Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(53)
“What…?”
“No safety and no biometric locks, so just pull the trigger hard when you mean it, and then keep on pulling. This little gem’s got tight tolerances, smooth action, and dead-on accuracy. Slide’s nice and loose, too. All that said, you’ll want to practice with her a couple of times before you go full-on badass. I just slipped a box of ammo into your bag there, and she’s got a full clip, ready to go.” She looked solemn and serious as a funeral when she stepped back. “Y’all take care.”
He sort of hated the feeling of the gun in his hand, but he wasn’t about to tell Mari that. Sharing a gun, for her, was like him sharing a toothbrush. Or a bar of dark chocolate. She got pretty attached to her weapons. So all he said, all he really could say after he slipped the gun into his jacket pocket, was, “Thanks. I will.”
Not to be outdone in the grand-farewell department, Fanaida handed over keys to her dragon. “You’ve got two fresh MOX rods in the reactor, so you don’t have to stop for nothing except for rest and recharging your own batteries. Be sure you do that once or twice. Driving overland is a helluva thing. There’s no rush here, mijo. World’s gonna be as fucked up tomorrow as it is today.”
That wasn’t a hundred percent true. Those Texas drones were still in the air, still blowing things up. Still killing. Still threatening his people. His com went off every twenty minutes or so with updates. If he and Angela could get to Vallejo faster and somehow divert him from whatever crazy scheme he was in the middle of, maybe they could keep some of those bombs from happening. Save the world. Yeah.
Mari’s gaze tracked them while they prepared, and before they left the Vault, she nodded toward Angela. “You go kill it, Senator.”
Okay, then. They turned, the two of them—well, two and a half, if you counted Yoink as a half a person—and left via a tunnel that would take them past blast doors and then up to the garage and Fan’s dragon.
After they got far enough away, he had to ask. “Mari didn’t just tell us to kill her daddy, did she?”
“Too bloodthirsty for you, cowboy?” Angela asked, shooting him a look replete with more eyebrow action. She glanced down at his jacket pocket, and her look turned downright lascivious.
Just like that, the tension and uncertainty fled his body. He centered his world over her smile.
“Matter of fact, that is a gun in my pocket,” he returned, absolutely cool. “And I’m glad to see you.”
? ? ?
Overland travel: not Angela’s favorite thing. Twenty-plus hours trapped in a wheeled metal box with Kellen Hockley, no witnesses, and a self-imposed prohibition against touching him. This was going to kill her. For real this time.
However, despite her apprehension, once they got away from the Pentarc, away from mech-Daniel, it was like she’d just surfaced from a deep dive with no atmo suit. The near-silent car flung her eastward through the desert, and she could breathe. Wide open breathing. This might be what freedom tasted like: crunchy travel rations shared with a needy feline and the man she had never managed to get out of her mind.
When Yoink finally curled up and fell asleep on her shoes in the seat well, Angela logged onto her com, tapped in two darknet addresses, and sent invitations to rendezvous. She got a reply from one almost immediately and pushed a swallow through her emotion-tight throat. She should have done this weeks ago. There was power in knowing that someone out there mourned her, even a near stranger.
Oddly, she didn’t experience the trepidation she expected from reaching out like this, for setting up assignations without having her schemes vetted and cleared in committee. It might make her the worst public servant ever, but she had to be honest, it felt fucking terrific.
She could get used to this dead-girl thing.
“What you up to, or should I ask?” Kellen had his hands on the steering wheel, probably a little too tightly. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that there was a vehicle control rig in this car. Fanaida hadn’t used the steering wheel much on the drive in from Kingman.
Plus, watching him work through tension was hypnotic. Long fingers, tendon-strung and sun-bronzed. He always did have good hands. Did the act of driving a car upset him enough to make him clutch the steering wheel like that, or was it something else? She thought about asking him if the sugar skulls on the dash were creeping him out or if forced existence in close proximity to her was his kryptonite. Latter would be better.
They’d driven in near silence for most of the afternoon, and night was falling fast on the desert. Out there in that monochrome black, bombs were flying, and people were dying, and civilization might very well be collapsing. But she didn’t want to know about it. For the first time in her adult life, knowing the details wouldn’t get her any closer to repairing the cause.
Night was a blanket tucked snug over this car, and she could pretend, for a few hours at least, that the world outside it simply did not exist.
Angela shut down her com, half turned on the ultrasoft seat, and propped one knee up on the console that separated her body from Kellen’s. She had shit to say, and it needed saying right now. “Yeah, you can ask. I have been working on possibly becoming undead. Not in the zombie sense undead, of course, although you know what, we—I mean the UNAN, not you and I personally—lack good laws governing the personhood of zombies and we probably should spin some up, but no, I mean I’ve decided to let some key people know I’m alive and will see how they handle the resultant cardiac incidents. And also, I’m really sorry I made you uncomfortable with my whoa-pushy horniness a few weeks back, especially sorry since we’re currently stuck in a tiny car together for twenty-plus hours. And finally I brought you a present.”