Dead Space by Kali Wallace (top romance novels txt) 📕

“I asked to be included.” I gestured impatiently toward the exit. “I have work to do, so either tell me what you want or don’t, but do it quickly.”

“Why did you ask? David told me he wasn’t in contact with any of the Symposium survivors. You weren’t friends anymore.”

It stung, to hear her say it, to know that David might have said it as well. “Why does it matter? You weren’t friends with him either.”

“Was he speaking the truth? Your friendship was so easily sundered?” Ping said.

She took a step forward. It was all I could do not to step back in response.

“It’s not relevant now.” I made myself move forward instead, to walk purposefully toward her, to play at harried and dismissive—however unconvincing—in every motion. “If you’ll excuse me.”

She grabbed my arm as I tried to pass. Left arm, metal arm, and I felt it in the twist on my shoulder, the slight pressure on my joint, more than in the touch of her fingers, of which there was only a hint, like the brush of a feather. Lifelike sensory capabilities for prosthetic parts cost more. I was used to it by now, the lack of feeling, but I was not at all used to being grabbed unexpectedly.

I froze a beat before pulling away, and in that moment of hesitation Ping leaned close and murmured in my ear, “I know he asked you for help.”

I twisted out of her grasp and stepped back. Stepped back again and bumped into the side of a shipping container. I had suspected before. Now I was certain: she knew about David’s message to me. What I did not know was whether she knew exactly what he had said. She could have found evidence of it somewhere in the comms system or in David’s personal devices. She could have overheard him or spoken to him or simply made a very logical guess. I wasn’t about to admit anything to her.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

Instead of answering, Ping said, “You’re still looking for the reason, aren’t you? All of the questions you’re asking, it’s because you have no idea why anybody would want him dead.”

“Of course we want to know why,” I said, with an exaggerated roll of my eyes, feigning impatience. “That’s why we’re asking all the questions. Do you know something you haven’t told us yet?”

“I know you’re asking the wrong questions. You have to understand—”

She stopped abruptly and turned her head; her straight black hair swung along her jawline. She peered intently into the darkness for several seconds. My skin prickled as I followed her gaze. I couldn’t see anything.

“Understand what?” I said. “By all means, if you want to tell me how to do my job, go ahead.”

“You must hate this work so much.”

“What?”

“Someone with your background, working in a job like this. It’s so far beneath you. You must hate it.”

For fuck’s sake, having a conversation with her was like chasing a narcissistic butterfly through a shit-filled meadow. I had no idea if she was doing it to keep me off-balance or if she just didn’t know how to follow one thought with another.

“It’s not my first choice, but it could be worse,” I said. “You haven’t told me what you want.”

“I understand. I really do. It’s frustrating to look at all this—” She swept her arms out to encompass the warehouse, the stations, the shadows. “All of this has been built in service of what? Nothing more than profit?”

“And? What’s your point? David was killed because of money? That’s your fucking revelation?”

“Doesn’t it bother you? All of this for no purpose except chewing up what’s around us and making a few wealthy people even more wealthy. All the people working here for their wages when they could be doing something amazing for humanity. All of these resources. All of this innovation.”

“You’re wasting my time.”

“You don’t really believe that. You know what I’m talking about. You created something beautiful and powerful. You created it not to serve a corporate master, but to explore and discover. You created something knowing that it would grow to become more—knowing that it would help us become more. You know we can be so much better, if we let them show us the way. You’ve already taken that step yourself.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. She was so serious, her eyes so wide, her words so intense, there was nothing I could do but laugh. She was the same as the cyberneticist who’d designed my prosthetics, swanning about the hospital corridors with a duckling line of followers behind him, claiming to everybody who would listen that he was redefining humanity in a way that no god could ever comprehend, that every patient who went under his knife would emerge as something wholly new and different. She was the same as the boy with the bleeding eyes back on Hygiea, reaching for my boots because he saw something in my prosthetic limbs that his drug-addled and surgery-muddled mind believed he should crave, and he had to believe it was time, it was time, now was time for the AI revolution humanity had been awaiting for centuries. She was the same as the reporter from Ceres who contacted me every couple of months because he was convinced, absolutely convinced, that the woman Hester Marley had died aboard Symposium and the AI Vanguard had survived instead, hidden away in the electronics of my prosthetic parts, learning to be human amid the wreckage of my old life.

Then my laughter was gone and in that moment I hated Mary Ping so much I was breathless. I was here for the man who had once been my friend, for the memories and the loss we had shared, and because it was the last thing he had asked of me before he died. I was here for my own foolish, selfish, fallibly human reasons. I was not here to fuel the mad light