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  Copyright © 2017 by Vivien Jackson

  Cover and internal design © 2017 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover art by Craig White

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

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  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  A Sneak Peek at Perfect Gravity

  Back Cover

  To Jen DeLuca, for talking me off that ledge so damn many times.

  Chapter 1

  SoCal Sprawl, 2059

  Mari adjusted the rifle butt against her shoulder and thumbed the bolt, chambering a custom wildcat. She had nine more rounds in a box magazine, but she wouldn’t need them. Mari didn’t miss.

  Correction: she wasn’t used to missing. If there was one thing she could count on in this whole fucked-up universe, it was her own aim on the squeeze. Steady. Fearless. Badass. That was her. She wasn’t some shaking, wibbly mess of a thing.

  And yet, a ribbon of sweat tickled her eyebrow, and her trigger finger burned to move. The fuck?

  Her elbows squished in cool mud, but it didn’t soften the concrete beneath them. She lay prone two stories up in a half-finished shell of a building, waiting out her target. Folks said that once upon a time, southern California was pretty, crammed full of gorgeous weather and gorgeouser people. Hard to believe that description these days, though. Now, an ocean of filthy water gave way to a dirtier sea of concrete, butted up tight against the mountains and stark, baked desert beyond. But ugly didn’t bother Mari. Dirty didn’t either. She was used to both.

  In fact, nothing about this setup struck her as odd. Not the stark, posturban downtown encased in fat black clouds that pissed stagnant drizzle over everything. Not the chill of cement dust turned to mud. Not even the miasma of mildew and petrichor.

  So if it wasn’t the place making her batshit crazy, it must be the thing. The job. The mech-clone.

  Mech-clone. N series. Indistinguishable from a human person. Oh God, why’d it have to be one of those? A tremble rolled up from her belly, and she gnawed it into her bubble gum.

  “Mari?” The voice in her earpiece cushioned her panic somewhat.

  “Yeah, I’m in position,” she mouthed into her com rig. A receiver embedded in her throat picked up the vibration of her subwhisper and transmitted it to her remote partner, Heron. She didn’t even need to speak. He was right there in her head, or at least his voice was.

  “I can see that,” he said evenly. “Read me in on the rest of it.”

  Mari laid her gaze down the sightline and took a couple of long, steady breaths. “Uh, I got a bead on the building. No movement so far, which really isn’t that unexpected, given we’re peeking at a holoporn suite at midday. Fancy-pants one, too. Don’t you figure patrons at a place like this would have day jobs?”

  “I try not to think about the proclivities of our targets,” he said witheringly. Except the words didn’t wither, not when he said them. He had a way of making his voice sound like exactly what she needed to hear. In another man, she’d call it magic. In Heron, it was probably wetware calibration. “But I was asking about neither the building nor the mech-clone, querida. What is your status?”

  For instance, he said your exactly as if he gave a shit. Not just about the job, but about her. And that warmed her up far more than it should have.

  Logically, Mari knew where she stood with him. He might call her querida from time to time, but in the same offhand way bar rats back home had called her ma’am. They hadn’t meant it as a mark of respect. Just like Heron didn’t mean to imply she was dear to him.

  They were working partners, sharing a contract but not much else. On this particular job, she functioned as shooter to his operations planner, but he had lots of other assets in play: drones, cameras, software bots, you name it. More dependable assets, too. Of the lot, she was the only one who had to get talked down from having the shakes.

  Which, weirdly enough, had lessened. They hadn’t gone away entirely, but at least her hands were steady, dogs to the Pavlov of his voice. She could do this.

  “Oh, you know me.” She flattened the gum behind her incisors. “Always itching to kill something.” Which wasn’t true at all, but it sounded appropriately badass.

  “Not kill. The contract is to capture or destroy a stolen mech-clone. It isn’t living and never was. It’s just a machine.”

  “It’s a pretty fucking special machine, though. There are, what, ten known N series mech-clones in the whole world? This contract is big balls, at least for me. I gotta get it right.” Heron might have pulled bigger, more high-profile contracts, but most of Mari’s work was small-time property destruction and softkill intercepts. She could bring down a drone like nobody’s business. But then, most drones didn’t look like people.

  She shouldn’t have taken this job. Everything about it stank to high heaven. Heron had been against it from the start. But then, on the flip side, there was that payout she’d been promised. The thing that would make it all worthwhile. The thing she hadn’t told her partner about yet.

  Heron didn’t say anything for a long while. Silence roared where his voice should be. Then, “If it’s really bothering you, we can call this off right now. You know I’d rather capture the mech-clone and return it intact. I believe I know who it belongs to.”

  Mari forced breath through her gum, popping a quiet bubble. “Nah, let’s take this fucker out. Less messy, no loose ends, and we don’t have to pack it up and ship it afterward. Just get your drone ready to vid the kill confirmation.”

  “The bounty would be higher on a capture,” he reminded her. “And we could sell it to somebody other than Texas.”

  The way he said Texas got her hackles up, but she bit back a defensive reply. Depending on who you talked to, postsecession Texas was either a geopolitical object lesson in what not to do or else a deep hick land of lawless gun-toters, enviro-containment zones, barbed wi
re, and whacked-out technocrats.

  “What was it you said about the proclivities of our clients? That we don’t need to like them?”

  “My reservations have nothing to do with our client’s hobbies or fetishes. Quite simply, I don’t trust the Texas Provisional Authority.”

  Heron’s voice on the com was as carefully modulated as ever, so maybe Mari was imagining the criticism. Maybe she was just too sensitive about where she came from.

  “They got money same as anybody, maybe more if those power grid rumors are true.”

  “I’m not talking about the payout, querida. I’m talking about you. I don’t trust them with you.” He paused. “I can get you other contracts. ZaneCorp is looking to take out the group that hacked them last month. Their data center is off the coast of Belize. Easy job, nice payout, white sand beaches nearby. You could wear a bikini and use explosives.”

  Her mouth relaxed into a half grin. Regardless of the fact that they didn’t socialize outside of work, this man knew her far too well. “Nah, we’ve been over this. I got a job to do here.” She pushed the gum against her soft palate. “Anyhow, don’t you got something better to do than chat me up while I’m working?”

  “Your bios spiked.” She could almost see his articulated shrug, a movement that was too smooth, too deliberate. And also god-awful sexy. “You are my mission priority.”

  So hard not to sigh. Mission. Job. That’s all she was to him. Getting her in and out of jobs was the beginning and end of his care for her.

  No matter that she had a thing for skinny, dark-haired smart-asses—even biomechanically enhanced ones. No matter that sometimes she thought of him as her guardian angel out here when things got hairy. No matter that she wished sometimes—okay, lots of times—that she could take him with her on a downtime, one of those booze-hazy interstices between jobs. Her usual contracts—thieving, demolition, corporate data smuggling—paid well enough that she could hie off for a few weeks after, blank her mind, and abuse her body in all the best ways.

  She tried to picture Heron with her in one of those downtimes. Sand, still warm from the sun, now splashed with bonfire and moonlight, music so loud her bones throbbed, and Heron lounging beside her, ass naked and relaxed, swirling a margarita. With his tongue.

  Whoa. Well, if she was looking to settle herself, that mental image sure wasn’t gonna do it.

  Except it had.

  Or maybe just talking to him had. Regardless of the cause, sometime during all that salacious thinking and silent chitchat, the quavers in her knuckles had eased. Gone was the overwhelming need to twitch, to run, to scrub the burnt-rain smell out of her sinuses. Just that easily, Mari found her groove and settled in a half inch of mud.

  She didn’t move after that, not even when the stolen mech-clone exited the building two blocks down, looking dapper in its vat-grown skin and tasseled couture waistcoat. And also looking exactly like the recon vid Heron had taken. Stolen, high-end, whoa-expensive little shit. And slagging it was going to buy her a treasure in information.

  The gun rested cool and perfect in her sense-gloved hands, a high-caliber extension of her will.

  A novice would pull the trigger now, but Mari was far too veteran for that. She trusted Heron to let her know when her angle was best, when she’d be clear of drone interference. She was pretty damned accurate, maybe the best human shooter around, but Heron’s post-human brain could still parse inputs more efficiently than hers.

  Now she waited for his sign, and it came nine chews into her bubble gum: an aural ping in her earpiece. Mari moved her thumb atop the barrel and painted her target.

  “Got your big red dot,” Heron said. “Stand by for the microwave blast. In three.”

  She stretched her gaze through the scope—

  “Two.”

  —braced her feet against two construction-tarp spikes—

  “One.”

  —and eased the trigger back. It gave under pressure like a milk-sopped cookie, and it was just as sweet.

  Four hundred meters away, the microwave burst from Heron’s drone and the wildcat slug from Mari’s gun hit simultaneously. Mari slammed her eyes shut at the moment of impact.

  Heron’s blast would blind security direction sensors and simple electronics, bringing down personal shields, leaving the target naked. Mari’s bullet would slip in, finish the job. It would. Her angle had been perfect. She didn’t need to watch. Couldn’t, in fact. She had a habit of not looking death in the face, not even machine death. So long as she turned her head the other way, she wouldn’t catch it looking back.

  She waited for Heron’s subvocal kill confirmation, but it didn’t come right away. Odd. Her hands tensed, ready for the second tap.

  “We good?” she mouthed into the com.

  With her eyes still closed, she played these seconds in her mind, what her target would look like going down. Her custom bullets would fragment on impact, dispersing chemicals cooked up specially to ruin electronics, such as the crud in a mech-clone’s skull. Couldn’t have anybody vulturing the corpse afterward and trying to reverse engineer it. Her contract instructions were pretty specific on that point.

  When the brain-like innards were goo, the mech-clone would twitch, slow, and then tip over, gears whirring. No matter how much they resembled human beings, all mech-clones reverted to their true nature when they got slagged. Junk heaps. Scrap metal with fake skin.

  Mari tentatively opened her eyes and stared down the scope. This target sure didn’t look right. There was blood everywhere, and its head lolled out to the side, hanging on by a red noodle of tissue. Mech-clones usually took high-caliber clean, as if they were armored all over. She’d expected a throat shot to incapacitate but not tear her target apart like that.

  She swallowed.

  “We got it.” Heron’s voice sounded tight.

  A jolt of wrongness zinged up her spine, but she didn’t have time to analyze it. Right now, she needed to get her shit together. Her com had initiated a countdown at the squeeze, giving her twenty-eight minutes to break down her weapon, toss some clothes on over her muddy tank and leggings, and meet Heron at the street-level bodega for extraction. She had the bipod folded, the dust cover popped, and the recoil assembly and barrel tucked safely in a snazzy floral-print duffel before she peeked through the detached scope again. She shouldn’t have taken the time, but she couldn’t help herself. She had to know.

  Traffic had tangled around the scene. Even the commuter pods had stopped. As she watched, some guy skidded his Ducati right to the curb and lined up his wristplant to record the whole thing, probably so he could post it on his channel later and get an IWasThere achievement. Sick fucking bastard. No way that dude could’ve guessed the corpse on the concrete was a mech-clone. For all he knew, he’d just seen a whole-organic murdered.

  He should be horrified, and instead, he’d swooped like a vulture to the gore. Clearly, there were several ways a girl could define inhuman.

  “Mari?”

  She tore her gaze away from the scene. Stuffed the scope into the duffel. Zipped up. “Yeah?”

  “Slight change of plans. I need you to cut through the alley, heading eastward. Reclamation crews framed in enough of that building that you should have some cover. Just keep tight to the wall in case security has drones up. There’s an autobus stop on Sixth, right in front of a taco cart. I’ll be behind the number 13.”

  “Which is arriving in”—Mari consulted her countdown—“twenty-three minutes?”

  “No. More like seven. Move.”

  • • •

  For Heron, keeping to a speed limit was like wearing a monk’s collar three sizes too small. A car like this wasn’t meant to be penned, and he certainly wasn’t. He crept up behind the fat city bus, trying very hard not to ram it just to vent some of his frustration.

  He’d failed. After all these years looking out fo
r her, protecting her, he’d failed. The job was a disaster.

  He’d watched that microwave burst from his drone take down all electronics within a ten-meter diameter. The bodyguards had wilted like wet tissue. But not the target. He had been willing to allow for some resilience in this target, some extra shielding, given that it was an advanced model, but then Mari’s bullet had hit. It should have slagged the mech-clone within seconds. Should have.

  With the last of its power, his drone had transmitted kill confirmation images. Startlingly clear. Horrifyingly clear. That blood. All that blood. Whole-organic blood, not process Red No. 72.

  The contract hadn’t named names, but Heron had run the target through the United North American Nations facial recognition.

  He knew whose blood that was.

  They were being paid to slag the mech-clone, vat-grown, machine-hearted imposter of Daniel Neko. Not the real Neko. Mari wouldn’t have taken a whole-organic assassination contract, not even if the fucking Texas Provisional Authority had promised to wrap her missing dad up in Christmas paper and deliver him to her postbox.

  At least he didn’t think she would.

  But what if they had made such a promise? An unspoken agreement he wasn’t privy to. She would have told him. Right? They were partners. Of course she would have told him. But once the suspicion niggled into his brain, Heron couldn’t make it go away. He hated doubting her like this, but…shit.

  And after all he’d done to keep her insulated from the chaos.

  He inhaled deliberately and connected to a mirror. He wouldn’t log into the cloud, not in real time. Couldn’t trust himself there. Last time he’d connected directly to the cloud with no firewalls or buffers, things had gone…badly.

  When his mirror connection was set, the augments at his temples projected a heads-up display, showing him data streams from the crime. Alert systems from the traffic cameras in that area notified local police, who notified regional paramilitary, blip blip blip…and there went the North American counterterrorism command.

  Now Mari was flagged as an enemy of the United North American Nations. A Texas rebel. A public danger. Shoot on sight.