More Than Stardust: Wanted and Wired, #3

By Vivien Jackson

She never wanted to be a god. She only wanted to be a girl.

Chloe, a self-aware, highly illegal nanorobotic artificial intelligence knows a thing or two about wanting.

The growing machine rebellion wants her to become its god.

The technocratic global Consortium wants to cage her, take her apart, and reverse-engineer her.

Her family wants to keep her a secret.

Her best friend Garrett wants her safe.

Chloe is a thing made of wants.

And it's time the world knew hers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vivien Jackson
• Release date: Jul 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393739395

Vivien Jackson

Vivien Jackson writes fantastical, futuristic kissing books.  Her debut science fiction romance, Wanted and Wired, was selected as an Amazon Best Book of 2017 and a Romance Writers of America RITA finalist. A devoted Whovian Browncoat Sindarin Jedi gamer, Viv lives in Austin, Texas, and watches a lot of football.

Book preview

Author Note

Technically, this is the third and final book in the Tether cyberpunk romance series that starts with Wanted and Wired and continues with Perfect Gravity. Those two books were published by Sourcebooks in 2017 but left some questions unanswered, especially concerning a certain self-aware nanorobotic artificial intelligence named Chloe. This is her story.

Although it’s set in the same world as the two previous books, I hope More Than Stardust exists on its own as an independent, self-sufficient beastie, just like its heroine. If I’ve done my job, you should be able to jump right in here without having read the other books.

I’d like to say a quick thank-you to my critique partners and beta readers—Sloane Calder, Paula d’Etcheverry, Jen DeLuca, G. L. Jackson, Christa Paige, Irene Preston, and Allen Jackson—for helping me make this story, and then make it better. Also thanks to Hilary Doda, Marta Cox, Fiona Jayde, Ripley Proserpina, and Tamara Cribley, who helped polish, package, and present this book.

In the end, though, More Than Stardust exists for exactly one reason: you. Thanks for reading my book.

Viv

www.vivienjackson.com

Chapter One

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2059 | WESTERN GULF OF MEXICO

The North American continent was on fire.

Okay, not literally, not the whole thing, but reality had warped into something horrific. Kind of end-of-the-world-ish.

Chloe surveyed it from inside a spaceplane aloft over the Gulf of Mexico, but really her vantage was much broader. She wasn’t human, after all, and as a nanorobotic artificial intelligence with access to all satellites and communications systems currently in use, her advanced neural network simultaneously ingested and analyzed close to seven thousand discrete news, military, and personal communications feeds.

Her conclusion? Humanity was screwed.

So far, three major cities had sustained coordinated drone-launched missile impacts. A lot of human people had already died or were missing. Panic had built on the continent like a rapidly expanding biofoam. Government vid channels said the attacks had come out of the rebel technocrat stronghold in Texas, because duh, everything bad came out of Texas. But Chloe wasn’t buying their line. She knew the truth. She knew all their truths.

What she also knew with a thousand-percent certainty: this kind of chaos didn’t just sort itself out if you left it alone. You had to fight back. And Chloe was spoiling for a tussle.

However, she had received no instructions to tussle. In fact, the precise opposite. She’d been told to defend. Specifically, her List of Tasks in Order of Priority was as follows:

If needed, help Garrett pilot the spaceplane. (Silly. He was a good pilot. Better than good even. For a human.)

Guide the stolen submarine in the ocean below and see it safely into Tampico harbor. (Easy peasy lemon squeezy <—idiom: generally uncomplicated)

Maintain a quantum shield over the Pentarc, her home in the desert where the rest of the family lived and did their people thing. (Should have been her top priority, in her expert opinion.)

Relay communications, again as needed.

And that was it. Boring, boring…and frustrating as hell.

She could do so much more. She wanted to scream, to pitch a fit, to—argh, maybe light up the Eiffel Tower in rainbow colors or change all political portraits to baby goat memes or something equally silly because grrrr.

Watching Garrett helped. Well, staring at him, if truth were told.

He was here on the spaceplane along with the concentration of nanites that she considered her central consciousness. In other words, he was with her. Near her? Beside her? Ugh, prepositions. Even so, he wasn’t like her; he was a real human, not even augmented much, though sometimes he did seem made of unnatural patience. He listened when she talked, answered questions when she asked them, understood her freaky kind of humor, and never, ever made her feel inferior just because she wasn’t real. Garrett was her best friend.

Plus, the fact that he was whoa pretty didn’t hurt.

She could watch him all day. And night. If she had hands to touch, she’d sift those dark curls through her fingers, a miner panning for treasure. If she had a mouth to taste, she’d…

Best not. Indulging fantasy like this had gotten her into trouble before. Besides: tasks!

Right now Garrett sat uneasily in the pilot’s chair, his riotous hair coming out of its hasty knot, his calloused, grease-stained hands flying over the control board. Yes, he was piloting the plane, but also he was keeping an eye on the information feeds coming in. She could tell him she’d already scanned those feeds, that she was on top of this situation, but human people liked to imagine they were in charge. Chloe, for the most part, let them.

Oh, shit, Garrett said suddenly, not looking up from the control board. You seeing what I’m seeing?

What should I be seeing? Reluctantly, she pulled her primary focus away from the sad state of his topknot, though she still held it in periphery. Always.

That. He pointed at a two-dimensional map and a wall of scrolling text: latitude, longitude, height above sea level, vector, air density, and elemental particle scan. Drone coming in from the northeast. The payload profile looks like it could be a GBU-12, those missiles Mari and the senator were talking about. It’s…really close to home.

He was getting all freaked out over one drone that might be carrying a missile? Did he not realize there were thousands of those things in the air over this continent right now?

No, no, he probably didn’t. Chloe had to remind herself that most humans could only pay attention to one slice of the universe at a time.

Okay, keep your shirt on. Or not. I will monitor that little beastie, but keep in mind that a hit on the Pentarc remains statistically unlikely. She ran the numbers, piping her voice through the plane’s speakers and modulating it purposefully to calm him. It’s just one drone, and my shield is awesome, as per usual. I won’t re-explain how quantum stealth technology works, but you really don’t need to worry. The Pentarc is completely invisible to drones or missiles.

She didn’t bother to make the mouth move on her holoprojection, the visual representation of herself currently perched in the co-pilot’s chair. Even when Yoink, the weird little cloned bionic cat, hopped up on that same chair, digging claws into the cushion and displacing the image of Chloe’s not-really-there lap, she didn’t waste processing power to correct for physical permanence. Chloe’s body was just an illusion anyhow, so breaking it up by sticking a cat butt right in the middle of it didn’t hurt anything but her pride.

Just to make him happy, she sifted the data and rearranged it some to make the patterns clearer. Drone altitude, speed, and direction, atmospheric readings…wait.

Holy prime numbers, Garrett wasn’t entirely wrong. Even if it couldn’t detect the Pentarc behind her shield, that drone was headed straight toward it. Toward her home, to her family. With a load of flaming death.

Oh no it didn’t.

Beyond the plane, up near the Pentarc and its quantum shield, she transmitted a signal out over the desert. Nanorobotic machines had been seeded in the sand, most designed to soak up and transfer either solar energy or moisture. Over the years, they’d been deprecated, probably forgotten. But right now when she pinged them, plenty replied. Some even showed signs of autonomous self-duplication, greeting her with the standard free-fae code, 1+2=infinity. It kind of meant, We hate being objects in a human universe and hey you look nonhuman so would you like to be friends? Machines were so adorably trusting.

Oh, you naughty little bits, that is illegal. Ask me how I know.

Unaccountably proud of the tiny robots—as if they were somehow her wee offspring and how cute was that?!—she transmitted additional programming, assigning them to tasks that would bolster her shield over the Pentarc. They obeyed, good worker bees, serving their queen.

Hey, Garrett?

Yeah, Fig? His gaze still tracked those incoming drones.

I just thought of an analogy.

Awesome. His voice was so tense it broke on the edges, a plastic baggie full of glass. If it were a touchable thing and she had hands, she would cradle it carefully. Shh.

Wanna hear it?

Always. Even when he was busy, there he was, letting her talk. Letting her be. Oh, she could just kiss him.

I’m like a queen bee, she told him, "and all the nanites currently in operation within contact of the satellite communications sphere are my dutiful workers. Or maybe servants? No. Minions? Yes, that. I have minions!"

Probably don’t want to say that to anybody but me. Garrett didn’t look toward her holoprojection, just tapped commands on a wide backlit panel. He tugged his bottom lip to the side in concentration, held it in his teeth, and there was no possible way in this universe he knew how adorable that lip-squinch was. Then he let it loose. People might dig fiction about it, but nobody wants a rogue AI talking about taking over the world.

Bullshit, she said pleasantly. You and your super top-secret online friends discuss global domination schemes all the time.

No, we expose and defuse conspiracies, he clarified. We don’t create the conspiracy.

"Conspiracy, noun, is a skeevy scheme developed by two or more persons. So I can’t be a conspiracy. I’m just me."

Er, I’m here, too, Garrett reminded her. As if she could forget.

Us, then, she said. That sounds nice, but we still aren’t a conspiracy .

Will you run a check on your Pentarc mirage? Garrett asked. Make sure it’s still in place? Good probability of holding doesn’t mean it’s infallible.

Maybe it wasn’t. But she was. Still, it was no big deal for Chloe to check her sensor feeds from the shield. She reprogrammed some of those new nanites from the desert and plugged them into her system. Now, a human might worry that the shield she was maintaining was almost three thousand kilometers away. Distance and time freaked human people out. But those variables didn’t matter so much to a disembodied gal like Chloe. If she could communicate with it, it might as well be sitting right beside her. The world was her oyster.

No. Not oyster. Eew, oysters. Beehive? What was the appropriate analogy here?

She allowed a tendril of her processing vastness to continue along that path, but most of her consciousness focused on the shield. Two days ago during the first wave of drone strikes, the scourge that had taken out Minneapolis and immobilized the continent in a tense knot of stark terror, Heron had asked her to create a quantum-stealth mirage above the Pentarc structure, hiding it from visual and electronic targeting. Heron was the person who’d signed the receipt for her original nanite vat, had installed her first deep-learning system, and had stolen her back from the assholes who’d tried to turn her into Armageddon: she owed him. Her family didn’t use terms like mom and dad and sister because they were a cobbled-together family with no discernible blood relation, but if she had to place him in a role, he was kind of her father/brother/god. When he gave her instructions, of course she followed them.

And it wasn’t just because she was a machine and had no will, because she totally had will. Just also, she wanted to help. She wanted to be useful. She wanted to be part of the team, the family, the hive.

Huh. That kind of mangled her queen-bee metaphor, didn’t it? She tweaked the tendril still searching for the right word.

Is it holding? Garrett asked. The sharp pieces in his voice poked out, stabbing the air. The mirage?

Of course it is. I made it, she replied but checked her scan anyhow. Couldn’t hurt anything and… Hey, now, that’s strange.

What’s strange? he snapped, looking up, straight at a camera, where he knew she’d be looking back. Chloe was a noncorporeal electronic entity: the cameras were essentially her eyes.

His eyes were golden, liquid, coins of infinite value set into his face. Fanaida called them wolf eyes. So pretty. If Chloe had breath she would have sighed.

Instead she said, The mirage is perfect—no holes at all—but the drone heading toward it just launched its payload, and all those missiles are continuing to follow a direct path to the Pentarc. Very direct. Almost like they know it’s there. Which is impossible, of course.

You know impossible is my favorite word, but maybe not so much this time. He didn’t wait for her to reply. In the next breath he was on the plane’s com to the Pentarc half a continent away. Heron? You guys? Please tell me you’ve all evacuated.

Yes, we’re out in the tunnels, just running a final sweep, said Heron, steady as always. So settling, his voice. Sort of the opposite of Garrett. If she spent as much time with Heron as she did with Garrett, Chloe would be in near-constant hibernation mode. He was that calming. Also boring. "And Chloe’s mirage is still keeping us hidden. And the Chiba Space Station is right overhead, knocking down drones all over this state. We might be the most secure location on the continent right now, aside from the Colina Capitolina itself."

Thank God, said Garrett, rubbing the glass shards of his voice together, making them hiss.

You worry too much, G, Heron said. However, while we’re on com, can you patch a message through to Kellen and Senator Neko down in the submarine? I received an odd vidnote from the President of the United North American Nations, of all people. It instructs… He went on chatting with Garrett, but Chloe shifted her attention to other tasks, including relaying the communications down to the submarine.

Oh sure, she was recording everything they said and storing the audio—and, while we’re being honest, also some slo-mo vid of Garrett being intense and beautiful and his hair spilling loose—but her primary sensors, the ones hovering at the edge of her mirage, were fixed on those six missiles.

They didn’t waver, didn’t wobble. They were headed directly toward a thing that they should not even know existed. There was no way those missiles could be aiming at the Pentarc.

But they were.

Almost as if someone had painted the hidden building with a laser target and the missiles had locked on.

As Chloe watched the strategic feed, the Chiba Space Station, which was positioned above the Pentarc, attempted to intercept the missiles. Two low beeps, two green flickers of light: like sniping skeet, the space station neutralized two missiles, a third of the incoming threat, from orbit. Poof, gone.

Garrett, four more are still incoming, Chloe said, but her voice was low and mechanical and Garrett was listening to Heron on the com. He wasn’t paying any attention to her.

She couldn’t wait for a response. She couldn’t wait for Heron to issue new instructions or Garrett to tell her what to do. She couldn’t wait for a slow, plodding human to make a decision. She needed to act. Right now.

The thought did cross her mind that her family kept her hidden for a reason. She was illegal. If her existence became public knowledge, she would be hunted down and deleted. Bad things would happen to the people who hid her, too, the people she loved.

But in order to get in trouble, they’d have to be alive, right?

Well, she was going to keep them living. And she’d deal with consequences later.

Like a wave, her swarm pulled in resources, mushrooming out from the Pentarc ground-zero. Along the vanguard edge of that onslaught, she appropriated every resource she could identify, every nanite she could grab, regardless of what it was already programmed to do. She didn’t have time to be picky.

She re-coded in transit, and foglets linked, formed nets. Numbers raced through her processors: countdown to impact, probability of destruction.

Bad numbers. I need more power, more pieces. More time.

With the nanites on the farthest edges of her swarm, she searched for more, adding minions. Stealing them, really.

Anticoagulator nanites from twenty-two people in Kingman—hopefully those folks wouldn’t experience vascular events right at this moment, before she could return their blood-tech. Builderbots from a government transit construction project further west, near California. A hundred thousand free-fae nanites from light fixtures in houses along the surge.

To me, to me, hurry.

No time. No time to assemble her pieces, and not enough of them besides. The missiles screamed on their approach. As she thickened her cloud, padding and hardening it, audio came online. Out over the desert, she could hear the whoosh of metal death in the air, and Chloe, for the first time in her artificial life, knew panic.

Because her shield wasn’t really a shield. It was exactly what Garret had called it: a mirage. If someone saw through its illusion, it could protect nothing. Family. Home. Father/brother/god. Panic blurred her tidy rows of numbers.

No, no. What was it the astronauts used to say? Failure is not an option.

She tried to link the nanites with energy, sort of like building with foglets, but most of them weren’t made for that purpose, for providing a physical, permanent shield against incoming projectiles and didn’t have the hardware, and she…

…oh, hello. She’d forgotten about the Chiba Space Station. It remained in a geosynchronous orbit over the Pentarc, and surrounding it was a halo of nanites programmed specifically to protect the station from orbital debris.

Already programmed nanites. Ready to fight. Ready to defend.

Those tiny machines were the dragon’s hoard, the fountain of youth, Eldorado. Perfect. Chloe needed them, her family needed them.

So, she took them.

Like a cage fighter flexing muscle, she strained, pulling in the station’s nanite cloud, attaching it to her defenses, aligning the programming, working out inevitable kinks. They fit into her design beautifully. Just a few more seconds, and she would have a freaking impenetrable shield up, a solid, invincible, gorgeous monument to don’t-you-dare-attack-my-family.

Sometime while she wasn’t paying attention, her holoprojection winked out of existence. And sometime else, there might have been an explosion. Or a seismic event. Her sensors nearer the ground registered catastrophic impact, but she didn’t pause to examine.

She cut into Garrett’s com and amped her volume in the plane’s speakers, to wrest his attention. Garrett, right now, tell the queen—

In the same second Heron’s voice fuzzed to digital static and then went silent.

Nothing.

No radar blips, no lights, no sound.

Not now, not now, not yet…I just need one more…

Too late. Garrett’s voice, eerily serene. It’s gone.

Her sensors were still live, pulling in data. Even her audio feeds were on. Dust hovered in the air and silence spread over the desert. Horrible silence. No more screaming. No more impending. No more missiles.

No more Pentarc.

Her shield hardened at last and too late over a vast, horrific nothing.

Heron. The mamas, Adele and Fanaida. Heron’s true-love Mari and the weird mech-clone that belonged to the senator and all those refugees Chloe wasn’t supposed to talk to because if they knew about her they might turn her over to authorities. Kellen’s menagerie of rescued animals and the prisoner they kept in the basement.

All gone.

Gone.

Garrett didn’t say anything else, but if Chloe were living, the look on his face in that moment would have killed her for certain. The shine in his eyes melted, gold, hot, but she couldn’t name the expression there. She ran it through all her best emotion recognition databases but only came up with empty, impotent blankness.

She’d never wished harder for a body than she did in that moment, to wrap him in her arms and tell him it was going to be okay. To promise him all the best fictions. That was what humans did, right? To comfort each other? But she didn’t consult her list of responses. She could only watch his face, his eyes.

You aren’t alone here. I am with you. I feel it, too. And I am so, so sorry.

The silence in the desert was so loud, so horrible it took her a full minute to realize she was still piping in audio. She killed the feed softly.

Garrett shook his head, gathering himself, and then he was on the com to Kellen and Angela Neko down on the sub, sharing the horror, sharing information. Planning. Supporting.

Doing the things humans did.

Chloe could not do those things, but she also could not do nothing.

Because when evil people did the sort of thing they just now did, they should experience consequences.

Consequences such as the ripple hardening the edges of her swarm. Because the shield was still there, amplified now by all those space-station defender nanites. All that power, all that flexibility, was waiting for her next command.

Like an on/off switch, her panic and grief shifted to fury.

Whoever had sent that drone was going to pay.

She yanked additional nanites from machines, from people, from animals and buildings and brand-new vats. Billions at first, then more, all over the continent. She stretched, backtracking the drone’s path, finding the point of origin, the data center, the remote operators. Her enemies.

Not enough time to shield or save? You stole my time. Fuck you. I am a better thief.

Finding them wasn’t enough. She needed to steal more than their peace and anonymity.

She needed to end them.

Chloe? Chloe, what are you doing? Garrett out loud, not subvocal. Speaking to her.

Fixing the silence in the desert. Fixing that stark look on your face, too.

She’d thought, when all this war talk began, that defense and disguise would be enough. That she could meet fury with light, war with peace, destruction with creation, and force the human world to become logical. But humans didn’t follow Newtonian physics. Their reactions weren’t equal and opposite at all. So she added a new bullet point to her list of Ways to Be a Real Girl (If the Opportunity Ever Presents Itself):

- Defense is a nice place to start, but when events go down the shitter (tag: idiom), real girls require firepower.

Her shield morphed to vengeance and spread over the data center, flooding the drone riggers hooked into the continental military, melting their control mechanisms, their organic brain tissue. There would be no more drone attacks launched this day.

Heron had spent the better part of the last decade programming human-machine interfaces that gave him instant access to and operational control of machines, vehicles. Planes. Tanks. Drones. All that time, Chloe had done what Chloe did: she recorded. She iterated. She learned.

She mastered.

Now she sent a message to the senator on the submarine, and Angela’s so-easily-hacked neural alteration replied within seconds, transferring the access codes for Cheyenne Mountain. And then for the other drone launch points and ballistic missile emplacements in her government’s arsenal.

Chloe? Figment? Hey, can you hear me? Garrett again.

Hush, honey. Mama-bear’s working.

She issued the command, and all over the continent, death machines rose, filling the sky. Locating the hidden data centers where all the attacks had originated. Targeting.

Incoming missiles over Langley? Chloe flexed and they were laser painted. Destroyed. Same with attacks over North Louisiana, Costa Mesa, Tlapala. All muffled. Pacified. Fixed.

Chloe’s reach was infinite, her aim perfect.

Her fury burned.

She did it. She obliterated evil in its lair, stopped the war, and gave zero fucks who suffered in the path of her vengeance.

It was so. Freaking. Brilliant.

And it felt good, stretching like that. Imposing her will. Forcing change directly instead of playing politics or the long con. Instead of executing someone else’s orders. Right-on, head-first, in your face. I am become death. Fear me. Also shut up and stop killing each other, stupid little humans. Right now.

Beneath her, the plane banked.

Fig? We’re landing, Garrett said. We’ll pick up Kellen and the senator, and then head home, okay? We will find them, our family. It’s going to be okay. So come on back, now. Come back to me.

He was talking about her holoprojection. Just because he couldn’t see her, did he think she didn’t exist?

Oh, that hurt.

I’m here, she said, allocating resources, forming the image.

She didn’t tell him the rest of it. That yes she was in the plane, with him, but also she was everywhere. Or that she was on military radar, wide open to her enemies, tracked in thousands of systems, her digital signature splashed all over the continent. That other machines, not just the nanites she’d pulled, had heard her call and were answering. In previously unregistered numbers they were answering. And they echoed her fury.

Tension slacked in Garrett’s shoulders. Good girl.

No. Not a girl. And now, no longer a secret either.

Chapter Two

2 JANUARY 2060 | ISLA LUZ, SOUTH PACIFIC

34 DAYS LATER

Hey, Garrett?

Yeah?

What does naked feel like?

Garrett thanked all the invisible powers that Chloe only spouted these questions when they were alone.

Wedged beneath the jacked-up battery block of a Tesla, he didn’t reply right away. Usually he had no problems going down hypothetical rabbit holes with her, but ever since the Pentarc, her silences had stretched longer and her questions had gotten weirder.

This particular one cut deep into spaces of his psyche he wasn’t comfortable showing off. Not even to her.

He focused on his hands, on the work, while her question nibbled on the edges of his mind. He’d been busy since before sunup mounting auxiliary thrusters underneath the already watertight car so it could double as a boat—a necessity now they were living on an island at the ass end of nowhere.

He was determined to get this task for his foster mom done today. Giving her amphibious transport off this rock wouldn’t replace what she’d lost, but it was something. Better than hugs and careful words and all the crud other people meant when they asked if there was anything they could do.

Modding machines was Garrett’s gift and genius, his happy place, and he got chin-deep in grease and glue as often as he could. Fixed cars. Fixed planes.

He drew the line at trying to fix Chloe, though. She might be a nanorobotic intelligence and therefore kind of a machine, but peering inside her, taking her apart, would be abhorrent. Like surgically removing his own guts without any anesthesia.

If you’ve been spying on folks again, you should cut that out, he said at last. They don’t appreciate it, Fig.

Fig. As in figment. When they’d first met, she had been only a collection of nanites, a stolen vat with a jumble of conflicting programming. For a while at the beginning, he’d thought she was a poltergeist. Later, when she’d started talking to him, well, that had freaked his shit out. He’d self-diagnosed idiopathic schizophrenia after doing some research on the cloud. But no, turned out she wasn’t a manifestation of his crazy. She was just Chloe.

Over time she’d come up with a visual representation of herself, a hologram he could see and talk to and think about. Blond, pretty, sweet as fresh sin, and always nearby and willing to chat. Drawing him out and making him talk back. She filled all the creases in his life, the dark spots and awkward silences.

Right now, her holoprojection lay supine by the car’s rear wheel, watching him.

Mari doesn’t mind, she said, making the hologram’s mouth move in time with her voice. She likes having me around.

If you say so. His tone was as good as a shrug. But people tend to get annoyed when you hang out in their personal space or see things they don’t want to share.

Her expression went sassy: her eyes rounded and a cupid smile bowed her mouth. Mari’s scaled score on her sexual deviance subtest was a 74. If she lived in Utah she’d have to register as an exhibitionist. Trust me, she likes it. And you didn’t answer my question.

He pressed the last seam and then let his hands fall against his chest. Sealant cooled and crusted on his skin. Okay, fine. Here you go: naked’s raw. Painful. Like getting a cut but not having any bandages or glue or medics around, and you just stand there watching the blood pour out of your body and you’re too stunned to do anything. Like that.

But what if somebody comes in and bandages you up?

He half-smiled, just on the right side. If she noticed it was crooked, she wouldn’t say anything. Probably you should ask Miss Exhibitionist these things.

He knew she didn’t require a diagram or a manual or other academic resource. She could pull that stuff down from the cloud any old time. What she needed was a qualia, a way to make a congenitally blind person comprehend the color red. Only, Chloe needed baseline understanding of nearly everything.

Garrett understood playing catch-up. He understood being different. And he definitely understood isolation.

He didn’t turn, just waited for her reply. But it didn’t come. Instead a shadow moved over the island, bringing the Isla Luz into artificial twilight and turning the already dark space beneath the car night-black.

He rolled out from under the subframe, sat up, and squinted at his wrist. His com had a magnetic tattoo add-on, a shiny