Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(35)
A chair had been arranged against the wall by the window, drenched in sunlight, and in it slept an ancient woman in a dove-gray khimar. She snored. On her lap, beneath one frail boney hand, lay a cinnamon-and-white-striped beast.
There wasn’t really another good word for it. Tiny, fragile, but with potential energy blazing off it like a coiled spring. Clearly this thing was a predator, even though it reclined in perfect stillness and didn’t seem ready to rip anybody’s throat out. Its green eyes locked on Kellen. An ear twitched. It opened its fang-filled mouth and emitted…a heart-meltingly adorable little mewl.
Epic adorable. Angela struggled to keep herself from answering with an awwwww.
“You pushy little thing,” Kellen said. For a half second, Angela thought he was talking about her. Then he crossed to the old lady and the cat. “Of course I didn’t bring you no food. Granny’d tan my hide if I fed you treats. She’s got you on a strict diet—you don’t run around so much anymore, and you are looking a bit tubby round the middle. We’d best be good.”
Without opening her eyes, the elderly woman uttered something in a low, melodic voice. Angela tapped her cuff com, and it translated the woman’s words out loud. “I’m not sleeping. I am only resting my eyes, child.”
Kellen tossed a grin back at Angela. “Well, aren’t you clever as a hoot owl. Why didn’t I think of using a translation app before now?”
“Because you are an ignorant western infant.” The computer voice coming from the tinny com speaker didn’t have much inflection, but the woman was smiling. Still with her eyes closed, but her face was content. She didn’t mean her words as an insult, and Angela suddenly realized that Kellen and this woman had talked before. Or, well, communicated. Even without speaking the same language and with no translation. Library magic? Or Kellen magic?
“Ah, Granny might talk trash, but she don’t mind it when I come bother her,” he said.
“The ignorant boy is right. I enjoy his company. He feeds my old Ghufran until she is fat and in love with him.”
Angela kept her gaze locked on the cat, but the skin around her eyes felt hot, and she was pretty sure she was blushing. Not because of the L word. Or because he was looking right at her and grinning that sly, deep-dimpled grin, like he knew every thought in her head.
Definitely not because the granny lady punctuated the awkward moment with a low chuckle. “Girl, Ghufran especially likes to be rubbed between the ears.” She moved her creaky hand, leaving the path clear to all that thick, strokable fur.
Angela hesitated. Sure, the cat looked impossibly soft. But also fangy and predatory and annoyed. And it was sitting on a person’s lap. Definitely within a personal-space sphere. No touchy. These things were drilled into all kids whose mentors didn’t want them to die an early viral, communicable, and hemorrhagic death.
Kellen apparently felt no compunction. Angela tried not to think what that said about his upbringing. He leaned in and rubbed Ghufran, not on her dome-shaped head but beneath the chin. The cat snuggled its head into his touch and purred so loud, the sound was almost mechanical.
“See?” he told Angela. “It’s okay. She won’t hurt you. She digs the attention.”
It…did. Angela took her time, but her hand did eventually find its way to the cat’s head. The fur felt amazing, like the best and most expensive synthwool, only made better by the warmth and purring vibration and…breathing. The cat was breathing. Angela wasn’t sure why this fact should so surprise or affect her. Respiration was one of the eight basic functions of living organisms, a component part of the definition of life. But words in a lesson had nothing on literally putting her hand on such a creature, feeling it doing all that living right there, with her and beside her.
“Wow.”
The com translated her one-word reaction, and Granny laughed. “She likes you, girl with no name.”
“Apologies. My name is Angela Neko,” she said, flushing at Granny’s implicit rebuke. First impressions, oops. She should have introduced herself right off. A mistake like that could cost a corporation its contracts, a country its peace.
“You are a MIST student?”
“We both are.” Angela, not wanting to stop her petting, indicated Kellen with a tip of her head.
“Where in the world makes a name like Neko?”
“She means are you another Texas redneck like me,” he joked, but there was an edge, buried deep. Most of the time it seemed like he took all these slights in stride, but Angela fancied she could see through his humor and thick skin. Every barb imbedded. Deep. She wondered what that did to someone, day after day, in a kind of enforced solitude. Clearly, it made him seek connection with strangers, like the assistant librarian’s granny. Maybe also with her?
“It’s a portmanteau name,” she said. “My parents are internationalists, Neeraf and Himiko. The phonemes Ne and Ko become Neko, since I, of course, am neither Bengali nor Japanese. I was born in Minneapolis.”
“You were born to the MIST.” That was exactly how people in her world said it: born to the MIST. Not born with talent or destined to be accepted to the academy but born to the MIST. As if the Mustaqbal Institute was mythological Avalon or something. As if she were magical or preordained just because of her DNA or her parents’ ambitions.
Correction: her ambitions. She hadn’t seen her parents in ten years. This was all on her now.