Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(30)
Kellen blinked up at her. Her body had stiffened, pressed up against his, but not out of desire. Tension invaded her and leached into him. He wasn’t sure yet why he needed to worry, but worry suffused him just the same.
“Specifically,” Angela said, meeting his eyes directly, almost defiantly, “my dependence on you is a problem.”
“How d’you figure?” His voice sounded more like a croak.
“You know my plans, my future. It’s all mapped out, and it’s going to be amazing. But I read the mentors’ write-up of my last evaluation.”
“Spy,” he teased, but the joke wasn’t funny.
“We must be informed, Kellen. Call it spying if you want, but you should do a little more of it,” she argued. “Anyway, the mentors think I have not been tested, that my life has been too safe and sterile. ‘A sword must be fired, else it shatters under pressure,’ one of them wrote.”
“Bullshit. You’re a person, not a weapon.”
“Be that as it may, I kind of see their point. If my whole life is a series of wins, if I never lose, I will lack the necessary wisdom to succeed.”
“There are lots of ways to succeed, though, and suffering doesn’t make any outcome more statistically probable than another. Considering where I come from, just being here with you is success.”
He could tell her plenty about struggle. Back home, before the MIST recruiters saw his test scores and flew him out here to the academy, keeping Sissy safe had been a 24/7 calling. Patching her up after Mama went on a mean streak. Mama always took her mean out on Sissy, leaving him to watch and hurt in impotence and then clean up after.
The academy’d sworn they’d take care of Sissy, get her out of that house. They’d brought him here, fixed his problems, and gave him an outlet to express all these thoughts in his noggin to boot. He was living his success, any way you painted it, and not a lick of it linked causally to whatever his struggles had been. Suffering hadn’t made him what he was. Right now, today, he’d still be a supergenius even if he hadn’t started out in a cheap-wine-smelling trailer in East Texas.
He’d still be important. Like Angela. Weren’t they just alike? Or was that what she meant? That they weren’t, somehow.
She leaned in and kissed him. Hard, that kiss, and close-mouthed. She stilled in the middle of it, with her lips pressed to his, and a tremble passed between their mouths, electrical, like she was in fact recording the moment. A frozen moment she could cram in a snow globe or something. Kellen turned his head, breaking their connection.
“What are you not telling me?” he demanded.
She flinched like he’d hurt her. “There is a new message on your com back in the dorm.” She raised her arm. Her own com was built in so she could never lose it. “We all got the alert, but yours includes a ticket back to Texas. One way.”
He swore under his breath. “But I passed my exams.”
“I know.”
“It’s in the contract. They let me keep enrolling as long as I perform to expectation. Well, I’ve done everything they wanted. Hell, more. Lots more.” How many papers had he written? How many databases crammed full of facts had he memorized? Even western fucking poetry, the god-awfulest stuff on the planet. He knew whole epic poems of that shit by heart and would never get them out of his brain now. The academy, the mentors, had said jump, and he’d fucking asked how high.
He took a long, raggedy breath. “Are you tellin’ me they’re kicking me out?”
She caught her bottom lip between her teeth and didn’t answer. He rolled, pushing her off, separating their bodies. All the warmth of the day fled. The air tasted like dust.
“What’s their reason?” They had to have one.
She looked at him steadily, her dark gaze impenetrable. Unknowable. “It isn’t your grades. It’s Texas. That hurricane came through this morning, our time. It was pretty bad. Cat six. Lowest barometric pressure in recorded history. Comprehensive and pervasive structural failure. Galveston is pretty much gone. Houston, too. It’s all over the channels.”
Ah. Well, as a matter of fact, he did know about that one. He’d been monitoring the storm the weather folks named Agatha. Not because he was going back, though. His family was in Lufkin, inland by several hours. Folks not from around there oftentimes didn’t appreciate how big Texas was, how much ground it covered. Even if that hurricane had hit Galveston dead-on and barreled straight up the ship channel, it still wouldn’t have affected Mama and Sissy much. This was a distraction, an excuse.
Those asshole mentors were still expecting him to take their deal. No baggage. Everybody on the mentor council expected him to flinch. To run. To do their bidding out of reflex.
So they could set fire to Angela. So they could hone her into their weapon.
And she was letting them.
He started pulling on his clothes. “Look, I ain’t leaving, but I am gonna run take a look at the terminals real quick and check in on my people. I’m sure they’re fine, but Mama can get pretty hysterical, even over minor things. She’s all about the drama. Sissy’ll need to talk my ear off, I’m sure. Afterward, I’ll…”
He had his shirt on, unfastened, and his uniform pants in a similar state of half completion. He’d just started on the placket buttons when her silence in the face of his string of chatter made him pause.