Chapter 20: Chapter 4 – Part 3

Wren fought down the urge to adjust herself, for the five hundred and seventy-third time, as she stood at the bar.  She’d thought it would be a good distraction to keep count instead of focusing on how different it was for her to be wearing a dress, but the sheer number of times she’d started to move and stopped herself was reaching preposterous levels.

 

The bar was not her type, although it was the kind of place she would have frequented once upon a time, and it had only been in the last few months that she’d realized what her type even was.  Or that she’d had a type.  It was slick and clean, with indirect lighting in blues and whites and not a clock to be found.  Everyone else there was looking pretty fashionable.  Of course, before, Wren would have just worn whatever she woke up in that morning, or was on top of the laundry pile when she got out of the shower.  Dress code be damned.

 

The dress wasn’t the most revealing thing she’d ever worn, but it was probably top five.  Jackson had originally suggested it be paired with heels, but Wren had never worn a single pair of heels in her life.  The only shoes she’d worn in years had been canvas sneakers.  She’d eventually borrowed a pair of Bonnie’s boots, which had somewhat changed the tone of the whole ensemble and not necessarily for the worse.  

 

Whenever Wren wasn’t fidgeting, or counting the number of times she wanted to adjust herself, Wren was bunching her toes inside the boots.  Bonnie’s feet had been in there.  Recently.  It was cool.  She’d even painted her toenails when she realized that those were the shoes she was going to wear, which had felt like the most ridiculous thing she could do, but she’d wanted to be pretty inside them.  Which was weird.

 

Good weird, probably, but weird.

 

It was definitely attention-getting.  The dress, that was.  Wren was much more used to doing the chasing, and was so inexperienced at putting herself out there that she was mostly oblivious to the glances being cast her way.  She was very much out of touch with herself as a woman.

 

For a relatively thin piece of fabric, with a really cute plunge down the front that she didn’t know what to make of, that dress was giving her a lot of big thoughts.  In fact, she was so wrapped up in unraveling the enigma of Wren that she almost missed it when her client entered the restaurant.

 

He was more or less what Wren was expecting.  Nicely dressed, in a sharp suit and tie, but there was no hiding the shape of his frame.  Jackson had said he was a desk jockey with ambitions, but Wren had been right to expect someone that looked like they might have spent time in a combat zone with Bonnie; someone that she might have fought alongside with, because without a betrayal her rage seemed out of place.  

 

On the other hand, this man had shot Bonnie, and maybe that was all the justification Bonnie needed to be so angry about it.

 

He misread her blank, narrow-eyed stare, because she’d completely forgotten what she was supposed to do, for cool composure, and sauntered over looking very much like he was dealing with a peer.  When she saw that it was working, Wren just kept it up.

 

He said, “Have you ordered yet?”

 

Wren blinked.  Shit.  There was a phrase.  A passphrase.  She was supposed to respond with something specific.  Jackson had been really clear about that.  She smiled and leaned back in her chair to buy herself an extra moment while she wracked her brain for the—

 

“I’m on a liquid diet,” she replied, holding up her martini glass.

 

“Can’t say I disagree with the results,” he said.

 

Wren smirked, and raised the glass to her lips.  Was there a final part to the passphrase?  She couldn’t remember.  It seemed like there was, and that she was already taking too long to say it, so she shifted her shoulders to let the plunging neckline show a bit more of her inside sideboob.  Insideboob? she thought.  Wren’s breasts were too small, and sat a little too far apart on her chest, to form actual cleavage, but with most men it didn’t take much more than a glimpse.

 

This man was no different, though he at least had the wherewithal to glance over her shoulder as he settled in front of her.  He couldn’t mask the shock of recognition.

 

“That’s right,” Wren said.

 

“Where did you get one of those?”

 

Wren turned and ran her finger, salaciously, over the chestplate of her newly-functional security bot.  “Oh, this old thing?”

 

The man chuckled, and flagged the bartender with a finger.  “I knew the stories about you were bullshit.  Some long haul asteroid miner taking out so many targets?  Carving a neat little chunk out of Jyi Bao’s bottom line?”

 

Wren ran her tongue over her lower lip and shrugged, disaffectedly.  “People talk.  I don’t correct them.”

 

“So who do you work for?  RL Inco was hot for one of those,” he said, gesturing behind Wren to the bot.  “I know that because they bought one, under the table, from me.  Then I hear through the grapevine that there was a problem with the delivery, and that they want another one.”  He chuckled and shook his head.

 

“The only thing you need to know about my client,” she said, casually, “is that they have deep pockets.”

 

Wren was having to focus much harder than usual, because this kind of pretend play was not her strong suit, but not so hard that she wasn’t aware of what was going on around her.  At a table behind her and to her left, a man had been conducting lengthy negotiations with a pair of escorts who had undergone cosmetic surgery to look like twins.  The work was good, more than enough to fool an executive down from the corporate suites three levels up.  The ‘twins’ angle was seemingly very important to him: so important, in fact, that he was overlooking the obvious differences in their eyes, tone of voice, and speech patterns.

 

Their business concluded, the three of them stood and headed toward the exit, and as soon as they were on their way the bot behind her turned sharply and grabbed one of the recently vacated chairs.  The man in front of Wren quirked his head and narrowed his eyes, trying to look back and forth at her and her bot at least once per second.

 

Wren laughed.  She’d been practicing her laugh, and she was pretty sure the word to describe what she’d been going for was ‘timbre’.

 

“What is it doing?”

 

“You can’t tell?” Wren asked.  When he just stared at her, she laughed again.  She turned, and they both watched as the bot carried the chair over to the far wall, flipped it upside down, and stacked it on top of another empty chair.  “Well?”

 

The man’s face betrayed nothing, but neither did he say anything.

 

“That’s how good they are,” she said, as she turned back toward him.  Her only move was to play it off like some kind of 4D chess maneuver and bluff like crazy.

 

For a moment, a really, really scary moment, it looked like he was going to call her on it, but then he smirked and shook his head.  “I knew it,” he said, under his breath.  “I fucking knew it.”

 

The bot returned to its post, behind her and to her left, and said, “Twenty three point four.  Forty eight.”

 

Wren looked back over her shoulder and nodded.  “My client is looking for more people with your skillset, and I’ve heard good things, Mr. Gerad.  Very good things.”

 

“Certainly not from Ms. Li,” he said, giving her a level look.

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“I didn’t need her to say anything.  The hole you put in her side told me plenty.”  She knew she’d needed to deliver that line, or something just like it.  Preparing herself for it hadn’t made it any easier.

 

And then, very casually, he shifted his stance in a way that, in hindsight, betrayed the fact that he’d had his hand slightly inside the front of his jacket, where he no doubt had a gun of his own.  He’d been ready to shoot her, and she’d missed it.  It was a lot to process, but she was pretty sure she kept her posture unaffected and easy.

 

“Will our history be a problem?”

 

Wren turned her head toward the bar, and absently ran her finger around the rim of her drink.  “We’re about to open up a campaign on multiple fronts.  I can have you operating in one theater while Ms. Li in another, none the wiser.”

 

“All business,” he said.  “I like that.  Bonnie never—”

 

“Ms. Li,” Wren said, sharply.

 

He blinked, a little surprised, and then nodded.  “Ms. Li never understood that, but it’s good to see you have a handle on her.”

 

She made a little sound in her throat.  A purr, crossed with assent, and just a hint of grimace.  “I prefer to think of it as a leash.”

 

He was good.  A cool customer.  His expression never changed, but his eyes gave him away.  For just a second, a fraction of a second, he was looking down at the front of her dress again.  Down at the exposed flesh in the middle of her chest.  Right where she wanted him.

 

“Twenty three point four.  Forty six.”

 

“Excellent,” Wren said, giving another subtle nod over her shoulder.  “Hold there.”

 

“Affirmative.”

 

The negotiation that followed was tense.  It had needed to be.  There was a lot riding on the authenticity.  Wren played it smooth, pressing him for his asking price first and then lowballing that since she had no real idea what to offer someone for a job like his.  Bonnie did it, more or less, for free, and she didn’t think he’d be so accommodating.

 

After a little back and forth, Wren felt like she had a handle on the middle area between his asking price and what he made currently, and made him an offer that nestled in between the two.  That had softened him up nicely, and his body language changed dramatically.  He ordered another drink.  His smile got a little lazier.  He stared less at her bot entourage and more at her chest, and he didn’t bat an eye when she suggested they continue their negotiations in private.

 

The hotel she’d rented the room from, on the accommodation wing of the station, projected an image of glamor and luxury that extended to the cost per night, but not to the room itself.  It was plain, which was not a bad adjective in her vocabulary but also maybe wasn’t what she’d paid for.  On another trip, she would have been mad about that, but right then she had bigger fish to fry.

 

He had tried, very hard, to be handsy with her, but Wren had played coy and was light on her feet, equal parts fending him off and buying time while they moved from transit car to elevator to hallway.  Finally, at the doorway, when there was no one in sight in either direction and his hands had gotten even more daring, she’d had to take a very different tack with him.

 

She said, “Settle down, sailor.  Mine is bigger than yours.”

 

The look that he gave her, surprise mixed with confusion mixed with curiosity mixed with disbelief, almost made her wish that Bonnie wasn’t waiting in the room to kill him.

 

Almost.

 

That part of it was over very quickly.  Once she unlocked the door, Wren turned and moved close to him, grabbing his tie and pulling him along while she backed into the room, keeping herself close enough to him to block his view of the room behind her.  Right at the end, it had nearly gone wrong.  She’d turned, pulling him around the door so she could close it, not wanting the noise of whatever Bonnie was about to do to carry out into the hallway, but that exposed Bonnie in the spot where she’d been waiting, in an armchair in the corner.  His eyes widened, and he’d grabbed at Wren to use her as a shield, but Wren took the grip she had on his tie and twisted to drive her forearm under his chin.  It was enough to keep him at bay and a little off center, so that he couldn’t use his weight to overpower her.  Once he realized that fighting her wasn’t going to get him anywhere, he tried to reach into his jacket, but Wren slowed him down just enough.

 

Bonnie got to her feet quickly, moving with purpose.  She didn’t need to press the gun to the side of his head to make sure it was a clean shot, but she got pretty close.

 

Wren watched him die.

 

She did not think of herself as being particularly naive or unworldly.  If you had asked her, ten minutes before, Wren’s dividing line between the people who’ve lived a life and the people who haven’t would have been ‘anal sex’.  Her bar for stepping outside the normative social experience was, she now realized, pitifully low.  She had caused death.  Her body count was not insignificant, but it had always been distant.  It had been survival, dog eat dog, and Wren had been the bigger dog.  Or the smarter dog.

 

She watched the light go out inside of him, and it was hard.

 

He deserved it.  He’d crossed Bonnie.  He’d betrayed her.  Bonnie was, more and more, her whole world, and that was justification enough for Wren.  She would throw herself, and all her energy, and all her wit, at Bonnie’s enemies.  She would slay them by the tens, hundreds, or thousands if she needed to.  She would wreak havoc.

 

Or, at least, she would as soon as she could get to her feet.  As soon as her knees could find some strength and support her, because it was going to be hard to pull all that off from the floor where she was scrambling and screaming.

 

This wasn’t supposed to be about her.  This was supposed to be for Bonnie.  She’d done a thing for Bonnie.  She’d even set it up as a surprise.  Bonnie hadn’t known what was happening, or what they were there to do, or who was going to come through the door.  She’d been prepared —Wren had made sure of that— but this was something Wren had made her peace with.  She’d been purposeful, and intentional, and why was she crying?  Why was she needing Bonnie to hold her, and tell her it was going to be alright?

 

She was supposed to be the one doing the comforting.  Helping Bonnie heal.  Helping Bonnie move on, and feel safe at night.  Giving Bonnie some peace of mind.  She was going to ride the thrill, and make out with Bonnie while they fled.  It was going to be romantic and meaningful.  Not... this.

 

***

 

Afterwards, Wren had thrown herself into her work.  She started taking things apart that she’d been meaning to fix for years, and had one of the most productive ninety six hour periods of her entire life.  She finally managed to get her security bot to stop giving her temperature and humidity checks every minute or so.  During their mission, as a last resort, she’d just removed the words degrees and percent from the verbal report, and pretended like those numbers it kept reciting meant something.  It was a good ploy, but it only worked in short bursts.  It would have worn thin after much longer.

 

Instead of customizing her body armor, which would have involved changing the colors of it in such a way that it would have rendered the grayscale camo style moot, she figured out how to weave some of those protective layers into her existing wardrobe.  It wasn’t a perfect solution, as it left her extremities exposed, but her torso was more bulletproof than it had ever been.

 

She tinkered with her gun, and she tinkered with Bonnie’s smart CAR, and she tinkered with the water recycler system.  She cleaned meticulously.  She did not sleep much.

After the fifth day, Bonnie insisted they change destinations.  It added time to their trip, as they’d been heading in the wrong direction, but it wouldn’t matter.  Jackson wasn’t expecting them.  Once the Daedalus had finished its reorientation, nav calculations, and shifted back into t-space on their new heading, Bonnie dragged her into bed and held her for a long time, only letting her go for long enough to take care of the necessities.

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