Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(60)
“Maybe,” she said, steel in her voice, “but I’m not taking any more of their deals.”
? ? ?
Reluctant as he was to do so, they had to untangle themselves from each other a few times for bio breaks along the way. Turned out there were lots of ways to get comfortable in a car, ways that had nothing to do with rest. This was about the damndest road trip he’d ever been on, yet every second of it was sweeter than stolen honey.
They took the long way around both Phoenix and Tucson, pussyfooting past what was clearly still a country hunkered down and scared. No public transit in sight, no planes in the air. Whole swathes of burbs turned to ghost towns, emptied by fear or worse. It was unnerving to see ruins this close to the capital.
Two alerts came in: more attacks out west, one of which was thwarted by some force that clearly flummoxed the newsvids and the government press reps alike. Apparently, a whole slew of unidentified intercepts came from space, from the sky. A couple of cults had already formed and were praying real hard. Garrett included a short note claiming it was aliens all the way, but he ended it with a smiley. He was likely getting a kick out of all the misreporting, because of course, he knew who was responsible for those intercepts.
Kellen had a good idea who’d helped out, too. He sent along a message of thanks to the queen of the Chiba Space Station. If she was watching over the Pentarc and all the space nearby, he felt a lot better about being eastbound and out of pocket.
As if all that man-made chaos weren’t enough, Mother Nature offered her own little fuck-you in the form of an eruption of the Volcán de Colima, right there on the border of Jalisco and Colima. Kellen’s butterflies were still hanging on, but widespread evacuations had inflated populations in Guadalajara and, to a lesser extent, Morelia. Infrastructure there wouldn’t hold long, especially with these other hot spots taking up a lot of the emergency response resources.
He sent a message to Heron asking when they could get their plane in the air, maybe do a drop or a fetch down there in old Mexico. If the Chiba was shielding them, they probably didn’t need Chloe dispersed anymore. Just a half second after he hit send, he remembered the data hole over Guadalajara. That would make getting a mission into the area a lot harder, if it was possible at all. Dangit, logistics.
“Seem to you like the whole world’s going to shit?” he asked out loud as the feeds continued to roll in. He only half expected an answer.
“That’s the pattern.” Angela was chewing on a nutro-crunch, eyes closed, her bare feet, still pink in places from her run through the Pentarc spires in wintered grass, propped on the dash. Yoink had draped herself over the upper part of Angela’s chest—that spot she called her boob shelf—like a slightly tubby old-Hollywood fur stole. That growled when he tried to move it.
“Shit has a pattern?”
Angela flexed her eyebrows but remained focused on whatever evil she was reading on the backs of her eyelids. “Yeah. The bad shit pattern. Goes like this: bad shit happens, there’s an evacuation, and waves of refugees wash up against the nearest metropolis. Femacities are born. Then, just when the NGOs get set up and people start to settle in as best they may, boom, subgroup infighting or another disaster or a crazy person with a bomb decimates that population. Move, settle, repeat. People don’t get a chance to grow deep roots or communities. Sometimes they are sent all the way across the world in these massive refugee-relocation initiatives. Sort of like your Pentarc refugees.”
“Now hold your horses,” Kellen said. Midmorning sun stung his eyes, and he’d slipped a hat on, low over his face. “We’re building a home at the Pentarc, a community.”
She opened her eyes. “Do you ever ask them if they want to stay? Or do you just assume that Pentarc living has to be better than wherever they came from?”
“In a lot of cases, it ain’t assumption. There is literally nothing left. Like that island that went under the ocean. But if they truly want to go home, yeah, we’ll help them get there. Ain’t our intention to hold hostages.”
“I’m not actually talking intentions or ethics here,” Angela said mildly. “Just demographics.”
Yoink yawned, opened one eye, then the other. She stared at Kellen reproachfully. In moments like these, the cat didn’t even need to use her interpreter net. He could see clearly what she needed. She was an unusually expressive critter.
He pushed his hat back and checked the dash nav. “Looks like we’re coming up on Las Cruces. Want to get out and walk around some? Rustle up some food other than compressed kibble for our half-starved feline overlord here? Maybe get you a new skirt ain’t ripped all up one side.”
“Says the mad ripper himself. You could use a new shirt as well, or at least new buttons.” Her dark eyes swept him from hair to boots, and her eyelids narrowed assessingly. “On second thought, why don’t you just take it off? I could stand the view, pretty boy.”
“We have discussed the inappropriateness of the term,” he grumped, but his body was in full howdy in response to her sloe-eyed stare. Damn, woman didn’t even have to touch him.
“Right. We agreed on fuckable, if I am not mistaken.”
He grunted. “In any case, it’s colder’n a cast-iron commode out there. I am not going to gallivant around shirtless on the short-hair side of winter.”
“That is a goddamn shame. Can we go gallivanting again later on, say in summer, then? Or, you know, any time when you wouldn’t have an objection. I haven’t seen you bare in years and consider myself deprived.”