Cardinal Ignition

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1. An Ocean Away

Chapter 2. The Locate Cases

Chapter 3. Inside the Inferno

Chapter 4. Seven Greek Houses

Chapter 5. The Lakeside Hunts

Chapter 6. The Courthouse Leach

Chapter 7. Did you Feel That

Chapter 8. Daddy’s Gone a-Hunting

Chapter 9. Crashing Lee-Shadow

Chapter 10. The Battered Beauty

Chapter 11. Shootout at the White Rabbit

Chapter 12. The Correction at Wetworks

Chapter 13. Hunting or Running

Chapter 14. Finders Keepers

Cardinal Ignition by Tracy Eire

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the author-publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Copyright © 2019 Tracy Eire

Chapter 1. An Ocean Away

He’s a clothes horse. Zoey told herself as she shut the trunk at the end of Ocean’s bed.

He had a small 7x10 room with two windows, one that overlooked the stairs out the back door of the Victorian House Zoey owned, and the other that looked at an elaborate bird-feeder in the back yard. She’d given this room to the C001-Oisín – the Ocean – Cardinal Machine her Great Aunt had left her, for… various reasons, not all of which she was comfortable with thinking about, so Zoey liked to boil it down to the old Collins rule-of-thumb that boys stayed on the main floor, and there were only two bedrooms there.

She’d had to remove a bookcase to put in a long wooden chest, which didn’t leave a lot of room at the end of the bed. He has more clothes than me.

He sure as hell has more books than you, the occupant of the other, much larger room, Noah Riley, came across the glowing oak floorboards carrying a pair of heavier jackets on hangers. Noah was the main reason Zoey wasn’t slowly starving into emaciation and had the occasional chocolate-oatmeal cookie, so she’d been well trained, apart from liking him, to wag her tail when he was in sight. He brushed by her in a wave of something sugary and went directly to the small closet. He’s not going to like that we took out a bookcase to stuff in more clothes.

She added onto the end of that, Because he’s spoiled.

Noah’s expertly drawn in brows went up, Still complaining, Zoey?

She set one elbow on the trunk and planted her head on her hand to smile, Oh, shut up. Whatever she said about Ocean, it was spiked with a healthy dose of… something serious. Zoey liked to think she fretted about protecting him, but that was the rather significant tip of the iceberg.

Noah helped her to her feet and they looked at the damage together. Not bad. The bed was enough to contain his 6-foot frame. If he’d ever bothered to lie in it, anyway. The wood case was the span of the twin bed, over 6 feet long, and about 4 feet wide. So… with the hanging bookcases, there was a little more space in here than she’d feared. Ocean didn’t care about floor space, but Zoey always did.

Well, Noah poked around in the closet and tried to make room. I remember when you moved him in here. It was his Cloud-attached disk by the closet, it was still by the closet, and the wrought iron bed. Now he’s got zippered storage under the bed, a trunk, and his closet is stuffed. Noah dusted his hands, his black-painted nails shining with gloss in the light.

I’m going to get him a wardrobe – you know, the cabinets – if this keeps up, I mean it’s not winter yet and…. Like it or not, since it got down to single-digits in winter here, he would need thicker clothes for – and she realized that, as an android, he didn’t get cold.

Noah started smiling. He’d hit on the same thing somewhere in there and now turned to her, a good half a foot taller than she was, having shot up in the summer. I know. But, if you think about it, he has a heat-source and coolant inside. All that must be easier to regulate, and need less attention, with a good coat.

Zoey didn’t want him going around in his Cardinal blues, as the default suit was called, when it was 5 and 7 degrees, no matter how trim and stylish the outfit was. She also didn’t want to encourage people to look at him and think ‘less than human’. He already had too many problems in that area.

They went out into the hall and Zoey gestured at the bookcase that had been in his room. Now it was up against a wall that had once held a console table. Not a book had been disturbed. Well, they’re still closer to him than the study is.

Noah cocked his head and realized. Speaking of which, I’ve literally never heard him complain about anything? You know that?

He’s easygoing, Zoey shrugged the comment away in the beams of sun from her back door’s wide window. Don’t bite off more than we can chew. She didn’t like to focus on the things that made him seem like a, well, like a robot, but then her brows drew down. I have.

Yeah?

Zoey started to smile, if a little tightly. Once about my boneheaded behaviour, and once about, her smile faded away, his Cardinal Machines handlers, uh, for his little junkets.

"His Mission Impossible stuff? Noah stretched, seeing as it was only 10 AM and they’d been tidying since 7 in the morning. Isn’t he dealing with them right now?"

I’m working on it, she told him quite honestly and checked the shimmery cuff on her wrist. She’d left a video player on top of the light-form emitting array and it was playing a stream of colourful images, everything from an artist pouring glitter in slow-motion, to the vividness of Holi in India. But she tapped the time up now. They’d been working to make the place tidy, seeing as Ocean had been out on a mission with Lieutenant Ott for the weekend, and, hey, they were 18- and 19-year-olds: the house looked like it had been through a bender, but without the drunken sex. Or much of the drinking. Though Noah had made a lot of fresh-squeezed OJ mimosas that first night.

They regrouped in the kitchen, where Zoey swatted a wasp through the open front doors with a hand-towel, and then wiped down the large, antique table.

Noah had just gotten the stew base going when the android in question came down Zoey’s long and twisting drive. Zoey could see him coming through the trees and found herself on the porch, arms tight around her own ribs, to watch his return.

Once upon a time, Ocean had been a concept sketch, or sketches, in a stack of potential projects drawn up and debated in design, talked about in hallways, pondered-on by developers, tested in focus-groups, persisted through the winnows of managers, and, finally, carried upstairs and handed to the personal staff and to none-other than Katherine Cardinal the 1st – Katherine 1 – herself. He’d been no more than an idea the lofty Mother of A.I., a singular brain trust inside Cardinal Machines, had begun to believe in. And now, he, and four other Cardinal Machine C001-Oisíns walked the earth. It made a difference to Zoey.

She watched him carefully, her entire body still, but in the way of human beings, which implied some movement, even if it was only in response to the beating of a heart, or the shifting of respiration. He had his coat off and one arm up to dangle it over a shoulder. She could see the shape of his torso, broad down to narrow, and the glint of sun off the buckles in his shoulder-harness as he came. Of course, he was in his trim and fitted Cardinal blues, the buttons of his shirt pressing against synthetic skin and muscle underneath. The design emphasized his build, as it had been meant to do. It was like sudden rainfall to the parched earth of her deliberation now.

When he got close enough, his head came up to take in the house, and she looked at the planes of his face. God damned beautiful. And though she didn’t want it to, Zoey’s heartrate cranked up, her stomach butterflied. She sucked a breath and inspected him, from the tight cut and escapee curls at one temple down to the wingtips he’d come with.

Unhurt.

He nearly smiled when he saw her.

Ocean wasn’t much for smiling. L.A.P.D. S.W.A.T. and the F.B.I. had trained it out of him. He had a near-smile, though, for those lips that seemed lightly curved at the edges, even at rest. He snapped his coat around and pulled it on before he came to the steps to stand before her. But he didn’t come up and he didn’t say anything. Which was very Ocean of him.

Zoey, aware of the soft scent of him again, going to mush at his warm blues and the expertly designed Cardinal eyelashes that shadowed them, felt her fingers clamp against her ribs. It was always a battle… but she didn’t touch him, How did it go?

Well. And you look very good. He said in that gorgeous masculine middle-tone of his. So, has anything in the house been on fire, Zoey?

What? She blinked at him and then glanced over her shoulder, though he didn’t seem to find it odd that she had to check. No. Nothing’s on fire. Where’d you get an idea like that?

The Lieutenant owes me money. He came up the steps and directly to her.

You made a bet, she said flatly.

He looked amused, We did.

That me and Noah would destroy the house if you left us here alone?

Almost exactly that, but with, his head tipped off to one side, endearingly, "well, more liberal use of curse words. The Lieutenant is emphatic."

Well, Lieutenant James Ott had never met a bad word he didn’t like. But now Zoey frowned. No sweat. The house is in perfect order.

We’ll see, he came up another step, one lightly tanned hand on the railing. His eyes widened a little. I expect the grocery situation-

Is fine, she challenged him.

Then they stared at one another for a moment. Finally, he reached up so that the backs of his fingers just barely brushed the back of one of her hands. It was a curious little gesture, and one he’d never made before, but she thought he meant to be comforting, somehow. Zoey blinked a few times, her lips compressed, and she unwound from around her own torso to put her arms around his broad shoulders. He came up the last step and lifted her off her feet in a hug, his hands in the small of her back. She felt his head come down against her shoulder.

Maybe she hated this. Then again, maybe she was being extreme – she had the presence of mind to realize she was young enough for that. But it felt like a slow torment. If he’d been real, a real guy, for her, there would have been no more questions, and the voices coming in from all over, maybe they would have silenced themselves.

Katherine Zoey Cardinal was supposed to be sophisticated, above such asinine temptations, too good for a metal, her sharp, worldly mind was too keen to be taken-in by fragments of custom plastic. She’d been made for a diamond life. Meanwhile, Zoey Collins was street-smart and scrappy, as worn-in as a trusted holster, and she was too cynical for foolish pursuits. None of this prevented Zoey from feeling the airless surge through her entire body, from the top of her light-blonde head to her bare, painted toes. His whirring heart pressed against her beating breast, and she felt, for an instant, weightless in gravity.

Then he set her on her feet again. The chaos noise of expectation, regulation, propriety, scandal, the pressures of a hundred things tumbled down like a shroud over the pair of them, but it discriminated between Ocean, who was unchanged, and Zoey, who crumpled under it and hugged her ribs tightly again.

He passed her by and went into the house to greet Noah.

Hey, Noah set down the veg he’d lined up on the quartz countertop and looked Ocean over. You’re… in perfect shape. You didn’t get hurt?

No damage, he said to Noah. Zoey noticed that Ocean stood by, and Noah, who had very little trust left inside of him for grown men, stepped over, gathered himself and put his arms around Ocean for a squeeze. Ocean was careful not to move for this. Say what you would of the emotional inelegance of androids, this one was dialed-in when it came to Noah and Zoey.

She exhaled a final puff of air. God, the relief that he was unhurt. Then she went to the stove and looked down into the broth and onions rendering in the pot, and that was enough to pull Noah and Ocean apart. Neither of them liked her cooking. One because she really excelled in burning herself and cutting her fingers, and the other because he’d tasted it before.

I’ll do that, Noah was almost chirpy with speed.

Ocean caught up a kitchen knife right before Zoey could, reversed it, and sliced open a bag of potatoes in one deft slash.

Killah, she gave a huffle of laughter. Those potatoes are going to feel the unholy rath of Cardinal Machines’ handiwork.

One moment of dimple later and he was honestly giving the bag of potatoes hell.

This one? Zoey held up another knife.

"You cut yourself on a butter knife, you’re cooking-grounded. Noah told her flatly. Check the breadbox. There’s a wooden bread-knife in there. Take it to the table and sit down, Zoey. The adults are working."

"You had a tantrum over nail polish," she pointed the wooden knife at him.

And that had nothing to do with coining these carrots, Noah said archly and snuck in, wide eyed, and if you’re going to call it quick-dry, I shouldn’t be getting cat hair in it five minutes later. That’s false advertisement.

And they didn’t even own the damned cat. But there she was, a little black spot on the rug, today, curled up in the foyer, sunning herself.

Ocean diced the celery like a machine, if she didn’t say so herself. Then again, she shouldn’t have been surprised that he was adept at knife-handling.

Zoey exhaled and watched the pair of them: Noah, a collection of cool clothes and eyeliner, too long and thin, the result of growing too quickly to fill out behind it, and Ocean, balanced within an inch of the design teams’ lives – just enough shoulders; just enough narrowness; just enough cheekbone; never too much. She looked at the table, at the wooden knife between her hands, and asked, Where were you this time?

Chicago. He said quietly.

She’d noticed that Ocean usually got quiet when he was trying to be gentle. According to the L.A.P.D. S.W.A.T. and the F.B.I., Zoey Collins – Katherine Cardinal – was one of Ocean’s handlers, but she’d not been able to leave with him on Friday. She’d been racked with nausea, and when fellow handler Lieutenant Ott had come down the driveway to get Ocean, she’d been collapsed on the couch. Since she’d inherited the ownership of Ocean from her Great Aunt, and then had it out with the F.B.I. over him, she’d tried to be on all his forays.

She’d been worried about him. Zoey looked up at his warm blue eyes – more green than gray to their composition – and she wondered if he’d missed her. Then again, she’d had to tell him he missed Ott before. Ocean had little familiarity with feelings like trust and kinship. Want to tell me what happened?

I was barely deployed, Ocean came to set his coat on the back of a chair in the kitchen. This time, the Negotiator succeeded in removing the threat. He sounded like that was gratifying and flicked a hand at the glassy television set in the front room, which came on to a low murmur. If you care to see, the news will carry it.

She made a little snort, I bet. But Zoey put her arms around herself and waited.

Noah started pouring the washed vegetables into the soup, but his attention was really on the pair behind him.

Well, an intern brandishing an automatic shot-gun barricaded himself in an office in an industrial park. There were about 200 other people in the building. There were 14 in his immediate open-concept office space. He’d begun to hear voices a little under 30 days prior, and they had given him a list of dangerous coworkers from which he needed protection. Ocean pulled out and eased into the chair beside her.

Zoey felt a shivering inside at the thought of that, Sounds like a bad situation. But you’re telling me the Negotiator talked him down?

She did. Ocean’s hands reached slowly across the table and found the wooden blade of the knife. His fingertips searched along it. "She talked to him about finding other work, walking away from that place, and going home to talk things over with his mother. Because the statistical analysis revealed that he placed a significant amount of trust in his mother."

Too bad for him, Zoey watched his hands on the blade of the wooden knife, because she could feel their motions all the way back in the handle. Because it sounds like he’s schizophrenic, and the only way to get that way is to have an anti-vaccinating parent these days.

Indeed. Ocean’s brows bounced upwards. The police thought he’d taken a bad dose of Digital Rain, in fact, but later analysis found he had no juvenile or adult priors, and nothing in his bloodwork. Just some recent incidents where he’d behaved oddly in public.

How’d he go down? she asked.

Well, it took about 10 and a half hours to get his agreement to release 10 of the people visible in the cubicles immediately beside him. They sent me in to get them as we agreed on release, he told her, I wore a vest, by the way.

Good, she smiled softly. That was one rule she had put in place earlier in the summer, just like a human, Ocean wore a vest.

Once I went in for the extraction, I never left the building, so it was busy. Command had me move everyone to the cafeteria and lock them in with Security. The perp couldn’t see that action on the news coverage. There were four people left on the floor – the four on his list. They were in separate parts of the larger office space, and S.W.A.T. had made their way to positions to secure them. Once we were ready to defend them, the Negotiator sent me back up to his locked office. She’d Negotiated a break with him, and when he came out to go to the break room, I subdued him, suddenly, Ocean’s fingers turned the knife right out of her hands. He did this even as she made a fumbling grasp for it, but it was gone, and Ocean said, before he ate a bullet.

Zoey looked at her now empty hands. Talk about an illustration of the methodology. She looked into his blue eyes and tried to imagine how he’d felt he’d barely been deployed, when he’d been leveraged during every aspect of the evacuation. But that was Ocean. He hadn’t had to shoot anyone, so it had been a light day.

Though I told the Lieutenant, ‘ate a bullet’ would have been the wrong terminology here, he said, it would have been a shotgun shell. Or a plasma-round. He had a pair of undisclosed hand-guns in the office with him.

He didn’t tell anyone about the guns? She gave a little jolt when Noah set down a cup of herbal tea beside her. She had developed a real taste for it, but her head had been in Ocean’s work.

He didn’t. Ocean handed her back the knife. Trust only goes so far.

Noah sat down among them and set a cup of tea in front of himself, and before Ocean. So, why’d you have to stay so long? The quads can go to Chicago from L.A. in less than 2 hours.

Ocean said nothing for a period of several seconds, and then reached out and touched the cup of herbal tea. It was still hot, steaming, and he took back his fingertips carefully. Still nothing from the android. Honestly, Zoey’s head tipped.

No, not like that, she murmured and turned the cup a little.

Noah reached out and wiped a bead of hot water from the side of the mug. It was full, so he tapped the handle and said a muffled, Coolest part, he gestured at the body of the mug, hottest.

No doubt, Ocean could see that. He nodded a little, but he wanted to hold it in his hands, as if to warm them, not hold it by the handle. A second later, he picked the tea up and looked down into it. Zoey tried to suppress a smile as she watched curiosity cross his face. His expressions were so lovely….

The mother was an anti-vaxxer, as you said, and, apart from there being conversation about the performance of local officials and police, there was a lot of fallout in the news and social feeds around this. I got the impression they wanted to downplay the role of this young man’s disease and would have preferred this to be a story about the spread of Digital Rain, rather than a condemnation of an influential political movement in the area. There were arguments with our unit over the handling of the incident, and they wanted to review my recordings – rather extensive. The fallout is ongoing.

He hadn’t looked away from the cup yet, from the steam coming out.

Ocean finished, I was delayed. He set the cup down as Noah took a sip from his.

He almost smiled at it. Zoey got to her feet, ducked in, and kissed him on the forehead. Apart from appearing thunderstruck by this – perhaps Cardinal Machines weren’t programmed to expect the little human touches – Ocean seemed, at last, back home for her.

Yeah, well, Noah pulled a lot of coffee, and I found out a guy was addicted to computer porn and not seeing another woman, during that time, her hand trailed away over his shoulder, so, yeah, try to keep up.

As predicted, the News did carry the story. Later that night, the ‘mini-movie’ of the event grabbed ratings. It had a lot of candid interviews from the local police, the local D.A.’s office, and even the Mayor, skewed towards the Digital Rain epidemic. But the footage that was stitched from dozens of cell and body cams didn’t mince words. Neither did the Negotiator. Nope. Not drugs.

Ocean was, again, just a bit part of the action, which was the decision of the station who’d pieced this together, but he was a silent presence in a hell of a lot of shots. Watching him bring close to 200 people into the cafeteria with the Negotiator’s voice-over was spellbinding. Ocean was a dynamo, sleek, quick, and trim, expert in his actions, right down to the moment when office cams saw him step around a corner, disarm, and cuff the young man at the heart of all of this. S.W.A.T. swept in to take him directly afterward, and Ocean eased aside.

But he wasn’t sure how to hold a coffee mug once it had a hot drink inside.

She looked back at him cleaning up from supper, at his profile, the planes of his face, his close haircut with the loose wave against one temple. He was gorgeous and capable, and Noah had been the first person to ever pour him a cup of tea.

It was crazy.

But part of what her role was, now, was to know these gaps in his experience and carry on as if they made no difference. They were important only to the people who lived with him.

It was much later in the night when she thought of the police action again. So late that the open double doors let in mist from the garden, which had rolled up from the nearby lake to mute the entire neighbourhood of elaborate Victorians, Edwardians, turreted Tutor houses, and their decorative gardens alike. In the far distance the bartizaned church chimed 12 midnight. The last toll it would make until 6 AM. Everything sounded muffled and socked-in. Noah had gone to bed two hours before, and Zoey still lay on the couch, wool throw over her, leeching heat from her android in the glow of the thin slice of glassy television that seemed to hover in the room.

Embers in the fire were smoldering.

Now the late-night National News came on, covering the Chicago affair. The mini-movie played, interspersed by experts in Hostage Arbitration, Law, and Police and Military action. There were pundits talking about the prevalence of Digital Rain and other android-blood-based drugs in the middle of the country. The main Conservative speaker made subtle the fact that androids were a bane on mankind, and creatively adjusted Ocean’s role in the bloodless success. The Liberal picked away at the man’s argument as if it were legitimate instead of outright calling him on his twaddle. Nothing new. She blinked heavily at the commercial break advertising an android line from the main competitor of Cardinal Machines, Heavenly Bodies – known for their personable entertainment models. This was for the glowing, glassy Sheba with pink fiberoptic hair. She could see its glossy, shimmery leg bone through this girlish figure’s flesh.

When the News came back on, she was watching Lieutenant Ott’s grim but handsome face as he spoke into the small radio-form that would lead to Ocean’s ear. There was no one else in the system of people speaking to him while he was inside who carried as much clout as Ott did, no matter their rank. The Governor could make a call, and Ocean would opt with Ott. Very often, she’d found out, the people in power spoke freely around the Lieutenant, never knowing it would go back to Ocean. It gave the handler a quiet and potent faculty with his android. Her android.

Ott glanced sidelong through his unkempt waves and curls of hair, spotted the camera drone, and turned his back on it entirely. Private conversation.

Zoey pulled out her phone-form, a nearly tablet-sized surface these days, and texted Ott. She was a somewhat precipitate partner in handling Ocean, but since the formalization of that relationship, he’d never ignored her texts. She wrote He’s home. Thanks for sending him back in one piece.

The reply came back What happened to you?

Just got sick this month. Ask your wife, Lt. She’ll understand.

It was a full minute and a half before he replied to that. He’s a good kid, Zoey. Did some fucking fine work he’ll never get credit for. Whatever hormones are zooming around in there, take it easy on him. Kid deserves a party.

Zoey didn’t know how to give him a party.

Not like she really wanted to give him.

She sat silently by him, torn between this soft, quiet feeling she could have stripped down and bathed in she secretly so adored it, and the much more problematic and feverish desire she felt to twine the two of them together into one creation, scandalous as that was. As if she knew how that would even look. How it would even work. Even the first mechanics of it.

Good Lord she wanted to work it out. But she was a girl of 18, and it wasn’t as simple to do a thing as to want it badly. Really badly, lately.

Then she looked at the android reading the Noble paper on the tablet-form beside her. He didn’t need a cuff. The forms popped up from his palms like magic. Zoey shut down her phone-form, took off the cuff, and threw it onto the coffee-table in frustration.

She breathed, reached up, and cupped a hand to stroke his hair.

Ocean made a soft eyeblink and his blue eyes slid in her direction.

He was new life. He damn-well did deserve a party.

God. No pressure. She wormed around on the couch, tucked a hand under one of his thighs and put her head down in his lap. Her eyelids sunk low.

She was dimly aware of it when Ocean reached down and stroked her hair, fascinated by the sundrenched threads of it, and that it had, by some miracle, grown from her that way.

She woke in the early morning sunlight, curled under blankets, on the couch.

The television was still on. The doors were still open to the misty morning, and she was alone. Zoey found that a little odd. If Ocean went to stand on his disk, as he was wont to do from 3AM to 6AM, he usually locked the house all the way down. This morning, she could see he hadn’t done that. She rubbed her face and checked her cuff 5:45 AM.

Zoey rolled up and went to the farm sink to wash her face, wash out her mouth with a cleaning tablet, and get a