“Kandi,” Whisper says with her eyes closed, the third morning after a just-for-tonight in a row that she’s sneaking out of the MOCOM without them talking about it.
“Fuck!” Kandi says, startled, hitting her head on the roof, and Whisper yanks her down to her knees next to bunk to painstakingly inspect her scalp for injury, scowling.
“I just meant to say,” the hacker says finally, loosening her grip enough for the collar of Kandi’s shirt to slip through her fingers, “that you know that guy’s going to be a problem.”
Kandi takes a deep breath, and lets it out, verging on a sigh.
“Yeah,” she says glumly.
Whisper lies down, clutches the blanket over herself, and closes her eyes, every line of her broadcasting disgruntlement. Kandi stares at her face helplessly. She’s not Whisper, doesn’t know the exacting buying power of everything in the world and how to mortgage it. She’s just meat, just metal, looking at things she knows she can’t afford.
She finds herself reaching out; stops herself, almost touching Whisper’s face.
“If it comes to a conflict of interest—” Whisper says, with her eyes closed.
“My interests include my ass out in one piece,” Kandi says. “Anyone whose interests stop aligning with that has fired themself from my team.”
She doesn’t need to say that Whisper isn’t going to be that person. That she trusts Whisper isn’t going to be that person.
She wouldn’t have needed to say so before.
…Whisper wouldn’t have needed to ask.
She takes her hovering hand back, slowly. “You want me to send the kid over with a coffee, when we get back from our run?” she says quietly, and Whisper opens her eyes and frowns at her like Kandi just did something mystifying.
“Sure,” Whisper says, after a few seconds of just looking at her, so Kandi ducks out of the MOCOM and sets a brisk pace along the beach with Antsy, trying to drown any weird nagging feelings in lactic acid.
Kandi’s pretty sure she’s not imaging things; there is something very fucking wrong with the job, in some way she’s not seeing. She’s not stupid, and she’s stayed alive this long off the back of her sniff-test reflexes, and nobody else is saying anything; it makes her feel squirrely and paranoid.
“How are you doing on getting everything coordinated with the other team,” she says noncommittally to Gabriel.
“They’re doing all the work,” he says, grins smugly and shrugs, and Kandi thinks: even if he is Lucky Ricky’s secret handler and set with a cushy job for life, shouldn’t he pretend to be interested in the prospect of working with Whisper? Of the potential opportunities?
She doesn’t find reasons to talk to Lucky Ricky. She doesn’t want to talk to Lucky Ricky. He talks at her, quite a lot, because he’s the boss, the big man, the one in charge.
She doesn’t find any new reasons to worry about Lucky Ricky. The fact he’s a shitty idiot already worried her.
Antsy — Antsy’s loyalty is clear, and exactly where it should be: with Whisper.
Kandi worries about Whisper, like a physical ache, like she’s hurting from the flu. If this thing goes sideways — if Whisper has a plan that kicks in for real, when this thing goes sideways, and she goes after whatever she really wants—
Well. Kandi doesn’t know, that’s the trouble. She doesn’t know what happens then, she doesn’t know how she’ll jump. Kandi’s the weak link, for all her bitching about Lucky Ricky; he’s at least predictably shitty.
She goes home on the bike, a long and winding spot-any-tail, confuse-any-pursuit route that gets longer and twistier every day, stows the bike in the derelict house. Leans on the doorframe and stares at the MOCOM and its uncheery too-white interior LED lighting, at Whisper unpacking takeout on the tailgate, at the bunk she’s absolutely, unquestioningly going to fall into again when Whisper tells her to take off or take off her pants. She chews at the inside of her cheek.
The thing, she quietly admits, about the Major chasing her for most of her life; murdering anyone she made friends or even acquaintances with; forcing her to start over, clean slate, every few years, is that she doesn’t fucking know how to clean up her own mess. She’s being weird and unprofessional about Whisper, and doesn’t know how not to be. She’s the problem. She’s a liability. And she can’t even manage an adult conversation about it, not now, not after trying it blew up everything she had with Whisper last time.
“Food’s getting cold,” Whisper says, at a conversational level, not looking over the distance between them; and Kandi sighs and pushes off the doorframe and goes to hop up on the tailgate next to her.
