Project Maigo(34)

“How’s the head?” I ask.

“Fine,” she says.

And that’s all she’ll give me. It was a weak attempt at best. Paramedics already saw to the wound and declared her fit for ass kicking. Nothing a few painkillers couldn’t manage, though they asked her to avoid any further impacts to the head for a week, as if she threw herself into the brick wall on purpose.

Seeing no other way to delay or derail the conversation, I say, “They were here for me.”

“Endo was ordered to be here. We have no choice.”

“Not Endo.” I shake my head. If it were only Endo, this would still be a salvageable day. “The Kaiju. Scrion. Nemesis. They were here for me.”

“Don’t be—”

“Ask Woodstock. Scrion came to kill me. Nemesis came to protect me.”

“You can call her Maigo around me,” Collins says.

“I’m not sure that thinking of her that way is a good thing,” I say. “She’s a monster. She killed thousands of people and destroyed Boston.”

“But she was driven by the memories of a murdered little girl,” Collins says. This perspective is new for her. She’s either been doing some thinking or she’s just trying to be supportive. “I think the people we really need to blame are the ones who made her, accidentally or not.”

“Gordon,” I say.

She nods. “And Zoomb.”

“And Endo.”

“We just need to play nice, okay?” She grabs my shoulders and digs her thumbs into my back, loosening the tension. “You can’t go all ‘fuck you’ to everyone and expect to gain their trust—”

“Or gain any useful information.” I toss the chunk of bark into the grass. “I get it. But I’m not happy about this. The idea of controlling Nemesis...it’s just...no.”

“It’s dangerous,” she says.

“It’s a break of trust,” I say. “If I do have some kind of connection with Nemesis now, if she’s somehow locked on to protecting me, then maybe the best thing for the world is for me to move to Antarctica or something?”

“That’s not going to happen,” Collins says, but I’m not so sure. If it kept Nemesis from making paste out of people, I’d gladly spend my life in the frozen South. Well, maybe not gladly, but I can’t put my personal happiness above the rest of the world.

Speaking of which... “I can’t stay here.”

She stops rubbing my back. The silence that follows is a big question mark.

“Gordon was here for me. Scrion was here for me. Scrion is dead, but if Gordon comes back, we might not be able to stop him. You all got lucky the first time. And there are probably two more Kaiju roaming the planet right now. If he’s controlling them, too...”

I don’t have to finish the thought. My presence here puts the team in danger. It makes the whole city a target. And I’m not about to let Beverly become my own personal Tokyo, to be stomped on over and over.

“Wherever you go,” Collins says. “I’m coming with you.”

I’d like to be the brave and noble hero and say, ‘Never! You must live your life, fully and gloriously and blah, blah, blah,’ but I don’t. Instead, I wrap my arm around her waist, my fingers finding her hip bone, and I pull her close. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

My phone rings, playing Gangnam Style by Psy.

“Who’s that?” Collins asks.

“Endo,” I say. “I programmed him in before we left.”

She smiles. “You are so totally racist.”

“What? Endo is Japanese! Psy is—”

“Korean.”

Dammit!

I answer the phone. “What?”

I listen to Endo speaking, his voice calm as usual, with a trace of arrogance or superiority. As he talks, I hear Betty’s rotors chopping through the air in the distance as Woodstock warms her up. When I hang up, I have a mix of feelings. First is anger. Endo is highjacking the FC-P. Second is anger. Yeah, that’s the same as the first, but they’re directed at different people for different reasons. Apparently, when Endo was trying to control Gordon’s mind, he was also embedding a tracking device.

On the plus side, I dodged the matrimony bullet that was no doubt coming next. That conversation scares me for two reasons. First, I haven’t fully thought it through yet. I don’t even really know how I feel about it. Second, and this is what really scares me, I haven’t the foggiest clue about what she thinks. Her first husband turned out to be an abusive prick. I’m not sure that’s a path she wants to walk down again, and if we could avoid the topic, that would be dandy. Of course, with a little Cooper-Watson on the way, that might be hard. Pheromones are in the air.