Page 15 of Spark Transform

Neirra had told him to find out what made him happy so he’d have a positive goal to work for, but he didn’t know where to look. Maybe he wasn’t meant to find peace in his life. Peaceful people didn’t want to crush a galactic government agency that had used and discarded him like a cheap shockstick.

Except, against all odds, he now had friends. Lunesti, whose real name was Haseem, and who had invited him to the anti-CPS group. Big-hearted ex-Jumper Kooga at the soup kitchen. Soleil Benoit, the instructor of the pay-what-you-can martial arts studio in the Canals with which he traded janitorial services for workout sessions. He wondered what she thought of his request to bring Charrascos.

He stole a glance at her. Her stiff body and shuttered expression made him suddenly wary. Something must have happened while he’d been away from her.

Their agreement that he wouldn’t die for her didn’t mean he couldn’t treat her like a human being. However, he wouldn’t know the right thing to say if it jolted him in the ass.

A flash of memory surfaced, of the day five years ago when he’d learned he could still cry. It had hurt and made him angry, and yet the tears kept coming. Neirra had held him, his bald head against her bony shoulder, blood from his collared neck staining her canary yellow tunic.

That experience broke him. He’d never been the same rage machine after that. He’d been terrified Davidro would notice and figure out how to use it against him, but his former boss had stopped seeing Renner as a human the day he’d collared him.

He cleared his throat. “Do you want a hug?”

She glanced at him, startled. She wiped a tear away from her face. It was the first time he’d seen her cry.

Her expression softened into a tremulous smile. “Not exactly security protocol.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “Neither is standing on the open roof.”

She wiped her face again. “Maybe later. Let’s go home.”

A bright orange aircar high above and to the right caught his attention. No automated traffic control system flew that recklessly, meaning a live human, probably chemmed to high orbit, was at the controls. Three speeders — single flyers with little more than an amped-up engine and a rain canopy — rounded the corner of a tall building at high speed, weaving like swifts through the controlled traffic. The aircar overreacted to avoid the first speeder and clipped the second and third, sending them plummeting toward the Novo Granica roof.

Instinct had Renner pulling Charrascos backward through the roof entrance and into the fire-glass vestibule. He shot tendrils of talent to the aircar and the speeder that smashed into the kiosk of the flitter stacker, twenty meters from where they’d been standing.

“No occupants.”

His former boss would have been mad and blamed him. Charrascos opened her bag and pulled out her tablet. Her eyes narrowed in concentration as her fingers flew through the holographic interface. A dozen thumb-sized spheres flew out of her satchel. She swung a booted foot at the sensor to iris open the vestibule doors, and the spheres flew out to swarm over the destruction.

She caught him staring at her. “What?”

“You carry a fleet of spy eyes?” The woman continued to perplex him.

She smiled briefly as she went back to directing the flying cameras. “Doesn’t everyone?” She tapped her left earwire and began subvocalizing.

He replayed the accident in his mind. In his younger days, he and his street-rat crew used ground vehicles to go after vulnerable storefronts that could be easily looted, but the principle was the same. The remote-hijacked aircar and speeders were the easy one-two setup, and the bullseye was the stacker or the kiosk. The true target was Novo Granica, and maybe Charrascos herself.

She opened the vestibule doors again. The flying cameras flew in and landed with tiny thumps in her open bag.

She sidestepped twice to stand a meter away from him. The tablet displayed rapid-time vids, and her fingers flew even faster as she subvocalized again. Seconds later, the colorful holo flattened and winked out.

She put the tablet back in her bag and sealed it, then turned to look at him. “I published it as free-to-read breaking news under a throwaway avatar. Let’s see if anyone trackable has an untoward interest in a minor traffic incident with zero casualties.”

Her gaze turned to the flitter stacker. “We’ll have to wait for Devanesh’s investigators and the facilities team to unload our ride.” Her shoulders slumped. “Damn, but I’m tired of this.”

He gathered she meant more than just being stuck in the Novo G building. “Call a secure autocab.”

She shook her head. “Can’t trust them in Ridderth. About half a year ago, a wetwork crew cracked the encryption using intel they bought from an insider with money troubles. Until the regional government implements the new cryptogon, anyone who buys the code can crack it in about five minutes flat. Half of Novo G’s staff have rewards on their heads from people with grudges. Even Z’Dann, because she sometimes publishes negative reviews.” She pointed a thumb toward the debris outside. “It’s like flushing a flock of pheasants and netting them as they take wing.”

That security vulnerability was new. Renner made a mental note to find out what else had gotten worse in Ridderth since he’d been gone. Charrascos’s life and his own might depend on it.

She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “Come on, let’s snag the good chairs in the eighth-floor lounge before anyone else does. We can track the trends from there.”

Hours later, at Charrascos’s townhouse, he set up the security sensors. After they’d finally made it back well after dark, he’d thought she’d go to bed. Instead, despite how tired she looked, she went straight to her attic office and immersed herself in work.

He spread out the new security equipment on the kitchen counter. It took an hour to hide the sensors outside at the complex’s access points and throughout her townhouse. When he put them in her office, she didn’t appear to notice. It wouldn’t surprise him if even a full-scale riot wouldn’t distract her while she was manipulating multiple display holos and muttering to herself or subvocalizing.

Her intense focus reminded him of Davidro’s prize forecaster, Georgie. Except Davidro hadn’t permanently warped Charrascos’s cognitive functions by dosing her with experimental minder control drugs. Annoyingly, Charrascos refused to tell him what had happened to Georgie and the rest of Davidro’s staff, in case it interfered with his memory recovery.