Written in Fire

CHAPTER 15

The tingle started at the airfield, as Cooper negotiated with one of the pickup pilots who hung out in the lounge.

“Newton, huh?” The woman cocked her head, slid her hands in the pockets of her jacket. “You’re in luck. It’s a clear night, good thermals. I can get you there in two hours. Four hundred.”

“Two hundred.”

“Costs four hundred.”

“Three hundred in cash—if you get me there in an hour.”

“Cash?” She raised an eyebrow. “All right. But you better not puke in my wings.”

“I don’t get airsick.”

“You might, kind of flying I’m gonna have to do to make it in an hour.”

Two minutes later he was helping her push a glider onto the runway. Made of carbon-fiber about the thickness of a napkin, the thing didn’t weigh more than a couple hundred pounds. The pilot hitched it to a thick metal cable and was checking instruments and talking to ground control before he’d even gotten settled.

The cable jerked tight, then yanked a mile in thirty seconds, slingshotting them into the sky fast enough to leave his stomach behind.

It was his second trip in a glider, and he didn’t love it any more than the first, when Shannon had been at the stick. Cooper had no problem with planes, but not having an engine didn’t agree with him. It wasn’t exactly mitigated by the pilot, who took him at his word and rode hard, bouncing hundreds of feet up on thermals before tilting into velocity-building dives, the cracked landscape of the desert hurtling toward them. After one particularly gnarly cycle, he said, “What happens if you time that wrong?”

“Then we get to see how well the safety foam works,” she said. “Supposed to fill the cockpit in a tenth of a second, solidify with impact, then dissolve. Anyway, you were the one said you were in a hurry.”

“At least I’m not hungover this time.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

The trip ended up taking a bit more than an hour, but he paid the full three hundred, then hopped in one of the electric cabs waiting at the Newton airfield. It started to snow on the ride, thin flurries that haloed the streetlights, and it was still going fifteen minutes later, when he climbed out in the midst of a row of two-story buildings, apartments over businesses. He walked past a bar and hustled up the steps two at a time. Cooper took a moment to smooth his hair and check his breath, then knocked on the door.

He waited, conscious of his heart, and a warmth that wasn’t entirely contained to his stomach.

The door swung open.

Shannon clearly hadn’t been expecting company. She wore what passed for pajamas—fitted black yoga pants and a thin cotton top that slipped low on one shoulder, revealing her collarbone. Her hair was loosely tucked behind her ears, and though he couldn’t see her right hand, the angle of her arm told him she held a pistol in it.

“Hi,” he said.

She stared at him. Quirked her lopsided grin. Moving with perfect economy, she set the gun on the entryway table, then reached forward, grabbed his shirt with two hands, and yanked him inside.

Her body was hot and tight against his, all dancer’s muscles and humming skin, and her smell enveloped him, woman and a whiff of shampoo. She took a handful of his hair and pressed his mouth to hers, her tongue flickering sweetly as he hoisted her up, legs wrapping his hips, his hands gripping her ass. He kicked the door closed as they staggered into a wall, and she laughed in her throat. “Miss me?”

“Guess,” he said, and kissed her again, softer, sucking her lower lip between his own. She moaned and ground against him, and that pulled a moan from him. Her hands slid down his chest, starting for his belt, and, Yes, he thought, God yes, he wanted it, both of them wanted it, fast this time, a reckless reclaiming of each other, and then later they could take their time, could spend the whole night taking their—

Reclaiming. Unbidden, an image of Natalie astride him flashed through his mind. Shannon’s fingers tugged at his pants, pulling them away from his belly as her other hand slid inside the—

“Wait.”

Shannon laughed. “Yeah.” She kept moving south, and God did it feel good, right—

No. He caught her wrist.

Something sparked in her eyes then. “What’s wrong?”

He set her down and ran a hand through his hair.

“Nick?”

“I need to tell you something.”

Shannon stood at the kitchen counter, not looking at him. Her fingers spun an untouched glass of bourbon. Her tri-d entertained itself, tuned to the Holdfast’s pirate news station, the volume muted.

“It wasn’t planned. It just happened. I’m—”

“Don’t,” she said sharply. “Don’t say you’re sorry.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“She deserves better than that.”

“I agree.”

“I get it,” she said. “You guys have history. And you and me, we never talked about . . .”

No, he thought. No, we never did. I was busy taking down one president and serving another, trying to protect the world. You were fighting a revolution and freeing children from slavery, not to mention saving my life.

“I wish we had,” he said. “Talked about it.”

Shannon shrugged noncommittally, still not looking at him. “It’s almost funny. I didn’t know until Natalie came to see me.”

“Didn’t know—wait. Came to see you? When was this?”

“Couple of weeks ago. After you died.”

“Ah.” He hadn’t known that. When Todd was hurt, and Cooper was beaten and ready to quit, it was Natalie who had propped him up. She had cleared his head, kicked his ass, and sent him off to fight for their children’s future. It must have been afterward that she visited Shannon. He could picture it easily. Another woman might have come to insult or threaten, to warn her off. But Natalie would just have felt Shannon deserved to know he’d survived.

At which point, Shannon had split from John Smith, then boarded a plane and arrived just in time to save his life.

The women in his life were amazing.

When the gods really want to mess with you, they give you too much of a good thing.

“I understood you cared about each other,” Shannon continued. “But until Natalie showed up at my hotel room, I didn’t know that she’s still in love with you.”

He hesitated. “I’m not sure that’s true.”

“It is,” she said, the same way she might tell him it was snowing.

“I didn’t mislead you. We’ve been done since the divorce. But I think everything that’s happened, it’s maybe changed the way she feels. Made her wonder if we deserve another shot.”

“What about you?”

“I . . . she’s the mother of my children. I’ll always love her.”

“Like I said, I get it.” Shannon sipped the whiskey. “I’m a grown woman, Cooper. Not some schoolgirl with a crush.”

And there it was. She’d called him Cooper.

“Shannon, I—”

“I’m sure it’s confusing.”

He wanted very badly to agree, but he’d been with women enough to know how very bad an idea that was. Somehow he kept himself from nodding.

“I’ll tell you what, though. You better not toy with her. She’s a good one.” Shannon took a breath, then another sip of whiskey. “Want a drink?”

He stared at her, feeling a tearing in his chest. Everything had taken on momentum, a slippery sort of velocity that seemed out of his control and headed for a wall. He knew that he could stop the crash. All he needed to do was say, firmly and clearly, that he chose Shannon. That he would always love Natalie, and didn’t regret last night, but that it was a farewell. That what he wanted was Shannon, period.

Seconds ticked by. On the tri-d, the image shifted, the footage of President Ramirez replaced by a sea of marching men.

“You see this?” Shannon asked, her voice tightly controlled. She opened a cabinet, took down a glass, and splashed bourbon in it, the bottle shaking only slightly. “They keep replaying the same loop, but I can’t seem to turn it off.”

“Shannon—”

“Here.” She pushed the drink to him, tapped it with her glass. “To the New Sons of Liberty. Tough bastards, I’ll give them that. Audio on.”

Cooper started to protest, but caught himself when he saw her look. There’s only one way to end this, and that’s making your decision, right now, and meaning it.

God help him, he just couldn’t. Feeling a little dizzy, he picked up the drink, swallowed half of it in a go.

The tri-d had reacted to Shannon’s voice command, the pirate announcer picking up mid-sentence: “—crew of wankers about five miles past the Rawlins fence line.” The shot was a high-angle, but even so, it was packed edge to edge, a living carpet of tiny figures trudging across Wyoming scrubland. A voice he recognized as Patricia Ariel’s, Epstein’s communications director, boomed out a warning, telling the militia that they were not welcome, that the Holdfast would defend itself. For a moment, everyone on the ground hesitated, and then a cry went up, the New Sons’ cheer, “This ends now! This ends now! This ends . . .”

“Attaboy, guys,” the announcer continued, “very catchy. Maybe in next week’s lesson we can work on words with more than one syllable. Oh, good, truck horns, add those too, nothing quite as scary as tooting. But then, wait for it, wait for it . . .”

The image cut off in an instant. An electromagnetic pulse, Cooper knew, to fry the electronics. He’d read details of the battle on the way to the airfield.

When the footage returned, it was clearly an hour or two later, after whichever news organization was closest had managed to scramble another camera drone. In this one, the landscape was devastated, the trucks torn and toppled, the scrubland turned into a ruined battlefield littered with corpses.

“Oh, da-yam! Well, you know what they say,” the announcer continued. “It’s all fun and games until someone launches a drone strike. Sorry about that, kids, so much for the Charge of the Dumb Brigade . . .”

Nice try, Cooper thought. But what you’re seeing, my smug friend, is an army setting up base camp.

“Audio mute.” Shannon shook her head. “What I don’t get is why Epstein stopped hitting them. News says about a thousand killed, another couple thousand wounded or fled. Which isn’t bad, I guess, but the Proteus virus took down like fifty times that. What’s the angle in mercy at this point?”

Apparently the romantic discussion had been tabled. He thought about raising it again, but didn’t really see what he could add. Better to let things cool off. “It wasn’t mercy. He just ran out of bombs.”

“You think?”

“The government wouldn’t allow the NCH to have offensive weapons. Erik bought some on the black market, built some on the sly, but he couldn’t risk having many. I’m not theorizing, I know it. I was DAR, remember?”

“You never let me forget.”

Don’t rise to it. She’s got a right to be pissed. “Anyway, he’s not worried about the New Sons. No matter how many men they have, they won’t get past the Vogler Ring. It was built to protect the Holdfast from villagers with pitchforks.” He shook his head. “It’s Smith that concerns me.”

Before, even as they watched the aftermath of a battle, her attention had been split. She’d put up a good front, but it was easy for Cooper to see that a front was all it was. But now all thoughts of their romantic future were cleared away. “Tell me.”

“He beat us to Abe Couzen.”

“That’s not good.”

“It gets worse.” He filled her in, starting at their separation. She listened attentively, asked pointed questions. It was a safe space for them, analyzing a situation and figuring out how to respond. It was what they’d done instead of dating. About the time he got to Abe’s lab, she finished her drink and poured another; as he filled her in on his conversation with Soren, he emptied his own, and she slid the bottle his way with unconscious ease. “By the way,” he said, “thanks for bringing Soren here. That couldn’t have been fun.”

“He wasn’t much company. Spent the last two days in the trunk of the car.” She flashed her half smile. “You really think he can help you?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“John is his best friend. He’s not going to give him up easily. Are you going to . . .”

“I don’t see much choice. Smith has been maneuvering the whole world to this moment. I still don’t know why, but I know he doesn’t start fights he can’t win.”

“Is there something you can offer Soren? A carrot instead of a stick?”

“Like what?”

She moved to the window and stared out. Flurries chased each other in a gust of wind. “You could talk to Samantha.”

“Who?” The name was familiar in a vague sort of way.

“Don’t tell me you don’t remember her.”

Why are you looking at me that—oh. He remembered, all right. Shannon’s friend, pale cream and spun gold and dripping sex appeal. She was tier one, a sort of reader, only with a bent empathy that meant she could pick up on anyone’s desires, and then emulate them. “She and Soren know each other?”

“Biblically. Since Hawkesdown Academy.” Shannon grimaced. “One messed-up relationship.”

You ain’t kidding. He’d only met Samantha once, but it had been easy to see that her addiction to painkillers was actually the lesser of her compulsions. Between her gift and her past—seduced by an academy mentor at thirteen, then turned out as a prostitute—she drew her entire self-worth from being needed.

Who could need her more than a temporal abnorm who lived every second as eleven? The intensity of his attention must have felt like heroin to her. And her ability to sense what he wanted without requiring all the social trappings he was incapable of must have made her unique amongst women.

“Can you imagine,” Shannon continued, “how the world feels to him? He can’t have a conversation. Can’t watch a movie. He gets drunk, the hangover lasts for like a week. Hell, sex has to be one of the only things that does work for him. Especially with Sam.”

“Does she love him?”

Shannon nodded. “Almost as much as she loves John.”

“Ah.” He’d had some notion of playing to her feelings, convincing her that she could save Soren. But he’d forgotten that Smith was the thread that united them. It was Smith who had killed her mentor and pimp. There was no way she’d betray him.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.” Cooper sighed. “I saw Millie today. Remember her?”

“The little girl with green hair.”

“It’s purple now. Anyway, she told me she couldn’t read Soren, that his perception of time screws things up. I thought maybe stress would change that, but instead, she ended up reading me.”

“Poor kid.”

He made a face at her. “Actually, she said I was pure.”

“She doesn’t know you like I do.”

“Ha-ha. Afterward, we were talking, and I screwed up, said the dumbest thing: that Soren was a freak, his gift had ruined him, put him outside society. And I no sooner said it than I thought about how the same could be said of her.”

Shannon winced. “And of course she read you thinking that.”

“Yeah. I feel so sorry for her. There’s way too much pressure for a little girl. She tries to cope, hiding behind her hair and her video games, but—” A thought struck him with almost physical force. He had that behind-the-eyeballs feeling of an idea, the tuning out of the world to examine it.

Was it possible?

Millie seemed to think so. And this was the Holdfast. The most technically advanced place on the planet, a closed society where brilliants worked with enormous funding and little restriction. They’d brought him back from the dead here.

“Cooper?” Shannon looked at him with both concern and curiosity. “You okay?”

He picked up his bourbon and swallowed the rest, barely tasting it. Then he turned his face to her.

“Carrot.”