Page 22 of Redstone
For a moment, Robbie thought he’d have to throw the guy over the wall right now; he was still grinning, something challenging in his amber eyes. But after a minute, he held up both hands. “No worries, buddy! Let’s be friends!”
“Let’s,” Robbie agreed. He let the men ease past him before opening the door himself and going inside. He resisted the urge to slam the door shut as hard as he could and leaned back against it instead. Their apartment was tiny and strewn with parts and half-unpacked bags of clothes. He saw Wyl in the corner, fiddling with something, one of Redstone’s bots standing patiently at his side.
“Hey!” Wyl said as soon as he noticed Robbie. “I got the array set up, so communications are a go. I also adopted a pet; his name is ZeeBee. Say hello to my husband, ZeeBee!”
“Hello, Christopher Robin.”
Wyl appeared to be waiting for something. When Robbie said nothing, he frowned. “What, no groan? No threats of bodily harm for teaching the robot to call you—oof!”
Robbie couldn’t take it anymore. Not the distance but especially not the thought of Wyl and threats. He was across the room and hugging Wyl to his chest in an instant. Wyl got withthe program fast, turning into the embrace and hugging Robbie back as hard as he could.
“Hey,” Wyl said gently. “What is it? What happened?” He kissed Robbie’s collarbone. “Baby?”
“We’re going to have to be careful,” Robbie said softly. His voice broke on the last word. “So fucking careful.” He couldn’t put the horror of the past few hours into words: what he’d learned, what he’d seen. Luckily, Wyl didn’t need him to.
“We will be,” Wyl whispered. “I promise, I swear, Robbie. We’ll be careful. I’ll be careful.”
Robbie sighed heavily. “Good.”
It was a start, at least.
Chapter twelve
Kyle didn’t do well being forced into stillness. He coulddoit; it actually came very easily to him, the art of not being noticed, of making yourself small and unavailable and uninteresting, but he wasn’t sure why. It was an ingrained habit, one of those abilities that it seemed he should have had memories of learning and didn’t anymore. He could shrink and vanish without knowing why, and because of that, he tried to avoid doing it.
Kyle was inherently reluctant to ever agree with Cody’s friend Ten about anything, but he had to admit that ze had a point in making hir life’s unofficial motto, “Go big or go home.” If you were going to commit to a course of action, you should do it wholeheartedly, which was why Kyle was here in the first place.
It stood to reason that he should listen to more experienced voices when it came to keeping himalivenow, but Isidore’s plan still grated on him a little bit. “I still don’t see why we have to delay this any longer.”
Isidore smiled at him. It wasn’t a condescending smile, not in the least, but it was measuring in a way that Kyle didn’t quite understand. Like he was being held up to a standard he wasn’t sure how to reach. And for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to him, Kyle wanted to hit and exceed any measure that Isidore could think of. “We need the time to prepare.”
“The other inmates already know I’m here. There’s nothing to be gained by not facing them sooner.”
Isidore shook his head. “Meals might as well be feeding frenzies here. Lots of deals go down when food gets distributed, and they’re the most dangerous times in Redstone, which is saying a lot. We can handle emissaries and small groups, but crowds will be hard to negotiate until we make more alliances. So, until we have the means to do that, we’re avoiding mealtimes.”
“What will we do when we run out of food?”
“We won’t.” Isidore indicated a stash of ration bars underneath the exterior hull of a robot that had somehow been ripped apart like a corn husk. That wasn’t supposed to be possible with this level of nanomaterials. They were harder than Old Earth diamonds.
“But we can’t let them think we’re afraid,” Kyle persisted. “The longer we hide away back here, the more they’ll rationalize trying to get rid of us when we finally do appear.”
“I don’t actually plan for us to be back here all that long,” Isidore said. “No more than a day. Just enough time for us to get the bits and pieces we need to do some deals.”
“What kind of bits and pieces?”
Isidore looked over his stash of goods consideringly. “I think we need to take another bot. They carry all sorts of tradeable parts, and one should be heading our way pretty soon.”
Kyle was lost. “Why?”
“It’s protocol with new arrivals, especially when the guards lose sight of one of them. They send the bots in to do a body check, make sure everyone is accounted for. If someone is missing, then the guards themselves will come in, but they’ll probably gas the place first, and that …” Isidore wrinkled his nose. “That’s a nasty experience. It’s hard to recover from, and it disrupts the chain of command, so they don’t like to do it but will if it’s necessary.
“The iron disrupts the vid feeds, so they don’t have a way of looking this deep into the core. That means sending a bot down here. We’re the only ones this deep, so by the time it gets to us, we’ll be the priority assessment.” Isidore rubbed his long thin fingers together. “We need to open it up and get some parts out of it but keep it functional so that it can record our identities and get back up to broadcast level.”
“How are the two of us going to take out a robot guard?” Kyle asked. He tried not to make it sound like a demand, but he felt uncomfortably out of his depth here. He was used to being … okay, not thebest, so to speak, but the one who knew what was going on. He’d been a star in the Academy, thanks to his public position and his secret one both, but now he was the one struggling to catch up. “They’re armed, aren’t they?”
“Yes, they are.”
“And they’re nearly indestructible.”
