Page 38

W e’ve got a run across Nock to do before heading to my place.

Kez doesn’t like doing it on my trike. She says it’s cheating. But we’ve got a full day, so we get it out of the way, avoiding the congestion in the center of the city where it looks like there’s a water riot in progress.

As we head back towards the river, I open up the trike’s engine. Kez’s arms tighten around me. Not with fear, but with exhilaration. She likes riding the trike. Probably as much as I do. The power between my legs. Wind in my face. My kitten’s warmth against my back. Total freedom.

Those seven-hundred horses in the trike’s powerful engine have us at the gates of my place in under five minutes, even though we’ve crossed the whole city.

Away from the snarl of the protest, the streets are clear.

There’s no official ground speed limit in Nock, so I let the trike top out.

Feels like we’re flying. I know Kez is enjoying it too when she slides her hand down the front of my pants.

I still haven’t figured out why she likes to have her hand there when we’re riding the trike, but she does and it doesn’t bother me, so I let her.

Besides, the look on people’s faces when they notice her wrist above my waistband is priceless.

There’s no one at my place to notice her molesting me, except the A-Eye.

Still, I think I catch a hint of disapproval as it flicks its red beam over us.

The outer gate slides open and a display pops up inside my helmet as the house’s H.P.C.

links up. I scan the display as I steer the trike up the short drive and through the inner gate.

All in the green. They’re still not trying for us where we live.

I revise that opinion when I find a corpse stuck to my shock net.

The shock net’s my own version of a million-K fence.

There aren’t any sensors on the net; too much clutter in the river.

But I’ve got a couple of viewies on the house’s pilings, and I see the dark shape as soon as I flick them on to run a check on the house’s security.

The river’s cloudy – run-off from the soyafields of Blyss District – but the shape is unmistakable.

From above, all I can see is part of the arm he got over the barrier before it killed him.

It’s on a three-second delay. Spares the fish.

From underwater, I can see that he’s stuck face-first to the net.

His right leg’s at a funny angle. He might have gotten a knee or foot through the net’s mesh before it killed him.

Whatever, I decide to leave him. The river and its occupants will clean him up eventually, and in the meanwhile, he’ll conduct just fine, so anyone trying to climb him is in for a surprise.

I slide my finger across the flexypane screen, causing the viewies to swivel.

Mounted to the pilings, they don’t have a huge field of vision.

About a hundred degrees. I finally get one to an angle where I can see the dead man’s face.

It’s puffy: eyes and mouth reduced to slashes.

Long strands of hair, washed from blond to grey-green in the murk, wave around his face like seaweed.

I don’t recognize him. I turn to look at Kez, who is in my kitchen, making tea for both of us.

She hasn’t noticed what I’m doing yet, and I’m not sure how she’ll feel about my intention to leave the corpse on the fence.

It might upset her. Still, he wasn’t here for a social call. This ain’t the time to get squeamish .

With a sigh, I call her over to the wall where I’m standing. She joins me at the viewie, handing me a steaming cup of klee tea. I take it and put my hand under hers as she leans in to look at the pane. Catch her bulb when it drops from her nerveless fingers.

“That’s-that’s?—”

“Who, kitten? Do you know him?”

“No! No, I mean, I don’t think so. Jeez, how could you tell? But that’s outside — in the river — isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” I hand her back her bulb. She takes it; takes a long sip as she peers at the monitor’s display. I drink my own tea, enjoying the malty sweetness that’s the mark of well-aged klee.

“No, I don’t think I know him,” Kez says finally.

“Right.” I pull up a command menu, capture the best image I can of the corpse’s face, and plex it to Myhre. Let her chew on that for a while. Then I tap off the monitor. Neither of us needs to stare at that. “C’mon. Into my parlor, said the fly.”

I beckon Kez after me as I move away from the flexypane wall, through the open arch where I removed the original slider between kitchen and dining room, which I’ve turned into a workshop.

Kez follows me. “It’s ‘said the spider to the fly.’ You’re the spider. And what are we doing?”

“I’m never the spider. Particularly not a green one.” That sets her giggling. “I’m going to sketch out that brand while we wait for Doc Gray.”

“Oh, okay.” She watches me while I find some blank flimsy, spread it on my workbench, hunt down a stylus – I have fifty million of the fucking things, where do they go?

– and sketch out the symbol I want to turn into our brand.

Once I’ve got the outline, I trace around it with my fingertip, consolidating the image.

I squeeze it together with my fingertips, resizing it, then spread my fingers, enlarging it.

“How big you think?” I ask Kez as I scale and rescale it.

“As big as your palm.”

My palm’s pretty big. Fifteen centimeters or so. That’s a huge fucking mark on Kez’s slender back. “How ‘bout as big as your palm?” Kez has long hands for a woman, but the length is mostly in her fingers. Her palm’s less than ten centimeters around.

She shakes her head. “I want to feel your hand on me. Yours can be the size of my palm if you want.”

I grunt. I want matching brands. “That means cutting two separate brands.”

“Too much work for you?” she asks.

Sarky kitten. I reach out with my free hand and smack her on the ass. “I want them to be the same.”

“Well, I’d like mine to be that big.” She reaches around me and drags her fingertip across the flimsy. I hold my hand over it, and she plays with it until the image exactly fits under my palm.

Once she’s done resizing, I tap the corners to lock the size into place, then use the stylus to thin the lines of the design.

Although I don’t have anything like Kez’s scar, I know that scar tissue stretches over time.

At least mine has. So unless I want a pink blob on Kez’s back and my arm in a couple of years, I’d better start with nice thin lines.

I hollow out the letters first. Turning the solid lines into outlines.

Then I add curlicues to the serifs. Fill in the center of each curlicue.

As I work, I see the healed scar in my mind.

I want it to be flowing, not blocky. Curved, like the edges of my kukris, or the line of Kez’s soft cheek.

I add more curlicues in the middle of the vertical stems, softening them.

Then on the crossbars. Until there’s not a single, unbroken straight line.

Kez watches over my left shoulder, her cheek pressed against my deltoid, where the brand will be. She has one arm looped around my waist. Leaving my right side free to work. When I finally put the stylus down, she sighs. “It’s beautiful,” she says.

It is. I shift back, slide my arm around her and draw her against my side. It is beautiful and I’ll be proud to wear it. Prouder still to see it on Kez’s hide. Healed, it’ll be a soft pink against the pearl of her skin. Perfect .

I check the chrono in my eye. A few minutes before Doc Gray arrives. Just enough time for us to talk about Duncan.

“You want another cup of tea?” I ask Kez. She nods and follows me into the kitchen while I move around making us another cup. Once we’re both sipping, I put my arm around her. “Somethin’ I need to tell you.”

“Mmm, about the brand?”

“No. This is from the other night. When I took down the Bale Brothers.” I pause to appreciate my tea, and the warmth of her against my side. “They gave me another name. The name of someone who’s been feelin’ intel to Jaxon, about you.”

I let that sink in while we both drink.

Finally, Kez says, “Duncan.”

“You knew already?” I ask.

“No ... but he’s the only person who makes sense. Unless it’s Ape.”

I grunt. She trusts her brother as little as I do – because he’s a fucking infant – but I don’t think she believes he’d betray her. “It’s not Ape.”

Kez leans her head against my shoulder. “Chain will love this. He warned me. He told me Dunk was a NoBo. That I shouldn’t trust him. I thought he was just being an ass. It wasn’t long after I kicked him out.”

After she found out he’d been fucking Nev.

“Doesn’t make him any less of an ass when it came to you.”

She snorts. “According to him, I was the one who did something wrong.”

He cheated on her with her best friend and she’s the one who did something wrong? “How’d he figure?”

“He says I stopped loving him.”

“I would, too, he slept with my best friend.”

“Hmm.” She nips at my shoulder; the shock of Duncan’s betrayal is passing. “He said it was before that. I stopped loving him so he turned to Nev. ”

“That’s fuckin’ bullshit.”

“I thought so, too. That’s why I didn’t forgive him.” She sighs. “But, honestly, Hale, I probably did stop loving him.”

Love can die. Or so I’ve heard. It’s always been the other way around for me. “Why, kitten?”

She rubs her cheek against my shoulder, and I give her a squeeze. “This is going to sound really shallow.” She sighs. “He didn’t care if it was good for me. I know that’s stupid. If I’d really loved him, it wouldn’t matter, right? There’s more to being with someone than sex. I know that.”

There is more. But sex is important. And letting the woman you love know that her pleasure’s just as important as yours, that’s the most important. “It matters, kitten. It absolutely matters.”

“I guess... I just knew I didn’t really want to be with him anymore.

” She chuckles into my skin. “That was the best year I ever had as a runner. It’s why my business grew so big, and I had to take on Dunk.

I was running twelve, fourteen hours a day.

Taking anything that came along. Even the really crazy runs to Kuus and Shyl.

All because I didn’t want to come home.”

That explains how Chain managed to jump into Nev’s bed while they were both living under Kez’s roof. I’ll admit that puzzled me. But if Kez was avoiding him, then I can see how it might have happened.

Kez sets down her tea and turns into me so she can nuzzle her face into my neck. “Hale, what are you going to do to him?”

I put my own cup on the counter and tuck her against me. Rest my chin on the top of her head. “Think you already know the answer to that question.”

She nods, bumping my chin. “Please?—”

“Don’t ask me not to kill him, Kez. He gave you up. Told them where you were gonna be and when. If I hadn’t killed them first... we wouldn’t be havin’ this conversation.”

“I know. You’re right,” she says, her words barely more than a cool ruffle across my skin.

I wait, to see if she’ll say any more. When she doesn’t, I kiss the top of her head.

“Sorry, kitten.” And I am. I’m sorry her family’s betrayed her.

Sorry I’m the one who had to tell her. Sorry I’m going to have to kill for her.

Again. But the alternative isn’t an alternative.

As much as it hurts her to hear it, know it, the fact she doesn’t argue with me tells me she’s accepted what I have to do to keep her safe.