Page 7 of Last Chance to Save the World (Chaotic Orbits #3)

7

W e eat dinner on the terrace. There’s wine, an occasionally soft coo from the roof, warmth under the solar shield, and crashing waves.

For one meal, we all pretend. We ignore the smells and act like our sun shields are just shirts and all is well. Mom pretends that I’m home visiting, bringing a new boyfriend for her to meet. She keeps feeding Rian like it’s her job, and Rian keeps passing the second and third helpings to me because I don’t get food this good on the regular. Rian pretends that he’s not that important, dodging Mom’s questions about his role in the climate-cleaner program.

I pretend like this is normal, and we’re going not going to save the world tomorrow.

The sun’s well beyond the horizon by the time Rian insists he really is full and needs to go to bed. I set him up in the room Mom keeps for me. It’s bland and lacks any decorations, little more than a mattress in a closet.

“It’s fine,” Rian insists.

“It’s because I never lived here, not really,” I say, to explain the utter lack of personality in the room. “Mom and Papa split before Papa got sick. And I roomed with friends during university.”

And after university, there was only Glory. Which, ironically, isn’t the type of glory my mother wanted for me, but I’m pretty comfortable with being a disappointment. Not that Mom would call me a disappointment. Maybe I’m just projecting. But damn, it’s hard having a saint for a mother. Maybe that’s why I’m better off on Glory than on Earth. If I’m being honest, nowhere on this planet feels like home the way my ship does. Certainly not here.

I guess the pigeons are more domesticated than me.

“Tomorrow morning—”

“Up early,” I confirm. “I’ve already hired transport to the city. It won’t take long.”

We’ll have to walk part of it. All the streets around Triumph Square are closed to traffic, anyway. I have the route sketched in my head—we’ll drop off outside Central Gardens, cut through the public park and the square, then get through security into Fetor Tech.

“It’s such a simple plan,” Rian starts.

“That’s why it’ll work. You’re used to red tape and layers of clearance. Sometimes, to get something done, all you have to do is walk through the door and do it.”

It’s kind of amazing the way few people just do the things they need to do. I don’t know how people like Rian convinced humanity that rules should be followed, but it certainly was effective propaganda.

Rian shakes his head. “That door is secured by multiple layers of biometric scans, clearance codes, and ident trackers.”

“Which is why I’ve got you.” I punch him lightly in the arm.

He’s tense. I am too, but I’m better at hiding it.

“It’s going to be fine,” I say.

“You absolutely do not know that for certain.”

“It’s going to be fine, unless we get caught.”

“Or fail to change the code.”

“That would just fuck up Earth,” I point out. As long as we don’t get trapped or arrested, we can get away even if the planet is doomed. Still: “No pressure.”

“None at all.”

I turn to go, then pause at the door. “Hey, Rian?” I ask the dark. I don’t have the courage to face him.

“Yeah?”

“When this is all over—all of it, I mean. Penthouse suite in the most expensive hotel in the city, you and me and buckets of chocolate-covered strawberries?”

He’s silent for a long time. So long that I almost walk away.

Then I hear his deep chuckle. “Yeah. I’ll bring some more peaches, too.”

I whirl around, eyes alight. “Okay, actually, if you bring me some of those peaches, you don’t even need to bring yourself; I can have that moment without you.”

His eyes are liquid and feral. “Oh, no,” he says, both a promise and a threat. “I absolutely intend to be there.” A heartbeat. “And it’ll be more than a moment.”

My body does all those things I’ve been trying to tell it not to do all week. We’re both lying, still acting like this is a future we can have. It’s a game, one we’ll lose even if we win, and we know it.

But it’s worth the fantasy. For tonight, anyway.

“All I have to do is save the world tomorrow, and I get you and peaches and all night in a penthouse suite?” I ask. “I may need that in writing.”

His voice is pitched low. “I keep my promises, Ada.”

Fuck me sideways, I know he does.

· · ·

I need a cold shower, but instead, I have to face my mother. I find her on the roof, illuminated only by a light near the door and the full moon. It’s weird to think that I was kicking up my heels on the lunar station just a little bit ago.

“He in bed?” Mom asks. She drank half a bottle of wine by herself, but her voice is sharp and clear.

“He’s in the bedroom, but...” But we need to be careful what we say.

“Got it.” He could come up here and spy on us, or he could have dropped a listening device.

“How are you feeling about tomorrow?” Mom asks.

“Confident.”

Mom smirks at that. She knows me well.

Just as she knows the plan. The real one.

I drop a hand to my belly. “Although a little queasy. Planetary gravity always fucks me over.” The only thing worse than planning a high-stakes heist with your enemy? Doing it while on your period, which has come with a hell of a punch, straight to the uterus.

“Ugh, sorry,” Mom says. “Do you need anything?”

“I took some meds. And I’m drinking all the coffee tomorrow. All of it.” Caffeine helps. And it’s hard to get beans in space. It was just crummy timing and inaccessible meds while I was in the black that led to this.

I touch my ear, the one unadorned. Mom’s eyes follow me.

“You lost an earring,” she says.

“I know. At the gala.” I know she knows what I mean: That part of the mission was a success.

Mom leans over and looks at my other earring.

The pair are a matching set, but they’re far, far more than they appear. I wore them to the gala on purpose.

Kidnapping Rian was only one goal, after all. And these high-tech earrings are pretty nifty. The one I still have hasn’t been used yet. The other one—the one I “lost” at the gala—is a code scanner. Tiny, wireless, put it next to any computer using basic coding, and it scans the data, recording it for analysis later.

“How was the gala?” Mom asks.

“It went well, I hope.” We’ll find out how well after tomo rrow.

Mom nods. Her face is grave, her shoulders tight.

“Why did you want me to come visit, Mom?” I ask softly. What we both know I mean is: Your cover is going to get blown now. Why did you force my hand to get me here?

I might have been able to distract Rian from how I have a residency claim to Malta through my mother. He might have glossed over the fact that he didn’t find much information about her in her official records. I could have done things to help facilitate a ploy big enough to pull his razor eyes away from my mother and her tower full of birds.

It’s too late now.

That’s why I couldn’t let him get a hotel—why I have to control who he sees and communicates with at least until tomorrow and the mission is done. It’s not just that he could call in backup. One deep dive into my mother’s identity, and he will notice that the holes in her record have been sliced out with surgical precision.

By me.

Mom still hasn’t answered my question. “We didn’t have to come here,” I say gently. “We could have pinged the locator and then gone to a hotel or back to my ship.”

“I’m aware,” she says curtly.

“You’ve been here a long time.” Are you going to have to leave now?

“I’m aware of that, too.” Maybe. Probably.

She looks a little sadly at the dovecote. Everything we say, everything we do—it has double meaning. Just in case someone else is listening.

Just in case it’s Rian.

I’ve brought the enemy into my mother’s home.

But in my defense, she invited him.

“You’re aware...” I say slowly. “But I’m missing something.”

One curt nod.

Fuck.

I’m missing something. There’s an angle here I’m not seeing.

“I got a message from the Moon,” Mom says.

I didn’t send a message to her from the station while Glory was waiting for landing sequences and clearance codes.

Rian sent a message. Not to her, obviously.

But a message she intercepted or was forwarded. Perhaps from our mutual contact, Phoebe, the double agent on Rian’s team who’s only our friend as long as we share a goal. More likely, this is one of Mom’s contacts, someone loyal to her.

She has a lot of friends.

Few people know the full extent of my mother’s network. Obscurity helps.

I feel a pang of sympathy for Rian when he inevitably figures all this out. He’s had his targets locked on to me so intensely that he didn’t even realize there was a bigger fish in my shadow. All those times he’s pressed me for who I worked for. It’s true; I take the jobs that come. But since Rian’s been watching me, my work has mostly come from one source.

All along, my client was my mother.

All along, my mother was Jane Irwin.

My mother was working secretly to facilitate change on Earth before my father even got sick. She used an older family name for a small level of anonymity, not knowing how quickly it would latch on. It started as an underground network to redistribute medicine to people who, like Papa, got sick and couldn’t afford treatment. But options were limited, and there was no black market for the meds that really worked. Papa’s death from climate sickness—a death that could have been wholly prevented, had people like Fetor not been so adamant about seeing profits from the treatments and vaccines—broke something inside of both of us.

For me, every fuck I ever had to give was drained from my body.

But Mom couldn’t save Papa. So, she decided to save Earth instead.

I know it disappoints her, the way I won’t join her rebellion, the way I demand payment even when I work for her. But I also know that she, more than any other human in the galaxy, understands why I am the way I am.

And she loves me anyway.

Which means, even when I don’t want to get involved, for her, I will.

For her, I’ll save the world.

I’ll just also make sure I get paid—with bonuses—along the way.

“It’s almost time for bed,” Mom says. She leans in for a hug, and when her lips are centimeters from my ear, she whispers, “He’s going to betray you.”

I hold her tight. It really has been too long.

“I know,” I whisper back.

I’ve known since he came back with blue puff cubes in one hand and a guilty look all over his face. Not the exacts of the message he sent, of course, but I knew he had sent a message.

I had told him it was a risk for me to let him out of my sight on the station.

I lied, obviously.

Because he had never been out of my sight.

And the risk? It was never mine.

Fucking hell, I think, my arms still wrapped around my mother’s slender shoulders, thinner than the last time we saw each other in person.

I let him go because I wanted to see if, maybe, he wouldn’t do the thing he did.

I wanted to see if, given the opportunity, he wouldn’t betray me.

But he did.

“I’m working on something,” Mom says. “For you.”

“Can I know the details?”

She shakes her head. She’s still working on the plan to get me out of Rian’s clutches, but it’s not solid yet.

“Any chance I’ll see you when this is all done?” I ask, finally pulling out of my mom’s embrace.

Her smile is hard. Worried.

“I hope so,” she says, doubt evident. She pauses. “Ada? I am so, so proud of you.”

I give her a flat look. “You know I’m only in this for fun and profit.”

“Still.” Mom tucks a stray lock of hair behind my ear. She hates the way I have it cut; I cut it this way partly because she hates it so much. It’s how we work.

If she opens the door, I want to stay. If she closes it, I want to go. I define myself as a reaction to her definitions.

“How early are you leaving tomorrow?” Mom asks.

“Very.” I tell her the time I have set on my alarm.

“I have a present for you before you go.”

Ah, there it is. The reason why she sent a message to Bruna to relay to me, the reason why she made sure she was here and insisted that we stay when I arrived.

She wants to help me escape the trap Rian has laid for me.

I give her a look, and she shrugs. She doesn’t know the specifics of how Rian will betray me.

She only knows he will.

He’s going to betray me. I knew it was a possibility from the start. But a part of me had believed in penthouse suites and luxury peaches and more than a night. More than a night.

He’ll wait, of course, for the mission to be a success. He knows that I’m the linchpin in reprogramming the nanobots, so he’ll make sure I can do the job. But after? That’s when he’ll strike.

A job isn’t finished when the last piece of the puzzle falls into place.

A job is only finished after the getaway.