sex bots 04 - one night steined (11 page)

Kuri woke hours later on a bare mattress. One of Frank’s coats was draped over her. Whatever Frank had given her had kicked in soon after she’d left the office, forcing her to nap while the rest of the team unpacked.

She couldn’t tell the time. Bright halogen lights hung from the ceiling, imitating the sun. She felt hungover—headachy and mildly nauseated, but she didn’t think it was from the meds. Kuri pressed a hand into her stomach, realizing she was hungry. She remembered dinner the night before, but knew she hadn’t eaten anything since the restaurant.

Shifting to her knees, she climbed off the mattress. A room’s four walls had been constructed around her, and though the panels were unfinished, the space reminded her of Frank. The dresser was an old, worn wood. The bedframe, waiting for someone to lift the mattress onto it, was rusted metal. Everything was sturdy, and permanent-feeling.

She listened to the sound of the team joking and working outside. A window pierced one of Frank’s walls and looked out into the warehouse. The door was still open and she saw the sun low on the horizon. It was hard to tell the time from that fact alone, though—the sun was always low on the horizon in the fall.

Kuri shivered, wishing they’d close the door. Everyone else was probably sweating from all the exertion, but she was freezing in her t-shirt and sweats. She wrapped Frank’s coat around her and wandered out through the empty doorframe, sensing how everyone’s attention pricked up. None of them turned to stare, and she was grateful. However, she definitely felt their tension.

“Hey, doll.” Frank set down a pile of knotted electronic cables and walked over to her. “Sleep well?”

Kuri tried to finger-comb her hair, but it was too tangled. She sighed. “Yeah.” Her belly rumbled. “Hungry.” Kuri smelled something tantalizing and swiveled her head in the direction of the scent, but then realized it was the landlord in his office.
Ew.
She must have been starving if she could smell humans.

Frank came to stand next to her. “Ben should be back any minute with food. I sent him out a half hour ago.”

The ZU’s human mascot walked through the door, his hands full of plastic bags. Kuri could see the blood pooling at the bottom. Ben hoisted them higher and called out, “Dinner,” though it was unnecessary, since the entire team was descending on him, looking ravenous.

Kuri shrugged off the jacket and looked around for the duffel Q-ter had taken from the hotel. She needed to be in her own clothes. Heck, she wanted to take a bath and brush her teeth and maybe burn her clothes. “Q? Where’s my stuff?”

Q-ter looked up from the box he was unpacking. He pulled out paper plates, plastic forks and a microwave. “In Frank’s room.” He nodded in the direction of the walled-in space where Kuri’d been sleeping.

“Thanks.” She hurried to Frank’s room, grabbing the duffel from its hiding spot in the corner. As fast as she could, Kuri put on her own sweater, and then her jacket. When she stepped back into the main area, Q-ter was feeding an extension cord across the room to plug in the microwave.

Frank said, “You need a 220 outlet for that microwave. That cord’s not going to work.” The smug, know-it-all edge to his voice got on Kuri’s nerves. It was weird, because his overbearing tendencies often bugged her, but at that moment they made her livid. It was as if the attractive man she’d spent the night with had suddenly turned into their father.

In fact, the whole dinner felt like the kind of family gathering she saw in movies, with crazy relatives and annoying fights and the main character—the only sane one in the bunch—just waiting for an excuse to leave.

Q-ter rolled his eyes, sassing Frank like he always did. “Pul-leez.” Then the kid produced a small box. It looked homemade and pieced together out of spare parts, but it had plugs on both ends and Q-ter connected it between the extension cord and the microwave. “This should do the trick.”

Frank folded his arms, his expression wary. “When did you build a voltage amplifier?”

“When Ben left to pick up the food. I knew we’d need it.” Q-ter placed a plate of food inside and programmed the machine to cook. “You don’t trust me with anything, do you?”

Kuri noticed that Q-ter was smiling as he said it, proud because Frank was impressed. She couldn’t begrudge the kid his moment in the sun. He was just as much a product of their big, weird family as she was. But if they were a family, what was she? The dutiful wife? The black-sheep daughter?

Somehow all their interactions felt different to her, now that she had her memories. Q-ter’s excitement seemed annoying rather than endearing, and Frank’s paternalism made Kuri feel trapped instead of safe. She loved her friends, and inside Kuri knew that she even loved Frank, but her muscles jumped as if they were urging her to run, to get out of this same old routine. If things were going to be different in her life—and they
had
to be different—she couldn’t stand to be around the same group of people she’d known for so many years.

Ben unscrewed a bottle of wine and poured it into some plastic cups. Then he served everyone as if he were a waiter at a fancy restaurant.

“A toast.” Frank lifted his cup. “Thank you, everyone, for pitching in with the move.”

Emotion boiled up in Kuri’s chest. She couldn’t be part of this—couldn’t sit and listen with a smile on her face and let her makeshift family wrap her up in their arms and hold her so close she couldn’t change. So as Shani and Royce led a raucous chorus of floor-thumping and shouts of “hell yeah”, Kuri slipped away as quietly as she could and headed to the bathroom.

She pressed her back to the wall, breathing through her nose and trying not to get drawn in as Frank’s deep voice echoed through the empty space. Kuri opened the tap and splashed water on her face. She had to get out of there, and for the first time Kuri desperately wished she had a driver’s license. The oddity in her program that made her suck at driving had never seemed worth addressing before, but suddenly Kuri realized how screwed-up it was that she relied on other people for all her transportation. She was completely powerless and at the mercy of Frank and the rest of the team, and she wondered why she’d never noticed before.

Kuri peered at herself in the mirror, her expression determined. Her huge eyes narrowed and grew steely. Her chin slid forward as her jaw tightened. She knew what she had to do—get away from her friends and forge a life for herself. And though the day had been a whirlwind of emotions, at that moment Kuri felt completely calm. She didn’t have to wait for Frank to fix her or for her friends to make it better. Kuri could do those things herself. And for the first time when she saw her own face Kuri didn’t see a Kewpie doll. She saw a pissed-off woman. And oddly, one who didn’t look at all like the type of girl men would hoot at as they passed in the street.

She stalked out of the bathroom and back to where the group was eating dinner. Kuri picked up her plate and shoveled the last few bites of liver into her mouth. Frank was rubbing his jaw, and talking in those sexy low tones that so drew her in, but Kuri blocked the sound. She cared about him, so much her chest ached, but she’d relied on him too much for too long.

Barbie walked over to Frank and gave him a big hug. The party swirled around Kuri, though she felt as if she were watching it play out on a stage.

“You okay?” Frank checked her eyes. “D’you need to take the other half of that pill?”

She thought about it for a second, feeling around in her mind for fear, panic. Kuri felt fine, but she didn’t want to have to rely on Frank and the others to dole out pills if she needed them in the future. “I’m fine, but give me the bottle to take home.” Kuri didn’t wait to see his look of concern. She knew Frank was going to argue—to say that she should wait for him or Q-ter to dispense drugs like pharmacists. However, she’d been working around the ZU’s medical facilities for over forty years. Kuri was more than capable of determining the proper dose of benzodiazepines.

Kuri took the bottle Frank held out for her, and then rubbed her arms. “It’s freezing in here.” With a belly full of food, the air chilled her even further.

“Got it.” Q-ter hopped up from the ground and returned a second later with a space heater. He held up the plug victoriously and then inserted it into his box. The group of them watched as the heater whirred to life. A few seconds later, it sputtered to a stop. The overhead lights blinked once, and then went out.

“Q-ter,” Frank growled. The team burst into laughter, drowning out whatever else Frank said. Then someone shouted, “We were done anyway,” and Kuri listened as people dug flashlights out of boxes to clean up.

Kuri took the opportunity to grab her duffel bag and ease toward the door.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Frank called to her from across the room.

“Just grabbing my sweater out of Shani’s car. I’ll be right back.” Kuri hid the duffel bag behind her back. Between the boxes and the dark room, she hoped Frank couldn’t make out what she was holding.

“Okay.” Frank’s grumbling voice made it clear he wanted her to take someone with her, but everyone was busy and his arms were full of plates. “Just come right back inside, ’kay?”

“Sure thing, Frank.” Kuri slipped out the door and before Frank could change his mind and come after her, she hurried down the street. Lights flickered over gas stations, restaurants and businesses in the distance and she hoped she could get to a phone to call a cab before anyone thought to look for her.

She got lucky though, because a cab pulled up next to her, slowing. The driver rolled down the window. “Need a ride?”

“Yes, sure.” She opened the door and tossed her duffel bag inside. On any previous day, Kuri would have been nervous getting in a car with an unknown man, but somehow she didn’t think she was going to
glitch
again anytime soon. It was weird, because she wasn’t sure how she knew, but some part of her understood that the
glitches
had served a purpose. They’d protected her from her memories. But now that everything was flooding back—the good and the bad—she was fairly certain her mind wouldn’t trick her into forgetting again. “I’m heading to Capitol Hill. But the train station after that.”

The taxi pulled away and Kuri mentally calculated how much time she could spend grabbing her essentials out of the apartment before the rest of the team thought to look for her at home. If she only spent five minutes she figured she could get in and out before anyone stopped her. And then…

She blew out a breath and looked out the window. There was a whole world laid out in front of her, and unlike some steins, Kuri could pass perfectly well for human. Kuri lifted her chin, watching the other cars pass. For the first time in possibly ever, Kuri felt like Frank had been right—she could be anything she wanted.

Chapter Nine

One week later…

“And you’re
sure
you don’t know where she might have gone, Shan?” Frank’s voice was little more than a snarl. He kept scanning the map on his screen, rolling his mouse around, expanding his search to wider areas. He gripped the phone hard enough to strain the plastic case.

A long sigh sounded over the phone. “I don’t know anything but what she said in the note. That she needed some time, that she’d call when she got settled…”

Frank listened to her breathe on the phone, feeling completely lost. He pinched his forehead between his thumb and forefinger, fighting the panicky headache building in his temples. “I can’t believe I let her leave. Shit, I should’ve made her take one of us with her.”

“Frank…” Her voice was slow, measured, but tinged with frustration. “She is a grown woman. It’s not your place to ‘let’ or ‘forbid’ her from doing anything.”

He wanted to argue—to point out that Kuri was sick, unstable and incapable of doing a lot of things most of them took for granted. But Frank stopped himself. Each point sounded more patronizing than the last. In the end, all he could say was, “I think she dug out her GPS.”

It would have been simple for her to do, and probably not hugely painful. Frank had inserted the tiny chips under his team’s skin on their upper arms. Still, the thought of her cutting into her own flesh to escape him made Frank shudder.

“If you can’t see her on your super-spy map, I guess so.”

“Oh.” Frank didn’t know what else to say. He peered around his office, realizing he didn’t even have a picture of her. Since none of his team aged, he’d never seen the point of capturing them on camera. “Hey, Shan?” Frank wiped at his face, scrubbing his feelings away.

“Yeah?” Shani’s voice was soft and kind, so unlike her normal harsh tones that it made the whole thing seem more final.

“You, um, wouldn’t happen to have a picture of her, would ya?” Frank said it offhand, planning to say he wanted to use it for a “lost person” ad if Shani pushed.

But Shani didn’t ask any questions. Instead she only told him, “Yeah. I’ll send you a few.” She must have had them on hand, because Frank heard the soft dinging of files loading onto his phone.

Two and a half months later…

Kuriko stepped out of the office building and into the bright Spokane sunshine. It was still cold on the other side of the mountains from Seattle, but at least she didn’t have to live with the constant rain and gloom.

“Hey, Amy.” One of her coworkers ran after her, calling the fake name she’d used to get her data entry job. “You going to the Christmas party?” The young man came to a stop in front of her, breathing out huffs of steam in the December air. He was cute—skinny with brown hair and blue eyes.

Kuri hadn’t had a flashback in three weeks and hadn’t
glitched
since before she left Seattle, but even if she was ready to date, the twenty-year-old human wasn’t her type. “No. I’m thinking about maybe heading home to see family.” It was the first lie that came to mind, but Kuri couldn’t help but entertain the idea. She hadn’t spoken to Shani or the guys since she left.

“Oh.” The guy looked at his feet. “Are you taking a holiday week, then? Or will you be around for New Year’s?”