Someone was messing with JT’s face. He slapped weakly in front of him and said, “Quit it,” with as much threatening, slurred force as he could muster. He had a splitting headache like someone had dropped a house on him, and his eyes wouldn’t focus.
Someone was saying, “Can you hear me? Hey, JT, say something.”
JT’s vision cleared. He was lying on a wide black leather seat that wrapped the circumference of a spherical room. The walls seemed to be made of translucent blue glass that rippled like water in a breeze. Sometimes the ripples were strong enough that a section of the walls would go clear. There wasn’t a hard edge anywhere in the room. Everything was curves. There was a gap in the wall, and through it he could see the ruined face of the lodge. A ramp ran from the gap down to the deck.
“How many fingers?” Austin waved his middle finger at JT.
“Fuck you too. What happened?”
Austin held up the Blue Unicorn’s data block. “I saved the day. As usual. While you sat around sleeping. As usual.”
Buzz stood at a round table of black glass in the center of the room. It shimmered with aerial images and interface controls. Buzz was covered in dust and splinters and blood. He looked awful.
“Are you okay?” JT asked Buzz.
“I’m fine.” Buzz came over and knelt next to JT. “You took the majority of it, I think.”
“What is this place?”
“The Marid.”
“3djinn has a magical bubble ship,” Austin said.
“It’s not magical.”
“I don’t know why they didn’t just send this to San Francisco to get you.”
“Maybe because it’s a secret? And UFO sightings get a lot more credit these days than they used to.”
JT struggled upright. He reached out to touch one of the walls. It felt like warm glass. “How does it work?”
“See, I told you he’d ask that,” Austin said to Buzz. “You can’t show him things like this. It gets him worked up. And then he bites.”
Buzz flashed him a dirty look.
JT scanned the place closer. “I don’t see any engines; how does it fly? Am I actually looking through the walls or is it a projection?”
Austin shook his head and rolled his eyes. “We probably shouldn’t stick around here. Buzz, get this thing off the ground.”
“No, my truck!” JT tried to stand.
Austin held him down. “JT—”
Buzz said, “Your truck is trashed, JT. Victor turned it into a pile of junk.”
“I ain’t leaving my truck.” He pushed at Austin, but he was still a bit woozy and Austin and Buzz held him down easily.
“You can print yourself a new truck,” Buzz said.
“I don’t want a new truck. I want that truck.”
“Hey, hey!” Austin took JT by the shoulders and turned him away from Buzz. “Hey, you know we can’t stick around here long enough for you to fix it, right? We’ve got nothing left. We’ve shot our load. Wham bam, there’s a good boy. And now we gotta go? Right?”
“Yeah, yeah, right.” Then JT shook his head. “But maybe if I can just get it running . . . extra parts somewhere . . .” He tried once more to stand up, but Austin pushed him back down again.
“JT, your truck isn’t important right now,” Buzz said.
JT snarled at him, and Buzz yelped and leapt back, eyes wide.
“You’re not helping!” Austin snapped at Buzz. He rubbed JT’s shoulders to calm him. “I’ll come back and get it for you.”
“You can’t even drive it.”
“I’ll get implants,” Austin said, cheerily.
“You will not.”
“I will. I’ll give up magic so you can get your truck back. Fair trade, innit?”
“Shut up.” Austin was just being stupid.
“Nope, it’s done. No arguments. I’m getting implants.” Austin sat back and looked away, feigning the end of the conversation.
JT tried to glare at Austin. He couldn’t. He was filthy with zombie guts and things he didn’t even want to think about. He was all battered. His drones were gone. His truck was gone. And yet, somehow, he didn’t feel nearly as shitty as he should have. Austin was there beside him making stupid promises that would never come true, like old times. And JT couldn’t get mad at him.
“All right. Let’s go. But let’s go now before I change my mind.”
The Blue Unicorn’s data block was heavier than it looked. A galaxy of rainbows caused by light refracting through a few million oxide monolayers danced inside it like a captured soul. JT had seen an artist who’d made window mosaics from the broken pieces of data blocks: tiny rainbows made by crystals carefully rotated and offset. It had been so beautiful, it had hurt to look at it.
It hurt to look at this block also, and JT couldn’t do it anymore. He handed it to Buzz. There were no sockets on the black glass table, no data jacks, nothing. Buzz just laid the block down on it. Apparently that was enough.
“We’re linked up to the 3djinn satellite. From there she can go anywhere she wants.”
“3djinn has a satellite?”
Buzz shrugged. “Someone may have lost one.”
Buzz wasn’t an impressive-looking guy—cute, but not handsome, not striking, not scary—so it was easy to forget that he was one of the most talented hackers on the planet. Maybe he even forgot it himself. But here on this bizarre aircraft, it was hard for JT to look at Buzz and not think of all the shadows and secrets that lay behind him.
“It’s starting.”
JT expected to see lights or a mist or something emerge from the block and drift upward. There was nothing like that. Buzz hadn’t invited JT into the Marid’s cyberspace to witness the transfer, so JT was as blind to what was happening as Austin. It was invisible, memory erasing itself, methodically shifting to zero-potential. To them it was just a data block on a table.
Buzz watched critically, eyes cyberspace-glazed. Austin smiled faintly, celebrating the rescue of some small part of his sister from slavery and dissection.
Austin wouldn’t see this as an ending, would he? This ghost had already set a fire under him and reignited his obsession with his sister’s death. People like Austin and JT never got closure. Bodies were rarely recovered when an illegal job went bad. Sometimes you didn’t even know whether a person was dead or captured or just decided to say fuck it and run off. Funerals were a drink and a smoke and a toast. JT should have counted himself lucky—this was the funeral they’d never been able to give her. This wasn’t a semisentient program released into the world’s networks, but a soul released into whatever infinity there was.
“Goddess, I’m ready to be home,” he said.
“Aaand . . . she’s gone.” Buzz smiled victoriously.
It was a shame that closure was just something some marketing guru had thought up to sell pop-psychology vids. It would have felt good.
Beneath them swept the Painted Desert. Mottled red and browns in the distance became sharp bands beneath them, as if they were passing over a color-coded elevation map and not real geography. The walls of the Marid never remained transparent for long; ripples of black and blue passed over the view.
Buzz and JT sat together and watched everything roll past. JT said, “You aren’t going to stay with me, are you? You’d be safe there.”
“Seeing you and Austin talking again, I thought that meant you were putting together a new team and maybe you wanted me along, you know, like you needed Roan, someone net-side doing that part of the job. And in my head I was thinking all this was like an interview or a test run or something. And you and I, we could kind of be like how you and—” He broke off talking with a nervous glance at Austin because Austin was right there. But Austin pretended he hadn’t heard any of it, so Buzz went on, “But you ain’t putting together a team are you?”
“No. I’m going home. And Austin’s going back to wherever Austin goes.”
“Those years Roan and I roomed together, I knew what she did when she ran with you guys and you all left on your jobs and I stayed home by myself and did my thing. I was an accountant. I moved numbers from one column to another until they told the story I wanted them to tell. I was good at it. But nobody knew who I was. And, meanwhile, you all were fucking superheroes. I know I’d be safe with you.” He looked away from JT, through the rippling walls to the world outside. “I don’t want to be safe.”
And JT understood. Of course he understood. If someone had asked him to quit while he’d been on that high after that first job they’d all done together six years ago, JT would have said the same thing. And though he didn’t feel it now, he remembered that high, and he remembered he and Austin had gotten drunk and stoned and had fucked like animals all night. There wasn’t going to be any fucking this time, was there?
JT said, “With everything that’s happened, I never got to say thank you.”
“For what?”
“For Jason Taylor. For giving me the chance to be someone else.”
Buzz leaned in and gave him a soft bittersweet kiss good-bye. “Same.”
Austin watched JT watch the strange blue globe fly off north. JT looked melancholy, but then, JT always looked melancholy.
“Were you actually in love with him?”
“No. But I wanted to be.”
The globe didn’t seem to move, not like a plane. It only shrank until it was gone.
“It doesn’t matter,” JT said. “It’s hardly my first rodeo gone bad.”
“Maybe it will be the last.”
“Yeah, sure.”
Austin slung his bags over his shoulder, and the two of them crossed the lot of JT’s compound toward the house.
Dante burst out of the garage where she lived. She pointed at the sky and shouted and danced around like she was on fire. “What the fuck was that? Did you just come out of that? What was that? Was that aliens? I knew there was aliens, man! I knew it! Did you go to Mars? You went to fucking Mars, didn’t you? Or Europa or Io or some fucking place. Can I tell anyone? Is this like some secret that if I tell anyone they’ll wipe my memory or something? I won’t tell a soul, man, not a fucking soul, I swear. Except Duke, what do I tell Duke? Because he’s been wanting to know where the hell you been, and I told him I don’t know. Fucking don’t get wi-fi on Mars, do ya? Fuckin’ right ya don’t. Holy fuck, what was that? I want to go to Mars!”
“Hi, Dante,” JT said.
“We didn’t go to Mars,” Austin said.
Dante went from pointing upward to pointing at Austin like she hadn’t even noticed Austin was there until he’d spoken. “What’s . . .” Dante stopped herself and finished her accusation with a pained look that evidently Austin wasn’t meant to understand.
Austin understood just fine. Adoptive father and daughter were reuniting, and no place for Austin. “I’ll be inside.” He adjusted his bags and glared at Dante. As he brushed past the young orc, he snapped his arm like he was going to throw a punch.
Dante jumped back. “You see that!”
“He’s just messing with you. Don’t worry. He’s leaving.”
Austin kept walking. “Yeah,” he muttered to himself, “Don’t worry. I’m leaving.”
Suddenly he couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
So why didn’t he leave, then? Just to draw out the pain, he supposed.
Austin showered, repacked his things, and still JT hadn’t come in from talking with Dante, so he unpacked again and ran laundry. He poked around the house.
Living room, dining room, and kitchen all one big room. The front of the house was photosensitive glass, curtainless and tinted amber by the afternoon sun. There was nothing in the house that said that once upon a time JT had been one of the most notorious data thieves in Pacifica. Nothing that hinted at Austin or Grayson or Roan or Bell Anderson. Nothing that said anything about JT except that he was a technophile with a taste for minimalist decor and exposed concrete.
Austin sat on the couch and drifted off into a sleeping trance. Nebraska came and nudged at him, but then went away.
Movement stirred him awake. JT had gone into the john and left the door open a crack, a bachelor’s habit. Austin heard the thunder of JT pissing. It gave Austin that vague butterfly feeling and stirred up an ache thinking of the dick that could make a stream that loud. Then he heard the hiss of the shower, and all Austin had to do was move two meters and he could have watched JT strip down through the crack in the door. He didn’t.
He went to the fridge and rooted for food. Either Dante had eaten everything since they’d been gone, or there’d been nothing but condiments there in the first place. Probably everything would have had meat in it anyway. He threw his clothes in the dryer.
An hour later, JT came out of the bathroom wearing a clean pair of jeans and pulling down a steam-dampened T-shirt that clung to him like paint. He wasn’t wearing underwear. Though his jeans weren’t tight, Austin knew what to look for: that thick fold of denim there along his thigh was the curve of his cock; that faint shadow was the ridge of its head. God, Austin needed to be out of here.
JT sniffed himself. “Nearly boiled my skin off and I still smell like zombie.”
“It’s in your head. You smell like Lave-Love Springtime scent. There are other soaps, you know. Some of them actually smell like springtime.”
JT shook his head. “I smell zombie.” He went back into the bathroom, used a towel to pick up his fouled clothes, and dropped the whole mess into the kitchen incinerator. He opened the refrigerator, grunted, then squirted mustard on a heel of bread. He ate it at the front window.
Anyone else would have thought he was watching the sun set. Austin knew JT was watching the change in light over the Corvette.
Austin leaned against the dryer. It hummed against the small of his back. “The kid knows who I am, doesn’t she? She knows who you are. She know everything?”
“Yeah. Not every last detail. Enough. She knows what we’ve done.”
And JT didn’t say sex or thieving or killing, so Austin assumed he meant all of the above. “You trust her that much?”
“Yeah. I do. But it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like I said, ‘Sit down, I got something to tell ya.’ We were drunk one night and talking and elves came up and so we started talking about elves ’cause she’d never met one growing up in Greentown, just seen them a couple of times, and I told her about you and how . . .”
And that was more than just a trailing off. That was JT deciding he didn’t want to finish that thought.
Austin was about to press him: How what, JT? but JT said, “And I told her about you and then everything else.”
“You talked about elves, and then you talked about me because you don’t know any other elves, and then ‘everything else’? And that’s why you blew your cover to a seventeen-year-old car thief?”
“Yeah.”
You’re the worst fucking liar in the world. Austin didn’t know which words were the lie exactly, or maybe they were all lies, or maybe half-truths or whatever, but there was lying in there somewhere. And maybe it was a bit hypocritical, because Austin knew he wasn’t always so truthful either, but it stung that JT would lie to him. “She’s that special?”
“This whole life is special.”
JT didn’t look at him when he said that, and that’s how Austin knew it was true, and how Austin knew that he really had to go.
JT took a tiny bite from his sad little sandwich and stared out at the blacker-than-black car. He changed the subject. Or maybe in his head it wasn’t a subject change at all. “Dante says everything’s ready for the big meeting tomorrow. This is it, ya know, our first big break. I mean, we haven’t done bad so far, but it’s all been small orders except for the rigs we’ve put together for Duke and his mercs, but he’s an investor, so that doesn’t count. But Suborbital . . . Our first big break.”
Austin didn’t say anything. What could he say? He hoped the meeting would fail.
JT took another bite of his sandwich, grimaced at it, and tossed what was left on the dining table.
Austin knew JT wouldn’t fail. JT was a genius. JT and Dante would do their song and dance in front of the Suborbital execs, and they’d win themselves a contract worth hundreds of millions and that would be that.
JT chose a plastic mesh ball cap from a rack of them and went outside. Austin watched JT walk to the car. JT opened the door with his mind and climbed into the driver’s seat. Austin thought that JT would take the car for one last drive, but he didn’t. He just sat there.
The timer on the clothes dryer buzzed.
Austin went outside to tell JT good-bye.
“Thinking?” The driver’s-side window was down. JT was sitting inside, eyes closed, looking like he was meditating.
“No. Just enjoying the breeze.”
“From inside the car?”
“I am the car.”
A long streamlined curve ran from front fender to rear. Austin brushed his fingers along the stretch of it beneath the window. The special paint of the car absorbed radiation, so the car was still warm from the daytime sun even though the air had started to cool. “You can feel that?”
JT didn’t open his eyes or turn to look. He nodded. “The ridge under the window.”
“What’s it feel like?” It was a question he always asked about the way JT experienced the world. Machine sensoria was something that many took for granted, but was something Austin would never know. JT always answered unhelpfully, It feels like feeling. Except this time he said, “It feels nice.”
Austin swiped a hand lightly over the car top. “Does it all feel the same?”
“No.”
So Austin walked around the car, running his hand along the curves and angles and lines of the fender, the bumper, the spoiler. He kept going, and at the front of the car, he traced the chrome of the headlights with his thumb and rattled his fingers across the grille. Through the windshield’s tinting, he could make out the dark outline of JT’s jaw and the ball cap he was never without, and he could see the faint red glow of arousal in JT’s eyes. It didn’t all feel the same, did it? Some of it felt much, much better.
Front and center of the car’s hood gleamed the Corvette emblem in chrome, red, and black: crossed racing flags stylized into a V. Austin knelt before it, eyes locked on the burning eyes inside. If this didn’t work, he would look like a complete fool. Well, some things were worth the risk, weren’t they?
Austin ran his tongue slowly along one edge of the emblem. Chrome and lacquer tasted like nothing at all. He ran his tongue along the opposite edge.
He glanced up. JT’s head was thrown back against the headrest. His eyes were closed, lips parted in a small O. Austin smiled. Sometimes it paid to look foolish.
Austin made love to the emblem with his tongue. It was the most ridiculous thing he had ever done. He wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t known that JT didn’t find it ridiculous at all.
Austin swept his tongue over the flags. He dabbed at them and traced around them. He stroked one side with his fingertips while he licked the other. He did whatever came to mind, having no idea what worked and what didn’t, all of it feeling equally silly. And what did it feel like to JT? A blowjob? A rimjob? To a guy with a car fetish, maybe it felt like something incomparable.
“Austin?” JT growled softly. “Austin, come here.”
Austin ignored him. It was always best to ignore JT. The orc never really knew what he wanted until Austin showed him.
Enjoying the breeze, JT had said. The emblem was wet from Austin’s spit. He blew it dry. He licked and he blew.
“Austin!”
Austin went around to the driver’s side. He was going to say something smart-ass, but JT reached out the window and caught his belt and pulled him hard and tight against the car door with a thump. He held Austin there with one hand and undid Austin’s belt and khakis with the other. A thrill shot through Austin. A thrill even better than seeing Nebraska pluck that eye out of Victor’s head. This was what Austin had been missing the last two years. This was what he wanted.
JT’s warm, soft mouth sucked him in. JT’s tongue stroked him and swirled. Austin knew the satisfaction of feeling a cock swell slowly in your mouth, and he wanted JT to feel that too. So he fought the shiver that ran through him and the blood that coursed down. He tried to slow his heart rate and his breath. He wanted everything slow.
But he’d wanted this for too long, not just from the moment he’d driven into the compound and seen JT in his grease-covered overalls, but long before that. Forever before that. And Austin, who could run barefoot over a forest floor covered in knives of ice and ignore the pain, couldn’t ignore what JT was doing. He was rock-hard in moments.
JT’s arm snaked around Austin’s waist and held him fast. Austin couldn’t move if he wanted to. He stretched his arms forward over the roof of the car and laid his cheek against the smooth warm plastic.
It felt dirty and exciting, getting sucked off out in the open like this. Like he was one of the prostitutes down at Volunteer Park giving his dick to some john who didn’t want to leave his car. He glanced over to the big garage, half expecting Dante to be standing there watching. Dante wasn’t. Lights flickered inside through windows and doors open to the night.
JT covered Austin’s nuts with warmth, then cooled them with a hiss of breath, the same as Austin had done to the crossed-flags emblem. Yeah, that had worked just as he’d thought. The warmth of the car, the cool breeze on the back of his neck, the rocklike heat of JT’s arm around him, the soft tongue prodding Austin’s balls, tugging, sucking, fangs and tusks catching and nipping, the contrast of all these sensations—warm and cool, soft and firm, dull and sharp—made Austin shiver. He whispered JT’s name as heat slowly blossomed through him: JT. JT.
JT took him in again, and Austin felt the soft head of his cock press against the softness at the back of JT’s mouth and then slide on down, JT’s throat snug around him and so warm. All of him was in JT now.
JT fucked his own throat with Austin’s cock, insistent, needing, as rough on himself as he was on Austin, like what he really wanted was to shove all of Austin inside him and eat him alive, cock and balls first.
Like a dying star, the bloom of heat that wracked Austin hit critical mass. Austin Shea, greatest fuck on the western seaboard, wasn’t going to last even ten minutes with JT sucking him. It would have been shameful if it hadn’t been mind-erasing first. The bloom trembled. Austin tried to push away from the car. He wanted to watch. JT’s arm held him like a steel band. Austin fought him and JT let go, growling, unhappy.
Austin came, one arm on the edge of the roof keeping his head from smacking down. His body contracted tight, contracted, and contracted like a black hole forming inside him. “JT,” Austin said as his spunk splashed on JT’s forehead and nose and cheek and the rack of it all drove through him. “JT.”
A long time later he looked down. JT was resting his chin on his arm on the window’s edge, smiling faintly, all tusks and spunk, looking happier than Austin had seen him since forever.
Austin swiped a finger through his seed as it started to slide into JT’s narrow trail of a beard. JT opened his mouth, and Austin let him suck his finger clean. JT’s tongue on Austin’s finger felt every bit as good as JT’s tongue on Austin’s cock. He pulled his finger out. Pop.
“More,” JT said. So Austin kept feeding him.
“More.”
“Ain’t no more.”
“So make more.” JT gave him a pissed-off look, like that should have been obvious.
Austin ran his hand along his cock. JT’s eyes opened to slits, red as laser light, hungry, and watched Austin jack himself. People always thought an elf’s cock should be pretty, elegant somehow. Austin’s wasn’t. It was like the root of some old tree, ridged and gnarled and wrapped in veins. It was a great cock for sucking. Hell, it was a great cock for anything. He made sure JT got a good view of it as he stroked. And the look on JT’s face got hungrier and hungrier.
JT glanced up at him. “You brought protection?”
“Protection from what?” Austin smiled coyly. His hand made slick noises as he smeared JT’s spit over his cock.
“I want you to fuck me.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“We don’t need protection.”
“Yes, we do.” Wetness crackled as Austin stroked.
“Glove compartment.”
JT popped the dash and drew out a pair of oversized tungsten handcuffs. They couldn’t be bothered to make clothes or cars sized for orcs. But they sure could make handcuffs. “Good. Now get in the car.”