with Yoink on her lap. Not that he was paying attention to these things. Much. Just figured physical space might help the both of them right now. He wasn’t sure how spending a lot of time apart was going to advance their getting-to-know-you-again progress bar, but, you know, baby steps.

  Heron smiled at his friend’s casual obscenity, but it wasn’t an easy smile. Looked like it took some effort to stretch that mouth. “You have just interrupted my very scintillating review of administrative minutiae. Food purchases to supplement the biodomes. Price comparisons for having EMP shielding installed on Fanaida’s dragon. Market fluctuations in Asia that might or might not indicate a political tremor.”

  “Well, that’s what you get for signing on to this crazy, adventurous life of crime.” Kellen slung his long body onto a bench near the armory door. “Where’s Mari?”

  “Hmm.” His lack of answer almost explained the pained not-smile.

  “Trouble in paradise?”

  “Maybe.” Heron turned his chair so he could face Kellen. He pushed fingertips into his eye sockets in a way that must have hurt. Or would hurt a human with normal pain tolerances. “You warned me she might not appreciate a less hair-raising lifestyle. She’s used to spontaneity and mobility and, let’s face it, danger. Pentarc is…not that.”

  Unsaid was that he personally was no longer capable of following Mari all over from one highly illegal adventure to the next. His ultimate solution both to that nanovirus back in October and to taking care of his partner over vast distances had been to plug into the cloud, lose himself in it. Now he couldn’t back out gracefully. In physical terms, he couldn’t back out at all. His mind was dispersed in the information network and couldn’t be crammed back into something as limited as one human brain. He had to stay put someplace with a node, else his consciousness could fracture.

  “Maybe you just have to let her light off on her own sometimes, man. She’s a boomerang. She’ll come back.”

  “I know.”

  “But it’s not the separation bothering you. It’s not even the slight possibility she’ll disappear.”

  “You know my reach is vast,” Heron said, a snip of haughty investing his voice. “She cannot run so far that I couldn’t find her.”

  “Missing my point,” Kellen said, keeping his voice gentle, as if he were luring a timorous rabbit to his hand. “You want to go with. Not because you don’t trust her and not because you don’t think she’s capable on her own. You wanna orbit that gal because gravity.”

  “Orbit is an odd word choice here, probably because this has nothing to do with gravity.”

  “No, it does. Hear me out. Stars are hot, right, steaming up the universe, radiating like all get-out, just trying to get somebody to look at them. And then another star drifts by, and our first eager little gas ball catches it, starts up this vast cosmic dance, and boom, they form a binary. Every major force in the universe is keeping them together at this point. It’s the inverse of Romeo and Juliet. Those two stars, they belong together, probably are even spiraling into each other, doomed to a catastrophic, immolative end.” He caromed his hands together until they smacked into each other. Bam. “But what happens when they realize this horrible destiny in store for them, when one star tries to give the other space, for her own good?”

  “It’s impossible,” said Heron.

  “Impossible,” Kellen echoed.

  “Is that what she did to you?”

  “Who, Mari? Fuck no, man. That girl…”

  “I mean Senator Neko.”

  Aw, shit on a shingle. How’d he do that? Turn a conversation that Kellen was directing, twist it until it flayed his own soul instead? Kellen resolved right then to stop giving advice to insightful folk. Only idiots would benefit from his brilliance from here on out.

  “Well, anyhow, back to the original thread. You could find Mari a puppy. I’m sure I could get you one. She’d have to crate-train it, which you gotta imagine would be more fun than skidding bare-kneed into a hot conflict zone and blowing shit up.”

  “You don’t know her very well.”

  “
Ha! Point taken. Hey, you got—”

  But Heron’s attention had gotten snagged on something. “Oh, no.”

  Wild hares and cosmic destinies evaporated. This thing that had turned Heron’s face white was something else entirely.

  Please God, don’t let anybody precious be in trouble. Reflexively, he pinged Yoink for her status report and found her still sleeping on Angela’s lap. Both his girls, safe. “What?”

  Heron turned the chair and extended his hands along the rails. Data-input tablets extruded from grooves on either side, and without even looking down, Heron was keying commands into the Pentarc system. “You know how Garrett is always planning for the giant flaming apocalypse?” he said in a voice made of tension.

  “Among other things,” said Kellen.

  “I think we might have to admit that he has a point. Look at this.”

  On the screen directly in front of both of them, the world exploded.

  • • •

  It was early, before the sun had a good shot at thawing the winter world. The wind sliced through the tower, shrilling like a Viking ghost. Angela was bundled in a blanket and lying in a haptic hammock she’d strung up between two columns in Northy. Nobody had ever filled in the window glass here, and cool morning air shifted her hammock, lulling her half to sleep while she electronically reviewed yesterday’s cast from a full-sensory news channel.

  Yoink, who adored this setup enough to comment on it every fifteen minutes or so, had spread her furry self across Angela’s belly, her little head resting lightly on her human’s thigh and her feline hiney propped on Angela’s sternum. Butt to the face, baby. Angela wondered if this was typical of all cats or if hers was just a special kind of nasty.

  Mech-Dan stood at attention maybe fifteen feet away. He’d told her he was hibernating till she needed him, but she knew he wasn’t. He was guarding her, probably iterating behavior patterns for Daniel Ashe Neko in his mind. He hadn’t made a secret of disliking the Daniel personality protocol. Poor Dan-Dan. Somewhere inside that mind, he was probably very put out.