Their Fractured Light (Starbound #3)(10)
I slide my other hand past the hacker’s lap, toward the door controls, the movement quick but smooth. The driver’s going to get over his confusion and outrage at some point, and I need to get the door open so we can bolt. I’m about to palm the scanner when the boy’s lips curve under mine—he’s smiling, grinning—and it’s the only warning I get before he’s parting his lips and taking full advantage of my ploy by trying to stick his tongue down my throat.
Asshole.
The fabric grows thin, translucent. Just on the other side of it is a young man with dark hair and blue eyes, gazing at the fabric as though he can see through it. This is what we have waited for.
“I wish I knew what the hell this is,” the young man mutters, in the language of the words and images and sounds that pierce the stillness.
The thin spot pulses, and the young man takes a startled step back. He’s staring even harder at the translucent place in the fabric, but after some time he gives a nervous laugh. “I’m imagining things,” he tells himself. “It’s not like it can hear me.”
The thin spot pulses again, more brightly this time.
The young man’s face goes white. “Rose,” he calls, voice suddenly urgent. “Rose, come quick. I think…I think it’s sentient.”
ALEXIS’S FINGERS FIND THE SCANNER on the door behind me, and I’m ready when it suddenly gives, breaking away from her to tumble out of the car with my make-out partner a beat behind me. Somehow I get my feet on the ground, and we dodge a gaggle of shoppers and a pair of electrobikes, the cab driver roaring behind us. For a moment we’re in perfect sync, and then she ruins it by swinging her arm sideways to whack me in the chest as we turn up an alleyway, sending a line of pain snaking down my injured arm.
“Hey, what was that for?” I hiss.
“You know,” she snaps, breath coming quickly.
I’d love to think her breathlessness is from our moment of passion in the cab, but we’re running pretty fast. “You kissed me, Dimples. How was I supposed to know you didn’t want me joining in?”
“My name’s Alexis!”
“I’m really sure it’s not.”
We spin around a corner, coming to a halt beside the back entrance to a designer boutique, chests heaving. She grabs my good arm, spinning me around to take a look at my bloodied sleeve. “How bad is it? Can you make it another few minutes?”
“No longer than that,” I reply, pressing my hand down over the wound once more, buzzing with a heady mix of relief at our escape, and the gut-twisting knowledge that whatever I saw today in that holosuite, it was a bad, bad thing. Merciful mother of fried circuits, my arm hurts. “Got somewhere I can seal it?”
The girl goes silent a long moment, then nods. “I’ve got a place.”
She leads me along another alleyway and between a couple of showrooms, then past the gated entrance to Regency Towers, the place she named for the driver, and through the garden next door to it. I can tell she’s mapped out her routes around this neighborhood, and I respect that. From there, we cut through a maintenance gate, so that when we approach the entrance of Camelot Heights—please, our actual destination, damn this hurts—nobody from the street has seen us go in. She pauses to pull a thin, close-fitting felt hat from her purse and uses it to conceal her blue hair as she keys in the security code and we slip inside. My stomach’s growing uneasier by the second; a girl who lives in a place like this isn’t a criminal, at least not the same kind I am. Was she sneaking into the holosuite today just for kicks? An image of the metal rift flashes before me once again, and the fear in her eyes. If she thought she was in this for fun, she sure knows now that it’s more than that.
“Kristina!” It takes me a moment to realize the smiling doorman is talking to us—or rather, to Dimples. “Who’s your friend?”
“That’s for me to know, Alfie.” She laughs, leading me into the elevator. Her game is flawless, like her laugh. The fear I saw back at LaRoux Industries is gone, and she’s not missing a beat. She hits the top button—penthouse, of course—and with a barely audible hum, we’re moving. It’s not until we’ve passed the penultimate floor without anybody else joining us that she starts digging through her purse. She produces a pair of dainty lace gloves and slips on the right one. When we reach the top floor, she presses the gloved hand against a square panel that glows with an ivory-colored light. It crackles briefly, as though the whole thing’s bristling with static.
I only have a moment to size up the security system, and then the doors are rushing open, confronting me with the sort of luxury I haven’t seen in years. Dimples tosses her purse down on the couch and vanishes behind a wall of frosted glass, calling instructions as she goes. “Sit down before you fall and crack your head open.”
With the slightly guilty feeling I’m making the whole place dirty—ridiculous, under the circumstances—I peel off my shirt and sink down onto the edge of the couch. Her apartment is insane. I haven’t been anywhere like it in years, and if this kind of place felt like home once upon a time, it sure doesn’t now. The floors look like real marble, and I can’t be sure, but I think that could be actual wood by the fireplace. The far wall is top-of-the-line smartglass, with that faint, iridescent sheen that tells me it’s compensating for the smog outside to render the view of the Corinth sunset clean and sparkling. Ha.