Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(37)

Her mouth opened, but she didn’t speak.

He waited, still touching her arm, because he couldn’t stop.

Until, of course, she yelped like a pinched piglet and leapt sideways.

? ? ?

“Holyfuckingwhatwasthat?” All one word and bleating from her mouth before she even landed. She hadn’t considered the fact that she was perched on permaglass ten stories above the ground, nor that some of the sides at the North Tower end weren’t walled in properly. They’d be sheetrock thin, fragile if hit with enough force. So not a great place, in general, to freak out.

But something had touched her ankle. Something soft and sleek and please-don’t-be-a-rat. She hated rats. She’d been attached to an envoy in a backwater shithole once, and the rodentia there were…

And then the weirdest thing in the whole world happened. Her com warmed. Crackled. And purred.

What the…?

Before she could ask a more coherent question, Kellen dropped to one knee, his attention clearly snagged on something else.

Something small, furry, and definitely not a rat.

A cat.

His long fingers curled under a cinnamon-furred chin, and the tiny feline leaned happily into his stroke. “Little general, you shouldn’t have snuck up on her like that. You like to made her jump clean off this building.”

The cat growled in reply but didn’t stop purring. Talented kitty. Multitasker. She knew this cat.

“How?” Angela breathed, unable to move her gaze from the animal. “You found another one?” Memory pricked her eyes, and she blinked rapidly.

“Nah,” said Kellen, still looking down at the cat. Not meeting Angela’s eyes at all. “Not another one. Same one.”

“Yoink? How is this possible?” She was on her knees now too, her hands reaching out to the impossible softness. She could feel the vibration of the purring beneath her palms and also in her com. “She was an old girl already when we took her in. What did you estimate? Fifteen? Sixteen? And that was more than a decade ago.”

“I took care of her,” Kellen said. “Couldn’t let anything happen to our girl.”

Our girl. Oh, oh, Kellen.

Angela bit her bottom lip hard and stared at the cat, blinking fast till she thought she could live through that moment.

Something had happened to Yoink in the intervening years. The color and patterns were right, but other things were very, very wrong about this animal. For one thing, Yoink had horns.

Not horns like in old pics of longhorns or triceratops or anything. Little metal horns right in front of her ears. Humans used similar alterations for projecting user interface controls. But a cat couldn’t possibly connect to the cloud. And even if it had the capability, what would it do there? Order stupid-expensive flash-frozen tuna?

“I know you,” the com said, pushing a completely unfamiliar voice into Angela’s brain. A sandpapery voice with a digital edge. Clear green eyes stared up at her solemnly. “My human. I want you to pet me. I also want to bite you.”

A sob erupted before Angela could lock it down. It morphed into a semihysterical laugh on the end. “If she could have talked, that is exactly what she would have said.”

The cat beneath her hand stiffened and moved its head away from Kellen’s touch. Reluctantly, it seemed, and Angela couldn’t fault it for that.

“I did say,” the voice in Angela’s com rasped. “More petting. Right now.”

“I don’t remember her being so cherry-colored on the head,” said Angela. Yoink’s wee face looked different, less wizened. Kind of wall-eyed. “What did you do to her?”

Kellen’s hand retreated. He’d dipped his chin, and the brim of his hat concealed his face. “I should’ve said she’s mostly our Yoink. When I went back to Texas, the place was a wreck, people fleeing the southeast like bugs when a light comes on. The vet program at A&M had been forced to evacuate, and I helped them get to a triage on down the state highway. They kind of took me in. What I learned at MIST, it was pretty easy to slot my work into theirs.”

“You cloned her?”

“Yeah.”

“And it looks like you modified her somehow as well.”

“I did.”

Angela didn’t offer judgment. She just kept petting.

After a long while, Kellen went on. “I’ll tell you something about cats: they ain’t dumb. Structurally, their brains are a lot like human ones, gyrencephalic, lots of synapses, lots of electrical activity. They can be wired to function as a hub for strategic variables. Plus, they can listen and transmit like nobody’s business, and their agility gets them into places robots can’t go. The research was all there. I didn’t think up the concept of enhanced feline intelligence all on my own, you know.”

“You’re referring to DARPA’s spy kitty in the 1960s, which was a miserable failure by all accounts. But this is light-years ahead. We’re talking actual language. That’s not just a mini spy recorder attached to her tail. She’s talking to me. On the com.” Angela still wasn’t sure what she thought about that.

“It’s creeping you out, isn’t it?” Kellen asked. His smile was hesitant but brash, like he feared her response but mocked himself for entertaining that fear.

Yoink rolled over and presented her belly. Angela rubbed it obediently. “Maybe,” she said. “And you’re right. It is also…kind of amazing. Not just the science and application potential but…this is my girl.”