Max and her friends — Logan, best buddy Original Cindy, Alec, Joshua, and several others — had witnessed young Kelpy’s meltdown and horrifying death. Since then, Max had worked even harder to make sure that she and the man she loved never touched. Anything — the brush of a kiss, the holding of bare hands, even the most perfunctory of hugs — would be the touch of death to him.
Gem brought his coffee, placed the steaming cup in front of him and offered a warm smile, which Logan returned.
“How’s Eve?” he asked the waitress.
The night after the Jam Pony hostage crisis, Gem decided that since her baby was the first transgenic to be born in freedom, the child should be named after the first woman in the world... hence, Eve.
“She’s already standing and she wants to walk,” the slim, attractive waitress said, “though she’s not quite ready yet. She’s gonna be a handful.”
“Standing already?” Logan asked, astounded. “At six months?”
Max just smiled. “Good genes — that is, really, really good genes. All of us X5s did that.”
Logan shook his head in wonder, then sipped his coffee as Gem returned behind the counter. Max ran a hand over her face and let out a long sigh.
“You look beat,” he said. “Too bad you weren’t genetically enhanced to be a mayor, not a killer.”
She gave him a weak grin. “That’s how tired I am — even a weak-ass crack like that made me smile.”
He snorted. “Weak-ass, maybe. But you did smile.”
“I did smile,” Max admitted.
“And we do have much to be thankful for.”
“Yes, we do. Do I sound ungrateful...?”
“Oh yeah.”
Max just shook her head. “Sorry... I wasn’t wired up to be a leader... I’m a loner. A commando.”
After taking another pull from his coffee, Logan said, “Well, loner or not, there’s a whole lotta people up on the roof, asking for ya.”
“Yeah?”
“Joshua, Alec, Original Cindy, Mole. I think Dix and Luke are up there. Sketchy, too... case you wanna toss his ass off the building.”
“Now you are tempting me... But it’s cold up there.”
For most of the last two weeks, the weather had been miserable, even by Seattle’s standards. The temperature had hung near the freezing mark, and the wind howling at thirty to forty miles per hour, with gusts as high as fifty.
Logan gave her a look. “I don’t see you wearing a coat... Anyway, aren’t you the one told me ’bout holding your breath for five minutes? In a pond under a sheet of ice? Back when you escaped from Manticore?”
“That doesn’t mean I liked it.”
“Where’s your Christmas spirit?”
“Christmas at Manticore didn’t build a whole lotta holiday nostalgia into me.”
“How about your foster family?”
“Yeah, that was great — like when my foster father got roaring drunk and pushed my foster sister into the tree.”
Shaking his head, Logan asked, “Talk about gettin’ coal in your stocking, Miss Grinch. You gotta get in the Yuletide swing.”
“I know a way, and it’s not up on a cold rooftop.”
“What’s that?”
“Sitting by a fire with you. What’s that old song? ‘Chestnuts Roasting’?”
“See,” he said, and his smile lighted up the place. “You do have some Christmas spirit in ya.”
That smile of his — all those white teeth, those deep dimples. She loved his smile; she loved most everything about him. She just had a hard time saying so, and she knew he had a similar problem. But they both knew how they felt, and maybe that was enough.
The two of them had also been so busy of late that they barely saw each other. Logan continued to use Eyes Only as a positive propaganda machine for the transgenics, and Max always had some Terminal City crisis or other that needed attending. If it wasn’t trouble with the water supply, it was building code violations, or choosing a logo for the new arts and antiques mall.
She might not have been interested in such mundane matters a few months ago, but now they were the tedious minutia that seemed to occupy her every waking moment. Having even a few minutes alone with Logan felt like finally coming to shore after swimming across Puget Sound.
“Why don’t we just go up there,” Logan suggested, “see what it is the gang wants, and be done with it?”
She playfully shook her head. “I have a better idea.”
“Which is?”
“Ditch them.”
His headshake was more serious. “You know we can’t.”
She huffed. “All right, we’ll go up on the roof, we’ll deal with whatever they want... on one condition.”
“Yeah?”
“The rest of the evening — it’s just us. A quiet evening together. Starting with, I’ll cook you dinner. I’m gonna officially fall off the vegetarian wagon tonight.”
Now, she had his attention. “Just the two of us?” he said.
“Do I stutter? Just the two of us.”
She was already out of the booth, finishing her coffee on her feet, and fishing a crumpled bill out of her pocket. “Let’s go.”
Dix had the building’s elevators running again; in fact, the mall was getting to be in such good shape, it was in danger of losing its funky appeal. Max and Logan went to the seventh floor, which was still in the process of remodeling and not yet open to the public.
At the end of the hall, the couple entered the stairway to the roof. As they climbed, they both pulled on stocking caps; they were already wearing gloves. When she started to open the door, Max felt the wind — it had sharp teeth! — try to drag the door from her grasp, and only her special strength allowed her to keep the thing from flying open all the way. Once Logan was through, she managed to push the thing closed; then she turned to see the others waiting for them under a gray sky, dusk settling on the city like a low-slung cloud.
Across the way, atop the main building of Terminal City, the Freak Nation flag flew, as straight out as a salute, stiff in the wind, its red, white, and black bars easily visible even from this distance, the rising red dove seeming to take flight.
The group standing before her in a loose semicircle, and Logan to her right, now made up her family. She smiled at the thought, feeling guilty at her reluctance to accept their invitation, flushed with warmth, despite the bitter cold, as she looked at them.
A girl could do a lot worse.
Original Cindy stood in the center, her puffball Afro mashed beneath a stocking cap pulled down over her ears, her hands conspicuous by their absence as they hid behind her back. Though an “ordinary,” she was a true beauty, with lively brown eyes and a wide grin that challenged the cold.
Not one to ever be considered “ordinary” on any level, though, Original Cindy’s powers were somewhat more discreet than those of Max, her best friend and sistah, her “Boo”; but Cindy’s attitude was in no way discreet. Original Cindy came on like a four-hundred-pound tiger on its fifth espresso, and she didn’t give a diddly damn whether anyone liked that approach or not.
Which, Max knew, was probably why O.C. and her had hit it off from the beginning, each recognizing the rebel in the other and relishing it.
On Original Cindy’s right stood Alec, his dark blond hair grown out some; normally he combed those locks back, though now the wind tossed them back and forth. He had sharp dark eyes and his face bore its usual wiseass smirk; he could be a self-centered jerk, Max knew, but he had his good side.