“Yeah,” I breathed. “Remember to call me Heather.”
“Mmmm, Mmmm, Mmmm,” she hummed, as if he were delicious.
Cupcake had been healing in the med-bay and then going through the transition—for the second time—in the days following Clarisse Warhammer’s attack and defeat at the junkyard. But she and Jagger had been together for several critical days of their transitions. What did he remember? The memories I had implanted? The full truth? Or a warped combination of the two?
“Wait here,” I said to Cupcake. I stepped off the curb and crossed the narrow street. From the corner of my eye, I saw Spy dart over. Then two more cats, dark streaks. My cat-guard clowder. The bodyguard followed behind me, and I could practically smell his biochemical markers flood with fight-or-flight pheromones. “He’s okay,” I murmured to the man, hoping I was right. “Wait with Cupcake.” The guard stopped and backed up. He took Cupcake’s arm and pulled her into a shadow.
I stepped into the shade of the tree, into Jagger’s personal space, and stopped. He smelled of exhaust and sweat and cigar. He smelled of the past, of the same scents my father had carried, the scent of OMW and the open road.
“Jagger,” I said softly.
Talking around the cigar clenched in his teeth, he said, “Heather. Or Shining. Which is it this time?” His voice was low and gravelly and vibrated through his chest, through the air between us, and into me. His question let me know that he remembered more than I wanted him to. Remembered enough to be dangerous to me and to the junkyard. And my nanobots wanted him, wanted to take him to my bed and—
No. That would be totally unfair to him. I had to feel my way through this meeting. “You came.”
“Didn’t have a choice, did I?”
I tilted my head at him, studying his body language, tone, the facial muscles visible below his dark glasses.
“What did you do to me?” he asked. “You and that Bug ship you call an office.”
Fear sang through me. He remembered not just what had happened in the fight and during his healing time in the med-bay, Berger chips running. He had been able to figure out even more. We had never talked about the alien ship buried in the junkyard.
“I did nothing on purpose. You touched my stuff. You got infected. Who have you told about me? About the junkyard?”
“No one.” He lifted a hand to the cigar, puffing several times to keep it alight before he removed it from his mouth, raised his glasses, and glowered at me. “Whatever you did to me, it kept me silent. I wasn’t even able to text or email the info. Hell, I couldn’t even whisper it to myself.” He was furious, but that fury was leashed. So far. “I planned to come here today and gun you down in the street just so I could be free of you. But I couldn’t pick up a weapon this morning. Not a handgun, not a blade. What. Did. You. Do. To. Me?”
Spy sent me a vision of Jagger and me as seen from above. She and her cats were in the tree. Her claws were out. She was staring at the spot on Jagger’s unprotected neck where she would land and bite him.
I nearly reeled from the visual connection and broke it with an effort. “Nothing,” I said again. “I have a disease. You caught it.”Infection.Disease. Good words. They hid the truth in plain sight.
“I’m faster. I heal quicker. I see better than I did. And sometimes…”
I waited.
“Sometimes I think I smell you, hear your voice. I research stuff, track people. I’ve always tracked the MS Angels, but now I’m watching my own people in case someone’s in contact with them. Without OMW orders. Just doing it because you might want me to. I have new contacts all over the scrap-business world, and when I should be sleeping, I plan how to buy scrap from you and how to send you weapons and tech. I came here todaywithout weapons. Because I’m a damn fool, and all I could think about was you.” This time he whispered, “What did you do to me? What is thisdisease?”
I could take him over again, as fully as the day he rode away from the scrapyard. It would be easy, a single touch, my bare palm to his. I could make him mine, a thrall, as servile as Cupcake had been. Or I could give him his freedom, as much as possible, and tell him the truth. That was a novel idea.
“You know the nanobots that were put into theCataglyphis bicolorants?”
Accessing his Berger chip for the info, he inclined his head slightly and said, “Using bio-nanos, military and Gov. created ants to scavenge dead flesh, to clean up the rotting corpses in the cities so they could be habitable again. The ants were supposed to die. Instead, a few of them—thirteen, they think—mutated. One became a female, creating a new, reproducible species.Cataglyphis bicolor fabricius. Instead of being solely scavengers, they became predators.”
“They swarm and attack any human they find,” I said.
“They’re impossible to eradicate because they can change sexes and start a new nest. What does this have to do with what you did to me?”
“The queens can transfer the bio-nanobots to any human who survives being swarmed.”
“No onesurvives swarming.”
“Three of us did. A guy named Sherman Griffith. A woman named Catherine Warren, AKA Clarisse Warhammer of the MS Angels. And a twelve-year-old girl named Shining Smith, the daughter of the prez of the Outlaw Militia Warriors.” I peeled down the wrist of my glove to expose the scars. They were rippled, ragged, bumpy, pitted, and still red. I returned the wrist cuff to position. “That survival makes the victim a carrier. Only survivors of a direct queen attack, so far as I’ve been able to find out, can transmit the nanobots by deliberate or accidental touch. Or by someone touching the things recently touched by us.”
His body went taut, ever so slightly, and his jaw tightened as he put things together, things that had happened when he was inside the office of the junkyard, touching my things with his bare hands. To cover that minute reaction, he lifted the cigar. Puffed. I really wanted a cigar, suddenly. It had been years since I’d had one.
“So, I’m what? A slave?” His Alabama accent hard and rasping, he growled the last word. He stood. Too close.
“Not exactly. I call them thralls. You have free will, but you’re bound by protective instincts and a desire to please me.”
