Perfect Gravity Read online

  Angela turned to her rescue-bot, the holographic blond with the gigantic boobs. “If I promise not to rat you out, will you take me to him? And then leave us alone?”

  “Deal. Let’s go be naughty.” Chloe happy-bounced (she totally could, even without gravity), and the remote lock on the unit door disengaged with a pop.

  Chapter 5

  Up at the barn, lying to himself he wasn’t there because he was avoiding anybody in particular, Kellen stroked the miniature goat’s flank. “Don’t you mind that coy little camelid, Rook. She’ll come around.”

  The goat looked over at the latest rescue to invade his pen and snorted. Almost like he knew exactly what Kellen was saying.

  Kellen would have laughed out loud, but a sharp noise like that could startle the animals he’d collected up here, the wild hares in particular. Instead he gestured to Azul, inviting her closer. He’d already injected her first series of nanocytes, and she was eating solids, as was proper for a girl her age. She had a powerful suspicion of other animals, though.

  “Come ’ere, Azulita. Rook and his goaties ain’t gonna hurt you. You’re safe here, girl.”

  She took a wobbly step toward Kellen and Rook, but clearly she had some misgivings. As a cria, she’d been around people a mite too much. Gal got way too excited every time he paid her a visit, which was flattering and all, but long-term, not good for her. She might never reintegrate with her original herd, especially since it had all but abandoned her as a newborn, but he had some thoughts of where he could place her in the wild. If she was still capable of being a wild animal after all this.

  Training her away from domesticity was harder than it sounded. And Rook, the most social of the three pygmy goats still receiving treatment here in the barn, wasn’t much help. He looked like he wanted to give her a good sniff. Possibly chase her around some. Show the newcomer who was king. But he was a rescue himself and tended toward timidity, so a lot of their interaction was Rook gearing up to introduce himself then backing off and Azul being oblivious of any overtures that didn’t come from humans.

  In a way, it was kind of like human courtship, the sweet parts anyhow.

  Kellen balanced in a squat next to the goat, careful to keep his body still. He motioned to Azul, and when she boinged over and nosed his wrist, he studiously ignored her, waited for her to take a step back, and then, on his terms, he petted her, letting her closer only once she had control of herself. She didn’t even seem to realize she was also close enough for Rook to get a good sniff. The little gal gurgled with joy, and Rook snuck to within a meter of her before he backed off.

  Baby steps, sure, but the social dynamics around here were looking up. Kellen breathed easy. Hairy mammals? Check. Insecure as all get-out? Check. Nonverbal but clearly needing some help? Also check. He was in his happy place.

  And then he wasn’t.

  Because she was there. Angela.

  Materializing from the umber shadow of the elevator house and moving into full lurid sunshine, Angela Neko sashayed back into his life exactly as if she’d never left it. As if she’d never blistered his soul with cruel words or scissored him out of her own bright future.

  Heron had warned him she was coming, but Kellen hadn’t quite accepted the reality. He’d been pretending he still had time to prepare himself. But he should have been honest. Nothing was going to prepare him for this, not even seeing the holoprojection of her up on Chiba Station. Angela in the flesh was a whole different experience, and he wasn’t anywhere near ready for it.

  With one brown-eyed gaze, she clamped him in a state of suspended ecstasy, and he couldn’t look away.

  Nobody had ever described Angela Neko as pretty, at least not in his hearing. She was a force, tremendous and terrible and amazing. She lured others into agreement with her, often against their will, like gravity. But all that was power of personality, not her looks. Physically she was tiny, graceful as a sapling liana, with tip-tilted, dark-fringed eyes and heavy, shining black hair. She used to wear it long, a cool curtain strewn across their bodies. When they’d holoconferenced a few days back, it had been trammeled in a severe updo, but now he saw she’d had it cut and shaped. Professional. Polished.

  Recognition, one body of another, feathered out from his spine, curling in hot tendrils to the ends of his extremities. He could no more make words in this moment than he could calm the canter of his heartbeat.

  “Hello.” Her voice painted the afternoon a darker shade of gold.

  In a solar eclipse, folks without cyber eyes are advised not to look directly into the sun. Not because a direct peek hurts, but because it doesn’t. The oh-what-could-it-hurt slow, sly voice of temptation leads a body to take in more than it can safely stand. Radiation scorches the retinas, but because there aren’t pain receptors there, the eyes can be damaged irrevocably without their owner even realizing until it is far too late.

  Looking at Angela Neko, at once an echo of the girl who had burned at the center of his soul and also the different, mature woman she had become, Kellen forgot that it wasn’t safe to stare. He forgot that it wasn’t safe to love her.

  From a star’s distance and without moving his oversaturated eyes, he watched the animals react to her presence. Rook peered at her suspiciously. The two other goats followed his lead. The more skittish littles were nowhere to be seen.

  But Azul, that oversocialized cuddlemonster, skipped right up to Angela, butted her soft nose against the senator’s wrinkled skirt, and insisted on wresting all the attention.

  It was the easiest thing in the world for Angela to reach down to rub the cria’s sweet snout.

  Even when Kellen’s mind was burning a supernova of memory, his instincts reacted. “Don’t do that,” he said too sharply. “You gotta thump her on the nose.”

  Angela’s smile dimmed, and confusion pooled in her dark eyes. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Because you want to do right by her. Encouraging her to treat you without respect isn’t a kindness. It’s bad training.”

  Kellen rose from his crouch, dusted his jeans with both hands, and approached the pair. Getting closer to that woman was way against his better judgment, of course. He did it anyhow. He wore his shabby Stetson against the hard afternoon sun, but it wouldn’t do much to protect his face from her. She would see him, as she always had, and know exactly what he was thinking.

  “If we don’t tell her to back off now, she’ll grow up aggressive, try to knock people down, and just generally behave like a brat,” he explained, working hard to keep his voice even and soothing.

  “Uh-huh,” Angela said with a grin that usually came with some eye rolling. But at least she’d pulled her hand back up. As he watched, she twined it with her other. Naked hands, no gloves this time. Hot hands, strong hands, lithe as flame tongues on his skin, those hands.

  He swallowed, got his bearings, and patiently lured the vicuña away from Angela’s knees. The activity centered him, tore him from staring, reminded him that time had passed. Whole years, nearly a decade. He wasn’t Angela’s thing anymore, indentured to her will.

  “You know what?” he said, maybe with a testy edge and definitely not looking at her. “It’s okay if you don’t believe me or don’t agree with my methods, but I do care how Azul matures. I care about that a lot. She’s already got three strikes against a healthy development: she was born too wee, bottle-fed by folks not her own kind, and she’s got no herd. ’Bout the least I can do for her now is raise her up right so she knows exactly what she is and has no delusions of grandeur.”

  “We’re talking about Azul?” Angela followed at a distance while he herded all the animals into a long pen nearer the barn.

  He wasn’t looking right at her and took the opportunity to scowl hard. “’Course we are. What’d you think…aw, damn it, don’t you even get on psychoanalyzing me. I ain’t your fucking what-if social experiment.”

&n
bsp; Kellen shut the gate and turned to her, hooking his thumbs in his belt loops. Else what the hell was he supposed to do with those hands?

  Muscle memory had some ideas. He drew his fingers up to fists. Tension corded his arms.

  “Discussing the animal. Right.” She burned a look up at him. “So, oh expert in animal behavior, what happens if I let Azul get close to me? What happens if I pet her beautiful head or stroke her flank?”

  She had to know what her voice did to him. She wrapped it around him on purpose, binding him with it, like a word witch.

  He took a deep breath, let it out. “Best not. She’ll get to thinking it’s okay for a critter like her to invade your personal space.”

  “What if it is?” Soft, her words, and bedroom low.

  “I don’t know what subtext you’re laying on here, but what I do know is—”

  “Kellen.”

  Why’d she have to say his name? And in a voice like that?

  “What if it’s okay for you to invade my personal space?” she went on. “What if I want it sort of desperately? What if I’ve thought of it since we spoke on the telepresence?” She floated one hand toward him and got within a breath of touching his forearm before she drew it back.

  Since their holoconference. Since he’d told her who killed her husband. This wasn’t the time to be laying her out on a bed in his mind. Shame burned through desire, turning it to bitter ash.

  “You best go on wanting, then,” he said.

  Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t resort to pouting or guilt. She’d grown past that, apparently. Her mouth hardened. “This wasn’t the reunion I expected.”

  “Better than the one I didn’t expect at all,” he said. “Why’d you come out here?”

  “I wanted to see you.” She moistened timorous lips, and he couldn’t help wondering if the tremble was part of her act. “I missed you.”

  He near tore the belt loops off his jeans. God Almighty, this woman.

  He pinched his eyes shut, but man, it hurt. “You been widowed what, a week? Ain’t it a bit soon to try and lay me down?”

  When he opened his eyes, she was glaring back at him. Hands in fists. One eyebrow up. Uh-oh. “What I endured wasn’t a marriage. Besides, salacious banter didn’t seem to bother you at the gala.”

  Confusion cooled his ardor a bit, and his humiliation. “What?”

  “The messages? The poem?”

  He repeated, “What?”

  She threw her hands up and half turned, muttering under her breath in a language he didn’t know. Not that it mattered. She could curse fluently in at least twenty.

  “Fit our tongues?” she snapped. “Wordsworth? In the dark?”

  Worth Dark Words. He remembered her code, of course he did. Scratched on the inside of her smartglove, a secret message, like they’d sent when they were kids and playing at spies in the Mustaqbal Institute. But what did that have to do with…

  Daylight broke upon his brain. “Is that what you meant? Somehow I guessed you were aiming for the sadder end of the poem. You know, the part where we’re old and bitter and blind to the wonders of the natural world and everythin’s gone to steaming shit.”

  “I am not old. Or bitter. Or…”

  More sublingual cursing. He wished he’d installed a translator app on his com. Whatever she was saying sounded just filthy.

  She was right about one thing, though: this cadence worked for them. The bickering, the sparring. They’d done this plenty back when, and although it had always led to electric pile-driving sex then, he was a grown-up now. He could resist.

  Plus, he had forgotten how sweet it felt all on its own, getting her riled up like this. He’d forgotten how her eyebrows swooped down in the middle but flared up in points on the outside, like demon wings. So fierce. And secret, known only to the people closest to her. He’d never seen her face set in anything other than perfect placidity on those vidcasts. As if fury were beneath her.

  Kellen knew better. He knew her better.

  She stood there spitting fire, and he shook his head in defeated admiration.

  “How can you be so hands-off and stick-up-your-ass today when the night before last, you were laying out lines at me like a goddamned dealer?” she fumed.

  “I got no idea what you’re talking about, but you sure do work up a fine lather.”

  “I’m talking about you responding to my secret code. You sent me messages. During the gala the night before last.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “I spent that whole night trying to keep Heron alive. Wasn’t easy. I didn’t have a scrap of time to play with you on Torchat, though I’m sure it would have been a hoot.”

  “It was… I mean, if it wasn’t you, then…” She turned from him, stared out into the desert. He could almost hear the gears of her big brain whirring. Finally she went on, “I guess mech-Daniel put that whole thing together. To make the gala easier for me. Christ on a pickle. Except, you know what? This shit is stupid embarrassing, and I don’t need any of it.” She pivoted and stomped off, while he watched from his vantage.

  Oh yeah, he watched. Drank in the sight, truth told. She was a hellcat in her wrinkled skirt and bedroom slippers, and she hadn’t changed one bit in all these years. Her firecracker temper crackled on his skin, both familiar and heartbreaking. Used to be, she’d spark it up just for him.

  She stopped just inside the shadow of the elevator house, one wrist poised in front of the scanner that would call up the elevator. Being her, though, she had to get in the last word. “So that’s it, then? You didn’t send the messages, and you didn’t want me here. And now you’re just going to let me walk away?”

  Oh no, you did not say that.

  They hit him smack in the gut, those words. She could have said anything else. Pain flared, and he spoke before the better part of him could even process. “Sure as hell am. Go play your tiny diva violin for somebody else, ’cause I am done listening.”

  She turned, and he braced himself. Was she planning to lay it on even thicker? Because if she expected him to roll over like a goddamn lap dog, she didn’t know him at all anymore.

  Her dark eyes snapped, electrifying him across space. “I am not…”

  “Oh, princess,” he drawled, pushing away from the fence post. “You most surely are. Ain’t that the same damn thing you did to me? You watched me walk away. Now, absofuckinlutely, I aim to do the same. Put that pill in your own mouth, and give it a chew.”

  • • • • • • • •

  SUMMER, 2049

  DUNES BETWEEN ABU DHABI AND THE MUSTAQBAL INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

  Late afternoon was the hottest time of day in the hottest part of the world, but Kellen sunned in it like a happy rattlesnake. Part of that had to do with how his blood still felt too warm, too heavy for his veins. With the languor that had invaded his limbs after sex, or the stretch of forever in his mind. And maybe also with light and heat that splashed over his bare skin, merging him inexorably with his lover.

  The sun lowered in the west, and he longed to hold it, hoard it. He didn’t want today, or this moment, to end. Not ever.

  She stirred against him, her breath billowing over his chest. “We should record this, you know.”

  “What, so I can send it to you during particle physics? Girl, you’d never ace a test again.”

  “You think you’re so distracting, do you?”

  “I know it.”

  “Ha. Well, you’re probably right. But I’d still get top marks in the class. With a high enough frame-rate and industrial magnification, I would be able to definitively describe the atomic interactions that occur at the point of orgasm. This is valuable research. Stills from our copulation would be in all the best science channels. Your cock would be famous.”

  She didn’t
touch anything especially sensitive right then, but she might as well have. His body reacted to being talked about. He moved one palm along her sweat-damp spine. Her skin was silk.

  “Also,” she went on in a softer, more solemn voice, “I would be able to play the vid over and over. When I am exhausted but cannot sleep. When I am scared but cannot scream. When I am lonely. Every time I’m lonely and wanting you.”

  “Sweetheart, you don’t have to worry about none of that,” he swore. “I don’t intend to let you get too exhausted or scared or lonely, not ever again. I aim to stick on you like glue all the rest of our lives. I love you.”

  He waited for her to say it back. She took a long time.

  “I love you too, Kellen, but you really shouldn’t make promises like that.”

  “Give me one reason why not.”

  “I can give you a billion reasons: all the other people crawling across our planet. A billion vectors in chaos. You can’t track them all or know their purposes. There are too many uncertainties to make forever-type promises.”

  “I can promise that I will love you forever.”

  “How can you do that?” she almost cried.

  His eyebrows crawled up his forehead, topping what he knew was a cocky grin. “Give me a couple weeks and I’ll come up with a theorem. Probably Pascalian, because of all them vectors, but till then, you’ll just have to trust me.”

  “I do trust you,” she said. She rose up on one elbow and looked down at him, her head eclipsing the too-harsh sun, her hair encasing their mingled breath. “But I think that might be a problem.”

  “Trust is a problem?” If she’d lean down just a smidge further, he would be able to kiss her, and they wouldn’t need to talk so much. His body stirred again, all his parts reaching for her. He could have her a thousand times out here in the desert, and he’d still want more.

  “Dependence is a problem,” she said.

  Kellen blinked up at her. Her body had stiffened, pressed up against his, but not out of desire. Tension invaded her and leached into him. He wasn’t sure yet why he needed to worry, but worry suffused him just the same.