“Warhammer created a nest, deliberately infecting people,” Jagger said. “Tying them to her, using them for whatever she wanted. Why didyoutransition Wanda?”
“I didn’t have a choice. Warhammer touched things in here, leaving her sweat everywhere. That left her nanobots behind. By accident, or on purpose, I don’t know. Wanda had already transitioned. The boys you sent to McQuestion hadn’t. If I left her like she was, Warhammer would eventually call her. Wanda would tell her about everything that happened here. And”—I looked at my gloved hands—“when we did attack Warhammer, Wanda would have died with her queen. I like Wanda.”
“So far as we can tell,” Cupcake said, “you only infected Mateo, us two, and now Wanda, which I understand. But what are you going to do with her?”
I looked at Jagger. “You stayed away. She can stay away too.”
Jagger frowned, his whole face pulling down like a death mask. His voice was rough as sandpaper and his words bitter as wormwood when he rasped out, “I wake up wanting you. I want you every single moment of every single day. I spend every one of those moments trying to figure out how to please you. What you might need that I can provide or do to make sure you’re safe and happy.”
I went still as stone. Remembering the very few others I had touched in my life.
“The nights are worse. I wake up in the night, thrashing from dreams”—he took a breath that sounded pained—“wanting you. I fight the need to come to you every single day. Wanda will not be able to fight the compulsion to come to you. It might not be bad for the first few weeks, but she’ll come looking for you out of desperation.”
Spy jumped on the table and brought her nose to my face. It wasn’t atalk to megesture. It was pure cat, scenting me. “Did you feed the cats?” I asked Cupcake.
“Marty had some cooked shrimp in the fridge. They smelled a little off, but the cats liked them fine.”
Spy sprawled across the table. Two other cats joined her from somewhere, sniffing and curious, before stretching out and beginning the job of grooming. I rubbed my scalp and turned back to Jagger. “I thought the Berger-chip programs were helping you.”
“They do,” Jagger replied. “But nothing makes the need for you go away.”
“That compulsion is one major reason why I don’t transition people, that and the dying part. The first ones I transitioned died. It was horrible.”
I had accidently transitioned a young biker I liked by touching his hand in passing. He got sick and died. And I deliberately transitioned Pops in the vain attempt to keep him alive when he was dying horribly. I hadn’t known what I was doing. He died too. And then I found Mateo, a slave of the sheriff in a nearby town, also dying, because mech nanobots from a battle with a space-worthy PRC Mama-Bot had gotten inside his warbot suit and were eating him alive. He had been badly injured, but he had figured out how to kill the mech nanobots in and on equipment. At his direction, I put his suit under Smith’s big AG Grabber to decontam, and him in the med-bay for palliative treatment since there was no cure. Humans didn’t survive under WIMP antigravity energies.
But he kept fighting. Kept trying to live.
The mech-nanos infecting him were so numerous that my only option was to transition him to my own bio-mech-nanos, hoping they would be able to convert the PRC nanos and repair some of the damage. It took weeks, and I monitored him every second. I flushed so much fluid through his system that Mateo should have drowned. Yet he survived. Because he was brain damaged, I uploaded him with Berger chips to reteach him everything.
He developed autonomy of a sort. My first success.
And then the man from Naoma who wanted to date me. He had touched my things in my office. That was when I learned the nanobots in my sweat and blood lived for a while on things I touched. He got sick, and I kept him alive using med-bay protocols I had created for Mateo, but without the Berger chips. He survived.
But he got persistent, repeatedly showing up at the scrapyard, begging me to be his girlfriend, his wife, his anything. He followed me. Stalkerish. When he attacked me, Mateo killed him and put his body under some scrap. I guessed his bones were still there.
Now I had Mateo, Jagger, Cupcake, and Wanda, who had a kid. Jagger was right. She would show up at some point, and I would have to take her in. I was building a nest whether I wanted one or not.
“Bloody hell,” I whispered. “Bloody damn hell.”
“Why do you say that?” Cupcake asked. “Why notshitorfucklike normal people?”
I grinned slightly. “The first time I saidshit, Pops backhanded me across the room. He gave me a list of appropriate cuss words, andshitandfuckwere not on it. I liked the ones he used, sobloody damnandhellandbuggerit is.” I thought a moment. “Sometimesbollocks.”
“Wanda?” Jagger asked, returning us to the problems at hand.
My smile fell away. “All I can do is wish her good luck.”
Jagger crossed his big arms and said, “Eventually McQuestion’s going to find out about you being Shining Smith. What do I tell him?”
“Why should anyone find out—?” I stopped. Clarisse Warhammer was telling people who I was. The MS Angels had to know. McQuestion would learn through his network of spies. The reappearance of Shining Smith would hit the rank and file of the Outlaws like a wrecking ball, which I had been trying to avoid for so many years. And he would ask Jagger about me. Jagger knew I was Shining Smith. Jagger was keeping secrets from his boss. No OMW was permitted divided loyalties. That was a death sentence.
The false memories had held for a while. And then I had kissed him, reinoculating him. He was mine. He’d never betray me. He mentally, physically, and emotionally couldn’t. He’d die first.
I could have come to care for Jagger, except I’d never know if he liked me for me or because his brain had been rewired. He was still loyal to McQuestion, but only in situations where the two loyalties didn’t clash. Jagger was in deadly danger.
“Tell him who you think I am. Bring him for a visit, and we’ll deal.” I checked my chrono. “We have eight hours of night left, ten before full light. We going after the Simba?”
“Yeah,” Jagger said. “One problem. According to Marconi, there’s a local gang camping near it. They have a rep as bad as the old MS-13. And they have weapons. Lots of weapons. When the Law tried to go after them, Marconi says they kidnapped a cop’s wife and sent her home in pieces. The Law’s done nothing to stop them since.”
