Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(66)

She moved slightly, let out a puff of breath that grazed his shoulder, a ghost touch of warmth. “And these ones?” She pointed to the dance of light on Yoink’s holographic grid.

He sighed, feeling like he’d just dodged a judgment bullet. “Well, the yellow ones are skeeters—”

“Mosquitoes? Oh yuck, Kellen. Eliminating them was one of the first major successes of this century. Why in seven hells would anybody want to bring back a population of those?”

“They aren’t my favorite, I’ll admit, but they deserve to live, same as anybody. It wasn’t their fault Zika and Dengue B went nuts, and there were better ways of handling that crisis than wiping out a whole species.”

“Better ways? You know, it is possible to lavish too much love on a bunch of blood-sucking disease vectors that don’t even know you exist.”

“Aw, honey, ain’t no such thing as too much love,” he said. Accusingly as all get-out.

He hadn’t meant to put it like that, but watching his words settle over her face, moonlike in the headlights and bathed in something that looked like shock, it felt like the right way to phrase his impression of the matter. The only way, in fact. He dared her to deny it, to prove somehow that she wasn’t a heartless, opportunistic, selfish bitch. That she wasn’t gonna leave him high and dry just as soon as she got her vengeance.

Her mouth closed, and she took a visible breath. “And the blue dots?”

Well then. Guess that was that.

“Dolphins,” he said. “Special ones adapted to live in the toxic radioactive soup of this particular shithole of a coastline.”

That super hurricane had taken out the South Texas nuclear plant when it devoured its way up to Houston, and nothing in the whole Gulf of Mexico had been the same afterward. Most natural marine life was gone or changed. Only the sturdiest stuff endured. And the adaptives.

“These bottlenoses right here are natural echolocators,” Kellen said, focusing on the dolphin blips and not Angela’s too-beautiful face, “so I asked ’em, via their nanocoms and Yoink’s relay, to show us anything under water that is neither ruin nor critter.”

If Vallejo had some underwater fortress casting up that data hole, Kellen’s network would find it.

“They can tell the difference?” The obvious disbelief in Angela’s voice caused him to look up.

“Yeah,” he said. “They’re smart, princess. Brightest of the bright.”

Like us. Only better, since they don’t give a shit about nation building or law slinging.

On the other hand, dolphins did join pods for a time, then drift off, joining another one. Loyalty seemed transient for them, as were concepts of home or family. So maybe they were more like her and her class than he’d realized. And maybe Angela wasn’t the freak of nature he’d been painting her for a lifetime now. Maybe he wasn’t either. Maybe both of them fit into their parallel ecosystems just fine, separate but crashing together like storm-tossed birds for one bright, emotionally excruciating encounter, and then just as suddenly drifting off back to where they belonged, separate, content to live off memories until the next climatic convulsion dropped them into the same biome.

“So is that a real big one or what?” she asked.

“A real big what?” This conversation could go down a gutter fast.

“Dolphin.” Angela pointed toward Yoink’s still-blinking display.

Holy moly. “That’s not a dolphin.”

The new blip didn’t have solid edges like the nanotracked animals; it was amorphous, a giant, gelatinous, pill-shaped blob burbling through the ocean. Which didn’t mean that’s what it looked like for real, just that several dolphins had located it and were transmitting click identifications per his request. It was the size of maybe a dozen adult dolphins, so definitely not a marine mammal itself, not even a collection of them. Pods didn’t get that big around here, this close to the shore and in an environment as hostile and uncertain as a string of sunken, polluted cities.

“It’s coming our way,” said Angela in a voice that sounded like armor being donned, safeties unlocked.

Kellen couldn’t look away from the image. Jesus, that thing was huge.

“No,” said Yoink. “It is here.”

Her display went dark.

? ? ?

Dark night, no moon, clouds obscuring the stars. And something that was supposedly not a dolphin coming right at them. Logic required Angela to run back to the car and grab that gun. She knew how to shoot. Sort of. Okay, she had been in conference with people who knew how to shoot. And they hadn’t been any smarter or more athletic than her. If those guys could figure out how to disable a safety and pull a trigger, she sure as shit could do the same.

But her goddamned feet would not move. She just stood there, dry mouthed and frozen. Under cover of darkness, Kellen’s hand found hers, and she clasped it. Probably harder than she should have.

Out there, the surface undulated. Something splashed.

As if a strange mutant sea creature was surfacing, searching. For prey? For her?

“Dolphins say to be quick. The intruder will move soon, underneath the water. From here, he will go into West Bay and may be harder to reach,” Yoink said, her digital voice perfectly calm, issuing as it always did from a com, this time Angela’s. “He says thank you for the communication relay and seeks admin access. Enable?”