Page 13 of Last Chance to Save the World (Chaotic Orbits #3)

13

F etor’s personal offices overlook Triumph Square. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows we can see the illumination of the countdown displayed for the growing crowd below. The party out there is gearing up to be a rager. We’re too far up to hear the thrumming beats of loud music or smell the foods being sold by vendors milling through throngs of people, more’s the pity.

“The party’s better up here,” Fetor tells me. An obvious lie.

But then I spot the chocolate fountain. A glorious display of cascading, creamy chocolate with skewers of fruit and cake just made for dipping. A part of me wants to unhinge my jaw and stand under the direct stream of liquid chocolate, but I don’t, because I’m a lady.

Now that we’re contained in the office, Fetor moves on to more important guests. A pair of chairs has been set up against the wall, framing the countdown happening outside, and a small woman with braids shepherds him over for an interview as I make a beeline to the food.

This is an even posher spread than the tables the caterers were setting up for the office celebration on floor forty-two. I spot Haoyu Long, and he raises a glass of champagne at me. A server walks by, displaying a bottle with a label from Rian’s family’s farm. Fetor must have had this shipped in from Rigel-Earth.

Rian sidles up to me. He’s a smart man; he knew not to interrupt me until I had dipped into the chocolate fountain.

“We need to get out of here,” Rian says in my ear.

He follows my gaze to the door, to the guards in position. If we leave now, it will be noticed.

Rian curses under his breath. “We don’t even know where the nanobots were relocated to.”

“Mm,” I say.

His razor eyes slice right to me. “You’re not concerned.”

I shrug. “It’s too late now. We did our best, but...”

A little muscle works in his jaw. “No. That’s not it. You should be more concerned.”

He’s going to betray you.

Not if I betray him first.

I can see his mind working. I’ve turned down food before, when something more important was on the line. His gaze drops from my face to my fingers, where I’m licking off some fruit juice.

Food always gives me away.

“What have you done, Ada?” Rian asks, just loud enough that Haoyu looks up. I smile charmingly at him, and he returns his attention to the chocolate fountain. Smart man.

I spin around to Rian, pulling him into a relatively private corner. The room’s not packed, but it’s crowded enough that true solitude is impossible. Anyone with a golden ticket to go up the golden elevator cashed it in, and the people allowed guests absolutely brought anyone they could.

But everyone’s distracted.

There’s a cadre here that truly cares about the program; they’re invested in the countdown, eagerly anticipating the launch of the climate cleaners, the salvation of Earth. But they’re well outnumbered by the people putting themselves in view of the cam drones or showing off for each other or simply snagging more and more champagne.

The guests here are a mix of the people who care and work, and the people who are on the guest list by nature of being Fetor’s friend—and that man only befriends people with high-enough bank accounts.

“Ada,” Rian growls, pulling my attention back to him. “I know you would do a lot of things, but giving up isn’t one of them.”

“Wow, that’s kind of eloquent; thank you.”

“You know something I don’t know,” he says.

I smile. “You can’t stand it, the not knowing.”

“Not when it comes to this,” he says, but I replace those words in my head with Not when it comes to you.

I glance at the countdown clock. There is less than half an hour left.

Rian grabs my wrist—he doesn’t see that I’m trying to look at my cuff, at the totally different countdown timer I started there—and he holds my arms pinned to my sides. It should be uncomfortable, but it’s not. He’s holding me like I’m the thread leading him out of the labyrinth. Like I’m not just valuable but his whole redemption.

A girl likes to be appreciated.

It’s not until I meet his eyes that he speaks. “I can stop it all, right now. I know the optics would be bad. I will stop the program before I allow dangerous nanobots to go into Sol-Earth’s environment. Ada, tell me what you know. Do I need to kill the countdown?”

I shake back my hair, looking at him a little defiantly. “I know that you shouldn’t do that.”

“Why.” It’s more demand than question.

Shit. He’s basically cornered me. And while usually that makes me stubborn, right now?

Hot as fuck.

“Okay, so, I told you I needed about an hour or so to reprogram the nanobots, right?” I say. Rian nods. “Well, that’s roughly true. But...” I get a good look at my cuff’s timer. It’s hit zero. Rian watches me, focused as I tap the screen and check a little alert that says, Program Upload Comp lete.

“You got to the nanobots?” Rian asks, his voice laced with deadly hope.

I nod. “I did need about an hour. But I didn’t need to be standing over it the whole time.” It’s not like I was actively writing the code into the system. Rian knows this. I wrote the whole program already and just needed to install and overwrite the malicious coding Fetor had put into the bots. If he understood the system more, he’d know that all I really needed was to use the fifteen minutes the security system allowed me to do everything I needed to do.

“The nanobots—” Rian starts, but then a little buzzer echoes through the room. All the guests pause, looking around, and Fetor stands up.

He claps once, loud, for attention. “Friends, that sound means that the nanobots have been successfully loaded into the launch site in the communications tower! In moments, it will be time to save Sol-Earth!”

Fucking pretentious asshole—

“Ada,” Rian says.

I point to Fetor, and Rian turns, watching as the man moves to a roped-off section in front of the window. A worker wheels out a display stand with a big, shiny red button. Fetor makes a false move, pretending he’s going to hit the button early, and people gasp and reporters scramble to get their cam drones positioned for the best shot, but then Fetor laughs mockingly and steps back.

“Soon!” he calls. “For now, drink up!”

Fetor signals for the servers to distribute more bubbly, and he makes a grand show of visiting all his elite guests, a shit-eating grin plastered over his face.

Rian’s grip on my arms tightens. “Ada, swear to me that the bots are good now and that the malware is gone.”

I look him right in those razored eyes. “I swear to you, your mission was a success.”

And so was mine.

“The bots are good?” Urgency threads through every syllable.

I nod and wiggle free from his hold.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asks.

“Chocolate fountain,” I say. I mean, obviously. I’ve showed remarkable restraint so far.

“Saving the world comes first,” he growls, pulling me back. I look down at his hand around my elbow, then back up at him, cold as ice. He drops my arm immediately, hands raised in defeat and apology. At least Rian’s trainable.

But he doesn’t let me leave our little empty spot against the wall. “The nanobots,” he says. “Were they—”

“Always in the server room, like you said they would be?” I say. “Yeah, obviously.”

Rian’s whole hand covers his face as he groans into his palm, then his fingers glide up his hair, loosening the locks so carefully combed into place.

Oh, I like this. I like to see him unraveling.

I like to be the one doing it.

“You made it sound like they were relocated,” he says in a low voice.

I nod. “Yes. Because I lied to you. Honestly, Rian, you should expect that of me by now.”

“But then why—”

I’m going to have to spell it out for him. “You wouldn’t have snuck me into Fetor’s communication tower if you knew I’d already set the program to run. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was a little anxiety-making to do that in fifteen minutes with a computerized voice yelling at me, but in the end, all I had to do was set the program up and walk away. Which I did.”

“And then you told me you didn’t,” Rian said. “Which is a little anxiety-making.”

“For you. I knew everything was fine.”

“Ada!” My name bursts from him, loud. Several nearby guests turn to look.

Might as well give ’em a show.

I throw my arms around his neck and kiss Rian right on the mouth. He’s so surprised that it takes him a moment to register my tongue before his lips part; he deepens the kiss, his arms gripping me around the back, lifting my body and pressing me into the wall. I hear several people nearby chuckle, one woman loudly leading her friend in the opposite direction of us.

Rian’s head ducks as his lips trail down my neck, sending a delicious shiver up my spine. “I know you’re up to something,” he whispers.

I tilt my head back until I hit the wall, exposing more of my neck. Rian’s left hand trails from the side of my neck down, fingers pressing into my back, bunching in the fabric as—for a moment—the game turns real, the desire turns liquid. He drags his mouth back up to my ear.

“So, you used me.”

I make a noise in the back of my throat—a moan of assent and confirmation. The subvocal transmitter picks it up, and while I don’t know what the AI interpreted that sound as, it was enough to make Rian huff in laughter and take a step away.

I grab him by the jacket and pull him back.

Rian cocks an eyebrow at me. His lips are no longer on my skin, but his hands have a mind of their own, trailing up and down my spine, tracing to a low loop before his fingers curl against my hips, needy and desperate.

“I haven’t forgotten what you said before,” he says. His body may be spiraling into a feral state, but his eyes are clear and sharp.

“Oh?” I say, attempting to be relaxed and failing miserably. “I’ve forgotten. What did I say?”

He releases my hips, hands going to the wall on either side of my face as he leans over me. “If you wanted to steal something really valuable from a highly secure location, such as, say, the gala at the MIH, you’d just let someone else buy it and steal it from the less-secure location the new owner puts it in.”

I can feel the whole length of his body, pinning mine against the wall. This started as a ploy to talk somewhat privately in a room full of guests, but it’s rapidly turned into something else. When Rian looks at me now, there is not a single goddamn person in the whole room. It’s just him and me and too many clothes between us.

“Did I say that?” My voice is flippant; we both know that’s false. “Clever of me.”

Rian’s eyes narrow, and his lips twitch. “That’s you all over, isn’t it? Too clever by half.”

“I just know how to play the game.”

Except do I? Because I’m no longer certain who’s the predator and who’s the prey.

“This was never a game,” Rian says, his voice low, both a threat and a promise.

I open my mouth but he silences me with another kiss, hard and brutal, the kind of kiss that devours, the kind that’s not supposed to start in a trumped-up boardroom because it absolutely needs to end somewhere dark and private. This is the kind of kiss that shatters, breaking me up into bite-sized pieces, all the better to eat me.

When Rian rips away from that searing touch, the severing is as violent as the joining. His chest heaves, his lips are bruised and wet, and he is not even a tiny bit satiated.

His forehead bumps into mine, a moment of respite.

“Fuck everything,” Rian moans.

“No, just me.”

He gives me a little snort of appreciation. “I know you’re up to something, and I cannot let you get away.”

“But you love me.”

That earns me a sardonic, deadpan look. “Ada, I know better than to fall for someone like you.”

“Someone like me?” I’m all innocence.

“Someone I can never trust. There will always be an angle with you. You will always find a way to use me to your benefit. It would be utterly pointless for me to fall for you.”

I swipe a sweaty lock of dark brown hair off the side of his face. “Too late,” I whisper. “You already did.”

But Rian doesn’t rise to the bait. “Ada, I’m serious. You may be doing a bit of a Robin Hood act for me today, stealing from...”

He struggles to find the right word. Rich isn’t strong enough to describe the type of wealth Strom Fetor wields like an axe.

I offer my own definition. “From an obscenely imbecilic man who crucified his own family to steal a bigger pot of the generational wealth that ensures he never once has to contemplate the deeply corrupt system of oppression that consistently enables him to fail up?”

“Yeah, that works,” Rian says. “And I’m with you. Making sure Fetor doesn’t win, just this once, when the salvation of all of Earth’s citizens is on the lines, that’s...”

“Noble?” I suggest.

“Close enough to it.” He sighs. “But this whole endeavor aside...I still believe in the law.”

I let my head rest against the cool wall. The more words there are between us, the further we drift from that moment where everything felt like fire in the best possible way. “So, what you’re saying is, all I have to do is seduce you with legalese?”

He doesn’t even crack a hint of a smile. “I need you to know this: I am going to arrest you.”

You’re going to try.

I can’t look him in the eye right now. Instead, my gaze roves over the party, the chocolate fountain, the security, the chocolate fountain.

“You’re going to have to face the consequences of your actions,” Rian keeps going. “Especially once I...”

I feel rather than see Rian’s attention drawn to me. Like warm honey down my back, his focus melts into my body.

And I can tell—he’s noticed.

Before, my missing earring was on the left side. I left that in the nanobot programming room, stabbing the input receptor with the post and successfully reprogramming the nanobots to protect Earth rather than exploit it.

When I burst out of the server room with the robotic voice telling me that security would be raised in minutes, Rian was too distracted by shutting off the alarms to notice I had no earrings in then.

Which got us to the communications room.

And now I have an earring in the right side.

His eyes shift from my ear to my face. His jaw is tight.

I can see all the pieces falling into place behind his eyes. I can see the accusation just on the tip of his tongue.

And I grin charmingly up at him just as Strom Fetor—and a buzzing cloud of cam drones—walks up to us.