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Eliot wakes up and holds the way he always does when the waking up is less yawn, stretch, flip the pillow and more like coming round. He hurts but nothing’s broken, he’s pretty sure. He’s gonna need a kidney scan. He’s flat on his back and his arms are up over his head which is why his shoulders are complaining and his chest feels compromised, and it’s not rope or zip ties round his wrists, more like chain which is a whole extra pain in his ass. No earbud. And it’s bright, a hot sun beating down on his face, so he’s got to get his bearings before he opens his eyes because he’s not going to be able to see shit till the dazzle dies down.
‘Parker,’ he says, because the other thing he knows without looking is that she’s here too.
She makes a vague fuzzed-out noise that’s proof she’s also coming around, which means they hit her as well and now he’s mad.
‘Parker, you’re needed,’ he says.
She makes another huffing little noise then yelps, because Parker’s not gonna wait to look.
Eliot opens his eyes, braced for gloating bad guys twirling their mustaches, but it’s just the sun blazing out from a wide open sky over a wide open field in Malcolm, Nebraska.
‘It’s too bright,’ Parker complains and it is, while also being the least of their problems.
Breanna brought them here a week ago for what is becoming tiresomely part of the caseload: some jumped-up AI businessman using a tool that could be of use to fuck over the little guy. Malcolm’s an agricultural town, and one of the few that’s got every chance of thriving thanks to a naturally-occurring hybrid brassica crop called hopseed. Harvested, the oil lowers cholesterol alongside its anti-oxidant properties and low saturated fats. In taste, it’s something between a grassy extra virgin olive and a light sesame. Eliot makes a terrific salad dressing with it, little pomegranate molasses, little lemon juice, he’s still thinking about whether a wholegrain mustard would lift it even higher – and Jo-Ann Pepper and the rest of the local farming co-operative are working on keeping up with demand. The only kicker: harvesting it sucks. Locally they call it ‘knife grass’. You’d need to be wearing chainmail to walk through a field and come out unbloodied. As it is, the workers struggle through baking heat in a combination of leather, mesh and moulded plastic, and still come home cut up.
So on paper, Caleb Stalls and his magical automated solution sounded like the ideal solution. Drone harvesters: a unique design that mimics the scythe-in-hand harvesting that the delicate crop requires, without real hands, capable of increasing the output tenfold. Eliot’s instinctive bristle was covered quick by Jo-Ann: freed up from getting knifed all day, the laborers would have work in the scaled-up operation, processing, packaging, sales and marketing, logistics. Jobs with longevity, career prospects, better pay and damn sight better conditions.
All sweet until three days in, a drone harvester flew ten feet from the farm perimeter into a family picnic and killed a little boy. Eric, age six. One of his mom’s has life-changing injuries. Eliot figures they all do.
When the crew came to town, Jo-Ann was facing twin horrors: the brutal death of a local kid, and Caleb Stalls, who was suing her for the death and the reputational impact on his company, claiming she and the farming co-op were responsible for delivering inaccurate mapping for the drones to follow. It was after less than 24 hours when they found the worse game Stalls was running in the background, the one he’d played before: threaten the landowner after an accident (‘just’ a severed limb last time), buy up the land at rock bottom price, and roll out the drones as planned – not just basic labor but covering the whole of the operation and removing every single paid job except at executive level.
Sophie was running the Appaloosa Handle, and Eliot hadn’t hated rocking up to that smug sonofabitch in a ten-gallon hat and silver spurs, an oil tycoon (the underground kind, no salad dressing) with a bigger purse to offer and no ugly scandal to clean up – until Breanna said ‘Uh, guys?’ in that particular tone and he was blown.
Lousy luck that Stalls wasn’t the high flyer he wanted people to buy: just the US frontman for a con where the money was Russian, and they don’t just believe another player happens to have rolled into town.
And now he’s here, they both are, chained to a drone in a field of knife grass, about to get dragged.
‘It’s a padlock on a bike chain,’ says Parker, sounding annoyed that it’s not something trickier. ‘I just need a pin, or a wire, something fiddly.’
Behind his head, Eliot hears a whirring start up.
‘You got a pin, or a wire, or something fiddly?’ he snaps.
‘No. But you’re still wearing those dumb boots, and if the steel toecap is cheap enough I can squish it.’
Eliot ignores the put down – she’s not wrong, the toecaps are probably tin – and tries to fold himself in half, lifting his knees first then throwing his feet up towards Parker’s tied hands.
‘Higher, I can’t reach.’
His battered belly doesn’t protest nearly as much as his shoulders as he strains, peering up to steer his boot away from kicking Parker in the face and into her fingers. She grabs on, pulls – and out of the corner of his eye Eliot sees the whirring blades of the drone blur and a light switch from red to green.
Then it takes off.
There’s a moment’s grace while the drone rises, a metal rig a meter square with a rotor at each corner – a very distinctive sound - and an apparatus hanging below of similar drone blades, these ones razor-sharp, on a series of retractable arms. Eliot feels his arms lifted off the ground by the bicycle chains at his wrists, the pull on his skin and his shoulders instantly awful. He catches Parker’s eye as she realizes what’s happening, what’s coming, what they can and can’t stop in time.
‘Get on up,’ he tells her, dropping his legs away and nodding at his chest, and is glad like he often is that it’s her here in the hellhole, not Hardison, though he’s said the same words to them both often enough and in much more promising circumstances. Hardison would want to argue about who does what. Hardison is also a lot heavier. In the much more promising circumstances, both of these things are fun. Right now, all that’s needed is fast decisions and faster moves.
With chained wrists and his wrenched-off boot in one of her hands, Parker manages to kick off the ground and spin herself up onto him, landing like a cat on his chest and his hipbones as the drone reaches its preferred height, around a meter off the ground, level with the top of the hopseed. Then it begins to fly.
Eliot’s had forty lashes in a Saudi prison, beatings with leather whips and bamboo canes, a brush or three with a cat o’ nine tails, and plenty of slashes and slices from machetes and katanas and, once, a bowler hat with a razored brim like that little guy from the Bond movie. This is worse. Immediately, shockingly unbearable.
Parker spins up off him and onto the drone rig almost as quickly as she’d landed but his own bodyweight drags him through the knife grass regardless. He’s in rolled-up shirtsleeves but the shirt’s torn into shreds in moments and that’s what’s happening to his skin too, on his hands, his arms, his head, his shoulders down to his ankles. He’s being flayed. If this goes on more than a minute, he’s either gonna bleed out from the slashes across his neck and arms or from when his hands are ripped right off his wrists.
The rig lurches wildly, dragging him sideways and setting off a whole new world of pain before it lurches back on its original path. He can hear Parker yelling something, I can’t, It won’t, something like that, and Piece of crap.
Then there’s a sudden loosening at his wrists, the briefest touch of fingers stroking the palm of his hand, and he’s falling, dead weight, into a brutal mattress of grass knives. It hurts like hell, like six hells, a hundred. He’s probably still damaged past recovery. But it’s stopped. No more dragging. No new cuts.
He hears the whirr of the drone fading and pictures Parker straddling it like some conquered stallion, riding it to give Stalls a haircut. But the sound shifts instead of fading out entirely, the now-familiar whine as it makes a turn setting his teeth on edge.
It’s coming back.
This time he can hear the other sound he’s learned to loathe: the secondary rotors kicking in, the ones that make up the thousands of tiny scythes to strip down the crop.
It’s harvesting. And it’s heading his way.
He knows Parker didn’t fall or fail – it’s Parker, dammit – so maybe this thing has a built-in failsafe when it’s been told to kill somebody to make sure it goes back to really finish the job. Hell, maybe the kid got killed because this is what the damn thing was built for.
He saw pictures of what it did to that little boy.
It gets closer, louder.
It’s ok. He’s left his letters, made his plans. Plenty of regrets but none he hasn’t faced up to. If he’s not absolved, at least he tried.
He hopes Hardison will help Parker through it. They can help each other.
The rig is so close he can feel the hopseed stirring around him – and then it veers away and behind it, in the clear path it’s carved through the dense crop, is an ambulance.
Alongside the mask over his face and the very blessed morphine they shoot him with real fast is an earbud slipped into his left ear, and Parker.
‘I hope you didn’t like those boots because the only way I got that thing down is by jamming a spur into the electrics. Drones suck. I’m sorry I couldn’t get it down faster. Don’t die, remember? We agreed: you, me and Hardison. No to dying. OK, they’re putting you under now. Remember not to die.’
*
Eliot’s in a coma for a couple of weeks and sedated for a few more while they get the surgeries and skin grafts and battling infection underway. He spends a long time lying on his face with a catheter in his junk and a feeding tube down his throat, so his flirting with the nurses options are limited. He takes this as gracefully as anyone expects.
Stalls faces a prosaic form of punishment (prison for corporate manslaughter, fraud and so on) and an out-of-court civic settlement that cleans him out and secures medical care and therapy for Eric’s family, all thanks to Harry.
Jo-Ann ‘buys’ the patent for the drones and hires a friend of Breanna’s to remodel them to only fly with a human pilot as guide. Sophie brokers a deal with a restaurant brand who pay for a year’s supply of hopseed oil upfront. It’s not the insta-growth Stalls promised, but it’s safe skilled work for the farm, safe for families to have a picnic, and the basis of a solid economy for the citizens of Malcolm.
Hardison comes home, and he and Eliot fight like they never have.
‘He’s scared,’ Sophie tells Breanna, when she slams another door on her brother.
‘He’s giving up on Eliot,’ Breanna snaps back. ‘Eliot. The man who you can drop a Hyundai on, and his primary reaction will be that he’d have preferred if it was a Dodge. Nobody gives up on Eliot.’
‘Hardison’s not giving up on Eliot,’ says Parker, sliding down into the bar in a harness and hanging in mid-air. ‘He’s asking Eliot to stop.’
‘Well he can’t!’ Breanna’s face crunches in dismay. ‘He’s moving out of intensive care tomorrow, he’s starting rehab the day after. He’ll be back on his feet in a month, tops, he told me. When you’re down, or sick, that’s what you need, a thing to aim for. He’s our bounce back guy. That’s who he is.’
‘That’s what he is,’ Hardison says softly, opening the slammed door he’s been listening behind. ‘Not who he is.’
Sophie gives Hardison a searching look.
‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ she says.
‘It might have to be.’ Hardison holds up a weary hand, dropping into a seat opposite Breanna before she can disagree. ‘You’re a grifter, Sophie, you always will be. Parker’s a thief.’
‘Yep,’ Parker agrees brightly.
‘Hitters don’t get to be hitters forever. They do it till they stop, or they do it till they die.’
‘See?’ says Breanna. ‘Giving up.’
‘I’m not, I swear it.’ Hardison turns his stool to face her. ‘Come on, Bre, this is Eliot. Ninety per cent of the time the guy is basically Wolverine – don’t tell him I said that, he’s gonna think I mean Hugh Jackman, I don’t mean Hugh Jackman, I mean the short one in spandex, and don’t tell him I said that either. Bounce back guy, for sure: takes the hits, keeps on coming. Saves all our lives, day in, day out. But he’s not actually a superhero with magical healing powers.’
‘Are you sure?’ whispers Breanna.
Hardison gives her a mournful smile. ‘You know how the guy is always grumpy? It’s not just crankiness. It’s chronic pain. He’s put his body on the line nearly every day of his adult life. It always comes at a cost. This time? This time was too damn close.’
Parker slips down to ground level and lines herself up beside Hardison.
‘We don’t want Eliot to do it till he dies,’ she says. ‘So he has to stop.’
‘You too? Parker, no.’ Breanna tilts her head in dismay. Then she looks to Sophie. ‘Sophie? Come on, back me up here.’
Sophie watches the interplay between Parker and Hardison, silent to anyone but her.
‘You’re stopping too, aren’t you?’ she says to Parker. ‘Not a new crew or a new city. Retirement.’
Parker makes a vomit noise. ‘No! I’ll still steal things. It’s the boys that want to mix it up.’
‘It’ll still be leverage-adjacent: righting wrongs, smushing bad guys,’ Hardison says. ‘Just, like, from a beach house. Or an armchair. Without any heavy lifting.’
‘I don’t get it,’ says Breanna, staring at Parker. ‘I know Alec’s been thinking about it, but. If Eliot stops, why would that mean you do too?’
Hardison looks at the ceiling. Parker looks at the floor.
‘Breanna,’ says Sophie gently. ‘Eliot, Parker and Hardison aren’t just friends. They’re in a relationship. Have been for years. What?’ she says, at Hardison’s wide-eyed look. ‘I’m Sophie Deveraux. Of course I know!’
Breanna meanwhile goes through a succession of emotions visibly playing across her face – curiosity, surprise, suspicion, retrospective interpretation of various comments, noises etc – before settling on respect.
‘Very progressive,’ she says, nodding. Then she punches Hardison on the arm. ‘Bro, you’re on the team!’
There’s a clatter outside, then Harry sweeps in.
‘Malcolm cases all wound up and all monies due are in transit. Wait. Hello. What did I miss?’
*
One year on
There’s a little town in southern California off the Pacific Coast Highway, just south of San Luis Obispo, that’s growing a reputation for good food and safe living.
Three apartments sit on the bluff overlooking the surf, interconnected and sharing one manicured garden but with distinct characters: one brutalist with a vast underground garage; one lined with smoked glass and soundproofing; one with a demure pink exterior, though inside is simply a shell with scaffolds, climbing walls and ropes, like a ninja course for a TV show except for a bed perched on a mezzanine.
The street below houses a bistro called La Resistencia: it’s Spanish for strength, endurance, resilience, the servers will tell you. The menu is famous – people travel just for the salad dressing – though it changes regularly to showcase a new cuisine.
Lara Prentiss and her mother Margo are driving the PCH: the road trip Lara had planned to take with Peter before the accident that took her husband and her hope. Margo thinks it’ll help her see there’s still something to live for. Lara thinks that’s a hell of a lot to ask of a road. A revelation’s what they need – though they need an accessible restaurant even more, with Lara’s chair.
‘Did you plan this?’ Lara spits, pausing as they enter the cool, spacious interior. It’s elegant and unfussy: whitewashed walls, palms and touches of pink, mint and lemon in the furnishings. Beyond the simple wood tables is an open kitchen with one difference that’s painfully obvious to her: low level counters, stoves, grills. The kind she had to install in their – her – place after.
‘Honey, the book said it had a ramp and kickass reviews for the food. If I’m honest, it was the second one that swayed me. Can we eat instead of argue?’
Lara concedes. She’s hungry, and also tired of her own self, this bitter, defensive conviction that life is something that was stolen from her hands that eats into every moment. They’re seated in a picture window that gives a glorious view of rolling waves and golden sand. It’s beautiful. Things can be beautiful.
They order. To start, lobster ceviche with mango and lime for Margo, a fish soup for Lara that comes served with crunchy round toasts, pungent garlic sauce and a little cheese.
‘You’d better try some of this or my breath is gonna knock you out,’ Lara warns her mom, and insists she takes one of the toasts and dips it into the soup. She doesn’t believe in raw fish but she tries a tiny bite of the lobster; it tastes fresh and bright.
Lara’s entrée of pan-fried bass with crushed baby potato, greens and a beurre blanc is so perfect, she stops eating with three bites left.
‘I don’t want it to end,’ she says.
‘I don’t want to stop eating,’ says Margo with a look of giddy delight, forking another mouthful of saffron and prawn risotto into her mouth.
They split a chocolate fondant neither of them has belly room for.
‘I’ve been a bitch to be around and I’m sorry,’ says Lara, looking out at the ocean.
‘Thank you,’ says Margo. ‘And – I don’t care. Be a bitch. Be annoying, or angry, or sad, or whatever. Just be.’
‘Cause not everyone gets to just be.’
Margo colors.
‘I didn’t mean to be glib, honey.’
‘Hey. Sometimes I could use a little Hallmark card sentiment from my mom.’
Their server comes by with more ice water and an offer of coffee, and Lara takes the chance to compliment the food.
‘That’s Rachel,’ he says, nodding towards a chef in whites, working her way around the kitchen in a compact chair that makes Lara’s look like a tank. ‘She’s only been here two months. Already getting headhunted by Rialto’s up in Monterey. Though – I have to ask: too much garlic for the fish soup, or good?’
‘A lot, but not too much,’ Lara tells him. ‘Sometimes you want something kinda punchy, right?’
He smiles: warm, crinkles round the eyes, a little spark as if there’s an in joke there she’s not party to.
‘I hear ya. Y’all have a good trip now. You pass through Rio Del Mar, you stop at the Seacliff, you hear? You’ll be comfortable if you know what I mean, and Chef Abel knows his business. Trained with the best. Order the chowder.’
Lara registers a mess of mottled skin and criss-cross scars on the man’s hands as he clears their table. The stiff way he holds himself; the pause mid walk, waiting out pain. But he’s wreathed in smiles when he reaches the kitchen, hefts one leg into a lightweight chair of his own and fistbumps with chef Rachel, evidently over the garlic choices since she peers up over the counter and gives Lara a thumbs up.
While Margot settles the check, Lara heads outside and breathes in the ocean air: sand, salt, wind. There are birds soaring overhead. On the beach: kids, families. There are ramps on the sand here too, she registers, plastic matting that creates a level-ish path to the water. Up above, at road level, a Veterans’ Centre with basketball court and outdoor pool.
It's so on the nose that she laughs out loud, is still laughing when Margo exits.
Margo looks so stunned and so afraid, even if only briefly, that Lara’s eyes fill with tears.
‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ she gasps, as Margo clutches her shoulder. ‘I’m just – ’
Lara looks out across the waves again.
‘I'm ready,' she says. 'Let's see how far we can get before dusk, huh?’