Range (5 page)

"Not even Gideon."

I crinkle my face at him. "Why?"

"Please, just listen to me, OK?"

I shrug. "Whatever. I can keep a secret, you don't have to worry about that."

He breathes out his relief and I watch him visibly shake off his apprehension. "OK, well. Besides killing the Mayor of Peak City, stealing some United Republics biometrics, and then purchasing two globally illegal weapons, what the fuck else you been up to lately?"

I laugh and push him back on the bed. "Ya know, Aren, if you'd have told me you wanted to date me I'd have been all over you years ago."

He laughs. All the way up to his eyes. "Is that right?"

I lean down and kiss him. His hands are suddenly all over my body, my shirt is off and my pants are unbuttoned before I even draw back to see how serious he is.

His half-mast gaze is all the proof I need. I lift his shirt off too and then he tackles me and makes the last twenty-four hours of stress and unhappiness melt away.

Chapter Six

It takes me three minutes to twist my excessively long hair up into a pony and throw on a pair of soft and faded denim jeans, a pair of brown leather field boots, and a white tank top. Then I sit on the bed in Selia's room and mope while she does her hair and make-up in the bathroom. The house audio is blaring some upbeat music with a female singer when Sel pops her curler-cluttered head out of the doorway. "This is that Cora chick I was telling you about, Junco. She's playing tonight in the arena on the main atoll. Wanna go see her?"

"What for?"

Selia stares at me like I'm a zit mucking up her perfect facial skin or something.

"Uh, I mean, do
you
want to go see her?"

She fiddles with a wayward curler as she talks. "Have you ever been to a concert, Junco? Ashur told me—"

"I've been to plenty of concerts, Selia. Jasus, you people think I'm an infant the way ya'll act like I've never been anywhere. I've traveled all over the world, I've seen Asgarth—"

"Junco, I mean like a
rock
concert?"

"What's the difference? It's music, right?"

She shakes her head and disappears back into the bathroom, but she doesn't stop talking to me. "Ashur said you never really had a teen phase, so ya know. I was just wondering if you wanted to go out. Act a little more like a young person and not quite so much like a grandma who happens to like cutting off heads. Have some fun and all that."

It bothers me that she knows so much about Ashur these days. Apparently she was in the Band for an extended period of time while my body was being mutilated by Inanna. He even paid for someone to fix that nasty head scar and her war-ravaged ear. I barely recognize her with the long blonde hair and her revealing tropical paradise wardrobe.

My hair is not the same either, but it's not exactly blonde. Yet, anyway. Blond hair is something all Archers get eventually but it takes a while. Gideon's is more brown than blond but I've been told I was morphed up a lot more than just one level while it was my turn to be held prisoner in Inanna's torture tank for Stag kids, so I guess that's why my hair is much lighter than his. It looks sun-streaked with parts that are very dark still. It's a total fucking mess and it hangs way down my back when not up in a pony. It catches on stuff and waves in my face and I find my fucking hair stuck to everything. I should just shave it off so I'd have a good six months before I ever had to think about it again.

All Archers have blue eyes as well. Gideon's eyes were always blue, but mine were hazel, so they aren't quite blue yet. They have freaky blue splotches running through them now, though. Color that looks like it's desperately trying to push away the green and brown that used to dominate in there. I have no idea how people can stand to look at me to be honest. Everything about me is a clusterfuck of hazel.

"Ashur knows nothing about my teen years, Selia. Not even Gideon knows what I was doing, so you guys can keep your pity talks to yourselves, I'm not a child, I might not have had screens and rock concerts, but I had work. And I defy you to tell me how that's not applicable to real life."

Selia comes out of the bathroom, her eyes darked up, her lips glowing and pink, and her naturally golden hair flowing down her back in large bouncy ringlets.

She's beautiful.

And I'm jealous of how easily she fits into her own skin, at how she can make small talk with strangers—even the guards in the elevator and downstairs in the lobby. And most of all, at how she always seems to be smiling.

Selia is more than beautiful, she's glowing. She's ravishing. And she's Ashur's girlfriend. Long-term girlfriend. Committed girlfriend, like if they were not involved in all this end-of-the-world shit they'd be picking out china patterns and writing each other love promises.

I haven't see Ashur since I've been back, but I've heard how Selia talks to him on the comm. Makes me want to puke.

And makes me a little jealous, too.

Not that she's with Ashur, he and I have never quite recovered from the whole Deliverance/Kush thing back on Amelia. I'm jealous because I know Ashur tells Selia how he feels about her. I know because she's always ending her calls with that stupid love promise.

Tier never did that with me when we had our little post-Deliverance holiday. He was affectionate and tender, but he never said sweet things to me.

But I'm no Selia, so I guess I understand.

And it should come as no surprise that Ashur fell in love with her while I was away being morphed. Selia looks happy.

I have a permanent frown, I'm afraid to talk to anyone except Gid and Sel, and I feel like my brain has been forced inside a body I've never met before. Even when I came out of the tank with wings back on Amelia I never felt this detached from myself. My replaced fingers and missing scars just make it worse. When a nightdog eats two of your fingers and a psycho slices a SEAR knife down your jawline, you're supposed to have to live with the consequences of those things forever.

And when you cut yourself in half to save the man you love, there should be evidence of that.

But my scars have all been erased. Every bite from the mutants in the Stag, every prairie lion claw mark, every battle wound I've ever had inflicted on me is gone. Even the one I inflicted on myself.

Just gone.

On the outside anyway.

The inside is another thing entirely. Memories of a brother I will never see again haunt me every fraction of a second—waking or asleep. I say his name in my head almost continuously. Every heartbeat says
Isten
. When I breathe in I say
Isten
. When I breathe out I say
Isten
. When I stop I say
Isten
. There is no rest from the pain, only a shallow reprieve that allows me to function for fractions at a time.

But reprieves are only temporary. A postponement of the inevitable, and nothing else. My mind is tempered by the reprieve, but this strength will not last forever.

Selia is suddenly in my face. "You're not wearing that tank top, Junco. I mean," she looks me up and down and her eyes stop on my chest, "you really gotta play up your assets." Her face brightens back up as she beams at me. "I'll find you another top. The jeans are OK, not great, but with the boots you almost look like a sexy cowgirl."

Cowgirl? What the fuck kind of drugs is she on? These are surplus
military
boots for Christo's sake. "I'm not really going for sexy, Selia. Just comfort."

She snorts in the closet but doesn't answer me.

Her room is nothing like any room I've ever had. It's not girly like my princess room, or minimal and modern like my secret room or my rooms on Amelia.

It's homey. Comfortable. Just a mess of this and that—nothing that matches or has any sort of style to it. In fact, most of her furniture is downright ugly—that rattan shit that makes me think of old people communities in the Texas peninsula.

But somehow it fits her. She makes it beautiful. Selia makes everything more beautiful.

Gideon kicked me out of his room, with the big luxurious bed covered in an Egyptian cotton duvet and piles of downy pillows, the first chance he got. So my current room is Gideon's guest room which has a sort of not-lived-in tropical-tourist thing going on. Not rattan, thank God, but more like regular summer camp for twelve-year-olds—two sets of bunk beds of all things. Two! Like he rents this place out as a holiday home when he's off killing people and needs stacked beds to accommodate large family reunions.

I snort at that thought. As if. As if we ever had one of
those
.

Nothing in that room is mine. Not one thing. Even the clothes were purchased with Gideon's credits in the gift shops downstairs and I had to have these boots overnighted to me because all they had in stock were flip-flops and strappy sandals.

I don't mind flip-flops for the beach, but I don't do strappy anything.

So to recap, Selia is beautiful, easy to talk to, and well-adjusted.

Right. Got it.

I'm a mish-mash of rural Farm girl and avian killing machine, afraid to talk to strangers, and well on my way to a severe psychological disorder that cannot be controlled.

This night is starting to sound like fun already.

Selia appears in front of me holding a brown leather bustier.

"No. I'm not wearing that."

She pouts. "Why not? You'll look great."

I'm about to answer with several cognizant reasons when she whips the tank over my head and spins me around, flattens the bustier to my chest, places my hand over it, and proceeds to try and zip it up.

The zipper sticks in the small of my back.

"Shit, Junco. You put on some pounds. Suck it in for a second, will ya?"

I do and she tugs on the sides of the leather and the zipper at the same time until it gets past the force of tension and slides up my spine.

She spins me around again and smiles. "Sorry about the pounds remark. The weight looks really good on you actually. You were always nothing but muscle and bone, but now—" she looks me over a little and clicks her tongue. "You're all curvy and shit."

I sigh as I wiggle and give the girls a little adjustment inside the bustier. I've noticed the extra bulk myself and I'm sure this will really fuck up all my defense moves, so it sorta pisses me off that Inanna made me downright pudgy compared to how I used to look. Soldiers don't need curves, just muscles.

It's funny though, I don't weigh any more than I did before this morph. I guess the wings were replaced with fat and that accounts for the whole conservation of mass going on. It's like my body is a chemistry equation that must be balanced—an honest-to-God stoichiometry puzzle. The problem is, I'm never sure if the products are better or worse than the reactants.

Selia pushes me to sit down on the bed, pulls the elastic tie out of my hair and starts to brush it with long even strokes. I hate brushing it. Strands come off and fly all over the place. They stick to my arms and clothes and drive me crazy.

I just sit there and let her do her thing. She comes at me with some kind of flat-iron and drags it down my hair to make it even and straight. It hangs lower now but it's not as unruly, so that's good.

I balk at the make-up but Selia slaps my hand away and orders me to sit still.

I do.

It's so much easier to let people do what they want than it is to fight them.

When she's done I don't even bother looking in the mirror. Who cares?

Not me.

We walk out to the living area where the elevator doors are open and waiting for us but there's no one inside. Gideon's voice carries back into the house from the terrace and I spy him and Sho out there. Gid has no shirt on and his upper body is golden brown from the sun. He's got some mirrored sunglasses on even though the sun has set and a cigar dangles from his lips. They seem to be a permanent fixture in his mouth these days. The few times he's gotten close to me the smoke on him is all I can smell. It makes me think of us at home. I frown at that thought. Thinking of camp as home is wrong.

Isn't it?

Gid's Archer scars are pale marks that partition off his back, the large triangle coming to a point somewhere below the waistline of his cargo shorts.

If he was Tier, I'd call that sexy. I might even have to see where that line eventually stops.

But this is just Gideon. He's not sexy. He's just Gideon. In fact, he's sort of an asshole these days and I'm not really sure if that's left over from the tough-love act of the first few days where I refused to come out of the bedroom, or if he's really holding something against me.

I've never even bothered to look at my own Archer scars, but both they and the wing bumps are mostly hidden by my hair. Selia says it's not so unusual to have such marks. Apparently people do all sorts of weird things to their bodies, up to and including scarring themselves on purpose.

I sigh.

Life.