Perfect Gravity Read online

  The interior of the car was just as personalized and bizarre as the outside: black ball fringe along the headliner over the windshield, an elaborate sugar skull balanced on the dash, and seat covers fitted out in some soft, dark fabric. The back of the driver’s side headrest was embroidered in orange with the words “El tiempo es un fuego que me consume,” and the right one continued with the rest of the quote, “Pero yo soy el fuego.” It was a Borges line from the last century, yet another piece Angela had been made to memorize. Time is a fire that consumes me. But I am the fire.

  The white-haired woman went around and got in on the driver’s side. The car was so old, it still had a steering wheel. She pressed a button on the dash, the electrics hummed, and the car lurched forward, slamming Angela against the seatback. What was it called on these things? Ludicrous speed? Just so. She hadn’t thought to put on a harness, but there probably was one around here. She’d have to dig for it.

  A plaintive cry made the fine hairs on her forearms stand up. Oh, yikes. No car, not even an antique, made that sound.

  “What was that?”

  “Mi cria,” the driver hollered over her shoulder. Without taking her gaze off the highway, she popped the lid of the compartment between the front captains’ chairs, withdrew a bottle that smelled like puke, shook it, and then handed it back toward Angela. “Lift up that blanket there and stick this in the feeder, yummy end pointed in her direction. She’ll be your best friend forever.”

  Angela took the bottle, held her breath, did as she was told, and came nose to nose with a furry face framing the most beautiful eyes she’d ever seen. Long-lashed and sweet-tea brown. The white face tilted to the side and let out that mew/hum sound again.

  A miniature llama. Or a baby one? Angela had never seen one, not in real life. She’d seen pictures of llamas, mostly in old books. Like other domesticated herd species, llamas had been decimated in recent decades. Predators, half-starved and desperate after a string of unpredictable climate extremes and disease-vector eradications, had descended on licensed herds, wrecking fences and ranchers’ livelihoods alike. Prey animals never had a chance, but even their sacrifice wasn’t enough, ultimately. Global ecosystems were disintegrating at a rate that was now too rapid to pause.

  Some of the heartier wild things had survived in sustainable populations: rats, hawks, and of course, cockroaches. But most of the beautiful creatures were gone, even the ones that had once been ubiquitous. Angela had seen only one cat in her whole life.

  The memory of that cat still throbbed. She pushed it away viciously.

  “Her name is Azul. She was a rare twin birth. Vicuña. Might not look it, but that little bit of fur and sass is almost two months old. Barely fifty pounds, for all her monster appetite, but if anybody can get that wee girl up to fighting weight, it’s Kellen. You know him?”

  Angela didn’t reply, just pushed the bottle in between slats in the traveling crate and fitted it into the feeder sling. The baby vicuña latched on almost immediately. Look at that little girl go! She did have a healthy appetite. Angela watched her, those slow-blinking eyes with their impossibly long lashes. So delicate.

  Shhh. You’re safe now. Promise.

  The woman was right. Kellen could care for this animal. He had a magic where animals were concerned. It would thrive. It would love him to absolute bits. All the creatures did.

  “Where did you get her?” she asked.

  “La Paz, or north of there, in the mountains. They used to roam wild all over Bolivia, whole bunches of them, till the poachers had a run at them in the 1900s. Gentle animals, vicuñas. They don’t deserve what we humans have done to their world, but they can’t say a damn thing to stop us.”

  What would a vicuña say if it could speak? Probably would agree with that statement. Certainly Angela’s—and her government’s—plans for the world were people-first. If she somehow managed to goad Texas into a war, bringing a dozen or more other entities into conflict, what would the voiceless animals of the world have to say about that?

  Nothing. They would say nothing, the cool statesman in Angela insisted. Bolivia wasn’t even in her continent.

  Still sucking at the feeder, the cria looked right into Angela’s eyes, possibly into her soul. At first, she read the expression in those round cocoa eyes as thanks. Angela had given the animal food, after all. Safety. But that was the easy interpretation, wasn’t it? Acquiring basic sustenance did not necessarily engender gratitude. In her experience, people who were riding the edge of desperation and were saved right at the last minute weren’t grateful. They were too wound up. They lashed out, suspicious, sometimes angry.

  The vicuña’s eyes weren’t angry, though. They were…she couldn’t read them. If only she could hook this little girl up to a psych-emitter.

  “By the way, you can call me Fanaida, or Fan,” the driver said. “Heron Farad, who you messaged? He’s my kid. Got a place not an hour from here. Good place, strong. You’ll be safe from whatever’s hunting you, mija.”

  Disbelief jangled up Angela’s spine. Bomb-flavored dust, cracks in the walls. Pain.

  I’ll never be safe. I’ll never be free.

  Still…Kellen would be there. Not-right Kellen and his murderizing band of scoundrels, true, but him at the core. And the core Kellen was more compassionate than eleven-tenths of the human population. Plus, he had messaged her tonight, earlier, before her world went to hell. That proved he still cared, didn’t it? That he wanted her here?

  And she, of course, had never stopped wanting him.

  • • •

  “Just sit yer boney ass down, already.” Kellen eyed his best friend, who looked like hammered shit this fine morning. “You need to sleep for about a week. Can’t even stand up on your own two feet right now. What you been through, man, you gotta take this recovery slow.”

  Heron might have been the most tech-altered human alive, but when he wilted into the wide executive chair and pressed his palms against the smartsurface boardroom table, he was just a guy, and a tired one at that. He closed his eyes for a long moment, and after a while, a look of perfect peace settled over his face. So perfect he might have been sleeping.

  Which, incidentally, Kellen would like to do, for his own self, now things were settled.

  “Mari will be here in one hour seventeen minutes.” Heron’s eyes slatted open, blinking through the digital fog. “I must be up by then.”

  There was a dirty joke in there somewhere, but even though they were both plenty punchy, neither went there.

  “An hour-long nap in the meantime wouldn’t hurt either of us,” Kellen suggested.

  For the last four days, Kellen had monitored his friend’s struggle to oust a particularly nasty neural-net virus. Seventy-four hours in applied neurobiology back in school and a decade of veterinary practice since had made Kellen keenly suited to caring for a human as brain-altered as Heron. But no amount of training got a body used to watching another person in suspended consciousness for four days. The vigil had been like watching a corpse decay in time-lapse, and not just any corpse. His best friend.

  It hadn’t helped that Heron’s sweetheart Mari had been on the com every other second, checking up on him. Or that she herself had hied off on some danger-junkie mission to Texas, a parallel attempt to figure out who had put the virus in Heron’s head and shut it the hell down.

  They were both of them crazier than a pair of springtime squirrels in traffic, but Kellen couldn’t fault them. All that crazy was for love. Kellen himself had done some less than purely sane things in the name of love before. Lord, hadn’t he just.

  He swiped a big hand over his face, shoving the floppier bits of hair out of his eyes. He needed to hit the sack, maybe for a week. The virus was gone now. They had won. Soon, his team would all be tucked back home in the Pentarc, feet on firm ground rather than some floofy space station or spaceplane or et cetera. Safe.
r />   Angela had taken care of Mari’s outlaw status—he’d seen the senator on vid channels flat-out denying that Daniel was dead, which he had to admit was a pretty ingenious solution. Ballsy too. She’d even gone on Rafa Castrejon’s channel, plugged into an emote caster, and convinced a couple million people real-time that no way could she have just been widowed when she was this crammed full of joy. She’d looked luminous.

  So much that Kellen had been tempted to slip a rig on his own head, just for a minute, and feel it. Angela’s joy. God.

  No, was probably best he didn’t do that. There were some things in this ’verse he’d never be sufficiently prepared to feel.

  “Kellen?” Heron was frowning, and his eyes were closed again. He’d stretched his bare hands out on the smartsurface, soaking in the information stream there. “Have you checked your blip boards this morning?”

  Reluctantly, he wrested his attention to Heron’s question, away from Angela.

  Kellen had trackers on all the critters he’d managed to bring in, alter, and release back into the wild. It calmed him to peek in on them from time to time, but even when he only had a second or two, he could glance at the overall board, see all their green lights, and know that even if he died right at that moment, he had put some good back into the world. All his work, his sacrifices, had already produced a net win. Sometimes just knowing that was enough. The blip board was his validation.

  “Nope, not this morning, but I did hear from Fan last night, before all that business with Mari started. Your mom’s bringing a vicuña up here later today, orphaned and wee.” Although Heron had closed his eyes again, Kellen had a sneaking suspicion his friend wasn’t drifting off, not yet. Too much tension in those hands. “Can you see all my trackers there?”

  Heron took a while answering. “I can see them. I can see…everything.” On the table, a tremble wobbled through his fingers.

  “Ain’t easy what you did to your brain. Best go slow,” Kellen advised.

  Heron’s faint smile was wry. “Information doesn’t work that way. It is indescribably fast, but there are…handholds, places within the cloud where I can sort of grab on and pause long enough to study.”

  The thing that had finally kicked that virus out of Heron’s head once and for damn-sure had been connection. Specifically a nodal connection: Heron had plugged straight into the cloud and essentially melded his consciousness with the global information net. Kellen had never heard of anybody doing that before, and the consequences of such a maneuver were likely to be a bitch, on down the road. But that connection had saved his friend, so maybe there was something to that ends-justifying-means crap after all.

  “Your blip board is one of those handholds,” Heron went on. “I find it comforting, the numbers of animals out there, thriving, because of you and our work. I see why you stare at it all the time.”

  Well, would you look at that? Dude was starting to get it. Kellen flopped down in a chair and propped his boots up on the long, granite-topped table. He butt-scooched to the edge of the chair, getting comfy. If he’d had his hat, he would have pushed it low over his face to shut out some of the light, but it was bad manners to wear a hat indoors. Some lessons he’d retained from all his mama’s hollering.

  “How my butterflies doing?” he asked.

  Butterflies, not Angela. So what the butterflies were wintering near Morelia? Aaaaaand Angela happened to be about two hours away from them, in Guadalajara, last he’d checked. It wasn’t like he was asking after his monarchs just because he was thinking about her way too much lately.

  Except that had been his exact reason.

  “Possibly not well,” Heron said. “There’s…”

  Suddenly Kellen was no longer searching for the raggedy edge of sleep. “Not well? What d’you mean?”

  He’d put a lot of time and effort into luring those monarchs down to the oyamel forests for their migration. If loggers or some corporation had come in and messed things up, he was gonna be pissed.

  Heron frowned, never a good sign. “There’s something dark near Morelia, maybe just a data anomaly, some intrusion countermeasures or… No, it’s northwest of Morelia. So good news, the butterfly habitat is probably fine after all.”

  “But?” There was always a but.

  “The data hole is over Guadalajara. Something is going on there that our government doesn’t want me to see.”

  Kellen’s limbs tensed hard, and his breath bunched up tight in his chest.

  The frown didn’t depart Heron’s face. “Senator Neko’s repeater initiated from the middle of that dark spot. Probably just a coincidence, of course, but I dislike coincidences.”

  Every time Kellen heard her name, it was like liquid nitrogen froze his entire body, melted straight to gas, and swished off, leaving him ass-bare and blazing with indeterminate but excruciating temperature. Every. Damn. Time. “Senator who’s what?”

  Heron pinched up one eyebrow. “The chances you misheard me hover near zero.”

  “Clarify repeater.”

  “A repeating message.”

  “To you?”

  “Yes.” Heron’s other eyebrow scooted up and met the first, high on his forehead. “I’m certain I told you she was coming here. Fanaida is bringing her, along with your rescue not-alpaca thing.”

  “You told me bupkiss, man.” Fuck. Fuckity fuck. Angela here? In physical, touchable, soul-singeing, memory-wrenching, toxic proximity?

  Heron tilted his head slightly. “No, I clearly remember saying that she—”

  That she was requesting a meeting with his shooter. Yeah, Kellen had heard that, or some similar bullshit, but he’d been busy just at that minute, trying to keep his friend alive. He remembered thinking at the time that a game-master like Angela wouldn’t waste her favor owed on something as useless as meeting Mari, not unless she was planning to renege on their bargain. Or she had some other nefarious purpose. You could never put such shenanigans past a politician.

  “Yeah, but can’t she meet Mari somewhere else?” Somewhere he wasn’t. Somewhere he wouldn’t have to see her, breathe her air, hold himself away from wrapping his arms all the way around her and forcing her never to leave again.

  Heron raised his hands off the tabletop and turned his palms up. “I didn’t realize it would bother you so much. Haven’t you known her forever? I thought you were fond of her.”

  Fond? Not even close.

  Kellen kicked back from the table, rolling the chair till it crushed into a plastic-printed ficus. He rose in one movement, clenching his fists and wishing he had something to squeeze. Or crush. Or hurl. He had things to say, but his internal editor kept his lips clamped shut. Mind frame like this, it was best not to let fly. Hollering without carefully choosing his words, especially when there were legit hollerable offenses going down and he was grumpy as all get-out, was against his personal rule set.

  But dangit…Heron had invited her here? Without even asking him? What kind of batfuck Judas move was that?

  “Best I see to that vicuña,” he muttered past half-clamped lips. A whole vomit of soot-filthy words pushed up behind his teeth, but he didn’t let it loose.

  He’d almost gotten to the door when Heron spoke again. “Fanaida just drove into the carpark. Your Angela is with her.”

  Here. Angela.

  But not mine.

  She hadn’t been his in nine years. And none of that was his fault. Not one second.

  Chapter 4

  Angela had fallen asleep during the drive, despite the cramped back seat and the smell of llama piss. Oh, right, no: vicuña piss. Apparently they were two separate species entirely. Somehow her exclusive smart kids’ education hadn’t denoted the difference, but Fanaida had taken it upon herself to educate.

  When the rickety old car screamed to a stop in a place that echoed, Angela woke, knuckled the temporary peace out of her eyes, and t
asted the backs of her teeth, hoping nobody had noticed that she’d dropped her dignity—and possibly her hygiene—about fifty kilometers back. She felt fuzzy and unkempt. Blessing the lack of vid cams or paparazzi, she unfastened her door and spilled herself out of the tinier-than-it-looked car.

  All carparks the world over looked exactly the same, though this one was a bit fuller than most. Not with cars, though: with shipping containers. Dozens of them. Hundreds? A few skeletal combustion cars littered the smoky, halogen-lit underground, and the space smelled of engine grease and…burnt tortilla? Ugh. Still, Angela was happy to get out of the cramped confines and stretch her legs some.

  Mech-Daniel no sooner hit the pavement than he had instructions for her. She’d be willing to bet he’d saved them up for hours. “We are to report to Heron Farad in the conference room on the third floor as soon as possible.”

  “Do I get a chance to shower first?” she asked.

  Fanaida cut in with a sniff. “Oh, it ain’t that kind of request, mija.” She’d already come around to the little camelid baby’s side of the car and was trying to coax Azul out with a fistful of fresh grass.

  Angela’s stomach rumbled. Because of grass. Not braised lobster or sweet floss halva. Grass. She was hungry enough that her belly was excited over a bunch of grass. Yeah, this day was looking up.

  And that thought reminded her in a rush of how the day had started. Somebody had tried to kill her. Probably still wanted her dead. She tasted the sour of panic in her mouth and swallowed it back.

  “Right,” she said evenly. “You mean the drought makes water for bathing a luxury. I didn’t mean to sound insensitive.” Or like a fucking princess. “In fact, I don’t need much to be comfortable.” A lie. “Did you know I was ambassador to the nation of Jolet Jin Anij, before it was sunk?” Youngest actual ambassador—not a made-up “goodwill” bullshit title—in the history of the preunification U.S. government. That was still a point of pride for her, evidence she was doing something right.