Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(11)
Apparently, however, Angela was of some interest on the newsvid channels, because from the moment she stepped onto the carpet, she was completely swarmed. She kept her smile and emotional throughput steady, but the mass of humanity and noise was…overwhelming. Pressing in on her from all sides. Loud. Smelled like spray self-cleanse, stale breath, and new clothes. Panic gurgled in her chest, made her nauseous. Too many people, too much noise/press/heat/filth/life.
And then someone was cradling her elbow in his cool, smooth hand, speaking to her in a voice programmed to be unflinchingly familiar. “Darling, shall we?”
Daniel had been almost a foot taller than her, and his mech-clone imposter was similarly proportioned. Their height differential was somewhat lessened tonight, due to her glass-printed platform slippers, and instead of looming over her, he simply steadied her amid the onslaught. Thankful for his support, she smiled up at him.
She didn’t expect what happened next, and it took every sliver of control not to cringe away when mech-Daniel swayed toward her, bent, and pressed a cool kiss against her mouth. Oh God. It was like kissing a corpse, kissing a machine. A robot. A robot that looked exactly like someone she loathed. She closed her eyes and reached for the nearest comfort thought, the warmest, dearest thing she could snag on short notice. A thing she had imprinted on her memory, saved and hoarded against moments like this. A memory of another kiss.
Kellen’s. Of course, his kiss.
Not the Kellen who’d been on the other end of that holoconference the other night; the real Kellen. The one etched in her soul, wrapped tight around the root of her. His steady hands cupping a wingless butterfly, his warm, blue eyes smiling. The safety of his hand clasping hers under water, pulling her to breathe. His mouth. She imagined the mouth kissing her right now belonged to him. To the golden boy she’d never fallen out of love with. Angela leaned into the kiss on a sigh.
“Apologies for invading your personal space, but we have a reply,” the robot murmured against her ear, too low for the crowd to hear. “It says, ‘Got your message. Shall we fit our tongues to dialogues of business, love, or strife?’”
A reply. Something deep and hot licked down her spine. And what a reply. Whoa. Fit our tongues? That was the line he pulled from the poem? She didn’t need to fake the surge of elation for the psych-emitter’s benefit. She pulled back and bloomed a look of such warmth and joy and naughty at mech-Daniel that he was probably really confused, poor thing. She dictated a response: “Tell him, ‘The fullness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.’”
The crowd around them rumbled, and she could’ve sworn some of the more romantically minded gossips sighed. Good.
She snaked her arm through mech-Daniel’s grasp and blazed a genuine and gamine smile for the vid feeds.
It held through the receiving line, a revived ritual she usually found harrowing, even though no actual bodies came into contact. No hugging, no shaking hands. Just acknowledgment of the ruling class by those who didn’t quite measure up but were allowed to exist within their sphere.
She endured La Mars Madrid’s air kisses and breath, which cleverly had been infused with a chemist’s version of rose petals but really just smelled like brand-new teeth and tonsil-spray implants. People like the trillionaires went to extremes to hold onto their youth and vigor and perceived beauty, but more often than not, they failed, sadly and publicly. Gossips loved to jump all over those meltdowns when they happened. Angela gave this one a year, maybe two. When La Mars Madrid finally kicked it, the news storm was going to be spectacular.
And on to the next receiving-line torment.
She looked away from the gaze of famed designer Limontour, who’d also been one of Daniel’s cronies and someone she could have gone through the whole rest of forever without encountering again. He had seen parts of her life she refused to discuss and instinctively blocked from her mind lest her psych-emitter snag them for encoding.
In a low voice as she passed him, he had the brass ones to insinuate he’d like to chat after the party and maybe in private. To talk about Daniel’s demise? Not on your already overlong life, asshole.
“Just ignore Limontour,” Zeke said into her com privately. “That’s not the real him anyway, just a mech-clone. N series, like yours. Just keep moving, kid. He won’t follow. La Mars Madrid keeps him on a tight leash.”
She could have smacked herself for not noticing. Wasn’t she supposed to see things, make connections? But she hadn’t noticed that Limontour was controlling a mech-clone, that he wasn’t here in the (repulsive) flesh.
She made a mental note to have mech-Daniel scan for imposters at all in-person events in the future and give her a heads-up.
But even that lapse in perception failed to dull her pervasive sense of joy. Nothing was bothering her tonight. She expended relatively little energy tamping her brain and making it project only emotions she wanted others to see. She sparkled in conversation, shone in luminous sincerity. She even danced, once with the ambassador from Basque—a modern, touchless tarantella during which he agreed to entertain her government’s proposal for a pact of mutual defense—and several times with her own husband. Or at least with the mech-clone pretending to be Daniel.
For his part, mech-Daniel’s performance was spot-on. He gave her updates of the newsfeeds and gossip snippets each time they danced. Over the last few days, her team had seeded the notion that Daniel Neko still lived, and tonight was the crowning confirmation of that truth.