Liquid Lies (18 page)

This time Xavier answered. “Don’t worry about that. Just concentrate on Genesai.”

Another assumption: that she’d help them at all.

She couldn’t say what made her think of Reed at that moment. Maybe it was the sound of the family piling back into their minivan, then the buzz of the engine as it accelerated back to the highway. So ordinary. So everyday. The Primary world came and went all around, never knowing that Secondaries existed among them. Or that some of them wanted to leave.

Reed kept saying that it wasn’t his business to know why he’d been hired to “extract” her. Yet he’d stayed. For her. He claimed not to care about the reasons for her kidnapping. He claimed only to want to keep her alive. She wondered, if after witnessing an alien spaceship rise out of the murky waters of Lake Tahoe and zoom back into the sky, he would continue not to care.

Holy fuck.

She rounded on Nora. “You’ll reveal us.”

Nora’s watery eyes widened and her narrow-lipped mouth curved into an evil smile. “My dear?”

“There’s no way your plan could work without revealing us to the rest of the world. The Primaries’ll know they’re no longer the only ones on Earth—or in the universe. You’ll leave us behind, knowing there’ll be a massive hunt.”

“Hunt?” Xavier smiled, and it wasn’t pretty. “We’ll tell them exactly where to find you.”

He reached into his jacket pocket and threw a stack of photos on the table. They fanned out, displaying disgusting images. Tedran slaves being drained. Rows of babies without parents. Ofarian doctors standing over blank-faced women as Tedran men tried to get them pregnant.

“Keep them, they’re yours. Enjoy.”

Keep them? She could barely look at them.

“I have more”—Xavier leaned over—“documenting the Ofarians’ wonderful little connection to water. Primaries love that stuff. As we’re flying home, the U.S. government will know exactly where the aliens live.”

The word
aliens
slithered out between his teeth.

She saw the scenario he envisioned, the one she’d been taught to fear all her life. Government pursuit. Mass captures. Lockups and tests. International panic.

Ofarians behind bars, just like the Tedrans in the Plant.

The air around the table stifled, turned noxious.
Think, damn it, think
. She swung her legs over the bench and jumped up. Xavier scrambled to his feet and started for her. She threw out an arm.

“I’m not going anywhere!”

She backed up a few steps to the edge of the rest area, where the dull earth sloped down into a barren ravine. On the other side, the land rose up like a giant wave, aggressive and dangerous and ready to crash over her. An arctic wind gusted under her sweater. Footsteps crunched behind her.

“I said I’m not going anywhere, Xavier.”

But it was Nora. Five feet never looked so intimidating. “There’s another way.”

Gwen wanted to scream. “Another way to what?”

“Help us. Do what’s right.”

She crossed her arms. “How can you possibly talk about doing what’s right when you want to inflict the same pain the Tedrans have faced on innocent Ofarians?”

Nora’s lip curled. “Let’s agree to disagree on the definition of
innocent
.”

“There are
two thousand
Ofarians who have no idea what’s happening. Why do they deserve punishment?”

“Do you want to save them? Do you want to keep them out of the public eye?”

“Yes!”

The wind whipped Nora’s clothing about her perfectly rigid figure and ruffled her short hair. “Then destroy the Board.”

“What?”

She shrugged. “And the Plant workers. Everyone who knows about the Plant and is instrumental in its function must die. Then stop
Mendacia
production, free my people, and let us live our own lives here on Earth.”

Gwen’s voice floated somewhere far away. She had to reach for it and drag it back. “Kill them?”

“Yes. Everyone. You don’t want to believe who’s really involved, but deep down you know. You know.”

She was talking about her father.
No
. Gwen wouldn’t believe that. And she wouldn’t destroy her own father just to prove a point to Nora. Death plus death just equaled more death. There were no answers in that.

“After all the Tedran lives they’ve taken, cut short, abused. You don’t think they deserve to die? It’s the only way to be sure it’ll never continue.”

That didn’t make any sense. There had to be another way.

Nora’s sick words hammered into Gwen’s head. “You know where the Board lives, where they work. Set up a bomb at Company headquarters. Hire Reed to take out the Plant workers, for all I care. He looks capable.”

Gwen threw a hand in Nora’s face. “No. I refuse. I reject everything you’ve said to me and I refuse to do what you want. I’ll cover my ears so I can’t Translate Genesai. And I sure as hell am not going to murder my own father.”

Nora looked simultaneously sad and pleased. She’d been waiting for Gwen to say that. Goddamn her. One hundred and fifty years to prepare and she’d thought of everything.

“Then we’re ready to send information about
Mendacia
and evidence of the Ofarians’ existence to the government anyway. If we’re still going to lose, then we’re taking you down with us. It’s your choice, Gwen. You have to help us. It’s just a matter of how you do it.”

SEVENTEEN

Reed should have been thinking about how to elude Tracker
. He should have been researching where he’d gone wrong bad enough to draw Nora’s attention. He should have left Lake Tahoe yesterday.

All he could think about, however, was Gwen.

He circled the house several times, inside and out, taking inventory of the surveillance equipment. Ninety percent of it was well hidden. The other ten percent was meant to be found, to let him and Gwen know they were being watched. One tiny camera spied on the narrow hall outside their attic rooms, but as far as he could tell, their bedrooms were untouched. At least they weren’t perverted clients. Adine’s futuristic watch dictated where he could and could not go. It opened some doors, but not all. A few perimeter gates but not the garage door to get the cars out. No phones anywhere, and he’d had to give his up as part of the contract.

The hired guards in the huts by the driveway and down by the water were soft ex-cons. They eyed him curiously. Let them wonder if he was like them. Let them wonder what he’d done time for, even though he hadn’t. He could take them if he needed to, but he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

Nora was paying Reed to keep Gwen captive, even as he was trying to keep her out of danger.

So fucked up.

This morning…he could still feel her hand on the back of his neck, at the scratchy place where his skull shave was starting to come in. She’d run her finger over it; he didn’t think she was aware she’d done it. But she sure as hell thought she could pull one over on him. Pressing into him, going in for a kiss. Did she think she was the first woman target to try seducing him out of responsibility? He’d never been fooled by it.

Except this time, he almost was. Because it was Gwen, with the sexy, vicious, high-heel stabbing of Japanese men’s phones. Gwen, with the easy banter and wit. Gwen, with that hair and those legs. Gwen, who never looked away from the faces of her challengers.

He took a seat at the breakfast bar in the immaculately clean kitchen. Gwen’s place in the city had been this spotless—every inch of counter streak-free, every length of grout scrubbed and even-toned.

He hated that she was out there with them. Without him. He was wrong; he had lied to her. He didn’t believe for a second she’d be all right alone with them.

The front door opened. Though his head snapped up at the sound, he casually leaned back to see if it was Gwen.

Nope. Adine.

The small, brown-haired woman clutched a large box in one hand and struggled to shut the door with the other. Could’ve been any frazzled person returning from any old errand. Except that Adine wasn’t any ordinary person. From what intel Reed had gathered, that mind of hers was extraordinary. So extraordinary that the last Silicon Valley company she’d been contracted for couldn’t keep its mouth shut. When word leaked out about some sort of strange composite she’d used in one of her doohickeys, more than just the CEO came calling. The government started to sniff around and she took off, taking her technology with her.

Now more than corporate America wanted to know her whereabouts. If anything happened to Gwen, Reed knew exactly where to point them.

Adine hurried across the foyer to the basement door, and grappled with trying to balance the box on one hip while freeing her wrist to access the lock with her watch.

He slid off the stool. “Need help?”

Adine jumped high enough the box top popped open and a bundle of wires peeked out. He pretended not to see them as she stuffed them back inside.

“No.”

He kept walking forward. “You make these?” He raised his wrist. It was good to perpetuate the idea he was dumb as rock.

“Maybe.” Shifty eyes.

“It work for the basement?”

One of her dark eyes—as dark as Nora’s—sat slightly closer to her nose than the other, and she narrowed both at him. “Not yours, no.”

He shrugged and started back for the kitchen. “Just curious.”
About what the hell you’re doing down there and what it is the government’s so interested in.

The basement door clicked shut behind her. Adine’s muffled footsteps faded out.

He frowned into the sunset, the orange and pink light bouncing off the lake and striking the glass wall of the house, bothered by the fact that he
was
curious. Curious about Adine and her inventions. About Nora’s connection to Tracker. About why they wanted Gwen.

Damn her. That woman had taken a giant spoon to his brain. Scrambled it all up. He couldn’t afford that.

The front door opened again. He turned. His reason for staying entered.

Gwen looked two inches shorter and two days short of sleep. She looked like she’d hacked her way through a battlefield and just barely escaped with her life. Stomach tight, he scanned her body, looking for a limp or a grimace—anything to indicate physical pain. Nothing. Whatever torture they’d inflicted, they’d done to her mind.

She lifted her head—slowly, heavily, like someone being held underwater—and found him watching. Ghosts lingered in her eyes, specters of rage that had floated away to be replaced by helplessness and defeat.

This was not the Gwen he knew.

Her blank gaze traveled past him, to a point beyond the glass wall.

Something twisted hard in his chest. To prevent himself from clutching it, he threw on his most impassive mask and sauntered to Nora.

“Orders?”

The little woman patted at her silver hair, the gesture of a woman just returning from the salon. “Done for the day. Lock her upstairs.”

Gwen was already climbing the staircase by the time he got to her, her cinder block feet thudding on each step. In the attic hallway she stood facing her locked door. He sidled around her, slid his watch into the lock mechanism, and held the door open. She moved hypnotically inside and sank onto the edge of the bed.

He’d done that to Gwen. She’d called him soulless, but she was the one without the soul. It had been ripped from her, and he’d handed the tools to Nora to do it.

He pulled shut Gwen’s door and went down the hall to his room, mindful of the cameras. Inside, he checked twice to make sure his door had locked securely, then crossed through the bathroom.

She hadn’t moved a millimeter from her perch on the bed. Head hanging, legs splayed out to either side, her arms dangled uselessly between her knees.

God, he was such a shit. He’d often imagined this devastation on the faces of his targets after he turned his back on them, but he’d never actually witnessed it. It sucked.

The solution, in his head, was remarkably easy. Throw Gwen over his shoulder and storm out of the lake house like a fucking action hero. The gates would open for him; the guards would fall with a good kick and punch.

That solution, in reality, could send him on the run and put a bullet in the back of her head when Nora found her. Of that, he had no doubt.

He was the only person on Gwen’s side. He’d stick it out, do whatever Nora wanted him to do, and keep a protective arm around Gwen—if only to see the courage on her face, or the bright, daring spark in her eye again.

“Hey.” He lowered himself to a wooden bench just opposite her. “How do you feel?”

When she raised her head, she didn’t look at him, but out the small window at the lake. “Like I’m in quicksand,” she murmured.

The sun had dipped below the far mountains, and the whole room was dusted in filtered shadows.

She swiveled her head and pinned him with a deeply tormented stare. “Do you know where they took me today?”

He opened his hands in a helpless gesture. “I told you. I know nothing. I’m paid to know nothing.”

She considered him for a long while, then nodded sadly. “Okay. Yes. That would make sense. There’s no way you could know.”

Her despair was starting to scare him.

“You know.” She straightened her spine and he heard a few faint cracks. “It’s really easy to blame you for all this.”

He wouldn’t react.
Would not
. “If I hadn’t done the extraction, they just would’ve hired someone else. I took the job for that very reason. I stayed because I didn’t want anyone else with you. Be glad it was me, Gwen.” Let her make of that what she wanted. He pushed up the sleeves of his shirt and balanced his forearms on his knees.

The expression on her face was completely undecipherable. Her dark eyes danced all over his face. When they returned to his, they stayed…and he saw in them what he’d seen at that sunrise on the San Francisco street. Like she wanted him, and hated herself because of it. He didn’t blame her; he was more than mixed up about it himself.

“It’s also easy to hate you,” she said. “Except that I don’t.” From the wide plea in her eyes to the seductive fall of her lower lip, she screamed of raw desperation. “And I am glad you’re here.”