I shoved the thought away as too terrifying to contemplate.
“Nothing like that.” I had to tell him. “I didn’t tell you the whole story about the expo.”
He frowned as if checking his mental calendar for the date of the expo. “There was a bombing there late at night. I assumed you had left before then. Were you in that?”
The flame on my cigarette hit the filter. “Kinda.” I tossed it away, and it landed in the tiny gap between the floor of my garage and the cement outside. “Myka was there when I stole the plans.”
“Myka Benton?”
I pulled out another cigarette. It was one of those days. “Yeah. She was trying to steal the plans for Cadinoff.”
He stared so hard, the full story spilled from me. Myka and me being handcuffed together. The ride in the hanging gondola. The singing, the zero-g, the puppies. I left out the part with the lemur. Had to keep some boundaries. As I got to the showdown at Halcyore’s, it became more difficult to speak. The next part was still painful. I forced it out in stilted sentences. Myka had told me that she had feelings for me, and I had lashed out. I had ridiculed her. I had thrown every insult I could think at her, and as I did the Myka I had found during that night had dissolved. She’d reverted to her corporate self.
I had tried to tell myself that it was her true self. She had tried to play me, and I’d stopped her. But the more I told myself that, the less I believed it. Now I wanted to smash my face into the 280 for thinking it.
Ryan left me hanging, not speaking as I waited for his judgment. He flicked ash from his cigarette.
“That’s a lot to leave out of the story.”
I laughed, grateful he broke the silence. “Yeah.”
“You were an asshole to her at the end, there.”
I sucked in smoke. “I know.”
“So you’ve been miserable for months because you yelled at Myka Benton after being handcuffed to her all night.” He spoke his thoughts out loud. “So you feel guilty about it.”
I didn’t want to think of it like that. “I just didn’t want to deal with what she was saying.”
Ryan had a weird look on his face—a scrunchy look reserved for when he was thinking through some engineering problem. His leg started shaking. “So what, exactly, did Myka say?”
“I didn’t take down a transcription or anything.”
“Just…I guess…did she mention what happened one year ago?”
I’d forgotten about the kidnapping thing. In the heat of the moment, my mind had blipped past it entirely. She’d said she’d helped me then, which didn’t make any fucking sense.
“She said something about having helped me last year. Clearly bullshit. You were the one to rescue me, right?”
His rescue of me was one of those heart-warming relationship moments. If there were an “Elly and Ryan” scrapbook, it would have a featured place of honor, with digital fireworks and little hearts. Ryan had rescued me by bursting into Cadinoff HQ with the Corporate Enforcement Agency behind him. He’d careened through a firefight to get to where I was crouched in hiding, somehow not getting shot in the process. If I could’ve taken a video of a terrified Ryan staggering across the hot zone between the Cadinoff soldiers and the CEA officers with windmill arms and wobbly legs, I’d keep it in a special lockbox and bring it out for fond laughs and playful ribbing.
But Ryan’s face went white in a way it shouldn’t with this memory.
“Ryan, you were the one to rescue me, right?”
One look was all I needed to know that he was about to pull the rug out from under me and then hit me with it.
“Yes, but…” He ran a hand through his hair and threw the unfinished cigarette away. “I didn’t know what to do, okay? I contacted everybody I knew, but who the fuck is gonna go against Cadinoff? I called the Corporate Enforcement Agency and they just ignored me. Because I’m just a kid crying about his boss being kidnapped by Cadinoff. Nobody cares about that!”
My stomach dropped like the acceleration dip of an old Behemoth Neutron.
“I was making plans to break in on my own, somehow. Bad plans. Stupid plans. But I was desperate. Then Myka showed up here.”
That wasn’t what had happened. Absolutely not. Nope. Nuh-uh.
“I thought she was gonna kidnap me too, but she gave me all these blueprints and details on your location and access points in the building. A data tab full of this shit. And then she gave me the name and comm code of a guy in the CEA who’d actually do something for me. So, yes, I rescued you…using the plan Myka handed over.”
“Why didn’t you tell me at the time?”
His voice rose. “She told me not to! I figured she’s going behind Cadinoff’s back and wanted to restrict the number of people who knew about it. Weird corporate espionage shit or something. I didn’t think she did it because she was into you! No offense.”
I couldn’t take any, could I? Before the expo, the idea of Myka Benton having genuine feelings was a fantastic party joke. An impossible thing, like unicorns or a way to run the Edelwarg 4-8 without it overheating.
This past year, all the times Myka had poked her head in and acted mysterious, I’d assumed it was a Cadinoff power play. Reminding me that Cadinoff could still get to me. But what if it wasn’t? What if the whole time, she’d just wanted to spend time with me? When I was being held by Cadinoff—when she was acting like a micro-manager with her questions and her constant supervision—she wasn’t gathering intel. She was…
This whole
