Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(85)

She washed her peace over him. Somehow, maybe by reaching through the psych-emitter link and tweaking his own brain. This woman was magic. Weird magic, sure. But his.

The communication board blurred beneath his hands. This wasn’t his forte. Fuck, where was that cat?

Tight against his chest, Angela’s wrist-mounted com buzzed.

“Yoink?”

“I am in the plane with Garrett,” the cat said. “A bad thing happened.”

Safe. Both his girls were safe. It wasn’t everything he needed, but it was something. He could put his hands in these holds and boost himself up.

“Sure has. Load up our blip board, little general. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

It took her several long, agonizing moments. Then, “The dolphins are bored. You’ll arrive in Puerto del Tampico in less than an hour, and can they go away now?”

“Give the pod our thanks,” he said. “And then scan up north, in the desert. See if you can find coyotes out near the Pentarc.”

More time. His teeth were wanting to chatter, but he wasn’t cold, or at least no colder than normal on this boat. But it felt like something core-deep had lost its heater, for good, and the chill spread, filling him up with emptiness. The only parts of him that lived were the parts touching her.

“Some coyotes, yes,” Yoink reported. “They are confused. Also, eagles.”

First good news he’d had so far. “Can they do a flyover for us, over home? Also, anybody among those eagles have a camera on board?”

“Maybe. I will see.”

Silence gnawed through the cramped communications room. The bank of lights hummed blue.

“Port in an hour,” he said. “We should get dressed.” But he didn’t move.

“Kellen,” she breathed against his back. “We will find them. They’re going to be okay.”

He wanted to reply. Couldn’t. All his energy right now focused on keeping his shit together. Not thinking of the tunnels, of the dark. Of the sick way the refugee camps had smelled in Texas after the storm, after the diseases took hold. Or of Sissy holding on to her boy, hours on and they’d both long passed. Cold.

Things falling apart. Chaos moving in. Once again, the rug pulled out from underneath him, peace and home sliced away like a fruit’s rotten part. A dead part. Here he stood through it all and couldn’t do a damn thing to stop any of it.

“And if they aren’t okay,” Angela whispered in that voice she had, the one made of titanium and cold fury, “you rest assured, my love, they will be avenged.”

? ? ?

“You look magnificent,” said Rafa, straightening the points of her collar, but even his voice was solemn. He knew what was happening, what the stakes were. Apparently Rafael Castrejon was something more than a pretty face after all. He’d been with her from the boat, from that moment she’d stepped off, and he’d been tireless. Someday she would thank him properly for this.

Not today. There just wasn’t time.

Cool black satin licked her legs, stirred by the air circulators on the landjet. Vidcasters clustered, maybe fifty in this car. Camera lights heated her dress until it burned her skin. Sweat pooled in the expected places, but she didn’t melt.

She wasn’t made of sugar. She sure as fuck wasn’t sweet.

She might look, as Rafa said, magnificent, but she didn’t feel anything approaching magnificent. She felt…nothing. Deliberately, cleanly nothing. She’d scooped out everything vital, everything worthy, everything real, and left it on a submarine docked in Tampico.

The nothing was important. People trusted people who felt things.

Today, she needed everyone to trust her nothing, the starkness of it. To feel its emptiness. She needed it to horrify the shit out of an entire continent of people, and she didn’t have much time.

Rafa kept primping, feeding her cues, and Fez kept transmitting on all channels, real-time and balls-out. She’d gone live with all of it, the disrobing and preparing, her steady reaction as news items filtered through, as petition signatures soared, as bombs fell. Not hiding where she was, not hiding her intentions. Nothing was sacred. If somebody on this continent didn’t know who she was or where she was headed, that was their own damn fault. No secrets, no lies. Only justice.

Alerts descended like party confetti. The UNAN security corps broke for her all up and down the West Coast, marching and chanting, “Soy el fuego! Viva la unificación!”

Refugees took up the call, pointing their wrath squarely at President Medina. Federal warehouses were raided in Quebec. Power grids went down in Oaxaca, and protesters planned their marches by torchlight. Stop the drones, they screamed. Stop the fire.

Because their continent was burning, only now it wasn’t just Zeke on the offensive. Angela and her team had joined the fray. She pushed back. She resisted.

All over the unified nation, locks were coming undone. Hangars emptied themselves, disgorging rows on rows of war machines. They accepted Angela’s command codes without question, because that’s what machines did. Drones rose, filling the sky, and then exploded like fireworks.

Teamwork. She wasn’t alone at all.

“How’s it going, Chloe?” she asked, not looking down. “How long can you keep this up?”

“As long as I must,” the nanorobotic AI replied with fierce solemnity. “Give me another target.”