The Mammoth Book of Futuristic Romance

Fade Away and Radiate Michele Lang

The only woman on an uninhabitable planet listened to the wail of the nightwind, alone in a research hut in the dead of the night. She studied her data outputs, and tried like hell not to think of Roberto. Because thinking of Roberto got her thinking about why she’d come to this desolate place. And thinking of her self-

exile made her think of the man she was running away from . . .

There was a knock on the door.

It was the moment she had imagined a million times with dread, and yet now that it had come, she wasn’t ready. With a gasp, Anika Bowman jumped from her chair, but before she could make any further moves, the door to her field lab swung open.

She glanced across the hut, to where her blaster lay hidden under her flat foam pillow. Her fingers itched to grab it, but it was too late now. Anika had bet her life on the simple fact that she was too far away from the rest of humanity to be murdered. If she survived the next few minutes, she would never make such a stupid mistake again.

Anika forced herself to look at the hulking figure filling up her doorway. Far away, outside the geodome in which she’d built the hut, the nightwind howled, hungry, unrequited. The haunting sound still pierced her heart.

“It’s me,” a muffled voice said, crackling over the spacesuit’s interface.

For a single, agonizing moment, she imagined it was Roberto, come back to her across infinity. That behind that mirrored helmet, Roberto was speaking to her now, that somehow he’d returned, as he’d once promised.

A miracle. But, no.

Roberto was dead, just another casualty of the Glass Desert war. Roberto hadn’t come back to her in a box, or an urn, or even on a memory stick or a download with a farewell message. He’d just gotten vaporized, as if he’d never existed in the first place.

Whoever this warrior was, hidden in his spacesuit, it wasn’t her husband. Roberto was never coming back. She was sure of it.

Big square hands encased in spacegloves reached up to remove the domed, mirrored helmet. She took a half-step back, her heart pounding so hard in her chest it shook her with every beat.

Anika saw the man’s face. She staggered backwards in her shock. Roberto would have blown her away less.

“Billy Murphy, it’s you,” she managed to gasp. “Never thought I’d see your face again.”

Captain Billy Murphy grinned and looked her up and down in a single glance. It was him: that thick, uncontrollable black hair. (Much longer now since the last time she’d seen him.) The deep-blue eyes, the spare, effective body. That face, even more appealing for the marks inflicted by all the trouble he’d survived.

“Yep, me,” Billy replied, and he laughed. “Took long enough for me to find you, am I right? Like you didn’t want me to find you.”

She stared at him in wonder as he shut the door behind him, clomped into the research hut, took a look around. Didn’t take more than a quick scan for Billy to see all there was to see.

The truth be told, she was relieved. Her life in the hut was over, no matter what happened now between her and this man, the last one to see her husband alive. And no matter how much she’d once craved the solitude and the silence of this stony, dead planet, Anika knew she couldn’t live in this frozen hell forever.

“How did you find me?” Anika forced the words past the lump in her throat. She would rather die than cry in front of Billy Murphy. She’d already done too much crying in this man’s presence. She didn’t dare do it again.

Billy laughed louder, and pulled the fingers of his gloves one by one with his straight, white teeth to get them off. “Bet you wanna know how I cracked your code.”

He was like a tiger transformed into a man, pacing the little room in his armor, sizing up her potential as a meal. Both of them knew she was no warrior.

The floor shook under his boots as he walked, cracked his knuckles, and wiggled his fingers to get the circulation into them again. “Glad to see you’re still in one piece.”

For now, Anika couldn’t help playing out what was going to happen next, going at a hundred times normal speed in her mind, like an end-of-life experience. The return to Earth. Her attempted, reattempted, and then final resignation from FortuneCorp – that place that had made her career, the place that wanted her soul along with her employment. A world corporation that intended to own this galaxy, that didn’t let the little cogs in its mighty machine just break away.

So she would spurn the company, walk unaffiliated, unprotected, in New York. And one fine afternoon, walking along Broadway or riding the helobus, or reading newsfeeds in Petraeus Park, the end would come for her at last. A murderer would poison her, or kidnap her, or just wipe her out. It happened to genetic and nuclear scientists all the time. It had happened to Roberto. And if Billy was anywhere around, it would happen to him, too.

His expression softened when he saw her stricken face. “Listen, I made you a promise,” he explained.

“At Roberto’s memorial. I swore, and I swore it to Robbo first. If anything happened to him in country, I was coming back after to watch out for you. You and I ain’t got nobody else.”

“I don’t need watching.” Anika cringed inside at the huskiness in her voice. She cleared her throat and stood straighter, not willing to yield to his charms. It was the same way she stood up to the fears that still stalked her every night. “I’m a big girl, and I’ve managed to survive just fine on my own all this time. I don’t need your help.”

Billy crossed his arms over his big, armored chest, and he shifted uneasily on his feet. It was as close as she’d ever come to seeing him losing his cool. “You’re a good girl, and I know why Roberto loved you so hard. But you’re lying to me. You’re not surviving out here. You’re lingering. Okay?”

The silence rose up like a ghost, and they stared at each other through the suddenly too-little space closing in between them.

Anika felt the damn tears coming, but she refused to shed them. Instead, she walked across the little room in three steps to her cot, and the blaster hidden there.

“I know you’ve traveled pretty far just to get here,” she began.

“That would be an understatement.”

She couldn’t help smiling at that, at the way Billy tugged at her heart. “Yeah well, I think the best thing for you to do, Mr Spaceman, is stay the night, have some grub, and stock up on provisions. And head right back out in the morning. I’m assuming there’s a craft in orbit waiting for you. No way you could head out to this quadrant all alone.”

Billy laughed again, more gently this time. His thick, black hair stood on end, all messed up from his helmet. He pushed the buttons at his wrist points, and the exoskeleton of his suit softened. He pulled the suit down and stepped out of it, looking like a man now and not a robotic killer.

He looked vulnerable.

But Anika wasn’t fooled. She knew what Billy really was, what Roberto had been before he’d gotten snuffed.

K-Ops. Genetically modified soldiers in the United States Army, technology owned by FortuneCorp, the soldiers serving their country. Sent by the US military to do what regular soldiers didn’t have the physical or mental stamina to do.

Roberto never spoke of what he’d done as a soldier out in the Glass Desert. He had wanted to leave the war behind when he had come home to her, and she hadn’t needed to know the details of his job. She’d wanted to love those memories away until he had to go back and make more of them.

But the last time he’d come home, Anika could tell something had changed. Roberto had changed. As if he knew the next time he went back to the Glass Desert, he wouldn’t be coming back.

“I didn’t come all this way just to say hello.” Billy broke into her thoughts, his voice a little too calm.

A jolt of fear shot down the length of Anika’s back. She didn’t want to hear any more, but she owed it to Billy to hear him out. He had come to the edge of the known world to find her.

“Do you know how Roberto died?” Billy asked.

Anika’s mouth was dry as sand. She licked her lips and shrugged her shoulders. “It’s war,” she managed to say. “Soldiers die in war. You don’t need to tell me more than that.”

He squinted at her, as if he were trying to figure out how much she already knew. “But you need to know. If you don’t already.”

Anika tried to relax but couldn’t. Billy took a seat on Anika’s desk chair, set in front of an ancient roll-

top desk that looked ridiculously out of place on an uninhabitable planet at the back end of nowhere.

Billy’s hands rested on the arms of her chair. She watched his strong fingers caressing the old-

fashioned realwood, and wondered where he hid his own weapons.

She knew he was armed. She scanned his spare, hard body for the weapons – traveling from those strong, knowing hands up to his muscular arms encased in dark-blue flight silk, across the defined shoulders, the curve of his neck . . .

She realized, belatedly, that Billy had stopped talking. Anike tore her gaze from Billy’s insanely beautiful body and forced herself to stare right into his eyes.

Eyes the color of midnight, of desolation. He seemed to pin her to the cot like a butterfly. Those eyes spoke of suffering she would understand, like Roberto’s. And yet his voice, vibrating inside her chest, remained gentle, kind.

“Roberto didn’t die in the field, you know.”

“I know,” Anika whispered. Miserable now, remembering. Billy was the one who had told her, after the memorial, in a low, quick undertone, far away from everybody else. The details were dangerous, she knew.

“Somebody got inside the barracks, somebody who knew they wanted Roberto specifically. They got past all of us – genmod soldiers – and killed him and escaped before we could do anything. And, Annie. I didn’t tell you this. There was no investigation. Nothing. We were told to act like it had never happened.”

Annie swallowed hard. “I figured he didn’t die the official way, the way the government told me.”

“What did you think?”

She shook her head as if she could negate the truth away. “Both of us worked for FortuneCorp, not like you soldiers. He never told you, did he?”

“Nope. As far as anybody on the team knew, he was just another soldier.”

“Well, he wasn’t. We worked together on genetic research, human and ecological modifications. He was a geneticist, I’m a biologist. Together we worked on eco-transformative research. How to mutate human beings, and climates.”

Billy nodded, not looking too surprised. “Roberto was way smarter than me,” he said. “A million times smarter. But didn’t have as much horse-sense. And you don’t just need a killer instinct to survive the Glass Desert, Annie girl. You need prey instinct, too. Roberto just wore his smarts out in the open, and it cost him.”

The lump in Anika’s throat all but choked her. She shrugged and tried to laugh. “I always warned him to watch his back. Doing our kind of research is so dangerous. Rival corporations will kill scientists, kidnap them and extract their knowledge. And Roberto put himself outside of FortuneCorp’s protection, going to war. But he wanted to understand what it was like to undergo genetic modification himself, and the only way to find out was to become a soldier. Like you.”

“Roberto didn’t fool nobody. I figured out after a while that he was a scientist, not a grunt.”

“Ah, yes. He told you his motto? ‘Geneticist, modify yourself.’”

Billy grinned sadly at the memory, and at Anika’s imitation of Roberto’s Spanish-inflected voice. For a moment, it was like Roberto was there with them, sharing the joke.

Anika smiled, and Billy looked into her soul again. But this time, his gaze felt more like a caress.

“I suppose a rival corporation got Roberto. Espionage. That’s what I figured when I heard he was gone.”

Billy stared at her for a long moment, and then he withdrew his gaze, looked into the middle distance, his open face suddenly unreadable. “After the memorial, I went back for six more months.

“Hard months, Annie. Hard, hard months. The whole team died out there, one by one. The genmod can help – infrared vision, limb regeneration – and it will keep you alive in the field, but the morale went bad.”

Billy shifted in his chair, and looked into the distance, like he saw the pictures drawn by his words.

She willed herself into complete silence. And Billy kept telling her the secrets of his war.

“Soldiers are superstitious, modified or not. And after Roberto was murdered on the base, our luck seemed to go with him. We knew some kind of bullshit was going on, okay? But we had no way to prove it. I figured with his scientist background, he made some bad enemies. Maybe he was even a spy, yeah?

We didn’t know for sure.

“I got the Murphy luck, ya know. Bad luck that gets you to the other side every time. But the other guys – their luck was just bad.”

He leaned back in the chair and sighed. And Anika trembled, only then realizing that she had been holding her breath as he spoke.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, watching the pain play over Billy’s face like a shadow. “It must have been awful.”

“Worse for you,” he replied, his eyes still closed. “I’m the luckiest man alive, to get out of the desert.

But you think he died because of you.”

Anika took a huge gulp of air then, the guilt twisting like a knife in her chest. It was true. Roberto died because of the work they had done together.

Before she could say anything, Billy opened his eyes and looked at her. “Everybody in a war feels guilty for surviving, Annie. That’s just part of the gig.”

He looked ordinary again, the smart-ass kid from Southie that he’d once been, before he joined the Army to get the genmod. But that street kid was gone forever too, and both of them knew it.

“It’s funny,” he said. “You run with a pack in the war, and once those guys are gone, it’s like you’re missing a limb.”

She nodded. That pain she knew all about. Still felt it, every day.

“I’ll tell you how I tracked you down,” he said. His voice was soft now, his Boston accent faded. “My tour ended and I was a lone wolf. So I come back to the Rotten Apple, and the first thing I do in New York is look you up, like I promised you. And him.”

They exchanged a long, low glance, and Anika knew he was thinking of the memorial, too. The things he’d said to her. The way he’d sworn to protect her, the way he’d held her in his arms as she’d cried.

That was a long, long time ago now.

“But you were gone,” he continued. “Six months after the memorial, and your house was all locked up, I couldn’t find you online. At first, I figured you was dead too, and why not? So was everybody else. But you took care of everything too neat. You disappeared too perfect.”

She’d tried like hell to stay away from Billy. Because if a rival corporation had killed Roberto like she suspected, then a rival corporation would likely want to kill her too. After all, she and Roberto had worked as a scientific team. She had told her FortuneCorp regional supervisor about her fears, and they had told her the matter was under investigation. But, like Billy, she’d heard nothing more.

And that silence had terrified her. Both she and Roberto had done research on classified techniques for human genetic modification and ecological re-engineering. Those techniques were worth billions. Now that Roberto was dead, Anika had been the only one who could complete the research track they had started together.

Anika had run off-world, all the way to AlphaZed3, to escape the reach of any other corporation. Her new technology, the Bowman eco-drive, would serve as a living legacy of her husband’s vision. And Anika had believed the remoteness of this posting would protect her from deadly visitors.

Billy’s appearance put the lie to that notion. She knew to her core that Billy would never hurt her, that he had sworn to Roberto that he would protect her. But if Billy could make it way out here, anybody could. And the blaster under her pillow wouldn’t save her.

The tears spilled over Anika’s cheeks, onto her lips, tasting of regret and loss and fear. And loneliness, such terrible aching loneliness, so deep that she didn’t dare surrender to it.

Billy got out of his chair and covered the space between them in a couple of bounding steps. He kneeled next to her low cot, and he was so tall that, even kneeling, his eyes were level with hers.

They were only centimeters apart now. Her breath caught in her throat.

Anika couldn’t care less about her legacy now. All she could see in her mind was the wisteria, the morning glories, and the snapdragons climbing the glass windows of her bedroom in Forest Hills, where she had once said goodbye to Roberto before he left for war for the last time.

“You aren’t safe out here,” Billy said gently. His eyes flashed with the tears he never shed, never. As he’d told her at the memorial, Billy Murphy didn’t do tears.

The unshed tears in Billy’s eyes flashed silver into midnight, lightning over a summer sea.

A rush of panic spread through Anika’s body. “I have to hide. You understand why.”

“I know you believe it was a rival corporation that murdered Roberto, to shut him up. To shut down your research. But think about it, Annie. Why didn’t they murder you in New York?”

The question hovered in the air between them. Billy’s hands reached for her and caressed her shoulders. And the shock of that touch roared through her like an ion storm. “I told you, Annie, that I love you. The night of the memorial I knew. And I told you. I knew it was too soon. You had to let him go, and I told you I’d wait, as long as it took. I fell for you the second I saw you. Roberto told me that I would.”

Anika tried to speak, but she couldn’t manage a word.

“Wait up, hear me out. The genmod does funny stuff, you know that. It gave Roberto some precog, he knew when stuff was going to happen.”

Anika swiped the tears off her face, as if she could wipe Billy’s words away. His fingers tightened over her shoulders, and she took a big, shuddering breath, fighting not to let go, not to release her true feelings.

“He had changed, by the end,” she finally said. “Maybe it was the genmod. Or maybe it was just the war.”

“Roberto told me he was going to die, the night before he was murdered. He told me he was planning to speak out about the stuff he’d seen in the war. But it was too late. And he told me I was going to save your life, just in time. And here I am, before it’s too late, just like he said.”

His arms slipped around her, protecting her, and Anika melted into him. After two years of running away from Roberto’s killers, she’d finally turned around and faced the past, the grief of not just losing Roberto, but Billy too.

“I’m safe out here, I think,” she said, her voice muffled from inside Billy’s arms. “As long as I just do my work and don’t cause any trouble, I don’t think any other corporation can get through FortuneCorp’s sectors. FortuneCorp runs the whole show out here.”

“It’s not safe. It wasn’t safe for Roberto, surrounded by his brothers. It’s not safe for you, out here all alone. I came to get you out of here.”

Anika cried then, remembering. Billy just held her, his silence saying so much more than words ever could. The tears slipped away after a while, though she knew, like the tides, they’d return. They rolled in every night, as she stretched out on her cot, her fingers touching the blaster for courage.

But that time was done, now that Billy was here. He could still leave in the morning. If she had her way, he’d go when daylight came, free and alive. Free of his obligation to her. But everything had changed because he had found her. Even after he went back to his life, Anika would remember that he had come.

“One night,” Anika insisted. “Stay the night and you’ll go in the morning. Just like I first said. And as long as I stay here working, and as long as you don’t poke the powers that be and just go your way, we should both be okay.”

Billy’s smile flashed across his face, banishing the shadows. “I got the Murphy luck, Annie. Too late to stay out of trouble, too late the day I was born. But I’m here.”

He knew as well as she did that a night could last forever, that anything could happen between this moment they shared, and daybreak.

Reunions are funny, time-bending things. After only a few minutes more, Billy and Anika had recovered from their emotion. Anika took Billy into the jungle to show him her artistry.

She beamed her arc-light torch skyward and dappled shadows filtered through the broad leaves stretching over their heads. “Those are tiny weeds back at home,” she whispered. “My technology grows crabgrass into trees, clovers into climbing vines. I grew this jungle in a single growing season. It would take fifty years, a hundred, for any other terraformer.”

Anika crouched down and dug around in the sandy dirt until she found what she was looking for. She pulled the black tube out of the ground to show Billy. “This is what the trouble is all about,” she said.

“The Bowman eco-drive.”

“Could anybody just take it and grow stuff?”

“You need the expertise, of course. But if you had the secret of it . . .”

She left the rest unspoken. Such a technological revolution was worth espionage, murder. To steal it, to control it, or at least to stop it.

They shared their dinner, eating picnic-style on the floor by the side of her bed, leaning against it.

Anika took a sip of protein gel. It didn’t taste like much, but it did the job of nourishing her. And all she cared about was Billy, anyway. Getting as much of him as she could before he had to go away again.

She was hungry for the human contact, for the simple pleasure of talking to somebody. But it was more than that. This was Billy, the man who populated her secret dreams and kept her company in her memories. As Roberto faded away, Billy became more vivid, and she held on to him like a talisman, like a soldier’s good-luck charm.

Never mind that he had the Murphy backwards luck he mentioned. She wanted all of him: that lopsided smile, that incandescent stare that made the rest of the universe disappear. It sounded idiotic, but she wanted to protect him. And if she couldn’t protect him by staying away from him, she wanted to give him a place of sanctuary, where he could let go of the banter, let go of the war, and find a peaceful garden to lay his head.

But it wasn’t that simple.

Anika put these thoughts away. Here with Billy, she was Annie, not Anika, and for the moment she could leave the beleaguered scientist behind, and be Annie, Billy’s girl, at least for a single night.

“So how did you get from the Jobs Prize to planet AlphaZed3?”

She sighed and leaned back against the cot, feeling the heat of his arm all along her side, even though they didn’t touch. “I don’t know how I ended up here, really,” she said, wrenching herself away from the tangled mess of her thoughts to look at him, in the flesh, next to her. “But making this planet habitable means big money for FortuneCorp,” she said.

“You wanna know how I found you out here? I knew you and Roberto worked for FortuneCorp, first off. And that aside from all your science, you love growing things. So I thought to myself – ‘Self, what would a scientist who loves growing things do for FortuneCorp?’ Grow new worlds, of course. After that, I hacked into the employee database of off-world employees, tapped into a few contacts, and I was hot on your trail.”

Annie’s dinner congealed into a hard, cold pit in her stomach. “Nice little felony you committed there, Murph. And don’t you realize they have a whole sheriff’s division at FortuneCorp that’ll trace your virtual tracks and hunt you down in the meatworld?”

Billy’s smile got small and quiet and dangerous. “It was worth it, Annie. I found out who killed Roberto in the database, too – the information was right in his dossier. In yours.”

The silence thundered between them.

“Don’t worry about me. I have my ways of getting in and out of virtual space alive. My contacts. My brothers.”

Annie nodded at him, numb to her bones. “So you know who killed him.”

“You want to know.”

“I’m not so sure. What can I do about it, even if I do know?”

Billy didn’t answer her. Instead, he guzzled the rest of his own protein gel and crushed the titanium can between his fingers. He kept crushing it into a tiny cube, as Annie watched.

“Once I found out where you were and who killed Roberto, I had to find you,” he said.

“So here I am, you found me,” she said, a little waver in her voice. “Growing this ball of ice into something habitable.”

Billy turned his head to look at the flimsy synthwood door to the hut, and Annie knew he could look right through it with his modified eyes. “That Bowman eco-drive is incredible. No other worldcorp has technology anything like it, not yet anyway. You grew a whole world.”

“Well, a few hundred square meters worth. But we have to make it more than a few kliks wide for a colony to settle here and get to work. The precious metals frozen inside the ice are worth trillions. Once it’s habitable, we can extract that ore and conquer the whole quadrant. We can use this as a regional base.”

She still spoke of “we”: what she and FortuneCorp could do together. It was a habit she had, maybe a bad one, but she wanted to belong to something – anything that was bigger than her and her fears.

Billy kept staring at the door, and didn’t look away even when Annie dared to touch his shoulder. When he didn’t respond to her, she squinted at the door as if she could see through it too, through sheer orneriness.

Nope.

Before she could say anything, Billy whispered directly into her mind: What’s that?

Those two little words sparked the shakes in her, from deep inside, working out to the tips of her fingers, to the ends of her hair. For two reasons.

One, Billy spoke directly into her mind. How did he do that? She wasn’t genmod in any way. Not even Roberto could do it, whisper into her soul. And he had tried.

So, what just happened?

The other reason was that Billy seemed to have seen something lurking in the jungle she’d grown, outside the perimeter of her research hut. But she hadn’t introduced any fauna to her flora, not yet.

So, what the bloody hell was out there?

Billy must have picked up on her fear, for he rose silently to his feet, and put her behind him. He took a blaster out of his boot (so that was where it was) and walked to the door, step by soundless step.

Once he reached the frame, he motioned Annie back, and she decided not to argue. Before she could take cover behind her desk, Billy reached forward lightning fast, and swung the door open.

In a flash, Annie saw the hummingbird-fast metal wings and screamed, “Don’t shoot!”

Billy reached forward and pinched Violet out of the air and into one of his big, square palms. Violet squeaked, and the gears ground audibly in the joints of her translucent wings.

“That’s my lab assistant,” Annie said, shaking so hard she reached for the top of her desk to keep from toppling over. “Violet. That’s what I call her.”

Billy brought the wriggling AI to her desk, opened the roll-top with an elbow, and pinned its metallic little body against the realwood surface.

“Looks like a killer drone to me,” Billy growled.

“Violet’s FortuneCorp-issued. And yes, they make the drones. But her directive is to assist me. She does growth measurements around the dome’s perimeter, to see how permeable the dome membrane is at the edges. To see if we can extend the geodome biosphere. I should’ve warned you about her. Sorry, I’m such a ninny.”

Billy snorted at that, sighed, and let Violet go. She buzzed on her back for a minute, like a metallic dragonfly, and then she found her footing and swung onto her furry-looking titanium feet.

“What’s that?” Violet asked in her high-pitched, buzzing voice.

Annie restrained a sigh. “This is my old friend, Billy Murphy. He was, erm, in the neighborhood, and decided to stop by and say hello.”

Violet’s compound eyes took in Billy and Annie in a single glance. And for the first time, those jeweled, all-seeing eyes unnerved her.

They seemed to see right through her. Seemed to know who killed Roberto. And why.

But Annie’s dangerous days were done. She was a frontier gardener now, she wanted to tell Violet.

And that’s all she wanted to be.

Violet joined them for the rest of their little picnic. Billy no longer looked at Annie or said much of anything. He just watched Violet. And Violet watched Annie.

“I need to return to my monitoring duties,” Violet finally announced. “Are you sure you are okay here, boss?”

Annie smiled at her. Oh, she knew Violet was programmed, and didn’t grow spontaneously out of carbon-based life, but she’d never cared. Violet knew an endless supply of silly jokes, entertained her and diverted her through long days of data analysis, eco-development, and heat generation under the geodome. Violet distracted her, on long, lonely, dark nights balanced on the edge of forever.

Her smile faded, though, as Violet’s wings buzzed into life. For the first time, Annie saw a creature created by FortuneCorp, one whose loyalty extended through her to her mother – the corporation. But Annie only said, “Goodnight, Violet. All’s well. As usual, mark me as off duty until sunrise.”

“Will do, boss.”

And with a buzz and blur of wings, Violet was gone into the night.

“You are in terrible danger,” Billy whispered, after Violet was well and truly gone.

“I know,” Annie whispered back.

“No. You don’t know who killed Roberto. Who is likely to kill you, too.”

Annie was afraid to know the truth. The truth was too horrible to hear.

Billy slid closer, put an arm around her, and leaned his head against hers.

Warmth flooded through her, and after a moment of basking in the pure human contact, Annie realized with a jolt that it wasn’t just emotional warmth she felt. Her body seemed to have connected with Billy’s.

Their consciousness seemed to have merged.

Roberto had once described the mental union he’d felt with his team, the way the genmod made it possible for them to fight as one. And now she felt that merging for herself. Billy spoke into her now, the way he’d once spoken into his team.

FortuneCorp.

Was all that Billy said. He said it into her mind.

That was all it took, to strip the willful blindness from her eyes.

FortuneCorp.

It was FortuneCorp that had known about her background and profited from it. FortuneCorp that knew she’d refused to go off-world while Roberto still served in the Glass Desert. He was their employee, but he was also a US citizen. He had undergone the genmod without their express permission, and FortuneCorp knew that not even the corporation could recall Roberto from the field of war.

So FortuneCorp had killed Roberto.

Not a dying radiation-poisoned terrorist, as the government had told her. She hadn’t believed that for a minute, but she’d assumed it was some corporate rival, some other worldcorp, killing Roberto to kill his value to his own company.

But FortuneCorp, her employer and Roberto’s, had murdered him. So that it could post her off-world like it wanted. To test the Bowman eco-drive, gain that competitive edge.

Now she understood. As long as she worked on the Bowman eco-drive and asked no questions, FortuneCorp got what it wanted out of her. But if she quit, if she betrayed the company’s loyalty, her value to FortuneCorp was gone. And if FortuneCorp couldn’t have her talents, nobody could.

Her life was balanced on a razor’s edge. She opened her mouth to speak, but Billy stopped her with a kiss. A kiss so mind-blowing in its intensity that all the devastating truth melted in its wake.

She surrendered to the fire of it, and it burned away the fear, the grief, the pain. The “we” was gone, was never more than a lie. Only an incandescent rage remained. And for the first time, an acceptance of the fact that Roberto was truly, forever, gone.

Billy whispered from inside that fire, into her mind. I am getting you out of here. Alive. I swear.

Annie made a little sound, and didn’t bother trying to get her brain cells to respond in words. Instead, she wrapped her arms around him, and just kissed Captain Billy Murphy back.

He caressed her gently with his fingers, their tips feathering down the back of her neck and against the length of her arms. With a sigh, she surrendered to him, let the molten flood of feeling crest over all of her defenses.

His kiss became more insistent, and she opened her mouth to his, curling into his arms as they twined together on the floor. She ran her fingers through that thick hair, felt the stubble along the edge of his jaw, and that inner sensation of openness and vulnerability was almost more than she could bear.

She almost pulled away then, begged off, asked for more time, made some excuse and slipped out of his fingers. But Billy sighed too, and to her shock her heart surged inside of her. Began beating in tandem with Billy’s heart, throbbing together in a single rhythm.

I will never leave you, he whispered into her, and all she could do was make a little sigh of gratitude in response. He kept kissing her even as he set her full length along the ground, and pressed his body against hers.

The warmth of him spread, and their shared fire rose up in her. His hands found her bare skin, under her tunic, and she trembled under his gentle but insatiable touch.

Their hearts beat together, faster and faster. And then, at the same moment, their eyes opened. And it was like she was inside of Billy’s body, staring back at herself. She simultaneously looked into him, and he looked into her. This communion was more intimate than even the act of sex; they mingled souls as well as their bodies.

From that double vantage, she could see what he saw when he looked at her. Feel what he felt. And the tears sprung up in her eyes. She was beautiful!

Billy kissed Annie again, as if he could kiss his life force right into her. She was the only woman who could slip through his fingers and right into his heart. He’d felt closer to her just hunting her in the cyberworld, and then the farthest quadrants of space, than to any other woman he’d ever known.

This little freckled blonde woman, who had run away from him to save him, had stolen his heart forever.

Annie couldn’t get enough of his lips, the velvet skin at the nape of his neck. She kissed down the side of his face, and she whispered, “Just this night. And then you go. Please.”

I will never leave you.

And she gave up trying to convince this man, who had the force of a hurricane, to do anything he didn’t want to do. She knew he wanted to kiss her, and for one night she’d gladly take every last kiss that Billy Murphy had to give.

I’m going to take your kisses in return, Annie. Make you mine, forever. But first I want to make sure you are safe.

With a sigh, Annie did the thing she never did, and accepted things for what they were. Bit by bit, her consciousness receded from his, then with a sudden snap she was back in her body, and Billy Murphy was back in his.

They lay together in a sweaty, intertwined heap of longing. “I want you, so bad,” Annie said.

“No kidding, right?” Billy said out loud, and laughed. “But I’m not getting naked with you, no way tonight. By this time tomorrow, though . . .”

By this time tomorrow, if Annie had her way, Billy would be safely gone. Her desire pulled hard, deep in the base of her belly. Annie licked her lips, and tasted the sweat and tears mixed together. And she was surprised to find the taste sweet.

They turned off the lights. Instead of lying in the cot, Billy insisted they sleep behind the bed, pressed up together on the floor against the flimsy back wall of the hut.

“Trust me,” he said. “Sweet dreams.”

His voice, so everyday and cordial, such a contrast to the raw passion they had just shared.

“But what about Violet?” she asked.

“I’ll take care of that little bitch.”

She got that he didn’t trust Violet. But how could a little, unarmed lab AI do her any harm?

Annie soon found out.

Somehow Annie fell into sleep, tucked inside Billy’s sheltering arms. He smelled like cinnamon and musk. She dreamed of far-off gardens filled with spices and wild creatures, fierce and beautiful.

Billy’s face hovered over hers in her dream, open, finally at peace. The war was over . . .

Annie awoke to furious buzzing and violent curses, flailing arms, and the hoarse cries of a man fighting for his life.

She rolled under the cot to get out of the way, and the battle royal raged above. She heard the crash of furniture, the desk smashing to the ground, Billy’s angry roar, the whine of Violet’s wings.

She reached up and felt for the blaster still hidden under her pillow.

No! Annie!

And she drew her hand back just as fast. As if Billy had smacked her.

A second later silence thundered down over them, as if the battle had never happened.

“Billy?” she whispered, suddenly full of a terrible foreboding. “Billy!”

No answer, and after another minute Annie decided she was done with hiding.

She hesitated, waiting for Billy to yell into her mind again.

Nothing.

She crawled out from under the cot and flicked on the bare bulb that hung over the smashed remains of her desk.

Billy lay sprawled across the floor, utterly still. With a cry, she rushed forward and rolled him over with an adrenaline-fueled strength, searching his body for wounds. Violet buzzed up into her face, like a fat, lost cicada in Forest Hills in August.

She slapped the insectoid AI away from her. “Stand down!” she ordered. But instead of responding, Violet buzzed away from her, drunkenly banging into the flimsy synthwood door over and over again.

As Annie watched in horrified fascination, Violet fell to the ground and crawled away through the crack between the door and the threshold.

“Billy.” She turned back to him, racking her brain, trying to figure out how a tiny AI could fell a big lug like Murphy. How could Violet have killed him without any firepower at all?

She checked for a heartbeat and found it, faint but steady. She let her hand rest against his chest. She listened to his breathing, so tentative that it seemed it might stop again at any moment.

Come back to me, she whispered inside his mind, not realizing she’d done it until he stirred under her, responding to her words with movement.

She stretched out next to him, warmed his cold body with her own, restraining her panic like a ravening dog on a leash.

“Back,” Billy said aloud a minute later, words slurring. “It was poison. Little viper.”

He opened his eyes, and Annie looked into him, disappeared into him. If he lived, she had to get him out of here.

She blinked hard to break their connection, and looked around the ruined hut. She could see beyond the circle of light shed by the bare bulb overhead.

Daylight. They’d survived the night.

“Do you . . . do you need an antidote?” Annie stuttered, though she didn’t have one, nor any knowledge of how to concoct one.

“Nah. The genmod. Comes in . . . handy.” With a groan, Billy sat up, his sides heaving. “That poison, though . . . it woulda worked on you. Easy.”

Poison. Annie shuddered. “Violet.”

“Hells yeah, Violet. She didn’t have bullets or lasers inside her. I knew to check for that, before. But they stored poison in her. I’m not a drone specialist or I woulda known.”

With growing amazement, Annie realized he was apologizing to her. “You saved my life. You realize that, I hope.”

He shrugged. “She never woulda come after you if I hadn’t showed up. Violet’s here to make sure you stay here, working. But now she realizes I’m taking you away from here, away from FortuneCorp. And her real job is to kill you rather than allow you to get off-world with that Bowman drive. If they can’t have your genius, nobody can.”

Annie’s stomach did a slow flip. She’d always thought Violet worked for her. She was wrong. Annie worked for Violet, and if she messed up, she’d be terminated. For good.

“She used up her first strike on your pillow because your face wasn’t there,” Billy said. “She had to move fast to get past me, she knew that. Didn’t have the time to register you weren’t sleeping in your usual place. But man, her reserve dose was enough to do the job, too. Ow.”

Annie stared and stared at her pillow. The cover was shredded apart, and a thick, brown liquid puddled on the synthfoam padding.

She tore her gaze away and turned her attention to Billy’s wounds. Annie could see the vicious punctures slashed into his palm.

“She got away,” Annie said, and pointed to the door.

“She’s probably got an emergency beacon signal programmed in ’er,” Billy said, getting to his feet.

“Time for us to get out of here, wicked fast. I hear FortuneCorp is working on a wormhole drive. If they’ve perfected it, then they can get here in two hours, not two days. Gotta go.”

A sick dismay settled over Annie like a thundercloud, a terrible certainty of doom. The room did a slow spin, and she felt like she was going to puke. “But go where? FortuneCorp owns this whole sector. I can’t hide from them, Billy. You came all the way out here to find me, but it’s too late, no matter what Roberto told you. I think you can save yourself if you get out of here fast enough.”

Billy’s laugh shattered her. He drew to his full height, magnificent, alive, and unbroken, and she looked up from the floor at him in wonder.

“I don’t work for FortuneCorp. I don’t belong to them. Never did. The US Army broke me down and built me over as a genmod freakazoid. But FortuneCorp can go suck it.”

He reached down for her with his bitten, bloody hand. Annie held on and pulled herself to her feet.

“Remember those brothers I told you about? The ones that helped me find you? They got free of FortuneCorp, just like you’re gonna. They set up their own planet, with their own ways and their own freedom. And I’m taking you there.”

“But . . .” Annie’s resolve to sacrifice herself faded in the blaze of Billy’s furious stare.

“No buts. I know, I know, you want me to go and save myself. I ain’t built that way, and you know it.

You wanna save me? Then come with me. Because if you’re not leaving, then I’m staying, and we’ll deal with FortuneCorp here, together.”

He pulled her to the door, and this time Annie didn’t hesitate. She left her past, her fear and her determination to hide, lying on the floor behind them.

“Sully’s on the way to pick us up,” Billy said. “We could use a gardener out there where we’re going, on that new planet. You’re just the woman we need.”

They walked away from the trashed hut and into the jungle that had grown out of Annie’s vision, through her patient fingers and over time, with careful tending.

After a moment’s hesitation, Annie decided to speak her last misgiving. “How is it you can talk inside my soul?” she asked. “Roberto never could do it. He tried. It seems like, I don’t know, cheating somehow.

Like it wasn’t right I couldn’t commune with him like that. And here we are, you and me . . .”

Billy stopped walking and turned to face her. “Yeah, my bro Roberto was possessed of many gifts,” he said with a sigh. “You guys were good together. But, Annie girl, Roberto’s gone. And he left your protection to me.”

They stood in a clearing surrounded by gently drooping vines, along a pathway of soft moss. The sun filtered weakly through the dome, arching high above both their heads.

“I was the team leader you know, and Roberto worked under me,” Billy continued. “I called my brothers into union. That was my strength. Roberto could see ahead. But I could speak into his heart. And you can speak into mine, Annie. You know what that means.”

She did know. It meant that despite Billy’s physical strength, his horse-sense – as he called it – and his ability to survive anything, his love for Annie ruled him.

The jungle grew up around them, rich and green and fragrant.

When Annie looked around, she saw only the two of them walking alone in the garden. But she knew, despite all appearances to the contrary, they didn’t walk alone. For one thing, Violet, the killer, still hunted them out there.

But Annie reached for Billy’s hand and squeezed, and despite the terrible urgency that they get off AlphaZed3 now, he waited for her, the way he always had.

Annie closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and saw with her inner sight the place where Billy spoke to her. And she saw that in truth three of them walked in the jungle at dawn.

Goodbye, Roberto, she said inside of her, knowing that Billy could hear her too. I will love you forever.

Adios, mi corazon, Roberto replied. Anika will stay with me, Annie goes with Billy. You go on, and I will too. We will meet again, in that place beyond the edge of forever.

Annie kissed Roberto in her mind, and finally let him go. The whisper of his goodbye echoed over her as he faded away, speaking into her for the first time, and the last.

She watched him go, blinked the vision away, and took a look around. Only a moment had passed, but all had changed.

She was still in the clearing. Billy still waited for her. For the first time, Annie believed she could be free. Free of FortuneCorp, free of the past, free of herself and her fears.

“I never spoke with Roberto like that, you know, in the soul,” she whispered. “I don’t know if I really want to say goodbye to him.”

She waited for the faithful tears to appear, but for the first time, they didn’t come.

Billy spoke out loud, gently, with a sort of reverence. “Aw, you spoke to him without words, always, Annie. You have the soul of a healer. A grower of seeds, right? Anybody who could grow a world like this has the power to whisper into a heart. And what I heard was Roberto saying goodbye to you. He let you go, he wants you to go, you’re free. He still loves you.”

He took her hand and quietly pulled her forward through the little Eden she had cultivated. And she only paused to pull the Bowman eco-drive out of the ground. To take it with them, to grow a new world.

And they came to the perimeter, behind the research hut, where Billy had moved through the barrier between her fledgling paradise and the ice.

“I don’t have a cold-weather suit for you,” Billy said. “You can’t go out there yet.”

They stared beyond the clear barrier between Annie’s warm, unfurling garden and the frozen hell howling outside. Dimly, she could see the landing pod Billy had used to come down to her. It was already half-buried in the swirling snow and clouded ice of the native world.

And then she saw it. The rebel ship breaking through the ice planet’s orbit, hovering over the frozen surface. She read the words painted crudely on the battered hull: The Sullivan.

A warm cascade of light shot from the belly of the ship to Billy’s landing pod, then traveled along the ice to the permeable plexisurface of the geodome, seeking Billy. His soul.

The light poured through the clear membrane, warming her like the sun of her childhood. Annie put her hands up against the plexi, feeling the cool membrane yielding to the pressure of her fingertips.

And then right before Annie walked through into the protective light of The Sullivan’s waybeam, Violet rose up from underfoot. Beating her wings into the ground, like a homicidal mechanical hummingbird with a hypodermic needle for a beak, stabbing Annie’s shoe again and again and again.

Her poison vial, now empty.

Billy looked down, then scraped Violet off her foot with his boot, and stomped until the AI was no more than a cluster of crushed gears.

“I bet the beacon inside the AI still works,” Billy said. “We’re getting out of here, just in time.”

With that, they pressed through the membrane and walked up the pathway of light and into the belly of the ship that waited for them.

And Annie looked back one last time, to the garden she had grown, to the illusion of safety she was leaving behind. The dome glowed in the morning sunlight, iridescent as a soap bubble, the blasted frozen whiteness surrounding it.

Roberto wasn’t there.

A huge weight suddenly rolled off her shoulders, a burden she’d never realized she carried, until it was released. After a long, barren season, she was ready. It was time for Annie to let the grief move through her, radiate and fade away, though not the love, never the love. She’d never forget him, would love him always, but now she knew she was strong enough to carry the loss forward into the future.

Annie turned, kept walking into the light. And Billy Murphy walked beside her. She’d never run away again.