18% Gray by Anne Tenino Read Free Book Online

ahead?”
    “Wouldn’t you have every escape possibility mapped out?”
    “Hell, yes. Okay, you go and I’ll be about thirty minutes behind you. I have to make another quick contact.”
    “I assume my address was in my file?” Matt nodded. James stared at him a second before standing up. “Thanks, Matt,” he said quietly, tapping his knuckles on the table. Then he walked out.
    Oh, this was going to fucking suck balls.

Chapter 4

     
     
    J AMES had known they couldn’t leave him here. He’d known someone would be coming, and even that it might be a contractor. The legalities around Enforced Emigration weren’t clear to him and he wasn’t sure they could send a team after him. But Matt Tennimore? He never saw that one coming.
    It wasn’t like he held a grudge against Matt. He’d been the dick, there. He was so grateful he wouldn’t have cared, anyway. He just wanted out.
    He’d been starting to get more sensitive to the implant. There were times he felt he could barely keep his brain in his head. In crowds, he could feel the intentions of other people pressing in on him so strongly it felt like his head might collapse. He avoided crowds when possible, but the job he’d been assigned as a re-educated former POW made it impossible. James was doing crowd control at religious rallies, of all things.
    He didn’t have to work that much, fortunately. Maybe three or four events—fewer than twenty hours a week. He didn’t know what was with the light workload, but he’d take it. He’d thought that Red states liked to make their moral criminals make retribution to society through hard labor. Not in his case apparently. Busting up big rocks into little rocks did not appear to be in his future.
    Maybe the RIA knew he was cracking up.
    Or they wanted to coddle him, bring him over to the Dark Side. Which could also explain the cushy living situation. No one fresh out of queer re-education got a roommate: couldn’t give them a same-sex roommate in case they “slipped”; couldn’t give them one of the opposite sex in case the re-education actually worked. Fornication was as illegal between hets as homos, after all.
    But did other parolees get a two-bedroom apartment in a halfway decent part of the city? It was a neighborhood from around the beginning of the millennium, not too run-down like most of the former middle-class neighborhoods. It had lots of brick-and-mortars in the area. Wealthy women from the hills above town came on weekends in their hydrogen sportsmobiles and shopped there, for God’s sake.
    The only thing he’d miss about this pit was his apartment.
    Okay, there was one other thing he would miss. He was walking right past Basha’s, so he stopped to order a chicken shawarma to go. May as well get the good stuff while he could.
    Almira, Basha’s granddaughter, chatted with him a minute since there weren’t any other customers. Aside from the food, he liked Basha’s because the family didn’t care about the pink triangle on his chest. Most people looked right through him unless he forced them to pay attention. It made his job in crowd control a mite difficult at times.
    James made it to his front door by 1725 with his takeout bag in hand. There was a pizza delivery bike out front, and a guy waiting on his doorstep with the standard flat box. He knew from half a block away that the guy was an RIA agent of some kind. A nervous one, full of bravado.
    James stopped halfway up his walk and hooked a thumb in his waistband. “Musta forgot all about the pizza I ordered.” The guy just looked at him. James sighed and came to the door, pressing his thumb to the reader, disengaging the lock. He wondered why they didn’t wait inside for him. He knew they could get in without his thumbprint. He could feel the guy’s impatience while he unlocked the door, like he thought it was a useless gesture.
    He waved the silent “delivery” guy inside, then followed him in. “Is there even anything in the