The bus jerked into motion, and she easily caught her balance. Sure enough, she spotted Howard’s horrified expression in the shifting streetlights. Their eyes met and she held up the bags of food in explanation. Relief cascaded over him, quickly followed by guilt.
Swaying with the motion of the bus, she continued past several rows of open, plush seats to get to where they’d retreated to try to distance themselves from the tour group.
“I didn’t know what you wanted, so I got you a steak hoagie on whole wheat,” she said as she sat, her voice betraying her slight annoyance.
Eyes wide, he shifted in the indulgent seat to tuck his phone away. “I thought you’d left.”
She extended him a bag, arm stiff. “I asked for your help, remember?”
Sheepish, he took it, bag crackling as he opened it up and looked inside. “That was before my cover was blown. Thanks.”
“Bottled water …” She handed him one that had been tucked under her arm, and he took it, closing out the complimentary Web link and lowering his tray table. “And your choice.” She opened her bag and brought out the chips. “Salt and vinegar, or black pepper.”
Howard smiled weakly, his face seeming to vanish as the bus lurched onto the service road and into a more certain dark. “Black pepper?” he asked, and she handed it over.
That he hadn’t trusted her rankled, and Peri sat silent beside him at the back of the bus, lips pressed as she arranged her sandwich and chips on the fold-down table. She left the courtesy light off, but the ambient light from the monitors, currently muted and showing the late news, was enough to see his continued embarrassment. Apparently Asia’s borders were closed, anyone trying to break the containment being shot on sight and dragged away by workers in hazmat suits. Peri thought it disturbing that no one seemed to care. Perhaps it was an ongoing thing she’d forgotten. She hadn’t been able to find any Twinkies the last couple of days, either.
“I left you a note,” she finally said, and he winced.
“I didn’t see it,” he said, clearly lying. “Thank you for the sandwich.”
“Uh-huh,” she said drily, the snap of the breaking seal on her water sounding loud.
Howard seemed to shrink in on himself. “I’m sorry,” he started, and she cut him off, hand waving as she swallowed.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said when she came up for air. “I’m the bad guy, remember?”
“I never—” he said in affront, and she eyed him sharply as she recapped her bottle. “Fine, maybe I did,” he amended, looking at his sandwich forlornly. “But can you blame me?”
“Eat your steak, Howard,” she said flatly.
Immediately he picked it up. “Opti is a mercenary task force,” he said around his full mouth. “The only thing keeping them from being classified as a terrorist group is that they’re on the government’s payroll.” He swallowed. “Among others.”
“I’m taking my black-pepper chips back,” she said, plucking them from his tray.
Howard chuckled, dark hands securely wrapped around his hoagie. “You do what you need to do, but you can’t tell me that Opti didn’t help that power plant melt down in the Middle East last year.”
“Why on earth would Opti blow up a power plant?” she asked, her voice hardly audible over the bus, roaring to get up the entrance ramp. The bus darkened further, cocooning them.
“To put an end to the religious extremists slaughtering reporters and medical relief workers.” Hardly more than a shadow, Howard hunched over his tray as his sandwich threatened to fall apart. “Millions displaced, thousands dead. Acres of newly arable land wasted. It’s a shame. The world lost a lot of history, too. Only so much of it could be trucked out ahead of time under the excuse of lending it to a museum.”
She didn’t remember, and for the first time, it bothered her. “Accidents do happen.”
Howard’s dark fingers stood out against his hoagie as her eyes adjusted, and he set his sandwich down. “They’ve done it before. Chernobyl ring a bell?”
Peri frowned and broke a piece of bacon off her BLT. “You’re mistaken.”
“Am I?”
The salty bacon tasted flat. Again, doubt trickled through her, her blind loyalty wearing thin. “What about Opti breaking up that credit card–strip hacker ring? Millions of dollars caught before it was funneled overseas. And Stanza-gate. You really think that wack job should set policy? How about finding that plane that went down in the Alps? Rescuing all those people before they started eating each other.”
Howard’s brow furrowed in thought. “That was three years ago.”
“Well, it seems like yesterday to me,” she said defensively, and Howard adroitly snatched his chips back, his faint look of pity-laced understanding irritating her.
Opening the packet, he leaned close. “I hate to break it to you, but the strip fraud was a front, paid for by the Billion by Thirty club to force that nifty new banking app on your phone into play. Opti found the Alps plane because they were the ones who downed it trying to keep a defector from going over to the wrong side. I’ll give you Stanza-gate, though. The guy was crazy.”
“Yeah, we should just let the world go to hell,” she grumbled. “Free choice and all.”
“That’s not what this is about.” He hesitated, the lights from the oncoming traffic making the furrows on his brow look deep. “Okay, the alliance is trying to shut Opti down, but not the work that drafters and anchors do. We need the terrorists stopped, the flesh-trafficking rings ended, and the power-hungry extremist governments held in check. And sure, the alliance isn’t so much the green tree-huggers that we don’t understand why sometimes it’s better if someone dies early or innocents suffer for the greater good. What the alliance believes is that it shouldn’t be a handful of wealthy families who both dictate and benefit, telling the rest of humanity that they did them a favor and to be happy with their new toys and don’t ask who paid for them and how.”