Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(64)
What she didn’t expect was reality. Kellen in a sulk. Why was he in a sulk? Frustratingly in a sulk, and not anxious to talk about what specifically had ensulkened him.
They rode in silence for hours. Literally hours. Kellen alternately stared out the car windows or asked if she wanted water/jerky/a bio break. They passed the security checkpoint, rolling right through it and broadcasting her superspy GNN credentials, and got waved through. And she couldn’t even crow about how perfectly that shit went off.
Finally, unable to take it one second longer, she said, “You’re quiet.”
He flinched like he’d been sleeping. He hadn’t. “Sorry. You need…?”
“Not really anything. Not technically. But seeing as we’re stuck in this car together for several hours yet, I thought we could, you know, interact.” She waited for the obvious flirty comeback, the absolute lowest-hanging fruit, but instead he stretched his long legs along the floorboard and scraped a big hand over his face.
“Sorry,” he said again. “Am being bad company.”
Yeah, you are. And you’re making me nervous/angry/sad. Was his problem meeting Fez, being reminded that Angela had a life outside of the little Pentarc-centric bubble she’d existed in these last few weeks? Could he not handle that? Daniel had opposed her strides toward independence, too. He had never wanted to share his toys. Specifically his main toy, her.
And oh shit, she did not just find a point of comparison between Daniel and Kellen. Yuck. She felt like she needed to bleach her brain for even thinking it.
“Was looking out at the land as we passed,” Kellen said in a low voice. “Thinkin’ how much has changed. This place used to be my home once. And now it’s not.”
The air whooshed out of Angela. Oh. Okay. Well, she could see why the landscape might affect him. She had seen it, the scarred leftovers of what had once been pretty, on hundreds of strategic sat feeds over the years. Orbital-bombardment craters, half-rubbled ghost towns, and intentional fire-break controlled scorches weren’t new to her, or shocking. Sometimes she forgot not everyone had seen the stuff she had. Not everyone had her emotional callouses. Fuck a muffin, she was being insensitive.
She thought about reaching out, touching him. Holding him. But connection was her core joy source, not his. He didn’t need to be constantly stroked, to be reassured that he wasn’t alone or incapable or insufficient. He was stronger than that. Stronger than her.
In the uncomfortable silence, Yoink slunk from her explorations in the back seat, climbed onto the center console, and licked her paw in a desultory fashion, peering side-eyed at her two humans, one and then the other. After a while she nosed Kellen’s hand until he moved it for her, and then shoved her needy head beneath it. When he cricked one finger against her chin, Angela could hear the purring from here. Traitor.
A traitor that Angela was suddenly super jealous of.
“I thought you were from East Texas,” Angela said after a long time. They were still pretty far west. No tall trees or green things yet.
“Yeah, Angelina County. Big pine trees, bigger cockroaches. Everything in Texas is big. You know it has—had—five distinct climatic regions? This here is a cold desert, but we should be heading into coastal lowland as we skirt south of San Antone.” He said it wrong on purpose, almost defiantly, owning the mispronunciation. People from this area said a lot of things wrong. Guadaloop instead of Guadalupe. Man-chack instead of Manchaca. Blaynco instead of Blanco. The speech pattern drew heckling from outsiders, and it had been a complete bitch during continental and language integration debates, but they kept on, almost like they were proud of their ignorance. Kind of like how Kellen had always held onto his twang.
“You sound like a tour guide.” She smiled when she said it but couldn’t help thinking that this wasn’t the conversation they needed to have. As freaked out as he might be about the damage his home state had sustained, it wasn’t like he’d never seen wrecked landscapes. Day in, day out, he rescued refugees on the cusp of annihilation. He knew how these things went down, what an area looked like as it approached the fail point.
“Just regurgitating facts,” he said. “Ain’t that what us supergeniuses do? When I was a kid, all’s I knew about Texas was that pecan trees are better than pines for climbing. Lower branches make getting a boost up easier. Over in Mustaqbal, though, I couldn’t read enough about where I come from. Geography, anthropology, bird-watching guides. You gotta know everything about a place if you’re gonna defend it.”
“We aren’t at war,” she reminded him gently. Ooooh, it felt dirty to say that. Had she not just spent a year and a half trying to draw the Texas rebels into a war? And for what? Her own career? Good God. Had that really been her?
“Everything is war, princess,” Kellen said in a fire-edged voice. “Just getting up in the morning sometimes works itself into a battle. Humans are by nature warriors, killers. Ain’t that what all the old texts tell us? We have dominion over the lesser critters, ownership over the land, all by virtue of how very good we are at killin’. But you figure it is ever possible to own something like this, something so vast?” He stretched an arm out, as if he could finger paint the landscape beyond the car windows. “We have failed as stewards, and in revenge, the land has kicked us out. Fucking look at it. We’re all at war, and we’re all refugees.”