“You’re right.” He stopped again, this time by a booth laden with seedlings. He thumbed idly through the paper envelopes of seeds in a lopsided spinning rack, but his gaze was on her face. “How did you meet Nina?”
The skin on her wrists itched, her clearest warning sign that memories were trying to surface. She locked them down ruthlessly and drew in a deep breath. The air smelled fresh, with hay and spices and the tart smell of apple cider drifting from a nearby booth.
It steadied her enough to get the words out. “Birgitte had a contingency plan, I guess. If something happened to her, one of her coconspirators was supposed to smuggle me out of the TechCorps. They hired Nina to hide me for a few weeks. She was the one who came up with the idea of faking my death.”
He chuckled.
Maya felt her lips twitch. Humor chased away the rest of the ghosts. “Yeah, it’s a bad habit she has. Rescuing people, faking their deaths, taking them in, and convincing them to help her build community resources. Real dastardly criminal shit.”
“It’s not that, it’s just … secrets.” He seemed to be searching for the right words. “Nina’s had to hide the fact that she’d rather save someone’s life than claim a two-million-credit bounty. And every time Knox saved a handful of lives on a mission, he had to act like it was just the most expedient way to get the job done.” He sighed. “Not everything about ourselves that we hide from the world is ugly. Sometimes it just makes us too vulnerable.”
She knew the truth of that in her bones. Her memory held a litany of plausibly deniable heroics, every tiny victory of Birgitte’s quiet revolution. Compassion was the ultimate weakness according to the TechCorps. The enemy of progress and pure scientific advancement.
That was a lie, of course. In the years Maya had lived on the outside, she’d seen that compassion might actually be the ultimate driver of innovation. Rogue scientists solved problems every day, and they did it with a fraction of the TechCorps’ massive resources. Not out of some sterile intellectual curiosity or selfish need for glory.
They did it because they cared.
But it was still seen as a weakness. The rot and greed and suspicion had seeped down from the Hill and poisoned the earth around Atlanta. No one trusted altruism anymore. Every generous offer from the TechCorps came with enough strings to strangle you and everyone you loved for a generation. It was the brick wall Nina had run up against again and again as they expanded their little library.
They thought you were scamming them until they thought you were a pushover. And then they usually tried to rob you. Or kill you.
“You don’t know how hard it was to earn even a little bit of trust in the neighborhood,” she told Gray, pulling him deeper into the warehouse. “No one knew what to make of Nina. I’m sure you can relate.”
“I can.” Then Gray grinned again. “Imagine if Knox had known, though. He’d have been standing outside her bedroom window every night with flowers and a proposal scribbled on a piece of cardboard.”
Maya huffed and shot him a sidelong look. “That would have been mildly preferable to the whole long-con-betrayal thing we’ve generously forgiven him for, on account of the extenuating circumstances.”
“That road trip was fun. Admit it.”
The thing was, it had been fun. Knox and his team might have lured them on the trip under false pretenses, but the enjoyment had been real. Breaking into pre-Flare movie theaters to see space battles play out against a massive, tattered screen. Camping in the woods with the crackle of fire and the scent of roasting turkey in the air. Even the torturous, sweltering night in the abandoned gas station when Maya had used the knowledge gleaned from dozens of mechanics texts to fix the industrial-strength fans.
For two decades, Maya had lived a sheltered life on the Hill. She’d been ferried between penthouse floors in AirLifts and helicopters. She’d sunbathed on terrace gardens a thousand feet into the air. Her feet had quite literally never touched solid earth, because people who traveled in executive circles at the TechCorps rarely lowered themselves to walk among the rank and file.
She could still number the times she’d been outside Atlanta on her fingers. Every memory was sharp and precious … especially the ones with the Silver Devils. Because their arrival had changed everything.
Gray was watching her with that small, warm little smile. She couldn’t call his eyes Gothic or brooding today. They were blue and bright and glinting with an emotion so subtle she kept thinking she was imagining it.
Mischief. She’d always known he had a sense of humor under those blank stares.
“Don’t get cocky,” she advised him, stopping in a sheltered little niche. Two towering shelves overflowing with spare parts shielded them from the rest of the market. When she turned to face him, the breadth of his shoulders blocked out the rest of the world. Her voice came out breathless. “You don’t know how many forks I’m packing.”
His reply came in a whisper. “I always assume that answer is enough to get the job done.”
Goddamn. His normal voice was intoxicating. Having him whispering practically against her ear was enough to lay her out. Tingles prickled over her scalp and down her spine.
“So,” he went on. “What are you after?”
He wasn’t really talking about her shopping list. The plank beneath her feet wobbled. That vast ocean stretched out beneath her, the waves churning. Maya wet her lips nervously and took another step. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
There was that grin again. “No rush.”
He’d say that. He’d keep saying it, even as the time he had left slipped away one minute at a time. Gray would sit there, as patient and unmoving as a stone, waiting for her to come to him.
She couldn’t sit here, waiting for someone to give her a push. She had to close her eyes and leap.
Her heart beating faster, Maya reached up to touch his cheek. His skin was as warm as she remembered, his jawline rough with the first hint of stubble. The contact shivered through her, too intense for something so innocent, but not bad. No, the warmth unspooling deep in her belly was the literal opposite of bad.
“I’m complicated,” she whispered. “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how much touch is too much.”
“We’re not so different, Maya.” He closed his eyes and turned his face to her palm. “It can be complicated for me, too. There’s no right or wrong answer, there’s only … finding out.”
She let her thumb sweep out to touch his mouth. Wanting pulsed in her, reckless and wild, the strength of it terrifying her. Control had always been central to her being. Toying with letting go in bits and pieces was one thing, but this …
Oh, the fall would be so sweet. The crash might break her. The fact that she didn’t care scared her most of all.
“Are you sure you want this?” she asked softly. “Are you sure you want me?”
Gray’s eyes flashed, and he moved closer. He stopped carefully, painfully shy of touching her, then slowly pulled her hand from his face. Holding her wrist lightly, he dragged her hand down until it rested on his hard chest, just over his heart.
It thumped beneath her palm, strong and reassuring. She licked her lips again, and the steady beat stuttered and picked up speed.