Sam squinted. Where the hell had that come from? He struggled to remember which movie he’d seen that ridiculous gypsy in. Clearly she’d been some sort of Harvard grad faking a Romani accent in front of her faux crystal ball telling suckers what they wanted to hear for a few quick bucks on Spring Break… He frowned, remembering the scene. It was making his guts twist for some reason, which made him think maybe it hadn’t been a mov—

“You actually look like him,” the elephantine infidel brayed, shattering yet another magnum opus. “Same chin.”

But Sam was getting a wave of cold goosebumps as he remembered that gypsy reading. “She cursed me!” he cried.

“Huh?”

“Pssst.” He held up a hand for silence, thinking. Maybe it hadn’t been a curse, but just really good observational skills. She was probably just like Sam and could read people really well—when he wanted to and cared enough to try—and she’d seen that he was well above average on the mental spectrum, so she assumed he would find unique ways to make cash.

Yeah, but hadn’t she said something about the dog dying? Max had died. Just like she’d said.

Easy, he argued. He’d asked her if the dog would die, given her info, and she’d caught a whiff of his worry, and had chosen the most likely scenario.

But he was a drug lord and a thief. Technically not a gang leader, but close enough. That surely wasn’t something she could’ve guessed from his suburbanite attire and his tiny wad of upper-middle-class disposable income.

“Are you both autistic?” she asked. “That why he’s so good at war?”

“Not autistic,” Sam said distractedly. It always perturbed him when people got that wrong. “Certified genius. The Tesla of the Congressional Era. Now shut up please, I’m thinking.”

The fake-Romani lady had been three-for-three. She’d called the aliens—Joe had told him about the reading he’d done for her after coming out of the hut looking like he’d been punched in the gut—and the thievery, and the dog dying.

Oh, and probably the part about his soulmate not being born yet, considering Slade still hadn’t run into her. What had been her name? Leila?

“Him and that Rat gal were the only two Humans who survived on Eeloir, weren’t they? You know her? She a badass like your brother?”

“I don’t fucking care about my brother and some horsefaced woman who has so little self-respect she calls herself a particularly large rodent,” Sam snapped, grabbing his temples in despair. “Please let me think. This is important.”

And it was important, too. As demonstrated by Exhibit A even then wasting his oxygen, he needed a soulmate. And if that faux-gypsy was right about the aliens, maybe he was right about a very quiet woman who would leave him totally unmolested to think, bringing him sandwiches and good coffee exactly when he needed it, judging his every need and desire with divine accuracy, and giving him the most exquisite blowjobs whenever he was done taking a shit.

Yes, he would find this Leila.

“You think they ever fucked? Him and Rat?”

“Of course they fucked,” Sam muttered. “Congies are sterile, so they fuck like bunnies. Combine that with the fact my brother’s got every lonely bitch with a pussy—and some without—masturbating to his moto posters at night, and the fact those two were trapped in a war situation together several times, not to mention PlanOps training together… Yeah, you can bet he banged her hardcore.” Probably handcuffed to a bed. He could totally see Rat dominating his brother in bed, and giggled despite himself.

“What’s funny?” She was cocking her head at him with that paenungulate stare again.

Sam waved her question off. “I read a story once about how she forced him to walk across town naked to catch a shuttle to his first duty station. She’s totally a dom. Probably pegged the bastard that night.” God Sam would’ve given a nut to witness that, but all camera equipment had mysteriously fritzed out anywhere Rat had been that entire day. He’d searched. A lot. Nothing within a thousand feet had been working, and the two potential examples he had managed to find—Congie equipment that had been shielded against EMP and other energetic interference—had been intentionally deleted.

Apparently someone else had had the same thought, and was waiting for the right moment to capitalize on a good blackmail scheme…

The woman sitting across from him grimaced as if the image didn’t sit right with her. “Yeaaah, I don’t think Zero’s into that.”

“How the fuck would you know?” Sam demanded, insulted that she had questioned him. “My brother’s a big, dumb pushover. Teddy bear. Totally took it up the ass by that horseface bitch if you ask me.”

“Well that kinda ruins the image,” she said, still making a face.

“Doesn’t it though?” Sam asked, delighted. He’d have to make a note to hack his brother’s private chambers sometime to see if he could get evidence.

His perfect woman, of course, would be a demure virgin, not some promiscuous, STD-laden badass brute of a Congie. Preferably a mute. He quickly shoved the Bajnan accounting files aside and began a search on the Human database of known mute virgins by the name of Leila, then narrowed it to an appropriate age range and facial structure—because he might as well have something pretty, not that steely-eyed, tight-lipped glare of a woman who always got what she wanted with barely-contained dominatrix undertones like Rat—and included height, hair color—he fancied blondes—and hand-size—again, he didn’t want anything like that muscular man-handed megabitch that his brother was fucking—and topped it off with an ideal BMI, a decent taste in music, and an education at Yale, because fuck Harvard.

Nothing. Fuck.

“I think you’re wrong about him being a teddy bear, though,” she said. “He’s killed too many people. War changes things for guys. My dad was a Marine—”

“Shhh. Don’t care.” Sam had made a few adjustments to his algorithm, then deployed it again. Again, no banana. Fuck!

“I mean, if I was gonna peg one of the two of you—”

The glorified serving wench was talking again, crushing his intricate inner symphony under the brutish cacophony of her ruminant stampede. Sam powered through it, making more adjustments to his soulmate-finding search queries, mentally playing AC/DC as loudly as he could to drown her out. He conceded that perhaps his perfect soulmate could have been educated at Harvard, if it was the only school that would give her scholarships, but she’d have to renounce her allegiance later. “—as a sub, I’d totally pick you.”

Sam was in the middle of reluctantly adjusting his soulmate’s music preferences when his mouth fell open and he twisted away from his computer. “What?”

A slight grin tugged at her pierced black lips. “Yeah,” she said knowingly, “You’re a subbie.”

“Am not!” Sam cried, horrified. “I’m too smart to be a sub.”

“They’re the best kind,” she said, with a predatory look that completely unnerved him.

Sam found he could only stare at her. And stare some more. His mind, working at pure harmonic brilliance only a moment before, had been trampled into unrecognizable meat, broken furniture, and shit-stained sheet music. He blinked at her, blinked at his search results, then slapped his laptop shut again. “Okay. We’re done here.”

“Chicken,” she said.

“Not!” Sam cried, already getting out of his seat.

“A chicken would get up and leave,” she noted. “How’s that denial treating you, subbie?”

“I am not in denial,” Sam said, sitting back down stiffly. “I am quite literally too smart for a woman to ever get the upper hand in a confrontation with me, and therefore, I can never be a sub. I’m the Tesla of the Congressional Era, Samuel Fucking Dobbs, and I am not a sub.”

“You keep saying that like it should mean something.”

Sam narrowed his eyes. ‘Tesla of the Congressional Era’ had been splashed across a good many of the articles that had been written about him in his early years…before the Congies showed up to steal his limelight and kidnap his brother and inexplicably turn him into a bald teenage idol. And then, after Eeloir, all anyone had ever wanted to talk about was Joe Dobbs, and any time Sam mentioned Samuel Dobbs, people looked at him and asked if that was another name for Zero.

“It does mean something,” Sam gritted. “Ask anyone at MIT or Yale. I was big news thirty years ago. Filed six hundred and thirteen patents before I decided to give up inventing for something more lucrative.”

“Thirty years is a long time,” she said, looking dubious. “What have you done since then?”

“Debauchery, mostly,” Sam said, narrowing his eyes at her. “What does it matter?”

“I dunno, I mean, you say you’re Zero’s brother, but you’re…” She trailed off, gesturing vaguely at his body.

Sam looked down at himself. “Skinny?”

“Basement trash.”

Sam narrowed his eyes. When it came to physical comparisons between him and his brother, he’d never had any misconceptions about which of them was more sexually desirable, on an evolutionary scale of things. Still, it rankled him to see the awe in other people’s eyes when they talked about his brother, when by all normal standards, Joe was just a dumb jock who would’ve been happy with a football scholarship and a 9-to-5 and Sam was the once-in-a-generation wunderkind who should’ve been showered with praise and attention by society as he advanced the Human race into a Golden Age heretofore unimagined by the small-thinking mental peons of the world.

…and had been well on his way to doing just that before the aliens had shown up and hogged all the news cameras.

Then Sam frowned, remembering another part of the gypsy-lady’s mutterings. She’d told Joe he would enter Congress into a new Age.

…which had already happened on Kophat, when his brother personally bumblefucked his way through undermining the rebellion plans of the Huouyt Representative. The chances of randomly getting that right before the aliens landed and instigated the Draft were infinitesimal to the point of impossible.

Holy fuck, he did have a soulmate named Leila!

“So…what’s your brother like?” the nameless barista asked. She actually wore a nametag, but Sam was too lazy to lower his eyes to read it, much less log that information in between the billions of streams of concurrent processing potential being used up with hidden Huouyt financial reservoirs—which were now being overloaded with the excitement of knowing that, somewhere out there, was a quiet, comely woman who would feed him and do dishes and give him heavenly blowjobs in high heels and an apron. He quickly added a culinary degree to his search query and deleted the Ivy League requirement.

There were three. Hallelujah praise the Lord! Sam immediately began scribbling down their home addresses, mentally planning a trip to each Turkey, Hawaii, and Saudi Arabia. Then, upon seeing the short, butch haircut on the Hawaiian chick, decided to just make it two.

“I mean, for him to survive so many wars, he must be super smart,” she said dreamily.

The record screech that ruthlessly tore apart Sam’s symphony this time was like having an entire family of Godzillas trampling the downtown arts center and the nearby twelve blocks. No more orchestra, no more shattered furniture and wadded sheet music, no more conductor, just him staring a gigantic lizard in open-mouthed disbelief, completely unable to form words. “Excuse me?” he finally sputtered.

“I mean, Zero fought Huouyt,” she said, voice filled with veneration. “How do you survive a fight with Huouyt if you aren’t smarter than all of them?”

Sam found himself rendered utterly mute. He knew his mouth was open—he could feel the air on his tongue—but he had no more control over its function than he had his limp dick, reduced to utter flaccidity by the idea his brother had women fawning over his brains.

Seeing the thoughtless awe in her eyes, the undeserved adoration, Sam decided right there he would make women everywhere respect the proper Dobbs’ brains, regardless of how many Wanted posters he had to put himself on to get there. Her awe of Joe’s intellect was un-fucking-acceptable. He could not compute. Like trying to do calculations for quantum mechanics and general relativity using factors of easter bunnies.

She clearly didn’t understand the epiphany broiling within him—the sheer determination to fix society’s mistake—or seem to notice the shock and disbelief so strong within Sam it was edging on violence. Like a drooling, mascara-smeared mastodon, she blithely went on, “‘Cause, you know, it couldn’t just all be luck.”