Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(50)

“Yes, it is. But I can repair it. Just be still. Hibernate.”

He didn’t.

She had never seen her mech-clone weep. There had never been a need. But that might be what his face was doing, his version. He didn’t have the back-end connections to his tear ducts, so they didn’t work, but blood vessels that had been attached to his cyber eyes ruptured from their connectors, and the subcutaneous blood seeped out. Like tears, pinkened sleet stuck to his face. “I cannot…”

A blur of movement from the elevator, a ding, and then Kellen was striding out into the morning. He wielded something long, like a sword.

Knight. Shining. Armor. She almost cracked into hysterical laughter.

And then, all powers help her, she did.

Kellen raised the glinting swordy thing, touched it to the back of mech-Daniel’s head, and the mech-clone collapsed to the ground like a sack of neutron stars. Heavy. Just like that.

There were words. Kellen’s words, and some others. Girl’s voice, woman’s. Saying things. Things things things. Angela might have contributed some of those things herself, but mostly she…laughed.

Oh man, it was the silliest thing, the worst, stupidest thing. She had survived a goddamn bombing and kept her shit together, but she was losing every thread of composure right now. Losing it like a virgin on spring break. It was all gone, unspooling there in the mud and ice.

She was alive. And somehow, that was fucking hilarious.

She let the shovel fall, and then she collapsed beside it, crumpled really, holding her face and laughing on the exhalations, snorting on the intakes. Mad as a hatter. Loopy as a shoelace. Non compos mentis.

And then gentle hands were stroking her head, her back. The kind of hands that promised no one would see, no one would judge. She could melt, disintegrate, and it was okay.

“Shhh, princess. I got you.”

His arms were right there, too, on the far end of those hands. She leaned into all of him, still laughing like a goddamn hyena. Because something about that perfect safe space in his arms? Reminded her that she was, in fact, powerful. Hunted, nearly dead, but still somehow a princess to this man. She had to be doing something right, to earn a title like that. From a person like him.

“No, not a princess,” she said after a long time, wiping the tears on his pointy-tipped shirt collar. “I am the fucking queen.”

“Okay.”

“And I’m not crying, either. Just so you know.”

He didn’t stop holding her. “I know.”

“Actually, I’m laughing.” She snuffled, settled herself slowly.

“I know,” he said again.

“Really? What the fuck? How can you possibly tell?” She pulled back and looked at his face. His face. That face.

He was smiling, but it was a cautious thing, hesitant, like he was sizing her up for a possible tranquilizer. “The queen of my world don’t cry.”

She wanted to kiss him. Put her mouth all over his body, ingest his sweetness, and then baste it all back over him. There wasn’t a damn thing sweet about her. There never had been. He was all the good that she ever was, and together, they would be even better. Best.

“No, you’re right,” she said. “This queen doesn’t get scared. She gets vengeance. Er, if she doesn’t die laughing first.”

“Such a badass, you.”

She was beyond silly now, but given what had just happened—the last fifteen minutes, the last fifteen weeks—she gave precisely zero fucks what anyone thought. “Good, bad, you’re the one with the…what was that thing you were wielding?”

“Cattle prod. Nine thousand volts, right to the diodes. Never got to use one before, but I’d say it came in fairly handy today.”

“Yeah, fairly.” She hiccupped. “You pacifists get all the best death toys.”

? ? ?

Angela stood inside a technological nightmare marble—okay, the room wasn’t actually a marble. It was the Vault, the Pentarc’s command center, a round-walled, armored enclosure four stories underground. She was willing to bet there was a Faraday shell behind those curved black panels with all the lights and blips and screens and always-shifting free-fae-lit data graphs.

Fat ropes of electrical cord wound along the floor, snakes perpetually threatening to strike an unsuspecting visitor. In the center of the viper pit was a command chair with a swivel base, so its occupant could pretend to know all and see all, like the guard in a digital panopticon.

Three curved doorways led off in various directions, but she didn’t go exploring.

Kellen had come into the Vault behind her. She knew it even without turning, and she wasn’t surprised when he set his hands atop her shoulders, wordlessly. Supporting her but not holding her up. As much as she cringed away from most people’s touch, his was different. Familiar. His microbes were her microbes. Someday he might even get it if she told him he had sexy-as-hell cooties.

He’d hauled a portable hydraulic calf table from the veterinary up at the barn. It might look like a medieval torture cage, but Kellen assured her that ranchers used these things all the time to restrain and transport cattle. Several people had come up to the barn to help load mech-Daniel’s body onto it. The thing weighed in excess of 180 kilos, and nobody wanted to dead-lift that. While Kellen had been checking out Angela to make sure she was unhurt—not holding her or stroking her or making her feel safe, right—Mari had whipped out a scary-looking knife and dug a trench in mech-Daniel’s head. The sounds of her ripping out wiring had been…well, they’d been gross. Presumably, now mech-Daniel either could not wake, or if he did, he wouldn’t be able to hurt anybody.