THEY were arguing again, Daria and Alex and Val. Or, to be entirely accurate, Alex and Val were arguing. Daria only stepped in to break up the bickering when it got too fierce.
“Wonder if she knows yet that she’s the new boss.” Gid tipped her head toward the spot a few feet away where the three of them were going at it.
Seven, who was still hovering and pretending he wasn’t even though Gid had managed to survive the last four weeks without catching another elbow to the temple during a mass murder, looked up and quirked an eyebrow.
Gid rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. So I’m supposed to pull entire paragraphs of information from your one little gesture, and you can’t come up with a few simple words without me explicitly filling in the blanks?”
To anyone else, Seven’s facial tic would have been barely perceptible. To Gid, it looked as big as a grin. Was a time he’d used to call Gid “Miss Santiago” and would as soon have wrung her neck as look at her. They’d come a long way since then.
They stood in the Graves ready room, which had only been called that for about a month, after Daria and Val had set Ardica’s shuttle bay on fire. Sometimes Gid wished she’d been conscious to see that. Other times, she caught Daria staring off at nothing, and Daria wasn’t the old wide-eyed, fresh-off-the-farm Daria that Gid had first met, and Gid was glad she hadn’t been awake to see Daria roasting fellow human beings alive.
Gid could deal by being flip about it inside her own head. But not even she would’ve said anything like that out loud to Daria or even to Val. It wasn’t like they were monsters, after all. Gid had been close when the crowd of exiled had yanked open the shuttle’s loading doors. She’d gotten a good look inside that shuttle. She knew who the monsters were.
“I was talking about Daria,” Gid said. “Do you think she fully realizes that she’s in charge now?”
Seven turned his head to follow Gid’s gaze toward Daria, but Gid caught another eyebrow quirk in profile.
“OK, yeah. Not in charge of you. Because nobody is in charge of you, tough guy. But of Graves and our movement in general.”
Because they had a movement now. Not just Alex pulling strings and dreaming big dreams and doing a lot of ego-puffing bravado, but a full-blown movement. Well, maybe not full-blown, because there had been a lot of scrambling to cover their asses. But they were getting there fast. Maybe too fast, some thought. You can’t steer what you’re not in control of.
Most of the boxes had been cleared out of the L-shaped room and into what used to be Alex’s office. Alex still called it that, but no one else did. It had become just “the other room.” Plenty of floor space in the ready room now, and they’d added strips of lighting around its perimeter, until it had turned bright as daylight in the room.
Currently, a dozen or so people stood around in varying degrees of patience—they weren’t crammed, exactly, but there was no milling-around space either. Even in short sleeves, Gid was warm-on-the-verge-of-hot. The room stank as much of body odor as of dank cement and electronic heat.
Across the room, Nunes and Jager watched Kaiden Novotny as he watched a monitor. Kaiden had clenched fists planted knuckles-down on either side of the keyboard. He hunched over the desk and glared at the screen like that was going to make Muire call in sooner. If Daria’s brother was any one thing, it was wound tight.
Which was not to say Gid wasn’t antsy, too. But she had the call alert screen pulled up in the corner of her lens monitor, so she’d see the flash as soon as it came in. And unlike Kaiden, she could multi-task. She also had the day’s newscast running on overlay in her right lens and kept an eye on the ongoing bicker-fest through its semi-transparency.
“We made things worse.” Alex crossed his arms. His biceps and pecs bunched admirably beneath the skin-tight maroon tee he wore. The ready room’s bright lights set fire to the diamond chips in his ears. Gid was well-familiar with the piercing emerald gaze he aimed at Daria. “You do understand that, right?”
Daria leaned against the door to the other room, palms pressed flat against its surface like she was about to push off. Her lips were pursed and her brows drawn down, and she stared across the room at Kaiden. She wore the cinnamon-colored polys Gid had given her, and of course she made them look better than Gid ever had. Gid was all angles. Daria had curves. Daria’s sandy hair had grown out and gone a little wild, and with that mane and her golden-hazel eyes, she reminded Gid of a wolf. You know, if wolves could sprout waves of heat energy from their fingertips.
On the opposite side of Daria from Alex, Val stood propped against the wall, too. Val was as slender as Alex was muscled, as pale as Alex was dark. Both of them had red hair, but Alex’s cropped curls were a bottle-variety deep maroon. Val’s hair was a natural strawberry blond that fell in loose ringlets around his freckled face.
“Nothing gets better without getting worse first.” Val spoke the words like they were something he’d rehearsed and didn’t have to think much about. Val didn’t look at Alex, either, but it wasn’t Kaiden he watched. He shot quick glances at Daria, a perplexed little line between his brows that Gid had been seeing a lot of lately.
Alex threw his arms open wide in a grand theatrical gesture, which was Gid’s cue to sidle over toward Daria, in case she needed someone to run interference.
“Oh! So that’s why he gets to write the pretty speeches.” Alex’s big gesture ended with him holding his arms out toward Val. “Please, say something else inspiring, Red.”
The perplexed little line between Val’s brows morphed into a full-on scowl. He aimed it at Alex. “Why are you still here, again?”
“Because we need him.” Daria’s voice was calm but no-nonsense. As Gid drew close enough to catch Daria’s attention, Daria’s gaze shifted abruptly away from Kaiden. “Gid. Anything new on today’s cast?”
“You haven’t had enough sunshine and roses for one day?”
“Shut up, Alex.” Gid flung the words at Alex like they had sharp edges and she meant to draw blood—because she did.
Gid didn’t bother looking at Alex. He wouldn’t be looking at her. Ever since the plan—his plan—to smuggle Daria and Val and Gid ashore had ended in death and horror and fireworks, he wouldn’t meet Gid’s eyes. Apparently, he felt guilty for almost getting Gid killed.
Good. He should.
Gid blinked twice in rapid succession to bring her right lens monitor out of transparency mode and clicked her right molars together to raise the volume. She was the only person who could hear it, of course, since it interfaced directly into her cochlear nerve. Gid doubted Daria believed there’d be anything new anyhow. The tension in Daria’s jaw told Gid she was looking for a distraction.
“You know we can’t keep doing this forever.” Alex re-crossed his arms and muttered his continuing objection. “We’re not fixing the problem, we’re just shuffling it around and making it ours instead of the city’s.”
Gid ignored him. On her lens, the day’s headlines scrolled past. The caster’s voice murmured inside Gid’s head, although not so loudly that she couldn’t still listen to the present conversation.
The news remained as calm and orderly as ever, but Gid imagined a new edge to some of the words. Maybe that was just because for once she knew the stories behind the headlines—the real stories: “LM4 Terrorist Attack Still Under Investigation. Potentially Dangerous Persons Held for Questioning.” “Reconstruction Continues on Shuttle Bay. Hundreds of Jobs Created.” “Siblings Sought in Triple Murder.” “Commander Tapia Rallies APS in Sub-Levels Martial Crackdown.”
“Alex.” Daria’s voice remained no-nonsense. She paused until Alex looked at her, then she leaned forward and lifted her eyebrows. “It wasn’t your fault. You were trying to fix it. We get that.”
Alex’s reaction was immediate. His pout turned into a deadly glare. He dropped his arms to his sides, turned on his heel, and marched off like he suddenly had a thousand more important things to do.
Nausea squeezed Gid’s gut, like it did every time they talked about that day.
“I don’t get it. And I don’t understand why you’re so forgiving of him.” Val’s hazel eyes blazed in Gid’s direction for a second.
“Not disagreeing,” Gid murmured, although she didn’t look at Daria.
Gid also didn’t look at Seven, but she knew he stood behind her. He hadn’t said anything yet, but Gid knew what he was thinking.
Val turned back to Daria. “Alex nearly got us all killed.”
“Not me, so much,” Daria replied. “I was busy nailing my own ass to the wall.”
Gid snorted a laugh that netted a pale version of a smile from Daria. Val sighed and shook his head.
“Anything, Gid?” Daria asked.
“Nothing new.” The caster had been elaborating on the mostly-false details of the alleged triple murder and the terrible evil of the brother and sister refugees who had committed it. She segued into the issue of economic and security issues associated with the refugees populating the city’s sub-levels.
They all knew the basics. Gid didn’t figure Daria needed to hear more details.
We know who the real monsters are.
“You doing all right?” Daria watched Gid’s face as she asked.
Gid forced a smile. “Have been for a few weeks now. It was one little elbow. Not a big deal.”
“It knocked you unconscious. When you came to, you couldn’t remember what day it was. Or how to operate your hardware.”
“Now that was truly terrifying.” Gid flashed a grin at Val in a blatant attempt to drag him into the conversation and divert attention from herself. The look he returned was utterly blank.
No sense of humor at all, that one, however pretty he is.
“Gid.”
Gid heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Yeah, yeah. I wasn’t doing so hot at first. But I’m good now.” She didn’t mention the headaches. She’d gotten headaches before, sometimes, after all. It didn’t have to mean anything was wrong. And Daria didn’t need anything else to worry about.
A faint shuffling of feet behind Gid reminded her that Seven was listening, too. She pretended not to notice. After all, would anyone else know that foot-shuffle was the equivalent of any other person shouting, “I call bullshit” at you?
In Gid’s ear, a single tone abruptly overrode the newscaster’s continuing drone. The call alert screen in the corner of Gid’s lens monitor flashed red.