Junkyard Cats - Faith Hunter Page 0,23

the dim light with the orangey glasses, I opened the food supply cabinet and removed the ingredients, putting it all on the counter. Jagger returned from the PTC too fast to have used the body wand, not that he had clean clothes to change into. I thought about that while he raided my cabinets to find a two-gallon stew pot, which he placed on the hob, and turned on the propane stove. He began to assemble the stew, starting with the dried onion, butter, and canned seafood. All that in the office—in my house. Making himself at home. Doing things I’d done alone for years.

I didn’t know what to do with myself.

I decided to clean up. After the fight, I stank. I left the room.

I stood in the tiny toilette, adjusting the screen to show the views from the office cameras, watching Jagger in case he decided to snoop. He didn’t. But he moved well—economical and sure. As I watched, I used the body wand. Dead skin cells, dried sweat, body hair, and desert filth landed in the bottom of the stall. I blew my body clean with the small blower and palmed a little dry shampoo into my hair, rubbing it into my scalp before vacuuming it.

I missed water. I missed it a lot.

And I needed to make a decision about Jagger. Fast.

After the wanding, I cleaned up my mess, moisturized, put on my orangey lip gloss and Kajal, and dressed in clean clothes, things I could sleep in comfortably if it came to sharing quarters with him. With Jagger. Who was clearly a dangerous mountain of a man. I stared at myself in the mirror, my glasses off, my odd orange eyes staring back at me. In the low light of the brownout, it wasn’t likely that Jagger could see my eyes anyway, so I didn’t have to wear the lenses. Hopefully. I debated putting on Little Mama’s perfume. Makeup.

This was not a date. It wasn’t.

But some small part of me might want it to be.

And the deadly part of me demanded it to be. I squashed that part down.

Back in the main room I defaulted all the inside screens, including the one in the PTC, to show outside events. I pulled out some of Pop’s clothes, things he’d worn before the war, before the stress and constant battle and seeing people he loved die had stripped all the meat off him, leaving him a shell of his former self. Before the Parkinson’s stole his brain and personality and memories. And before I changed. I rested my hand on the heavy fabric. The pants legs would be too short, but they were soft and clean. Better than the sweat-stained things Jagger was wearing now.

Jagger had made a roux with the butter and flour and herbs, added in the goat milk, dry milk, a bottle of water, and the seafood from their packets. It wasn’t fresh seafood from the ocean, which I hadn’t had since I escaped Washington State and headed east, but it smelled delicious.

I placed the clean clothes in the PTC. Jagger set the propane burner to simmer and went to the toilette. Shut the door. I hadn’t said a word. Into my earbud Mateo said, “Got yourself a servant. That’s a little fast even for you.”

Softly I replied, “I didn’t do that on purpose.”

“Did he touch you?”

“No.” I thought through the events of the afternoon. “But the office hasn’t ever been decontaminated. And I didn’t wash my hands at lunch. Or after I set up the med-bay. I never thought about it. I don’t clean my stove or the cabinets.”

“You’re still passing them through your sweat,” Mateo said. “Interesting.”

And awful. We had hoped I’d eventually stop secreting the funky nanobots through my pores.

My ant-stung wrist itched, wanting to be used, as if the nanos knew what was happening and wanted to speed things up.

Night fell. On low-light cameras I watched the pride cats tear into another Puffer. I couldn’t ID the specific cats, but they were fierce. I watched as Mateo strode in, lifting his long legs over the skids of engine and body parts, and swept up the pieces.

“Gomez,” I said, talking to the office AI. “Put on some of Pops’ music in the background.” Pops had loved music of all kinds: Heavy Metal bands, nineteen-forties Big Band, Jazz, R-and-B, crooners, Country, even the skirling early-war martial Celtic stuff. He listened to everything. Eclectic taste. Gomez started with a tear-jerker called “Half as Much” by