Page 77 of Throwing Fire

CHAPTER 29

After we say goodbye to the doc, I lead Kez back inside and into the lounge.

This is the room I used most before I met Kez, and least since. She calls it theman-cave. I like dark wood and soft fabrics and that’s nowhere more evident than the lounge, with its heavy furnishings, window-walls set to wood-panel mode, and thick carpet. I make it even more cave-like when I tap up the window-walls, switching them to black-out. I seat Kez on one of the deep, soft couches, then collect a pair of skullcaps.

There’s an old myth that humans only use ten percent of their brains. At least, I was told it was a myth. Spending time with Kez’s brother has made me wonder. Truth is, humans use all of their brains, just not all at the same time. Head-sheds in MI, they thought ‘all brain, all the time’ was a great idea. They called itexpansion. Gave me nose-bleeds. But I learned how to datalink, and while it still ain’t my favorite thing, it has its uses. Especially when you’re facing Myhre’s fucking endless reports.

I hand Kez a skullcap, pop mine on and settle down on the couch next to her. In training, we did datalinking in SD-pods. No othersensory input. Helps avoid some of the nasty potential side-effects of expansion, like schizophrenia. But Kez and I aren’t absorbing terabytes of technical data. Just a couple meg of analytics. Kez has only datalinked twice, so I shut off her feed at the end of Myhre’s reports. Keep my feed open for a few more seconds while I absorb the twenty-seven minutes of vid Payton has sent me. Then I shut it all down, push off my skullcap and stretch out next to Kez. She turns over, so she’s lying along my side, and puts her head on my chest. I slide my arms around her. Stroke her soft head. Nothing nicer than feeling my kitten close to my heart.

We’re both quiet for a while, processing the information that’s been fed directly into our cerebellums. Myhre’s reports are pretty dry, and I’m glad I won’t have to use the looping techniques I learned in MI to transfer the streamed data into long-term memories. I might die of boredom before Jaxon and his buddies manage to take us out.

Kez sighs and shifts on my shoulder. “I’ve always hated numbers, and that wasbeforeI met Myhre.”

“She really is a bean-counter at heart.” I chuckle.

“With everything else that’s going on, she’s prioritized this thing in Jielt?”

I pull up that report. A bunch of Jielt diggies want to meet with Chi and Kez about leakage from a bunch of underground methane pools. Myhre’s prioritized it for Kez and flagged it as a security concern for me.

“They’re not even Tyng property,” Kez grumbles.

She’s right. The caves are govvie property, and the pressurized methane pools in them are a govvie problem, left over from last-century’s dirty terraforming.

But Jielt is a company town. Tyng employs more than half the population. The govvies are using Tyng-tech to process the methane into useable fuel. So if the pools are leaking, I guess that makes it a Tyng problem.

“Stinker of a situation,” I say.

Kez knocks my shoulder with her forehead. “You didn’t.”

I chuckle. “Yeah. I’ll go down there with you.” Because I’m not letting her out of my sight. Particularly after what Doc Gray had to say. “Kitten, Doc’s worried about you.”

She scoots up on my chest so she’s looking down into my face. “Is that what he wanted to talk with you about?”

“Yeah, and you nearly tore my dick off.”

“What?”

I grin at her reaction, smooth my hand over her head and tuck her down against my chest again. “Doc’s given me some goo. It’ll be fine. If you’d stop jumpin’ me every half-hour.”

“Hale, I am so sorry.”

I love the earnest dismay on her little face. It makes me grin so wide my cheeks ache. “It’ll be fine. Let’s talk about you. Doc says you’re stressed.”

She shrugs and buries her face in my shoulder. No avoidance there.

I stroke her back for a while in silence. Give her the comfort of touch. Let her relax into my skin. When her breathing is even, I say, “I’ll promise you somethin’.”

She stirs. “Wha—?” she asks. She sounds extremely sleepy.

“Whatever happens, you ain’t gonna be alone. I’ll be with you every step.”

She rubs her face against me, yawns, and kisses my shoulder. “I know that. I’ve never doubted that.” Another yawn. Datalinking can be exhausting, although we didn’t do it for very long. I think back over her previous sessions with Doc Gray. She was sleepy after a couple of them.

“Good.” I settle us into a better position on the couch. We’ve got an hour before Kez needs to meet Chi to pick out fucking plates or whatever they’re doing, so she can have a nap.

“Hale?” she whispers sleepily. “I love spending time with you. Whatever’s happening.”

I kiss her forehead. I’ve thought it before and I’ll probably think it again. My kitten is a complex woman, but her happiness is notcomplex. Her happiness is sweet and simple. All I have to do is keep us both alive to enjoy it.