Page 77 of Violet Spark
“And don’t forget to give me back my phone,” I reminded him. Not that I’d trust it until Jacob hacked it for me.
“Moving you to a secure facility and eliminating everyone who knows about you is clearly a better plan.”
Alarms even louder than the ones I’d triggered in the basement at BantaMatrix blared through my skull, but I gave him an ingenuous smile. “Why though? Alling sucked the hive out of me. I’m all burned out, useless to you. You’d be an embarrassment to your agency bosses if you brought me back now. They’d probably have to demote you. No more replacement SUVs and slick sunglasses for you.” I widened my eyes. “Shit. You’ll probably have to gun for my job. ‘Welcome to the Desert Freeze. Would you like an extra squirt of sunshine sweetness today?’” I let my jaw swing open in abject horror. “Oh no, Dane. You’d have to learn to smile.”
That made him take a step back, and I thought I’d finally broken him, but then Carlo opened the door, and my mom entered with a tray.
The smell—dear God the smell!—hit me like a fist to the face. She placed it on the table and wheeled it toward me.Yuup.She’d found a fat, juicy burrito. Side of beans, too. And there was a square of frosted yellow cake.
“I love you,” I told her. I meant it with every fiber of my being.
Dane watched warily as I wedged half of the cake square into my mouth.
“Those nanobots were hungry little fuckers,” I said, crumbs spraying. “Good thing they’re all out of me now, because I deserve this.”
“Imogen! Really!”
I swallowed my massive bite. “Sorry, Mom. But right, Dane? Don’t I deserve to have my cake now that you have the bugs back and everything’s back to normal again?”
Dane’s gaze glittered with anger. Or maybe a touch of reluctant appreciation of how much cake I could gulp in one bite.
He pivoted silently on his heel and stalked toward the door where Carlo stood wary guard. Mom ignored them both as she cut the burrito into small chunks like I was a baby. And I didn’t mind.
But when Dane stopped and looked back at me, I couldn’t help but meet the challenge in his stare. “Enjoy it,” he said finally. “I’ll be in touch.”
Ooh, that sounded like a threat.
“Back to normal, huh?” Mom angled the burrito bites toward me as the door closed, leaving us alone.
“Well, our version of normal,” I said.
She snorted, sounding kinda like me for a second. “Give me the other half of that cake, hun. I think I earned it too.”
I plowed through the beans while she nibbled neatly at her half of the mangled cake. When there was nothing left but plastic tray, I sat back with a sigh. “I want to get out of here.”
“Let me get some scissors.”
“Mom!”
She leaned over to kiss my forehead thentskedas she brushed cake crumbs off my poor wrecked Desert Freeze shirt. “I knew you could do it, Imogen. You saved us.”
Not ashamed to say I cried this time for real. Maybe I was finally leveling up.
EPILOGUE
AWEEK LATER,a big cardboard box was sitting on the front step when I got home from my shift at the Freeze. If Rique had hated me before, he hated me double now for snatching the manager job out of his hands—again. I didn’t feel even a little sorry. Amanda, of course, couldn’t have cared less who was the boss.
I stared at the big box with the same suspicion Gwumpki gave his carry crate.
No delivery sticker to note where it came from or who’d sent it. But the imprint on the side said it was an Alienware product, and I… Well, like a cat, I couldn’t resist a box, especially not one with a gaming computer in it.
Anyway, I couldn’t let myself into the house without moving the obstacle.
Mom was at PT but she’d left a bento on the kitchen counter for me. I nudged it aside to open the mysterious box. I held my breath as I knifed along the tape.
I let out a gasp at the pretty machine inside. So pretty, I almost missed the sticky note on top.
Enjoy it. The small, precise handwriting told me exactly who’d sent the computer.
