Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(18)

Which, incidentally, Kellen would like to do, for his own self, now things were settled.

“Mari will be here in one hour seventeen minutes.” Heron’s eyes slatted open, blinking through the digital fog. “I must be up by then.”

There was a dirty joke in there somewhere, but even though they were both plenty punchy, neither went there.

“An hour-long nap in the meantime wouldn’t hurt either of us,” Kellen suggested.

For the last four days, Kellen had monitored his friend’s struggle to oust a particularly nasty neural-net virus. Seventy-four hours in applied neurobiology back in school and a decade of veterinary practice since had made Kellen keenly suited to caring for a human as brain-altered as Heron. But no amount of training got a body used to watching another person in suspended consciousness for four days. The vigil had been like watching a corpse decay in time-lapse, and not just any corpse. His best friend.

It hadn’t helped that Heron’s sweetheart Mari had been on the com every other second, checking up on him. Or that she herself had hied off on some danger-junkie mission to Texas, a parallel attempt to figure out who had put the virus in Heron’s head and shut it the hell down.

They were both of them crazier than a pair of springtime squirrels in traffic, but Kellen couldn’t fault them. All that crazy was for love. Kellen himself had done some less than purely sane things in the name of love before. Lord, hadn’t he just.

He swiped a big hand over his face, shoving the floppier bits of hair out of his eyes. He needed to hit the sack, maybe for a week. The virus was gone now. They had won. Soon, his team would all be tucked back home in the Pentarc, feet on firm ground rather than some floofy space station or spaceplane or et cetera. Safe.

Angela had taken care of Mari’s outlaw status—he’d seen the senator on vid channels flat-out denying that Daniel was dead, which he had to admit was a pretty ingenious solution. Ballsy too. She’d even gone on Rafa Castrejon’s channel, plugged into an emote caster, and convinced a couple million people real-time that no way could she have just been widowed when she was this crammed full of joy. She’d looked luminous.

So much that Kellen had been tempted to slip a rig on his own head, just for a minute, and feel it. Angela’s joy. God.

No, was probably best he didn’t do that. There were some things in this ’verse he’d never be sufficiently prepared to feel.

“Kellen?” Heron was frowning, and his eyes were closed again. He’d stretched his bare hands out on the smartsurface, soaking in the information stream there. “Have you checked your blip boards this morning?”

Reluctantly, he wrested his attention to Heron’s question, away from Angela.

Kellen had trackers on all the critters he’d managed to bring in, alter, and release back into the wild. It calmed him to peek in on them from time to time, but even when he only had a second or two, he could glance at the overall board, see all their green lights, and know that even if he died right at that moment, he had put some good back into the world. All his work, his sacrifices, had already produced a net win. Sometimes just knowing that was enough. The blip board was his validation.

“Nope, not this morning, but I did hear from Fan last night, before all that business with Mari started. Your mom’s bringing a vicu?a up here later today, orphaned and wee.” Although Heron had closed his eyes again, Kellen had a sneaking suspicion his friend wasn’t drifting off, not yet. Too much tension in those hands. “Can you see all my trackers there?”

Heron took a while answering. “I can see them. I can see…everything.” On the table, a tremble wobbled through his fingers.

“Ain’t easy what you did to your brain. Best go slow,” Kellen advised.

Heron’s faint smile was wry. “Information doesn’t work that way. It is indescribably fast, but there are…handholds, places within the cloud where I can sort of grab on and pause long enough to study.”

The thing that had finally kicked that virus out of Heron’s head once and for damn-sure had been connection. Specifically a nodal connection: Heron had plugged straight into the cloud and essentially melded his consciousness with the global information net. Kellen had never heard of anybody doing that before, and the consequences of such a maneuver were likely to be a bitch, on down the road. But that connection had saved his friend, so maybe there was something to that ends-justifying-means crap after all.

“Your blip board is one of those handholds,” Heron went on. “I find it comforting, the numbers of animals out there, thriving, because of you and our work. I see why you stare at it all the time.”

Well, would you look at that? Dude was starting to get it. Kellen flopped down in a chair and propped his boots up on the long, granite-topped table. He butt-scooched to the edge of the chair, getting comfy. If he’d had his hat, he would have pushed it low over his face to shut out some of the light, but it was bad manners to wear a hat indoors. Some lessons he’d retained from all his mama’s hollering.

“How my butterflies doing?” he asked.

Butterflies, not Angela. So what the butterflies were wintering near Morelia? Aaaaaand Angela happened to be about two hours away from them, in Guadalajara, last he’d checked. It wasn’t like he was asking after his monarchs just because he was thinking about her way too much lately.

Except that had been his exact reason.