Carlota kissed Erika goodbye with a serious twinge of regret. It was everything she could do not to stay for a while and get emotionally involved with her. Bog troll had been fantastic. Erika had cleared that bar with so much to spare that she might have set it to a new level.
It would be a hard act to follow.
Still, she made it downstairs and caught that first hint of morning chill. The temperature had dropped a bit from yesterday and the streets were slick.
Carlota considered calling a cab, but wanted to walk.
She needed to process things, and did that better in motion than she could sitting in her room and meditating.
Or fermenting. Whatever it was she did there.
Armand had touched things in her mind she’d mostly forgotten about. Erika had dusted off cold spots and warmed them.
What was she doing right now? Playing a deadly game with Salonnian and other intelligence agencies. Tweaking their noses that she was better than they had given her credit for. Better than them, if she pulled it off.
Then what?
Up until now, Carlota realized that she’d been hoping they would come to their senses and offer her back her old job as a field agent. In the cold, damp, chill of morning, proudly slut-walking her way home, she understood that the Bureau wasn’t going to thank her.
They were going to bury her. Every day that passed, they would get angrier with her, especially when everyone got to Chapter Seven and she started talking about folks who were still working. Politicians who were still in the limelight trying to win elections, or at least influence things. Agents out in the field who might not be known to the general public, but would be to other agencies.
The kinds of dirty dealing that would compromise a lot of folks.
Make them extra angry.
And what was she going to get out of it? Fame? Some. That just made her a bigger target.
Money? She had a stupendous amount stashed away. And the ability to score more from a variety of things if it got tight. With Armand’s help, she’d made enough to live quite comfortably for at least a year, just in one night.
And what had it gotten her?
Hiding in a hotel. Sneaking out in disguise and seducing complete strangers. Or letting them seduce her. Armand and Erika had both been wild cards in her planning that just showed Carlota how much the rest of her life had gotten bland and almost banal.
She wasn’t living. She was marking time.
Until what?
Until when?
What was her endgame?
She came to almost a violent stop as it dawned on her. They were going to kill her.
Worse, she’d set the rules of the game such that she’d drawn all the hunters to Borlait so she could thwart them personally. There was no way off this planet, she was guessing, short of somehow smuggling herself out. Or stealing a ship and surviving making a run for it.
Did she kidnap some woman cop who was trying to watch the starport and use her credentials to escape, pretending to be the other woman long enough to get gone?
She didn’t want to die.
And looking back, that had been the implicit outcome. She’d gone into this with rage and it had gotten her here. Trapped her.
Death wish. Make them kill her because they couldn’t stand that she was better than they were.
Passively suicidal. Death by cop, or death by agent. Same difference. Because she didn’t have anything else she could do but be a spy.
Did she?
She had been trained as a card sharp by a man who understood that a pretty woman at the table altered the equations at what was frequently an all-male endeavor.
Carlota certainly didn’t want to find some sugar daddy to take care of her. Worse, none would, because she’d be competing with perky, little bimbos half her age, willing to do anything for that brass ring.
Which was exactly why some men chased them, because women like her didn’t have any fucks left to give at their behavior, so they had to find someone dumb enough, green enough, desperate enough, to put up with them.
Creator willing, Carlota would never be that put upon.
Which left strangers and random couplings. Was that all she wanted out of life?
No.
Worse, she didn’t want to die right now by her own stupidity, and had no good idea how to slip out of the trap that she had created for herself.
Carlota wasn’t even sure that she could escape, or if the rules of the game would demand her head on a stake in order to complete everything.
She’d made a monumental error at the beginning. Baked it into the project, because her subconscious mind had been preparing to die, and wanting to go out in a blaze of glory.
And she suddenly didn’t want to die.
Carlota physically shook herself, feeling almost like a wet dog as she emerged from whatever terrible place she’d walked herself into. She looked around, but the streets were much thinner with foot traffic than they would be later in the day, when the sun came up.
A few joggers. A few folks going in to work. A few, like her, stumbling home from a too-late night that had hopefully turned out as fantastically awesome as hers had.
Or at least close enough.
Carlota pulled out her comm and opened it with shaky fingers.
She wanted to live, and was surrounded on all sides by angry folks who had nothing to lose by chasing her with ever-escalating firepower and deniability.
Worse, she was truly outlaw now, with all that entailed.
She called a cab, because she needed to get someplace quiet to think.
There had to be a way out of this.
Right?