DRiTC #2 Snippet: Reclamation

Hi guys!

So, I finally finished my second prompt story, which I've tentatively titled Reclamation. I have no idea when it will be out on the Goodreads M/M Romance Group's website, but you can have half of the first chapter right here! It's a dystopian (because what else have I been doing lately) near-future-with-a-sci-fi-flair fic, and it all starts with strippers. Because that's what my prompter wanted, and that's what my prompter gets.

***

Chapter One

Matt could tell by the way Jojo sashayed over to him that he wasn’t bringing news he thought Matt wanted to hear. He leaned in close, suffocating Matt with the scent of his favorite floral perfume, and purred, “You’re up, Cali-boy. Your favorite patron got here five minutes ago, and he’s getting impatient.”

“Well, fuck.” The reluctance was all part of the act but genuine enough that Matt didn’t have to try too hard to sell it, either.

His reply got the expected laugh. “He might be a dog, honey, but he’s more bark than bite when it comes to you.” Jojo reached around and smacked Matt firmly on the ass. “Lucky you, huh? At least you know you’re gonna make the rent on nights like these.”

Matt rolled his eyes. He’d put on so much mascara that his eyelids felt weighed down by it, but there were certain expectations when it came to the look that Johnny Rock’s went for in its strippers. That meant his personal opinion was meaningless. It also meant Johnny, the owner and manager of the place, had taken one look at Matt three weeks ago when he first hired him and said, “You’re going to be California, you got it, boy?”

“California?” Matt didn’t follow. They lived in the sprawling urban center of Phoenix, Arizona. “Why?”

“’Cause you’re tan and you’ll look good as a bleach blond,” he’d said. Johnny was probably in his seventies, with a head full of white hair covered by a cowboy hat and his hand never far from a glass of whiskey, but the folksy affectations were nothing more than a costume for Johnny. Matt had seen more genuine emotion in roadkill. “Everybody’s got a schtick, kid, and that’s going to be yours. I lost my last California a week ago.”

“To what?”

In retrospect, it had been a dumb question. “Death,” Johnny had replied simply. “You in, boy?”

“Yeah,” Matt had said, because he really didn’t have any choice. This was his job, after all. His part of the case, the mission. He was going to do whatever it took to make it work. “Sure, I can be Cali.”

Three weeks later, Matt had his routine down pat. Cali was a sweet, slightly vulnerable West Coast transplant with a big, wide smile and a slightly goofy personality. Cali liked to be admired, and Cali wanted to be loved. Cali particularly liked the attentions of the youngest son of the head of the Jimenez cartel in Phoenix, a frustrated gay boy who flouted the disapproval of his family by frequenting the only all-male strip club in the city.

The Jimenez cartel ran a smuggling ring that trafficked drugs through the heart of the sun-burnt West, sneaking cocaine and heroin up into Canada and bringing high-tech mod chips that could enhance a person’s mental and physical traits when installed by a decent neurosurgeon. Mods were all the rage for people who could afford them, ways to keep yourself alive longer in the mess that had been left after the bullshit of the Second Secession thirty years ago. They were illegal to transport without some heavy-duty permits, but they could be smuggled easily enough inside of people.

Federal law enforcement had been happy enough to leave the Jimenez cartel to their work as long as the scope stayed small. They had bigger things to worry about than a few hundred pounds of heroin or a couple dozen mod chips making it over the southern border every other weeks. But the Jimenez patriarch wanted to expand his business, and he needed manpower to do it. Not the armed kind, either, or adding chips to girls who were trafficked north as part of the sex trade. They needed people who could blend in, carry dozens of chips in their bodies without rousing suspicions. That meant kidnapping locals and “persuading” them to work for the cartel. And while the easiest ones to press into service were the runaways who made their home on the cancerous edges of a dangerous city, there were some high-profile exceptions that had caught the attention of the feds.

All of which meant that Matt, recently promoted to detective out of Phoenix PD’s vast rank and file, was sent undercover in an attempt to gather enough evidence against the Jimenez cartel to give law enforcement an idea of how to put a stop to the kidnappings without resulting in unacceptable levels of violence. No one wanted a repeat of the Meth Wars, after all, and while the Jimenez cartel was as tight as any mafia family, there was always a way in. In this case, the feds thought that one way might be Tito Jimenez. And Matt was just his type. For now, at least.

Tito of the clammy hands, Tito of the bulldog set to his jaw, Tito who was too young to have that permanent frown line between his eyebrows. Tito was a regular at Johnny Rock’s, but who he spent his money on was fluid, ever-changing. He’d go as far as he could without getting rebuffed by either the stripper or Johnny, or however far his family would let him go before reeling him and his spending back in. Tito was a man desperate for something he couldn’t even put a name on, and it was Matt’s job to give it to him.

Matt stretched his back and shoulders out behind the curtain, listening to his intro begin on the stage. He still wasn’t used to the way his new implants had left his body so freakishly flexible. He’d lost his strength mods during prep for the mission— there was no way a young, unemployed drifter like he was posing as could have afforded police-standard modification chips. The force’s doctors had even removed Matt’s generic forearm implant for connecting to the web, to help emphasize his needy, destitute state. So it was bye-bye enhanced fast-twitch muscle development, hello black market insert that somehow turned his hips into a lazy Susan.

“You’re up,” Jojo reminded him, and Matt nodded. “Don’t forget your sunglasses.”

Matt groaned but took the shades, complete with bright orange frames. “These look fucking ridiculous.”

“But they’re so California!” Jojo mocked, grinning around his fake teeth. “Maybe Johnny would let you switch them out for a surfboard or something, if you’re really—”

Matt shot Jojo a horrified look. “Don’t even think about suggesting that to him!”

“I won’t if you buy me a drink after your show.” Jojo pressed a sparkly kiss to Matt’s cheek and then wiped it off with his thumb. “Go and impress your admiring hordes, Cali.”

“I got it.” One more quick inspection in the mirror and then he headed out on stage, ready for another round of seducing Tito Jimenez.

It was a game of catch and release, working at Johnny Rock’s. When you were onstage you played the field, heading for whoever waved the most money. Johnny ran a cash-only club, a throwback to the early oughts, but his acts were exclusive enough that people complied, bringing precious bills in with them in order to get a taste. There was a bounty on paper money, the government trying hard to transfer over to a card-only system that could be more easily tracked, and so that made cash even more desirable.

An old club remix of West Coast came on, and Matt headed out onto the stage. He didn’t affect a sexy strut like Jojo used, not for Cali. As Matt became Cali, he toed off his sandals and walked out barefoot, wearing nothing but a pair of ripped jeans so thin now they were almost translucent, and that stupid pair of sunglasses. The rhythm of his hips and shoulders was an enticing wave, sliding up and down the line of his body in time to the beat. This was a sensual song, even sped up to its current pulsing beat, and Matt elongated every murmur of the singer’s voice with a soft, subtle movement. He kept his smile small and secretive as he paced out to the pole in the center of the stage, spread his legs, and leaned his shoulders back against the cool metal.

The stage wasn’t raised very high, making it easy for Matt to jump down and work individuals depending on who earned his personal attention for a measure or two. He tilted his head down toward the floor but kept his eyes moving beneath the dark lenses, surveying the crowd. About thirty people sat around scratched wooden tables on uncomfortable chairs, some of them drinking or checking the screens on the backs of their forearms, but most were looking at him.

No one was looking harder than Tito Jimenez, his dark eyes wide and focused in his foxy face, a stack of bills on the table in front of him. He wore diamonds in his ears that glittered in the low light, and a gold cross on a chain around his neck that seemed to drag him forward. The two men sitting with him were less intent, one of them looking actively uncomfortable—bodyguards then, or rather, babysitters. Tito ignored them and shifted the top bill into his hand, waving it back and forth like a flag to a bull.

Well, Matt couldn’t be that easy. He grabbed the pole above his head and arched forward, hips leading the way, turning his upper body into a perfect ∩-shape. He pushed up onto his toes, bowing bare skin and toned muscle toward the crowd and then swiveled back to standing so smoothly he got a few gasps from the audience.

Tito had two bills held up now, rubbing them against each other like he was imagining them as flesh. Matt smiled and slid his free hand down his chest, absently tracing the cut plane of his abs as he picked his first target. There, two tables deep: Ball Cap. He came in a couple times a week and always had a leer for Matt. He smelled like day-old chewing tobacco, but he was a decent place to start. Matt sidled to the edge of the stage and dropped off the end like a leaf falling through the air, lilting and tilting but landing as softly as if he’d floated down. He ignored Tito’s small, shocked exhale as he headed away from him, hips swaying, to bend over the table in front of Ball Cap.

There was no grabbing, no pulling and no touching under the clothes or across the crotch. Johnny Rock’s was a surprisingly chaste place, all things considered, but that was part of the appeal. There were plenty of highball clubs where enough credit would put a naked girl in your lap to play with for all the world to see. Johnny’s strippers were desired in part because there was still an element of mystery, something that made mental fingers itch to uncover them.

Matt rolled over so that only the base of his spine and the tops of his shoulders touched the table, his head dangling off the far side just inches over Ball Cap’s lap, and grinned lazily. Rough fingers roamed over his bare chest, settling fast on his nipples and pinching them hard before Matt pulled away with a gentle tsk.

“Oh, c’mon,” Ball Cap whined, sticking two hundreds into Matt’s waistline and letting his hands linger there. “Come back, I’ll be nice!” He slipped his hand around to Matt’s crotch and palmed his dick through the smooth denim. Matt slipped gracefully away, ignoring the way his skin seemed to crawl. Keep it together. Put on a show.

“Not nice enough,” Matt drawled. “Maybe next time, baby.” The song was getting close to the halfway point, and he needed to draw Tito’s anxiety out a little more. A guy at the bar… there.

Matt had seen him in here several times before, always drinking just one beer at the bar before he left again. He’d never paid for any company, never catcalled or even made a gesture in Matt’s direction, but Matt’s thirst for lowbrow was at an ebb for the moment. He needed a chance to breathe a little, get his composure back, and this guy seemed like just the way to do that.

It didn’t hurt that he was handsome in that sweet boy-next-door way and obviously dead tired. Matt wondered what brought this guy in so late, then pushed his curiosity back as he set his palms down on the edge of the bar, encircling his mark, and rolled his hips in a figure eight that just barely brought their pants into contact. The man wore the plain, sand-colored cargo pants of a city worker and a T-shirt with a faded circular logo, oversized for his frame, but Matt could see the firm muscles in his arms and the definition in his shoulders. The frisson of desire that followed was surprising.

Matt wrapped his arms around the man’s shoulders and swayed gently into the protective curl of the man’s body. He didn’t smell too sweet, probably just off a shift somewhere, but his tentative hands rested like petals against Matt’s waist, barely brushing him. His palms were rough too, but warm and dry.

“I can’t…” The guy cleared his throat. “I can’t afford you,” he said quietly.

“It’s okay,” Matt whispered, pushing his sunglasses up. He glanced over his shoulder at Tito, who looked livid, a whole fistful of bills raised in Matt’s direction. “I’m just catching my breath.” When he looked back into the man’s eyes, though, he felt like he was losing air instead, his lungs going still for a moment under the weight of that considering amber gaze. “Thank you,” he finished, and then pulled away and headed for Tito, still swaying, carelessly undoing the top button of his jeans as he went. A few other men and one determined woman thrust bills at him, but Matt ignored them, trying to focus on his target and forget about the way the pockets of his hips still tingled from the man’s touch.

Redstone Ch. 8, Pt. 1

Notes: Yay, more Redstone! I'm actually hitting my goals so far for this week (oh yes, look, we're at all of Tuesday, I'm so fucking mighty :p) but it gives me hope. Forecasts call for utter insanity up through the 8th, and only mild craziness until the 14th, at which point they'll settle back into standard hustle-and-bustle fare. ANYWAY! Have a little Robbie, a lot of Wyl and some very enjoyable robot. At least, I think he's enjoyable.

Title: Redstone, Chapter 8, Part 1.


***

Redstone was even more bleak and funless than Wyl had thought it would be. He’d been in prison before; not a serious one like this, but the version that housed non-violent offenders as a means of working off their debt to society, or in some cases, just their debt. Wyl had signed on to get bonded as soon as the option was offered to him, thinking that anything would be better than the bland, colorless life of a Federation minimum security prison. He’d ended up enslaved to a madwoman on a ball of ice in the Fringe, so—bad deal, overall. He should have stuck with bland.

The point was, Wyl was intimately familiar with imprisonment. After living with Robbie for a while at Caravan, he even knew a fair bit about maximum security conditions. This place…this place was not maximum security. This place was hell, pure and simple. There were no attempts at rehabilitation, no genuflections in the direction of mental and emotional health beyond trips to the Regen tank, and then only when absolutely necessary. In Caravan, if you fucked over another inmate, you were put into isolation for a week before gradually being reintegrated back into the prison population with additional, but largely temporary, restrictions. From what little Wyl could tell about Redstone, it was basically, to use an Ancient Earth metaphor, a shark tank. The big and powerful ate the tiny and weak, and the guards were little more than puppets put there to keep the ‘bots running and provide a last-ditch failsafe against total anarchy.

Robbie, needless to say, wasn’t happy. He didn’t say anything, in fact, but Wyl hadn’t been in love with the guy for over a decade without learning his tells. He saw frustration in the curve of Robbie’s lips, annoyance in the slant of his eyebrows, and downright rage as his nostrils flared. One fucking day they’d been here, one day, and Robbie was already close to either breaking down or breaking faces. Wyl wanted to coax the tension out of him, and planned to, in fact, but he had his own project to get underway. Thank fuck he’d gotten his iron transmitters staged on the exterior surface of Redstone from a distance, because once they landed on the meteor the warden’s secretary was stuck to them like they were molecularly bound.

“You’re late,” he said to Robbie the moment they stepped off Warden Grave’s transport ship. He’d been pinging their ship’s comm for the past hour, but the pilot, a usually cheerful woman who was polite to a fault, had restricted all communications to text only, citing “mechanical issues.” Wyl had laughed at the time. Now he was starting to get it, though. “You should have been in training with the other guards an hour ago.”

“Gravity wave,” Robbie said easily, his crisp military voice giving over to a slouchy Ancient Earth accent that he’d told Wyl was loosely identified as “redneck.” “Can’t get ‘round ‘em sometimes.”

“Regardless, you will have to make up the hours. I’ll take you to get processed. Your…spouse,” he continued, glancing dismissively at Wyl, “can get started transporting your things to your quarters. Agent ZB89 will guide you there.”

“So much for the welcoming committee,” Wyl said soft enough that only Robbie could hear it, just to see him crack a little smile. “Go get processed and meet the rest of the boys, honey,” he said more loudly, punctuating his statement with a noisy kiss that made the sour-faced secretary frown harder. “I’ll get us all settled.”

“Thanks, babe.” Robbie sidled off, leaving Wyl alone with ZB89. The robot was a single-wheel model, ancient by modern standards, actually using a gyroscope to stay upright and with no hover technology at all. Wyl itched to take it apart, but that wasn’t the way to make a good first impression. He shouldered a bag and grinned.

“Lead on, ZeeBee.”

ZeeBee’s green eyestrip brightened momentarily. “Command accepted. Follow me, human-male-spousal-counterpart.”

Wyl grimaced. “That’s a hell of a mouthful. How about you just call me Wyl?”

“Wyl is not a complete designation.”

“You need a last name too, huh? Or maybe a title.” He thought about it for a moment. “How about…Wyl the Conqueror?”

The eyestrip brightened again. “Suggestion accepted. Follow me, Wyl the Conqueror.”

“Aw, shit yeah,” Wyl crowed as he followed the robot. “I can already tell that we’re going to have a good time together, ZeeBee. When you see my husband, I want you to call him Christopher Robin, okay?” It was an old jab, but Wyl never got tired of it.

ZeeBee’s head swiveled back to regard Wyl even as his body continued to roll forward. “Are you authorized to change human-male-guardian-spouse’s designation, Wyl the Conqueror?”

“I am legally, morally and hilariously entitled to change all of my husband’s designations,” Wyl said confidently. “He’d be the last person to argue with you about that.”

“Accepted.” They left the landing zone and entered what looked like a shared living area, one large common zone with a big kitchen and plenty of holoscreen space. Two levels of rooms lined the longest two walls. ZeeBee led Wyl up a ramp to a battered-looking door at the very end of the hall. “You and Christopher Robin shall be living in Suite Two-Twenty,” the robot recited. “Press your hand to the reader.” It was scarred and cracked, but the palm scanner still worked well enough to accept Wyl’s print. “It will respond only to you and Christopher Robin, who shall be scanned in during his intake. Please enter.”

Wyl did, and was depressingly unsurprised by what he found. A living room, bedroom and kitchen, all with dingy white walls and well-used furnishings, and a tiny bathroom that contained an even tinier shower. Definitely no room for two in there. “This is the couple’s version?” Wyl demanded. “Really? I thought the suites were bigger than this.”

“Only guest suites are equipped with more square footage, and they are housed in another section of Redstone, Wyl the Conqueror.”

Of fucking course they were. Because just getting to run into Hummingbird in the halls would be too fucking easy. “Great. How do the other spouses feel about this?”

“You are currently the only spouse in residence, Wyl the Conqueror.”

Oh boy. That was…going to lead to problems, Wyl was sure of it. For now, though, it looked like he had the place to himself. “Where is everybody, anyway?”

“Emergency training exercises, Wyl the Conqeuror.”

“Great, perfect. Let’s go get the rest of my stuff, yeah? Are you cleared to help me with that?”

“I am cleared to act in whatever capacity you require that does not go against my base programming, Wyl the Conqueror.”

“Okay, enough of that.” Wyl clapped the robot on the shoulder. “We’re friends now, right? You can just call me Wyl. Think of it as both a name and title rolled into one, okay?” He watched the eyestrip brighten, then dim, then brighten again. “Come on, ZeeBee, I know you’ve got the justification in your programming somewhere, you’ve just got to dig deep.”

A moment later the robot’s eyestrip brightened, then settled into a steady green glow. “Command accepted, Wyl.”

“But stick to Christopher Robin right now for my husband, okay?”

“Accepted.”

With ZeeBee’s help, Wyl was able to get his and Robbie’s baggage from the tarmac to their quarters without running into anyone, which was good. He wasn’t afraid, necessarily, but he wasn’t looking forward to running the gauntlet here without Robbie as backup. Places like this became tight-knit, and not usually in a good way. Wyl wasn’t going to be able to charm his way into anyone’s good graces, and so it was better to have fear or intimidation on his side. And Robbie, for all he had grey hairs and the general demeanor of a lazy lion in his prison guard persona, was intimidating as fuck when he put his mind to it.

Wyl dismissed ZeeBee after a bit, telling the robot not to be a stranger, which made its green light flash brightly as it struggled to compute the colloquialism. He ignored the bags of clothes and most of the equipment in favor of rapidly reconstructing his remote pulse emitter. It connected to a tab that Wyl had programmed to assess the wavelengths of Redstone, searching for a frequency that would be close enough to something common that it wouldn’t be remarked upon, but different enough that it would be picked up solely by his communications array. The program didn’t take long to analyze things; Redstone, for all the hype, was still a fairly small place.

“Ah.” Wyl grinned with satisfaction. “Good.” The first pulse would be a test, a way to check on the viability of his array and to tell whether or not he’d need to use dampeners to diminish the strength of the signals. He took a deep breath, then sent his initial pulse out into the blackness of space.

A moment later, the tab pinged. Wyl inspected the graphical feedback, noting node strengths and locations with regards to where he was now, and where he anticipated his target was. 85% efficacy, well within the parameters he needed to operate. He grinned manically. “We’re in business now!”

Of course, it all might be a lark in the end. There was no way for Isidore to communicate back at them, not unless he happened to have a run-in with Robbie, which given their respective positions seemed like a bad option. He might not even get the codes, if the density of the prison walls changed too much or his mod was malfunctioning. But Wyl had to try. If it worked, at least Isidore would know he wasn’t alone.

Very carefully, he tapped out a message in Morse: CAVALRY IS HERE.

Posts for this next week...

Busy! Why? Gah.

I've got Redstone coming, a teaser for my second DRiTC story which I should be finishing this week, and I've also got a new Spanish translation of In All Your Ways coming soon. I've got the files, I just need to find the time to POST THEM (caps for my benefit, not yours, I'm all about motivation via self-recrimination). This week, I swear.

In other news, my folks have gone back to Germany, my MIL is settling down in Cambodia, and we are now without guests for the first time in...over a month. Holy shit. No wonder everything feels crazy; I have to relearn normal. Having people here was fun but super stressful, and I didn't get as much as I should have done. I will remedy that issue asap.

Hope your weekend has been lovely!

Redstone Ch. 7, Pt. 2

Notes: I'm back in action! Most of the family has left, I'm whittling down the projects on deck...and I'm really loving the way that Redstone is going, even though it's not nearly all plotted out yet. This story is shaping up to be a long one, darlins. I hope you enjoy this next part.

Title: Redstone, Chapter 7, Part 2.

 

***

Kyle was getting tired of headaches. He didn’t even remember how he’d gotten his current one, but it had a sharper edge to it than the last he remembered having, the one that had stuck around after his mod deactivation. This pain was a sharp, heated ache that radiated out from the back of his skull, like he’d been hit in the head too hard. When had he been hit in the head? The last thing he remembered was…

Fighting, a shin kick to the face, dodging, the swift crack of iron against his thigh, falling, and finally a pair of dark eyes in a solemn, considering face just before he—

Was hit upside the head, apparently. Kyle tried to shift his shoulders, and couldn’t quite repress the groan the movement induced.

“Hey, there. Hang on.” A steady hand pressed briefly to his forehead, soft and warm, before retreating a little bit. “Try and open your eyes before you try to go anywhere.”

Kyle wasn’t sure why he obeyed—it wasn’t like he had any reason to trust whoever this was—but he complied, slowly opening his eyes. The way his head hurt he expected the light of this place, however dim it was, to stab at him like a stiletto to the brain, but instead he saw a callused palm hovering over his eyes, shielding him from the light. He blinked, and the pain retreated a little more.

“Good,” the voice said encouragingly. “Do you think you could keep down some water?”

“Wha…” Kyle’s voice petered out, and he tried to clear his throat but couldn’t.

“Yeah, let’s try some water.” The edge of a cup pressed to his lips, and again, instead of fighting, Kyle opened his mouth and swallowed the lukewarm, metal-sour water. It helped, despite its awful taste, and when he tried to speak again he met with more success.

“Why…this?” Because Kyle just didn’t know. He couldn’t think. The fog was back, battling the dull red ache for control of his mind, and if he thought he could trust this person he’d just fall back asleep, but he couldn’t.

“Why am I doing this?” Kyle managed a little nod. “I think I hit you a little too hard,” the man said on a sigh. “Or they just didn’t fill you in very well. I’m your contact, Kyle.”

“My contact…”

“Yes, your contact. You help on the inside, the one who’s here to make sure you’re still here by the time your trial is called. Don’t you remember? Weren’t you told this?”

All Kyle felt was confused. “Maybe? I don’t…how do I know?”

The shielding hand disappeared, but Kyle was accustomed enough to the light now that it didn’t hurt any more without the protection. All there was were two glow strips set deep into the metal walls, not enough to fully illuminate the little alcove where he lay. It was a crowded place, every nook and cranny filled with robotics or rough cloth or strange little tools. It took a moment for Kyle to realize his head was being cradled on a soft nest of filaments and fibers, and that he was wearing a pair of pants and nothing else. “What happened to my…”

“Clothes? I sold them. Bargained them, really, in exchange for you, so try not to be too upset about losing them.”

“I don’t care about that, I just…” Kyle turned to look at his odd kidnapper, or benefactor, depending on how he was starting to think about things. He couldn’t see him very well, backlit as the man was. “I need to sit up.” He needed to feel more in control, even if it was just an illusion, and lying flat on his back wasn’t going to give him that.

“Sure, wait a moment.” Strong fingers slid behind his neck, another hand grasped his shoulders and a second later Kyle was sitting up so easily it almost didn’t hurt at all. The water sloshed unpleasantly in his empty stomach, but he swallowed hard and kept it down.

“Good,” the man said encouragingly. He started to let go but Kyle listed to the side, and then those fingers anchored in to stay. “Or better, at least,” the man amended, and Kyle finally opened his eyes and got a good look.

The guy was…familiar, but not what Kyle had been expecting. He didn’t have a grand sense of presence, or remarkably distinguishing features. He was thin, with high cheekbones and a tense, somber mouth that quirked up a little when Kyle focused on him. His skin was dark and his eyes much darker, and his straight black hair glistened in the light in a way that seemed odd, to Kyle. He wore the same institutional grey that Kyle knew all the prisoners here wore, and it should have made him seem cold but his hands were warm, and still supporting Kyle, and the grip relaxed him despite himself.

“There you go,” the man murmured. “Can you hold yourself up?”

“Not yet,” Kyle said honestly. “Tell me. Prove it to me.” Because he wanted nothing more than to believe that he wasn’t alone in here, he knew he wasn’t supposed to be but he’d almost been killed, he was being pulled and pushed and everything had gotten twisted in ways he hadn’t been able to anticipate, and Kyle had to know…

“Fledgling.” Kyle slumped back suddenly, a tension he didn’t even know he’d been holding on to evaporating from his body, and the man smiled. “I’m Magpie,” he continued,” but here you can call me Isidore. Or Iz, either is fine.”

“Isidore.” Kyle had never felt so relieved in his life. It was almost enough to make him blush, he was so stupidly grateful not to be alone. He hated feeling that vulnerable, but he wouldn’t get very far if he lied to himself either. “You saved me back there.”

Isidore shrugged. “That’s what I’m here for. It was touch and go, honestly, but your clothes made good bargaining chips.”

“Because of the Regen fluid.” Kyle remembered now: his sudden expulsion from the tank, his rapid trip down the hall. “Someone pulled me out of Regen before I was done recalibrating after getting my mods deactivated.”

Isidore frowned. “Not very subtle. We’re going to have to be more careful than I thought if they can get away with being blatant.”

“You know who they are?”

“No more than you do, but I know that there are plenty of people in this prison who would love to have you in their power, for all sorts of reasons.” His thumb rubbed a gentle circle at the base of Kyle’s neck, right over the vertebrae. It was oddly intimate, but Kyle didn’t say a thing. He felt touch-starved, like he had getting pulled out of his escape pod so many years ago, numb with terror and shock. “We’ll just have to be more careful. I’ve set things up to encourage most people to leave us alone, and we’ll be able to tell if we’re being followed down here without much difficulty. No one likes to be this close to the core.”

“The core?”

“The core of Redstone. The iron. It pulls on the blood, tears at your organs. It’s very destructive, long-term.”

Well, this sounded like a shitty place to be. “Shouldn’t we try to avoid the core, then?”

Isidore shook his head. “We’re not going to be here long enough for it to matter. Others stay away because they know it really will mess with them, but for now our proximity will keep us a little safer.” He finally let go of Kyle, and Kyle shivered at the loss of contact. He felt colder, even though it was actually warmer down here than it had been up in the hallway.

“What’s the game plan?” Kyle asked, trying to distract himself from feeling bereft.

“Survival. By any means necessary, which for you means that if there’s something ugly to be done, you let me do it,” Isidore said. He seemed quite serious. “Your only job is to survive until your trial. That means we can’t give the warden any excuse to delay things based on your behavior, so if there’s fighting, you run back here. If there’s any issue at all, you get out of it. If people ask, you run because I told you to. As far as the gangs are concerned, you’re mine, bought and paid for. That doesn’t mean people won’t try to challenge me for you, or go after you once they realize who you are, but it does give you a layer of protection where justifying your actions is concerned.”

“Why is that important?”

“Because if they think you’re soft, or a coward, they’ll come after you regardless of your status as mine. Weakness is consumed in Redstone, unless you’re part of a larger whole.” Isidore shrugged again. “And we’re a team of two. Hardly big enough to hold our own against everyone.”

Kyle considered that. “We should try to recruit more people to our cause, then.”

Isidore frowned. “We can’t trust anyone else.”

“We don’t need to trust them, we just need to convince them to work with us.”

“The inhabitants of Redstone are some of the worst people the Federation could find and convict,” Isidore pointed out. “They’re not prone to teamwork, or to convincing that doesn’t come on the end of a knife.”

“That doesn’t mean they can’t be persuaded in other ways.”

Kyle was expecting a fight, but Isidore surprised him by smiling. He looked totally different smiling, the terseness that muted his expressions gone. He looked young, almost as young as Kyle felt. “You’re so much like Garrett. I’m not surprised you two found each other.”

“I’ve…never actually met him in person.”

“But you’re working together. You have the same ideas about people, and about what you should be able to accomplish.” He shook his head, but he was still smiling. “And if you really are like him, you might be able to do it. I’ll do what I can to help, but I’m not going to let you risk yourself unnecessarily either. Whatever you do, it has to come off as my idea. If I don’t maintain my public control over you, I might as well not have any control at all, and you’ll be considered open again. And you can fight, I know that, but you can’t fight everyone.”

“Especially not without my mods,” Kyle muttered, and Isidore nodded.

“Exactly.” Isidore leaned back and glanced down the hallway. “Sound’s picking up. You’ve been out for about six hours, so they’re getting ready to serve breakfast by now.” Kyle’s stomach growled in sympathy, and Isidore flashed his teeth. “It’s good that you’re hungry, but we’re not going back down there yet. I’ve got a few things set aside that you can have in the meantime.” He reached over behind one of the piles of equipment and grabbed a little synthetic package with dull, dry nutrition bars inside of it. “These are like gold here,” he said as he handed one over to Kyle. “Most of the food you have to eat in the mess, it isn’t easily transportable, but these are given out every so often.”

“Thank you.” Kyle took a bite. It was just as nasty as he’d expected it to be, no flavor at all, but he chewed gamely and swallowed. “Will you tell me how you got involved in this?” he asked.

Isidore actually laughed, gentle and quiet. The sound made Kyle’s toes curl. “It’s a long story,” he warned.

“We’ve both got time.”

“I suppose we do.” He came over and sat next to Kyle on the bench—or maybe it was functionally a bed, Kyle wasn’t sure—and crossed his legs under him. “Do you know where Paradise is?”

Kyle thought for a moment. “It’s a Fringe planet, right?”

“Yeah. I was born there. I thought I’d die there too, one way or another.” Isidore’s smile fell away. “I still think I should have, sometimes. Instead I met Garrett, and he changed my life.”

“How?”

“Utterly and completely.” The smile was back, but it was smile and private now. “It started in a club…”

Hiking, Fresh Fiction and Cambodia

I'm back! I have returned from the Colorado Trail as of Tuesday evening, tired and sore and walked into the ground by my 68-year-old dad, which is partly embarrassing for me but mostly awesome for him. I have to say, with the damage I did to my feet I feel like one of Cinderella's ugly stepsisters.

Yeah, that's my foot, apparently a very imperfect fit for my new boots. Note to self: do NOT break those things in during a backpacking trip, you dummy.

Okay, other stuff! I'm featured on the Fresh Fiction blog today chatting about romancing supervillains. This is a very cool, fairly mainstream blog, so the fact that it picked up my new release to feature is awesome. Come and visit me! http://freshfiction.com/page.php?id=7351

Finally, my inestimable, fantastic mother-in-law has left for the Peace Corps as of today. She'll be in Cambodia by the 26th. She turns 63 two days later. She is fucking amazing, and I'm so proud of her. There is literally no one else in my extended family with the chutzpah to do something like this.

So, as for other updates...more Redstone next week, as I'm up to my neck in things to catch up on right now. :/ A few other little announcements here and there to come...yeah. Pretty much that. Thanks, darlins, hope all is well :)

Hi Ho, Off I Go

So, tomorrow I take off for this beautiful place to do some backpacking.

How idyllic and remote! Me and five other people, because nothing says "Hello wilderness!" like a crowd, are going to kick ass and take names. Mostly names I have to teach myself to pronounce correctly (it's spelled "Saguache" but you say "Sawatch," who knew) but it'll be fun. However! No phone, no computer, no nothin'. Including no Redstone next week, and I'm so sorry. I'll make it up to you.

By the way, if you're commenting on my blog tour and you win the prize, I will email you as soon as I get back! We are gonna NAME this Villain (or Hero), baby!

Have a great weekend, guys :)

Redstone Ch. 7, Pt. 1

Notes: Hi, guys! So, less intense this time around, but we've almost got everybody in the same place, yay! Unfortunately, next week we'll have to have a brief hiatus, because it's time for my annual backpacking trip through the mountains with my father and his friends, and my very brave husband ;). Obviously, there will be no computer access. And when I get back, I'll still be in the throes of family visiting (my parents, sister, SIL and nephew, MIL before she leaves for Cambodia and about 5 others are wending in and out for the next two weeks, so...yeah. Busy.) Lots of family time means less time for writing.

However! I'm in the process of writing another prompt for the DRiTC event, so there will be more free fiction for you soon. Plus the new releases, plus the Redstone that's already done, so I'm not leaving you completely hanging. Thanks for understanding :)

Title: Redstone Chapter Seven, Part One.

*** 

To be honest, Tamara was expecting the alarm to go off. She’d been situated in the guest quarters of Redstone for less than a standard day, but she was already expecting the alarm. This wasn’t a quiet, well-managed prison: this place stank of darker emotions that chem scrubbers couldn’t remove, filled with fear and anger and a pain so deep that it tugged at her blood just like the iron core did. Her father would have said she was imagining it all, but Tamara had been active in espionage for long enough that she knew there was more to a place than what your most obvious senses could tell you. She wasn’t a psychic, had never tested positive in any of her evaluations, but Redstone was so steeped in violence that apparently it didn’t take anything special to realize what a hellhole the place was.

The alarm wasn’t unexpected, and neither was the call to the warden’s office. Guests were few and far between and all of them connected to high-profile prisoners, so it made sense to pass on information. What Tamara hasn’t expected was for Kyle’s lawyer to corner her as soon as she walked into the office, so furious he was practically spitting with every word.

“Not even a day before you tried to get rid of him!” he shouted. “You couldn’t even give him a fucking day, you had him abducted out of the med unit and throw into that—”

“Mr. Gyllenny,” the sallow-faced man sitting behind his desk said coldly. “There’s no evidence that this was anything other than a mistake.”

“A mistake?” Gyllenny rounded on the warden and Tamara took a deep breath, slowing down her racing heart as she tried to figure out what was going on. “No, the mistake was leaving him alone in your custody for any length of time. Jerking him out of your Regen tank before his treatment was even finished and throwing him, completely unprepared, in with those wolves? That was completely deliberate, and I don’t trust her—” He thrust a finger back at Tamara, “or the son of a bitch she’s working for any more than I trust your damn doctor to keep order in his own med unit!”

“Doctor Kleinman assures me that the guard’s actions were done without his knowledge or permission.”

“So guards have constant access to the med unit without having to sign in or provide verification of their identity? You can’t even give me the name of the person who illegally and against all standing orders attempted to murder—”

“Don’t be dramatic, Mr. Gyllenny, there was no attempted murder here.”

“No?” he asked scathingly. “What would you call what happens in that holo?”

Tamara cleared her throat. “Excuse me.” Both men looked at her impatiently. “I’m sorry, but I’m completely lost. What’s going on with Mr. Alexander?”

“As if you don’t know,” Gyllenny snapped, but the warden—Harrison, Tamara remembered—inclined his head slightly.

“You should see it.” He tapped a finger on his desk and a holovid appeared above it. Tamara drew closer for a better look, and he started to play.

There was the med unit, a Regen tank…Tamara could make out Kyle’s face under the glass. Then the guard, in full uniform and helmet, came in and stopped the cycle. There was no alarm, no one came in to check on Kyle, and he was jerked out of the tank and hauled down the corridor almost faster than he could walk. The holo ended with a door opening into a narrow hallway, and the guard shoving Kyle through and shutting it behind him.

Tamara knew her eyes were wide, but she couldn’t stop it. This was bad. This wasn’t the plan “What happened next?” she demanded. “Is he all right?”

“What, now you’re pretending to care?” Gyllenny’s laugh was hollow. “Don’t bother.”

Tamara rounded on him before she could stop herself. “You can think what you want, but the fact is that I had nothing to do with this and I don’t want to see Kyle Alexander injured any more than you do!” She made an effort to modulate her tone. “He’s going to go to trial and he’s going to take responsibility for his actions, and acquit my employer in the process. It’s the only way President Alexander can remove the stain on his reputation, so why would I want to impede that?”

“Credits go a long way toward covering up stains and repairing reputations, and Raymond Alexander has the means to pay people in money or influence or blood,” Gyllenny replied, his intensity so fierce that Tamara felt heat rise in her cheeks like a radiation burn.

“Regardless,” Harrison broke in, his dry voice flat and even. “There is every reason to assume that Kyle Alexander is alive.”

“Show me,” Tamara said, and a new holo sprang to life. This one was confusing at first, not a shot of the little corridor but of the central room in the prison, where over a hundred inmates waited hungrily by the doors, anticipating the new arrivals. Only then there was a sudden surge to the right, the crowd refocusing on a narrow door. Tamara used her mods for a quick facial recognition, searching, searching—there. The familiar face she’d been waiting to see, gone a second later through the little doorway. It took a few minutes but he eventually emerged again, with a nude body slung over his shoulders, and strode off toward the other side of the main room and out of it without being harassed any further.

The holo stopped. Tamara frowned. “No, keep it going.”

“The cameras only work in the shielded parts of the prison. That side hall isn’t one of them. It leads to the core, which is an unfriendly place for technology.”

“Unbelievable,” Gyllenny muttered to himself. “What about the man who took him? Who the hell is he?”

“Prisoner 2751. A separatist and terrorist from the planet Paradise, responsible for the deaths of more than twenty Federation soldiers in an explosive attack. He keeps to himself in Redstone, not a member of one of the established gangs. He sleeps close to the core, from what I understand.”

“You don’t understand very much about what goes on in the prison that you’re charged with maintaining control in, do you?”

Warden Harrison killed the holo and leaned back slightly in his chair. “Redstone handles the worst criminals in the whole of Federation space, Mr. Gyllenny. If I was given carte blanche in maintaining control, I would have them drugged to the eyeballs or placed in cryo sleep to serve their debts to society, but alas, that is considered cruel and unusual. So instead, we make do with the limitations of a system which allows them a certain amount of autonomy. Certainly, theirs is a mini-society of frightening consequence to them, but it has little to no consequence in the larger universe. By ignoring them, I render them irrelevant, Mr. Gyllenny.”

“What about their safety? What about their right to—”

“They have a right to life, and nothing further. If you were so convinced of your client’s innocence, then you should have fought harder to get him placed in a medium-security holding facility. Redstone is no resting place for the innocent.” Dark eyes calmly glanced between the two of them. “I’ll deploy bots to do a sweep of the whole of the prison tomorrow. You’ll have more answers then. Dismissed.”

“We’re not your employees, you can’t just dismiss us.”

“I am the warden of this prison,” Harrison said coldly. “And you are a guest here. If I determine you to be disruptive to the running of Redstone, I can and will have you sent offsite regardless of your connections. You make work for great powers, but I am the only power of note here.” He waved them out. “As I said, dismissed.”

As soon as they were in the hall, Gyllenny rounded on Tamara again. “I’m sure you’re pleased.”

“I meant what I said,” she insisted, not bending an inch now that she knew where things stood. Kyle was safe with Isidore, no matter how horrendously he’d gotten there. “I want Kyle Alexander to stand trial. I had no idea this was going to happen and I’m not any happier about it than you are.”

Gyllenny snorted. “Sure. Like his little brother dying in prison wouldn’t be a huge coup for the president.”

“Shockingly, he doesn’t share everything with his charity hire,” Tamara snapped right back.

“Charity hire…”

“I’m a natural. And this is hardly the ideal environment for someone like me, so I’ve got a better idea of how it feels to be shoved aside than you do, probably. How do you think it’ll reflect on me if I fail to do my job here, which is to keep an eye on your client for my employer leading up to the trial?” It hadn’t been her original mandate, but Tamara had already received the communication from Raymond Alexander’s office that her return to Olympus was going to be necessarily delayed, that he apologized but knew she’s be fine there for a few more days, that he needed her eyes in his brother to keep everything looking as legal and above-board as possible. She’d been expecting, even hoping for this development, but it just showed how adept her employer was at lying right to her face. Bring you home, working on a cure indeed. Bastard.

Tamara straightened her shoulders. “I’m going back to my room now, but I’ll be standing outside the warden’s office first thing in the morning watching those bots on patrol, and if Mr. Alexander is anything other than alive and whole, there’ll be hell to pay here.”

“I don’t believe you.” Oh, but he wanted to; Tamara could see it in the way his hands relaxed a little, the wavering tension in his shoulders.

“You don’t have to. You’ll find out soon enough without me doing anything to prove it to you.” Tamara huffed and shook her head. “Goodnight, Mr. Gyllenny.”

“Goodnight…”

“Ms. Carson. Tamara Carson.”