Beyond Pain by Kit Rocha Page B

seated position. "What kind of meeting?"
    "To talk about Sector Three, I suppose." He finished assembling his rifle and nestled it into its case. "Debriefing."
    Her gaze was fixed on his hands. "Huh?"
    "A meeting." Her distraction was blatant--and adorable. "I have other guns I can clean, if you want to watch."
    She slipped from the bed and crossed the room, his blanket still crushed to her chest and trailing the floor behind her. "You put it together without even looking."
    "Mmm. It was my first. Had it close to twenty years now."
    Her finger brushed the edge of the case, but her hair had spilled over her shoulder, hiding her expression. "It fits you. Graceful and deadly."
    He pulled her around the edge of the table and into his lap, spinning her so that the blanket wrapped around her first. "Sounds scary when you say it like that."
    "Not to me." After a moment of awkward stiffness, she leaned into him, resting her forehead on his jaw. "Because you've got my back."
    "Yeah." It helped to soothe him. This was a place of power, of control. He couldn't change the past, but she'd invited him to protect her now.
    She turned her face to his neck, and her breath tickled his skin. "You saw my back."
    "I did."
    "Some of it's old. It wasn't all Trent."
    "No?"
    He felt her shake her head, take a breath, and let it out again. Then she changed the subject. "How many guns do you have left to clean?"
    "Fourteen." But he made no move toward any of them. "I was born in Eden, but not in the city proper. In the underground. I don't have a number, the barcode on my wrist was faked, and my name isn't Brendan Donnelly. I don't know what it is, or if I ever had one, really."
    "Oh." Six slipped a hand from the blankets and ghosted a finger over the black box on his wrist, where Ace had filled in his barcode all those years ago. "I thought there weren't slums in Eden."
    If only. "There are slums everywhere, sweetness. Even in Eden. Another dirty little secret."
    She touched the tattoo again. "My father had seven wives. He learned my brothers' names, but he mostly called us girls by whatever order we came out. Some of my little sisters never got real names at all."
    "I'm sorry." His own story couldn't compare to that. At least it wasn't his family who'd left him nameless, but the loose network of outcasts beneath the city. "It worked out for me. I survived, and then Cooper plucked me up."
    "Cooper?"
    "Neal Cooper, retired military police. He--" Words didn't exist to explain Coop's unwavering honesty to people used to lies. The matter-of-fact kindness where only cruelty was expected. "He takes care of lost things, people who've been thrown away."
    Six twined her fingers with his. "I'm sorry you were thrown away. Whoever did it was stupid."
    "Desperate," he corrected. "And it doesn't matter. The hardest shit in my life came early, and I didn't know any better. It just was, and I got through it."
    "Everyone's desperate," she whispered. "Everywhere but here. You don't understand how stupid I am. All this tech you have? The running water, the electricity? This is what I imagined Eden was like."
    There were places in the sectors that defined wasteland , where the land beyond the borders, out in the wilderness, was a less forbidding place to live. "You aren't stupid. Life here in Sector Four's pretty damn posh. Dallas keeps it that way."
    She huffed in amusement. "No, I'm a little stupid. Girls don't need to read on the farms in Six and Seven. I was just gonna be some old guy's eighth or ninth wife."
    "Uneducated is one thing. It means you can learn. Stupid means you can't, even when someone gives you the chance."
    "I guess." Her lips brushed his throat, over his pulse. "I know I'm not really stupid, but sometimes I feel that way. Like it doesn't matter if I can learn, I'll never do it fast enough to catch up with everyone else."
    Bren had seen burly men--tough men--reduced to tears at the prospect of trials and changes smaller than the ones she'd endured.