Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(99)
He couldn’t think of a damn thing to say to that. Not poetry or teases or even promises. So instead he leaned down and kissed the hell out of her.
? ? ?
There were a lot of legal and administrative noodles to untangle after taking over a government, after ripping the hat off a conspiracy. It was a long night. Word came in some of those protests had turned ugly. Not all security officers had moved aside like the ones in the Capitolina had, and some had fired on the protesters before they got the stand-down. This coup had not been bloodless.
They went together with the whole family to take Mama Adele home. She was originally from up near Leeds, in England, but her own parents were from Motherwell, in Scotland. A bagpiper played when they put her in the ground.
Mari never got confirmation of her aunt Boo’s death, but the land where she’d been staying was wiped clean, as if no building had ever existed in that place. The family went with Mari to Lampasas, smack into a war zone, to gather up her family’s treasures, what was left of Boo’s home site. But it wasn’t really closure. Not like Mari must surely need.
Kellen accompanied Angela to all the other services, too. Six hundred twenty-four souls died to make their voices heard, to make their government stop. There were memorials for a solid month after, and Angela remote-attended every single one. Even if she only stayed a moment, to sign the condolence register, she was there. Only good thing to say about any of that was sometimes the services clustered, like the forty-one who went down together in Atlanta.
And all the while he was there, feeling her feels. The way his brain worked, those folks weren’t an aggregate. They were names, individual ones, with faces and lives and families and snuffed potentialities attached. And he would know them all, clear as church bells, until the day he died. Sometimes it hurt to have a perfect memory and internal record of the wrong.
Angela made speeches till her voice went, and then she had an amplifier stuck in her throat, and she went on speaking.
When exhaustion snuck up, the two of them tumbled to rest wherever they found themselves, sometimes with clothes on, sometimes not. They didn’t talk much, but that was okay. They were soldered together now, didn’t hardly leave each other’s sight. Hell, they even bathed together—which, he had to admit, was something of a bright spot in the midst of the rest.
The special session indicted Medina on all counts and promptly chose the education minister, some dude by the name of Wendell Week, to be the next interim president and fill out the term just started. Congress declined to create a war ministry. Actually, they didn’t even address the status of arms, not officially. Angela, reinstated as the elected senator from California, still possessed the command codes, and both Heron and Chloe sure had a will to rig them suckers. Kellen guessed if the new President Week wanted to blow something up, and it wasn’t a terribly mean thing to do, he could always ask nice.
Kellen wasn’t sure whatever happened with the mech-clones once his people were done with them. They reverted to the control of their owners, most likely. And that bothered him some, how easy it had been to take them over and then give them back. Like the mech-clones themselves had no say in the matter at all. And legally they didn’t, so nobody pushed. Nobody said anything, publicly, about the mech-clone hijacking the night of the inauguration. Narrative spun it that evidence against Medina had convinced his closest advisors he was a warmongering psychopath, so they took him into custody. As good citizens do. Narrative, as always, was about ten percent true, but nobody fought the lie this time. They just wanted it to be over.
Three days after the government changed, Week signed a policy directive countermanding all wildlife and weather adjustment initiatives until studies could be made of unforeseen consequences. The order provided full funding for reclamation and rescue as needed, both people and critters.
The official doc didn’t say critters. It said animals.
Kellen celebrated Christmas on a hired plane over Florida. Private jet, slower than Heron’s spaceplane, but with way better bunks. Bed even, and long enough for Kellen to stretch out on. Not quite wide enough for two people and a cat to fit comfortably, but he wasn’t complaining. Sleep while traveling: that luxury made the day begin to feel festive. Like after the longest night, they really were coming out of the dark.
He gave Yoink a pouch of special-order high-priced tuna, and she reacted with typical Yoinkness. First, she ignored him for an hour. Then, she sniffed the pouch, devoured half, sat on his head purring, and went back to the corridor to polish off the rest of the food, nasty smelling but happy. Any cat—hell, any man—should be so lucky.
Kellen rolled over on that comfy bed, tapped a control on the wall, and shut Yoink and her fabulous stink treasure out in the corridor.
Angela did not by habit celebrate religious holidays, which he remembered from before, so he didn’t push. He didn’t consider himself evangelical about, really, anything. Live and let live and let some more life happen.
Which made her gift to him that night even sweeter.
Air circulators worked at getting the tuna smell out of the cabin, and the plane roared through the night like Santa Claus’s sleigh. She came out of the closet lavatory in a nightshirt with some futbol team’s logo splashed across the front. Her hair’d grown some, though it still wasn’t long. It framed her face like a halo in black. She climbed onto the end of the bed, perched herself beside his feet, and stared down. He’d seen a very similar look on a deer’s face once.