Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(2)
“It is late,” she said, pushing authority into her voice. “You all should be in bed preparing for tomorrow. Good night.” Implicit in every word was a threat. Her mentor, Zeke, wielded power beyond the walls of the school. All kinds of rumors swirled around him. People on the conspiracy-shrouded darknet swore he was trying to take over the world. Angela wouldn’t go so far as that, but even so, she knew Zeke could nudge whole lives off course if he so chose. If she told him he should.
The bullies echoed her good night in a rainbow of languages, showing off like complete losers. Two told her to have pleasant dreams. She didn’t inform them that her only dreams were nightmares. The darkness inside her mind wasn’t any of their business.
Only she and Kellen remained in the courtyard then. He finally spoke. “Ain’t you on the tiny side to be the boss of them?”
Yow, what an accent. Roughly a dozen words in, and she wasn’t certain she could stand to listen to even one more. And yet, that niggle of justice remained, like a stone in her sandal. And, okay, the pretty didn’t hurt.
“It’s late. I’ll hack your dorm lock tomorrow,” she said. “Yamal should not have shut you out. He’s a prehominid on his best days. And was that a short joke?”
“Of course it wasn’t. I like little,” said Kellen. “And don’t rush or nothing. I was gonna crash in the liberry.”
“The what?”
“The liberry. As in books. You do know English, dontcha?”
“Of course I know English. I’m from Minneapolis. And the correct pronunciation is li-brary. You’ll note the r.”
He tilted his head and a fringe of spun-gold hair half shrouded his face. It made him look like secrets and mischief. He grinned, and suddenly, Angela could not breathe. Could hardly think.
“Yeah. The library.”
“Well, you don’t have to stay there, no matter what you call it. Here, follow me.”
“As you wish, princess.” He had deep dimples on either side of his mouth when he grinned wide.
She let his soft sarcasm pass. It wasn’t an overt challenge to her authority, and to be honest, she didn’t mind being called princess. Princesses were things that had happened. They weren’t myths. Princesses could be mighty. Princesses could become queens.
What did worry her was how…aware she was of him following her through the hallways, back to her dorm. It felt like all the other students were watching through peepholes or something. Ridiculous, but also real. She was being observed, ranked, rated. She knew how the weight of such an evaluation felt. And even though every time they tested her, she was found worthy, the fear of failure never quite went away.
In her dorm, she gave him a blanket and showed him to her haptic study hammock. It was fairly comfortable if you didn’t load in any simulations. He could sleep there until they got his dorm lock sorted.
She wasn’t used to people arguing with her when she gave instructions, but she expected something, a pushback from him. Another sarcastic comment, maybe. Or really anything other than a knowing, slow-honey smile.
He was just as unsettling as that creep Santa. And he was in her lounge. Where he would presumably stay all night. While she slept. Defenseless. For the first time, she had a second thought about this plan.
He didn’t seem to. He kicked off his ratty sneakers and rolled up his borrowed blanket before shoving it behind his head. “So, I’m Kellen. You got a name, little princess?”
When he stretched impossibly long limbs across the hammock, she tried not to stare at his naked feet. What was wrong with her? She saw naked feet all the time, but his were uniquely obscene. And a bit hypnotic.
“Angela.” She swallowed.
A shadow smile fitted over his mouth, but it didn’t dig in, didn’t make the dimple. “Shoulda guessed, way you do that guardian thing and all. Thank you for that. For all that.”
She searched for the sarcasm, the joke. But…there wasn’t one. He was completely sincere. Which might make him the most fantastical creature in the universe.
“Well, good night, Angela,” he told her, closing his eyes and getting comfortable. “Sleep tight, y que sue?es con los angelitos.”
She mumbled something and practically ran to her bed in the next room. She changed her passkey on the bedroom door four times, but her face still felt hot. The blanket, also: too hot. Impossible to sleep.
His words, even in that ghastly accent, kept knocking around in her head.
She’d never thought much of her name, outside of it being boring and Western and old-fashioned. But in his voice? None of those. In his voice, it evoked the angels he’d told her to dream of. Just, you know, not the kind that flits around misinforming new mothers as to the divinity of their offspring. Also not the fallen ones. Or the many-eyed wheels-for-feet ones. And totally, definitely not one that Kellen Hockley was dreaming of tonight.
Which, she had to confess in secret, kind of sucked. She might enjoy being in that boy’s dreams.
Chapter 1
HOTEL RIU, GUADALAJARA, OCTOBER 2059
Angela didn’t play chess. Her game board was, um, bigger. Like the whole fucking planet big. She didn’t have time for small games.
She had an election to win, a war to start, a career to kick in its slow-moving ass. And accomplishing those goals was going to require her emotional experience today to be on point. Thousands of potential voters would be feeling it along with her.