Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(65)
“You’re getting scary low,” she told him. “And I need you to work through this funk before we arrive at the coast. We don’t know what we’re going to find there, and I can’t have you navel-gazing or waxing philosophical.” She didn’t mention how root-level terrifying it was to see Kellen—bright, optimistic, sunshine and roses Kellen, for fuck’s sake—go on about war and death and failure.
“I’ll have your back in Galveston,” he said, not looking at her. “You don’t need to worry about me being on point.”
Angela’s com buzzed, and she cringed instinctively. Alerts of more attacks? Another update from the Pentarc? Neither promised to be good news. She tapped, and the message crackled out.
“Lucky cat says sum of luck is proportional to number of belly rubs sustained,” Yoink communicated. Angela looked down and saw that the cat had stretched all the way across the console, her head and one paw on Kellen’s thigh, her fluffy butt pushed up against Angela. A little fur-covered kitty bridge. “More rubbing is urgently required.”
So hard not to laugh, so fuck it, Angela did laugh. For once, she didn’t resist the urge. She reached down and stroked Yoink’s soft belly. When Kellen rubbed between the cinnamon-striped ears and the purring rose to weaponized ultra-low-frequency levels, Angela couldn’t help feeling that this was right. This mission, this plan.
This…family?
Chapter 12
Night came early this time of year, and dark had settled in long before they got to the Highway 6 Bayou Vista exit, where the world ended. Kellen rolled the dragon close to the onset of the ocean but tucked it far enough back that the water wouldn’t be able to get at it.
Behind them lay war-scarred Texas, and ahead roiled a monster. The Gulf of Mexico wasn’t just a body of water anymore. It was a water beast that had consumed cities, had murdered millions. When Superstorm Agatha had roared up Galveston Bay, shoving mountains of its bloated, surge-driven self up the Houston ship channel, the beast had grown like one of those old Japanese anime horrors.
And Vallejo had intentionally moved his data-hole electronic-coverage bubble here. To the horror that he had created. What a ballsy, blight-upon-humanity little motherfucker he was.
Unless he hadn’t. Unless they’d guessed wrong about him being under that dark spot.
Was it sick as fuck Kellen kind of hoped he’d been wrong? If Vallejo wasn’t here after all, or somebody else had launched those drones, their quest could continue on. More days, more weeks. More time he could be near her, hold her, touch her, feel her voice on his skin and pretend all this would last. Sure, he wanted this mission to end the way it ought and the killing to stop.
He also, secretly, wanted it to never end.
“So do we check in with Garrett now or what?” Angela, bundled up in that ugly, borrowed peacoat, stood by the hood of the car, pecking into her com. Not that it would do her a lick of good.
“Data hole,” Kellen reminded her, coming around the scuffed bumper. “We’re on our own.”
Yoink hopped up onto the car and settled herself between her people. Close enough to touch, but not actually, you know, touching. Anybody wanting to pet her would have to come to her, on her terms. Saucy cat.
“What? So what are we supposed to do now?” Angela sounded frustrated. “We can’t go any further with the car. I mean, I know the dragon is durable and smart and handles terrain like it’s on tracks, but I don’t think it’ll…”
She kept on talking. Kellen reached down and stroked Yoink between the ears. “All right, little general. Hook us up.”
The cat got still, channeling information through her amplified neural. Out here on the dark edge of nuthin’, Kellen might very well be cut off from the rest of the world and its cloud of information, but he had unique access to a totally different cloud. A moving, breathing one. He drew patterns on Yoink’s tiny head, and the metal horns by her ears extruded light in rivulets, forming patterns, drawing a picture. Well, a grid more than a picture. Along its light lines, a few dozen to a hundred blips came online, a pattern of color in the starless night.
“What is that?” Angela asked.
“Critters,” he answered. “All them critters under the ocean. Yoink just sent out a hello, and they’re answering.”
“They’re…altered? Like Yoink?”
He didn’t dare look at her when he said, “The early ones got microchips I put in by hand. But later on we switched to nanotrackers, and those things self-replicate, get passed on. So we got multiple generations now of tracked, augmented critters with artificial adaptations.”
“You did this?” She breathed the voice of judgment, and he wanted to crawl in a corner and pretend they saw this eye to eye. He knew her government’s policies on unsanctioned alteration. He knew he hadn’t been licensed for any bit of what he’d done. He knew if she was a good little law-abiding senator, she’d haul his ass to jail as soon as they got back to civilization.
But he couldn’t deny this work, his life’s passion, the thing he loved almost as much as he loved her. He just wished she could understand.
“World’s gone hostile to wildlife,” he said through tight lips, “so I make wildlife fit back into the world. Skin augmented with capillary action for more effective water collection and heat radiation in coyotes out west, Vectran-reinforced hide for prey animals like that vicu?a you rode in with, to keep her and her someday-babies safe from poachers’ bullets. Yeah, that’s what I do.”