Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(88)

His arms came around her slowly, but they got tight pretty quickly, once his mind admitted she was real. “Thought you were off rousing yourself a revolution, princess.”

She leaned back, looked up at him, blinking against the toxic air and gathering night. “Duly underway. One more bomb falls, and I am crashing his goddamn inauguration, as planned. But right now I need to be here. I need to be with you. Please don’t make me go away.”

He was sobbing. She couldn’t see it ’cause of all the shit in the air, drying out his eyeballs. This was sobbing tearless. He felt the hard, half hiccup rumble in his chest, and she was latched on so tight, she must’ve felt it, too.

“I’m here,” she was telling him. “We’re going to do this. We’re going to find them. I’ve got you.”

Why could he believe it more when she said it? He’d believed in all sorts of shit over the years, and disbelieved as many times, but never anything as much as, right at that moment, he believed in her.

She rose up on tiptoes but still couldn’t reach his mouth. Tiny thing; he always forgot her lack of height. She kissed his chin. Soft lips, warm.

“I love you,” she said. “And I brought help.”

He looked over her dark head and saw what she was talking about. The public pod service didn’t run out here, but folks had come anyhow. Folks in mass number. Folks with supplies and skills and cameras and vidcasters. They’d brought their cars out here, beaters and fancy-pants sedans, long-haulers and dune buggies, all rolling out over the desert. Her revolution, but not armed with guns or bombs.

They’d brought shovels.

? ? ?

She’d thought she would dig, haul, and search until she died from it, just fell over and lights out. But the human body is a terribly efficient machine. At a point, hers just told her it was time. And it was apparently Kellen’s time, too. They didn’t consult each other, just joined hands, checked in with General Yoink, and retreated to a sleek Audi autocar, low to the ground. She didn’t have a clue how it had made it over the uneven scrub brush to get here. It was technological magic, making this day endurable.

Its owner was on a bucket brigade and had left the lock open, on purpose. The car had heat. Blessed, wonderful heat, thawing her half-frozen body. She took off her boots and coat, and Kellen wrapped himself around her in silence, warming her the rest of the way.

She set a timer on her com. Four hours.

There were things she needed to say to this man. Questions, confessions, reassurances. In the past, she might have wanted to tell him all her plans, soak in his inevitable compliments on her cleverness. But this wasn’t that kind of day. Nothing that had happened in the last twenty-four hours was about her, yet the events had cut her to the very root, tiny slices that bled in regrets and would never stop.

Which was fine. She was trained to endure horrors that weren’t hers, to take on pain she hadn’t volunteered her heart to hold.

“Someday,” he murmured right before sleep took him, “someday I’m gonna lay you down in a comfy spot, someplace worthy of the queen you are. Fuck all these cars ’n’ subs ’n’ shit.”

If he’d wanted to fuck that night, she could have made it happen. Just being near him ignited parts of her body like that’s what they were designed for. She could have comforted him in a thousand ways. Because she loved him, and also because she was trained to see to the comforts of others, emotionally if not physically. But this was Kellen. Comfort for him was holding the things he loved safe. So she let him hold her, and she held him right back.

It was enough.

But in the end, they didn’t have four hours.

At 3:22 on her timer, somebody rapped at the car door. When she opened it, a chubby twentysomething girl with black hair and face made darker by the night passed along a message. There was somebody coming from the west, on foot. Running. He kept repeating names, and was she Garrett, Kellen, or Chloe?

She woke Kellen, and they followed the girl out, around the southern edge of destruction.

Somebody had sent out a pickup to fetch the runner, which brought him faster to the main hub of the camp.

“His name is Kellen,” she called out, dragging him along by the hand. A tangle of people surrounded the pickup. He clutched her hand so tight her bones creaked, and the crowd parted to let them pass.

The bruise of a cloud over this whole area blocked out any moonlight from the sky, but folks had com lights, a dozen or more of them, camera lights, too, all pointed at the truck. She saw him, the runner. Balanced in a crouch in the dirt-dusted bed, serene and still, searching the crowd for longed-for faces.

Dan-Dan.

He looked like he’d been through a meat grinder. The hands capping his bent knees were worn down to the metal beneath, and strips of vat-grown flesh dangled like party streamers from the cuffs of his long-sleeved poly shirt. All his clothes were stained dark in streaks. Very likely, he had already bled out, and the circulatory mechanism that kept him looking humanlike had died some hours back. There wasn’t enough wound glue on this continent to fix what had been done to his face. He looked like a monster, but there was something warm in his ruined face, in his posture, something infinitely kind. It was recognition, one person of another.

“Please stop digging,” the mech-clone said. “We aren’t down there. We went to the tunnels, westward. There are miles of them, but they’re underground, too deep to establish any kind of communications, and I’m afraid we are trapped there currently. We have some injuries, but all our people are accounted for. Your animals, too, Doc.”