Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(44)
Okay, making up the stories was a lot of fun, but it didn’t resolve the fact that she was completely cut off now from everything familiar. On first blush, that meant nobody was calling her for a statement, nobody was trying to get her to agree to meat-meets or other inconvenient bullshittery. But also, it meant she couldn’t access about 80 percent of her life.
Deceased senators had no clearance. She tried to log on to her remote-vote service, but her account no longer existed. The Vatican nuncio she was supposed to have met with this week instead mass-messaged a public prayer for her immortal soul. It was viral-mapped seventy-three thousand times on three separate social media platforms.
She no longer existed.
She had to break it to herself—Zeke had cut her loose. She didn’t know why he’d done it, and it annoyed the ever-living fuck out of her, but strangely, it didn’t hurt. Not on a gut-emotion level. It just seemed like what people did in her life: they came in, told her what to do, and then left. Sometimes the telling hurt like hell, but the leaving rarely did.
Except when Kellen did it. She wondered if he realized he was the only person on the planet currently capable of hurting her. She wondered if he’d think that was an honor or a burden.
He hadn’t been alone in a room with her since that elevator thing, so she couldn’t ask, play the getting-to-know-you game he seemed to want.
He met with her at least once a day, always in the presence of others, when his reports for all his freaky bio-noodled animals came in. Sometimes they plugged the vid bits into a VR rig, so she could get her own eyes on the ruin. She’d run through the bombed-out hotel in rat POV so many times, she almost—almost—didn’t shudder every time she saw that room, that doorway, the fallen ceiling.
He’d located bits of the smushed bomb. They didn’t look like bomb parts to Angela. They looked more like twisty metal toothpicks, but if he said they were weaponized toothpicks, she figured she might as well believe him. He knew more about this killing business anyhow.
Mari came in a few times and laid some of her explosives expertise over the evidence. She thought it was a GBU-12, whatever the hell that was, but honestly, one mangled bit of wreckage looked like any other mangled bit of wreckage to Angela. Bombs typically didn’t have trite from-sender messages scrawled on them. She was pretty sure none of these spy-data caches were going to supply the breakthrough she coveted.
Maybe she just didn’t want it enough. Maybe she wanted to keep not knowing, to keep fearing. So she could stay. So she didn’t have to try again—or fail again—to take control of anything.
But she couldn’t tell Kellen that. It was manipulative and me-thinking and just generally shitty. He, as an opposite, was so solemn, so careful to lay out all these facts for her, like prizes. Or offerings. He kept his distance, no touching, and refrained from mentioning anything remotely related to either elevators or penises. He didn’t meet her eyes, he didn’t smile, and he didn’t attend Adele’s family dinners, and her heart broke into a zillion guilty pieces every time she did catch a glimpse of him. She imagined scooping up those component bits, gluing them back together with apologies, and offering the resultant ugly craft project as proof that she wasn’t a monster.
Instead she stayed across the room from him, watching and waiting and regretting.
Zeke won reelection. He cried affectingly during his victory speech, dabbing with a hanky like a posh Victorian duke, live-emoting the whole thing, and lying like a lying thing that lies. Days then weeks passed, and he still didn’t message her, despite the fact that she’d left signposts out there in the cloud, “I’m still here; message me” notices. Well, fuck him.
But even that bravado felt hollow, wasted on her lack of audience.
Her plan had been to gather evidence. Well, she’d gathered, but instead of an enemy and a clear target going forward, she had…nothing. In terms of power, she was naked. She had no idea what her next step should be, and that terrified the shit out of her.
The only dollop of peace in this whole situation tangle was Yoink. True, gears clicked somewhere in her hairy little body when she stretched, and having her rub those metal horns under an armpit at three in the morning could be startling, but there was also something marvelously peaceful about feline companionship. Angela had forgotten. She had forgotten how easy it was to get lost just watching her girl sleep or lick a paw and then rub that same paw behind her ear, cleaning herself in the daintiest way. She’d forgotten how comforting it was to know that when she woke up, somebody was there waiting for her to open her eyes. Even if it was just so Yoink could have her breakfast (right the hell now), she had a thing, a reason to hoist herself out of bed.
Such reasons, for her, were kind of in short supply.
Angela followed Yoink across the skywalk almost every day into Northy. Sometimes the two of them would go exploring, skipping gaps in wounded staircases or prodding unfinished walls until they revealed their unintentional secret passages. It reminded her of the years she’d spent exploring Mustaqbal.
With Kellen.
Damn it, everything did always circle back to him.
Sometimes they’d sit and do nothing at all, Angela and the cat. Except for her, doing nothing took an absurd amount of effort. Thinking hurt. See, the thing that the experts never say about abnormally smart kids, those with eidetic memories and other unique methods of cross-hemisphere neural activity, is that the ability to remember every page of every book ever read, every photo of every campaign donor, every cruel word delivered like a knife in anger, was more torture than talent. What she experienced could never be annulled. Angela couldn’t claim ignorance. She knew what she’d done.